Fire Summer. Thuy Da Lam
his bony limbs bending as he folded into the gaps between intertwined bodies. The boys wedged their feet onto the flimsy back step and clung onto the roof’s edge. When the overloaded vehicle sputtered and then accelerated, the boy with one arm was blown off-balance, but he quickly steadied himself. The wind howled through the hole in his chest and filled the woman with emptiness as vast as the sea. The jitney careened through the night toward the lights of Ho Chi Minh City.
When the jitney stopped at the night market where peddlers lined the alleyway leading to her home, the woman smelled sundried anchovies, crispy fried Chinese crullers, and freshly baked French baguettes. There was something she had not noticed before—the earthen odor of oxen in the humid heat after the afternoon rain. She realized then why the neighborhood was called Ox Alley though they were long gone by the time her husband relocated her family from the Central Highlands to the southern capital one fiery summer.
The trail of pale lantern lights, flickering fireflies in the night, beckoned the northern boys to disembark. They untangled Hai from the ball of knotted bodies and insisted on carrying him home. The cripple, flanked by two teenagers to whom he promised the barrel of rice moonshine he had distilled, and the woman with the basket full of ocean debris, all merged into the market where people spoke an unrecognized language. When the woman strained her ears to listen, she caught distinct phrases she knew, interwoven with other familiar yet incomprehensible tongues. People moved side-by-side, crossing into each other’s path, overlapping like a palimpsest. It occurred to her that now she could see her hairstylist friend. She told Hai and the boys to go ahead home.
At the entrance to Phoenix Salon, the woman called out to her friend, “Đẹp ghê ta!”
“Ghê là đúng,” Phuong replied and lifted her long side-swept bangs to reveal a deep gash across her forehead. She rolled up a pants leg to expose another scar on her knee.
The woman said, “I should’ve taken my own advice and jumped off the train with you.” She eased into a chair and leaned her head back into the basin.
“What’s the story with you and the warden?” Phuong asked.
“I should’ve learned how to swim.” The woman sighed, welcoming the cool water on her dry, itchy scalp. “Or at least brought a life jacket.”
“Bồ kết shampoo?”
“Who would have thought? You bring pictures of your family, you bring gold leaves sewn in your hems, and you bring ashes—”
“Your brother-in-law Hai’s ashes?”
“In an old jar of mắm cá lóc in this shopping basket.” She laughed, remembering Hai’s objection to the smell of fermented snakehead. “We were almost there.”
“It’s fate.”
“Is it my fate to be married at sixteen? What would life have been if I were a young girl or an old woman when the North came south? But I was twenty-five. A husband and a daughter one day, and the next, they’re halfway across the world. My happiest years were in prison. Did I tell you?”
“What’s the story with you and the warden?” Phuong asked again.
“You just accept. Who would have thought? The currents didn’t even take us to the other side.”
Winter Night Café
AS NIGHT FELL over Ho Chi Minh City, the neon pink sign glowed: WINTER NIGHT CAFÉ. The xích lô had left Maia and JP in front of the garden café, where white plastic chairs and round tables were strewn around a stage under a sprawling starfruit tree. A skeletal kitten slinked through the Ochna integerrima hedge. Its mouth opened mutely.
“Your grandmother lives here?” JP asked.
Maia checked the address on the envelope and looked for a street number on the entrance. The wooden gate was a familiar sight though freshly painted in a different color. The hoàng mai hedge in summer bloom with bright red sepals and dark glossy berries was as she remembered. On stage, a girl in black tights crooned “Unforgettable” as the patrons smoked and sipped on iced café au lait.
“Here, Pōpoki,” JP called, and the scrawny orange stray tottered over. When he picked it up and scratched under its chin, it gazed at him fixedly with pale yellow eyes. “Look,” JP said. “The little fella has a protruding belly button.”
They entered the outdoor café, the kitten tottering behind. They sat at a peripheral table. The kitten clambered up onto JP’s lap and curled into a spiny orange ball.
The girl in black tights came over and smiled broadly at JP. “Hi, Big Guy! My name is Na. Bia Saigon? Bia Hơi? Bia Ôm?”
When Na returned with a Saigon beer and càphê sữa đá, JP invited her to join them. Na plopped into the chair beside JP and immediately intrigued him with her stories. Though her oblique black eyes, long wavy hair, and dark skin alluded to her mixed parentage, she did not speak of it.
Maia observed the waning gibbous moon through the starfruit tree and thought of her mission.
“Time to visit family and resolve whatever questions you might have.” The Independent Vietnam Coalition had agreed.
“I just have my grandmother’s last letter,” she had said.
The address was the only shred of evidence that linked her to the past. A flimsy, inconsequential piece of information she was allowed to carry with her. It was an address of a maternal grandmother she barely knew, an address the Coalition had thought no longer existed.
“Whatever you do,” the Coalition instructed, “be at the foot of the Vong Phu Mountain on the first night of the full moon.”
A shooting star flashed across the sky. Maia heard faint laughter and was reminded of her childhood when she had climbed the tree with the neighborhood kids. They would squeeze onto the narrow plank wedged between the V-shaped trunk, scared and exhilarated at the height and closeness to the sweet, tangy starfruit.
“You know why no customers?” Na asked when it was time to close the café. Her mischievous eyes surveyed the dark surroundings. “This place is haunted—” She stopped and looked toward the man-dug fishpond. She whispered, “Someone is here.” It could have been the different time zones, the mix of alcohol and caffeine, or Na’s easy laughter. Whatever it was, the threesome peered intently at the approaching shadow. “It’s coming!” Na let loose a string of shrill laughter. The kitten leaped from JP’s lap, baring its fangs as if hissing at the shadow.
“Xuan!” JP exclaimed. “It’s Xuan.”
“We should go,” Maia said. “It’s almost curfew.” She stood up, but JP had already risen, shaken hands with the tour guide, and pulled out a chair for him.
“Didn’t think we’d bump into you here,” JP said.
Na eyed Xuan. “You scared us.”
Maia picked up the skeletal kitten by the nape of its neck like a sack of bones and gathered it on her lap. “Na thought you were a ghost.”
“Nonsense,” Xuan said.
“So brave!” Na said. “You’ll be visited—”
“This place is haunted,” JP mimicked her. He had given up on a serious conversation with Na. She had talked openly about being the café’s singer-hostess, her likes and dislikes, and her dream of one day opening a café of her own. She had let him touch her smooth lineless palms and boasted their absence of fate’s grooves. But when he said he was hapa with a lineage from the Middle Kingdom and asked if her father was American, her face changed.
“Big Al from Love City works in passport,” she blurted out. She then clammed up and became cross. She preferred ghost stories, believed in the afterlife, and claimed to converse with spirits.
Maia shifted in her chair, aware of Xuan’s eyes.
Na began an unsettling