“Why couldn’t you just shut up, you damn Meo? I didn’t do you any personal harm. Besides, you have no idea why I had to flee my home province. How can you understand the pain of someone forced to leave his homeland? What dark wind blew in your direction so that you dumbly listened to others? What wicked black veil covered your eyes so that you looked on me blinded by such a poisonous thought?”
Onstage, they are performing a short piece of cheo theater from the traditional ethnic Vietnamese playlist. The piece is called Xuy Van Gia Dai (Xuy Van Feigning Madness). An cannot recall any of the details of the story, only that it is about a woman betrayed in love who has gone mad. The actress onstage wears a bright red skirt the color of kapok flowers with a white magnolia flower in her hair. Her confused movements and her beautiful, thoroughly sober look don’t seem to go together at all. Her singing is mournful, imbued with authentic melancholy, but at the same time quite alluring. To An, it isn’t the singing of a madwoman, but rather that of a female bird calling for her male companion.
“Male and female birds call to each other in the spring, coo throughout the summer, make love throughout the fall, and take turns brooding their eggs over the winter. Those are the happy birds. Only we suffer. Now we can never call to each other or carry out a courtship with our words and songs. We can no longer make love and never will we have children to cuddle and nurture like little birds that are taken care of by their parents.”
As these thoughts slowly pass through his mind, they cut like a knife heated hot in a furnace and now applied to his skin and flesh. He can almost feel his skin and flesh sizzling under that horrible knife. He misses her, the pretty wife he had. His first love but also his last. The one and only woman in his life. Fused with his flesh for sixteen full years, she will live forever in his soul.
“Dong, where are you now? My lover, please ride the wind and the trees, please borrow the voice of birds and beasts to give me an answer. Where are you? And where is your little sister?”
Dong and An had become lovers at the age of fifteen. But they had known each other since they could barely walk. They had been the closest neighbors, their houses separated only by a mountain slope. Both their mothers had become pregnant in the same year, and had given birth to each of them in the same moon, her at the beginning and him at the end. The following month, the two families agreed to take the full-moon day to celebrate the first full month of both children. The mountain village people had gone to her home to kill a cow and celebrate at noon, and in the evening they had come to his family’s house to roast a pig, boil chickens, and have a feast. The festivities went on until very late and everyone stayed the night, not returning to their homes until the next day.
The immense flank of the mountain had been their playground during childhood. It was where she would follow him into the bushes to find ripe fruit, catch May bugs and ladybugs, or dig up cricket holes. When they were five, he had taken her on their first adventure, leaving the familiar hill to go look for the springs that brought water to the village, then up the mountain to where one could hear the sporadic songs of the nightingales. In the winter of that year, a pharyngeal epidemic had spread throughout the district. Xiu Village was lost in an isolated, faraway valley yet it, too, could not avoid the common plague. Since then An had been an orphan. His father had died one day, and the next, his mother also passed away from an epidemic that killed mostly young ones. His parents were its only adult victims. What had been odd was that he was living in the same home yet he stayed in splendid health. His parents and the young dead had to be collected, put on the same pyre, and buried together in a corner of the valley so as to prevent the epidemic from spreading.
The saying used to go, “With father gone, there’s still the uncle / With mother dead, the aunt will still give suck.” That was all one needed in a traditional Nong clan. After the funeral, An’s uncle and aunt sold their house to a neighbor and moved into his parents’ house on stilts so that they could take care of their nephew. At the time they had been a young couple. Not until four years later, when he turned nine years old, did they have an only child, a girl called Nang My. There had been nothing to set off one child from the other and they loved each other as if they had come from the same parents. Nang My had been born the same year as Dong’s younger sister, called intimately “Little One,” and thus, in their case also, those two girls — niece and aunt — had become fast friends from the time they were toddlers. At the age of seventeen, his uncle and aunt had married him to Dong. After the wedding, seeing that her father was by himself, they had been allowed to go and live in the house on stilts on the other side of the mountain. It had been a marriage made in heaven, as it was like a series of honeymoons. Or better yet, one unending honeymoon. Two weeks after the wedding, he had gone down to That Khe district town to continue his studies. Once a month, the lovers had been allowed to be together. At that time, the district school did not have enough students, so the program dragged along. For that reason, it took him more than ten years to complete his secondary schooling. At the graduation ceremony that year, he, Nong Van Thanh, was the only Tay to graduate — the pride of Xiu Village, who had achieved a dream shared by all prominent Tay families.
Growing up under the protection of his aunt and uncle, An could do no more than submissively comply with the orders of his uncle, who one day said to him: “You have become quite a grown-up man but you are still in your youth. I have hesitated for several years, but now you must go and join the resistance. We are a small village with not many households but we cannot afford to become the laughingstock of the larger villages.”
“I understand, Uncle.”
“Your aunt will take care of your clothes and medicine and some cash. Is there anything else you need?”
“I just need a few days to go and say good-bye to my friends in the village and to go down to the district to take leave of my teachers.”
“OK. We have five days before you need to go to camp.”
After a moment of hesitation, An had added: “I haven’t done anything to help you, Uncle. Ever since my childhood, I have done nothing but take your money and rice to go and study. Now that I am on my way, I leave back here my family burden.”
His uncle smiled. “We raised you so that you could become a useful person. That was my wish. Now that you are enlisting it’s because I realize you cannot avoid your duty toward the country. As you are going to be on your way, be at ease. At home we will take care of Nang Dong, your wife. Besides, Mr. Cao, your father-in-law, and I are friends…”
An had not dared say anything further. What more could he say to a person who was both his uncle and father? Besides, he was very much in the prime of his youth and had wished to be on his way into the world. New horizons had beckoned him. Echoes of war from far away had called to his soul; many of his classmates had already enlisted. Even Nang Xuan, “Little One,” had left the village at the age of thirteen to join other young cadets in the maquis. And pretty soon, his own sister would possibly be sent to the Soviet Union or China in accordance with the mobilization and training plans of the revolutionary movement. In such case, how could he stay put? The quiet valley, which was his birthplace, was bordered on all sides by the forests. He knew every path going through those gentle woods. In the familiar surrounding hills, he was fully cognizant of all the falls that trickled onto the rocks and cliffs. Nightingale Falls in particular had been singing its eternal song from the time he had been a baby till he knew how to make love. The footprints of buffalo on the muddy paths leading to the village on a rainy day — the jingling bells under their necks resonating in the deserted sunsets — was all too familiar to him, familiar to the point of his not noticing them. He realized that he must leave this valley to learn a little more of the outside world. He must go out even though he very much loved Dong.