Free Ru by Kim Thúy

born into an exhausted Saigon and had grown up during Vietnam’s darkest period. They described to me, with mocking laughter, how they had masturbated men in exchange for a bowl of soup at two thousand dongs. Holding nothing back, they described those sex acts naturally and honestly, as people for whom prostitution is merely a question of adults and money, a matter that does not involve children six or seven years old like them, who did it in exchange for a fifteen-cent meal. I listened to them without turning around, still sewing, without commenting, because I wanted to protect the innocence in their words, not tarnish their candour by my interpretation of the act. It was certainly thanks to that innocence that they became engineers after ten years of studies in Montreal and Sherbrooke.

C oming home after leaving my cousins at the University of Sherbrooke, I was approached in a gas station by a Vietnamese man who had recognized my vaccination scar. One look at that scar took him back in time and let him see himself as a little boy walking to school along a dirt path with his slate under his arm. One look at that scar and he knew that our eyes had already seen the yellow blossoms on the branches of plum trees at the front door of every house at New Year’s. One look at that scar brought back to him the delicious aroma of caramelized fish with pepper, simmering in an earthen pot that sat directly on the coals. One look at that scar and our ears heard again the sound produced by the stem of a young bamboo as it sliced the air then lacerated the skin of our backsides. One look at that scar and our tropical roots, transplanted onto land covered with snow, emerged again. In one second we had seen our own ambivalence, our hybrid state: half this, half that, nothing at all and everything at once. A single mark on the skin and our entire shared history was spread out between two gas pumps in a station by a highway exit. He had concealed his scar under a midnight blue dragon. I couldn’t see it with my naked eye. He had only to run his finger over my immodestly exhibited scar, however, and take my finger in his other hand and run it over the back of his dragon and immediately we experienced a moment of complicity, of communion.

I t was also a moment of communion when my large extended family got together in upstate New York to celebrate my grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday. There were thirty-eight of us, gossiping, giggling, getting on each other’s nerves for two days. I noticed then for the first time that I had the same rounded thighs as Aunt Six and that the dress I had on was similar to Aunt Eight’s.
    Aunt Eight is my big sister, the one who shared with me the thrill of the word
goddess
that a man had whispered in her ear when she was sitting, out of my mother’s sight, on the crossbar of his bicycle, encircled by his arms. She is also the one who showed me how to capture the pleasure of a passing desire, of an ephemeral flattery, of a stolen moment.
    When my cousin Sao Mai sat behind me and embraced me for the cameras of her two sons, Uncle Nine smiled. Uncle Nine knows me better than I know myself because he bought me my first novel, my first theatre ticket, my first visit to a museum, my first journey.

S ao Mai became an important businesswoman, a public personality, a modern queen after she’d beaten dozens and dozens of eggs by hand—there were power failures five days out of seven in Saigon—to make birthday cakes that she sold to the new Communist leaders. Like an acrobat, she delivered her cakes by bicycle, zigzagging through other bicycles, avoiding the black smoke of motorcycles and the manholes with covers stolen. Today her cakes, and now also her ice cream, pastries, chocolate and coffee, are sold in every neighbourhood in the big cities, criss-crossing the country from south to north.

I am still the shadow of Sao Mai. But I like to be, because during my stay in Vietnam I was the shadow that danced