Love Like Hate Read online
Copyright © 2010 by Linh Dinh
A Seven Stories Press First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dinh, Linh, 1963–
Love like hate : a novel / Linh Dinh.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-60980-129-8
1. Vietnamese Americans– –Vietnam– –Fiction. 2. Losers– –Fiction. 3. Vietnam– –
Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.1494L68 2010
813′.54–dc22 2010028878
v3.1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank my wife, Linky, and Hai-Dang, Matthew Sharpe, Leakthina Ollier, Noam Mor, Bob Malloy, Thuy Dinh and Phan Nhien Hao for enduring earlier versions of this novel. Their comments and suggestions were invaluable. I’d also like to thank the David K. Wong Fellowship, the University of East Anglia, the International Parliament of Writers, the Pew Foundation for their support, and my publisher and friend, Dan Simon.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Part I 1 - Rebirth
2 - Whattup?
3 - Let’s Learn English!
4 - There’s No Such Thing As Ohio
5 - Assets
Part II 1 - Wedding at a Chinese Restaurant
2 - A Frenchman and Public Nudity
3 - Rice Basket of the South, a Ghost
4 - Rifles as Limbs
5 - Hunches and Beliefs
6 - Checkmate!
7 - Mouse Child
8 - The Truth
9 - Nixon in China
10 - A Jailed Democrat
11 - Is That You?
12 - Jar Games
13 - Paris by Night
14 - Poetry and Usury
15 - Dearest Wife
16 - Unexplained Pork Stew
17 - If Jack Kerouac Were Vietnamese
18 - The Dumpster of History
19 - Wafts of Decay
20 - Inescapable Ass Kissing
21 - Going Home
22 - A Cyclo Ride
23 - The Awakening
24 - Amazement
25 - High Blood Pressure
26 - A Servant’s Tale
27 - A Gagged Audience
28 - Primates
29 - True Love and Cross-Dressing
30 - Coming Home
31 - Conjunctions
Part III 1 - Enlightenment
2 - Ersatz Izods
3 - Acrid-Smelling Blood
4 - A Tight Posse
5 - Mother Vietnam
6 - Loving Dolphins
7 - Two After Midnight
8 - Heavenly Messages
9 - You’re My Freckles
10 - A Haircut
11 - Photographic Evidence
12 - A CEO
13 - A Drunk Biddy
14 - Via the Tin Roofs
15 - Happy Birthday
About the Author
About the Publisher
Part I
1 REBIRTH
Dazzlingly mad, I died then came back to life gleaming.
—Bui Giang
Saigon lost its identity in 1975, but by the early nineties it had regained much of it back. A young metropolis with a raw energy, it is the least traditional of Vietnamese cities. Unlike Hanoi or Hue, it has never been the seat of an imperial court and therefore has no traditional monuments of any distinction. There are a handful of ornate Chinese temples on Nguyen Trai Street, but the city is still dominated by a French/Vietnamese hybrid architecture left over from colonial times. Now there’s even a smattering of skyscrapers to give downtown a veneer of postmodernity. But Saigon is, in fact, thoroughly postmodern. A hodgepodge of incoherence, Saigon thrives on pastiche. Sly, crass and frankly infatuated with all things foreign, it caricatures everyone yet proclaims itself an original. On Vo Thi Sau Street, there are vendors selling empty liquor bottles: Talisker, Hennessy, Teacher’s, Baileys … Picture a Saigonese sitting in a room gazing at an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. When friends come by, he can boast, “I drank all that by myself!” Or picture him pouring moonshine into a fancy bottle. “This is imported from France!”
With economic reforms, Vietnam could more or less feed its own people by the early nineties. The worst thing about Communism is not that it stops you from thinking or writing poetry, the worst thing about it is that it can stop you from eating altogether. Now that hunger was no longer a threat for most of the population, people’s taste buds were becoming more sophisticated. Many restaurants catering to the drinking crowd now advertised “a mouse with a pouch,” kangaroo meat imported from Australia. (It tastes just like beef.) In the suburb of Thu Duc, there was a restaurant, Hoa Ca, specializing in alligator meat. (It tastes just like chicken.) Several featured the meat of a “water dragon,” a cousin of the man-eating Komodo dragon of the Malay Archipelago. (It tastes just like dragon.) At Tri Ky on Nguyen Kiem Street, poisonous snakes were killed right at your table. Deep-fried crispy snakeskin was a popular dish, as was snake soup with lotus flowers. One of the owner’s sons actually died from a snakebite in 1997.
Some people looked west to revive their gustatory spirit. Trendy cafés advertised Italian ice cream, while spaghetti was available at most markets. On Pasteur Street, there was a restaurant called the Nutrition Center. Its blue exterior was painted with white slogans: DIABETICS; NUTRITIOUS FOR CHILDREN; STRENGTHEN BONES; FIGHT FAT. Inside, more slogans: GOOD FOR THE BLOOD; GOOD FOR THE KIDNEY; SMOOTH THE SKIN; COOL THE LIVER. There was a scale for diners to weigh themselves after a meal. The menu, however, featured such fatty foods as pizzas, cheeseburgers, fried chicken and cheesecakes. Although few of these “occidental” items were prepared very authentically, the reasonable prices suited a Vietnamese clientele. By contrast, the fancier international joints downtown—Sapa, with its Swiss specialties; Ristorante Santa Lucia; and Tex-Mex, etc.—catered almost exclusively to foreigners.
In short, Saigon reverted to being a city where eating is the main pleasure. Discos also sprang up. It was becoming a happening place again and Vietnamese who had escaped at the end of the war started to return for visits in sizable numbers. They brought with them money and news from overseas. These overseas Vietnamese were called Viet Kieus. You could always spot a Viet Kieu by the way he dressed, by the size and shape of his body, and by his body language. A Viet Kieu always took up more room and he usually overtipped.
One afternoon in 1999, a Viet Kieu wearing a gray T-shirt and blue jeans walked into Paris by Night, accompanied by Huyen, a girl from the neighborhood. Pale and muscular, he smiled easily and seemed amused by everything he saw. He chuckled at a ceramic statuette of the Goddess of Mercy standing on the counter. Abetted by a hidden pump, she was pouring water into the mouth of a carp, to encourage the free flow of money. He saw a
Christmas tree in a corner, complete with gold reindeer, red stockings, tin soldiers, cherubim and a Star of David. “Christmas in August!”
“I bought that for thirty bucks!” Kim Lan exclaimed. “It was the fanciest tree I could find!”
“That’s Mrs. Kim Lan,” Huyen said, “the owner.”
The Viet Kieu shouted at Kim Lan, “You have a very cool place here!”
“You should come by in the evening,” Kim Lan said. “It’s much more lively.”
“I have enough liveliness in the United States. I just want a nice place to sit and relax and drink a beer or two.”
“Where in America do you live?”
“In Philadelphia. I’m in business. I run a restaurant.”
A restaurant?! This young guy runs a restaurant in America?! He’s probably lying. He’s probably a waiter or a dishwasher or something. Kim Lan continued, “Restaurants in America must be much more classy than the ones we have here.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” the Viet Kieu said modestly, “but they are definitely cleaner!”
Kim Lan wanted to ask about the Viet Kieu’s income, but she didn’t want to be rude. Suddenly Huyen blurted out, “We’re getting married in two weeks!”
What?! This plain girl is marrying a Viet Kieu?! “That’s very nice,” Kim Lan said, forcing a smile. “How did you two meet?”
“We met in an internet chat room.”
Kim Lan had heard of the internet, but she didn’t know what a chat room was. She didn’t want to betray her ignorance, however. She turned her attention to the Viet Kieu. “Is this your first time back?”
“No, I came back for the first time two years ago. It was a real shock. I had left as a kid, you know. I was overwhelmed by a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, you know, like the traffic, for example. All these motorbikes nearly running into each other all the time. It was weird. I thought I was going to die!”
“It must be very different in America.”
“They stop at red lights, for one. Even at three in the morning, with no cops around, and no cross traffic, a car would stop at a red light.”
“That’s incredible! And everyone drives a car, right?”
“Just about everyone. And everyone stands in line for everything. You don’t have to take an elbow in the ribs just to buy stuff.”
“But we have supermarkets now,” Kim Lan said brightly. “People stand in lines at the supermarkets. I never shop there, however. It’s too expensive.”
“But the regular markets are so dirty!”
“Yes, they are,” Kim Lan agreed, frowning. “I hear that all the countries on earth are clean now. Except Vietnam. Have you been to many countries?”
“Not really. I’ve only been to Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.”
“That’s three more countries than I’ve been to,” Kim Lan remarked before changing the subject. “Has your mom met Huyen yet?”
“They’ll meet for the first time at the wedding.”
Kim Lan smiled a tight smile. If I were this Viet Kieu’s mom, she thought, I wouldn’t settle for such a plain girl. She still couldn’t believe that Huyen was marrying a Viet Kieu. She looked at the couple as they leaned across the table to kiss each other, their tongues sticking out, their faces glowing. Kim Lan had never seen Huyen so happy. Wearing a pair of expensive jeans, she already looked like a Viet Kieu.
After they had left, Kim Lan kept thinking of the Viet Kieu. Although Vietnamese, he didn’t resemble any of the men in her life. The Viet Kieu seemed purposeful, unlike Sen, who spent his days playing chess and going to the whorehouses. The Viet Kieu exuded a quiet confidence, unlike her husband, Hoang Long, who seethed with wounded anger. The Viet Kieu made himself completely at home in a strange environment, unlike her son, Cun, who could barely talk to a stranger. Although they were contemporaries, the differences between the Viet Kieu and Cun were outright shocking. If only we would drink fresh milk and eat a piece of cheese occasionally, Kim Lan reflected, we wouldn’t be a country full of stunted bodies and rotting teeth, living in vast malarial swamps where the streets are paved with oil slicks and dog shit. The Viet Kieu’s teeth were even and white, while Cun’s were crooked and brown. The clincher, however, was that the Viet Kieu seemed totally happy, and he had made his girlfriend totally happy. After Hoa came home from school that day, Kim Lan gave her daughter a thorough appraisal and firmly concluded: My beautiful girl deserves nothing less than a Viet Kieu.
2 WHATTUP?
The Viet Kieu’s name was Jaded Nguyen and he was a manager-trainee at a McDonald’s on Passyunk Avenue, a street of sooty row houses cutting diagonally across South Philadelphia. Geno’s and Pat’s Steaks were on Passyunk, and so was Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar, famous for a disused ankle-high pissing trough hugging the length of the L-shaped bar. Jaded’s salary was $16,000 a year, before tax, which forced him to live in Grays Ferry, one of the dumpiest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He rarely went out and when he did, he rarely allowed himself more than three beers, either Rolling Rock or Yuengling, the two cheapest brands available. Like all losers, he alternated between meekness and aggression, and could only relax when he was totally drunk. These traits did not endear him to many women—of any race or shape—and he could not hit on the girls at work, for fear of being laid off for sexual discrimination.
Jaded was also Asian, which meant that he was smaller. If he were Yao Ming or Dat Nguyen, it wouldn’t have mattered, but he wasn’t even Ichiro size, more like Apolo Ohno, except not that good-looking, and he didn’t have Michael Chang’s born-again faith to rock himself to sleep each night. (If there was one guy who annoyed Jaded more than Michael Chang, it was Jackie Chan and his stunted sexuality. The guy clowned and kicked ass, but never got laid. About the only Asian guys to get laid in Western movies were the ones conjured up by the feverish mind of Marguerite Duras.) Being boy-sized and without facial hair, Jaded was regarded by other people, if only subconsciously, as an incomplete man or even a boy trying to act like a man. During a good year, when all the stars were lined up right, he could bed a woman maybe five or six times, but Jaded had also gone through many months without even a cheap feel, unless he went to a go-go bar. He endured these dry periods by ogling amateur blondes flashing on the streets of Prague at nakedinpublic.com. He also subscribed to nastycheerleaders.com, republicanbabeswithguns.com, sexykitchens.com, innermostdreams.com and even youngpee.com. Upskirt, downskirt, dominatrix, hog-tied, slaves, elderly nuns in combat boots, elementary schoolteachers made to kneel naked then spanked, infants, corpses—he sampled them all with his eyes. He couldn’t help himself because they were always available. The coolest website, however, was nakedmcbabes.com. Thousands of real McDonald’s workers worldwide posed on the Web with only parts of their uniforms on. Nothing gross or tacky, no ketchup or mustard smeared in unlikely places, no showers of pickles, just crew members disrobing into artistic poses. It was terribly exciting. Jaded could recognize Lakeesha and Tina from his very own McDonald’s. Dang, you gurls are real fine, I’m loving it. There were even gay and lesbian sections. It seemed like everyone and his grandmother were posing naked on the internet. Jaded envisioned a day, very soon, when one could google any name whatsoever and find nude photos of that person on the internet. Perhaps one should call it the idternet. Jaded never sneaked into stables or pens, however. He didn’t go there. “That stuff’s sick.”
The only lasting solution to his dilemma, Jaded finally figured, was to cut his dick off, or go overseas. If he were French, he would have booked a flight to Bangkok. Italian, he would have gone to Romania or Cuba. Since he was a Vietnamese American, Jaded suddenly discovered a deep love for his ancestral homeland. Logging in to Vietnamese chat rooms as
it overloaded with girls posing in ao dais, prom dresses, pajamas and bikinis. Smiling, grinning and puckering their lips, they swiveled, bent over and arched their backs, to feature good sides and hide defects. They peekabooed behind beaded curtains, palm trees and potted cacti, then reemerged glistening from oceans and swimming pools. They sat cross-legged on swings and moon slivers in photo studios, stood shivering in front of Swiss chalets and Norwegian fjords. Some posed with musical instruments, most often a guitar or a koto. One girl in horn-rimmed glasses sat stiffly at a piano; an extra-gifted one blew into a flute, a clarinet, an oboe and a saxophone. Taking his time, he chose a dozen semifinalists and invited them to video chat with him. Five girls had to forfeit since they didn’t have a computer or a webcam at home. That didn’t bother Jaded since he didn’t want to marry a poor one—her family would be too grabby, he figured. Three girls soon eliminated themselves by allowing their moms to pop onscreen to say hello. One mom even had her hair streaked blonde, as if she herself was auditioning. Among the finalists, only Huyen had a computer in a private bedroom, which allowed them to chat late into the night without interference. Neither was shy—whatever Jaded did, she matched—and that’s why he finally picked her. They were both naked when he proposed. It went without saying that Huyen was also good-looking. Like most mothers, Kim Lan devalued other people’s daughters, overvalued her own. Landing at Tan Son Nhat Airport, Jaded felt like a winner at last. He was the rich and ugly American come home to conquer.
For Huyen to be chosen by Jaded was like winning a beauty contest. To score this trip to paradise, and not for a two-week vacation but a lifetime, she had to compete with as many girls as Jaded had the stamina to weed out. Though she had outclassed the competition, Huyen was not enamored with her own beauty. She considered it a useful tool, of course, but not to be taken too seriously. It was a physical thing after all, something easily soiled and degradable. She was actually well educated. A third-year architecture student, she had to interrupt her study because she didn’t dare make Jaded wait. If he changed his mind, she would lose the chance of a lifetime.
Blood and Soap
Fake House
Love Like Hate