Chapter 23
Their uncle’s home lay on the outskirts of the city, nudged onto a heart-shaped patch of land accessible only by a zigzagging
road that branched from the main thoroughfare. The structure was a tall, two-story Modernist fortress with a gray, curving
exterior pocked with honeycomb openings for ventilation. Palm trees in various states of fruiting encircled the home.
After Ted dropped them off at the house in Long Xuyên, they stood among cars and motorbikes parked in dubious formation, like a pile of Matchbox vehicles dumped onto a rug. They
watched people stream in and out of the open doors. Kids with fisted sticks of sesame candy; young women in hair curlers calling
requests from the balcony; men dragging crates of vegetables to the back of the house as a terrier yipped and weaved under
their feet. There was a roiling urgency in the way they moved, as if trying to catch up to some future excitement just down
the road.
Vivi whispered, “Are we sure this is the right address?”
Calla squinted at a scrap of paper. “This is it. Let’s talk to someone.”
An ancient woman was running a straw broom across the threshold with ferocious determination, kicking up clouds of dust that
displaced into heaps in the yard. She paused every so often to shoot a quelling glare toward the younger kids edging their
way toward the mud puddles. Cowed, they slunk away, back toward the shade of the house and the boredom that awaited them there.
When the sisters approached, the woman stopped sweeping. She was barefoot. In her ears were gleaming, hazelnut-sized diamonds.
No longer stooped, a bright intelligence irradiating her gaze, she seemed younger than she had first appeared. Later, they’d
learn that she was an especially spry ninety-year-old who’d preserved her vigor through that most honorable of elder duties—haranguing
the wayward youths huddled under her matriarchal umbrella.
“You’re the photographers?” she demanded.
“No, we’re artists,” Calla said.
“Oh, really! That’s so much better. I always said there was something more permanent about a painting than a photograph. The
couple will need a portrait to remember this day. Will you paint mine too? Money is no object, especially when it’s my son-in-law’s
money.”
“Sure, of course,” Calla said.
Vivi broke in, jamming herself in front of Calla. “Sorry, no, we’re not here for a painting or a wedding—is it a wedding?”
“Is it a wedding!” The woman placed her broom against the doorjamb. “It’s the wedding. Tomorrow, my granddaughter is marrying her fiancé, at long last. We call him Canadian Evan. He’s even taller than
you.”
“Congratulations,” the sisters murmured in unison.
“Yes, congratulations indeed,” the woman said wryly.
“Khánh is nearly thirty. By the time I was her age, I’d had six children and the signs of chronic hernia.
But of course, now Khánh will leave us for icy Toronto.
We do not fare well outside of our homeland, you know. An orchid doesn’t bloom in the cold,
does it? She’ll be back soon enough.”
The woman’s familiar manners unseated them, but they were drawn to her ease, the way she seemed to sweep them into her fold,
another in the herd of bodies swarming the house.
“So who are you, if not the photographers or the painters?”
Calla opened her mouth, but, nervous that she’d find a way into another tangent, Vivi cut her off. “I’m Vivi Nguy?n and this is my sister Calla Howard.”
“Calla Nguy?n,” Calla corrected. “We’re Tu?n Nguy?n’s children, visiting from overseas.”
Pleasure blossomed across the woman’s features. “You’re little Tu?n’s American children!”
Little Tu?n. Nothing could less aptly describe the towering figure who’d alternately terrorized and ignored them throughout their childhoods.
But Vivi and Calla nodded, allowing themselves to be claimed.
“Of course! I see him in you, Vivi. Same chin, same way of standing, like a stiff, graceless soldier.”
Calla smirked. “You should see her on the dance floor.”
“He was so proud of you girls. I remember now. He talked about you, Calla, and how brave and imaginative you were. Your artistic
talent, of course, came from him. And Vivi, he was so impressed by your love of books. A brilliant scholar!”
Vivi and Calla exchanged a glance. They’d rarely heard their father talk about any of the relatives he left behind. Nor had
they ever overheard him describing them with anything more than weary tolerance.
She misread their look. “But I’m leaving you standing here, how rude. I’m V? Th? Anh. Come in, please come in. You’ll want to meet everyone.”
Vivi protested, “This doesn’t seem like the right time—”
“And you’ll stay for the wedding. How lucky. What’s another person! They invited hundreds; nearly the whole town. You’ll see
how we do things here.”
“I’m not sure,” Vivi began.
At the same moment, Calla said, “We’d be delighted!”
Bà Anh grabbed each of their hands and pulled them inside. The shades were drawn around the high windows, so the first-floor
rooms felt dark and close, even with the honeycomb openings in the concrete walls. Sand-colored tile lined the floors and
a blocky staircase led upstairs, to what Vivi supposed were the bedrooms.
The sisters followed their host out back, where half a dozen women labored in front of the countertops, chopping mint leaves, descaling shiny-bellied river basa, digging their hands into fistfuls of ground pork.
Their voices raised and fell as they worked together to fill platters of food that would later get squeezed into any crevice of the fridge they could find.
Upon their approach, the women quieted. Bà Anh took a cleaver and began hacking at a slab of crackly skinned pork as she introduced the sisters to her daughter, a middle-aged
woman named Linh, and her granddaughter Khánh, the bride. Khánh wore a swinging ponytail and a pinched expression of anxiety, hewn with sudden, luminous smiles.
“Your first cousin,” Bà Anh clarified.
Calla gripped Vivi’s hand and squeezed it. A fly staggered throughout the kitchen, loud and insistent, landing first on Linh’s
shoulder, then the bluff of a winter melon, before some enterprising auntie reached out and smacked it down, as if with the
mighty hand of Zeus. The blade of the cleaver, hitting the cutting board in a syncopated rat-tat-tat rhythm, droned into Vivi’s
head.
“I’m sorry,” she said, pressing fingertips to her temple. “Our cousin? That would make Khánh’s father—”
“Your uncle, yes. Nguy?n V?n Ki`êu.” Bà Anh wrinkled her brow, an unasked question dancing at the edge of her voice.
Vivi swallowed her humiliation. “Of course. Forgive us, the jet lag has scrambled our minds.”
The women in the room evaded the sisters’ gazes, out of pity or maybe kindness.
Khánh’s smile wavered. “Technically, we aren’t blood cousins. Ba Ki`êu is my stepfather, but the only father I can remember. He and my mother married when I was a toddler. He’s the best man I’ve
ever known.”
“We’re eager to meet him. Our uncle.”
Vivi tested out the word and found that it caught in her throat. Calla nodded, a mirrored unease in her expression. They were
afraid that the Nguy?ns of Long Xuyên would want an explanation for the silence in their family. These strangers seemed to know so much about the sisters, and
Vivi and Calla knew so little about them.
In time, their relatives settled the sisters with their own cutting boards, elbow to elbow with the other women.
Calla was tasked with slicing lime wedges, while Vivi wrestled extravagant bunches of cilantro whose mangled leaves left wet, green splotches on the plastic board.
They spoke lightly about their intentions in Long Xuyên, framing their travel as part of a lifelong desire to understand their family’s roots. Calla, Vivi could tell, was bursting
to reveal more, but Vivi gently steered the conversation to the ordinary. She didn’t yet trust her relatives with all the
secrets she and Calla held.
She said, “We regret not knowing more about the people we came from. I’m an art conservator, a bit of an amateur historian.
I find myself preoccupied with dates and lineage.”
“It’s very boring,” Calla said, in her child’s Vietnamese. But Vivi noticed that, even in the few days Calla had spent in
Viet Nam, she’d become more proficient. The rhythm of the language, now immediate and less theoretical, sang on her tongue. Vivi
felt a flash of pride. Calla had always been brilliant at anything that held her interest.
“If you want to know such things, Ki`êu is the one to speak with,” Bà Anh said.
“He’s home?”
The prospect of meeting their uncle filled Vivi with hope, mingled with a sludge of dread. If he was anything like their father,
then it would not be a long or pleasant conversation. Yet, from the easy way his family spoke of him, Vivi thought that perhaps
Ki`êu might be made of a different, less wounded substance than his brother.
“Resting now. He’s easily worn by the commotion. But he’s the one who carries our stories, the historian of the family. Has
made it his mission to know who rutted with who and what illegitimacies it led to.”
“Má!” Linh cried.
“We’re all adults here. And what family isn’t stained by a dalliance or two? I pity the family without a good, meaty secret
nested somewhere in their bones. That’s where the humanity lives.”
Vivi didn’t know if she agreed. A secret had led them there, to this overfull kitchen, among voices that engraved into her mind with every passing moment. And yet, long ago, a secret had also broken the foundation of a family, torn a mother from her son, two beloved sisters from each other.
Secrets were a necessary rot, wells of the soul where spores flourished and spread, fed by darkness and fear and, sometimes,
love. The draining of them, these deep and scattered wells, was grueling labor, the sort that depleted one’s emotional stores.
Even after all this time, Vivi wondered if she and her sister could withstand the excavation of such secrets or if they would
drown in them, unable to kick their way back to the light.