Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
Mimi
Mimi could never leave Ho Chi Minh City.
She remained there, in case by some wild twist of fate her daughter would retrace her mother’s journey back.
This fragmented thread of hope knotted around her, and she stayed put, four years later, six years later, and so many more still.
If she stayed, maybe somehow Ngan would return to her—like a homing pigeon.
Meanwhile Mimi’s sister, Cam, moved to Da Nang once she married. Her husband wanted to live by the sea.
“Every day I’m surrounded by insects crawling everywhere, worms, beetles, I can feel them on me at night.” She moaned to Mimi on the phone, “Why a fish bait store? Why couldn’t he start a jewelry shop, clothes, or something like that? Even a fruit stall would have been better.”
“I bet you eat the best fish in town though,” Mimi tried to say.
“I would be happy to never eat fish again. Did you call that woman at the hotel?”
“Not yet.”
“You better. You can get yourself a job. If it’s anything like the hotels here, these foreigners will pay big tips, you’ll be able to get yourself some land in no time. And I know, you are not thinking of this, after America, after Ngan. But maybe you will meet someone again too, start over.”
Mimi was silent. The loss of her child in America lived in a separate space of pain, where nothing fit within its jagged edges, not the death of her father during the war, or Ngan’s father abandoning her almost immediately after she fell pregnant.
Everything that mattered to her was lost that day in the Philadelphia airport.
“Anyway, you better call that woman. I have to go.”
Mimi didn’t mention to Cam how thin she had become or about the argument she’d had with their aunt, who had told her she was depressing the customers, that her aunt’s children were starting to get anxious around her, and that there was no work left for her at the laundry service anymore.
She needed to find another place to live.
So Mimi had no choice. She called the Thien Duong , the Paradise Hotel, and said she would take any job they offered.
And they did offer her a job that paid more money than she had ever earned before.
She started working as a chambermaid. They said she wasn’t presentable enough to greet the guests.
So she began to clean. Every day, she arrived early to work, took her trolley and knocked gently on the guest-room doors before letting herself in.
After a few months of working in the rooms, sifting through other people’s dirty sheets and laundry, she found tips left for her on the bedside tables, just like Cam had said.
Sometimes it was almost a week’s salary.
When the restaurant staff were let go for stealing bottles of wine from the cellar, Mimi was called in to serve, and she collected more tips then.
“You are more presentable now,” she was told.
She worked ceaselessly every day, smiling at the guests who looked tentatively at her in the hallways; some of the bolder ones, usually men in bright shirts unbuttoned too low, would shout out Xin chao , pressing their hands flat together in front of their chests and bowing.
She nodded her head in recognition of their efforts, smiling to herself.
These big white men, Mimi began to learn, didn’t greet her with any intention of interacting.
It was for them to feel better about themselves, that they spoke to the help, that they smiled and acted gracious to the hired hands who cleaned their soiled bedding and wiped their bathrooms clean of their human waste.
She saw from the lift in their shoulders and their smiles that they felt pleased with themselves.
She wondered what they saw when she passed them, if they would even know the difference between her face and the girl who worked behind the desk if they weren’t dressed in different uniforms.
Sometimes, the American guests would shout Goooood morning, Vietnam somewhere in the hotel, usually by the pool, where they clutched bottled beers as they lay back on their towels, bellies hairy and bursting from the fabric of their shorts.
Cam and Mimi had watched that film in Philadelphia and laughed at the sight of the girls all dressed in white ao dai s.
“These stupid Americans think we are dressed for Tet every day of the year. What about when we go to the market? Clean the house? They think we’re wandering around in white clothes, with all the dust, mud, and rain?
Where are the ponchos? The aprons?” They laughed at the beginning of the film before they began to see the death, and then they had to turn it off.
Mimi held Ngan in her arms that night, singing softly and wishing that Ngan would never know what it was to be hungry or afraid.
Mimi smiled as she passed the men in the hallways and thought how nice it must be for them to only see what they wanted.
The weight of her needing to return to America was always present.
It stayed there inside her, a permanent pull at her insides.
Mimi’s soul had shattered, and the remaining shards dug deep into her heart, where scar tissue enveloped it to keep what was left from disintegrating.
She existed, nothing more. Her skin was dry, her eyes bloodshot, her spirit faded.
Most days, she stared into the space before her.
When anyone asked her what she was looking at, she said she didn’t know.
By the time that Ngan would have been six years old, Mimi had changed jobs several times.
She now worked as a helper in private households for expat families.
Every morning she drove through the busy side roads of District 2.
She had finally saved enough money to buy a motorcycle and drove it to the river daily to watch the murky brown water flow past. Green snakes would swim upstream and disappear into the floating shrubbery.
Otters slipped into the water from the jungle banks, snatching fish from the bottom of the riverbed, emerging out of the water’s surface with sleek wet heads and jet-black eyes, bringing the fish up to their sharp fangs and ripping their heads off.
She watched their incisors rip into the flesh, blood soaking their whiskers, and then the fish’s body would be tossed back, worthless to them.
She couldn’t eat fish anymore and decided then that she didn’t like the otters.
Another time, she saw a dead human body float past, and she vomited on the banks.
The gray, swollen corpse brought up a stench, and unspeakable images of her Ngan passed through her mind.
But most of the time, she just watched the movement of the water, the artery that ran through her city, feeding it, taking from its people when the rains came, giving back less and less as the construction and development increased.
She watched new buildings rising around her, past and beyond the orange rooftops of typical Saigon houses and the rocks at the bottom of the well she had been sitting on for years.
She could see the light again, and it breathed life into her, the darkness a little less black every day.
On the day that Mimi and Toan’s story began, she arrived early to work, her belly full from a steaming bowl of Pho Ga from the nearby stall rumored to be the best in the district.
You’re too scrawny, make sure you eat all the chicken skin.
I’ll give you extra , the woman ladling the bowls said.
The edges of Mimi’s mouth were still burned from the sliced chili she’d piled onto the herbs.
There was an unusual wind, the palms swaying noisily as if to complain that they should be left to their own devices and that these gusts were too rough.
A group of European tourists had been staying at the hotel; she thought they might be Italian.
Among them, a small-boned woman with a beaklike nose and multiple piercings in her ears had been sick for almost a week.
Each day that Mimi returned to service her room, the girl’s face was more gaunt, and wet, dirty towels were passed to her with a request for more.
Mimi wanted to ask her what she had eaten, whether she had been drinking the water, but she couldn’t get the words out of her mouth.
Instead, she passed the towels in silence.
She left extra bottles of water and a coconut she had cut and put a straw through on the third day, when the girl looked especially bad.
Everything was supposed to be logged and charged to the room, but instead, Mimi had knocked on the door, left a tray, and waited to see the girl emerge before quickly walking away to her other jobs.
On the sixth day, Mimi went up to clean the room and knocked with the four fresh towels ready to pass through the door.
Nobody answered, and she stood waiting for some time before letting herself in.
She found the room deserted. A sadness swept over her.
She liked looking after the girl with the earrings.
She felt there should have been a goodbye, to acknowledge the significance of their connection, however minor.
They would never see each other again. She looked around the room, touched the cabinet, where the drawers had all been left open.
Mimi put the air-conditioning on high to clear the air, even though the hotel management told her not to, to save on electricity.
Beside the table, she found two five hundred thousand dong notes and a message scribbled in English on the pad.
Thank you for looking after me. A smile crept up to her mouth.
She folded the notes and placed them neatly inside the waist of her skirt.
That would cover the month’s rent, maybe two. All for a few extra towels.