Free Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) by Ho Anh Thai

lead to over-familiarity, which would lead to resentment. Thế rarely let his wife participate in issues that he judged important and correct. If she reacted hysterically he would silently leave the house and go off somewhere. If she did the same, he would calmly do whatever he had to do until she grew tired and came back home. It had been the same this time. Thế didn’t tell his wife anything about his decision that Phũ and I should take Bóp’s body down to Saigon. Only when we had already flown did she find out. Frightened, she repeatedly called Saigon, waiting in anxious suspense until the day the two of us were to fly back. Nobody had told her what had happened in Saigon. So when I stepped into the house, I tried to keep my face impassive. But I was still a bit pale and she caught my change of countenance. She was shaking as she asked me, “It happened to Phũ, didn’t it?” And then she passed out.
    Let me return to the story of Phũ’s early days. His mom gave him the name Mạnh, but a month later she received a letter from her husband. He was adamant about changing his son’s name to Phú. 3 Phú would represent, concretely, the will and determination to get rich, of a generation that during the war had eaten noodles and three-quarters rations and had slept in the dust like homeless people. During that time Thế had decided to set his mind on becoming rich. He was determined to give his child the name Phú—Tạ Đắc Phú. Later on his friends mispronounced his name as Phũ; 4 it fit him better.
    My relationship with Phũ was more than the usual relationship of an uncle and a nephew. We were sometimes like friends, and sometimes like brothers, but mostly we had a kind of father-son relationship. I had witnessed him coming into this world, a purple little baby full of snot and saliva. Throughout my youth I carried him around on my back. I had followed him throughout the transformations of his childhood. In his fourteenth year, Phũ invited Cốc and Bóp to come study martial arts at my house. The three young men, so impressive and so fierce, were able to thrive in the martial arts. One morning that same year, when he turned fourteen, Phũ showed me some mottled stains on underwear. “I’ve become a man, right, Uncle?”
    “Not yet; you’ve just begun puberty. Becoming a man is something altogether different.” From that point on I would try to explain to him from time to time just what it meant to become a man, and what he should do during this perilous turning point in a person’s life. Sometimes I had to make use of visual aids to provide realistic explanations for him. This was exactly the type of concrete experience that Thế had transferred to me when I had begun to turn into an adult. Our family had been affected by Western teachings. Sexual education for the son was the responsibility of the father, of the uncle, or of the older brother, while the sexual education of the daughter was the responsibility of the mother. Now it was my turn to educate my nephew. I knew I had to have a frank conversation with him, and not turn away from the truth of things. According to our encyclopedias, the ancient Indians believed that virtue that was maintained only by ignorance was an unstable kind of virtue.
    For a time, I was away on a voyage. When I returned, Phũ had brought a pair of women’s panties to me, bragging, “I’ve become a man.” His whole class had gone on a camping trip outside Hanoi, and Phũ had managed to pull a girl away from the blazing campfire; he had just gotten her panties off when he exploded and found he was suddenly wet all over. I had to explain to him that getting off like that wasn’t the same as getting off inside of a woman, so we still couldn’t say that he’d turned into a man. Then I went off for another period, and when I came back this time, Phũ brought me a dozen panties to brag about. He was obsessed with searching out and collecting these silent trophies.