CW: Vietnam War. (mention of, but no description of rape, war crimes)
Since it's been a while since I've written Patrick and Anna I thought I should right that wrong...
This is Saigon. Carved from swamp lands, The Paris of the East designed to hold 400,000 souls, now an overcrowded metropolis of almost 2,000,000 souls living cheek to jowl.
Inhaling smoke from motorcycles while observing fleets of blue and white Renault taxis down the main city's thoroughfares, then dodging the cyclos as she makes her way to the market, Anna Nguyen feels 1,999,998 of those cheeks, jowls and fingers brush, press and pinch against her and when she arrives home her toddler son will make that 1,999,999.
They arrive in Saigon to escape Vietcong night raids, U.S. Army Napalm, NVA rockets and ARVN tanks. War transforms belligerents into real estate agents and Saigon into the most prime real estate in the world. Many of the refugees live in District Four, not far from the city's center. They live in steel shanties held up by beer tin can roofs. There the flicker of a single flame no more powerful than a drawn out sigh can mutate into an unquenchable fire that would leave thousands homeless for a second time in years, months, weeks, days, hours.
Average life expectancy here is forty years.
Anna wipes the few sweat beads chained around her neck with a silk scarf, tapping her sandals against gravel and though she can dissect a sentence in three languages and tell a man to fuck himself in four, five if her manicured finger counts, those drops of sweat are the most accurate translation of her thoughts on the morning's molten heat.
Soda Curtis understood the heat. Cavorted it in a way no sane person ever would and in different circumstances he'd be here, baking in the sweltering sun and she'd be inside an apartment called theirs. Or perhaps Anna could be catching a movie at the Rex where smartly dressed ushers and usherettes might greet her and during intermission a woman will traverse the aisles selling Eskimo ice cream bars out of a small ice box.
Or maybe in this scenario Soda's dead and his spirit is haunting her, or he's back in the jungles this time living in a Montagnard village. But he's not; he's… wherever he is now, the last time she's heard from him it was stamped Oklahoma… Anna hopes he's suffering, pointy ears and all.
Desperate. That's the feeling Anna got from his letter. Desperation. Sticky and all consuming. Yes, desperation is a type of heat and a type of smoldering and eventually a type of suffocation. Also, a self-immolation.
In Saigon, the war is a kaleidoscope of experiences and sensations; Know escape routes. Know that it's best not make yourself like a sitting duck at a cafe on Tự Do street, which means Liberty. But if you squint your eyes just the right way you can blink out the refugees, the soldiers, the secret police, the spaces of air where limbs existed. Hum the latest tune by Trinh Cong Son or The Beatles and you can even block out the screams and the sirens after an attack.
Unless... you were there in the square, by this police station, next to that theater, where you will deconstruct into bone, blood and tissue and at that exact moment a hand that could have been yours, should have been yours, will slowly unwrap a silver paper and bite into a half melted ice cream bar.
No, that's not the olfactory reminders of burning flesh running through your nostrils.
This time it's merely the scent of Pall Malls and Marlboros and Winstons aflame in the darkened theater, under the 'No Smoking' sign. Because there's a war going on and if you can defy death you can defy a 'do not smoke' order.
And sometimes, yes, it is this theater. This year, in a few months from now, a woman will walk into the Rex and in her handbag a plastic explosive and a timer, she's discovered before it goes off.
There are some 2 million Saigons each with a story of it's own, here is but one:
Anna adjusting her sunglasses; she remembers two years ago, when she became a mother, two year ago when the Tet Offensive pulled the war beyond the occasional bombing, riot, self-immolation, police 'action' into the city.
Through her shades she considers rows and rows of cosmetics, food, beer, cigarettes, bandages, laundry detergent, even weapons, electronics and toys; and that's only a sliver. You can buy cars on the black market; but also furs, household appliances, marijuana, hairspray. In 1966 there was a congressional inquiry into the 140,000 cans of hairspray imported into Vietnam. Hairspray has replaced chocolates and cigarettes as payments to prostitutes.
You can choke on the hairspray here.
This, is her city. Later Soda will understand what it is to miss it, and still it's not his.
Anna grips her hand around her purse's chain strap, holding the purse like a blue bird ready to fly away, guarding against pickpockets.
Soda gave her a pistol, yes, and Soda gave her a baby.
Except this bird is lilac. On her other arm, sliding just off her shoulder, a woven straw handbag with the blue silhouette of a woman sunbathing. An order in letters so curved it's a wonder they aren't toppling over: "We'll Have Fun in the Sun." Though she feels her intelligence dropping precipitously every time she glances at the handbag, its sturdy enough to carry everything she needs.
She wonders about the original owner, about her story. We'll have fun in the sun, is that a command, a plea, a promise? A threat? Anna looks up at the sun, hidden in the sky and the color and shape of a long nhãn fruit.
In her lilac purse she carries Vietnamese currency. At home she has greenbacks and military certificates, as a local she's not supposed to own ether. Prisoners of war aren't supposed to be tortured and killed, napalm bombs aren't supposed to amputate whole villages from the earth. Women aren't supposed to be raped and children aren't supposed to be torn from their mother's breasts and slaughtered. Bombs aren't supposed to go off in theaters. People aren't supposed to disappear. And against those outrages, the carton of cigarettes, the clothes, the sunglasses, the purses, all which will be resold at a considerable profit along with the Fisher Price telephone with a face on it for her son, is, in her woven straw bag, weightless.
The phone is missing an eye. In that way it too, belongs.
Though this conflict is destroying the lives and livelihood of millions the black market has, in some instances, brought greater economic equity and mobilization than the headiest promises of either socialism or capitalism.
Three years ago, the first supermarket opened in this city complete with express checkout lanes and a speaker system, but now the shelves are half empty, its chief promoter drafted in the South Vietnamese Army. While here, on the streets of Chalon, the city's traditional Chinatown, once home to the world's largest gambling establishment after Macau, the stalls engineered out of beer crates, everything in the world is available for a price.
It's the way the world is.
You can trade in the black market, know how to dissect a sentence in three languages, tell a man whose baby you will have to fuck himself in four, five, if you count your finger and still you'll spend your evenings arguing with a two year old over his bed time. Right now, LOSE an argument to a two year old over his bed time and it will make you so tired, exhausted, worn out. You want to collapse but instead you scream without making a single audible sound. Caged in your bones and skin and muscles and searing in your blood it is the exact sound and indeed the exact rhythm of your pugnacious beating heart.
He spent the afternoon with one of his Aunties, the young women who still speak in the provisional southern accent Anna has abandoned, who spoil him and treat him as he belongs to them too, who giggle and tsk, tsk him calling her Anna and wonder what she is trying to prove and who she is trying to be or not be, even in District 1 in wartime Saigon she is an outlier. Not even the Americans allow their children to call them by their first name. How will he learn to respect her? Who does she think she is?
For that reason, in public at least he calls her Má, sometimes it's easier to give in to expectations.
Patrick's mama is back from a date, they went to the Rex, watched Easy Rider. Most of the audience, teenagers and twenty-somethings didn't dig it. They wanted a shoot 'em up western.
As if Saigon isn't shoot 'em up enough.
Had her date been born a generation earlier or if there hadn't been a war, he might have stayed in his native city of Hue. As it is he's here in Saigon, studying and taking mandatory cha-cha-cha lessons to prevent boredom and trouble-for example- dating a provocatively older woman in her mid-twenties.
"I didn't much care for the film…" he offers as way of conversation.
Years later, she'll skim through Fear of Flying and the phrase 'zipless fuck,' sex without emotional commitment. For Anna, there has never been a time or place like Saigon during the war, afterwards there never will be again.
Years after that the young man, now middle aged, will return to Vietnam from L.A. he's one of the 'spacemen' rocketing between the United States and Vietnam during the economic reforms of the late 1980s. He'll end up opening Vietnam's largest video rental store, with branches in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Hue. They sell mostly action films from Hong Kong and Jim Carrey movies.
It's best not to ask about his family, then again that's just common sense, here, especially for those of his generation, and the ones that came after, and after and are still yet to come, but it's easy to forget that advice when he's able to quote from memory The Mask.
Now he's five years old and tall enough to pass for seven. In District Four, where the refugees squeeze in steel shanties held up by roofs made from flattened beer cans, he might at a glance even pass for nine. So much of his features are from his father. His long legs, intertwined with her own, are from her, too. His eyes look straight at her, a mirror on a face that she has to squint to really recognize herself in.
"Anna, please, tell me about my father." As if she hasn't told him everything she's going to say about Soda Curtis. As if she can summon him from memory to matter by her eye roll alone. As if she would want to...
She understands why he's asking this question, besides that he is five and curious about his dad, about who he is too. A month ago the last U.S. troops left Vietnam, and Patrick followed the news on the radio, pressing his pointy ears against the speaker. The Americans may have left but the war is still continuing.
In their tiny apartment she watched him walk across the room, carrying an invisible bag over his shoulder, sighing deeply and climbing on board the invisible plane. Sometimes he would look down and wave at the floor, "so many bombs," he muttered in Vietnamese. But this is normal.
Once though, he saw a plane, and pointed up to it. "Hi Dad. Hi Soda." He spoke those four words in English with a Saigonese accent. And yes a weaker woman might have died in that moment but as it was Anna Nguyen just allowed her jaw to crack.
Anna turns towards Patrick, his hair long enough to curl at the bottom and she brushes it off his face and plants a kiss on his hot cheek before looking up at the ceiling. His hair is long, too long, for a boy, especially a Vietnamese boy, but she cannot bear to cut it. As it is, she's is used to the glares she shoots at other people.
At least that's how it was. Now everything is uncertain, hanging by a thread. Between April 29, 1973 and April 30, 1975 is this;
If she could see his face right now, the anxiety, the hope most of all the curiosity would she have told him that his father was a good man, a decent man, a strong man; because he at least is a good boy, a decent boy, a strong boy?
Would she have told him this one true story. Of the look on his father's face when he first (last) saw his boy. That whatever happened before, whatever happened afterwards, in that moment when father and son stared into each other's faces, when their mouths opened in unison and drew the same breath, in that moment they belonged to one another. Even if it meant telling him a truth that feels like a lie under the weight of all this anger that's filling her chest and yes, it does feels as if it could crush her inside this very moment and turn her into dust. If she lets it.
"Má?" He asks, his voice rising in pitch.
She squeezes her fists, but there is no one to punch, no one to hurt. Only her and her son. It's always, in this city of millions, in this world of billions, only, them. There is no one coming for them, there is no one coming after them; not anymore, not yet.
She decides to speak. Softly but firmly into his damp neck, "do not..." her lips touching his skin. She remembers his newborn scent as if it is now. She will be turning 28 in November and knows that hope can spread quicker and as ruthless as any flame. Gently, she turns his head until they are eye to eye again. "Do not," she says for emphasis, "hold onto him that way my darling." He has her bone structure. She takes his tiny balled up fist into her hand. My son. She flicks open his hand until his fingers spread out, unwittingly at first, but then they relax. He knows where he is. "As if he's still coming back for you. As if he's yours."
Patrick turns from her and up at the ceiling, squeezes his eyes and opens his mouth, still, he's grasping.
S.E. Hinton owns The Outsiders; Erica Jong owns Fear of Flying, Trinh Cong Son was a highly influential musician during the 1960s; long nhan is dragon eye fruit
Thank you for reading.