H’ung rests her hand over her bulging
stomach, waiting for the soft thud of a heartbeat against her palm. A trickle
of sweat runs down her spine, and her feet feel heavy and disconnected from the
rest of her body. She can’t deny the inevitable anymore. Things are going to be
different in the Siu household, and everyone will have to make adjustments.
“How about an ice cream cone?” H’ung
asks her six-year-old son as they pass an ice cream parlor on the way home,
grocery bags in hand.
Stuart smiles appreciatively, wiping
his flushed face. Holding a bag of rice almost as big as himself, he lugs his
load to the shop doors. H’ung almost helps him with the bag, but she stops
herself, remembering how she’d always carried the rice home for her mother in
Vietnam. Just because she and her husband, Dreng, have moved to America and
given their firstborn child an American name, doesn’t mean Stuart is exempt
from his responsibilities as a good Montagnard son.
Stuart is already inside the ice cream
parlor, hands pressed against the glassed-in freezers. The air conditioning
feels good, so H’ung doesn’t mind standing in line despite the dull pain in her
lower back; the wait offers a welcome respite from the sweltering August heat.
Stuart wants chocolate with sprinkles, like every other American boy his age.
Remembering the fresh fruit drinks of her childhood, H’ung opts for raspberry
sorbet, although she suspects it’s made from raspberry flavoring, not actual
berries.
“Any toppings with that?” a teenager
behind the counter asks, blonde curls popping from beneath his backwards
baseball cap.
H’ung shakes her head, letting long
blue-black hair fall over angular cheeks.
Stuart’s dark eyes brighten under
crescent brows as he licks his ice cream cone. She leads him outside, and he
plops onto a bench overlooking a small Methodist church. A bright green banner
stretches across large wooden doors: “Welcome to God’s Flock!” In the corner of
the poster, a blue-eyed Jesus carrying a lamb meets her gaze. H’ung turns away
and eases herself down beside her son, holding onto the arm rest as she sits.
Except for taking Stuart to church on Sunday, she leaves faith and prayer to
Dreng. Christianity is why they left Vietnam, or, rather, why they’d been
forced to leave.
They’d lived a strenuous but
comfortable life in a small hut alongside rich-smelling coffee fields. Now,
every morning when she awakes to the droning of construction work below their
fifth-floor walkup, she misses the view from her bedroom window back home,
overlooking mountaintops. In Vietnam, each day began and ended like the one
before it, the entire family sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating bowls of
rice. Now, nothing is constant.
H’ung glances at Stuart, who’s
blissfully licking his cone, unaware of the homeland he’s never known. H’ung
had been pregnant when they left, and Stuart had been born in Chapel Hill, away
from the hills of her childhood.
First her brother had been taken. A
rural preacher, he’d served God faithfully. He went into the fields one morning
and never came back. Frantic calls revealed he’d been thrown in prison. First
they cut out his tongue so he couldn’t spread the word of God. Then they
blinded him so he couldn’t see the beautiful world his Lord had created. Next
the police killed her father, feeding him poisoned food disguised as a
peace-offering. And finally the police put a gun to her husband’s head and told
him he could no longer call Vietnam home.
“We’ll come back,” Dreng had promised.
“One day things will be different.” But six years later, they still hadn’t
returned.
H’ung knew he missed home even though
he never talked about it. Every night before they went to sleep, he read aloud
from the Book of Psalms. He insisted on using an English Bible, “for practice,”
but he closed each reading with the Lord’s Prayer in Montagnard. Before turning
off the light, he’d make a tiny tick mark on the back cover, as if reminding
God how long they’d been away from home.
Not that Vietnam had ever been home in
the traditional meaning. Born about a decade after the Vietnam War, H’ung had
grown up hearing stories about how her village had converted to Christianity
and fought alongside the Americans. Then, one day the soldiers packed up and
moved out, leaving her Montagnard people to the wrath of their own government.
As a child, she’d attended a segregated
Montagnard school in the village where her teachers had forced her to write in
Vietnamese and slapped her wrists when she drifted into her own language. Every
day after school she’d escape to the soft rolling hills. Lying in the fields,
she’d spin fairy tales for her younger brother. For the first twenty-five years
of her life, her world began and ended with long rows of coffee plants. And
then in a flash, the government had taken their land and told them to leave,
claiming their family had become too “revolutionary.”
H’ung didn’t blame God, but sometimes
she wondered how He could let so many horrible events happen to just one
family. And in the first few months after Stuart was born, she cried herself to
sleep, asking God why he’d taken her son, too. No, Stuart hadn’t died like
other members of her family, but she’d still mourned his birth in a foreign
land.
Even now she struggled to keep this
sadness secret from her husband. She’d pretend to be asleep as he crept into
bed beside her around 4:00 a.m., smelling strongly of disinfectant after his
night shift at the shoe factory. She’d listen to his tired, ragged breathing as
he drifted off, and she’d scrunch her eyes together, wishing she could believe
and hope as he did. Sometimes he’d wake and find her staring at the wall.
“What are you thinking about?” he’d
whisper, holding her close.
And she’d make something up, never
telling him how she’d been dreaming of her hills and thought she’d heard her
mother’s voice, soft and lilting, as if she were standing behind her.
“God brought us here,” he’d remind her.
“He’ll take care of us.”
“No,” she wanted to say. “God has
nothing to do with it.” A Methodist church, not God, had funded their escape.
But she couldn’t say any of this to her husband.
“You get this faraway look sometimes,”
he’d continue. “And I worry about you.”
A look she has now, she reminds
herself, and she quickly smiles at Stuart. Swinging his feet a few inches from
the sidewalk, he hums as he eats, a sure sign that he’s in his own little
world. If she could but enter that world herself!
Her sorbet has melted into a pool in
the bottom of the cup. She takes a soupy spoonful. Still humming, Stuart
crunches into his cone.
“Are you excited about the new baby?”
she asks in Montagnard.
He smiles, nodding. “‘Course,” he
returns in English.
And yet, H’ung’s own feelings are not
so simple. She had cried with joy, not sadness, when she’d discovered she was
pregnant again. She finally had the chance to correct the mistakes she’d made
with her first born. For starters, the child – girl or boy – would be given a
good Montagnard name. They’d given Stuart an English name so he’d fit in, but
instead he’d stuck out. No longer Montagnard, but with deeply slit eyes and
dark hair fanning up at the part, he certainly didn’t look like any of the
other Johns or Mikes or Davids in his class.
Next, with their second child, they’d
only speak Montagnard, so he could talk to his grandmother over the phone even
though he’d never seen her round face or stared at his own reflection in her
soft brown eyes. They still spoke Montagnard with Stuart, but he always
answered them in English.
And, finally, they’d never stop at the
McDonalds drive-thru, go to the movies on rainy afternoons, or attend Carolina
football games with fellow church members. Their second child would learn the
American Way soon enough. Stuart certainly had.
“Do you think we’ve raised Stuart
right?” H’ung had once asked her husband.
Dreng had stared at her for a moment
and then turned away. She’d never broached the subject again, but she often
wondered about the meaning behind that look. Now that they’d begun raising one
Montagnard-American boy, H’ung understood the importance of the hyphenated
identity. She might raise her children in America, but they’d always have two
homes, and she’d remind them Montagnard came first. This time, she had great
expectations.
“I want to be the big brother,”
Stuart says.
“What are you most excited about?”
H’ung asks, smiling.
He polishes off his cone and licks his
fingers appreciatively. “We’re gonna play basketball and baseball and
football,” he says, listing each game on his hand. “We’ll race cars, and I’ll
teach him how to build block towers real high.”
H’ung frowns slightly. They’d always
been careful to keep the gender of the baby neutral, not wanting to know
themselves until delivery. “And what if the baby’s a girl?” she asks, holding
her breath.
Stuart laughs. “Don’t be silly,” he
says, shaking his head confidently. “I asked God for a little brother.”
H’ung raises her eyebrows.
“‘Ask and it will be given to you,’” he
recites.
She starts, recognizing the scripture.
“Where did you learn that?”
“Sunday School.”
H’ung remembers the simple assignment:
memorize a Bible verse for a piece of candy. Just one more example of American
piety: always seeking a reward. In the past few months Stuart had become avidly
devoted, repeating verses over and over again, like a little monk.
H’ung forces herself to look at the Methodist
church across the street. Jesus peers at her through cobalt blue eyes. She
thinks carefully before framing her words. She throws her sorbet in a nearby
trash can and lifts the grocery bags. Stuart picks up the bag of rice, and they
start walking home. She concentrates on the shuffling sound of his brand new
Nikes scraping the pavement. It begins to drizzle, sending chill bumps up her
arms.
“Stuart,” she says.
He looks up, surprised, as if he hadn’t
expected her to speak. His eyes are wide with innocence, completely trusting,
completely vulnerable.
“I don’t want you asking God for a
little brother.”
“Why not?”
They approach McDonalds and cut through
the parking lot, heading towards their apartment complex. The rain picks up.
Stuart jumps in a puddle, splattering water all over H’ung’s skirt and soaking
his sneakers. “Just don’t ask for such big favors,” she continues in
Montagnard.
Stuart stops by the golden arches, his
face screwed in angry determination.
“You might be disappointed,” his mother
says, softly, tugging at his hand.
He throws her hand aside. “But he’s God.
He can do anything.”
Stuart’s yelling now, and H’ung
blushes, under the judgmental stares of a family in a gray SUV, turning into
the drive-thru.
Rain falls hard and fast, drumming the
pavement. H’ung’s wet hair sticks to her face like paste.
“Don’t make a scene,” she tells him,
switching to English.
“But God PROMISED,” he yells in
Montagnard, hurling the bag of rice against the golden arches.
Rice spews like a fountain from the
split bag, puddling by the drive-thru sign, and H’ung feels her face burst into
flames. Stuart scowls; the spilled rice mocks her. She senses the SUV family
gawking. His angry Montagnard words still ringing in her ears, she rushes
forward, snatching first at Stuart and then stooping for the rice.
But the rice is ruined, tainted by the
pavement checkered with bubble gum wads and oil stains. If only Stuart had been
named Uy or Ta or Kam, he’d never have treated her this way. Eyes brimming, she
turns to her son with outstretched arms and hugs him close, pressing him
against her stomach. Kicking and punching, he resists her embrace.
H’ung imagines that from inside the
SUV, the family watches mother and son battle. They watch his flailing fists
fall fast and furious against her skirted legs. They watch her pull his head
close to her bulging stomach, running her fingers through his black straight
hair. They watch tears falling, hard and fast, just as the rice had spilled,
quick and plentiful, onto the pavement.
And then the line at the drive-thru
moves, and the SUV family pulls forward. They do not see how the mother
continues holding her son, cradling both him and herself, slowly rocking back
and forth until his arms fall limply to the side and his fists unfurl to open
palms. They do not see both mother and son carefully scooping handfuls of
drenched rice into the garbage. And they do not hear their quiet conversation
as they walk hand-in-hand down the sidewalk.
