The Journey Prize Stories 25 (7 page)

When her husband, Thuong, told Josephine that Vancouver was bilingual, that it was just as French as it was English – like the rest of Canada – she believed him. There was no need to go to Montréal, where some of her friends would end up. Vancouver would be as fine a place as any to continue life.

Until her last day in Saigon, Josephine taught French in primary school, refusing to admit that French would be useless to her students once the Communists took over. Her great regret was never getting to see any of them discover
The Stranger
. But at least she got to leave Vietnam in an airplane, not like her friends. She fled to Hong Kong with Thuong and his mother. Thuong returned to studying economics now that his military career was finished. In the year they spent in Hong Kong, while Thuong applied to universities all over the world, Josephine picked up more Cantonese than English, though all she could really do in Cantonese was haggle down the price of vegetables.

Two universities in the Vancouver area offered Thuong scholarships. All else being equal, Thuong chose the school located in the mountains because such a school is, naturally, more auspicious than a school by the sea. When they arrived, the only thing French about Vancouver was the bilingual grocery labels.

Now, seven years on, their son Christian set for kindergarten, the family rents a basement suite on Fleming Street in East Vancouver, and Thuong is still working on his PhD. Josephine’s English is much improved, although she still prefers to read the grocery labels in French. She occasionally watches the French broadcast of the CBC, even though the Québécois accent will always sound foreign. Maybe it is just as well that they ended up in Vancouver instead of Montréal.

Josephine sits in with Christian for the first few classes, because he is a weeper when she leaves him alone. She doesn’t like what she sees. She understands that in public school the children don’t wear uniforms, but most boys here don’t even wear collars. In Vietnam even the poor wore uniforms with stiff collars, even if they only had one shirt that their mothers had to iron each morning. And everything here is in English. Nothing is taught in French. Josephine pulls Christian out of kindergarten after only two weeks.

There is a Catholic school close to home. She had not considered St. Maurice’s earlier because it charged tuition – a few hundred dollars and the cost of a uniform. They will have to budget better if Christian is to go. For dinner there will be fewer noodles in each bowl of
pho
. She will have to cut the
beef into thinner slices. But it will be worth it. St. Maurice’s teaches French.

The French language conjures up everything Josephine is fond of about Vietnam, of grey-green
margouillats
climbing the Doric columns of the school where she taught, of nuns chewing on betel leaves while tracing their sisters’ steps across the courtyard, of ham and baguettes. What happens to wine when it is allowed to breathe in the open air? Josephine is not an expert on wines, but she imagines it is similar to the alchemy that occurs in her head when she inhales French. French takes her back home more than Vietnamese does, Vietnamese being, these days, the language of arguments over chores and the future.

No one notices them when they enter St. Maurice’s. The teacher is writing on the chalkboard:
“le chat,” “le chien,” “au pays,”
and other short words arranged like little
bon bons
on a plate. The teacher’s back is turned to the pupils, who are scattered throughout the classroom amongst the books, toys, and cubbyholes.

Josephine sits on a popsicle-orange chair in the corner and Christian stands by her side, his hand on her shoulder. The teacher turns around and calls the children to attention, ignorant of Josephine’s presence.

There are many things here that remind Josephine of her classroom in Vietnam. There is, for example, the alphabet that snakes across the top of the walls, the various accent marks hanging over the vowels. There are familiar books, which seem beyond the grasp of five-year-olds, but which thrill her:
Tin Tin, Les Fables de La Fontaine, Le Petit Prince
.

But here class is held in a portable with the musty smell of plaster, wet wool, and rain-drenched wood. And here the pupils come in varying colours – brown, yellow, and white – though the squealing of children is the same everywhere.

All of this is to be expected. What is surprising is that the French teacher does not have a Québécois accent. It is Parisian, like the nuns who raised Josephine. And that the accent belongs to a man.

The kindergarten teacher is very tall and wears a yellow bow tie over a blue sweater-vest, both as bright as crayons, and a five o’clock shadow. He is like Gulliver as he tries to herd the children (dangling from window sills, buried in plastic toys) to the worn-out polka dot rug in the centre of the classroom.

Josephine hoped to simply drop Christian off, but already he is fidgeting with his clip-on tie. She knows Christian will start wailing the moment she leaves him.

“Attention,”
says the teacher, in French. No response, so he claps his hands. Nothing. He sucks in his breath to let out a holler, then sees Josephine sitting in the corner.

“You’re a teacher?” he says.

“No. Not here.”

“Oh, I see,” he says. “The new boy. You can leave him.”

“He will be a nuisance to you if I leave him alone.” She says this in French, the first French she has uttered in seven years:
“Il sera une nuisance pour vous si je le laisse seul.”
She is not a smoker, but she can imagine the feeling of a long-awaited relapse. Blood rushes to her head.

Meanwhile the children have stopped in place and look over at Josephine. She claps her hands. “Over to the front,” she says in French.

“I can …” says the teacher, then loses his train of thought as the children gather on the rug at the centre of the classroom for their morning alphabet lesson.

The copper statue of General Tran Hung Dao beside Thuong’s desk is not the image that most are familiar with – that of Vietnam’s great hero who fought off the Mongol invaders almost a millennia before Ho Chi Minh thwarted the French and Americans. It is not the General Tran struck in the tunic, cloak, and shoulder armour of full battle regalia, his dark beard in warring bristle, one finger pointing ahead – to a distant enemy or wind-swept oasis Thuong is not sure. In this version, which stands three feet tall, General Tran is dressed as a scholar king. His eyes are just as piercing, but tempered with sympathy. His beard is a pointed wisp in repose. He wears a turban, not his armoured helmet. His belt is a thin bolt wrapped around a scholar’s gown, embroidered with a pattern of clouds. His sword rests in its sheath. In his hand is instead a rolled-up scroll. His victory over the Mongol oppressors is behind him, his fate as a deity lies ahead.

Thuong rescued the statue from the temple in his neighbourhood in Saigon. Who knows what the Communists would have done if they had gotten their hands on it. Thuong packed it in a huge steamer trunk that belongs to Josephine, swaddled in Josephine’s silk dresses.

The statue stands in the corner of the study that doubles as their bedroom, the only space in the basement where there’s room. When Thuong sits at his desk, he meets the General at eye level. It is still beautiful, although the copper is turning
green-blue. Thuong isn’t sure whether it is proper to regard the statue as an object of beauty. He is not sure if the look on the General’s face is meant to instill awe, or fear, or devotion, or all of these things at once, and if so in what proportions. This is what he thinks about when he looks upon the General, when he should be working on his dissertation.

Sometimes he thinks the General speaks to him. The General has goaded him to study harder for his exams. He has commanded Thuong to settle on a dissertation topic, even though it may not be the perfect choice. Thuong knows that it is improper to pretend that an object of worship would stoop to be Thuong’s personal academic mentor. But Thuong can’t help himself.

Thuong wishes the statue wasn’t such a distraction from his studies. Heaven knows, both the university and the Canadian government have given Thuong enough scholarships, stipends, and breaks to get him this far. They have even supplied him with his own IBM PC, which takes up most his desk, and a daisy wheel printer that rocks the walls when it runs.

But the General is always staring at him, unblinking.

Thuong gets so dizzy sometimes with all his thoughts that he has to stand up, stretch out. Get some fresh air. Call his friend Fred Wong, another economics student. See maybe if there’s a card game he can join in Chinatown, just some penny ante table. Just to take his mind off things.

The students call the teacher Monsieur LaForge, though Josephine has learned that his first name is Paul. Against the walls of Paul’s classroom are little framed pieces of paper containing pithy quotes in the French language:

Josephine can’t help but to ask Paul about them.

“It’s for the children to read,” he says.

“You can’t expect them to absorb all this wisdom,” says Josephine.

“When I am done they should at least be able to mouth the words, if not understand them.”

Josephine has attended the half-day kindergarten all week. Christian starts crying even if she gets up for the washroom, and has not improved.

Paul was at first annoyed by Josephine’s presence. It was one thing for five-year-olds to judge him, it was another thing to have an adult’s eyes on him as well. But Paul cannot deny the calming effect that Josephine has on all the children. When she is not in the room they not only fidget, as five-year-olds do, but cough, go glassy-eyed, snap at each other, droop, make a break for the Lego. Perhaps it has to do with Paul’s deep, sonorous voice delivered at the pace of a metronome, a voice that could command the attention of a jury but which lies outside the register of young children. Josephine just barks across the room when there’s defiance. She has a tone
that corrals the children when they lose their focus on Paul.