What We All Long For Read online

  I spent seven years at Pulau Bidong as an orphan, and I wished the Thai pirates had taken me with them. I would have had a destination and another fate. As it was, I ran to be photographed each time some news reporter or refugee official arrived. Perhaps I hoped my father or mother or my frightened sisters would find me. How did the pictures turn out? Do you recognize me? I’m the one who is smiling brilliantly less and less and then giving up on that more and more. I don’t suppose it showed up in the pictures. Bidong became my home.

  Once in Bidong I met another boy like me. There were many of us. He asked if he could play with a metal toy I’d made, the last sign of my innocence. I told him no, bluntly. He asked if I knew of his mother and father. I said, “Why would I?” He asked if he could be my friend. I said, “Suit yourself.” I don’t know what became of him.

  What happened next? What happened next happened. That’s the one thing Pulau Bidong taught me—shut your mouth.

  TWO

  RAIN HAD FALLEN the night before, but today the sun lit the studio, and the clutter of wood, canvasses, paper, and the general debris that Tuyen considered to be the materials of her art. Tuyen looked out of her window facing the alleyway. Overflowing garbage cans and a broken chair rested against the wall of the building opposite hers. The graffiti crew who lived on the upper floors there had painted a large red grinning pig on the wall. She hadn’t noticed the chair there before and examined it from above, thinking of what she could make with it.

  She was still wearing the old oilskin coat, waiting for her brother Binh. She hadn’t bothered to take it off when she got in. Carla had gone to her own place next door, and Oku had left them three stops before their own on the subway line. Just as she entered her door, Binh had called to say that he was coming over. That was an hour ago. “Be outside,” he’d said in an irritated voice, “I’m coming right now.” But Tuyen knew better than to trust his sense of time, and she knew he was only annoyed because he’d been sent to visit her by their father. Though she’d kept her coat on just to be ready.

  She was contemplating the discarded chair when Binh’s Beamer turned into the alleyway. He pulled up and immediately leaned on the horn, then he put his head out the car window and bellowed her name. She opened her window and fixed him with an exaggeratedly bored stare. Binh leaned on the horn again, not letting up until she slammed the window shut and made her way down the stairs to the alleyway.

  “That is so childish,” she said to him when she got there.

  “Well, you know I hate to come to this dump. Why do you live here anyway? Suffering for your art!” His tone was caustic and slightly envious at the same time.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have to come here, would I?”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t know about obligations.”

  “Blah, blah, blah. You’re so funny.”

  “Oh, take this!” he said distastefully, passing her two plastic bags from the passenger seat. “And here,” he said, handing her a small envelope. “Money, I guess. Can’t you get a job?”

  “Thank you, sweet brother.” Tuyen ignored the barb.

  “Well, can’t you? Why don’t you go find work to do, huh? Or a husband?”

  “As soon as you find one, you fag.”

  “You’re the one with secrets, not me, okay.” He waved a finger in her face.

  “So, fine. Thank you very much. Goodbye.” She turned to go back into the building.

  “Hey,” Binh said, stepping out of the car. “Hey, I want to talk to you.” He was dressed immaculately, his hair long and groomed over his collar, a pair of expensive shades on his eyes.

  “I don’t want to talk to you. And don’t we look fashionable? What d’you want anyway?”

  “I’m going to Bangkok …”

  “What for? A little child-sex tourism?”

  “Don’t be disgusting. Can you open the store for me?”

  “Not in this life.” Tuyen turned to go.

  “Come on! I’ll pay you.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “It’s not for me. It’s for Ma, you know, and Bo. They can’t leave here. They’re … Ma’s terrified …”

  “When did you cook this up? Did they ask you? Are you leading Ma on again?”

  “Forget it. Anyway, thanks.”

  “Stay out of things. Why don’t you let them forget instead of encouraging them, eh?”

  “Listen, I’m not encouraging them. I haven’t even told them I’m going there, all right!” He removed the shades as if to underline his honesty.

  “Just leave it alone. Don’t go digging around and then it’ll be more disappointment for them.” Tuyen stepped closer to him, trying to be intimidating.

  She was slightly shorter than he but in every other way as striking. The same thick black shoulder-length hair, the broad high cheekbones, the perfectly arched eyebrows—only she was dressed in a second-hand shirt and a baggy pair of paint-splattered pants she had made herself.

  “You surprise me, Miss Great Artist. Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know what happened? Don’t you wonder about him? With all your soul searching and finding yourself, don’t you want to know?”

  “It’s not my stuff, it’s theirs, and it’s painful to them and I don’t want you going digging around in it.”

  “And who are you to tell me what to do?”

  “You asked me, so I’m telling you. Don’t be selfish.”

  “Selfish? I’m going to try and find out what happened, what happened to him. How am I being selfish?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s how you are.”

  “Okay, fine, never mind. Chao chi!”

  Binh got into his car, and rolling up the window, he revved the engine and sped up the alleyway.

  “Chao anh to you too!” Tuyen yelled at the car speeding away.

  Tuyen received these visits from Binh every time her parents hadn’t heard from her for a while. Her mother, Cam, would send food and her father, Tuan, would send a brown envelope with money. They never came themselves. Cam would have liked to visit her daughter, but Tuyen’s father had forbidden it, thinking that they had to maintain a solid front in their objections to Tuyen moving out. The front always wavered though, as their anxiety made them send Binh to give Tuyen money. Binh refused to go up to the studio apartment because he said the staircase was filthy, so he would always lean on his car horn or scream her name up the alleyway until she came down. She was younger than Binh by eighteen months, but she felt she was much more mature, since he seemed to need their parents’ approval far more than she. Here he was going on another fruitless search trying to get their attention again, she thought, as she made her way up the staircase.

  Tuyen’s studio apartment was a mess of wood rails and tree stumps, twigs and rope, debris, really, which she had picked up walking along the beaches, and lumber she’d bought, all of which she was making into a great figure, a lubaio, which, when she was finished, she said, would fill the entire studio apartment from ceiling to floor. She’d enlisted her friends, Carla, who lived across the hall, Oku, and Jackie, to help her stand one of two railway ties up on its end while she tied it to iron hooks she’d hammered in at the four quadrants of the room. For months the railway ties had lain diagonally across the floor. Every now and again she bumped her toes trying to get by, until she decided that she would make a signpost.

  Stolen is what they were, the railway ties, but “come by” is what she and Oku laughingly called it, recalling their nighttime raid on the railway yards. Tuyen had happened on the idea of the lubaio when she was cutting across the railway yards on one of her searches. She hadn’t counted on the weight of the railway ties and the difficulty of moving them around at will. But Oku had used his father’s old gas guzzler, a windowless sea scow of a Buick Plaza, and they’d harnessed the ties to the top of the car and driven home slowly and stealthily through alleyways. First the ties sat up the staircase for months, t
hen, when they finally arrived in Tuyen’s studio at the top, she got her friends to help her raise one to standing.

  “Christ, this thing is fucking heavy,” Jackie had screeched. “You must be out of your mind. If I get one single scratch, my fucking career is over.”

  “What ‘fucking career,’ Jackie? Hold your fucking end up.”

  “Don’t make me drop this on you, Oku.”

  “Drop it on me, girl. Just like you drop it on that German guy.”

  “Don’t go there, man. Don’t front. You couldn’t handle it.”

  “Well, test me, girl, test me!”

  “Stop, stop.” Both Tuyen and Carla said this at the same time, laughing, the railway tie tilting precariously.

  “Why the fuck do I bother with you guys?” Jackie said dismissively.

  “Because we love you, sweetie.” Tuyen finished tying off the pole.

  “It’s your Jones for me, baby.” Oku wrapped his arm across Jackie’s waist.

  “Anyways—” Jackie gave Oku a freezing look, at which he dropped his arm limply, then turning to Tuyen—“And what the fuck are you making now? Is this some ancient Vietnamese shit or something?”

  “I’m making a fucking lubaio …”

  “Okay, honey, say no fucking more.” Jackie examined her nails and her long legs. Jackie could use the word “fuck” as every part of speech, in every grammatical construction.

  “… because I am not interested in the idea of life, death, fertility, hope, or anything, and because Dali’s Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.”

  “Word!” Oku.

  “And because there’s some ancient Chinese-Vietnamese shit that’s my shit and I’m taking it. Okay?”

  “Oh Christ, turn her off.” Carla. “But I thought you were Vietnamese?”

  “How long have you known me?” The words sounded dangerous in Tuyen’s throat. Carla had ventured into a sensitive place.

  “Whatever,” Jackie said, noticing the sudden disruption. “Maybe you’re a fucking genius, but you’re nuts is all I know, girl. This place is a fucking mess!”

  “Okay, let me explain. You know those fake carved posts they’ve put in the middle of the road down on Spadina? In Chinatown? Well, they’re kitsch down there, but they’re supposed to be signposts. Like long ago people would pin messages against the government and shit like that on them. So my installation is to reclaim … Of course, regular electric posts already have notices on them like flyers and stuff … Well, I still have to think it all through, but …”

  Breaking off, she explained the plan to make a pulley with a seat so that she could move up and down the lubaio, engraving and encrusting figures and signs. At the planned installation, which was to be her most ambitious, she would have the audience post messages on the lubaio. Messages to the city.

  Jackie began to make snoring sounds. “Anyways, very interesting honey, but …” she said, pausing pointedly, “catch you all later. Much. I got business.”

  Tuyen was devoted, as devoted as she could be to anyone, to Carla. That is, Carla reminded her of a painting she loved by Remedios Varo. Madness of the Cat. If you saw Remedios Varo’s painting, you would see Carla—without the cats but with the electricity, all kinetic electricity, all the supernatural otherworldly energy. That was how Tuyen saw her, and indeed there was a striking resemblance to the girl in Remedios’s painting. The wraithlike face, the high cheekbones, the reddish hair, kinked in Carla’s case not by electricity but by her father’s genealogy; and the dark hues of her skin put there also by him. But the surprise on her face, the startled, knowing look, was another alchemy altogether her own. Tuyen rightly saw that Carla inhabited a world of fantasy, of distance, of dreams. Her bicycle, like the wheeled apparatuses of Remedios’s inventions, extending from her bones as she pedalled her way around the city, her winter sun–yellowed jacket and the courier’s knapsack on her back ballooning out like a sail. And the city’s smogged air around her seemed painted in decalcomania. All that was why Tuyen was attracted to Carla. The hidden energy, the little shocks secreted in inconspicuous places. The times she came upon Carla in her sparsely appointed apartment next door, standing still as if in the middle of a conversation with unseen people, she fell silent watching. If she were to paint Carla, and she had tried, it would be to copy every painting of Varo’s.

  In every one of Tuyen’s installations—she’d had six now, and had a growing reputation in the avant-garde scene—there was the figure or some aspect of Carla. Sometimes her eyes with their luxuriant lashes, sometimes her mouth in that rich sombre pout. And in each installation her hand on Carla’s figure had grown more erotic, painting the escarpment of Carla’s cheek or her ankle or her back like a lover.

  Tuyen had been drawn to her since the first day of high school. They were both intense, bright girls who kept quiet in class but always had a quirky yet correct answer when asked a question. As when Carla blurted out in class that To Kill a Mockingbird was maudlin and embarrassing and why did people need to feel pity in order to act right. Or when Tuyen in a small voice from the back of the history class, during what she thought was a tedious intonement by the teacher about Normandy, said that she was sick of the Second World War and it wasn’t the world anyway, it was Europe, and asked what had happened in the rest of the world, did anybody else die? Was anybody else heroic?

  Their friendship escalated and expanded to include Oku, a studious guy, when he told the phys. ed. teacher, Mr. Gordon, to eat shit when he invited him to run track. He was suspended for a week because he didn’t apologize, and as a matter of principle, Tuyen and Carla, and even Jackie, who was different and odd all on her own, decided to take the week off with him. It was a wonderful week. They played video games at Jackie’s house, and Jackie’s mother taught them how to play euchre. They ate pizza at Joe’s on College, they got high on one tiny toke and giggled at everything and everyone they saw. That was grade eleven. Now that friendship of opposition to the state of things, and their common oddness, held all of them together.

  They shared everything: money, clothes, food, ideas. Everything except family details. There was an assumption among them that their families were boring and uninteresting and a general pain, and best kept hidden, and that they couldn’t wait for the end of high school to leave home. Only once in a while did they sigh in resignation at some ridiculous request from their families to fit in and stop making trouble.

  “Yes, Ma. I’ll get a blonde wig and fit in all right!” Tuyen once yelled at her mother. At which her mother looked wounded and told her to stop making jokes and try harder.

  They had an unspoken collaboration on distancing themselves as far as possible from the unreasonableness, the ignorance, the secrets, and the madness of their parents. They carried around an air of harassment or impatience about matters at home. “Anyways!” was their signal for dismissing whatever had happened in the hours between going home and coming back to school.

  Loners before they met, they were all skimming across high school, all bored with the adolescent prejudices of classrooms. They couldn’t wait to get out of school, where they had very early realized, as early as grade three, that nothing there was about them. Their parents didn’t understand anything. They abandoned them to the rough public terrain that they themselves couldn’t handle but out of which they expected their children to emerge with good grades and well adjusted. So they settled in as mainly spectators to the white kids in the class.

  Tuyen noticed the scythe-like, limber, sharp blade of Carla’s body, her strange whisper of a voice, and fell in love immediately. Carla would dream off in class—engrossed in a long-ago moment when she had heard a chair falling—Tuyen would nudge her when the teacher spoke to her. Because Tuyen saw a similarity. At home, she herself was caught by a kind of lapping shame. This is what drew them together. They each had
the hip quietness of having seen; the feeling of living in two dimensions, the look of being on the brink, at the doorway listening for everything.

  They all, Tuyen, Carla, Oku, and Jackie, felt as if they inhabited two countries—their parents’ and their own—when they sat dutifully at their kitchen tables being regaled with how life used to be “back home,” and when they listened to inspired descriptions of other houses, other landscapes, other skies, other trees, they were bored. They thought that their parents had scales on their eyes. Sometimes they wanted to shout at them, “Well, you’re not there!” But if any of them had the temerity to say this, they would be met by a slap to the face or a crestfallen look, and an awful, disappointed silence in the kitchen. Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed of other shores wrapped around their parents. Breaking their doorways, they left the sleepwalk of their mothers and fathers and ran across the unobserved borders of the city, sliding across ice to arrive at their own birthplace—the city. They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.

  Only once back then did Tuyen share a family detail with Carla. A letter written by her mother.

  Dear My Phuong,

  You do not know how my heart is open. You have seen my son, Quy? I am in hopes that he is safe with you. I will give any things I have to meet him. My days is nothing …

  But before Carla could read more Tuyen had grabbed the letter, stuffing it back into her bag, saying, “Anyways … my mother’s crazy, huh?” Carla had grinned uncomfortably, and they’d said nothing more about it. After that they acted as if the incident had never happened, yet for all its unfinished nature, it brought them protectively closer. When it came to their families they could only draw half conclusions, make half inferences, for fear of the real things that lay there.

  Tuyen’s father owned a restaurant on Elizabeth Street where most of the help and most of the customers spoke Vietnamese only. When she was little, Tuyen rebelled against the language, refusing to speak it. At five she went through a phase of calling herself Tracey because she didn’t like anything Vietnamese. She used to sit at the cash register, her legs hanging from a stool, reprimanding people older than she to speak English. “English, English!” she would yell at them. As a teenager she cut her hair herself in jagged swaths, shaving the left side and having the rest fall to the right over her eyes. Her mother wept, bemoaning the good thick hair she said Tuyen had butchered. Even back then she disobeyed Bo’s warnings to stay close to home, scouring the beaches, the railroads, and the construction sites at night for unattended wood. She said she was going to be an architect, and she actually spent two years in college learning draftsmanship. She dropped out before finishing and started doing sculpture at the college of art, but she dropped out of that too, saying that the people there were vulgar, no-talent assholes who only wanted to suck up to teachers and do the conventional.