When we reach the café, that doctor stands ordering at the counter. He smiles at us when we walk in. “Hello, Shelley. Mai.” I’m impressed, with so many adoptions going on here, that he remembers our names. I can’t remember his. “Will you join me for breakfast?” he asks.
We order, then follow him to the back of the café and pull up stools around a table. It’s funny seeing Western men try to sit on Vietnamese-style furniture. They twist into contortions to fit. The doctor, being tall, looks especially silly, but he seems mostly amused by the challenge, like a clown taking pleasure from his own tricks. He’s the first foreigner I’ve seen in Vietnam who appears perfectly at ease here, even content.
The waitress arrives with the coffee tray, with glasses of orange juice for each of us. The doctor turns to Shelley. “I expected to see you and the baby the other afternoon.”
She rubs her forehead with the tips of her fingers. “I’m having some problems with my documentation, so they’ve postponed the G and R,” she says.
The doctor’s face turns serious. “Sorry to hear that.”
Shelley looks at him. “Do these things usually get settled okay?” she asks.
“Of course. Very, very common,” he says. “Don’t worry.” But he’s a doctor. He sees what she needs and makes the right prognosis.
Shelley pours some milk into her coffee, then stirs it with a spoon. “I’m trying to be optimistic.” She gazes down at the coffee cup, her voice low, as if she’s giving herself a lecture.
No one says anything for a moment, and when I glance up, I see that the doctor is looking at me. His eyes are large and unblinking, a melan-choly green, but also amused. He lifts his orange juice. “Here’s to a quick solution,” he offers, then drinks it in a gulp.
Shelley grins, but she doesn’t look up. The waitress arrives with our omelets. For a few moments, we fuss with butter and jam, chili sauce, napkins, refills of coffee, our forks. Then the doctor says, “I have a proposal for you, Ms. Mai.”
I stare at him. Why me? I’m just the friend here. He must notice the look on my face, as if he’s the police coming to arrest me. He hurries to explain. “It’s a favor. You see, I spend Wednesdays conducting primary-care clinics in the countryside. Today my nurse, Ngoc, had to stay home to care for her mother. I’m left without a translator. I’m wondering—” He leaves off here, gesturing with his hand in the air, letting us guess the rest.
Shelley jumps in. “You need Mai?” She pats my leg with her hand. “Go ahead!”
Under the table, I pinch her thigh. Is she crazy? I stare at her. “I have go with you.” I let her know in a dozen different ways that she should mind her own business.
She shakes her head. “I’m only going to the orphanage today. Tomorrow I’ll need you. Today I’ll be fine.” She grins pleasantly, like I’m the problem.
The doctor has his eye on me. “I no good translator,” I argue. “My English terrible.” Okay, maybe I’m dropping a few more verbs than usual. But the basic point is true. I don’t know how to do that work. I don’t know how to spend a day with a strange foreign doctor. I can’t even remember his name.
“I’m not worried about your English, Ms. Mai,” the doctor says.
“Go with Dr. Penzi!” Shelley exclaims, supplying me, at least, with that.
I look away from both of them. Outside, an army truck full of pigs wheezes past in traffic. “My English bad,” I mutter.
With Dr. Penzi’s driver, Long, we head west out of Hanoi in a new white Toyota. The road is narrow and full of traffic, even five, ten, fifteen kilometers beyond the city. We pass long stretches of farmland, with no sign of a building or a shop. Every few kilometers, we go through a village. Along the edges of the road, women in bare feet or plain rubber sandals bob along with poles slung across their shoulders, carrying cabbages, bananas, lychees. They move in mass, too many for the narrow road, and Long veers around them, honking, as he passes. Out here in the countryside, I see few cars, more trucks, mostly motorbikes. The road is thick with them, low to the ground and drifty, like cats racing after their dinner. We are so far from I-40, and I am so glad.
Out beyond the road, over the rice fields, the air already shimmers in the heat. It’s cool inside the car. Dr. Penzi and I sit in the back while Long sits alone up front, humming to the music on the cassette player, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. Behind Long, Dr. Penzi dozes, his head resting against the window, his arms folded like a make-shift blanket across his chest. I’m grateful that he doesn’t want to talk. I’ll do what I can for the man, but he should know that I’m no translator. If he complains about my skill, I’ll remind him that I am a shopkeeper. I can say “bandage” and “antibiotic” in both English and Vietnamese. He shouldn’t expect more than that.
I do like the solitude. For the first time in days, I don’t have anyone pestering me for assessments of how the country has changed since I left. People seem obsessed with the subject. Mrs. Huyen, Dr. Thuy at the orphanage, Tri at the hotel—give them two minutes with me and they’re spouting statistics about Honda sales since 1990. If I’m slow to demonstrate that I care about such things, they’ll say, “Haven’t you noticed how many more motorbikes we have in this country since when you went
away?” They are polite toward me, but slightly resentful, too, as if I’m a member of the family who went on vacation and left them with the chores. They want me, the
Vi
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to understand that they have done just fine since I abandoned them.
Khoi must have given his family and friends great satisfaction when he was here. He considered the motorbikes a sign of an economic miracle. Two thousand dollars a pop, he told me. People are rich! But I have seen a more impressive sign of wealth in Vietnam. I have seen fat children on the streets of Hanoi. Imagine it: fat children. I think of My Hoa and the paltry spoonfuls of rice gruel we managed to offer her. In those days, we considered a piece of dried fish a special treat. Now I see fat children slurping crème caramel, licking ice-cream cones, picking at cake. Picking at cake! I can see, right out the window of this car, proof that poverty in this country still exists, and that the gap between rich and poor has grown vast, but why talk about motorbikes when there are children in Vietnam who are picking at cake? What symbol of wealth is more effective than that?
Dr. Penzi shifts in his seat, stretching his legs diagonally across the floor. His worn sandals rest only inches from mine and I find myself staring at his long, knobby toes. They’re clean, but rough and callused, like feet that have never worn real shoes.
“I have a theory.” He’s talking to me. I turn my eyes away from the doctor and his toes. “Imagine that our feet or hands were simple blocks,” he says. “Like paddles.”
Am I supposed to respond to that?
“How do you think we would feel about toes then, Mai? Or fingers?”
I turn to look at him. “I beg your pardon?” In Wilmington, rich ladies say “I beg your pardon?” to let you know you’re rude.
“Toes. Fingers. I believe we’d find them very ugly.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him. His toes are ugly now.
He slides a foot from a sandal and places it against the back of the front passenger seat, directly in front of me. I should be insulted, but mostly I’m just shocked by his foot. Now, in the sunlight, it looks even
worse, a rice farmer’s foot. He contemplates it for a moment. Then, he says, “The human form. We speak of it as if it’s beautiful. But, if you look at it objectively, a foot seems strange, even ugly.”
I don’t know why he’s talking about the human form. This is not an issue of the human form. To prove my point, I pull my foot out of my clog and press it against the seat, a few inches from his. The doctor looks at me and smiles. Now there are two bare feet resting against the passenger seat in front of me. Through his rearview mirror, Long tries to figure out what we’re doing. Dr. Penzi points a finger at our feet and says, “Look, both yours and mine are natural. No polish. Bluntly clipped. We were born with these feet. I see nothing wrong with either one. I state this opinion to you as a fellow human being. But, if I step away from my species for a moment, they’re rather ugly, don’t you think?”
My feet are well-proportioned, the toenails uniform and even, the skin smooth and pink. “My feet aren’t ugly,” I tell him, “but yours are.”
The doctor looks at me sideways, grins, and lets his foot drop to the floor. “Okay, then, hands!” His right hand shoots up and both of us look at it seriously, as if we’re contemplating a work of art. Long is having trouble keeping his eyes on the road. “I have nice hands,” the doctor announces, lifting the other for me to see.
He does have nice hands. His fingers are thin, nimble, delicate but sturdy, adequate for his profession. “Now, yours,” he orders.
I hold up my left hand, but only reluctantly. I bite my nails. I have a poorly healed scar on the thumb from rushing too fast while cutting carrots. And I have the remains of a deep gash, years old now, on the tip of my index finger from the morning I miscalculated the distance between my hand and a cleaver. I would hold up the right hand instead, but the scars from two bad burns make that one even worse. “I cook,” I explain. “A clumsy cook,” he says. “My hand is prettier. That makes us even
now.”
In the front seat, Long turns on the radio: a blaring crowd, announcers cracking jokes. Dr. Penzi leans forward and rests his arm against the driver’s seat. “Long, can we have a little quieter World Cup, please?” I slide my hands beneath my thighs, not knowing quite what to do with
myself. Long reaches over and fiddles with the volume, but the difference is barely noticeable.
Dr. Penzi leans back into his seat. “Why did you return to Vietnam?” he asks.
He’s caught me off guard. “For Shelley,” I say. My voice is flat, unin-viting. I concentrate on what’s outside the car. Ahead of us, I can see the dim outline of hills. The sky is milky white. In Wilmington, the sky is almost always blue, but I can recall so few blue skies from my life in Vietnam. We pass a truck full of prisoners, built like a cage. I can see hands, gripping bars.
The doctor whistles softly as we pass. Then he turns his attention to me again. “You have no family here?”
“I do. In Hanoi. Where you from?” I want to change the subject. “From Italy. And the reunion? Has it been a happy one?”
We drive through a town. Black stains of mildew cover the garish new concrete buildings. In front of a store filled with ruffly evening gowns, a hand-painted sign reads
RENT WEDDING DRESSES HERE
. I say, “My father has emphysema.”
The doctor responds quickly. “If he needs any kind of examination, please feel free to bring him by my office.”
“Thank you,” I say. Then he leaves me in peace.
Fifteen minutes beyond the town, an old French road marker says we’re seven kilometers from the provincial capital of Hoa Binh. I’ve never been to Hoa Binh. When I was a child, this part of the country seemed dark and mysterious, the gateway to the mountains and the border with Laos. These were the homelands of the
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U:o
i dân t
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minority people, the Thai and Muong, whom I only read about in school. Once or twice, when I was a girl, I’d see a group of them walking through Hanoi. They wore intricately embroidered costumes, heavy silver jewelry, and carried their babies in pouches on their backs. My friends and I would chase behind them on tiptoe, shy but curious, trying to catch snippets of their language. When I was even younger, and had been bad, my mother would threaten to send me to the mountains to live with the
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i dân t
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This warning could always make a bad girl try to be better.
“I like the idea of a town named Peace,” Dr. Penzi says. I look at him. “Peace?”
“My nurse, Ngoc, told me that the name of Hoa Binh City means ‘peace’ in Vietnamese.”
“Oh. Yes. I guess it does.” Just like Americans with Chapel Hill, or Los Angeles—“the Angels”—we Vietnamese don’t give much thought to the literal meaning.
“Hoa Binh,” he repeats, then he sighs. “Only a country that has suffered war as intensely as Vietnam would think to name a city ‘peace.’”
I nod. I don’t want to be rude, but, really, what would an Italian know of peace? He’s too young to remember World War II. Peace, to him, would be a romance, like those few minutes of elation my friends and I felt when we first heard that the war was over. The boys jumped onto their wooden desks and shouted with joy. The girls hurled themselves into a teary mass embrace. We expected so much. But what did we get, really? Just emptiness. Hunger. Cleaning up the mess. Every trouble of life—the violence, the deprivation, the loneliness—had been endured in the name of war. And when it was over, nothing took its place. Just more deprivation, more national struggle, but fewer people believed in it.
What could I say that an Italian would understand? “Peace,” I say. “It’s a very pretty name.”
He continues to look at me. Perhaps he’s guessing from the tone of my voice that I suffered deeply. I won’t deny him that pleasure. There’s something epic about tragedy on such a scale as Vietnam’s. But my little disaster? Well, nothing’s epic about bad judgment and bad luck.
Although it’s only ten-thirty when we reach Hoa Binh, we pull to a stop on a wide tree-lined avenue in order to have lunch. As we get out of the car, Dr. Penzi explains that there’s nothing to eat in the tiny village where we’ll hold our clinic, so we need to stop before we go there. “My appetite is very enthusiastic,” he tells me. “If I’m too hungry, I might sew one person’s foot onto another person’s arm.”
I stop, my hand resting on the car door. “You do that,” I say, “and the
Muong people will sew your brain to the back of a donkey and haul you up to China.”
Dr. Penzi faces me across the hood of the car. He cocks his head, quite genially, and looks at me for so long that I have to laugh. “That could be a problem. Could you and Long find your way home without me?”