‘... Phan...’
That one word was irrefutably clear.
‘. .. Phan Tran...‘
The repulsive, mucus-clotted voice was speaking flaw-lessly accented Vietnamese.
‘. .. Phan Tran Tuong..
Tommy’s name. Before he had changed it. His name from the Land of Seagull and Fox.
Phan Tran Tuong..
Someone was calling to him. Far away at first but now drawing closer. Seeking contact. Connection. Something about the voice was... hungry.
The chill, like scurrying spiders, worked deeper into him, weaving webs of ice in the hollows of his bones.
He hammered the radio a third time, harder than before, and abruptly it went dead. The only sounds were the rumble of the engine, the hum of the tires, his ragged breathing, and the hard pounding of his heart.
His left hand, slick with sweat, slipped on the steering wheel, and he snapped his head up as the Corvette angled off the pavement. The right front tire - then the right rear - stuttered onto the rough shoulder of the highway. Sprays of gravel pinged and rattled against the undercarriage. A drainage swale, bristling with weeds, loomed in the headlights, and dry brush scraped along the passenger side of the car.
Tommy grabbed the wheel with both slippery hands and pulled to the left. With a jolt and a shudder, the car arced back onto the pavement.
Brakes shrieked behind him, and he glanced at the rear-view mirror as headlights flared bright enough to sting his eyes. Horn blaring, a black Ford Explorer swerved around him, avoiding a rear end collision with only a few inches to spare, so close that he expected to hear the squeal of tortured sheet steel. But then it was safely past, taillights dwindling in the darkness.
In control of the Corvette again, Tommy blinked sweat out of his eyes and swallowed hard. His vision blurred. A sour taste filled his mouth. He felt disoriented, as if he had awakened from a fever dream.
Although the phlegm-choked voice on the radio had terrified him only moments ago, he was already less than certain that his name had actually been spoken on the airwaves. As his vision rapidly cleared, he won-dered if his mind also had been temporarily clouded. It was easier to entertain the possibility that he had suffered something akin to a minor epileptic episode than to believe that a supernatural entity had reached out to touch him through the prosaic medium of a sports-car radio. Perhaps he’d even endured a transient ischemic cerebral attack, an inexplicable but mercifully brief reduction in circulation to the brain, similar to the one that had afflicted Sal Delano, a friend and fellow reporter, last spring.
He had a headache now, centred over the right eye. And his stomach was queasy.
Driving through Corona Del Mar, he stayed below the speed limit, prepared to pull to the curb and stop if his vision blurred... or if anything strange began to happen again.
He glanced nervously at the radio. It remained silent. Block by block, fear drained out of him, but depression seeped in to take its place. He still had a headache and a queasy stomach, but now he also felt hollow inside, grey and cold and empty.
He knew that hollowness well. It was guilt.
He was driving his own Corvette, the car of cars, the ultimate American wheels, the fulfilment of a boyhood dream, and he should have been buoyant, jubilant, but he was slowly sinking into a sea of despondency. An emotional abyss lay under him. He felt guilty about the way he had treated his mother, which was ridiculous because he had been respectful. Unfailingly respectful. Admittedly, he had been impatient with her, and he was pained now to think that maybe she had heard that impa-tience in his voice. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Never. But sometimes she seemed so hopelessly stuck in the past, stubbornly and stupidly fixed in her ways, and Tommy was embarrassed by her inability to assimilate into the American culture as fully as he himself had done. When he was with American-born friends, his mother’s thick Vietnamese accent mortified him, as did her habit of walking one deferential step behind his father. Mom, this is the United States, he had told her. Everyone’s equal, no one better than anyone else, women the same as men. You don’t have to walk in anyone’s shadow here. She had smiled at him as though he was a much-loved but dim-witted son, and she’d said, I not walk in shadow because have to, Tuong. Walk in shadow because want to. Exasperated, Tommy had said, But that’s wrong. Still favouring him with that infuriating, gentle smile, she’d said, In this United States, is wrong to show respect? Is wrong to show love? Tommy was never able to win one of these debates, but he kept trying:
No, but there are better ways to show it. She gave him a sly look and ended the discussion with one line: How better - with Hallmark greeting card? Now, driving the long-desired Corvette with no more pleasure than if it had been a second-hand rattletrap pickup truck, Tommy was cold and grey inside even as his face flushed hot with shame at his ungrateful inability to accept his mother on her own terms.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child.
Tommy Phan, bad son. Slithering through the California night. Low and vile and unloving.
He glanced at the rear-view mirror, half expecting to see a pair of glittery snake eyes in his own face.
He knew, of course, that wallowing in guilt was irrational. Sometimes he had unrealistic expectations of his parents, but he was far more reasonable than his mother. When she wore an ao dais, one of those flowing silk tunic-and-pants ensembles that seemed as out of place in this country as a Scotsman’s kilts, she looked so diminutive, like a little girl in her mother’s clothes, but there was nothing vulnerable about her. Strong-minded, iron-willed, she could be a tiny tyrant when she wished, and she knew how to make a look of disapproval sting worse than the lash of a whip.
Those uncharitable thoughts appalled Tommy even as he indulged in them, and his face grew yet hotter with shame. Taking frightful risks, at tremendous cost, she and Tommy’s father had brought him - and his brothers and sister - out of the Land of Seagull and Fox, from under the fist of the communists, to this land of opportunity, and for that, he should honour and cherish them.
‘I am such a selfish creep,’ he said aloud. ‘A real piece of shit, that’s what I am.’
As he braked to a full stop at an intersection on the border of Corona Del Mar and Newport Beach, he settled deeper in a sea of gloom and remorse.
Would it have killed him to accept her invitation to dinner? She had made shrimp and watercress soup, com toy cam, and stir-fried vegetables with Nuoc Mom sauce - three of his favourite dishes when he was a child. Clearly, she had worked hard in the kitchen, hoping to lure him home, and he had rejected her, disappointed her. There was no excuse for turning her down, especially since he hadn’t seen her and his father for weeks.
No. Wrong. That was her line: Tuong, haven’t seen you in weeks. On the phone, he had reminded her that this was Thursday and that they had spent Sunday together. But now here he was, minutes later, buying into her fantasy of abandonment!
Suddenly his mother seemed to be all of the stereo-typical Asian villains from old movies and books rolled into one: as manipulative as Ming the Merciless, as wily as Fu Manchu.
He blinked at the red traffic light, shocked to have had such a mean-spirited thought about his own mother. This confirmed it: He was a swine.
More than anything, Tommy Phan wanted to be an American, not a Vietnamese-American, just an American, with no hyphen. But surely he didn’t have to reject his family, didn’t have to be rude and mean to his beloved mother, to achieve that much-desired state of complete Americanisation.
Ming the Merciless. Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril. Dear God, he had become a raging bigot. He seemed to have deceived himself into believing he was a white person.