Prologue
November 1986, Ba Tri, a coastal village, South Vietnam
The first day my father’s body washed up in the estuary, the village chief policeman, Phu, noticed. He stuck his wooden pole into my father’s side and shoved him back toward the Ba Lai River. The sun bled deep purple over the wide bright green fields, its flatness stretching endlessly toward the blurred horizon.
Phu squatted down on the walkway then looked back to his square brown shrimp farms along the river, watching for the tiny surface bubbles the shrimp made when they popped.
Phu was a kind, gentle man. He had the deep, ruddy sun-washed skin of the coastal people in Ba Tri, a village that curved like a hook in the fluid Mekong Delta and a natural catch point for flotsam. It wasn’t unusual for a body to wash up in his yard. For nearly a decade after the official end of the war, the wooden boats of Vietnamese people trying to escape the Communists frequently capsized. Bodies shored like crabs after a storm.
When my father’s body washed up again the next day, Phu recognized him—the length of his limbs, the rip on the elbow of his pale blue shirt. He paused. Then he walked out to the end of the wooden walkway, took his long pole, bent at the knees, and gave my father’s body another hard push.
Phu watched my father’s body for a while, bobbing past the shrimping floats in the brackish water, past the exposed braided roots of his neighbor’s mangrove, until it was just a tiny speck. He imagined the body floating on the current down the river, all the way out to the South China Sea.
That night, Phu woke up from a dream. The window was open. Brine coated his throat. In his dream, he had seen my father, the bones of his face exposed.
“Are you awake?” Phu whispered to his wife. He found her cracked hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back. “There was a body today. The same one as yesterday,” he whispered.
Phu’s wife, a devout Buddhist, didn’t respond. It was practically dawn, and she would have to go out to the rice paddy soon. She was a no-nonsense farm woman who worked hard, earning them enough chickens and bitter melon to survive.
Phu nestled closer. Her nightgown clung to the sweat on her plump back. He knew she didn’t like to sleep entwined on those hot nights. Still, it brought him comfort to feel her chest rising, to smell the incense in her hair.
On the third day my father’s body washed up in Phu’s yard, he hooked his pole under my father’s shirt and dragged him to shore. He pulled my father into his backyard until he got to his family’s cemetery. Phu had decided there was a reason why this man had chosen his backyard. He laid my father on his back and crossed his arms over his chest.
Phu called some friends to help give my father a proper funeral. It took them all day to dig the grave, carefully shoring up the sides and the bottom of the mud with a wall of brick and cement. While it dried and they were preparing my father for burial, Phu found, sewn into a pocket and sealed in plastic, my father’s identification card. Our family’s address in Saigon was printed on it.
Phu held the card and recited my father’s name.
“Nguyễn Văn Tàn,” he read. “Toàn,” he whispered.
One of Phu’s friends, a tall thin man whose face was scarred by childhood acne, noticed my father’s sandal was bulging. He bent down and carefully removed the sandal from the water-bloated foot. Sewn inside was a small pouch containing a gold ring.
Phu looked at him sternly.
“We bury him as he came,” Phu said.
“He can’t use it anymore,” the man argued.
Gold had been the currency for the South Vietnamese ever since the Communists took over our city. If my father had been captured again and sent back to the labor camp where he’d been imprisoned for a decade, that one ring could have bought him extra cassava for a month or given him the privilege of contacting us. This ring bound him to my mother, whom he was desperately trying to reach on the other side of that ocean.
Phu turned his back to his friend, a rare gesture for him. Phu was an ethical man whose judgment was well-respected.
“Here, you take care of it then. He’s yours,” the man said, handing the ring back to Phu. Phu took the ring in his palm and marveled at the green hue the ocean had turned it. Then he put the ring on my father’s chest, beneath his folded arms. The men wrapped him tightly in the heavy linen shroud then carefully lowered him into the ground. Phu’s wife burned three sticks of incense and led them in chanting.
Weeks passed after my father’s body was placed in the family graveyard when something strange started happening. Phu’s shrimp farming business took off. At dusk, the shrimp popped in a cacophony of sound that resonated like a Vietnamese opera. Shrimp squirmed heavy on the nets. When he pulled them in, his biceps straining, they were translucent white and the size of a large man’s hands. Orders suddenly poured in from everywhere.
Within a month, Phu and his wife had more shrimp than they could handle and enlisted friends to help.
Within a year, they grew incredibly rich. Phu kept his side position as a village policeman, but the family no longer shredded their hands in the paddy. They traded in their humble thatched-roof house for a brick house with electricity, running water, and even an indoor bathroom. Phu bought some extra land along the coast to raise more shrimp.
His wife had rich meat and fish for dinner every night.
Every afternoon at dusk, Phu’s wife hiked out to my father’s grave. She kneeled and lit an incense stick then prayed, thanking my father for the good fortune that he’d brought them.
Sometimes, Phu watched her, bundled up in her sweater, silhouetted in the shadowy rose light.
He decided to find my father’s family.
July 1994
I stared out the window as the plane descended into the airport just outside Saigon, at the maroon rivers twining through the lush green land. My wife, Christine, slept with her head tilted back. I admired Christine’s ability to sleep on the plane. I couldn’t tune out my thoughts.
I was haunted by a feeling of déjà vu. It wasn’t my own memory that cloyed but rather my memory of a short story by Tuong Nang Tien I’d read a decade earlier. The heroine in that story returned to Vietnam long after she’d escaped. At the time the book was written, nobody who escaped Vietnam could imagine returning to our homeland. The fact that it was happening to me then seemed surreal. And I worried what would happen when we landed.
So many emotions flooded my heart. I felt like a river with a blocked drain. My senses remembered how it felt to stand in the lukewarm bathwater air and walk through the clotted market streets in Saigon, to feel the earth give way as we traveled on a ferry over the Mekong River, overripe jackfruit perfuming the air.
But it was no longer the country of my childhood. It had been thirteen years since I’d fled Vietnam. The only thing that was the same were the seasons.
I released another two buttons on the dress shirt I was wearing. I had chosen to look dignified in case we needed to bribe people to leave the airport. I kept reminding myself that I was safe, that I was an American citizen. My frame had thickened. It was no longer the sinew and bone of that starving teenager who spent all day hacking with a machete to harvest corn and cassava in the labor camp. Still, my body remembered. My eyes felt as heavy as they were during those gloomy years, my breathing thin, as if somebody had punctured my chest with a stickpin.
I didn’t know who was on the ground awaiting us. The efforts of the US human rights campaigns had shut down the camps, and the iron fist of the Communist had brought stability to the country. But the men who won were our enemies.
We descended. The muddy river was the color of brick, slinking through the green grass. I could make out metal buildings that had looked like thatched houses from higher up.
Suddenly, I didn’t want the plane to land.
But then I reminded myself the reason I had returned. I pulled an envelope from my brown leather briefcase. It was the latest of a series of letters from Phu, written in a loping scrawl. I learned it was written by Phu’s wife since the peasant lacked formal education.
Dear Mr. Pham van Hung,
We are indebted for the gifts you last sent to us. Our sons loved the American T-shirts and the valuable medications.
We respect your decision to come visit your brother-in-law and bring his remains. We understand. It may be a hard journey. We will do all we can to help in this process.
You are also welcome to visit your brother-in-law any time you wish.
Yours truly,
Phu
I was still unsure we were doing the right thing, taking my father from his resting place to bring him to America. Phu was worried about the exhumation. But he had graced us with a rare gift—evidence of my father’s disappearance. We had closure. The families of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese weren’t so lucky. They’d all vanished. Those dead at sea included my eldest brother, Thach, his wife and toddler, six cousins, an uncle and eight other people on their boat, including my old girlfriend and her family.
I refolded the letter, returned it to my briefcase, then leaned back in the seat and shut my eyes.
I tried again to conjure up a memory of my father. I didn’t have the chance to get to know him well. I came from a large family and spent most of my time playing with my seven siblings or neighborhood kids. We respected and feared our father, a serious routine-driven military man. It always bothered me that I didn’t get to know him as an adult until our last time together. We weren’t particularly close. But I had tried.
*****
The music reverberated through the walls into my brother Thach’s room, Thai Thanh’s elegant and sorrowful voice belting out “Ky Vat Cho Em” (Memorabilia for You), backed by the deep sound of woodwinds and brass orchestra. My brother smiled. The sweet notes were coming from my father’s room. We decided to go visit him.
We sneaked into the room quietly. Our dad was lying on the floor in his pajamas with his head on the pillow. It was rare to see him relaxing, even rarer to see the smile on his face as he listened to the music from a cassette player on the dresser.
I was eleven years old, and I had to tighten my lips to keep from giggling at the sight of his giant belly bouncing jellylike as he breathed.
Then I got down to lie next to him, my ear resting on his tummy like a pillow. My dad pretended not to notice, but his smile got bigger. We didn’t speak. The harmony vibrated through my thighs, and the violin plucks tickled my spine while Thai Thanh’s soprano voice echoed through my dad’s belly into my ear. This was one of my best memories of my dad. I look back and realize how, as a child, I was seeking a way to get close to him.
*****
The seat belt lights came on with a ding.
“Are we there?” my wife asked, yawning. She opened her eyes, blinking up at me. She looked beautiful, but like me, she was apprehensive.
I grabbed Christine’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
*****
Faint wind tickled the shocking green fields. Reeds drifted in subtle magnetic waves from one end of the paddy to the horizon. Coconuts and mangroves lined the periphery, loose wobbly trees which belonged neither to the land nor the water.
The place was beautiful but also unsettling. The feeling that I was lost, that I didn’t belong there, returned.
Phu walked in front of me. At forty, he was about a decade older than me, but his strong farmer’s body navigated the trail without effort.
“Our family is grateful to you. We are forever indebted.”
He turned to face me. His skin was dark and ruddy, farmer’s wrinkles furrowing the sides of his eyes.
“It is okay,” he said simply.
I was in awe of Phu’s quiet humility. He continued walking.
With two fingers, I wiped the sludgy sweat that had collected under the white cloth headband the monk had tied to my head. I struggled to keep my footing on the trail, skirting garbage and animal and human waste, the tall grass tickling my bare arms.
The sun hung low in the center of the paddy. It was already noon. We were rushing to complete the exhumation because we had a meeting at the mortuary in Saigon later that day.
Still, I walked slowly. There was a part of me that didn’t want to leave that sticky languid place where Phu had saved Dad’s body.
“My father was a good man,” I started then cleared my throat. “He was always frugal. It drove my mother crazy because she wanted what the other military wives had, like a new car. His frugality probably saved us after the war. At least we had some gold bars to trade.”
Phu didn’t turn around, but he slowed his pace. He was listening.
“He was in a labor camp for ten years. I was in one too. It bothers me that he managed to survive in that terrible place all those years, just to die in the sea. It doesn’t seem fair.”
Phu cleared his throat and took a deep breath.
“My brother Thach waited for him to come back. They helped build boats then see others off. They were on the last boat.”
Phu turned and stared at me. His eyes filled with sadness before he turned toward the rice paddies. We saw the shrimp fields whose success he attributed to my father.
Phu held the paperwork that allowed for the exhumation of my father’s body. His position in Vietnam piqued my curiosity. Like all the villages in the Mekong Delta, Ba Tri had a strange history during the war. Officially, it had been controlled by the South Vietnamese Army. Simultaneously, Vietcong guerrillas would come out of hiding at night and kidnap children, recruiting them for their militia or to act as spies. The farmers had to give up their land. The only people who remained were a famous battalion of elderly people who fought with pickaxes and machetes against both sides to keep their rights to the land.
To maintain his position as a police officer, I suspected he had to cooperate with both opposing sides. He’d probably been some kind of spy for both the Vietcong and the South Vietnamese Army. The village had been a stronghold for Communists, the people responsible for the death of my father, the same people who placed me in the camps and jail.
After the war, they were still controlled by the Communists.
Phu was a simple farmer who’d been caught in the middle.
We’d all lived long enough to recognize that a war never truly exists between the people on the front lines fighting.
Ordinary people are forced to do what is expected of them.
“I know there is a reason my father found this place. Why he wanted to be with your family,” I said.
Phu rubbed his chin, and his stoic face twitched slightly, like a dragonfly taking off.
“It brings back memories. Being back. It is strange,” I said.
The thick and salty air clung to my newly tanned skin, coating my Adam’s apple.
“Could you tell what happened to him? From his body, I mean. Did he drown? Did he have a heart attack? I keep trying to figure out how it happened.”
“I don’t know that answer,” Phu said.
It was quiet on that flat treeless land. But as we got closer to the gravesite, we heard the low chanting of monks and smelled incense.
I was relieved to see my father’s grave, nestled in lowland and surrounded by graves of Phu’s family. Others were already gathered: Christine, my sister, my uncles, in-law families, and Phu’s wife. It was comforting. But still my throat and knees seized as I followed Phu into the gathering.
I was kneeling down, lost in the repetitive beat of the monks chanting, the clanging of the copper cymbals attached to their fingers, the intoxicating incense.
To the right of the gravesite sat traditional plates of tea fruit, rice, and a cooked chicken as an offering to the gods. Candles flickered on silver plates. There were gold bars as well as red and pink paper lanterns, fans, and clothing we would burn to see him off safely.
It was remarkable to me, after all those years in the camp, to see Buddhism practiced again out in the open.
Although we had to wait until Phu had secured the paperwork to officially start the excavation, some mortuary men had started the process, digging a few inches down. They’d exposed the brick and cement wall of my father’s grave. I was impressed by the craftsmanship and care. For all those years, he’d been more a part of Phu’s family than ours.
Above, a heron screeched on the way to the rice paddy. The monks chanted.
I kept glancing at Phu, noticing a disappointment in his face. He’d treasured his odd relationship with my father. He was wondering what would happen after my father was gone.
Still, he continued to do the right thing. He fought hard until the government released its grip on my father’s remains. I was in awe of this man, in awe of his integrity.
I don’t know how long I sat with my head rocking as the monks chanted, preparing my father for departure. But then I heard the sound as the shovel located the first bone.
They uncovered a wrist bone that they cleaned off with rice wine. At that point, Christine nudged me, and I bent down in the dusty earth to help. I carried more uncovered bones in the heat, my father’s bones—phalanges and toes and his collarbone. I helped to pour the rice wine over the bones in the bucket.
The sweat dripped into my eyes. My throat was as cracked as the earth. My stomach hurt.
Then they found the gold ring—the ring my father had sewn inside his sandal. The ring that Phu had made sure was buried with him. In the back of my mind, I was praying it wasn’t him, that there had been some kind of mistake and my dad wasn’t dead. It was the prayer of the eleven-year-old boy using his father’s fat tummy as a pillow, feeling the vibrations of Thai Than’s soprano vocals in my ears and my legs.
A man passed me a bone he had dug up, and I held it, surprised by its lightness. It was an arm bone. It wasn’t hollow like the others. Inside was a platinum rod from when he’d broken his arm in the army.
It was him. My father. We finally knew.
My vision grew blurry as I passed the arm to the man who put it in the bucket and another poured rice wine from a jug.
I don’t know how long we sat there, clawing in the dirt, the sun beating on my neck, the sweat pouring down from my headband. I kept helping, my gut clenching deeper and deeper as we dug, as we placed bones in a bucket to be cleaned with wine. I couldn’t breathe right. I was afraid I would vomit.
After it was over, I sat down with my legs pulled into my chest, writhing and sobbing deep childlike sobs. Chills traveled down my neck and my spine, all the way to the back of my knees, feeling like blades of grass on the rice paddy, waving with the wind. The tears kept coming.
I looked around and realized I wasn’t the only one.
We stood near the hearse as they loaded the casket with my father’s bones. The sun had lowered some. Christine and my sister were in the back seat, waiting. I was worried we wouldn’t make it to the mortuary in Saigon in time for them to accept the bones for cremation.
My eyes were swollen. Ash from the offerings we’d burned, to make sure my father’s spirit went where it was supposed to, clung to my hair and my clothes. My stomach was still bloated from the blessed food that we ate. But there was something intoxicating about standing there, the air acrid-sweet with salt and coconut. I didn’t want to move.
Phu stood, looking at the hearse. He would miss him. The gift he gave us would cost him.
In the hazy sunlight, I briefly looked at Phu’s features—the wide plane of his cheekbones and his ruddy skin, the way he squinted his eyes.
“We are forever indebted to you,” I said.
Phu’s expression, which had been veiled for most of the day, suddenly changed. His eyes grew watery. He took my hand and shook it firmly. We held each other’s gaze.
It was a senseless time, his eyes said. We did what we could.
