That would be the word he would use.
I can hear children playing in the apartments across the alley. I do not need dreams for this. They have found a metal hoop and nailed it to the wall above the automobiles that are parked there. They try to make a ball go through the hoop. They laugh when it does. They laugh when it does not. I remember phung thy and muong, but not this game. It is a game they have learned here. They have families. Their aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters came with them, were not left behind, did not die when the boats sank or the Thai pirates came. They did not have to say good-bye to each other in camps. Perhaps (I tell myself) they did not have to come in boats at all—perhaps they came another way—and that is why they are still together. Can cha hoa. The luck of the lucky.
I saw (in a dream last night) Captain China walking on the roof of their apartment building, so close. He does not know roofs like these. In his world, there are only buildings of glass reaching like hands toward the sky. I saw him looking down at their hoop and wondering to himself: Why do they wish to put a ball through a hoop when there is a boy—alone in a room somewhere in Chinatown—who is unhappy, who is so much more important than any ball?
He was so close, yet he could not hear me.
I was crying.
In the dream.
I do not know the man who comes to my room today. He has never visited before. His skin is as dark as Mister Thupak’s, but there are freckles on it, something I have never seen on someone so dark. He grabs me by the hair (which I must keep long, Mister Thupak says, because most men like it this way) and hits me in the face. He is the kind of man who will hit me once—I know this—but whether he wants me to cry or be silent, I do not know. I do not know what kind of man he is except that he will hit me once. I am silent. I do not cry, and I know this is right. He does not get angry. He grabs me and turns me so that I am facing the wall. He says something in his language. It is rough, yes, but it is only a sound.
He wants me to hurt, but he does not want me to cry. He is that kind of man, I see now.
He pushes me down, so that I am on my hands and knees. He gets behind me. I hear the animal—the one I always hear. A tiger, a dragon whose breath is like rotting cloth. The animal begins to chase me through the great shadows of the U Minh Forest, where my family lived for a year, past the Hoa Binh rebels in their dirty camps, through the great bomb craters that filled with rainwater (catching the light of every sunset), through the paddy water where dead bodies floated like dolls. The animal growls. It grunts, wanting to kill me and eat me. It chases me on to the sands of the South China Sea, into the water, into the beautiful sea, where the boat sank and my uncle—
I close my eyes. I see him. I see Captain China. I see his head turn to listen. He hears it, the hideous sound. It makes him angry, but what can he do? He does not know where I am. He knows only what I am feeling, as I know what he is feeling.
Please, I say.
The animal snarls.
People do not understand. There are no orphans in my country. There never have been. I remember an Englishman talking about this to my father in My Tho, one day when I went with him. The Englishman knew French, as my father did, and so they spoke in French. When we returned home, my father told me what they had talked about. “You have no orphans,” the Englishman had said to him. My father did not understand at first, but no one in my country would have. In my country, there is only family. “Mu cheng ni chuong ma,” we say. “The world ends at the hedgerow,” we say. We have said this for a thousand years. We mean there are no loyalties, no duties, as strong as those of family… nothing that calls to us beyond the thorny hedge around our village. If a child’s parents die, there are aunts and uncles and cousins to take care of him. There is always someone. After all/an “orphan” is but a boy or a girl without family… and in my country this is not possible.
But I am not in my country. I am in the Chinatown of a country far far away, across a sea. Mister Thupak is the one person I know, and he is not family.
Unless a family sells its children for the pleasure of others.
Captain China understands this. He is far from home, too, and he understands. He cannot return until he has done what he must do here—
Which is save someone—someone who needs saving.
Because, he says, of what I did long ago and must be forgiven for…
I do not understand this, but it is true.
Because of what he did long ago and must be forgiven for.
I lie on my bed—which smells of skin and bad dreams—and I dream of the camp in Thailand, where Mai and Cam got sick and were taken away. I see Captain China. I see him going through the camp looking for us, when there are so many others, too. Shouldn’t he save the little boy with one eye from Phankek, the teenage girl so beautiful that even filth cannot make her ugly, the old woman who cries every night for her husband (though he died thirty years ago)?
There are so many here who need saving, and only one Captain China.
When he finds us at last, he is too late. We are in the water, our heads are bobbing, the waves are swallowing us, spitting us out again. The pirates are drifting closer, trying to decide which of us they will leave to drown and which they will pull from the water, dry off, and sell.
He sees us—Mangh and Li and Phue and me—floating in the water, but which will he save first? He is late. There is time only for one. A hero, but only one.
He is crying because he knows he can save but one.
Mangh drowns. I watch his head disappear in the waves and I shout: Save him, Captain China. Save him. Mangh is gone, taken by the water. Li tries to grab the pirate boat, its wooden side, but the pirates aim their rifles and shoot him. I shout: Save Li, Captain China. Save Li! But Li is gone, the water as red as flame trees. Captain China can only watch, his face in pain, his eyes full of sadness as the pirates pull Phue and me from the water because we are young and handsome.
And then Captain China comes for me.
He covers me with his cape, so that I will be invisible—so that the pirates will not see me and I can escape—but I shout: No! Go back to My Tho. Save my mother, Captain China. Go back to the camp. Save my father and uncle. Put the cape around Li or Phue—not me. Without them, I tell him, I am nothing. Do you understand?
I can see this in Mister Thupak’s eyes: You do not exist. You eat nuoc mam, you eat pho soup, you read comic books I give you, but you do not exist. You are nothing.
“You have no orphans,” the Englishman says.
In my dream.
In other dreams I do—I let him save me. I let him come to my room. I let him take me in his arms, and hold me. I feel his skin against mine, my cheek against his chest. I touch his arm with my fingers. He wants nothing from me. I let his cape surround me, so that I will be invisible to the men who visit my room.