It was Miss Linh. I know it was her. The man who told me Major Trung’s story — his brother — actually showed me Miss Linh’s photograph, the one that had sat on the mother’s shrine. I knew her round face, the thin nose, and of course that wide mouth that I watched now with special attention. She stepped into the street before me and held up her hand. I stopped the car and I got out quickly and walked away at a right angle to her, peeking over my shoulder to see what she would do. She did nothing. She watched me walking away and she smiled. But just a faint smile.
I cut through some yards and made it into the next street and I headed for the embassy on foot, fighting my way through very heavy crowds now. When I came to the next comer, I could see back down to the intersection Miss Linh had prevented me from entering. Two vehicles were already on fire there and I could see people in the crowd waving clubs. Miss Linh had saved me. But you can understand how this gave me no peace of mind.
A helicopter pounded overhead and I had no time to think of ghosts. The evacuation would soon be over, I knew, and I ran hard until I was in the street of the embassy, and there my heart sank. The embassy gates were besieged by a vast throng of my people and I could tell the gates were barred and no one was going in. There were figures trying to go up the wall and I heard automatic rifle fire and these figures leaped back down. I turned my eyes to the roof of the embassy and a chopper was sitting there with its rotors still moving as a single-file stream of people was climbing into its belly. I could tell even from this distance that almost all of the people going into the helicopter were Americans.
And then the voice came softly into my ear, whispering my name. I spun around and it was Miss Linh, her round face hovering before me like a bloated summer moon. I reared back and gasped and she smiled and I didn’t want that mouth to widen any further. My voice spoke and I heard it as if from a great distance. “Is this our appointed time?” I asked.
Miss Linh nodded yes, the smile steady on her lips, and she took a step toward me and I squeezed my eyes shut, I could not bear to see her monstrous tongue. But I felt nothing for a moment and then another moment, and I opened my eyes and I did not see her. I turned around and Miss Linh was standing near me in the street, and as I looked at her, she raised her hand to an approaching car. The car was large and black, a limousine with American flags on the fenders licking at the rush of air. But Miss Linh held her ground and the car stopped and then she stepped to the back door and opened it. Inside was a very important American, the boss of my boss. He recognized me and he said to get in. I looked at Miss Linh. She smiled at me, a lovely wide smile that ended in a nod toward the gaping door. So I stepped into the car and I was taken away to America.
Are you confused again, my round-eyed friend? Look at me, look where I am, listen to how I speak compulsively to strangers, even strangers from this alien land, listen to the kind of treatment I expect even now, even from you who have pretended to listen to me this long with interest. How do I know the major’s story is true? Because as I sat in the darkness of the limousine and it drove away, I looked out the window and saw Miss Linh’s tongue slip from her mouth and lick her lips, as if she had just eaten me up. And indeed she has.
SNOW
I wonder how long he watched me sleeping. I still wonder that. He sat and he did not wake me to ask about his carry-out order. Did he watch my eyes move as I dreamed? When I finally knew he was there and I turned to look at him, I could not make out his whole face at once. His head was turned a little to the side. His beard was neatly trimmed, but the jaw it covered was long and its curve was like a sampan sail and it held my eyes the way a sail always did when I saw one on the sea. Then I raised my eyes and looked at his nose. I am Vietnamese, you know, and we have a different sense of these proportions. Our noses are small and his was long and it also curved, gently, a reminder of his jaw, which I looked at again. His beard was dark gray, like he’d crawled out of a charcoal kiln. I make these comparisons to things from my country and Village, but it is only to clearly say what this face was like. It is not that he reminded me of home. That was the farthest thing from my mind when I first saw Mr. Cohen. And I must have stared at him in those first moments with a strange look because when his face turned full to me and I could finally lift my gaze to his eyes, his eyebrows made a little jump like he was asking me, What is it? What’s wrong?
I was at this same table before the big window at the front of the restaurant. The Plantation Hunan does not look like a restaurant, though. No one would give it a name like that unless it really was an old plantation house. It’s very large and full of antiques. It’s quiet right now. Not even five, and I can hear the big clock — I had never seen one till I came here. No one in Vietnam has a clock as tall as a man. Time isn’t as important as that in Vietnam. But the clock here is very tall and they call it Grandfather, which I like, and Grandfather is ticking very slowly right now, and he wants me to fall asleep again. But I won’t.
This plantation house must feel like a refugee. It is full of foreign smells, ginger and Chinese pepper and fried shells for wonton, and there’s a motel on one side and a gas station on the other, not like the life the house once knew, though there are very large oak trees surrounding it, trees that must have been here when this was still a plantation. The house sits on a busy street and the Chinese family who owns it changed it from Plantation Seafood into a place that could hire a Vietnamese woman like me to be a waitress. They are very kind, this family, though we know we are different from each other. They are Chinese and I am Vietnamese and they are very kind, but we are both here in Louisiana and they go somewhere with the other Chinese in town — there are four restaurants and two laundries and some people, I think, who work as engineers at the oil refinery. They go off to themselves and they don’t seem to even notice where they are.
I was sleeping that day he came in here. It was late afternoon of the day before Christmas. Almost Christmas Eve. I am not a Christian. My mother and I are Buddhist. I live with my mother and she is very sad for me because I am thirty-four years old and I am not married. There are other Vietnamese here in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but we are not a community. We are all too sad, perhaps, or too tired. But maybe not. Maybe that’s just me saying that. Maybe the others are real Americans already. My mother has two Vietnamese friends, old women like her, and her two friends look at me with the same sadness in their faces because of what they see as my life. They know that once I might have been married, but the fiancé I had in my town in Vietnam went away in the Army and though he is still alive in Vietnam, the last I heard, he is driving a cab in H
Chí Minh City and he is married to someone else. I never really knew him, and I don’t feel any loss. It’s just that he’s the only boy my mother ever speaks of when she gets frightened for me.
I get frightened for me, too, sometimes, but it’s not because I have no husband. That Christmas Eve afternoon I woke slowly. The front tables are for cocktails and for waiting for carry-out, so the chairs are large and stuffed so that they are soft. My head was very comfortable against one of the high wings of the chair and I opened my eyes without moving. The rest of me was still sleeping, but my eyes opened and the sky was still blue, though the shreds of cloud were turning pink. It looked like a warm sky. And it was. I felt sweat on my throat and I let my eyes move just a little and the live oak in front of the restaurant was quivering — all its leaves were shaking and you might think that it would look cold doing that, but it was a warm wind, I knew. The air was thick and wet, and cutting through the ginger and pepper smell was the fuzzy smell of mildew.