Chapter 21
To the customs agent at Tan Son Nh?t, Vivi and Calla declared that they were visiting family. Vivi half expected to have to explain the mixed circumstances of
the word to the man at the counter, but he only stamped their passports with a thud and waved them on.
The humidity of Ho Chi Minh City gummed in their throats. Within the inexorable crush of bodies the sisters were led along
like sprats in a teeming school. Oblivious to the annoyed glances around her, Vivi paged through her guidebook, waving her
phone in front of her as she tried to hook onto some reception. Calla tutted, then grabbed her arm, pulling her through the
crowd to the taxi stand.
“You’re going to get run over, slowpoke.”
“We don’t know where we’re going,” Vivi protested.
“We’ll figure it out.”
Vivi had to admit that Calla was a more capable traveler. Where Vivi fumbled her way through her foreignness, Calla barreled
ahead, certain that she’d be welcome wherever she landed. It was this confidence—uniquely American, perhaps, but certainly
unique to Calla—that made others want to give her what she asked for. One couldn’t learn charisma, Vivi thought with a sigh.
“I can’t believe this is the first time I’m here,” Calla said. “He promised he’d take us someday.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Well, after Mom left—died—he hardly ever left Deer Creek.”
“He wanted to, I’m sure.”
Tu?n, traveling home years ago, back when he was strong and whole and alive, would have parted the crowds deliberately, the way
a bull moves through a pasture, with no regard for jostling shoulders or swerving luggage carts. Maybe his relatives welcomed
him when he landed, wrapping him with news and gossip that created silken threads of connection to lure him from the half-remembered
routines of Deer Creek.
Once, snooping in her father’s luggage after one of his trips, Vivi found a photograph of Tu?n with his arm around another man. They sat in front of a noodle stand, serious and unsmiling. Above them, white cirrus filaments,
the flustered canopy of a bodhi tree. The men were turned to each other with an intimacy that she’d rarely seen Tu?n exhibit. She’d counted the photograph among the mysteries he hid from her and her sister, but now wondered if it might have
been Ki`êu, the lost brother he rarely spoke of.
Calla said, “But Dad didn’t go. That’s the thing. He stayed with us. And that counts for something, doesn’t it?”
Soon, tucked with their luggage in a taxi, the sisters flew through the city center to their hotel, a persimmon-colored building
with tiny rooms and a broad view of the packed city streets. A fan swiveled from the corner, stirring flecks of dust from
the tiled floors.
Calla opened the window and let in the smells and sounds of the city. The same, in some ways, as those they’d find in Chicago;
and yet, here, they took on a different texture entirely, one that gave the sisters an unexpected sense of rootedness.
A rangy dog barking in a high-pitched tone.
Grilled meat studded with pearl droplets of grease.
A shuffling in the corridor from the housekeepers wearing too-large plastic slippers.
Laundry strung from a balcony—fluttering lace skirts, a wisp-thin blouse, army-gray men’s trousers.
Ho Chi Minh City was a riot of color, unapologetic and vital.
Even though Vivi was exhausted and wanted to lie down, she lingered at the window, letting each gale of sensation wind through
her, momentarily grateful that they’d been led to this unlikely home.
“It feels different here,” she said. “All those people who look like us. But not.”
“I know what you mean. My chest is open.”
Vivi marveled. “You’re right. That’s exactly what it is. I feel like my breath is finally filling me up. What do you think
it is about this place?”
“Diesel fumes.” Calla flounced onto the bed, popping a wasabi-covered pea into her mouth. “Let’s get some food at B?n Thành Market. And then maybe we’ll go to the C? Chi tunnels. We can’t pass up the Museum of Fine Arts either.”
“We’re not tourists.”
“Sure we are.”
“We should go to the address on the envelope first. Our uncle’s address.”
“And we will. But it’ll be there tomorrow. How often are we in Ho Chi Minh City together? We’ve got nothing but time.”
This was true, and yet, in the back of her mind, Vivi still counted down the days to Sea to Earth. A little under a week to go now. Samuel would be caught up in last-minute preparations, adjusting the lighting, fine-tuning
his welcome speech. If she’d been there, she’d be caught up in the flurry too. There was always a crackling anticipation before
a big exhibition. It was addictive, this sense of possibility, this potential to brush with greatness.
Calla sensed her indecision and pounced on it. “We’ll have to get food anyway. Like you’re always telling me, I’m too skinny.
And when was the last time you had bún bò Hu? . . . ?”
Vivi’s stomach gave a responsive grumble. “Okay, fine. Let’s go. But just dinner.”
Calla thrived within the slurry of chaos and activity at the market.
The hall was packed with locals and tourists reaching over one another for the best wares, small dogs weaving between their legs.
The tall ceilings were vaulted, the lighting glaring.
Plastic fans were affixed to the frames of each stall, whipping about the smells until it was impossible to distinguish them.
There was an atemporality to the scene that reminded Vivi of a Christina Rossetti poem, “Goblin Market,” that she’d been assigned
in her freshman lit course. In it, two sisters are lured in by enchanted fruits, until one of the sisters, the greedier and
more impetuous one, nearly dies from hunger once she cannot find the market—and its forbidden wares—again. The poet’s brother,
the famous Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had illustrated the poem with wood-block prints of the devoted sisters
intertwined in bed as sinister goblins tempted them in their dreams.
But Vivi’s goblins weren’t there in B?n Thành Market. They existed beyond the scope of reality, as malicious and ephemeral as the monsters of Rossetti’s fairy tale. That’s
what made them so frightening.
The din of the market dizzied her. Her mind, unaccustomed to constant translation, now taxed with yet another time change,
had become overstrung with wires of French and Vietnamese, until she felt like there was a smoking circuit board where her
brain should be.
Someone bumped into her, shaking the images from her mind. “Xin l?i, c?. Désolé.”
A few paces ahead, Calla was leaping from stall to stall, haggling in her rudimentary Vietnamese as she perused stacks of loose-leaf teas and fabrics.
She gesticulated in ballooning arcs, her cheeks flushed in excitement.
Vivi drifted to a stand with a neat display of lacquerware.
She thumbed through the plates and cups until she saw a red box nestled behind them all.
On the top of the box, a dragon had been painted in fine lines of gold, all serpentine curls and whiskers. A creature of earth and sea.
The last time Vivi had seen Phoebe, she had told Vivi all about vivianite, a rare, translucent mineral that grows in damp
places, including decomposing corpses. For all her love of princesses and knights, Phoebe had a macabre streak that’d delighted
Vivi. A lacquer box could hold all manner of treasures for a child with a florid imagination.
Vivi began to pay for the box, but then Calla edged in front of her. She shook her bob back and forth at the vendor.
“No, no, that’s too expensive,” Calla said, adopting the tone of a brisk and vaguely disgruntled Vietnamese shopkeeper. Vivi
stared at her sister, bemused by the minor transformation. “It’s not even real lacquer, ha. We’ll give you thirty ??ng.”
The vendor scoffed and began arguing in rapid Vietnamese as Calla crossed her arms. Vivi tugged at Calla’s shirt hem and said,
“It’s fine. I’ll just pay what she asked. Do you even know what she’s saying?”
Calla shushed her and began negotiating again, embarrassing Vivi to no end. Minutes later, triumphant, Calla handed her the
lacquer box, acquired for marginally less than the asking price. Vivi tucked the box into her messenger bag. The vendor smiled
toothily at them, no trace of her prior ire to be found.
“Come back soon,” she said.
“See?” Calla crowed. “You have to play the game, Bee. What’s this box for anyway? Not really your taste, is it?”
“It’s for Phoebe.”
“Because you love her. Because you love Samuel?”
“I guess,” Vivi said miserably.
Now that he was gone, really and truly gone, she found herself able to miss him. She wondered if it were a personality flaw,
that she could only let herself become tender and vulnerable after a person had left. That her love could only blossom in
the shade of memory, like a fussy night bloomer.
Calla was watching her. She braced herself for Calla’s antipathy or, at least, her apathy. But Calla only crooked her head.
“It’s a bitch, right? Heartbreak.” She patted Vivi’s back. “Come on, kid, let’s get some food. You can tell me about it.”
At a noodle stand, they ordered bowls of bún bò Hu? and sipped slowly from the volcanic-red broth. Bobbing in their bowls were cubes of garnet—congealed blood—and pale semicircles
of sausage. On a plate next to them, a verdant field of herbs that smelled like May’s garden.
“What do you miss about Samuel?” Calla asked, mouth working at a tangle of noodles.
“You really want to hear this?”
“I want to see what you see in him.” But the statement wasn’t a challenge, not this time.
Vivi set down her spoon. “Samuel can hold complicated things at once. He can look at a piece of art and take in its sadness
as well as its beauty, its life. His favorite artists are Francisco Goya and Takashi Murakami.”
“Eclectic.”
“He collects work from unknown Chicago artists. He supports their shows and gives them opportunities where he can, but in
this discreet way where you’d never know unless you were watching closely. Which I was. One time, a disgruntled artist came