p and I looked at this woman’s face and I know what I felt and something told me that Thp was feeling that, too. He watched for a long time, his face lifted, his hands, I know, yearning.
He was still watching as I turned my own face back to the screen. There were two more films after that, and I viewed them carefully. But my mind was now on Thp. I knew that a few rows in front of me he was suffering. This man had been my sworn enemy till a week ago. The others in this room had been my friends. But Thp was my countryman in some deeper way. And it had nothing to do with his being Vietnamese, either. I knew what was happening inside him. He was desiring his wife, just as I was desiring mine. Except on that night I thought I would one day be with my wife again, and his was newly dead.
But if that was all of it, I don’t think he would have made this impression on me that does not leave. These films he saw sucked at his desire, brought the feel of his wife to him, made his hands rise before him. He was a man, after all. I watched the films till there were no more and I felt bad for Thp, his wanting a woman, wanting his wife, his being drawn by that very yearning to a vision of her body as ashes now and bits of bone. The third time I looked at him, his head was bowed again and it probably remained bowed. It was bowed still when the lights went on and Captain Townsend was called to the front of the room and was hailed for his show with wild applause and cheers.
And as we all shuffled out of the tent I saw Thp’s face briefly, between his two Australian mates, the two infantry officers who had made him feel like he was really part of the gang. Thp’s face told me how it would all end. His eyes were wildly restless, like he’d been on a sapper mission and a flare had just gone off and he suddenly found himself here in the midst of his enemy.
That night he went to a tent and killed one of the two infantry officers, the one, no doubt, who had insisted on his coming to the club. Then Thp killed himself, a bullet in his brain. It was lucky for Townsend that Thp didn’t understand the cheers at the end or the captain might have been chosen instead of the infantry officer. Thp’s desire for his wife had made him very unhappy. But it alone did not drive him to his final act. That was a result of a history lesson. Thp was a true believer, and that night he felt that he had suddenly understood the democracies he was trying to believe in. He felt that the communists whom he had rightly broken with, who had killed his wife and shown him their own fatal flaw, nevertheless had been right about all the rest of us. The fact that the impurity of the West had touched Thp directly, had made him feel something strongly for his dead wife, had only made things worse. He’d had no choice.
And as for myself, I live my life in the United States of America. I work in a bank. I have my own apartment with my own furniture and I have saved more money than I expect ever to need, if I can keep my job. And there’s no worry about that. It’s a big bank and they like me there. I can talk to the Vietnamese customers, and they think I’m a good worker beyond that. I read the newspapers. I subscribe to several magazines, and in one of them beautiful women smile at me each month. I no longer think of my wife. I go to the movies. I own a VCR and at last I saw the movie “Mary Poppins.” The street I live on is one of four named after Mary Poppins in our neighborhood. This is true. You can look it up on any street map.
The Vietnamese on the Westbank do not like the Vietnamese in Versailles. The ones on the Westbank point out that for the ones in Versailles, freedom only means the freedom to make money. They are cold people, driving people, Northerners. The Southerners say that for them, freedom means the freedom to think, to enjoy life. The Vietnamese in Versailles do not like the Southerners. We are lazy people, to them. Unfocused. Greedy but not capable of working hard together for what we want. They say that they are the ones who understand America and how to succeed here. There are many on the Westbank and in Versailles who are full of hatred.
I say that desire can lead to unhappiness, and so can a strong belief. I can sit for long hours from the late afternoon and into the darkness of night and I do not feel compelled to watch anything or hear anything or do anything. I can think about Thp and I can fold my hands together and at those times there is no hatred at all within me.
MR. GREEN
I am a Catholic, the daughter of a Catholic mother and father, and I do not believe in the worship of my ancestors, especially in the form of a parrot. My father’s parents died when he was very young and he became a Catholic in an orphanage run by nuns in Hanoi. My mother’s mother was a Catholic but her father was not and, like many Vietnamese, he was a believer in what Confucius taught about ancestors. I remember him taking me by the hand while my parents and my grandmother were sitting under a banana tree in the yard and he said, “Let’s go talk with Mr. Green.” He led me into the house and he touched his lips with his forefinger to tell me that this was a secret. Mr. Green was my grandfather’s parrot and I loved talking to him, but we passed Mr. Green’s roost in the front room. Mr. Green said, “Hello, kind sir,” but we didn’t even answer him.
My grandfather took me to the back of his house, to a room that my mother had said was private, that she had yanked me away from when I once had tried to look. It had a bead curtain at the door and we passed through it and the beads rustled like tall grass. The room was dim, lit by candles, and it smelled of incense, and my grandfather stood me before a little shrine with flowers and a smoking incense bowl and two brass candlesticks and between them a photo of a man in a Chinese mandarin hat. “That’s my father,” he said, nodding toward the photo. “He lives here.” Then he let go of my hand and touched my shoulder. “Say a prayer for my father.” The face in the photo was tilted a little to the side and was smiling faintly, like he’d asked me a question and he was waiting for an answer that he expected to like. I knelt before the shrine as I did at Mass and I said the only prayer I knew by heart, The Lord’s Prayer.
But as I prayed, I was conscious of my grandfather. I even peeked at him as he stepped to the door and parted the beads and looked toward the front of the house. Then he returned and stood beside me and I finished my prayer as I listened to the beads rustling into silence behind us. When I said “Amen” aloud, my grandfather knelt beside me and leaned near and whispered, “Your father is doing a terrible thing. If he must be a Catholic, that’s one thing. But he has left the spirits of his ancestors to wander for eternity in loneliness.” It was hard for me to believe that my father was doing something as terrible as this, but it was harder for me to believe that my grandfather, who was even older than my father, could be wrong.