A trip to fuRiwa
Brian Ma
In 2003, with my cousin Duong, an ex-convict, I took my grandmother on a road trip. I was in my last year of college, where I was writing a thesis on postcolonial literatures in Vietnam, and I was visiting my grandmother in Chicago. My grandmother was entering her thirtieth year of dialysis and she felt she had little time left. She told us one summer morning that she wanted to visit old friends. Her friends turned out to be two women who used to manage her house and look after her children in Quy Nhon before the takeover of Vietnam. At that time, in the earlier part of the last century, my maternal grandmother oversaw a large estate as the second wife of a man who owned a tea farm that covered two mountains. The two women my grandmother called friends lived on the estate along with other workers during the week and returned to their families for the weekend. The aristocratic practice reminded me of the European nobility written about and glamorized by Nabokov. My grandmother spoke fondly of the two women she wanted to visit and when I asked my mother about them, she told me warmhearted stories about these older women who lightly scolded her when she would steal the freshly laid eggs of the chickens that roamed the courtyard and eat them raw after stabbing a little hole at the end of an egg and mixing the yolk in a glass with soda and too much condensed milk. When they all came to America through different means—another story for another time—my grandmother ended up in Chicago while the two women who used to manage her kitchen and look after
her children ended up in Los Angeles, they found each other through the quiet human networks that connected refugees across the globe. My grandmother told me that she wanted to meet them and that she also wanted to reconnect with her family in Guangxi. I told her, One thing at a time. My grandmother was always warm to me but she was also strict. When I accompanied her to her dialysis appointments, the nurses called her the Iron Lady, a moniker stolen from from Margaret Thatcher, because she never seemed to be fatigued or in pain. I knew her simply as grandma. I never knew her name until the old friends she knew in Vietnam called to talk to her and I was the one to pick up the phone. My grandmother always called them old friends, but when they called to speak to her, they called her Boss Tran.
When I was in eighth grade, Duong had finished his time in federal prison for assault and armed robbery and needed to serve two years of probation. His mother begged my mother to take him in so he wouldn’t be tempted to go back to his old ways. My mother kept saying, If you’re in a gang, you’ll never be able to escape. My mother begged my father to let Duong stay for two years in our house in Lynchburg, Virginia. I’m not sure what my mother promised my father, but sometime around my birthday in May, Duong arrived at Lynchburg Regional Airport. During his time in Virginia, he walked around town with me down long suburban streets that must have been very different from his memories of Chicago. We ate so much Dairy Queen that Duong became overweight and unrecognizable. He spent every night on the phone with his girlfriend Tammy whom he later married. During these phone calls, he left the door to his bedroom cracked and I imagined that my father might have laid down a few house rules. One evening, Duong asked me to teach him a Jackie Cheung ballad, which he spent all week practicing and sang to Tammy
over the phone on a Friday night. The song is about a goodbye to a girlfriend. In it, he sings that his love is a kite with its thread cut that cannot fly into her world. When he left, he thanked me and laughed. He didn’t seem sad. He said that he would take me clubbing when I turned twenty-one. Then he said, I’ll be almost forty. Fuck no. Nevermind.
I called Duong only once a few years after he left. He picked up after five rings and asked, Who is it? I said, It’s me. He said, Me, who? I said, You forgot you were going to take me clubbing? I’m still not old enough. And he laughed and said, It’s been a while, but his laugh was lukewarm. How’s Tammy? I asked. He said, We’re married now. I said, I know. I told him that I had heard of his wedding and the birth of his daughter through his younger sister.
“Why didn’t you invite me to the wedding?”
“I did. Your mom didn’t say anything?”
“No, she didn’t.”
In the background, there was the back and forth of the voices of a child and a woman.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I asked.
“Ask her yourself.”
“I will.”
I asked him, “When will you visit us?”
“I will,” he said. “I will. I will.” And he hung up without saying goodbye.
The week leading up to our trip, my grandmother packed carefully, taking care in selecting the outfit she would wear when she saw her former servants. She laid out clothes on her bed and asked me to come help her judge what was appropriate. She said she wanted something nice but not ostentatious. I felt that she
meant that she didn’t want her former employees to see how far our family had fallen. She still had a few nice dresses but nothing was of the latest fashions. She would show me her outfit and then turn around to look in the full-length mirror on her closet door. She got dressed and asked me, Do I look old? She brushed her wavy hair and asked, Can you see that I’m losing hair? She chose two nice outfits, a blazer she paired with a long skirt and a blouse with gray slacks. She made sure to bring a few hats that she was fond of and that I thought were very dashing. She chose the rest of her outfits on the day before the trip. They were simple and fit into a small roller. Duong had come over and we sat in the kitchen together and planned our route and lodgings. We would drive to Denver on I-80 and stay the night and then go the rest of the way and rest a night before meeting my grandmother’s old friends. She told us to call them Amy and Phuong. I asked who’s Amy and who’s Phuong and she said that we would be able to tell. The next morning, just before dawn, Duong pulled up to pick us up in his silver BMW. When I saw the car, I asked him if this was the same car from the last time I saw him when I was still in high school. He laughed and said, No way. I bought this car last year. I carried my grandmother’s roller, my own, and her nice outfits in a garment bag I hung in the backseat. I opened the trunk and settled my grandmother’s roller and mine next to an aluminum bat and Duong’s carrier. My grandmother was already in the front passenger seat. Duong handed me a large iced coffee and said, Hold on. He went back into the house and came back with my grandmother’s wheelchair which he put inside the trunk. My grandmother didn’t look at Duong, and I didn’t say anything. I thanked him for the coffee and sat down. The inside of the car smelled new and on the dashboard was a family photo of Duong, Tammy, and their daughter.
My grandmother wanted to go to Lake Michigan before we left. Duong stayed in the car while I walked my grandmother towards the lake. We walked over the fields between Foster and Montrose Beaches to arrive at the revetments which always felt like ancient ruins to me. It was where her husband had gone every morning before dawn to beat his chest and shout over the water. I felt that he must have been so angry that the war reduced him from a wealthy landlord to a refugee with nothing. After his morning visit to the lake, he went to a tiny shop on Argyle to gamble on mahjong. My grandfather died three months after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctor had told him that he would die in three months if he didn’t quit smoking. My grandfather called the doctor a rotted dick cuckold and insulted both the doctor’s wife and daughter. Then my grandfather died in three months. At the funeral, I was ten. I sang a song about heroes who never died. I was surprised by how many people were there to remember my grandfather. I remember that my father seemed out of place and my mother didn’t. I also remember that Duong was standing with twenty or so young men in dark suits. Then Duong and his friends kneeled in front of my grandfather’s casket for three days, and the procession from the funeral home to the graveyard included over a hundred cars.
My grandmother walked all the way to the edge of the water. The winds that blew from Canada became progressively stronger the closer we got to shore. There were only two joggers by the shore. My grandmother looked over the water and said that sometimes it looks like an ocean, so blue, but the water smells bad. She looked at the promontory where my grandfather used to walk and didn’t say anything. It was the first time I realized that maybe she expected to die on this trip.
Back in the car, Duong said that traffic seemed to be clear and he pointed at the fuel gauge, which was at full. He and my grandmother spoke in Vietnamese and I replied to them in Cantonese. A white plastic bag full of sandwiches Duong had bought earlier was in the back seat. I looked through the bag and selected a sandwich with pâté. Duong said, Already? And I said, I’ll eat now and you can tell me when you’re tired. I’m never tired, he said.
When we got onto the highway, my grandmother seemed to doze off. She had her head leaned against the window. The local radio station was on low volume, reporting on strange weather in central Illinois. Duong and I were lazily chatting. I told him that I vaguely remembered that once he had asked me to read a book to him when I was less than ten years old. He had handed me a thick book that was either the Bible or a volume of an encyclopedia. When I tried to open the book, I found that the pages had been glued together and that center of the pages had been cut out. Inside the hollowed-out book, there was a small gun. I couldn’t remember if it was a revolver or another kind of gun. Did that really happen? I asked. Duong looked at my grandmother who had woken up at some point during our conversation and was just staring at the passing landscape. She didn’t seem to care. That happened, he laughed.
My grandmother also told us a few stories about her youth which she had never really spoken about before. She talked about how her father had been a gambler in Guangxi and that he was in extreme debt when he sold her to a rich family to eventually be married to their incompetent son. She ran away a year before the wedding and made it to Vietnam, where she met my grandfather. He never told her he was already married, but he had a lot of
money and he treated me like his first and only wife. I repaid loyalty with loyalty. And eight children. Things were really different back then, I said. Duong laughed.
We stopped in tiny towns and lonely gas stations for bathroom breaks, dusty and deserted. I took over driving somewhere in Nebraska and took us into Colorado. I told the car I was hungry and everyone concurred. After eating burgers at a diner, we stopped for the night at a motel called Saint Howahkan. The motel was modest and serviceable with even a small pool. My grandmother and I shared a room with two twins and Duong took the next room over. We left our bags in the room and stepped out for air. Across the street was a store called The Sioux Trading Outpost. We tinkled through the doors into a quiet shop run by two white ladies. One pointed at my grandmother and said, You could be Sioux. The shop had tchotchkes lining the walls, totems, quilts, patterned fabrics and beads. And fireworks. Pottery baskets. Among the items for sale, there were two things that were particularly unique. One was a human skull. I asked the lady if it was real and she held it in her hand like Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull and said, Yes, this belonged to a lady named Susan who was chased off her lands and then made a home in another tribe’s territory and got chased out by the same settlers.
“Sounds like your grandfather,” my grandmother said to me. “How much is it?”
“The skull?”
“Yes.”
The woman leaned in next to my grandmother and whispered. My grandmother laughed.
The other item that we considered buying was a bow and arrow. Duong was particularly interested in it and asked the women how
authentic it was. The stouter woman said, Well it’s made of green ash. And look at this. She pointed at lines along the length of the arrow shaft, some wavy. These are blood grooves, she said.
Duong was pulling at the bow string. My grandmother was looking elsewhere in the store.
“Do you think that could hurt anyone?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” he said. “The traditional ways are best.”
In the end, Duong bought the bow along with a quiver and about ten arrows. He said he could make more. He said he would pick white feathers and dye them pink so he could know where his arrows had gone. I bought a few roman candles. Night came over the highway, the motel, and the trading post. When we got back to Saint Howahkan, I put everything into the trunk, and we retired to our rooms to rest.
In the night, I could hear Duong talking quietly on the phone through the wall, probably to Tammy. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and stepped outside with a beer around midnight. The pool was still lit and the water shimmered like bioluminescent ocean. I watched the water and thought about my grandmother’s life and Duong’s life. They seemed unique and different with drama that seemed much larger than my own which probably made them sadder and more beautiful. I didn’t think about my own life in an American suburb and what it meant. Duong came out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette. When he saw me, he waved and made his way over to the pool. I couldn’t sleep, I said. Duong seemed strange. He seemed supercharged, his eyes the eyes of a vampire. He said, How’s the pool? I haven’t swam. Very nice, he said. Very nice. He rubbed his nose and talked very quickly about his new family and about how he had never driven here and how he had only flown to Vegas. I said, Grandpa would have loved Vegas. Yes, he would’ve. I would too. You would too. You won’t be able to sleep, will you? BRIAN MA 145
I asked. No, I don’t plan to sleep, he said. Let’s just keep driving, I suggested. I went back upstairs and saw that my grandmother was also awake. She was sitting at the edge of the bed and knitting something. I asked her what she was working on and she said a hat. Didn’t you bring three hats with you? I love hats, she said. Duong is up. He’s wondering if you want keep driving. Sure, she said. I never sleep much anyways. Duong said that too. We left Saint Howakhan just after midnight.
The rest of our drive was unremarkable. My grandmother kept knitting her hat with maroon thread. We stopped for gas around dawn somewhere in Utah and my grandmother called Amy to tell her that we would be a day early. I could hear voices on the line. The voices sounded happy. We kept going through the Utah landscape which was very different than the landscape around Chicago and my grandmother kept saying that she had never seen anything like it. Duong said he had only been to Ho Chi Minh City, Vancouver, and Sydney. We passed Vegas in the late morning and my grandmother pointed at a few of the casinos and wondered what it would be like to go and we promised her that we would stop by on the return trip since we had already changed plans with Amy and Phuong once.
My grandmother had booked a private room at a place called Furiwa in Garden Grove for the dinner with Phuong and Amy. It was a large banquet hall in the style of Hong Kong grandeur. We arrived early to the restaurant—they had just opened for dinner— and we went to the restroom to freshen up. My grandmother used a single occupancy bathroom, so I went in with her to help her into her jacket. Then we went back outside to wait in our car. We came back into the restaurant thirty minutes earlier than we had told Phuong and Amy to meet us. We came into the room
my grandmother booked. There was a circular table with a lazy Susan in the middle. There was a small tasteful floral centerpiece and a coat rack in the corner and a Dado rail running around the perimeter. The tea came and I poured three cups. Phuong arrived earlier than Amy, sliding the door aside carefully. She was dressed in a dark blouse and was missing a tooth. My grandmother didn’t seem to recognize her until she was shaking my grandmother’s hand. Phuong? she asked. And Phuong answered, Yes, who else? Who else? She seemed on the verge of tears. Are these your grandsons? she asked. She looked at each of us in awe and said, Here, and she reached into her purse and brought out two red envelopes that she had obviously prepared ahead of time, pressing the envelopes into our hands and clasping our hands together. She kept saying, I am so grateful. I am so grateful. Then she turned to my grandmother and they both began to cry. They hugged each other and began to talk in excited murmurs, stories full of people I didn’t know. I asked Duong if he knew any of the people they were talking about and he said, Of course not. We stepped out and let the two women talk together. We went to the restroom and Duong went into a stall. I washed my hands and Duong said, I’ll be out in a second. I told him I’d meet him in the front of the restaurant, which was not yet busy. Duong came out into the California air clearing his throat and I thought he was about to spit on the sidewalk but he didn’t. He sniffed a few times and lit a cigarette. I speculated on how Vietnam must have been a crazy time and Duong said, I was born there. Before I could properly respond, however, a lady in a trendy white dress breezed by. I heard her mention my grandmother’s name to the host and I said, Duong, let’s go. I think that’s Amy. When we got back to our room, my grandmother and her friends were settled in. Amy had brought a Nice BB Toiletry Pouch from Louis Vuitton that she placed on the coat rack. They were
conversing hilariously about the past. After introductions, Duong sat to the side, with both his elbows on the table, phone in hand, scrolling through pictures of his daughter.
My grandmother said that we should order and Amy and Phuong both deferred to her choices. I remembered my mother saying that ordering for a table was an old-world skill which I saw on display as my grandmother calmly selected steamed fish, baskets of steamed dumplings, and fried noodles from the extensive menu. The women were talking about how nice the restaurant was and how the food was going to be good. The chefs had worked in lauded restaurants in Hong Kong. They asked my grandmother how she knew about the place and she said that she knows the proprietor and that his mother is also from her mother’s hometown. That’s why we got a room like this, my grandmother said. Basically soundproof. She slammed the table violently with her open palm and Amy startled. Phuong laughed and marveled, You know everyone. Amy changed the subject to other restaurants, mentioning an Italian restaurant named The Nook and a French restaurant named Maison Zero. My daughter made reservations at Maison Zero months in advance. She talked about how luxurious and exclusive it was and how it was better than the French restaurants in postcolonial Vietnam.
My grandmother nodded and said that she likes snails. They’re French, she said. Then my grandmother reminded them how her husband had been good to them in Vietnam and even during the war, he had brought all the families into his house and taken care of all of them. Yes, Phuong said. Of course, he did. Phuong talked about how they had all shared food together and if it weren’t for my grandmother’s generosity, who knows what would’ve happened to them. Amy vaguely nodded and said something about the one time soldiers came to the house to interrogate my grandfather. It was so scary, Amy said. I felt like he was a criminal.
Like he had done something wrong. I was almost ashamed, Amy said. My grandmother waited a few seconds before saying, Yes, he could be a scary man when he wanted to be. Then she said that she had always thought of them as family and thanked them for staying on the estate and sharing those moments together. She mentioned again how her husband had taken care of their families. The mood at the table was slowly shifting and I grew uneasy. Then my grandmother asked them if they remembered what my grandfather had given them and said that she needed it back. Both Amy and Phuong looked nervous.
Amy said, “That was so long ago. Was it even really worth that much? I have no idea where it went.”
“It’s the principle,” my grandmother said. “I am dying, so I want to see it again. It reminds me of my husband.”
“Of course,” Phuong said. “I understand. I just need to call my son and see what we can do. My husband is dead, you know. He was the only one who worked.”
“I don’t have that money,” Amy said bluntly. “I don’t know what I can do about it. I spent it on my daughter’s college.”
“And your clothes,” my grandmother pointed out.
“My daughter bought me this.”
“Maybe I should ask your daughter.”
Phuong seemed scared. Amy was defiant. Duong was just on his phone and didn’t seem to hear anything.
As it turned out, my grandfather had given Phuong and Amy’s families a few bars of gold each during the war, asking them to hide the gold for him. When everyone fled Vietnam, they lost contact. The war had scattered everything. No one seemed to know if the gold was a gift or a loan. I wondered about the lives of my family in Vietnam, who they were connected to, who they cared about, what they did to survive. Apparently, my grandmother had
never mentioned the repayment of the gold to them when they reconnected. My grandmother had gotten quiet and neither Amy nor Phuong spoke. Duong put his phone in his pocket and said, I’m going to go for a smoke. He gestured for me to follow him.
Duong walked to his silver BMW. What’s happening? I asked him. He said, I’m not sure, but grandma needs us. He opened the trunk with a beep. He took the bat out of the trunk and slid it into the front seat. Duong moved with such energy that he seemed to be awake now and asleep earlier. He looked at his phone as if to check the time and as if talking to himself, he said, Amy’s house is only five minutes away. Her daughter should be there. Why is that important? I asked. Usually, the family knows something, he said. I was getting scared. Are you going to do something bad? I asked. He asked me if I had my phone and if it had battery and then he told me to stand near the front of the restaurant and call him if Amy and Phuong came out. I’ll be right back, he said. I asked him where he was going. He said, Don’t worry. Not far. Just call me if they come out. He held his phone up and gave it a little shake. But where are you going? I asked again. He pushed his hair back from his face and seemed to be taller than before. He smiled. What are you going to do? I asked. I’m worried, I said. I’ve never seen you like this. Duong said, I’ve always been like this. He waved me away. We’re just going to talk. If nothing happens in twenty minutes, go check on grandma. You can do it, he said. Don’t worry, he said again. We’re family.