Tan wandered in the walled city, looking for Xuan, looking for food. Thousands wandered with her. The walls had crumbled under the bombing, half the houses were knocked down. People looted what they could before the soldiers came back. The soldiers had guns and took the best of everything.
The sun came out for one day and the bodies in the streets began to stink. Families, dressed in white for mourning, made circular graves for their dead in the red earth of the parks and school yards. The bodies were wrapped in black cloth, then in white, and buried in the mud. The Americans wrapped their dead in green plastic bags and left them on the curb for trucks to pick up.
Tan found Madame Co at a refugee center the government soldiers had set up. There was no food. Dr. Co had been found with his hands still bound behind his back, buried alive. There was no word of Madame Co's sons or Tan's brothers. No word of Xuan.
Tan wandered in the monsoon. Sometimes Americans would give her food. She was afraid to approach them alone, but joined groups of begging children. Tan found the men gave more if she talked like the little children. Hey, you, GI, she would call, you numba one. You give gell to eat, yes?
The Americans would smile if they weren't too tired and hand out a little food. People cooked what they could beg or steal right on the street, in water pots made from artillery shells.
The first time Tan saw Supply Sergeant Plunkett he was wrapped around a case of Army K-rations. He grinned at her as he hurried across the rubble, rattling his cans of beans and processed ham. Care for a bite? Tan was too hungry to be scared. His legs were so long that she had to run to keep up with him.
You, me, pom-pom, he said to her in the abandoned house they sheltered in. Boom-boom. Fuckee-fuckee?
He seemed very pleased when she didn't understand what he meant.
You vir-gen gell?
She told him she was.
Vay good. Me show you boom-boom. Then you eat. Beaucoup food.
He did what Dr. Co had done to her, but he looked her in the eyes afterward and smiled.
You no vir-gen now. You Plunkett gell.
Tan smiled back at him like she had learned from the young children, smiled and said you numba-one GI. Numbaone boom-boom. Me eat now?
The Communists disappeared and bulldozers came to bury the walls and buildings that had been blown down. Tan went with Plunkett to Da Nang. He would give her money. If the Communists had taken her brothers and Xuan she would become wealthy enough to buy them back.
Plunkett set her up in a house on the edge of the sand flats in Da Nang, close to the refugee camps. There were four other girls who had American soldiers. Plunkett paid her rent and gave her money for food and clothes. She sewed most of it into a chair. It was nice having the other girls to talk to, there was a mama-san to keep the house and always enough food. Plunkett visited at least twice a week.
There was garbage everywhere in Da Nang, small mountains of it that little boys fought and played on. People in the camps sat all day waiting for food, crowded together like insects. There were girls on the streets, country girls who had sold eggs and produce in the market before the fighting. Buy me, buy me, they said. Me numba-one gell, suckee-suckee, sixhundred pi.
Plunkett would come to drink and for boom-boom. He liked how thin her body was, how her breasts barely stuck out. My little girl, he called her. He asked if she had a little sister he could meet. Tan said she had no sisters. He showed pictures of his little daughters back in America. Plunkett didn't like the name Tan, he called her Betsy. It was the same name as one of his daughters.
He smiled and laughed constantly, like a child. He said he didn't like her eyes. They looked like she was hiding something from him. You trick me, he would say. Alla time samesame. You Betsy unscrutable gell. He gave her money to have the round-eye operation like Madame Ky, like the other girls in the house. She sewed it in the chair.
Tan had been in Da Nang three months when the word came about the men and boys taken from the Phu Cam Cathedral. Their bones were found buried together in the jungle a few miles from Hue. Most shot, some buried alive. Over four hundred men and boys. Plunkett gave Tan money to send to care for her brothers' bones.
Her belly grew. The other girls noticed first, then Plunkett. He was very angry and took her to his friend Dr. Yin.
Dr. Yin was Chinese and smelled of ammonia. Tan was terrified. Plunkett reassured her that Dr. Yin was an American, a soldier, and his friend. But Chinese was Chinese. Tan screamed and had to be given a shot when the young doctor approached her.
She was thin again then, but Plunkett didn't seem to like her so much. He brought her a Catholic-schoolgirl's uniform, like she had worn when she was little, and had her put it on for the boom-boom. Sometimes he made her bend over so he could hit her with his belt. He didn't smile or laugh so much anymore.
Plunkett left things at the apartment, medicines, food, sometimes guns. He ordered Tan not to touch them. She listened for hours to the American radio he had given her. She would lie in the dark at night twisting the dial back and forth, listening to all the different languages, all the voices blending into each other. She felt like she was floating, hearing everyone's private thoughts. When she woke the batteries would be dead and she'd be without radio till Plunkett came. He always had batteries with him.
Tan was twenty, had been in Da Nang two years, when she saw her sister on the street. Two Americans were walking with their Vietnamese girls. One of them was Xuan. She looked like all the other street girls, looked like she could take care of herself. Her American called her Sue-Anne. Tan followed, listening to her sister laugh at what the Americans were saying, and then let them walk out of sight. A moment later she thought better of it and tried to catch up, but Xuan had turned some corner and was gone.
Plunkett said he would send Tan to America. She would help him be a rich man. He explained that in America opium was used just like money, better than money. But government police would steal it from you, just like in.Viet- nam. It was hard to bring opium to America, but Tan could help him.
He took her back to his friend Dr. Yin. They explained how much just a little opium was worth if it was pure. She watched the doctor put it into the implants. They would be like a cyst, he said, like a thorn that the skin grows over. Harmless.
Tan lay on the slab and remembered all the stories Quat had told her. Dr. Yin put her under. She dreamed of riding a bicycle in a quiet, walled city.
When she woke her breasts felt mammoth, they jutted out stiffly from her body. The skin was stretched taut, the nipples pointing up and out. There was a scar in the crease beneath each breast, creases she had never had before. The breasts didn't feel a part of her. They belonged to Plunkett. He loved to grab them in bed. The-future is in my "hands, he would say, and smile like he used to.
He arranged for her to go to the American city of San Francisco. He would come later. Tan was afraid to tell him about the money she had hoarded, afraid he wouldn't understand. It was in piasters, and wouldn't be any good in America. It wasn't opium. The day before the plane took her, Tan ripped the money out of the chair and gave it to the other girls in the house.
It would be good in San Francisco, she thought. No one was fighting and there was always enough food.
A nurse, a young American girl, calls Tan into the office. She is seated in a leather reclining chair. Doctor is in the back washing his hands, says the nurse, I'm his assistant. The nurse asks Tan if she is sure she wants to go through with the eye operation, says she is a very pretty woman already. Tan says she wants to go ahead. The nurse leaves.