A couple of weeks ago, my Aunt Manh Nhi, who's a high school teacher in New York, sent me an anthology with a collection of works written by her students and some of the teachers. In it was a piece written by Aunt Manh Nhi herself. The story recounts her years in Vietnam before and after the war, and after reading it, I asked Aunt Manh Nhi for permission to share the story.
I didn't realize until recently that many of the refugees who fled Vietnam during the 1970s were actually Chinese. According to my Aunt, many Chinese were persecuted, and those who stayed in Vietnam after the war had to live in ways even they couldn't have imagined.
The name of the story is called The Pool at the Sak Woi Club. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
******
I. SAIGON, 1967
The wind in a room.
Often, though the club would be a hive of activity, with waiters, sunbathers, diners by the food counter, and children splashing through the wading area, the deep end of the pool would be empty. A current of air would occasionally undulate along its placid surface, raising a single wavelet that glittered like a flounce on a plain dress.
Ringing one side of the pool would be the French women in string bikinis with their shapely legs and to me, awesome breasts, their bodies creamy with suntan lotion. These Europeans seldom went in the water, so the club was filled with swimsuit-garbed people who never swam. The pool was like a bay that was empty but surrounded by ships in dry-dock.
When I was 15 years old, I learned to swim there. I felt gangly and ungainly as I walked along past the row of reclining, full-bodied white women. As a rule, the Sak Woi Club was closed to Chinese, but because my father was a manager for a large Taiwanese textile factory, our family was allowed to be members. My family wouldn't pay for swimming lessons, so I would sit by the poolside and observe.
The French women always swam sinuously. Though their eyes and facial structure were concealed by goggles and caps, the delicate muscles of their slim necks and shoulders would become visible as they rose from the water when doing the frog stroke. I loved to see their sturdy flanks and muscular arms draped in water so transparent that they seemed to be swimming in a glass of white wine.
2. THU-DUC, 1976
The Chinese in the city had a saying, "Man doe gung chan dong mal jow you jowfaide." ("When we smell the C0mmunist wind, we have to run very fast"). The saying indicated the dread we felt when we knew they were going to take over the country. The Vietnamese had no great love for the Chinese, and we knew we would bear a large brunt of the burden in supporting the country's reconstruction. What exactly this would cost us was unclear. We Saigonese Chinese waited like sheep who knew we would be sheared but not whether we would be slaughtered afterward.
Now, if there was one thing the C0mmunists were experts at even better than at contorting dialectics, it was squeezing money.
Once the C0mmunists came to power, the most deep-thinking Chinese, like my uncle preempted intervention by immediately "donating" their goods and factories to the conquerors. Such people were given special consideration by the authorities. In case of my uncle, well, he was an old man anyway. Those who resisted such donations had their enterprises seized while they ended up imprisoned or dead. But what about those, like my father, who could not give up as much as they were expected to yield? Father quickly, if grumblingly, turned over all of his property; but he could give little more because he didn't have all the wealth in gold or jewelry, they thought he had. During the boom, he was always expanding our noodle factory, adding sheds, workers' housing and a driveway. He kept returning his profits to the business. True, he was an old man now too, but the C0mmunists didn't trust him and they were desperate. Like a handful of dusty, bruised grapes, he must go into the wine press.
The gov't had three ways to get our money.
They changed the currency first. All old-style dollars had to be turned in. When you surrendered your money, you were registered and got $50 (Vietnamese). If you turned in $10, you got $50. If you turned in $1,000, you got the same $50. You could only buy food with allotment coupons, and unless you were registered, you couldn't get those coupons. What good was the old money anyway? It was worthless on the world market.
Second, the gov't sent people to live in your house. These were high school students who didn't have any school at that time. They lived with you for months and watched what you ate every day. As I stated, you received coupons for a certain amount of oil, vegetables and rice for each month. The students watched to see if you were eating more than your allotment. They kept asking you where you hid your jewelry and money. They searched your house and followed you to see where you went.
Third, if they were convinced you had wealth, as they were in my aunt's case, since she owned a jewelry store, they imprisoned you. They said to you, "I want you to come here. We have a few questions to ask you." Then they kept you in a hotel for months. They would wake you up at any time, day or night, and demand that you tell them where your gold is. Almost every person who had a business got this treatment. My aunt was in business for many months.
Here is what happened to us.
Father had one Vietnamese clerk, Hue. All the others were Chinese. She was not as good as the others, but we needed someone who could write Vietnamese. She kept asking for a promotion but never got one. Once the gov't seized the factory, she became the union representative. If you did that, you got a good job in the factory. The factory was full of North Vietnamese soldiers. They were afraid we would steal something to sell. Every morning all the employees had to sit in a circle. Father had to sit in the middle and Hue accused him of things.
I heard about a secret boat that would be leaving the country and I asked my parents what I should do. My mother said, "How can a young lady survive? You will be cheated by people in America. We are diligent people. Let us all die together."
Father said, "I believe we can work hard to survive!" So I did nothing about it.
The rations were sparse. For six people for one month, three kilos of rice. And it wasn't good rice, but sa gook my: rice with sand inside and husks. We had to put the rice on white paper and pick out the dross. We cooked it mixed with guy may, that is yams. We were starving and mother went crying to uncle, who used to own a jewelry store. He began selling his hidden gold on the black market to get us food. When the students found out about our extra food it brought shame on my father. They put him at the center of the circle. "You oppressed your workers, " Hue said. "You hid your gold. You must give it back to the people. Where is your gold?"
During the week, we slept in factory. I would rise at 4 a.m., wash, then wake father. One cold morning, near the time of French Christmas, a particularly cold sluice of wind stove through the wooden wall slats. I woke timidly, still flattened out like a tire tread by lack of sleep and food. That morning, as I splashed water on my face, I felt the wind hitting me like a series of slaps.
The hallway was filled with cats, prowling and meowing. Many of them hung around the factory waiting for food scraps and hunting down the abundant mice. I bent to chuck my favorite under the chin.
Father's door was hard to open. When I got in, I saw him lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, as if entranced by the dirty tarpaper. His mouth was open like a pouch ready to receive a coin: his skin no longer orangish but white, like milk had been spilled all over him. His hands were curved like chicken feet.
I tried to shut the door, crying, pushing back all those filthy animals. For if a cat crosses a dead man's body, the corpse will rise.
3. SAIGON, 1976
I stood looking at a pool that seemed to be filled with Kool Aid. Crowded, sudsy, and lime-colored, the water teemed with the sandy, ruddy, smoky bodies of Vietnamese. Many of the swimmers were vetarans: scarred, disfigured, de-limbed, so their swimming was erratic, off-course, jarring. There were no discernible lanes such as the Europeans had established, no pathways through which swimmers could move along in orderly queues. Everyone was swimming, paddling, and flopping this way and that like a mad rush of waterbugs when a stone is tossed into their pond.
Looking closer, I saw the water appeared greasy, as if it were made up of sheets of wax paper spread in diaphanous layers.
There was no chlorine smell, but an odor of sweat urine and burnt rubber.
I dove in.
I think I was the only Chinese in the club. It was the same Sak Woi Club that had been seized by the gov't and now reopened to members and factory operatives only. Since our factory had been taken over, I had been running a machine in it and this entitled me to use the pool. Admittedly, there was a sort of equality now. It wasn't like when the French and the Americans took everything. Now no one had anything.
Back then, the French had stationed a woman at the entrance of the door leading from the showers to the swimming area. She had always looked as stern as the cow that stands at the Gate of Hell. This lady would reprove and turn back anyone who had not showered. Now that woman was gone and people walked in off the street, trunks under their clothes, stripped at waterside and jumped in. Since not many people had running water at home, I think many used the pool for bathing, not recreation.
I broke the surface, angry. Some flailing swimmer had lashed me along the leg, making my flesh sting as if it had been cut by a sapling. I had a gagging taste in my mouth.
I forced my eyes open and moved forward to swim another lap, shouldering aside a tracery of wind that swept my dirty, drizzling locks.
Random thoughts and pictures of my experiences in China and the rest of the world.
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