The Lotus and the Storm

by Lan Cao

Genres: Biographical; Cultural Heritage; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A lyrical novel of love and betrayal in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon—from the author of Monkey Bridge

A singular work of witness, inspiration, and courage, The Lotus and the Storm marks the welcome return of Lan Cao’s pitch-perfect voice, telling the story only she can tell.

Four decades after the war, Vietnam’s flavors of clove and cinnamon have been re-created by a close-knit refugee community in a Virginia suburb. But the lives of Minh and Mai, father and daughter, are haunted by ghosts, secrets, and the loss of their country. During the disastrous last days in Saigon, in a whirl of military signals and helicopter evacuations, Mai never had a chance to say goodbye to so many people who meant so much to her. What happened to them? How will Mai cope with the trauma of war—and will the thay phap, a Vietnamese spirit exorcist, be able to heal her?

Release date: August 14, 2014

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

I

A SMALL COUNTRY

1

The Tale of Kieu

MAI, 1963–1964

Our mother drives with an elegant, carefree manner, one hand casually on the steering wheel. My sister and I picture her driving through the streets of Cholon in our Peugeot, a hulk of sleek black metal winding its way through this spark plug of a city filled with open-air markets. Cholon is where we live and where she conducts her business. She alone is in charge of our family’s finances. She keeps the records and maintains the books. It is in this unprepossessing Chinese city adjacent to Saigon that she makes our family fortune.

We have a chauffeur, but our mother often drives herself. Demonstrations organized by monks have begun to disrupt the city, but she is not afraid. She is intimately familiar with these streets, even the unmarked ones that dissolve into begrimed dead ends. The Chinese merchants trust her. Perhaps it is because she is herself part Chinese, although you would have to go back several generations to prove it.

Tonight she has just returned from an evening out with our father. The Peugeot is parked in our driveway, its black paint highlighted by swags of molded silver and chrome. Mother is resplendent in her satin ao dai as she arranges its folds on her lap, then sits with her back against the headboard of our bed. Her hair, shiny and black, is tied in a chignon at her neck and she is wearing pearl drop earrings. Daylight slowly extinguishes itself and a lavender darkness creeps through the window. The streetlights have come on. We are inside the meshed enclosure of white mosquito netting. I don’t allow any whiteness to touch my head. White is the color of death and mourning, levitating above me even as I sleep.

Our mother reaches into a straw bag and pulls out a book. But she will not need to read from it; these are well-waxed passages she knows by heart. I lean against her body and ready myself to listen. She and our dad recited these verses to each other when they first met. It is hard to imagine a time when they existed without us, but still, I try to picture their time together before my sister and I were born. The sound of their laughter as they walk hand in hand. The velvet green uplands of rice fields, waiting to greet them.

She smiles, ready to share a great national epic with us. Kieu, beautiful and learned, loves Trong, the young scholar-hero, and Trong loves Kieu. They are bound together by the threat and promise of love. We know that they suffer years of separation because of Kieu’s decision to sell herself as a concubine and a servant to save her family. But what I love most is the part where he longs for her. Our mother runs her hand along the length of my back and, in one long breath, recites Kieu’s heroic renunciations and Trong’s grief. Every child in our country grows up with this story.

He drained the cup of gloom: it filled anew—

one day without her seemed three autumns long.

Silk curtains veiled her windows like dense clouds,

and toward the rose within he’d dream his way.

Her voice has a quieting effect on us. Trong and Kieu, I say out loud. Minh and Quy, I add, pairing our father’s name with our mother’s.

Both wrote a pledge of troth, and with a knife

they cut in two a lock of her long hair.

The stark bright moon was gazing from the skies

as with one voice both mouths pronounced oath

Their hearts’ recesses they explored and probed,

etching their vow of union in their bones.

Once in a while, my mother will lengthen the story with paper and pen if I demand some similar evidence of her bond to our father. Her pen makes swift, scratching sounds as it inks out the strokes of her signature. It combines her name with our father’s, his name first, attached to hers after. Our father’s signature similarly conjoins his name with hers, in reverse order. We know—it is impossible not to—that our parents are linked in many inward and outward ways.

Our mother’s eyes rest on us. My sister, Khanh, smiles back but I know her attention is elsewhere. She is fixated on the book’s pagination, on the tiny numbers tucked in the upper-right-hand corners. Numbers captivate Khanh. She dwells in a world of equations and straight-spined rules that are constant and predictable. Mine is a world of fantasy and mystery, words unloosing themselves, producing secret, tangled lives that float into my imagination. Still, I am certain at that moment that my sister and I share the same lustrous dream. Around each of our necks is an identical chain, fine gold with a circlet of jade, now a pale apple green that over time will mature into a deep dark luster.

It isn’t long before Khanh, fired up and fidgety, nudges our mother to turn the page again. My sister, four years older, is convinced that she will win the Nobel Prize in Physics when she grows up. She looks at page numbers and does mathematical calculations in her head, showing off virtuosic accomplishments with giddy delight. I begin to nod off to sleep. Our mother whispers our names. “Khanh.” “Mai.” Khanh’s breath is warm against my face. Khanh, a name I have known before speech, before memory. Hers is a presence I take on trust. Four years apart, but we are twinned. I hold my sister’s hand, comforting myself with the softness of her palm as she turns this way and that. Soon, our mother’s impeccable chignon begins to loosen, her hair falling with liquid ease into a thick cascade that rests on her shoulders. At that moment of reverential silence, when we are poised to sleep but yet awake, her touch softens. She waits for us to doze off. Inside this coveted sphere, the world is filled with happiness even as the bashful sun disappears.

 • • • 

Sometimes in the evening, we gather among the ravenous vines that meander through our mother’s garden. There, in an unruly tangle of fernlike shrubbery, are clumps of plants with feelings. The mimosa is sensitive and shy, reluctant to offend, my sister says. It clasps its leaves inward against its chest when touched. I brush my legs against the leaves. All at once, as if they were fully on beat and part of a well-disciplined choir, the entire being of the plant, stems and leaves alike, reorients itself to bend modestly toward the ground. Tonight, against the green stretch of ground cover is an explosion of small, fluffy pink flowers that bloom like stars.

A declivity of earth and bluestone pebbles surrounds the mango tree, and I crouch there behind a giant earthen jar—my favorite place to hide. Next to the mango is our star fruit tree, its branches bearing green fruits the shape of a five-point star. It is how starlight tastes, my sister says. Our mother told us she herself had planted it from an original cutting when she and Father first moved into our house. Khanh has etched her initials and mine on its brindled trunk.

I am still hiding. Tendrils coil and brush against my bare legs. The air smells of frangipani blooms. Khanh leans against me and together we draw into our lungs their flowery fragrance. A violet twilight swaddles us in a benign glow. I love the evening most of all—the ritual, at least when our father is at home, of hiding in the murky night and waiting to be found, his giant black military boots trudging through the brambles and ground cover. From where we hide, he cuts an imposing figure. The jungle green on his military fatigues ripples. Our swing set squeaks. Ordinary noises startle us as we settle into a hushed silence to practice invisibility. Fire crickets rustling their wings. Fireflies flicking dots of umber. Street vendors peddling bean cakes with their syncopated voices. I make myself small behind the jar, holding my breath as if my life depends on it. But of course our father will soon be upon us, swooping us into captivity, cupping my belly with his large hand and flinging me onto his shoulders. I rub my bare legs against the stubbles of his cheeks. His arms, lithely muscled, will hold me in place, perched high above his head.

He is away from home most of the time because there is a war going on and he has to fight in it. On those occasions when he is with us, I love the sight of him, the halo of thick black hair, the symmetry of his body, the tumble of tight, compact muscles shifting quietly under his uniform. His omnipotence is palpable, though not suffocating or overpowering. He is beautiful but his beauty is modest.

In my father’s private room is a framed photo of a lotus flower. The flower, our father once explained, is a reminder of life’s eternal progress toward a simple purity. A plant that grows in mud yet manages to produce a stunning flower that floats pristinely above the water. One night I stood at the doorway, looking at the picture and at Father. He was sitting diagonally across the daybed, cross-legged, studying a book, running his index finger across the page. Closing it to caress its leather spine; reopening it as if to contemplate its mystery. My forehead burned with the realization that this was where our father came to fully occupy himself. He let go of his book and sat in seemingly unremarkable stillness. I listened to the smooth intake of his breath. Something was happening and I felt suddenly like an interloper. I wanted him to need my presence. But everything, the water running through the faucet next door, reckless sounds from the kitchen below, the neighbor’s hammering, was happening outside of him. I wanted to reclaim him, make a noise, claw through the hard distance to pull him back. But I could not imagine how. Here was our father, baffling, elusive. But at that strange moment, he was not. Not our father, nor a soldier fighting in a terrible war. Nor a paratrooper who jumped out of planes. He was instead this new person, even-tempered, with liquid eyes. An almost unbodied presence.

 • • • 

As a child, I want to talk about the satiny eggplant color on our father’s face when he returns home after months away. I want to talk about his boots, muddied and nicked. I want to talk about old wounds, puckered scars that glisten like mother-of-pearl against his sun-browned abdomen, strange griefs of delicate luster, hidden from view. I never know what exactly he does during those intermittent months. Our father cups his other life away from us inside himself. Khanh and I want what he wouldn’t give us. His stories, his explanations. Rampant and obstreperous, like firecrackers. I know they are inside his skin.

Every time he vanishes into some remote province of our country, I ask my sister, “Why does he have to go? Doesn’t he want to stay here with us?”

“He has to go where he is ordered,” my sister answers.

“The war is far away and he goes to it?” I ask.

My sister stoops over and pulls me toward her. “Yes. But he will come back soon.” There she stands in front of me, rocking on her toes and heels and offering me her promises and reassurances.

“Will it come to us, right here, where we are?”

“The war? No. It won’t come here. That’s why he goes away to fight, so the war can be kept far away.”

She tells me the names of places where the war supposedly is taking place—Qui Nhon, Binh Gia, and more—but they blend together like distant shadows.

Our mother’s side of the family is Catholic so we celebrate Christmas. Every Christmas Eve, Khanh and I place our father’s military boots outside our door. With profligate coatings of thick black polish, they look beautiful, hefty, and brand-new. Santa Claus, we are assured, would leave our presents next to them.

 • • • 

On the map, Cholon is a separate city from Saigon, but in reality, the two cities are twinned and hardly anyone knows where one ends and the other begins.

Cholon’s commercial district is several blocks from our neighborhood. Our house is tucked away in a more residential area. Here it is, a French colonial–style villa, painted in yellow ocher, the same color as all the other French colonial villas, the same as the grand Opera House on Rue Catinat, as our mother still calls it, although it was changed after the French left to Tu Do Street, Tu Do for “freedom.”

Here I am with my sister. Here is the place where everything that has yet to occur will occur. I do nothing without running it by Khanh; I live my life under her protection. From the window in our bedroom I can see our terrace where our parents go for their after-dinner drinks. More often than not, my sister is permitted to join them while I am sent to bed early, merely because I am younger. In our country a child is one year old when she emerges from the mother’s womb. Although I insist for the sake of argument that I am therefore older, this fact is lost on our mother. She shrugs off my protest with a declaration of her own.

“Time to nest for the night,” our mother would say, tossing her hair. Aggrieved, I would beg our father for more time. Our mother would utter “Anh Minh” and place her hand preemptively on his, as a restraint against his tendency to indulge. They are now a united front. Our nanny, whom we call our Chinese grandmother, would scoop me up and hustle me out. On this bed, I am left to mull over their unconsidered act. The view from the window is partially covered by an adjoining building. Its brick wall cuts a vertical line and creates a narrow, elongated frame through which I can glimpse but a swath of our terrace and garden—a beguiling sliver of an image. Sometimes a full, socketed moon positions itself inside this enclosure, hanging low, as if within reach. From this vantage point I can hear voices, faint but clear enough through the rush of air. Even as they think I have dropped off to sleep, I listen.

Today, Khanh put up a giant poster of Galileo on our bedroom wall. Already my sister has a plan, an ambition, and Galileo is her inspiration. Khanh turns herself with stubborn conviction into someone who will someday win the Nobel Prize. With implacable hunger she devours books, not those about magic carpets or evil genies, but those with equations and proofs about the fundamental principles of the universe. Hers is an intricate vocabulary of numbers. Each new day brings with it a modulation of magic outside the world of Euclidean perfection.

Yes, my sister reads books about matters that lie beyond the norms of conventional understanding. She believes in infinity. Her fingers peck at reality. She draws the mathematical sign representing infinity for me. There is no time in her world. Hers are stories that evoke the balance between science and magic. When a giant star dies and a black hole is created, both time and space stop. In the black hole, the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Our planet was birthed during a cosmic explosion of dappled colors that hurled matter in all directions. Distant galaxies are still moving away from us at great speeds. I am astounded that such a wistful and scary epic of the universe inspires her.

“Do you understand?” she asks with a proprietorial gaze. She wants me to love what she loves. Stars, especially. She shows me a picture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. She sees motion in the brushstrokes, swirling patterns of subatomic particles beneath the appearance of solid mass.

I nod. I understand. I wish for my own personal planet. For a genie to grant me my every wish.

When I confide my wishes, she says with a show of exaggerated exasperation, “What an imagination you have, little one.”

In the kitchen, we prepare a smorgasbord of delicacies. We practice eating a well-known Swedish specialty—surströmming, fermented canned herring. My sister has researched the ritual. It cannot be performed indoors. We go to the open-air terrace. She ties a cloth napkin around the tin can, places it on the table, and opens it. The cloth is not included to create an aura of formality but rather to soak up the liquid that spurts from the can due to pressure built up during fermentation. The can, bulging with gas, hisses. We wait for a strong smell to be released. My sister scoops the herring from the briny liquid and spreads it on paper-thin hard bread. We each take a bite. I swallow mine quickly without chewing, pretending it is no more stinky than our traditional nuoc mam sauce of fermented anchovies.

My sister wants to acquire this taste. The Nobel Prize is given in Sweden and she has many ways to prepare for this heroic future awaiting her. Already she is graceful. There is an eloquent flex, an arch to each foot as she positions one lightly in front of the other; she is on a stool, her stage, to deliver her acceptance speech. I stand sheltered, next to her. Ours is a world of mathematical grace. It is alive with possibilities. I lean into Khanh’s body as if the enormous resolve inside her were solid mass.

 • • • 

Hours later, we eat dinner with our Chinese grandmother, who has been with our family since my sister was born. She comes from a family of Chinese traders and speaks fluent Vietnamese.

She is wearing her usual tunic and trousers. Her hair is tightly coiled and held together by pins. We call her Grandma when we talk to her. When we talk about her to others, we call her our Chinese grandma or our Chinese grandmother. Our real grandmother lives in Saigon, not far from our house, although we rarely see her.

We swirl about the trees and grass, raising ourselves ecstatically skyward, diving with winged arms like planes dodging rocket fire. We take turns. We taxi and take off, swoop and swerve. Our Chinese grandmother grows impatient. A crease of disapproval lines her bark-colored face.

She wipes her mouth with her upper arm and grunts. “Is it possible for the two of you to stop moving and sit down to eat?” she asks as she clops down the garden path in pursuit of us. When she’s excited, a Chinese cadence is unloosed into her Vietnamese, giving it a peculiarly choppy rhythm.

My sister smiles. I hear a giggle as she speeds up and vibrates her wings. I too am flying and doing clever aerial turns. I know our Chinese grandmother wants us to hurry. She wants us to be on schedule. Eat, play (a little bit), then sleep. Once we fall asleep, she will be able to settle, at last, into her nighttime routine of betel nut chewing and reading.

“Stop and eat. Chew. Swallow. Have I not taught you manners?”

She is not pleased that we have developed a habit of bunching our food in the back of our mouths. I want to accommodate our grandma’s demands but I do not want to antagonize my sister.

“Don’t walk away and ignore me when I’m talking to you,” our Chinese grandmother says, enunciating each word.

My sister walks away and ignores her. I too take a few steps before turning back to look. We get no more than a few meters down the garden path before we are collared.

“Huh,” she says, satisfied with her success.

I stand still, to let her know I have succumbed. My sister twists herself loose but then stops and smiles.

“Grandma,” my sister pleads. “I am sorry. I want to make up.”

There is only silence.

“We will sit still and eat, I promise.”

To demonstrate, my sister sets herself on a rock and does not move.

Immediately our Chinese grandmother responds. She can be placated with the right move. “All right then. You can sit right . . .”

“But we will need to have some Coca-Cola,” my sister says sweetly. “Please?”

Our mother doesn’t allow us to drink soda pop, but once in a while our Chinese grandma rewards our good behavior with a few sips of Coke.

Today my sister is trying a new experiment. She is asking for the drink in exchange for good behavior that has yet to come.

Perhaps because she is exhausted, our Chinese grandmother consents.

I am astonished. Khanh runs to the kitchen, finds a bottle, and takes a good, long draw. Her face is radiant.

We quickly finish eating and then return to the task of piloting our planes. As we hover in the air and look down, making sputtering sounds with our mouths, the rice fields below are alive and voluptuous, a glorious green. We take care to avoid the rain-collecting cistern that sits squarely against our wall, positioned just so to be gravity fed, its open mouth ready to intercept the rainwater that flows off our roof. Our mother harvests the rain and redirects it for our garden. During the monsoon season, she puts out an additional four or five cisterns under the eaves of our house. When they are empty, my sister and I use them for games of hide-and-seek.

I lift the lid and dip my hand into the cistern, spraying my sister with water. We run out the front door with Grandma in tow. “Not so fast,” she says. Her face is brown and weathered. She can be crotchety if challenged. She is bestowed a degree of authority over us but doesn’t possess any intrinsic authority of her own. Khanh and I listen to her, but only enough so that she does not complain about us to our mother. Grandma sighs at our impudence. I glance nervously at Khanh who is busy placating her.

“We’re very careful,” my sister says, glancing back to give our Chinese grandmother a compliant nod.

We do not want to lose time. We are in a hurry. Khanh and I head straight to the front gate, make a right turn, and race down our block, Ngo Quyen Street, named after a Vietnamese general who decisively defeated the Chinese in the tenth century and declared Vietnam’s independence after one thousand years of Chinese rule. Our street is lined with tamarind trees. Tamarind pods, fully ripe and plump, lie scattered about. Their shells are dry and brittle. I pocket a few to crack open later. With a sprinkling of sugar, their brown juicy pulp, normally acidic, becomes sweet and tangy.

We walk by an ornate moss-covered tomb, its stone marker engraved with Chinese calligraphy. The tomb is in our neighbor’s garden a few houses down from ours, and although it is not his ancestral tomb, he is reluctant to remove it for fear that something bad might result from dislodging ancient spirits. We turn left into a side street with Khanh leading the way. I am learning how to snap my fingers. We snap our fingers in unison as if in doing so we button our parts together to make a corresponding whole.

As usual, we are hoping to find the American soldiers who gather every day in and around the South Vietnamese military police compound, a modular building with a roof made of galvanized iron sheets. A guard-duty station stands at a corner, and as we round it, the Rolling Stones thump “Tell Me” accompanied by a strong slide guitar and driving bass. We are surrounded by coils of concertina wire. Because the South Vietnamese military police is headquartered here, this is a secure and well-guarded street, always patrolled by soldiers.

It isn’t long before James Baker catches sight of us. James is our special friend. He is an American serviceman whom we often see with the South Vietnamese units at the military compound. We found him about a year ago when we followed the thumping bass line and the squeal and transport of electric guitars emanating from his portable cassette player. We were coming home from school. My sister, running after the music, caught up with him, tugged at his shirt, and grinned. “Mick. Mick Jagger.” He pointed to the music box and winked.

“We love it,” my sister said, speaking for herself and me. We didn’t want delicacy. We wanted the big sound of rock and roll. James turned the volume up and offered us two sticks of Wrigley’s gum.

We have learned his routine. We know when he is off duty.

“We’re here,” he says when he sees us this evening. “Me and the Rolling Stones.” My sister beams. James is eager to show off his liquid moves. There is no getting around the music. It pulls you into its center, coaxes you to take leave of the ordinary world. There, in the midst of the acoustic guitars and bass drums, is a new kind of sound, loud and enormous enough to assault and liberate at the same time. You can feel it up your spine. James throws more music on the turntable. It erupts with life, snaps and crackles with a bigger and bigger bang. Grandma grimaces. I jump into the shrill, raucous rumble as the music rises. James strips down to his white undershirt and begins to shift his feet, sway his body. His back is long and lean. He reaches for Khanh and me and swings us each a half-turn. The three of us hold hands by hooking fingers. Our private ritual.

Rock and roll has its way of gathering momentum, of transcending barriers and demanding acquiescence even in this smoldering heat. We watch James, his James-ness, as he shakes his shoulders and lowers his body to the drum’s beat, lower, lower, lower, until he is squatting against pronounced resistance on his haunches, the Vietnamese way.

James had told us about his family. His parents come from a long line of potato farmers in a place he calls the East End. I imagine the same flatness of farmland we have here, absorbing the same iridescent green, extending infinitely from plot to plot. He likes to tell us about his two-story clapboard house sitting on a flat field overlooking the Long Island Sound. That is where he played soccer. The game the entire world loves, James calls it. We nod in agreement.

I look at his distinctive chin, the way he thrusts it outward, the way the dimple dances when he moves. A low growl rumbles from the record player. We are all still caught inside its grip. I see Grandma out of the corner of my eye. She shakes her head. She likes James but she does not like his music.

“It’s time to go home,” she declares.

We protest; we have barely arrived. Khanh picks up an album cover and studies it. The singers have long hair and stare sulkily into space.

“Don’t ignore me when I’m talking to you,” Grandma says.

Khanh keeps her eyes on the album cover. She feels the drum’s beat underfoot. I see the pursed lips, the palpable defiance. Her hair, knotted and tangled, is plastered in sweat.

“Do you hear me?” Grandma asks. “You still have homework to do and it is almost your bedtime.” A definite Chinese-ness has insinuated itself into her Vietnamese.

Khanh pretends sudden interest in her watch, doing quick multiplications and divisions with the numbers, a stalling tactic. She shoots our grandma an imperious look, juts out her jaw defiantly. Grandma scowls. James prudently intercedes.

“One more song,” he says cordially. A perfect voice, soft and melancholy, fills the air. “Yesterday, ” sung with aching abandon. Grandma, becalmed but still petulant, begins to relax. The hardness she affects is usually short-lived. Most of the time she can be jostled out of it. She allows herself to enter Paul’s loose, liquid voice. I slip into her arms and stay there while the Beatles sing.

James winks. Despite her outward displeasure, Grandma is inclined to indulge him. His weekly volunteer work at the orphanage in the neighborhood behind our house gives him a gravitas that his youth alone does not. James often buys chocolate and gum from the American PX and hands it out to the children there.

“He is a nice young man,” Grandma often says with an intonation meant to convey not just affection but also admiration.

James pulls a camera from his knapsack and fiddles with it. He aims it at us and maneuvers the lens into focus. “Just point and shoot,” he says, then mimics what he wants to convey by pushing his index finger toward the camera’s button. He hands it to our Chinese grandmother and asks her to snap a photo of him and my sister and me. So that the camera’s lens will take me in and I will not be cut from the picture’s edges, I lean as deeply as I can into my sister and James.

Our Chinese grandmother looks through the viewfinder and pushes. I hear a click. The shutter is released. James tells her he is sure the photo will be just fine.

2

For I Remember Yet

MR. MINH, 2006, 1963

I wake from a long night’s sleep to discover that it snowed heavily overnight. Wind has blown a swell of snow onto my windowsill. The shimmering expanse of white covering the grass reflects the sun’s glare. Roofs, trees, cars—everything is covered in snow. Beyond them, against a stretch of acquisitive white, a steeple dances in the mist. A pure silvery world has been created, separate from the world of yesterday.

Once I used to wish for the infinite beauty of a snowfall. As a child in Saigon, I read about it, the wind-whipped powder, the geometric flakes, tree branches sheathed in white. So different from the tropical swelter I was bor