Fishing for Tigers

  ‘You said he was a fisherman.’

  ‘Hush.’ I pressed my finger to his lips and felt him smile. ‘So, one day as the young man was standing waist deep in water he was alarmed to see a fleet of boats with fluttering flags and triumphant music heading right towards him. Panicked, he leapt onto the shore and buried himself in the sand, leaving only the tip of his nose exposed to the air.

  ‘Princess Tien Dung’s boat set down very close to where the fisherman was hiding. The princess immediately proclaimed it the most beautiful place she’d seen in her life and ordered her servants to erect a shelter and bring her tubs of fresh water so she could bathe there. As she bathed, the water ran over the sand exposing the poor naked fisherman.’

  ‘Oh, hey, I think I’ve seen this porno. She decides he needs to be punished and calls in her handmaidens to—’

  ‘The princess listened to the fisherman’s sad story and became convinced that God had placed this good, innocent man here for her to find. She announced her plan to marry him.’

  ‘Did he get a say?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Of course, he wanted to marry her. She was rich and beautiful and adventurous and kind enough not to have him stabbed on sight.’

  ‘That is kind.’

  ‘Anyway, when the king heard that the daughter who had long refused to marry was now planning to marry a penniless fisherman he was furious. He disinherited her and later, wrongly thinking she and her husband were establishing a rival kingdom, sent an army to attack them.’

  ‘Harsh.’

  ‘Very. But then, as the king’s army approached there was a violent storm. By the time they arrived to seize the princess and her husband, the couple, their home, indeed their entire little town, was destroyed. All that was left was a beautiful lake, which would be forever known as the One Night Lagoon.’

  ‘What a nasty story.’ Cal threaded his fingers through the fringe on my shirt sleeve. ‘Do the right thing by your father and you’ll get to marry an awesome princess. Go against your father and you’ll be punished with exile and then utter destruction.’

  ‘I didn’t get that from it at all. It’s a foundation story, not a morality tale. It’s about new developments, the rural and the urban coming together, leaving some old traditions and keeping some others. It’s about Vietnam.’

  ‘Are you questioning my interpretation, tây?’

  ‘No. I’m flat-out telling you it’s wrong.’

  ‘Western imperialist.’

  ‘You’re wrecking my sleeve.’

  He untangled his fingers from my sleeve and slid his hand up inside my shirt, squeezed my breast. ‘So take it off.’

  ‘I think you should go home.’ It came out of me like air from a punched stomach.

  He slid his hand out of my shirt, didn’t look at me. ‘Dad’s not there anyway.’

  ‘No, Cal, listen. I think you should go back to Sydney.’

  He sat up straight, ran both hands through his hair. ‘Okay. Why?’

  ‘Because it’s time. Like you said the other day, you need to enrol in uni, be with your family for Christmas. All that.’

  ‘And what gives you the right to decide this for me?’

  ‘I haven’t decided anything for you. It’s my advice.’

  ‘Did I ask for your advice?’

  ‘Yes. You did. You said you had to make some decisions.’

  ‘I asked you how you felt about me. I wanted to know whether you saw a future for us here.’

  ‘Okay. So there’s your answer.’

  He stared at me, then jumped off the couch. He left the room and then returned with his overnight bag over his shoulder. He walked out of the house without glancing back.

  I left a few phone messages, sent texts and one long, morose email. He didn’t respond and I had to admit that was fair enough. I found out from Henry that he’d gone back to Saigon and that when Matthew was well enough to return to Hanoi, Cal would be heading home to Australia. Everybody agreed that this was for the best.

  I had lived in Vietnam for six years and, for at least five, had not contemplated living anywhere else. But within a fortnight, the few pieces of furniture I owned had been taken by friends, my books donated to the English-language exchange, my clothes packed into three large suitcases. My workmates took me out to lunch and although I believed Thuan when she said she’d miss me, I realised that I had been to this restaurant a dozen times to farewell a dozen workmates whose names I hardly remembered, and I understood that after a month or so, my absence would barely be noticed. The final blow came from Mrs Lam. I told her I didn’t want to abandon the book, that I could keep working on it and email the finished chapters. She frowned and shook her head. ‘Forget it. Plenty of editors. Two, three, come ask for jobs every week.’ And that was that.

  On my last morning in Hanoi, Henry, Amanda and Kerry came to sit with me while I waited for the airport taxi. We ate tangerines that Amanda had bought on the way. The children from next door chased each other around my suitcases, stopping every few minutes to help themselves to a piece of fruit. The locksmith sat out the front of his tiny shop, pretending not to watch. His wife was next door with the barber’s wife and several other neighbourhood women, all of them lined up on plastic crates, front-row seats to my departure.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re really going,’ Kerry said. Her eyes leaked and I realised I loved her and would miss hearing her weekly confessions.

  ‘She’ll be back,’ Henry said. He sat on the largest of my suitcases and peeled his tangerine one segment at a time, eating the uncovered flesh before moving on to the next piece.

  ‘Hanoi won’t be the same without you,’ Amanda said. This was what we always said when someone left, as though this ancient city, where everything has already happened and will always be happening, could be altered by the absence of a single wanderer.

  The taxi pulled up and I hugged each of my friends. I thought to tell them to give Matthew my love, but the driver finished placing my bags in the boot and climbed into the car and Kerry grabbed me by the shoulders and said ‘damn you!’ and then I was in the taxi and moving down the street. My neighbours sat on crates and stools, leant on their bikes or squatted on the edge of the road. Just as they had when I’d arrived, they watched me pass and did not rouse themselves.

  el picked me up from the airport and took me straight to Margi’s where children I didn’t know were waiting excitedly to show me what they’d done to the spare bedroom: a home-made poster of the Vietnamese flag; a pile of glossy women’s magazines and a tube of hand cream on the bedside table; a shaggy yellow teddy-bear tucked into the bed. The little ones clung to my legs and talked incessantly; they seemed to accept the word ‘aunt’ as proof enough of my trustworthiness and lovability.

  I found that speaking was a real effort, but one that the instant, full family life I had walked into demanded of me often. After a week of forcing myself to take part in conversations about things in which I had no interest and contribute to decisions on things about which I had no preference I realised how completely I had lost myself in Vietnam. I don’t mean that I discarded the things about myself I disliked or that I lost touch with my roots, although both of those things are true. I mean that I had become a woman without a self.

  For years I had spoken in sentences that weren’t. In work and food and housing I’d got not what I wanted but what I could ask for. My opinions and insights became as childish as the fragments of language I had to express them. My foreigner’s defence of smiling blandness bled into my English-speaking interactions. The thing I got that I didn’t ask for would do and the thing I wanted but didn’t get I could do without. The friends I had were those easily kept. They could have been anyone. I could have been anyone.

  Surrounded again by people who referred to each other’s ‘ways’, who described someone else’s latest exploit as ‘typical’, who analysed their own decades-long romantic, familial and social interaction patterns using shorthand like ‘the bad-boy obsession’, the ‘of
fice martyr complex’, ‘the domestic-goddess thing’, I realised how strange it is to reach one’s mid-thirties patternless. My Hanoi friends thought what I did with Cal was out of character but how would they know? How would I? It may have been the first in-character thing I had done in my entire life.

  Everybody asked if I was happy to be home and I said yes, and they asked if Sydney had changed much and I said yes to that too. I didn’t know if either thing was true. I knew that the love I had for my sisters was primal and vital. It burbled up into my chest the second I saw them, and although day-to-day life felt hard and pointless and I felt mostly blank and bewildered, when I held Margi’s hand or wrapped my arms around Mel’s waist I was close to okay.

  Sydney itself was cool and spacious and clean. The hospital, of course, but also my sisters’ homes and the children’s schools and the vast shopping malls with their obscenely sterile supermarkets and oddly scentless food courts. The parks were quiet and neat, the footpaths wide, smooth and empty. The roads – even those that Sydneysiders described as congested – seemed ominously calm.

  I remembered Cal talking about his grandfather’s ‘dizzy breathing attacks’, his sense he had woken up in a world without people. My life was now saturated with ­people – at every meal and in between and in the car and while watching TV and trying to read and buying the groceries, someone always along for company or to get a lift or wanting to chat – but when I looked past them, out into the bright, wide suburban streets and connecting freeways, it was like the apocalypse had come and gone and only a few small clusters of casually dressed white people survived.

  After a week or two I found my voice, and listening to myself I realised I was the awkward aunt who tells rambling stories about places no one cares about and uses foreign words as if everyone should know what they mean. Margi and Mel seemed to enjoy this; they would smile indulgently at me and mouth ‘be nice’ to the kids when they thought I couldn’t see.

  I launched myself into my new role as the always available spare woman of the family, although I didn’t have the first clue about nursing a cancer patient or helping children with homework or even shopping and cooking for a large family. How humiliating to discover at thirty-five that your only skills are brewing tea and identifying exotic south-east Asian herbs.

  I thought of the Hanoian grandmothers who squatted in the gutters, washing a baby in a plastic tub with one leathered hand, grinding rice flour in a battered tin bowl with the other; and of Thuan who could fix a broken-down motorbike as easily as she could translate a seventeenth-century epic poem; and of the nurse at the local hospital where I visited a workmate once, a girl who looked no older than sixteen who didn’t flinch when an old man she was sponge-bathing shat all over her arm.

  I willed myself Vietnamese and my family marvelled at how well I had re-adjusted to life in Australia.

  Most nights we three sisters talked until Margi fell asleep, and then Mel and I would say goodnight to Brad and then whisper together on the front porch for another hour or so until Mel dragged herself out to her car and I crept inside to my single bed.

  We didn’t talk about Margi’s illness and rarely touched on events of the last decade and a half. We talked instead about our childhood, remembering together Sunday afternoons spent watching The Sound of Music and Annie and Meet Me in St Louis, and school holidays spent in south coast caravan parks, the way we’d sit on the steps at night and pick off each other’s peeling skin. We talked about the way our mother used to sing show tunes and our father pretended to hate it, but we knew it was all an act, because on days when she was sad he would start humming ‘Oklahoma’ or ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ until she took the hint and broke into song again.

  My sisters remembered much more than I did, of course, but I remembered more than I’d realised. Night after night Mel or Margi would say ‘Remember that time . . .’ and I’d find that although I’d not thought of it since, I did.

  ‘All those years you were in Vietnam,’ Mel asked me one morning, ‘what did you miss most about home?’

  I answered her as honestly as I could: ‘I missed easily understanding the signs around me, knowing what it is that the old ladies on the bus seat across from me were gossiping about, what the words to the song my taxi driver was singing along to were. Sometimes I missed supermarkets and multi-level book-stores and current affairs TV where the pundits are allowed to call members of the government liars and wish for their political deaths. I missed drinking water straight from the tap. I missed dry heat and cold rain.’

  And then I lied a little, because it was the decent thing to do. ‘I missed you,’ I told her, ‘and Margi and all of my nieces and nephews. I missed my brother and sister-in-law and my aunties and uncles. I missed my people, of course, I did.’

  It’s not even a lie, really, so much as a simplification of the truth. All those years ago when I left Australia to get married I missed my family fiercely. Even the tiny nephews whom I barely knew. I missed the fact of family, the physical comfort of being surrounded by faces and hair and voices like mine. I never stopped missing all that, but by the time I arrived in Vietnam it was like missing my childhood bedroom: a sweetly sad nostalgia, a comfort in itself.

  I didn’t tell her that right now I miss Hanoi far more than I ever missed Australia or the US. That I wake up and remember where I am and I feel bereft. It’s a dramatic word to choose, I realise that, but it’s the right one. Every day I wake up and feel I am not where I should be. It doesn’t sound terrible, but it feels that way, it really does.

  And then there’s Cal. Do I miss him? It’s impossible to say. I think about him often and it doesn’t feel good. Remembering Cal is like remembering the way the dry cleaner giggled at the rip in my wedding dress and the doctor examining my ‘jogging injury’ asked no questions about the fingerprint bruises on my upper-arm. Thinking of Cal makes me bitter and regretful and ashamed and defiant. God, of course I miss him. Savagely.

  I kept hearing about Vietnam on the news, reading about it in the papers. It seemed that debate about the current wave of ‘boat people’ from the Middle East and south Asia had prompted the ‘boat people’ of three decades ago to speak out. I read of a woman who fled with her siblings after her father was released from a re-education camp with both hands broken and a mind taunted by internal voices. I heard a man speak about being six years old and watching his mother gang-raped by pirates. ‘My mother has always said it was worth it,’ the man said. ‘I think she is right. Vietnam forever is a far worse fate.’

  I had been in Sydney a little over six months when I received the email from Cal. Its subject was ‘Hello from Chau Doc’.

  Here’s the funny thing, it started, I’m in love with Vietnam.

  For the first month or so after I went home I couldn’t even speak about the place. I felt that going there had been the stupidest thing I ever did. But Grandpa kept asking me questions, really specific ones, like, we were eating from a local restaurant we’ve been eating at my whole life and Grandpa suddenly asked about the in Hanoi: is it still as he remembers it, not so sweet and loaded with greenery, delicately fragrant, with slices of beef so thin you could hardly feel their weight on your tongue?

  I didn’t even know he’d been to Hanoi, but it turns out he was born there, didn’t move south until he was 10. He described streets that I know I walked down, though I didn’t recognise the names. He wanted to talk about the sky and the trees and the milk flowers. He wanted me to describe the markets, what foods, what the women looked like, how it all smelt. Then he wanted to hear all about Saigon. I didn’t have much to say, because, well, you know how it was there, but it turns out I didn’t need to say much. Grandpa had ­stories he wanted to tell. Some of them were really sad, but lots were just about where he’d go to buy pineapples and where he and my grandma used to go on dates when they first met.

  Anyway, one day he said he wanted to go back. Mum and my aunties got together to discuss it and everyone cried a lot. None
of them wanted to go with him, but he couldn’t go alone because he’s half blind. So I said I’d take him and I regretted saying it straightaway but he was so excited I couldn’t back out.

  So a month ago we arrived in Hanoi. It was difficult at first. But we kept moving, went to Danang, , Hoi An, Dalat, Mui Ne, Saigon. We spent a few days cruising up the Mekong River. Grandpa has found the weather hard to take – old men cannot afford to lose so much sweat, he says – but other than that he’s been amazing. I’ve never known him to be so loud. He talks to everybody, laughs constantly, yaps away late into the night until one of us falls asleep.

  But he says it’s enough now. He misses his daughters and his bedroom and his kettle and teapot. Tomorrow we go to the travel agent in town to book his flight home. He’s okay flying back alone. He knows I need to stay.

  There’s a lot more I want to tell you about this trip. I don’t just mean there’s a lot to say about it – I mean that there’s a lot that happened or that I’ve felt that I want to tell only you.

  Once I see Grandpa off I’m going to head back up to Hanoi. Unless you tell me otherwise, I’m going to assume you don’t mind if I email you again from there.

  C

  I wrote: All the times you said you loved me I tried to feel what I felt in an instant when I read that you love Vietnam. I deleted that and started again. I won’t tell you otherwise. I hit send before I had a chance to ruin it.

  For the next couple of days I checked my email nine or ten times a day and then I told my brother-in-law I would go out with the friend he had been trying to set me up with since I arrived.

  The friend was called Craig. We ate at a Thai restaurant and he talked about his job at a wildlife park and his hobbies which included online gaming and paintball. He said Brad had thought we would be perfect for each other because I, too, had never ‘sold-out’ and ‘settled down’.