A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  But when we entered the crowded terminal, my perception changed completely. All of a sudden he was too tall, too pink, too blond, too thin. With a jolt, I realized that for the first time in my life, I fitted in more than he did.

  After collecting my suitcase, we flagged down a metered white Citroën driven by a man with a plaid polo shirt. The seats had been re-upholstered with a plastic material that crinkled and stuck to our skin in the heat. A Vietnamese flight attendant with a polka-dot blouse sat in the front seat, sharing the ride. The plaid and polka dots were familiar patterns, not foreign.

  Through the window of the cab I noticed that the streetlights were the same as in England. The lines painted on the roads were the same. And the pigeons. The trees, however, were different. Some had leaves that flashed silver underneath when the wind lifted them. Others had long feathery fronds and clusters of fruit. The air was so warm and humid, even the concrete sidewalks looked fertile. Flowers and grass were growing from the cracks.

  We dropped the polka-dot flight hostess off near a post office that resembled a giant railway station and had a huge clock. Oliver explained that it was designed by the same man who had built the Eiffel Tower. Then the cab turned the corner into an area of shops.

  The neighbourhood was clanging open. Steel shutters were being rolled up. Glass windows were popped back into their frames and buffed and polished with newspaper. Old women and men set up stalls and displays on old tarpaulins; unloading garbage bags full of flip-flops, playing cards, steel helmets and embroidered slippers of yellow, green, blue, violet silk.

  I was suddenly overcome by all the things I had never seen or drawn before. How did one draw a market crowd? A woman squatting? A street sweeper?

  At a red light, I watched a boy and a woman constructing a fruit stand from old cardboard boxes. When the boy spotted me, he picked up a grapefruit and pretended to pelt it at me. Then he picked up two more and started juggling them. The spheres of fruit were too big for his hands and dropped to the ground. One, two, three. Laughing at his own clumsiness, the boy bowed, theatrically, as if he were the star of a show. Then the light changed and the taxi continued on its way to the hotel.

  My heart was thumping with excitement and panic. What were the rules here? How was I supposed to behave? I turned to Oliver, who was winding his watch. A drip of sweat ran from his hairline down his cheek. We had been apart for so long, a part of me was waiting for him to make a big reunion speech. I was disappointed that he seemed distracted so soon.

  “Did you see that boy with the grapefruits?” I asked, to break the silence.

  Oliver nodded. Then he told me the real word for the fruit and I said the word over and over to myself—pomelopomelopomelo—to make myself feel less nervous.

  The truth was, I was almost speechless myself. I had never seen a city that looked so beautifully jumbled. There were old-fashioned ferries and plaited bamboo fishing boats swaying on the river, and merchants arranging fresh baguettes and leaf-wrapped rice cakes, which they sold from rickety carts parked along the broad boulevards. There were ancient cyclo drivers and boys on motorbikes zigzagging from lane to lane. There were girls with fancy hairstyles and sunglasses who might have been Asian Annette Funicellos, were it not for the traditional dresses they wore over wide trousers, elegant silk gowns with flaps that fluttered like the wings of excited moths. There were strange-looking pagodas, standing right beside brutal grey office buildings.

  As the car approached what seemed to be the centre of town, I spotted more Americans and Europeans. Young and old, of various heights and weights, some with bristly crewcuts, others with floppy mops and sunburns that gave them a drunk look. I saw them in everyday clothes, drinking coffee, smoking cigars on outdoor terraces, strolling down the sidewalks in white or olive-drab uniforms followed by children who skipped around their legs, tugged on their shirts.

  There was no question. The strangers here were white.

  I saw a painting on the side of a church. In Saigon, even the angels had dark hair.

  The Hotel Continental was cream-coloured, with a fancy French feel. But when I looked closer, that feeling started to crumble. I saw the bars on the bottom windows, the flaking paint, the cracked glass, the unevenly painted letters spelling out Continental Palace on a long cloth banner.

  There were two doormen in front wearing white cotton gloves and holstered pistols. One of them bowed at Oliver as we stepped through the open glass doors into the dimly lit lobby. Making our way, I felt the cracked floor tiles wobble under my feet.

  The lobby had a very high ceiling and a chandelier that glittered despite its missing pendants. There was a sitting area with four wicker chairs and a large fountain of flowers. Oliver saluted the concierge at the front desk, an old man dressed in a yellow porter suit, who waved enthusiastically when he noticed me. “Your son!” He removed a key from a hook and slapped it on the counter. Oliver walked over and picked up the key, slipped it into his pocket.

  We rode the slow, grunting elevator to a juddering stop on the second floor, and then walked down the corridor to the second-to-last door. Oliver unlocked it and we stepped inside.

  The suite was bigger than I had imagined it would be. It had been created by combining three smaller rooms and smelled of lemon furniture cleaner and faint diesel fumes. I walked around staring at the old photos of rice paddies and mountains on the walls while Oliver tipped the porter, who had arrived after us with my luggage. When Oliver was done, he showed me to a bedroom with two twin beds, both draped in gauzy mosquito netting. His own room was just off the sitting area.

  The room he had set up for me was simply furnished, but he had clearly tried to make it more homey. There were several boat postcards taped on the wall, and two large shadow puppets dangling from the ceiling. On the dresser, he had placed a bent wire sculpture of a boy riding a bicycle and a book of Vietnamese folktales. I smiled at him, at the effort he had plainly taken. But he reacted with an embarrassed shrug and clearing of his throat. Once he had helped me lift the suitcase onto the bed, he excused himself and went off to prepare tea.

  I waited for the door to click shut, then opened my satchel and emptied its contents into my night-table drawer. Stasha had slipped in a stack of pre-addressed aerogram “blues,” which I placed on top. I quickly unpacked my suitcase, sloppily folding my clothes into the dresser.

  When I was done, I joined Oliver for tea. The table at the centre of the main room was laid out with white teacups and saucers, wedges of almond cake, a bowl of sliced melon.

  “I brought you a gift,” I said, handing him a tiny leather sack.

  “Is it a gold nugget?”

  “Almost. It’s a piece of shrapnel from your old collection. I polished it for you.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Hmm, yes, it’s very nice.”

  I sat down at the table and watched Oliver slip my gift into his shirt pocket.

  “Everyone at home sends their love,” I said, while he placed food on my plate. I tried to remember all the things I had been storing up to tell him.

  I continued. “Did you know that Vilma has a vicious streak?”

  “She must have been very worried about her mother,” Oliver replied.

  “Well, Ramon was worried but he didn’t get mean about it.”

  “No,” he said, reflecting for a moment. “That’s not really his way.”

  “Was Ramon kind to you when you were a boy?”

  “Oh, yes, always very kind.”

  Our conversation continued in spurts. I felt Oliver jump a little every time I spoke, as if startled to have me around again. Neither of us spoke of Pippa.

  I soon grew used to the various hotel sounds. I listened to the activity of maids, bellhops, chefs, barmen, waiters and gardeners. As I discovered over the first few days, my new home had everything anyone could possibly need: a restaurant, a bar, a sunny courtyard with big round tables, potted plants, birds, and huge striped umbrellas t
hat blotted out the sky when they were opened. It had open-air corridors that circled the ground-floor courtyard, and walls scattered with lizards and strange multilegged bugs that scurried off whenever you gave a tap. It had expensive colonial furniture (deep armchairs with high backs and massive wardrobes); but also an assortment of junk (cheap busts of French composers that looked old and heavy but were light as a feather, tables made of white plastic that had been painted to resemble marble).

  Our suite, number 29, overlooked Lam Son Square, the busiest intersection in Saigon. The sitting room had French doors leading to a small balcony and two very tall windows above Tu Do Street, a main thoroughfare lined with hotels and fine shops with signs that said Fermé or Ouvert. To the very south of the street was the Saigon River, where tankers floated alongside tiny sampans.

  The tall windows, covered with widely spaced shutters, let in the noise of cyclo drivers, bicycle bells, car horns, and sometimes the sound of street barbers shouting for customers or dentists offering to pull teeth for a few cents.

  At night I sat on the windowsill in my cotton underclothes and watched life on the street. By dusk, the street was transformed. Couples clogged the steps of the old French Opera House, which stood on the east side of the square, while women with sparkly halters and pointed heels walked in sexy circles, spritzing themselves with bottles they had bought at the parfumerie. The animals came out too. Bats swooped out from the eaves of the hotel and criss-crossed the sky looking for insects. Cats howled on the roof.

  “Oliver, come here,” I called out one night.

  When he joined me, we sat listening to the sounds of rattling dice and clicking abacuses and Chinese chess pieces rising from open windows below. Tu Do was the most exciting street I had ever seen.

  Oliver put up with my window sitting even though it made him nervous. He made me promise that I would never, under any circumstances, go out on the balcony without permission or stick my head out of the window. But it was hard to remember these rules from my window perch. I had never had such a marvellous view. Even the boring activity of doing laundry was transformed. I gave my dirty clothes to the hotel concierge and within a few hours I would look outside and see them drying on a balcony across the street, the sun filtering through my shirts, a prayer-flag row of socks flapping in the breeze.

  I watched one afternoon as two workmen pasted up a big blue and white Pan Am billboard across the street: Welcome to Sunny Saigon. As I sat there, the gauzy curtains danced in and out of the French doors. A damp and hot breeze blew.

  Eventually I would find that everything was carried on that breeze. Mosquitoes and blowing sand; thick acrid exhaust and pungent pickled radish, cigarettes and waffles; shreds of Communist paper and candy bar wrappers; whiffs of cheap perfume and the grease of grilled hamburgers; Top 40 hits and rumours of American troop buildup. Later, the breeze would carry fire, death, poison, madness, defeat . . .

  But when the war was just beginning, the breeze was innocent. Nothing more than a stream of air. Air blowing in the trees, on my face.

  For years after, whenever I felt a warm breeze on my skin, I’d think of Saigon as the soft breath of someone near, passing through me, around me, inside me.

  Shortly after I arrived, I began noticing more jeeps and along with them more American soldiers in their khakis and sunglasses. With each passing vehicle, I felt my childhood interest in soldierly uniforms diminish. The old women who sold pho on the street began to move their noodle soup stalls away from the roads to avoid the dust. There were other changes too. From my window perch one night, I eyed the lights glowing from a new club called The Striped Star.

  “That wasn’t there last week,” I said to Oliver, pointing at a winking neon sign.

  A few days later, I noticed a new advertisement for beer: “Coors. Is that an American drink?”

  Then one night over dinner in our suite, after we had placed our napkins on our laps, I heard a sudden bang outside.

  “What was that, Oliver? Was that a bomb?”

  “That was nothing,” Oliver replied quickly, tightening his mouth. “Maybe a car engine.” Then he excused himself to go downstairs.

  I ran to the window and saw three Vietnamese soldiers forming a cordon around a parked car on Tu Do while a crowd gathered to see what had happened. What I could see was a burnt, black gaping hole where the car roof had once been and shattered glass on the street. There didn’t seem to be anyone inside.

  Oliver downplayed the incident when he returned, dismissing it as a random act of vandalism. Saigon is just the same as London, he said. A city full of “bored teenagers, hooligans and delinquents.”

  In the days that followed, I noticed that Oliver was often mistaken for an American. One afternoon as we strolled along rue Pasteur, a group of shoeshine boys came up to him, dragging their beat-up wooden kits behind them.

  “Hello, GI, you give me candy?” The smallest boy touched Oliver on the arm.

  “No GI,” he said, and placed a hand on his chest. “Bao chi, reporter.”

  The children giggled and formed a circle around us as if they wanted to be our best friends.

  “Will you buy me hamburger, will you buy me Fanta Orange?”

  “American dollah. Coca-Cola.”

  “Hai-lo, meester! Nice day! Yes! Where you going now? Maybe I come togeper wip you?”

  “You give me beaucoup candy, meester. Hey, Bao chi, you number one!”

  “I have no candy, no money,” Oliver said firmly, indicating to me that it was time to continue walking.

  But I dawdled, walking backwards, unable to peel myself away. I saw the smallest boy crouch down to pet a cat, pointing “go, go” when the cat wouldn’t leave. The other boys hissed and stomped until it scampered off. One boy released a whip of spit.

  Their voices stayed with me even as Oliver pulled me around the corner.

  “Hey, Bao chi! You number ten thousand!”

  “Blam! Blam!”

  The last thing I saw was a boy about half my age shooting us with his fingers.

  Oliver didn’t leave me for a moment. He did most of his writing in the afternoon. When he attended daily press briefings at the Rex Hotel, he took me along and set me up with school work in the corner. I had brought my textbooks from Beckenham with lessons the teacher had written out for me. There were pages and pages of her flowing script, enough work to keep me busy for a decade.

  Every now and then, Oliver would ask, “Have you memorized your multiplication tables?” or “Are you studying photosynthesis?” or “What about Latin declensions?” And I would say, Yes, yes, yes . . .

  We ate breakfast in the Continental Garden (the hotel’s open courtyard), lunch at the Continental Shelf (the hotel veranda), and supper at the Continental Palace (the indoor restaurant). As I settled in, I no longer examined my glass before taking my first sip to see if it contained any spiders or beetles. I learned not to stick my chopsticks straight up in my rice bowl, after being told that it was considered bad luck. I noted that Oliver was seldom offered chopsticks and tended to recoil at the habitual sound of people slurping their noodles or sucking on bones.

  The hotel waiters told me I had my father’s eyes, his nose, his smile, and for simplicity’s sake I never corrected them.

  When we went out walking in the district, I braced myself to be stared at, but I discovered a small truth about foreign intervention. When almost everything and everyone arriving is odd and new, the odd and new cease to be remarkable. In Saigon, I walked lightly. I bore fewer questions, suffered less scrutiny and, consequently, felt more at ease. Everywhere I looked, I saw faces that resembled mine, Eurasian faces, Hmong faces, in-between faces.

  I spent a lot of time in the hotel courtyard, where I walked among the ceramic elephants and watched the geckos running up the Banyan trees. The flowers were bigger and more colourful than any I had ever seen. I liked to listen to the sound of the kitchen staff speaking, shouting, words without endings.

  My former daily pattern
, cemented over the months I had spent with Mrs. Bowne, crumbled at the Continental. I grew accustomed to the lack of regularity, dining at 5 p.m. one night and midnight the next. I went to sleep and woke up when I felt like it. I saw the sun rise. I drank orange juice from squat highball tumblers and Coca-Cola straight from the bottle. I lit Oliver’s cigarettes with the flick of a lighter, peeled fruit with one unbroken twirl of his penknife.

  I noticed that Oliver had developed new habits. He wrote with the fan on, a transistor radio playing, saying he found it difficult to concentrate when it was quiet. Once a day, while we were downstairs having breakfast, the maids tried to press everything back into straight lines, crisp folds and neat piles, tidy impersonal surfaces. Oliver would return and right away walk around messing everything up again. “I don’t want my living space to look like a showroom,” he explained.

  The hotel staff began referring to me fondly as “the English boy.” They called Oliver “the Englishman.” I don’t know if it was fondness. They thought he was posh because he spoke with a clipped British accent rather than a nasal American one. Sometimes I noticed him deliberately exaggerate the difference when an American entered the room. Lifting his cup, he would make some staid, Queen-like declaration in cut-glass BBC English about “the absolutely ghastly heat” or toss out some remark about a “sticky wicket” or “chalk and cheese.” He may have liked the American reporters individually but that didn’t mean he wanted to be lumped in with them.

  Not that any confusion was likely. Next to them, Oliver looked like another species. An older species. He had started walking with a slight stoop. Even with a tan, his skin seemed winter-pale.

  It was when the other reporters said, “Still hanging in there, Oliver?” that I began to worry.

  I watched Oliver file five hundred to seven hundred words of copy every day. I sat as close as I could to him while he worked. Sometimes I wrote postcards to Kiyomi. When I grew bored of the suite I wandered around the hotel. The cracked emerald green tiles wiggled like loose teeth under my feet. I chatted with the concierge and gardeners, or sketched outside the room in the open-air corridor. I drew all the things I had never drawn before. I drew birds sunning themselves on the climbing bougainvillea and lizards twitching along the warm tiles. I took my time and drew them over and over again until they became familiar.