Five Points, Volume 11, Number 3, 2007

Georgia State University Digital Archive @ GSU Five Points Department of English Publications 1-1-2009 Five Points, Volume 11, Number 3, 2007 Mary Oliver Philip Levine Debra Nystrom Kim Addonizio Elizabeth Spires See next page for additional authors Recommended Citation Oliver, Mary; Levine, Philip; Nystrom, Debra; Addonizio, Kim; Spires, Elizabeth; Jacobsen, Josephine; Batykefer, Erinn; Trethewey, Natasha; Irwin, Mark; Rumi; Barks, Coleman; Lieberman, Laurence; Lidov, Debora; Wrigley, Robert; Hoffman, Alice; Finley, Karen; Thon, Melanie Rae; Panning, Anne; Dinh, Viet; Burris, Sidney; Hirsch, Edward; Storlie, Erik Fraser; Roudané, Matthew; McHaney, Pearl Amelia; and Yamamoto, Masao, "Five Points, Volume 11, Number 3, 2007" (2009). Five Points. Paper 2. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_deptpub_fivepoints/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English Publications at Digital Archive @ GSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Five Points by an authorized administrator of Digital Archive @ GSU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Authors Mary Oliver, Philip Levine, Debra Nystrom, Kim Addonizio, Elizabeth Spires, Josephine Jacobsen, Erinn Batykefer, Natasha Trethewey, Mark Irwin, Rumi, Coleman Barks, Laurence Lieberman, Debora Lidov, Robert Wrigley, Alice Hoffman, Karen Finley, Melanie Rae Thon, Anne Panning, Viet Dinh, Sidney Burris, Edward Hirsch, Erik Fraser Storlie, Matthew Roudané, Pearl Amelia McHaney, and Masao Yamamoto This article is available at Digital Archive @ GSU: http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_deptpub_fivepoints/2 Viet Dinh Substitutes In 1974, we waited for the world to be ours. That fall, we were sixthgraders, the top of the food chain at Vinh Xuong. Now, our soccer skills were unmatched, and our bodies had grown in ways that we had not foreseen. If we had any fears, they were only of Mr. Hanh, who had taught at Vinh Xuong longer than anyone could remember. Even our parents had stories about his tight, pinched face. He’s lived on nothing but lemons his whole life, they told us. He kept his white hair parted on the left, revealing a crisp line of liver spots along his scalp. You have to watch out for his cane, they warned us: a meter-long bamboo stick, thin as your pinkie finger. Upon command, a misbehaving student had to produce his hands, palm-side up if lucky, palm-side down if unlucky. No one dared watch the actual punishment.The sound of cane breaking the air like a sudden intake of breath, the deadening crack of wood against flesh: that was enough. But that spring, even before Saigon fell, our town became awash in strangers. Can Tho had always been a port, but now its biggest export was desperation. The line of evacuees stretched down the riverside, along Hai Ba Trung Street, and into the alleys. They spread their belongings on the ground as if building personal forts and jostled for position, fighting to move two feet closer to the dock. Women pulled their hair and cried for mercy.They stood stooped, gold ingots dangling from cloth cradles around the necks, and bawling infants in their arms. In the market, those haggling for shrimp paste became indistinguishable from those haggling jewelry, silk brocade, money— anything they had—for safe passage down the Mekong. Then, there were us, the families who could not afford the tickets, who could not leave our houses, our livelihoods, our relations. Life had not changed for us: we went to the market as always, pulled our nets in from the river, fried the sprats until the bones were brittle, edible. We ate in silence, even as the Communists stormed Can Tho, filling the streets with drab olive uniforms, second-hand Kalishnikovs, indiscriminate trigger fingers. They came into our homes and sat with 168 / Dinh guns lengthwise across their knees. They asked if we’d been collaborators, if we’d abetted the ARVN. May as well admit it now, they said, because the truth would come out. Even as our parents insisted on neutrality, the soldiers gestured to us with their muzzles: Do you want your children to grow up orphans? One day, the docks groaned under the weight of exodus; the next day, empty. The Communists had swept everyone out to sea, into corners even more remote than Can Tho. Our parents forbade us from picking through the abandoned belongings: It’s bad luck, they said. Food jettisoned as unnecessary weight rotted in the gutters. Even the stray dogs refused to eat it.Those who had been captured were frog-marched through the streets, pleading with each step. To where, no one knew. Our parents urged us to forget the commotion. There was nothing to be done now. All you have to worry about, they said, is school. By September, Mr. Hanh had lost none of his fearsomeness. “To your desks!” he barked. Strolling the aisles, he was a minesweeper, tapping out misbehavior with his cane. “Pens and paper out. Hands folded on top of your desk.” His face was as shrunken and desiccated as a preserved prune, the effect more pronounced when he pursed his lips to scrutinize our work. “Who taught you how to write? Monkeys? Your parents should be ashamed.” After a month, Mr. Hanh still hadn’t exhausted his stores of creative punishments: tardy students knelt at the front of the room, arms outstretched. Talking in class resulted in an oral recitation from memory; falling asleep earned you a mouthful of chalk dust from a well-aimed eraser. It was rumored that Mr. Hanh had been trained as a sniper against the Japanese. “He’s too old,” someone said. “It was probably against the French.” Once, he knelt eye-level to Minh. “Open your mouth! Lift your tongue.” His bony fingers took a wad of chewing gum out of Minh’s mouth and rubbed it into his eyebrows. “There will be no gumchewing. Understood?” And the cane: every time he picked it up, our palms sweated. It was reserved for poor work, and woe to him who caught it across the knuckles. From that alone, we knew how arthritis must have felt and treated our grandparents with more respect. The red welts from a caning stayed all day, and no matter how sore your fingers were, how Five Points / 169 much they’d swollen, you had to continue writing, because if your compositions were illegible, that meant more punishment. This was something we had to survive, just as our parents had survived their own youth. Each day, we scratched our collars and crossed our legs in hopes that he’d misread the clock and dismiss us early.We thought our torture would never end. Then, three months into the school year, it did. Miss Bui was Mr. Hanh’s opposite: young, lovely, kind. Her ao dai cupped her hips, curved around her bust. At the start of the day, her long black hair caught the morning sun; lit from behind, it became the Mekong, red with silt. She trailed the scent of jasmine when she walked, and some of us made errors just so she’d correct us. She must have recently graduated from teacher’s college, because although she was patient with our schoolwork, she didn’t know how to discipline. She frowned when notes were passed (unlike Mr. Hanh, who made the recipient of the note read it out loud before the writer ate it), and when Minh and Truong’s argument over a playground soccer foul spilled over into the classroom, she couldn’t break it up. “Boys,” she pleaded. “Boys! Stop it!” We waited for her to take Mr. Hanh’s cane, propped in the corner since his disappearance, and wield it like a martial-arts swordsmistress, but Minh and Truong continued to roll on the floor, swinging punches and kicking desks out of their way. Unwilling to surrender, they grunted and panted. Finally, Miss Bui ran out of the classroom, her slippers clapping against the floor, and returned with Principal Kim. In his gray polyester suit, Principal Kim pried Minh and Truong apart, holding each boy aloft as if they were unruly cats and carried them away, ignoring their howls. They were really in for it. For the rest of the day, Miss Bui bowed her head, as if the swirls of dust where they had tussled were evidence of her own failure. The topic of our composition was “Why do people fight?” As we read them aloud—we fight for honor, we fight for protection, we fight for justice—she searched the sky beyond the window. The afternoon was blank: no birds, no planes, not even smoke from cooking fires.The world beyond the white plaster of Vinh Xuong, just past the low walls that enclosed the yard, seemed distant, imaginary, as if we had only read about it. “I hope you have learned something today,” she said. After school, Principal Kim reprimanded Miss Bui. “It is your 170 / Dinh responsibility to stop fights,” he said. “We cannot allow students to run wild.” Her reply was inaudible. We yelled at some nearby third-graders to stop gossiping, but heard nothing further. The next day, Miss Bui seemed normal. She had cut her hair shoulder-length, which we all agreed was a pity. The previous day lingered in Minh’s black eye and Truong’s split lip, but we’d already put it behind us. We returned to spilling ink across our homework so that she would walk towards us, smiling as serenely as Quan Yin, and we treasured the swish of her white pants, the tilt of her head as she approached. She, too, vanished. We had nothing but speculations, and these we traded like playing cards. Miss Bui’s absence was made more acute by Mrs. Pham, who clipped her tightly-bunned hair with rusty bobby pins. She carried age in her face, in her stooped posture, in the way she shrank from our loud voices. The trouble started the second day. We were doing recitations, and she called on Truong. When he didn’t respond, she looked at him and asked, “Truong?” The devil flashed in his eyes: “I’m not Truong, I’m Phuoc. He’s Truong.” And he pointed to Minh. Minh immediately shouted, “Liar! That’s not true. That’s Truong.” And Minh pointed to Quang. Within seconds, the room reeled with accusations and confessions: “That’s Truong!” or “I’m Truong!” The demon inside Truong now possessed all of us; even students who had never gotten in trouble played along. When the accusations got ugly— “Truong is the stupidest boy in school,” “Truong is the one who smells like fish!”—Truong slammed his fist against the desk like a gavel. We had so much fun calling each other Truong that we’d forgotten Mrs. Pham. She stood at the front of the room, paralyzed. In a voice like dead leaves, she whispered, “Please be quiet. Please be quiet.” She must have been saying it for minutes.We pitied her. But we didn’t let her off the hook.We wondered if she had ever taught school before. If she had, it must have been very young children. More likely, she had been a housewife, maybe a shopkeeper. Every smile struggled against the wrinkles weighing down her skin. She threatened to go to Principal Five Points / 171 Kim when we grew too unruly, so we pulled back our antics until her face eased into neutrality. As long as we wrote our compositions, she ignored the ball of paper being kicked along the floor in an ersatz soccer game. None of us knew where she came from. It seemed unlikely that she was from Can Tho or our parents would have known her. Khanh claimed that the Que family had taken her in. But perhaps she didn’t have a home.That would explain why she always wore the same white blouse and black skirt. Each day, her clothes merged further towards gray. Still, Khanh stuck by his story. She was a refugee from Saigon, he insisted. Her husband had abandoned her.That’s why she always seemed so sad. He had a pass to take his family to America, but instead of taking his wife, he took his mistress. I mean, who wouldn’t have taken someone else? Khanh took a drag off his cigarette. That’s why she seemed so inexperienced, he continued. She had to find a way to make money. We agreed: How sad. For our recitation, we chose the history of a Vietnamese emperor who executed his wife in order to save the country.We watched for a long sigh, a fist clenched in rage. Maybe she would tell us her story. And maybe this would have brought us closer, given us a pathway to understanding tragedy. But she only said, “We’ll pick up the story tomorrow.” Maybe it’s better that Mrs. Pham left. We all knew the ending: the emperor would marry a Mongol princess and still lose Vietnam to the marauding Chinese. Mr. Luu was with us for a week. He kept a suitcase the size of a washbasin by the desk. The leather along the bottom had cracked and peeled away, the cardboard underneath spotted with water stains. We wondered what could have been in it; Minh said that it didn’t move when he kicked it. Clothes alone couldn’t have been that heavy. Gold bars, maybe. Or maybe his children. Two of us could have easily fit inside. The roster still had Mr. Hanh’s crisp, spidery handwriting on the cover, but Mr. Luu didn’t bother to mark absences. Truong, who wanted to trick another teacher, yelled out “Here!” for every name except his, but Mr. Luu didn’t glance once. The first day, we were stupefied. We spent most of the day writing 172 / Dinh in our notebooks as Mr. Luu read The Journey to the West. Even the funny parts, like when the Monkey King tries to trick Pigsy into becoming a rich man’s wife, were drained of laughter. Perhaps it was the gray February weather. The rain was cold, and the sun never dried the damp from our skin. After school, there was nothing to do besides play soccer: we were too old to catch fireflies and too young to kiss girls. The curfew kept us inside at night, listening to the radio with our parents, songs interspersed with victorious slogans. Our rebellion started the next day. As soon as we were in our seats, he began what we thought was a dictation. But we could barely understand him; he was reading from a guidebook to New York City. Truong passed a note across the aisle, but Mr. Luu didn’t notice. Before long, paper went back and forth as if we were trading critical communiqués: “Hi” “How are you?” “I can’t believe we’re doing this” and “It’s like we’re not even here.” Soon, we got up to hand-deliver our notes, then, after a while, decided to stop wasting paper and began whispering. And, finally, we gave up whispering. Amidst the cacophony, Mr. Luu ignored us and read to himself. We admired his honesty: he’d soon be gone. He knew it, we knew it. He’d be sailing south down the Mekong with Mr. Hanh, Miss Bui, and Mrs. Pham towards…Towards what? We didn’t care. We could do whatever we wanted. Here, in school, we were free of checkpoints, of soldiers, of guns. The only time Mr. Luu spoke was when Truong and Minh’s horseplay got rough, and Truong stumbled against Mr. Luu’s case. “Clumsy!” he hissed. As he pulled the case towards him, the handle looked as if it might wrench free of its rivets. We were good until the silence became too unbearable and we remembered that, one way or another, he didn’t care. We weren’t surprised to find Mr. Luu gone. But we were surprised by who took his place: an army officer—a general, judging from the pins and medals adorning his uniform—standing with hands held behind his back, his family name, Khang, embroidered above his colorful commendations.The red cloth band above the black rim of his cap was a bright as a new flag. But the scar bisecting his face from one ear to the other frightened us the most: it was as red as the band on his cap. Five Points / 173 We sat with our backs straight, hands folded on our desks. Mr. Hanh would have been proud. He called out names as if we were conscripts, and Truong didn’t dare contradict him. “So,” he said, after a few minutes of our squirming. “What are you studying?” We each answered him differently. We’d had so many lessons in the past few months that we couldn’t agree on one. The general sliced his hand through the air: “Enough!” We trembled, the sweat cold on our backs. “How many of you consider yourself scholars?” he asked. No one spoke, and he squinted as if he could discern the liars. “I thought so.” He pointed to Khoi. “You! What do your parents do?” “My parents build farm machinery.” Khoi added “Sir,” hurriedly. “Farmers feed our people,” General Khang said. “Tell me, do you need to go to school to build combines?” “No, sir,” Khoi replied. The general chose another student. “And your parents? What do they do?” “My father unloads fish at the docks.” “Good. Without him, I wouldn’t have any nuoc mam. And yours?” “My father sells snakes at Phung Hiep.” The general went around the room, asking about our families. We knew better than to respond My father was a soldier, even if it was the truth. General Khang asked again, “How many of you plan to be scholars?” No one. He pointed to Truong. “Answer me honestly. Do you want to be in school?” Truong hesitated. Then, taking the General at his word, replied, “No.” “Excuse me? I didn’t hear your answer.” “No, sir,” said Truong, louder. “How many of you do not want to be here right now?” he asked. A smile crept onto his face. Even the scar seemed to smile. Minh raised his hand slowly, as did a few others. Truong shot his into the air unequivocally. “Vietnam needs people who serve the common good,” General 174 / Dinh Khang said.“We must turn our backs on those who turn their backs on Vietnam. Now tell me—” He broke into a huge grin, and our fear passed away. He wasn’t scary; he was on our side. The general clapped his hands, a firecracker’s pop. “Who wants to be a part of their new country?” Hands went up immediately. We felt joy returning, excitement returning. Truong and Minh shouted out, “I do!” and upon hearing them, the rest of us yelled, “I do!” We clamored for attention, and he chuckled. He raised his hands to quiet us. “You are the future of Vietnam. It’s on your shoulders that we will rise. So forget about school. Go help your mothers in the fields. Help your fathers on the fishing boats. Make our people strong.” General Khang picked up Mr. Hanh’s cane, still in the corner.We’d almost forgotten about it. The wood was white from chalk dust. He held it up. “This,” he said, “is the old world.” He brought the pointer over his knee and broke it in two. We cheered. He tossed the pieces into the waste bin. Outside, shuffling feet, chatter: other classes had already been let out. General Khang saw us glancing towards the door. “Go on,” he said. “Join your comrades. Make your country proud.” And with that, we streamed out, our voices mingling with the others. In the yard, soccer games had begun, and we joined in, raising a cloud that settled in our hair, our clothes, our eyes. We walked out of Vinh Xuong dirty, our faces turned up to the sun, basking in freedom. The world opened up before us, and from here, nothing would ever be the same. We would never return to Vinh Xuong. Soon afterwards, the gates were replaced by guard shacks, and the soldiers, stone-faced, barked at us when we approached holding soccer balls. The walls doubled in height, stucco smothered beneath smooth concrete. On top, spirals of razor wire like a notebook’s spine. At night, Vinh Xuong was lit up as if from flares, and the speakers hung high on poles spat messages of liberation into the darkness. Word spread that people near other re-education camps were unable to sleep from the noise. From a nearby hill, we could see into the yard where middle-aged men sat in straight rows, cross-legged, writing on scraps of paper while a voice spoke of the new social order.They looked hungry, repentant. Five Points / 175 Once a week, women stood outside the gates, cradling infants or rice wrapped in banana leaves. When the guards shook their heads, the women dispersed. Sometimes, the gates disgorged an emaciated man, and the women rejoiced. Sometimes, the guards brought out a list of names, and women crumpled as if crushed by the sky. Someone swore that he saw Mr. Hanh in our classroom, and one afternoon, we gathered on the hill. The window was a dark rectangle, indistinguishable from the others. He was right there. Are you sure it wasn’t a ghost? Might have been. But it was Mr. Hanh, for sure! We waited for a face to appear in the black space.We must have been there for hours before someone appeared.We pointed excitedly, squinted. And, like that, the person disappeared. Maybe it was a different man grown old and gaunt. Or perhaps it was Mr. Hanh, after all. From behind the wall, guards marched in formation.The prisoners, as well.Why would Mr. Hanh be there? We didn’t understand, but we weren’t afraid.After all, this was now our world. It’s good to be free, we told each other—but even so, who amongst us had never dreamt of escape? 176 / Dinh