Deep in her heart, my mother did not sleep but listened. This I came to know by the uncanny timing with which she came to my bed to take me down to the bombshelter at night. The Viet Cong attacked at odd hours, sometimes at midnight, sometimes during the colored dreams before dawn, but each time she would appear just before the first mortar hit. It was as if she had heard the thumping of the base plate onto the ground, the clink-clank of the barrel being mounted onto the tripod, the twist of the shell cap, set to detonate on impact, and the metallic pop as the shell struck barrel bottom and reversed full blast.
One night, I woke up startled. Silence spread heavy like oil over water, but my belly knotted and gnarled. I thrust a knee into the bed ledge and pressed my face into the cool green mosquito netting. Wafts of incense from someone’s night prayers hung in the air. A mosquito hummed.
Then the sky roared. The room shook. “Shrapnel,” someone yelled. My throat tightened and my mind spun. When Grandma Lotus’s lithographed face swung frenziedly on the wall, I bolted upright. The mosquito net flew open. A yellow blanket billowed like a parachute before it enveloped me. In one sweep my mother scooped me up. I craned to look around me but she tightened her hold, fastening the blanket into a hood that covered my face.
She dodged the creaky planks and maneuvered for the stairs. By the kitchen cupboard where we paused, dishes rattled as we listened to walls and shingles crumple nearby. Then stillness spread again. The ticking of the second hand, barely background in daylight, now grew fat in space, shifted in pitch, throbbed in the changing air pressure. My head lay on her chest. All I could see in snatches of light as she hurried down the hall was the skin at the hollow of her throat where an artery pulsed. She did not say a word, but something transferred in the silence—the electrified air on her skin, the pounding in her ribcage, the musky scent of flight mingled with the silk from her nightgown. I breathed only when she breathed.
Halfway down the stairs, the light flickered and dimmed. She braced to leap for the bombshelter but the step beneath her, mildewed and rotted, suddenly collapsed. We tumbled down weightless. She landed sitting while I slid from her arms. On the stair landing where we parked bicycles, a gear gashed my arm. I lay stone still. I was sure I was bleeding and broken, but when a flashlight spotted my mother’s face on the staircase, I willed myself soft, untangled from the gear and crawled into the shelter trapdoor.
Every house on Docloc Street had a bombshelter. Ours looked like the others, a 2-by-3-meter cavern tucked in the back of the house. The ground was paved with concrete and the top reinforced with sandbags to slow bullets and shrapnel. If you went door-to-door peeking inside each bombshelter, you would find what people needed most to survive if Danang were razed overnight. The café owner next door kept a tin cigar box, Black Cat Brand, full of photographs from her previous marriage, one she could not speak of near her husband or children. The jeweler hoarded old, frayed novels, a silver magnum .45 and a hard-to-find French bonbon that melted rum at the center to warm up your tongue. Of course everyone kept rice and kerosene stoves, and the young pastry cook down the street, always courteous and polite, hoarded stacks of magazines of nude ladies, all relationships he wished he had. Ever since Tet, my father had added some canned foods bought from the PX lady and a large hammer that could double as a club.
“Just in case,” he had said.
Now my father held the flashlight as I blew on the wound. I imagined the sting of iodine solution penetrating the gash.
My father, feeling sorry he had forgotten the first-aid kit, swung the flashlight like a martial arts weapon. “This is how you crack a shoulder,” my father said, then strangled the invisible knave. “Why are you laughing?” he asked me.
My brothers and I knew our father secretly nursed fantasies of defending us in skull-cracking, joint-snapping fights. The trouble was, no one had yet seen the enemy.
Outside in the watch shop, glass shattered. A display case blew, then another. We grew quiet, putting only our fragile parts, the mortal flesh-and-bone body, in the shelter. Our minds wandered, searching, scanning the sky for possibilities. Each sound lent clues to the direction of the mortar, artillery shell or rocket being fired. We calculated the chance for a direct hit. That second we would all evaporate, but the chance for it was not predictable, nor was it unpredictable. The possibility resided in between, in that wellspring of what-ifs that had wormed its way into our subconscious, muttering beneath our thoughts, hooking up with the smallest events of the day, tempting us to attribute cause and effect where none was obvious, as if finding a 500-dong bill on the street then spurning the beggar mattered in the grand scheme of things, as if it could determine whether we lived or vanished into thin air that night.
A helicopter flew low over our roof, signaling a South Vietnamese counterattack. For us it meant safety for the night. As I climbed out the trapdoor, a rush of breeze shocked me. The helicopter rotor beat like an excited human heart. The pressurized air pushing and pulling on my skin exhilarated me.
Within a week, my father replaced the broken step. The new display cases arrived reinforced with double panes. Even the gash on my arm healed. Still, secretly I willed something catastrophic to happen, like bombs falling, leveling the whole block so we would stare blankly at each other the next morning, or the shock of a dismembered arm, the fingers curled in a tight fist and the white bones flashing—anything to release the pent-up tension. But mayhem exploded elsewhere, in Hue along the DMZ. We saw the news pictures and heard about it on the radio, between flood warnings and Coca-Cola commercials. Danang was spared.
At night, my dreams took a new turn. I lay in bed, the bamboo mattress stuck to my sweaty skin, imprinting its crisscrossing weave onto my elbows and shins. Some part of me kept staying awake, wandering, ready to respond to a rat’s gnaw, primed to every stirring, plank creaking, the dripping of wet laundry on a clothesline. Eventually I would fall asleep, lulled by the rhythmic flipping of a newspaper left near the rotary fan. I dreamt of fleeing and falling, and in the morning a sense of déjà-vu seized me. I could not remember whether I had been woken up last night, the night before, or the night before that, or some night in the future to come. It was as if I had awakened into an ancestral dream, an ancient refrain of flights and shelters, where the perpetual preparation had become the war turned inward.
A soldier my father knew from Saigon brought to our shop two Americans in uniform. One had a watch to repair. My father livened up. On occasion he had fixed watches for the army, but he liked it best when he could amaze the customer by describing to them their daily habits based on the wear on their watches. Plus, young men reminded him of his wild days escaping from the Japanese. He tried out his bad English, stumbled, signed like a smart monkey. Soon the Americans loosened up.
The stocky American with the broken diver’s watch waved when he saw me at the desk. He had an anchor tattoo on his bicep. I waved back. He flashed me a thumbs-up. I winked. He winked back, and left me alone. We knew where we stood. On Docloc Street where we had old names and comfortable lives, it was said only two kinds of people approached a man in uniform: those like prostitutes who wanted money and favors from him, and those who wanted him dead. Whether this was true, both the prudent soldier and the shopkeeper knew to keep their distance, lest they tempt fate and the adage prove self-prophetic.
The other American, the taller one with the curvy lips, watched our banter. Yet even as he sank his long arms into his trouser pockets and leaned on one leg to show friendliness, he seemed awkwardly lanky, like a toy giraffe stuck by some naughty child in a miniature hut among rice paddies, out of place against the street vendors outside bent before their wares. He was assessing the wall of clocks with a focus fit for riddles and booby traps, and I was surprised when he stopped by my desk to watch me draw.
I would have bolted and hid if he had tried to lift me up to the ceiling like another American once did, but he lingered at a distance where I didn’t have to run, where I could see that even with his fatigues and the pistol buttoned in his holster, he was not entirely at ease.
He pointed at my drawing and asked in Vietnamese, “May bay?” Airplane?
I giggled. He had a Hue accent that made him sound like a noodle-vendor.
Taking that to mean what he wanted, he asked, “Embay?” Do you fly?
I nodded yes.
He pointed to himself, then clutched an imaginary control and hummed to indicate an engine.
“A pilot?” I asked.
He nodded, but some memory stirred and he grew quiet. I let him sit across from me and resumed my drawing. Whether he was interested in my sketching or found himself at home sitting there, I could not tell. Each time I peered up, he teased me with a funny face. After a while, he reached into his pocket and pulled out something in a fist.
He baited me, offering his closed palms. It reminded me of a game I played with my uncle. I tugged on his fingers, prying them open.
I wanted to see a praying mantis chafing its claws, or maybe a ladybug. Or empty hands, the way my uncle would try to trick me. “Come quickly, Meimei,” my uncle would call, holding out his fists. When I got there he would pantomime a hawk flying off. “Too late! It got away.”
The tall American opened his palm. In it was a silver dollar.
I waited, hoping he would pull out a handkerchief and make it disappear or turn it into a flower. He did nothing. The coin stared at me with its cold inertness.
“A dollar for candy,” he said, pressing it to me.
I drew back, shook my head. That instant our expectation for the other vanished, and I sat there with him, with the space between us crowding up with shadows and threats. When the openness faded from him, I got up to leave. He seemed to fade from where he was, hunched over with his back exposed to the street and the suffocating heat. Something familiar registered in me, the scent of cold sweat from his uniform, the hint of panic, the tightness in his throat. It was as if he too had awakened into my dream and I reached out to embrace him.
Sand that blew in from the sea invaded floor crevices, got lodged beneath fingernails. The salty air attacked everything, breaking it down. Hinges rusted, curtains frayed, the paint on the French windows cracked and peeled. As the night attacks ceased, I kept the yellow blanket folded on a bed corner. Its woolen fibers had started to break, and as I mended a tear, stitch-by-stitch gathering from the tensile strength of the surrounding fabric, another ripped open. The surface tension held a logic of its own. Interfering with it became as futile as shifting sand among the dunes of Mykhe beach. Once in a while, I spread out the blanket and ran my palms over the seams and pinches that carved it up like rivers and ridges on a map.
One Saturday, the old woman who sold us the illicit PX goods raised her prices.
“Our friends are going. If you love them, stock up now.” She undraped her basket and unpacked the cans without labels. “These are chocolate wafers, and these are peanut butter and crackers,” she declared confidently.
My brother Lu and I nodded hopefully.
After she left, we opened up the cans and found vanilla pudding in one and some strange-smelling cheese in another. We showed the cans to our mother but she felt sorry for the PX lady and never complained. Besides, my mother thought, if it came down to living inside the bombshelter day after day, the mystery contents would give us something to look forward to.
Lu and I often climbed into the bombshelter and stole from the emergency supply of cans. When the floor cracked and got repaved, my parents decided to remodel the washing area around it, which led them to repaint the bathroom, the staircase and the kitchen. Gradually, having triggered many changes inside the house, the bombshelter became incorporated as an essential part of the house like a kitchen or bedroom. Its presence was vital as the heart or lungs or kidneys to the functioning of our household, and depending on the weather my mother would move different flavors of rice, dried meat and candied fruit in and out of it. My father would maintain it the way the body regenerated itself. Wall by wall, ceiling and floor, these got replaced so that after a time, it no longer looked like the same bombshelter.
Death did not fall out of the open sky, not as my father feared. Nor was there a sudden catastrophe to make use of my mother’s various flavors of rice. Death did come, but it began with the separation between those things we kept inside the bombshelter and our daily lives. The cigar box of photographs, the cans of mystery, the magazines, bonbons and cheap novels—they bore for us such unnameable value that we kept them buried deep inside the bombshelter. We could not risk bringing them out to the front shop, where the neighbors and customers might chance upon them, or tuck them casually in a drawer where they might be burned and destroyed in a quick crossfire. Over time, that which was supposed to safeguard us in the darkest hours became the very thing safeguarded, and we lost sight of them.
Eventually, my parents forgot to yell and the bombshelter became our regular haunt. The light bulb grew old, acquired a primitive incandescent cast. It still had no cover around it and each time to work it I had to wiggle it in the socket. The whole place felt under construction, in transition, about to be replaced by other things. But it did seem like the safest place anywhere around us. Our shops and homes were French-style townhouses with shared walls and beams throughout the block. We lived so close together you could smell the lemongrass chicken being grilled on the coal stove at the end of the block. If one house collapsed, the neighboring ones were sure to come down with it. Outside, there was no escape from the predictable physics of life. Inside the bombshelter, it was dark and had the thrill of promise that when you crawled out, your life would be completely rearranged, changed, ravaged to pieces or miraculously transformed by the will of the unseen world.
The only other place that lent the same promise was the open balcony on the second floor. Made of construction-grade corrugated steel, it expanded across the entire block. The kids could climb into any house and watch the adults work. At night it was the highway for gossiping aunties, entrepreneurs, poets and yowling cats in heat.
Not long before South Vietnam fell, driven by the humid heat after dinner, we climbed out onto the balcony. A truckload of American GIs on their way to the airport waved to us. Then the electricity went out, and the stars were so bright and distinct, and there were so many to choose from.
Lu reached and pointed out one. “That one—that’s the brightest one.”
“Yes, yes,” I agreed excitedly. “That is the brightest one.”
And we were not sure if we were looking at the same star, but we were certain it was the brightest one.
PHOENICIA VUONG, ’92, MS ’97, lives in Palo Alto and is studying traditional Chinese medicine.
