Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
Mimi
Four. Four was the number of times Mimi almost got back to America since she lost Ngan.
The first time was just a year after she had returned to Saigon, before she had met Toan, before she started to come back to herself.
The agency her sister had used to get their jobs in America had closed down—their previous contact said that US Immigration Services had become more stringent in allowing entry and gave them another name to try.
The new agency agreed to try to find Mimi another placement at a price, but two weeks before she was due to board her flight back to New Jersey, Immigration Services discovered that this new company was issuing false documents and it had to disappear fast. They took all her money, and she never heard from them again.
The second time, after three years, Mimi had saved almost enough money for a flight: every salary, every tip, living in the most modest room, taking every extra shift on offer, and eating the cheapest food she could find.
She was just three million dong away from being able to buy her ticket, when her sister called her crying.
“They’re going to take our home. The loan sharks…
we just can’t pay it back.” Cam’s wet sobs echoed through the phone lines.
“What about the boys? We’ll be begging on the streets, the shame of it…
” Mimi knew then that she would be giving all her money to her sister to pay off her husband’s gambling debts. She would have to start again.
The third time was when her first expat employer, her first American madame, had asked her to come back to California with them.
But just three weeks before her flight, her husband had lost his job, and she was told they wouldn’t be needing Mimi anymore, but not to worry, they would find her a position with a nice Western family.
The fourth time, she had tucked the money for a ticket inside her jeans pocket as she rode her motorbike through District 3.
She was going to buy her ticket from the travel agent, but she was stopped by a police officer, who searched her and took every last note.
She hadn’t even told Toan she had the money saved, he just assumed her tears were from the sadness about Ngan, which he accepted was a waterfall of grief that stopped and started on any given day.
And this time, five, she didn’t even need the money. Providence brought all the pieces together.
Mimi’s eye lingered on the pile of bedding Toan put on a stool in the corner of their living room. Her day began as Toan’s ended. He was working night shifts at the InterContinental hotel in District 1 as a security guard after loan sharks had taken over his driver’s agency.
Their living room was a mess of boxes filled with items from her old employers: a toaster, though they only ate banh mi (she planned to sell it in the market), a pair of cycling cleats (they didn’t own a bicycle), a blender (she preferred to hand press her juice).
Eleven dresses that were four sizes too big so that the necklines fell off her slight shoulders.
For over a year, she’d planned to take them to the tailor.
It’s always easier to make something smaller , she had explained to Toan.
Mimi noticed that Toan was starting to put on weight, around his stomach mostly, and now his jawline had softened.
She wasn’t surprised, since he sat all night in front of a security monitor at the hotel.
Toan told her he walked around the floors twice a night, but Mimi suspected he spent a lot of time smoking outside, based on the smell of stale cigarettes on his clothes.
She pictured him sleeping at his desk and eating whatever the room service staff gave him from the leftover tray.
“The smell gets everywhere,” she complained, leaning on the doorway as Toan batted away the morning mosquitoes. He stood outside to undress in the courtyard, putting his nicotine-stained shirt in a basket, and tutted.
Mimi put a plate of pomelo, dragon fruit, and watermelon in front of him, telling him to fill up before she offered him any meat, noodles, or rice.
“You are so regimented, my little general,” he complained, his eyelids drooping as he forked the fruit into his mouth.
She rubbed his shoulder, and he squeezed her hand. He would go to sleep after she’d left.
Mimi left the house by seven and rode her motorbike across three districts.
She joined the snaking traffic through the newly laid roads of Saigon.
She loved to drive through District 1. She mentally waved to the statue of Uncle Ho in the city square, passed the twisted orange turrets of Notre Dame Cathedral.
The city was alive: shop stalls opened, vendors shouted as they argued over prices, workers slurped their morning Bùn B? Hue on the street corners, and the smell of freshly baked banh mi was in the air.
She stopped at her favorite Café Sua Da stall and watched the black liquid being poured into the cup.
A swirl of condensed milk snaked its way through the ice cubes that only the locals could stomach without getting sick, then went straight into her marrow, fuel for the day.
The sign above the iron gates of the BP Compound in Thao Dien, Ho Chi Minh City, read cái khó ló cái khan .
And every time Mimi drove through this entrance, she shook her head.
“Adversity is the mother of all wisdom,” the sign said.
Her mind always returned to her child when she saw the sign, back to that moment seventeen years ago when she couldn’t see Ngan anymore in the Philadelphia airport.
Mimi was not wiser. Losing her child at an airport and never seeing her again was one of the greatest adversities a mother could endure.
To not know whether her child was dead or alive for seventeen years and still be living herself.
This was adversity, surely? Mimi was not wise, no.
Her grief was a giant boulder at the bottom of her soul that she could not move, no matter how hard she pushed.
The irony of this sign was not lost on her.
What did adversity look like to those living within the walls of Vietnam’s most prestigious foreigners’ compound?
What did these people know of hardship? Their tables overflowed with food.
They had drivers, maids, and gardeners to serve their every need, and still they complained, snapped at their staff, shouted at their children, and drank away their sorrows.
Their adversity, she recognized, may have been to be far from family and friends in a foreign land.
But money could take away the bitter taste of loneliness.
The compound was made up of four roads, each with six sprawling houses: twenty-four houses, varied in size, forming a tidy grid.
The houses on the outer edge were the most modest. There were no swimming pools, only courtyards instead of gardens.
The residences closest to the river were the grandest, with six or seven bedrooms and with swimming pools, and were usually home to the foreigners with the most important jobs.
Many worked for international companies she had never heard of.
The lawns were manicured, and the palm trees swayed in the infrequent breezes that ran up from the Saigon River.
During the rainy season, security guards barricaded the entrance to the compound with sandbags and pushed the gushing water back into the streets.
Those working for the compound used any means necessary to avoid inconveniencing their pampered residents.
The houses were white when residents moved in, freshly painted for each new arrival until the walls and garden fences started to blacken along the edges from the rain and mold.
A tar-like trickle dripped down the once-white walls, an assault by the city’s relentless heat and rain.
The Vietnamese said you were always wet in Saigon, either from the humidity or the rain.
The architecture of the houses was a nod to the French, the last colonists.
They were built on brand-new foundations, a new world.
There were vast, sprawling lawns guarded by sleepy security men.
Delicate, hot-pink bougainvillea–laden branches hung over the high brick walls that offered privacy to the residents.
These bright pink flowers and leaves were favored by the poisonous tree snakes, who had a venom so deadly it could kill a dog or a child.
Most Vietnamese knew that dense trees and bushes meant more mosquitoes, frogs, snakes, and whatever else the jungle would throw out.
But on the BP Compound, this was all part of living in the jungle, and part of living like a king in the jungle.
Just outside the gates, the rich fragrance of cinnamon and star anise filled the air, from simmering cauldrons of chicken stock for hundreds of bowls of pho about to be served to hungry workers.
Hawkers peeled back the delicate skin of mangoes to reveal the sunshine flesh on top of their precious and short-lived commodity.
The heady smell lingered, but it would turn sickly in a matter of hours, as the mangoes began to rot.
Two years after meeting Toan, Mimi had left the Paradise Hotel and taken a position in a private home as their “helper,” a maid.
Toan’s employer’s boss was looking for someone to work for his family, and she went for the interview.
Mimi was a natural when it came to working in a private home.
She was industrious, professional, quiet, and could disappear when tensions arose.
She never forgot that she held one of the most coveted jobs a country girl from northern Vietnam could hope for. Her employers were wealthy Westerners, and everybody knew that foreigners made the best employers.