“My gosh, it’s time to cook food for the ancestors.”
“Why hurry? The ancestors witness our faithful hearts. It’ll be fine to bring them food at noon,” he replied.
There were only the two of them, but the offering meal had to be complete. Besides being smart, Miss Ngan possessed all the necessary skills to cook well in a kitchen. She did not need her husband’s help to prepare a ten-course banquet in less than two hours: steamed chicken with lime leaves, fried honey chicken, stir-fried beef with bamboo shoots, stir-fried fish with celery, stir-fried pork with cauliflower, chicken pie, pork pie with fungus, jellied pork hock, shrimp soup with fish bladder, and braised ribs with bamboo shoots. Not counting different pork rolls and rice cakes. Right at noon, a tray was brought up and enticing dishes were put on display all over the altar. There were eighteen plates and bowls for the main and the minor dishes. Mr. Quang stood there, stroking his beard and complimenting his wife. Incense and sandalwood smoke spread pleasing aromas throughout the rooms. The warmth of an invisible fire filled the air. The genies of happiness — which always come to a house where people love each other — smiled invisible smiles.
At the very moment when Mr. Quang, dressed in formal robes, stood directly in front of the ancestors’ altar getting ready to offer prayers, Quy with his wife and two daughters stepped in. He carried two pink grapefruit from his own garden with a stack of black cakes, the kind that Mrs. Quang had liked to eat the most when she was alive. After putting these offerings on the altar, Quy said:
“May I pray to my mother first? Afterward, I must go and bring good New Year’s wishes to the units and the villagers.”
“Back away from there! On this altar I have ancestors from seven generations back. After that we have great-great-grandparents, grandparents from both maternal and paternal sides; then come the parents, my uncles and aunts. After that is my older brother who died young. Your mother, that is, my wife, has to wait her turn after him. The order of precedence is settled. There is no authority for a variance.”
“But I…”
“Back off,” Mr. Quang screamed. He did not say it but he knew that nobody in Quy’s family had acknowledged Miss Ngan. She had withdrawn to the kitchen on seeing the animosity on their faces.
“This is my house, not the office of the village committee. Wield your authority elsewhere; not under the roof of this house.”
His father’s determination caused Quy to step back. His wife, always hiding in some corner, reached out to pull her husband’s shirt. Quy then had no choice but to wait for Mr. Quang to bow and pray.
His prayer was a long one because he had to invite, according to proper generational sequence from high to low, the spirits of all the ancestors, from five to seven generations back down to his wife who had just died the previous spring. That length of time was hard to endure for a son who is belligerent and has real power in his hands. Chairman Quy stamped one foot then the other, as if there were a nest of red ants biting his feet so that he could not stand still. When his father had finished, he rushed forward to the altar, bowed twice, bending his back as they do in the theater, then raised his voice to cry out loud:
“Mother, Mother in heaven: if you are divine please return and open your eyes to see all the turmoil under this roof. Oh, Mother, it brings shame to us children. Why were you in a hurry to leave and let frogs jump on the table, chickens bring trash into the house, and crows build nests on the top of the grapefruit and orange trees?”
“Oh, Mother, dear Mother…”
“Dear Grandmother, where did you go? Like this you left us, Grandmother?”
No doubt having rehearsed beforehand, Quy’s wife and children raised their crying voices like the choir at a play singing along with the orchestra. Their cries resonated in the calm atmosphere of the neighborhood. At this hour, neighbors were getting their clothes ready and preparing to go out. All the words back and forth and the crying of the chairman’s family had slipped right into the ears of the neighbors on all sides who were always ready to listen in.
Mr. Quang was mortified. He was not prepared to receive this blow. To be accurate, nobody had sufficient imagination to anticipate such a thing. They worked hard all year, waiting for the new year with all its new hopes. The first day of Tet is the first day of a new block of time, of a span of life yet to come, a day that has the special, sacred meaning of an unsullied beginning. For that reason, no one would quarrel with any other on such a day; neighbors, even if they hated each other a lot, would suck down their bitterness to make sweet their greetings and wishes, because if words are not good and the meaning is not kind, then misfortune will come to both sides. Even enemies do not fight during Tet; so how could loved ones and blood relatives? That is why he was in shock when he saw his firstborn son with his family crying in front of the ancestors’ altar, turning the sacred New Year’s Day into a funeral. After a second of stunned bewilderment, he knew he had to act. Pulling out a pole leaning in a corner, something that had been at his side for twenty years while in the woods, he turned toward Quy’s face and shouted:
“Go away! Go away right now! This is the altar for my ancestors, not the personal altar for your mother. If you are filial, I allow you to take her picture back to your house to worship. Your wife and your kids, too, get out of this house. I need children and grandchildren, but not a pack of scoundrels that disturb. I will not allow such ingrates to turn this house into a market.”
“Oh heaven, you chase your child and grandchildren out of the house; oh, Grandfather…”
Quy’s wife continued to scream, while her husband stared at his father with red eyes. His breath smelled full of alcohol; for sure the son had been drinking to draw on the encouragement of alcohol before leaving to pick a fight with his old father:
“My mother lived here; you do not have the right to drive ME MYSELF out of this house.”
Mr. Quang stood stiff for a minute as if he did not believe what he had just heard. In his family children of whatever age had no right to use such a self-promoting, personal pronoun with their father under any circumstances. His children as well as the children of his brother and sister all knew this rule and looked upon it as something that distinguished them from other families who were looser in their protocol and discipline. Such a humiliation had never happened in his family. Quy knew that full well. Now he became the first to spit on the ways of the ancestors.
Mr. Quang stood shocked for a long while. A piercing pain ran through his heart again and again as if someone were continuously stabbing a dagger through it. For the first time in his life, he realized that a father’s heart is extremely delicate and easily injured, that bitter pain can make the eyes blur and send tremors through one’s whole body like the shakings that come with malaria. He knew that the change in his son’s use of a personal pronoun to address him marked the last boundary line; that, from now on, they would never be father and son as before. Never as before. The pain kept coming nonstop. At the same time his body suddenly hardened like rock, a feeling similar to that moment when he was seventeen and had first put a house pillar on his shoulders in front of the taunting eyes of some young men from the upper section.
The father considered the face of his son, distorted by hatred and alcohol. Another second passed in silence. Then suddenly the father started laughing: