Authors: Thanhha Lai
“They are hiding. We were loud.”
She turns back to the bank. Yes!
My good friend is stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. She thinks if we stay quiet enough for long enough the glowing globs will return. So we’re squatting on the bank, our bottoms inches above mud, like two gigantic, displaced frogs. Tiny needle pricks are crawling through my nearly dead legs. To think, I could be lounging on a mat right this minute and be ASLEEP! The things I do in the name of friendship.
I poke and repoke various parts of my legs double-checking for leeches, although Út whispered they don’t live in city ponds. Another universal fact I’m supposed to know. My luck, the one leech in this pond would find me. I recheck for lumps again and again before allowing myself to believe I’m safe.
My body is half asleep, so after a while my brain is too, sinking into a night that belongs to the unseeables. They announce themselves, though, by screaming joys or sadnesses into the grayness at such a high decibel that all the noises coalesce into a soothing lull. If I weren’t human, I’d probably never want to leave this place.
The air breathes out hot and muggy, as always, but after a while hot is just hot. It’s true, a constant sticky film envelops my skin, but people have lived here for forever and they’ve managed to thrive. The world smells of mud and rot and nectar and grass . . . familiar. I can imagine maybe living here, not here in the pond, but somewhere near Út, not forever, but maybe for a summer. Vietnam might be home too.
“They won’t come out,”
says a boy’s voice near us. We jump and knock over the jars. Út holds up the net as a weapon.
Another boy calls out,
“Don’t worry, we’re not stupid enough to bother a foreigner. The police treat them like crisp money.”
A girl,
“Don’t be scared. We can catch them for you.”
Figures walk out of the shadows. We are taller than they are. It’s dark, but surely they’re kids, grade school even.
Út admonishes them,
“Why aren’t you sleeping?”
The second boy laughs.
“This girl is funny.”
Why is Út funny, exactly? But I stay quiet.
The girl again,
“Five each. How many do you want?”
“One each,”
Út counters. My friend is bargaining with street kids over the equivalent of a few cents.
Second boy,
“Ten frogs for forty.”
I squeeze Út’s arm to make her say yes. It works. We get to stay on land while the kids wade all the way to the reeds and shake them and make noises. The glowing lumps hop out and the net goes down. So the trick is to shoo the frogs from their hiding spots. Who knew?
Just then we hear mopeds screeching to a stop. Van jumps down and screams,
“Do not touch my clients.”
Frogs and kids disappear.
Will this froggish night never end? I’m pretty sure capturing them is illegal, but no one is asking me. I saw on PBS you can’t relocate things. Look what the Burmese pythons are doing to the Florida Everglades. But didn’t Út say the village pond used to have glowing frogs? It was hard to listen to her soliloquy while on leech alert.
Út has words with spit for Van, who finally calls into the darkness for the kids to come out. But before they can round up more frogs, they have to fish for the sunken net. Before they can fish for the sunken net, they have to renegotiate their price. Annoying but admirable. Finally, ten frogs sit in ten jars, lids on. A glow illuminates from the jars like captured moonbeams. Hey, that’s something Bà would say and I thought of it all by myself. When Út puts her face close, the glow reveals the soft gaze and melty grin of true love.
Út pays the kids right before we jump on the revved Hondas, which broke all kinds of park laws by riding near the pond. Van complained until I slipped him a fifty. Right before we take off, I jump off my ride and run over to the kids, pretending to thank them but slipping each twenty dollars, as in the bill that might get me followed. Dad would want me to take the risk.
I
n the morning, Anh Minh belongs to us again. With him in charge, we can yawn and relax and be brainless. He has bargained for Van and LuLu to take us around, plus a Honda for himself to ride. He has a list of tourist attractions, numbered in order of cultural significance. As for masks, he has bought us our own, so we can return Chị QH’s. She doesn’t want them back.
After breakfast, we go to Hồ Hoàn Kiếm or Lake of the Restored Sword, a national treasure. It looks totally different in daylight, a tourist trap full of flags and souvenirs. Út and I play well our starring roles as gushing, first-time visitors. Anh Minh blabs on and on about the legend of a turtle swimming to the surface with a sword that a Vietnamese king used to beat the Chinese. The turtle is immortalized in a stone statue in the middle of the pond, complete with a sword in its mouth. No one can go near the statue or even the water. Oops.
Why does every story in Vietnam’s four-thousand-year history involve a fight against some intruder? The Mongolians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the French, the Americans. Anh Minh is telling me why but I’m very sleepy.
Next, we visit a pagoda that sits on a tree trunk. Really cool actually. Then we zip through the French Quarter, where houses look like mansions, not stacked rectangles. I think I like the stacked rectangles better—they’re very Vietnamese.
We stop to snack every hour, which tremendously helps Út and me stay awake. Anh Minh thinks of everything, always picking a stand where we could eat sitting on the Hondas. That way no one has to be the moped watcher.
We eat grilled squid as big as my chest and as tender as . . . a rope. It stinks like dried fish and you have to chew, chew, chew, but it’s so good dipped in a hot, tangy, sweet sauce. We stop for
chè ba màu
, a dessert that even Montana is addicted to. It’s sold in every corner in Little Saigon. Sugar, fresh coconut milk, tapioca strings, three kinds of beans. Don’t go by the description, just try it.
The best is when we stop for corkscrew, pinkie-sized snails. This time, we pay the vendor’s son to watch the Hondas because eating snails requires sitting down with full concentration. The snails come out steamed in a basket. You hold a snail in one hand, a sewing pin in the other. With skill, you use the pin to pull out the meat without breakage. If done right you get a string of curly meat, which is dipped in red-hot, garlicky, diluted fish sauce and brought to your mouth without dripping one drop. The stuff stinks more than the squids and if spilled it will take the kind of vigorous scrubbing that might remove your skin.
Van is an expert, taught by his big sis, Chị BêBê. He presents Anh Minh with a perfect piece of curly meat because he’s in awe of the boy who won the scholarship where he was ranked thirty-sixth.
“I was only second and would not have gotten it if Út’s sister had not declined,”
Anh Minh says.
“Why would anyone be dumb enough to refuse an experience overseas?”
“Every new school year she must sit in the back for weeks before slowly advancing to the front row. But she remembers everything she reads and hears. If that’s dumb, I wish I were.”
“I apologize. I’m so envious of everyone. Poor kids whose smarts extend to the clouds. Rich kids who get tutors and come out ahead. They receive tutoring from the same teachers who give out the tests,”
insists Van.
“The teachers tutor because their salaries aren’t enough to survive. Consider the children who never get to enter the competition because their parents cannot afford kindergarten.”
I feel so grown-up listening to them, although I’m sad. Why can’t everyone go to kindergarten? It makes me feel like I don’t know much. What else do I not know?
“Is everyone so driven?” I ask Anh Minh. “Where are the lazy, slacker kids?”
He laughs. “That’s the privilege of those whose parents have achieved the top ranks. For the rest of us, we’re all reaching for security, status, satisfaction. The same goals parents everywhere want for their children, only here the children want it even more for themselves.”
A cell rings. It’s Van’s, who relays that his sister heard from Chị Quỳnh Huyền who heard from Cô Nga the dentist who heard from her sister Cô Hạnh that we must return immediately to the dentist’s home. Bà is arriving in one hour and this evening we fly to the South. For a second I’m disappointed and wonder if Bà would go without me. Anh Minh’s list of attractions does extend to two pages. Guilt, though, strikes me hard. I remember the reason for this trip and stand up.
I’m in front of the dentist’s house, picking yet another armful of mosquito-proof grass. It’s a weed, a grow-anywhere, in-any-dirt weed. Of course, I harassed Út about her holdout.
“You didn’t ask,”
she said, barely looking up from her precious froggy jars. Anh Minh said the grass makes him itch worse than any mosquito bite. “Concentrate on making your blood salty, miss.” Oh, that’s so easy to do.
The detective and guard arrive in
Honda Ôms
. How young and hip. I bow to both, then pull the detective to the back courtyard.
“No tell
alley
Cô Nga.”
I don’t know the translation for
alley
.
The detective leans in, listens, then pretends he doesn’t understand. I repeat myself, pantomiming surprised faces and mopeds slipping on greasy dirt.
“Ah,” goes the detective.
“Hurt many speak if.”
I fold my hands into a prayer, and say, “Pllleeeaaassseee.”
The detective starts talking, always a bad sign, and I catch something about disobedient children and consequences. That’s when I yell for Anh Minh.
Anh Minh informs the detective that if he tells Cô Nga, then Cô Nga will fire Chị QH, then Chị QH will never write a letter for Chị BêBê, who won’t be able to help Van with his dreams of studying overseas. Back and forth they go. The result: the detective insists it’s his duty to report our stupidity. Ugh!
“Miss, you must provide him with somethin’ he yearns for, otherwise what is your bargainin’ power?”
“What does he want?”
“The question is what do you have?”
Five captured frogs (I can claim half, right?), inadequate capri pants, dried food bought weeks ago, a matching set of glowing-charcoal mask and hat, a suitcase full of grass—then I remember what else is stuffed in the suitcase. His powdery notebook.
The detective jumps higher than I thought possible.
“At once I must reclaim it to my possession.”
Not so fast. Translation: he will get it back at the airport when Bà, Dad, and I board for LAX, provided he clears all obstacles so Bà can get her wish. And of course he must keep my and Út’s adventure in the alley to himself. Deal?
The detective tries to intimidate me with glaring eyes buried in deep sockets and protected by twisty, salted-caterpillar eyebrows. I stare right back even though the young are not supposed to stare at the old. But this is an emergency.
“Children today! What will become of society?”
I don’t blink. Actually, I do because I’m human, but I don’t blink a lot. The detective finally sighs, not having anything to counterbargain with.
Then I remember Dad is supposed to be meeting us here. Anh Minh translates and the detective shakes his head.
“A case so urgent that he must meet us in Sài Gòn.”
It figures. I’m so going to complain and complain when I see him. Bà is his mother, Ông is his father, hello, can he not make some time for them? I, on the other hand, have been solid from day one. When home, I’m going to bring this up every chance I get.
Anh Minh says he must go pack because he and Út are going back to the village in the same van that should be bringing Bà soon. I’m sad to see him go, so I ask if he’s ever been to Saigon, maybe he’d like to go with us. I know better than to ask Miss Busy with Frogs in Jars.
“No, miss, I have not the time. Too much preparation before school. And I cannot allow you to go south without knowin’ that it is Sài Gòn, two words, both downward tones, not Saigon, and to be truly updated, the city has been renamed Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh since the war ended. Never write Hochiminh City, it is so many ways wrong. And it is Việt Nam, two words, the first a deep and glottal tone, not Vietnam. Historically . . .”
This is what I get for being considerate? Who can tell the difference except a true Vietnamese? Why be so picky? But I can’t reason with him because he’s going on and on about what foreigners did to his beloved language. Yawn.
We hear a van out front. I leave Anh Minh talking to the wind and run to Bà. I hug her and she hugs me back. As always, I sink into Tiger Balm and BenGay and soft, cool silk. How insane to think I could miss being with her when she finally reads Ông’s message. It’s her turn.
B
à and I are stuck in a tiny, noisy hotel room. I thought Dad was obsessed with saving money, but the detective outfrugals (a word?) him by far. He and the guard wouldn’t even stay here with us, saying it’s too fancy. They’re rooming somewhere else.
Bà and the guard talked forever yesterday, so quiet and private that even though I spied I couldn’t hear a thing. I finally gave up and went to pack for Saigon, I mean Sài Gòn, taking care to switch the detective’s notebook to Bà’s bag just in case he’s sly enough to search mine. I know he would never touch Bà’s private belongings . . . simply not done.
When they dropped us off at this hotel late last night, the detective admonished us to stay put until he returns.
“Ði bao lâu?”
I asked how long he would be gone. Let’s move it, this is my last obstacle, then home home home.
“Không biết.”
Of course the detective didn’t know, then he launched into a long agonizing explanation. By then I had found a fascinating crack on the ceiling.
Whatever the detective and guard are doing it’s got to be better than sitting in a tiny room without a TV or even a real fan. When I turned ours above level 2, the whole thing shut down.
As for Dad, surprise, he’s not here. Here’s Mom on the detective’s phone: “Don’t worry, he will be there. The little boy had to have surgery again and is not recovering well. But Dad will meet you there.”