What We All Long For Read online

  Tuan’s engineering came in handy at calibrating the weight of crates and boxes on his shoulders and back. His first two years he lifted lichees and jackfruit and sugar apples and star fruit and bean curd and dried mushrooms in all their assortments. Also lettuce and bok choy, Chinese cabbage, and bean sprouts. Fish and ducks, pig halves and the dead weight of frozen chickens. His back was either wet or cold most days. He graduated to selling at the front on the occasional summer day. When they figured out how—Tuan with his contacts in produce and with the money they’d brought with them plus the money they squirrelled away—they opened their own hole-in-the-wall restaurant off Spadina. After that there was no thought of being a civil engineer any more, or a doctor. Tuan knew he would never be allowed to build buildings. Cam was more hopeful, more dogged. She studied and studied, but always, four times, her English proficiency failed her. Never mind that she was probably only going to take care of Vietnamese patients who couldn’t understand English-speaking doctors anyway; never mind that she could turn a breach, never mind. She too gave up finally.

  The restaurant became their life. They were being defined by the city. They had come thinking that they would be who they were, or at least who they had managed to remain. After the loss of Quy, it made a resigned sense to them that they would lose other parts of themselves. Once they accepted that, it was easy to see themselves the way the city saw them: Vietnamese food. Neither Cam nor Tuan cooked very well, but how would their customers know? Eager Anglos ready to taste the fare of their multicultural city wouldn’t know the differences. Luckily, national pride and discerning palates overtook the Vus and they hired a good cook, giving him a one-eighth share of the business, the only way they could keep him. The engineering skills came in handy again. How to fit thirty people into the tiny squarage of Saigon Pearl; the ergonomics necessary to urge them to leave so that another thirty could be seated within forty-five minutes; the right greeting and treatment so that thirty diners felt satisfaction, familiarity, yet not intimacy, which would make them linger. Then the translations that Ai, Lam, and particularly Binh and Tuyen, would have to facilitate.

  Binh and Tuyen were born in the city, so they were born under the assumption that simply being born counted for something. They were required to disentangle puzzlement; any idiom or gesture or word, they were counted on to translate. Cam and Tuan expected much from them. As if assuming a new blood had entered their veins; as if their umbilical cords were also attached to this mothering city, and this made Binh and Tuyen not Vietnamese but that desired ineffable nationality: Western. For Tuan and Cam, the children were their interpreters, their annotators and paraphrasts, across the confusion of their new life.

  Such power in children. Of course they became oracles of a kind too. Tuyen, perhaps, was the most savvy, and with a combination of her father’s affection and indulgence, she used this power to get her way always. Her desires were not as geopolitical as her parents, not as strategic, and because she was a child, they were far more personal. Like wanting a certain pencil or a certain piece of beef or candy or wanting to sit on this chair or that and throwing a tantrum if she was told to behave. Such power in children makes them become smarter than their parents much sooner than expected. And perhaps Binh and especially Tuyen became not only smarter than their biological parents but smarter than the surrogate city—the authorities whose requests and rules they translated for Cam and Tuan. Perhaps they took a liberty here and there, made a deliberate misrepresentation or two along the way. Binh would later finance certain operations in what is called illegal human traffic, but which he saw as the free flow of goods and labour. And Tuyen, a little more esoteric but with the same surrealist bent and without the masculinist charm of her brother, but perhaps with a little more intellectual rigour, would become a Dadaist, making everything useful useless and vice versa in her chaotic apartment.

  But back then, right after school, Ai, Lam, Binh, and Tuyen had to report to the restaurant to clean tables or wash dishes or chop vegetables endlessly for the freezer. They served soups with beef and mint and sprouts, and chicken on rice, and Singapore noodles. Ai and Lam and Binh worked dutifully and without chafing, but Tuyen complained constantly. She cut things carelessly, she broke glasses, and she left a mess with the dishes. She bawled the customers out if they didn’t use English. Her father put her on the cash register, where at least her passion for numbers and patterns kept her interested. Nevertheless, she was wilful and rude, overcharging and arguing when the restaurant was crowded and everyone feeling rushed. Lunchtime and six to nine-thirty were their busiest times. Then, while they cleaned up late at night, Tuyen did her homework at one of the tables.

  She remembered all this in a rush, moving around the cluttered kitchen, the eternal cooker blinking. No matter the size of their kitchens over the years, they were always cluttered. She felt a sense of comfort and contradiction. What was that unease? she wondered. Why had she wanted as far back as she could remember to “not be them”? Not be Vietnamese. It was nothing that they had taught her. They were so definitely who they were. She felt outside of herself, outside of them. Which is why she’d found Carla. She wanted to be more than them. More what? she asked herself now. Damn. All she’d come here to do was borrow money and get back downtown, and all she had done was dig up uncontrollable feelings.

  Her father came back into the kitchen, dressed in street clothes. He grunted at Tuyen, moving toward the fridge.

  “You still here? You change your mind?”

  “Bo …” He raised his hand, stopping her, poured himself a glass of water, added bitters, and drank slowly.

  “Your mother’s sleeping. Don’t wake her, eh?”

  “Bo”—Tuyen added pleading to her voice—“are you going downtown? Can I get a ride? I need your help, Bo.” She placed her words where she knew he would find them. “Need” and “help” always appealed to him. Her voice was wanting, if not childish.

  “Hmmm,” he said, giving in.

  She would apologize to him on the way into the city. Smarter or not, she loved her father. She had to apologize for touching that vulnerable spot that she had been unable to translate in all her years as her parents’ interlocutor. She had not even been able to get the story fully spoken.

  SIX

  JACKIE WAS SEARCHING for yet another cigarette when Oku caught up with her. Oku wished he had one to give her. He wished that he had anything to give her since he had obviously stepped across a very thin line with her at Tuyen’s. He’d teased her before about the German boyfriend, but he hadn’t heard himself do it with quite the venom of a while ago. Or quite the childishness. Was it because somehow he felt that he was losing ground, that she seemed more distant? That he hadn’t seen her for some time or that they, meaning Carla, Tuyen, and himself, were seeing less and less of her these days? Or was it just his inability to find the words to tell her how he felt? Maybe some fumbling sex between them, once, a long time ago was not enough to be a declaration of love.

  It was the women’s washroom at the Lula Lounge one night, when Jackie dragged him in, daring him to do it to her right there. The laughing-giggling-blurry high of her pulling him into the stall, opening his shirt, biting his left nipple. Yes, he remembered it was his left nipple. He remembered everything about the sex. Especially the breathless laughing sound she made when he went into her. He remembered everything, but she didn’t. At least it seemed to make no difference to her now. They had gone back to the dance floor and danced all night as if they were not in the middle of a packed room but in each other’s skin. He had licked the musky sweat off her neck, she’d held him with both arms around his waist, running her hands up his back. When the party was over, they had stood outside on the sidewalk, at first waiting for Tuyen and Carla, whom they’d lost in the crowd, oblivious to them. Not seeing them, they thought of hailing a cab, but Jackie told him to walk her home instead. And they’d walked along Dundas Street hugging and dancing and trying to trip each other.

  It was t
hree in the morning and they were both still high and drunk when they got to Ab und Zu, Jackie’s store on Queen Street. She let herself in, turning and brushing her hand against his face. Oku hadn’t thought of Reiner, but the door closing brought the cold fact of him. He’d quickly hailed a passing cab and gone home. The next time he saw Jackie it was as if, for her, nothing had taken place. She had been so casual with him, he felt upset. He felt like not talking to her, but this tack didn’t work either. It wasn’t as if nothing had happened, it was as if what had happened was meaningless to her, like hanging out, or laughing, or having something to eat. After that she seemed uninterested in him. So he wrote her poems.

  But poems, obviously written for her and declaimed at Tuyen’s installations, missed their mark among the people in the room, even though he sent them, as seductively as he could, right at her sharp cheekbones and her full wide lips. Didn’t he, in the middle of his most passionate verse, see Jackie lean over, offering her mouth to the German boyfriend? Oku could not bear to think his name or say it. The German boyfriend, or cruelly, “Nazi boy,” was how he referred to him. Maybe poetry was too obtuse, too angled for his purposes. Which, if he thought about it, were what? His purposes, that is, he asked himself, fumbling stupidly in his pockets as if he could find a cigarette there for her. He always caught himself doing something that he guessed she would find trifling. But if he was trifling, what did she see in that German idiot with the dyed black hair and the ankh in his ear and the bad imitation of Hendrix guitar playing?

  “Fresh out, Jackie.”

  “You do not smoke cigarettes, Oku.”

  There it was again—he felt awkward, more so.

  “Listen, Jacks … ah, sorry about the ‘Nazi boy’ stuff …” He felt insincere. He had meant the “Nazi boy stuff.”

  “Really! No kidding. ‘Sorry about the Nazi boy stuff’?”

  He felt her looking right through him, mocking him. They were stopped at the light. She looked at him directly for so long his face tingled. How rich her skin was. Her face evenly beautiful, not a blemish, not an incongruency. And no innocence whatever. A face that knew everything—everything bad—a face that could search out failure and scorn it. Or find it amusing. Amused is what Jackie’s face told him now. Oku didn’t know which he liked—to be found amusing or to be scorned. To be scorned probably. That at least was charged. To be found amusing made him blush, made him melt.

  The traffic light must have changed several times—he had the feeling of other people crossing and traffic moving, then stopping. She held him in a kind of glimmer. He wanted her to look away and he wanted to be held. He didn’t want her to hold him like this, when all she had for him was amusement. But to be held at all by her, by her eyes, was thrilling—it was to be held as if by her body. She hadn’t laid a finger on him, yet he knew this is what it would be like to touch her again. To be held in some knowledge she had, some substance that was tangy.

  “Really,” she said again, her voice insinuating yet distant. He knew that he was losing her attention, even her amused attention.

  “Jackie, hook a brother up, huh?” He had intended to say something else, something certainly less inane, something serious, but now he’d said this and it seemed lewd.

  “You know, Oku, men are so innocent.” She breathed the words rather than said them. “I hear your poems, they all begin as if you’re innocent. Like things happen to you that you can’t predict. You never know what’s going to happen to you. You love innocence, you’re fixated on it. I don’t trust innocence. I’m not innocent. I know what’s going to happen to me.” She spoke slowly, singeing him with each breath.

  He noticed with a shock that she had not used the word “fuck” once. The College streetcar was at the light. She had always been aware of the traffic, the lights, the streetcar approaching, her particular plans, the everyday world going on around them. He hadn’t. Jackie was on it before he could recover.

  Oku saw the streetcar moving, the doors closing, and her beautiful back disappearing. He felt like a daydreamer just awakened.

  Quy

  Other tragedies have overshadowed mine. Look at that Catholic priest in Managua, he got himself shot; a plane will crash in the North Sea; some stupid rage—I know all about that—will hack eight hundred thousand people to death in Rwanda. But nothing will suck all the oxygen out of the air in years to come as what they will call 9/11, then the Americans will rampage the globe like thousands of Vietnams, and I, I will be forgotten. You see what I’m talking about?

  In my heart, sometimes, I feel a lightness, a nonexistence. I feel it now riding this train. I have these moments, very dangerous, I feel scattered. But I’m here, and I feel like telling you the rest. Not because you’ll get it, but because I feel like telling it.

  My life at Pulau Bidong wasn’t always unpleasant. I discovered small things about myself, small pleasures. There was a boy I used to play with in the old rotten boat in the bush tangle, near the rock that resembled the Buddha. Along a slimy path to the boat he would push me and I would push him and we would run and swing on the rotting banisters. There was a sapling growing inside the boat and we would swing and bend it and let it go. And it made a loud slapping noise. We tied a rag to it and filled the rag with stones and we would slingshot the stones up in the air and out of the boat. We would balance on the side beams and chase each other. The boat was just like the one that had brought me to Pulau Bidong. One day, the boy fell off the boat screaming. He grabbed the plank as he went crashing down. I ran down and around to see what happened to him. He was crying, his ragged shirt was ripped open, and there was a little cut in his belly. I tried to pull him free, to help him to stand up, but he cried more. I told him to stand up, but he wouldn’t listen to me. I told him if he didn’t stand up and stop crying, I would go back to the camp by myself. He just kept crying. So I went back to the camp. I knew he would soon come back and tell on me. He would probably say I pushed him, which I didn’t do, but I knew he was a wicked boy and would tell a lie on me. So I went to sleep without any food and I hid from him the next day.

  I was eight years old. When no one tried to beat me for pushing him, I was sorry I left him and went to look for him by the boat. He was still lying there beside the rotted boat. His hand was over his eyes. I called him, I said, “Hey boy!” but he didn’t move his hand from his eyes. He didn’t answer me. So I pulled his hands, and his open eyes stared at me. I said, “What you trying to pull, you asshole!” Then a bee flew out of his ear and stung me on the mouth. I saw the merest smile on his face. I screamed and started running. My lips became swollen instantly, and I vowed never to talk to that boy again. He disappeared. No one looked for him. Except me, sometimes. Just to see if he was sorry for playing the horrible trick on me. If he had only once appeared to me, I would have maybe said sorry myself. Anyhow, I did not miss him, and as days went by I did not miss him even more.

  A month or two went by, and on a day when I was tired from the wear and tear of cuffs and scratches from the other children, I went to the rotting boat to see if my friend was still there. He wasn’t. But he had left his shirt there, and the zipper from his pants. The place where I last saw him seemed bleached out, grass ripped up. Of course, it took me years to figure out that the fall had practically killed him and that I’d done the rest. A clouded leopard probably ate him, or perhaps the rats that roamed the camp like we refugees. Perhaps in all the days that I hadn’t returned for him, they had taken small bites of him and little by little he was dragged away. But I chose to think of him then as nothing but a trickster. Perhaps I was afraid someone would think I had hurt him and they would beat me or send me away to another camp where my parents could not find me. After all, they were soon to come for me, so I had to stay quiet.

  Then there were the beatings at the camp. You could get a beating from anyone. And for someone like me with no one to retaliate, I was like a bed mat on a line. I can’t tell you how many beatings I got. That boy used to hit me. So, I played dumb.
I was dumb. They let me go finally with a beating. By now you would understand I was not a lovely child any more. My legs had sores, places I picked and picked and ate the skin off. I was unwashed, and lice were plentiful in my head. I scratched and scratched until my head was bruised and scabby.

  Pulau Bidong was cluttered with ramshackle buildings, small lean- to shops and houses, barracks really—some stilted, some open to the weather. Every day more people came, getting off the boats, walking the wooden pier with whatever they salvaged, sometimes only their arms swinging, one foot in front, one behind. There was nothing to do all day but stand around or find things to eat. I would jump off the pier to relieve the itchiness of my head. So I learned to swim, and one day a woman approached me. She used to run the shop where drink was sold. She said I was a good swimmer and she had a job for me. She told me I would have to swim out to a boat and bring back a plastic bag for her. She told me to wait at the pier until the sun went down. And so I began my first career. The woman gave me food in exchange and tar for my head lice. She was not a pretty woman, she had a cleft palate—her mouth was cut in two. She was nothing like my mother that I remember, nor my sisters. Her fingers were dirty, and she tricked me and gave me less than what she said, but that was fair. Who was I?