“They look like me. All of them. I’m not different here.”
Mel should have grasped a long time ago what it had meant to her daughter to look out at the world and not see herself reflected in the faces looking back at her. Even if this trip did not result in their finding Anh, Mel under
stood even in these first few moments that what they learned—about themselves, about each other—would be immense.
They emerged from the terminal into oppressive heat and a curtain of rain. Mel had forgotten how aware one always was of the weather in Vietnam; she wondered if she was experiencing her first hot flash as they waited for the bus that would take them into the center of Ho Chi Minh City. With sweat dribbling down her armpits, she and Tien maneuvered their suitcases onto the bus and settled into two of the open seats. Mel had chosen the bus to bring Tien as close as possible to the life Mel remembered being lived on the streets of Saigon. The cocoon of a taxi or limousine sealed one away from everything there was to absorb in a city. With a map open on her lap, Mel pointed out landmarks, but what she saw passing by the windows of the bus resembled nothing that she remembered from the last bus ride she had taken on these same streets.
This was no longer “her” Saigon. The tawdriness, the sense of impending disaster, the frisson of danger that electrified every encounter, the mud were all missing. In its place was a scrubbed and orderly city, new buildings, parks in which families strolled rather than sought refuge from the enemy to the north. Here and there she saw an older building, its facade still pockmarked. As the bus crossed Dong Khoi Street, she caught a glimpse of neon and saw that the bar district had not disappeared, only switched its clientele. She might find one or two of her familiar haunts and be able to say to Tien, “This is where Anh worked and where she asked me to help her get you out of the country.”
They settled into their hotel and Mel asked at the desk for the closest noodle bar. The hotel staff tried to steer
her toward Western-style restaurants, thinking they were a pair of neophyte American tourists. But Mel dragged up her rusty Vietnamese and convinced them she didn’t need coddling, just good information.
They ate, returned to the hotel to sleep and began their search in earnest the next morning. As they trekked from one ministry to another and made contact with each name on Mel’s list, they felt themselves weaving a web. Their expectations were high as possibilities started to open up for them—the location of Anh’s village; the name of a cousin.
A setback occurred three days into their search when they discovered that the villa that had housed St. Agnes had been destroyed as a vestige of the colonial era. No one knew what had become of the nuns. The news distressed Mel more than she expected. She’d not always understood the women who had run St. Agnes with such discipline and efficiency in the face of devastating deprivations; but to have even the memory of their existence wiped away as thoroughly as the building was to her incomprehensible and chilling.
Other fragments of her own history were missing as well—the Baos’tea house and the whole cluster of alleys where her flat had been located seemed to have been replaced by a block of modern apartments. She was disoriented by the transformation of the city and missed its seediness and dark corners.
On the fourth night they ventured to the bar district. As Mel had noted on the bus ride, it was still in the same place, throbbing with Japanese techno music and black lights. They wandered up and down the main avenue as Mel got her bearings, but as they rounded a corner a doorway hung with beads jogged her memory.
“That’s it! That’s the club where Anh worked.” She steered Tien across the street and parted the curtain of
beads. Inside was thronged with tourists—Chinese from Hong Kong, Australians, even some Germans from the conversations Mel was overhearing as they pushed further inside. The dance floor where Anh had entertained American soldiers was pulsating with young people while a DJ moved through his repertoire. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, knockoff perfumes and rum. Mel, for the first time since arriving in the city, felt the prickle of familiarity. She saw herself at twenty in the bodies on the dance floor, the barely contained seductions, the excitement of the unknown unfolding itself in the rhythm of the music and the sweet taste of umbrellaed drinks.
Tien, on the other hand, drew back. Mel saw the discomfort in her daughter’s eyes. Perhaps this was not how she had imagined Anh’s life. Beneath the energy on the dance floor she was seeing the spilled drinks, the furtive groping.
“What do you expect to find here?” Tien shouted to Mel, trying to be heard above the pounding music, her face in the flashing lights pained. “No one will remember her. The bar girls are younger than I am.”
But Mel wasn’t thinking about asking the waitresses. Instead, she made her way to the bar where an older woman was mixing drinks. Tien followed reluctantly. Mel managed to eke out a few questions between record changes. The woman had only been working at the club for a few years; she’d come from Hanoi after the war. But she knew of one or two women who had worked here before; she took Mel’s cell phone number and offered to pass it on to them.
Mel would have lingered, soaking up this one sliver of her history here, but Tien so clearly wanted to leave that she reluctantly led her back out to the street.
“I just want to go back to the hotel and shower,” Tien
said, as if to cleanse herself of any connection to that place so irrevocably tied to her mother.
Tien’s discomfort with Ho Chi Minh City—what it had been for Anh and Mel, what it was now—grew stronger over the next several days. The food was spicier than she liked and upset her stomach; she struggled to use her limited Vietnamese.
“Why didn’t you insist that I learn Vietnamese when I was a child? All I can speak or understand are the baby phrases you used to say to me. How will I be able to communicate with my mother when we find her?”
Mel noticed that Tien was referring to Anh now not by name but as my
mother.
The conversation with the woman in the club set off a series of connections as Mel’s phone number apparently was being passed from one possible source to another. They went on a round of meetings with women who claimed to know Anh or know of her. Then a man called, a lawyer who had developed a specialty in helping the children of the babylift find their families. He offered his services for a retainer.
Mel cautioned against trusting him, but Tien insisted on meeting him.
“We’ve turned up nothing so far. If he’s been doing this as long as he says, he may have connections and access to records that we don’t know about. At least hear him out!”
Mel acquiesced and accompanied Tien to the lawyer’s office in a nondescript building, but only to protect Tien from what she suspected was an unscrupulous predator. When he pressed them for an advance payment before he began helping them, Mel refused.
“I need to see some evidence of your ability to assist
us—some assurance that you can make the connections you claim,” Mel said.
They jockeyed back and forth, neither speaking the other’s language well, but understanding enough to get the message across. Mel did not budge, and ultimately the lawyer threw up his hands. “Then I cannot help you.”
When they left the office, Tien was furious.
“You treated me like a child in there!”
“You told me yourself that you feel unsure speaking Vietnamese. I was only trying to make sure he understood.”
“But why didn’t you want to pay him? What if we’ve lost our only opportunity to find her?”
“I wanted him to see that he wasn’t dealing with someone he could easily exploit. I don’t trust him.”
“You think I can’t handle this on my own!”
“Tien, you asked me to help you. I’m trying to do that. I’m also trying to protect you against false hope.”
“But you keep throwing obstacles in the way. You doubt
everyone.
I think you honestly don’t want me to find my mother!”
“Tien, I promise you that I will persevere for you until we’ve exhausted every option, explored every possible lead. But you’re hovering on the edge of obsession if you’re willing to believe that some snake oil salesman can magically make Anh appear.
“I know these last two weeks have been frustrating, and so much less than you hoped. But don’t let your need to find Anh turn into desperation. That will only make you easy prey for someone like him to take advantage of.”
“Stop patronizing me! How can you possibly understand my need? You
know
who your family is. You
know
whose blood runs through your veins.”
“
You
are my family, Tien,” she whispered, crushed
that her daughter did not understand the bond that had been forged between them.
They had been arguing in front of the lawyer’s office. Mel believed that if she stayed there any longer they would both descend into a spiral of accusations about mothering and daughtering from which they might not recover.
“I need to be alone for a while. I’ll hail you a cab to take you back to the hotel and meet you there in a few hours,” Mel said.
“I can do that myself.”
“Fine.” Mel turned toward the center of the city and began walking. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Tien go back into the lawyer’s building, but she resisted the impulse to stop her and walked on.
She was angry—with Tien for not recognizing how vulnerable she was, with herself for her own ambivalence. Was Tien right, that she didn’t truly want her to find Anh? She longed to offer Tien wisdom and reassurance. Instead, she fumbled as awkwardly as she had decades before when she had first held Tien in her arms.
She continued to walk, futilely seeking refuge in a city that was no longer hers. The closer she got to the center, the more chaotic and alien it seemed. Horns blared. Motorbikes wove recklessly through a sea of three-wheeled trucks, pedestrians and bicycles. Heat simmered above the payment.
She felt oppressed—by the weather, by Tien’s criticism, by her own weaknesses. She had a fleeting longing for the cigarettes she had given up when she became a mother. She could use something right now to distract her as she strode through the city, putting distance between herself and her daughter, between the past and the present. She doubted that a cigarette would do the trick, but decided she’d settle for some air conditioning and a
long, cool drink. The afternoon rain had begun. Her sandals were soaked and starting to chafe, and her bare legs were splashed with mud.
She’d led herself to a neighborhood that held pockets of familiarity and realized she wasn’t far from the old
Newsweek
office in the Hotel Continental. As she rounded a corner, she saw it up ahead. The hotel had been renovated rather than demolished. With relief, she rotated through the revolving door, shook out her umbrella and cast about for the bar, where she was happy to sink into one of the padded booths.
She ordered a tonic and lime and scanned the room. The place definitely appealed to a western tourist clientele. Copies of the
Financial Times
and
Herald Tribune
were scattered about.
She was leafing through the
Herald
absentmindedly, refreshed by the drink and lulled by the monotony of falling rain, when her eye fell on a familiar face staring out from page three.
Phil Coughlin, even in a low-resolution black-and-white photo, bristled with energy and a penetrating brilliance. It stunned her, especially when he had been so recently in her thoughts. She read on, hoping that the article would divert her enough from the unsettling tension with Tien.
The MacArthur Foundation had just announced its latest round of Fellows and Coughlin was one of them. They referred to him as the “Mountain Doctor” for his work among the hill tribes of northern Thailand. It appeared that he had never left Southeast Asia. After he had crossed into Cambodia, ministering to the victims of Pol Pot, he’d made his way north, building clinics in the remote territory above Chiang Mai in Thailand. The facts of his achievements as a humanitarian were spare—a list
of dates and deeds that was long but lifeless. He had apparently impressed the award committee, but Mel had no sense of who Phil Coughlin was now beyond the label that had been attached to him.
She folded up the paper and was about to leave when her phone rang. She assumed it was Tien and flipped it open, but the number was a Washington area code.
“Mel, this is Sam.”
The feature editor at the
Post
. It was 2:00 a.m. in Washington.
“I’m sorry to bother you on your vacation, but Susan told me where you are, and, well, I need you to take an assignment.”
“Sam, I’m on leave taking care of family business.”
And messing it up.
“I know. But hear me out first, please. The MacArthur Foundation just named a new set of Fellows and they are a quirky bunch, so we want to do an in-depth piece on them. It seems that one of them is in Thailand. You’re closer than anyone I’ve got in the newsroom, and I understand that this guy rarely comes back to the States. He’s something of a one-man Doctors Without Borders, a cowboy, from what little I could find about him. But he’s willing to do an interview—maybe only because MacArthur told him he had to. I can fly you up there and back to Vietnam—thirty-six hours tops. Will you do it?”
Mel had enough stature at the paper to refuse, but she didn’t immediately turn Sam down. She felt a duty to Tien to see this quest through to one answer or another, but the frustrations and hostility of the morning had left her questioning whether she was helping or hindering her daughter. She also was pulled in two directions by the subject of Sam’s assignment. The flatness of the MacArthur press release had left her curious about what had
shaped and driven Phil to a life so different from hers. But at the same time, she was wary of opening herself up—to her own regrets, to his judgment of the path she had chosen, even to why he had disappeared so thoroughly, never once trying to reconnect.