That Summer In Provincetown

That Summer in

Provincetown

CAROLINE VU

GUERNICA • ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 119

TORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY • LANCASTER (U.K.)

2015

For Arianne and Clara

Contents

1   Uncle Hai’s Magic Wand

2   My Brother Tim the Tinker

3   My Mother Lan

4   Uncle Tan the Sympathizer

5   My Father the Buffalo Boy

6   Nam the Ex

7   Handsome Cousin

8   Uncle Chinh and Catherine

9   Me

10   My Cousin Daniel

11   My $99 Special

12   Aunt Thu and the Pedophile

13   Mary the Teenager

14   Aunt Frances and the Obsessive-Compulsive Lawyer

15   Aunt Shirley Temple

16   My Grandmother Anh

17   The Family Ten Years Later

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

If you can not get rid of the family skeleton,

you might as well make it dance.

—George Bernard Shaw

Chapter 1

Uncle Hai’s Magic Wand

Daniel died prematurely 28 years ago. You’d think with time he would be forgiven. But no, there’s no such chance. Memory and pride go back a long way in his family. I know because his family is my family too. We shared more than a grandmother, aunts and uncles; we shared a century of untold stories. Daniel was my French cousin. Actually he was only half French but his ego wished us to believe otherwise. Muttering French to himself was his way of showing off his Frenchness. Unfortunately, his extensive knowledge of Vietnamese swear words always got in the way. Fuck your mother in a perfect Hanoi accent always betrayed him. He could not hide the other half of his roots even if he worked hard at it.

Daniel passed away 28 years ago at the age of 30. To this day no one in the family mentions his name. Or if they do, it is only in reference to me. Remember when he taught Mai to scoop the fish out of the fish bowl to let it dry to death? they’d remind each other. What a naughty boy, that Daniel! always followed What a naive girl, that Mai!

As kids we could not escape comparison. Living in the same house made this comparison even more inevitable. While I stayed a good child, Daniel didn’t. At his best, my witty cousin created art out of nothingness. He’d twist kitchen rags into dolls’ clothes while music flew from his chopsticks. At his worst, he became a brat, always getting into trouble, forever seeking attention. I wanted to disappear into the background whenever an adult entered the room. Daniel would go out of his way to earn a kick in the butt.

Yes, Daniel received more butt-kicks than the rest of us kids. Butt-kicks, face-slaps, skull-knocks; he tasted them all. The punishment often came from his father’s swift hands. Our mutual Uncle Hai, a young army sergeant with the ego of a general, participated as well in these acts. My own mother also showed traits of this inherited family disease. Although she loved Daniel and spoiled him rotten, my mother didn’t mind knocking him out when the right situation presented itself. Spanking, like eating and washing; another daily ritual! my mother would repeat this as in a mantra.

Uncle Hai, on the other hand, never bothered with mantras. He never said much. One minute he would be jolly drinking beers, the next minute he would be removing his belt. It did not take much for him to turn dark. But the belt straps paled next to the rifles. Daniel bore the brunt of Uncle Hai’s sadism, but I wasn’t far behind. He never actually hit me with a rifle. But the psychological terror he unleashed proved worse than any beating. He loved playing a game of ‘Kill the Communist’. In this game, I played the communist while he, a soldier, chased me around the house with his real rifle. Once, he even put a handgun to my right temple after handcuffing me. And that’s for collaborating with the Commies! he said through clenched teeth, a cigarette hanging from his lips. I had no problem recognizing Uncle Hai’s posture. The gun to the temple? I’ve seen that photo a dozen times. It was front-page material in all the Saigon newspapers for weeks. Uncle Hai had a thing for media images. He behaved like a boy wanting to play John Wayne. Except that this was no John Wayne. This hero of my uncle was none other than Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, Saigon’s chief of police and the most notorious communist tracker of all time. And I had to be the communist in this game. Of course, the louder I screamed, the harder Uncle Hai laughed. For reasons unknown to me, my grandmother never intervened in these torture sessions. She only said: Tuk! Tuk! Stop screaming Mai! before returning to her betel chewing.

Fortunately, Uncle Hai also cultivated a civilized side. Being a doctor as well as a soldier, he sometimes healed people, not just threatened them. In a country of mostly emasculated-looking men, Uncle Hai’s commanding stature and bulging pectorals drove women wild. So despite being a macho, all around town mothers stalked him for their daughters. Girls lined up in front of our house for a peep at him. I had giggling teachers giving me candies in school simply because of our family ties. Tell your teacher I like her. Nice hairdo, my uncle reminded me often. The first time I blurted out the ‘Nice Hairdo’ line, my gym teacher took my hand and forced me down a dark, empty corridor. We walked for a long time in silence. Immediately, I regretted my stupid remark. I thought the teacher would report me to Mother Superior. But no, she spared me Mother Superior’s rod. At the end of the long corridor, we came to a locked room. The teacher took out a key from her pocket, unlocked the door and invited me into her treasure cave. In the room, I saw new comic books on the table, sweet lotus cakes on the stove, candies in the open cupboard. The scene mesmerized me. This is for you, but don’t tell anyone, the teacher said as she handed me some chewing gum. After that episode, ‘Nice Hairdo’ became a sort of ‘Open Sesame’ for me. Every time I repeated it to one of my teachers, they would invariably smile. Saigon may have been big and overpopulated, but everywhere I went, I collected gifts from giggling ladies. Uncle Hai’s magic travelled far.

* * *

How many hearts Uncle Hai broke, I don’t know. How many hymens he tore apart, I couldn’t guess. But there must have been plenty, given the perfumed envelopes in our mailbox each day. Uncle Hai never bothered with the letters, he only kept the photos. Snapshots of women adopting the Brigitte Bardot in Paris Match poses filled a box under his bed. Even in our society of restraint and self-denial, girls lined up to be conquered by Uncle Hai’s magic wand. And the more he brandished his magical rod, the more those Nice Hairdos clung to him. He bedded indiscriminately: cute ones, plain ones, young ones, old ones. He didn’t earn the nickname Horny Hai for nothing. Perhaps the war had something to do with it. Perhaps the war turned virgins into willing victims. Procreate now before the war kills you! It must have been a good pick-up line for the times.

* * *

Uncle Hai was my grandmother’s baby and most spoilt child. She had him at the ripe old age of forty-two, which in her day was reason enough for shame. At a time when life expectation hovered around sixty-five, one became a grandmother at forty-two, not a mother. But my Western educated grandfather mocked this traditional school of thought. He had just returned from France an undecorated but proud soldier. Grandfather may have been a mere yellow-skinned footman doing the dirty work for the French during the Second World War. But pride still emanated from his every pore. Despite being an army doctor, my grandfather never had a chance to save lives. He did what was asked of him — prepping his diminutive compatriots for an encounter with the towering Germans. It was a thankless job. On his return to Vietnam, my grandfather marched triumphantly into the house, ordered pho soup from the cook and then love from my grandmother. It didn’t matter that my grandfather’s colonial troops failed miserably and France surrendered to Germany in 1940. Grandfather still felt elated setting foot on French soil to be part of history. So when Uncle Hai saw the light of day in 1941, he became not only a child of Desires Satisfied, he was also a child of Future Victory over Nazism. Even if my grandmother blushed over his birth, the family loved this last baby. And they spoiled him rotten.

Uncle Hai’s childhood became the envy of his older siblings. The whole household put up with his whiny attitude. I guess being sick helped Uncle Hai’s cause. At the age of three, Uncle Hai caught cholera like many other children of the time. The unyielding diarrhea robbed my uncle of his energy and roundness. His baby face turned angular as his skin dried up. Despite being a doctor, Uncle Hai’s father could offer him no treatment other than bed rest and a liquid diet. In those days, antibiotics went to French patients first. Vietnamese, being second-class citizens in their own country, gave themselves opium instead. This by-product of poppy served many purposes: it controlled the people’s pain, plugged up their intestines, lulled them to sleep and turned their despair into a fake euphoria. But opium remained off limits to three-year-olds.

Sick little Uncle Hai fortunately recovered from his cholera. This was a big deal at the time since many children in the neighbourhood did not recover. The day the diarrhea stopped, my grandmother gave a feast to Buddha while my grandfather celebrated with a whiff of opium. Contact with malady at an early age left its trace on Uncle Hai. Because he lost out on a few months of play, he soon became convinced the world owed him something in return. He developed an attitude of someone who could do no wrong. He took responsibility for none of his actions, caring for no one except his own cute self. A young Uncle Hai cried at the least frustration, knowing well his tears would break his mother’s heart. When his new shoes hurt too much, he had to be brought to friends’ houses on the maid’s back. Pretending to be