Fake House by Linh Dinh Page A
Authors: Linh Dinh
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, Asia, History, Short Stories, Short Stories (Single Author), vietnam, Vietnamese Americans, Vietnam - Social Life and Customs
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again.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll never want to see you again.”
“It’s a deal.”
“Je suis,”
Huong blurted, with vehemence, accenting each syllable,
“Tu es. Il est. Elle est. Nous sommes. Vous êtes. Ils sont. Elles sont.”
T WO W HO F ORGOT
T here is no reliable method of calibrating degrees of suffering, and of the countless mishaps and irritations a passenger may encounter while riding the train from Hanoi to Saigon, I will only catalog a small inventory. A breakdown of the kinds of explosives and bombs that were used to destroy its 1,334 bridges, 27 tunnels, 158 stations, and 1,370 switches during the Vietnam War would be useless and incomprehensible. I do know that the poet Do Kh, traveling in 1992, fell asleep during the stretch between Ha Tinh and Vinh while trying to read Duong Thu Huong’s
Love Stories Told Before Dawn
. And in Bao Ninh’s uneven novel,
The Sorrow of War
, there is an extraordinary account of the protagonist and his girlfriend, recently raped during the confusion of a bombing raid, walking away from the wreckage of their train in tatters, only to be approached by an old beggar soliciting alms. And Tran Huynh Chau, a former ARVN officer, tells in his memoir of nearly being hit by a rock pitched through the window as his train passedthrough Nha Trang, a resort town renowned for its beaches, snorkeling, and scuba diving. It was 1980 and he was heading home after five years in prison. The 960 miles from Thanh Hoa to Saigon would take sixty hours. Each prisoner was given fifty dong as he was released, a kind of severance pay; Chau’s ticket cost forty-five. The custom of hurling rocks at trains began after the war when children in the South decided to take aim at the pith-helmeted heads of the Northern soldiers sitting inside train windows.
A couple of train-related incidents occurred during the early hours and late afternoon of June 3, 1995, but before we get to the details, I must give you some background information on what I was doing in Vietnam in the first place. On May 3, 1995, at the age of thirty-one and after an absence of twenty years, I returned from Philadelphia to Vietnam, the country of my birth, for a one-month stay. I had left Saigon on April 27, 1975, sitting on the floor in the hold of a C-130 cargo plane, a few hours before NVA rockets shut down the runways of Tan Son Nhat Airport.
Returning in a Boeing 747, my reentry into Vietnam’s airspace was lubricated by the sweet voice of Blossom Dearie, one of the many inspired selections on the jazz channel of Vietnam Airlines. Below, and a little to the right, was the red earth of the central plains, patched by swaths of emerald-green rice fields and hemmed on one side by the turquoise-blue of the Pacific Ocean. The Suntori whiskey I had drunk at Seoul’s Kempo Airport was starting to kick in, and I imagined myself to be greatly moved by the occasion. Alcohol, which always makes me either maudlin or violent, was the likely culprit for my agitated state. It is, again, last call at Dirty Frank’s—a bar I frequent in Philadelphia, where Blossom Dearie is also available, on the jukebox—and I hear the bartender’s raspy voice telling me to go home. “I’m going home, Al. I’m going home.”
Although Saigon-born and raised, I had decided early on to spend the bulk of my time in the northern part of the country, since both of my parents are from the North (my spoken Vietnamese, to this day, betrays this genesis). During my stay in Hanoi, Hai Phong, Thai Binh, and elsewhere, I was seldom mistaken for a local, and often assumed to be a Chinese, a Japanese, or a Korean. I was even called Ong Tay, literally “Mr. West,” a Westerner, a word that used to denote only a Frenchman. A practical consequence of this fact was that I was always seen as a foreigner and was always charged accordingly for my accommodations. I should point out that an overseas Vietnamese was also considered a foreigner, but if one looked
“Why?”
“Because I’ll never want to see you again.”
“It’s a deal.”
“Je suis,”
Huong blurted, with vehemence, accenting each syllable,
“Tu es. Il est. Elle est. Nous sommes. Vous êtes. Ils sont. Elles sont.”
T WO W HO F ORGOT
T here is no reliable method of calibrating degrees of suffering, and of the countless mishaps and irritations a passenger may encounter while riding the train from Hanoi to Saigon, I will only catalog a small inventory. A breakdown of the kinds of explosives and bombs that were used to destroy its 1,334 bridges, 27 tunnels, 158 stations, and 1,370 switches during the Vietnam War would be useless and incomprehensible. I do know that the poet Do Kh, traveling in 1992, fell asleep during the stretch between Ha Tinh and Vinh while trying to read Duong Thu Huong’s
Love Stories Told Before Dawn
. And in Bao Ninh’s uneven novel,
The Sorrow of War
, there is an extraordinary account of the protagonist and his girlfriend, recently raped during the confusion of a bombing raid, walking away from the wreckage of their train in tatters, only to be approached by an old beggar soliciting alms. And Tran Huynh Chau, a former ARVN officer, tells in his memoir of nearly being hit by a rock pitched through the window as his train passedthrough Nha Trang, a resort town renowned for its beaches, snorkeling, and scuba diving. It was 1980 and he was heading home after five years in prison. The 960 miles from Thanh Hoa to Saigon would take sixty hours. Each prisoner was given fifty dong as he was released, a kind of severance pay; Chau’s ticket cost forty-five. The custom of hurling rocks at trains began after the war when children in the South decided to take aim at the pith-helmeted heads of the Northern soldiers sitting inside train windows.
A couple of train-related incidents occurred during the early hours and late afternoon of June 3, 1995, but before we get to the details, I must give you some background information on what I was doing in Vietnam in the first place. On May 3, 1995, at the age of thirty-one and after an absence of twenty years, I returned from Philadelphia to Vietnam, the country of my birth, for a one-month stay. I had left Saigon on April 27, 1975, sitting on the floor in the hold of a C-130 cargo plane, a few hours before NVA rockets shut down the runways of Tan Son Nhat Airport.
Returning in a Boeing 747, my reentry into Vietnam’s airspace was lubricated by the sweet voice of Blossom Dearie, one of the many inspired selections on the jazz channel of Vietnam Airlines. Below, and a little to the right, was the red earth of the central plains, patched by swaths of emerald-green rice fields and hemmed on one side by the turquoise-blue of the Pacific Ocean. The Suntori whiskey I had drunk at Seoul’s Kempo Airport was starting to kick in, and I imagined myself to be greatly moved by the occasion. Alcohol, which always makes me either maudlin or violent, was the likely culprit for my agitated state. It is, again, last call at Dirty Frank’s—a bar I frequent in Philadelphia, where Blossom Dearie is also available, on the jukebox—and I hear the bartender’s raspy voice telling me to go home. “I’m going home, Al. I’m going home.”
Although Saigon-born and raised, I had decided early on to spend the bulk of my time in the northern part of the country, since both of my parents are from the North (my spoken Vietnamese, to this day, betrays this genesis). During my stay in Hanoi, Hai Phong, Thai Binh, and elsewhere, I was seldom mistaken for a local, and often assumed to be a Chinese, a Japanese, or a Korean. I was even called Ong Tay, literally “Mr. West,” a Westerner, a word that used to denote only a Frenchman. A practical consequence of this fact was that I was always seen as a foreigner and was always charged accordingly for my accommodations. I should point out that an overseas Vietnamese was also considered a foreigner, but if one looked
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