Lucky Language

When Hoa ran into a street sign on a bicycle, he had no idea he had just avoided a miserable, rainy, mud-covered death in the jungles of Vietnam. Instead, he broke his arm and his leg, and fell into a ditch where he lay for a half hour and contemplated how he would die there: miserable, rainy, and mud-covered on the banks of the Red River in Hanoi. A Japanese soldier finally heard Hoa’s desperate yells as he was passing by with his regiment. The soldiers were all drunk, because word had it they would be sent East into the Pacific to fight Americans and defend islands they had never seen or heard of.

The Japanese soldier had a hard time understanding Hoa’s hoarse Vietnamese, so he pulled him up by the broken arm, and Hoa felt something else crack and then as he tried to steady himself on his broken leg, he fell forward into the mud. All the soldiers laughed. Eventually, Hoa was propped up on the handlebars of his too large bike as the soldier swung him tipsily through the rain-smattered city to the hospital.

Hoa would remain there in the commandeered French hospital, as his patriotic father escaped with three of his brothers from the admittedly lax Japanese security around Hanoi to join the Vietnamese “Resistance” in the jungle. Serving under Ho Chi Minh was a fashionable occupation, even if Hoa’s father considered the man incompetent. He aimed to replace the Marxist scholar by undertaking several dangerous missions and proving himself a smarter man than the general. Unfortunately on the first such mission, his entire regiment was killed when they set off a bomb far too early, and missed the bridge they were attempting to destroy by a full 50 yards.

One of the victims was Hoa’s favorite elder brother Kinh, whom Hoa would have followed to the end had it not been for the rusty and faded “Arret” sign that had knocked him off his bike. Hoa wondered what that sign meant as he lay there in the mud; he didn’t know French at the time.

The sign meant “Stop.”

***

Hoa learned the meaning of the sign from Fredéric Terrien’s third edition French-Vietnamese dictionary that his grief-stricken mother gave him in the hospital. He grew to love the book because it was the only thing he had to love in the ward after his brother died. During his 13 years of life, he had done nothing but follow Kinh around, whether it be going to karate class, stealing sugar cane from the market, or taking bike rides in the rain. Kinh was the epitome of fun, the goofy son who kept the sprawling family together. He was short and wiry: he looked like Bruce Lee. Years later, Hoa would watch Enter the Dragon and think of his long lost brother.

He looked for a replacement to follow around in the second ward of the hospital. His options were pretty limited. He could move around only slowly; the Japanese nurses were unkind and didn’t speak Vietnamese; his mother and remaining siblings were busy trying to provide for the family; and there were barely any other patients because the small resistance groups were based in the south. Hoa had to follow and eventually love Terrien and his furiously footnoted dictionary.

When he left the hospital and rejoined his newly emaciated family, Hoa enrolled immediately in the old French lycée. He was so thoroughly in love with French that even his teachers – expatriate Frenchmen ruing the end of France’s importance in the world – were impressed with him. They put him on scholarship within three weeks, which was good news for Hoa, because incidentally he was three weeks late on the first installment of his tuition.

***

By the time the war ended 4 years later, Hoa’s French had advanced to such a degree that he was entrusted to edit the fourth edition of Terrien’s dictionary, reprinted to commemorate the efforts of the Vietnamese and French Resistances against the Axis Powers. Still just 17 years old, Hoa had nonetheless become the foremost Vietnamese linguist in the entire scholastic world. His expertise grew from his deep-lying obsessive compulsion to read and study. Perhaps it was not obsession; he had nothing else better to do. Hoa equated languages to the fun he used to have with his brother. Notwithstanding his natural gifts as a linguist, there was a great shortage of other language scholars left in academia; the old guard of Vietnamese professors had all had the same idea as Hoa’s father and gone into the jungle to join the reoriented – this time against the French – resistance under the Baudelaire scholar Ho Chi Minh.

Hoa inadvertently became a beacon of hope for the study of language in Vietnam. After moving to the south and graduating in 2 years from the University of Saigon, and then writing his own French-Vietnamese dictionary, Hoa was sent as the first Vietnamese recipient of a student visa to the United States. He settled into a brownstone on Central Park South and attended NYU. It was here that he began working on his seminal English-Vietnamese dictionary, which is to this day pirated the world over. It was also here that he avoided the commandeering of his ancestral home in Hanoi by Ho Chi Minh’s forces after they took the city from the French. His mother was raped and killed during the process, but luckily Hoa would never find that out. His last surviving brother told him that she had died peacefully in her bed reading Hoa’s dictionary.

Hoa was unconcerned by the newly instituted North Vietnamese communist government, mainly because its leader hadn’t correctly analyzed Baudelaire’s use of synesthesia, and thus could in no way lead an army to victory. He fully expected to return to a capitalist Vietnam once he was done studying. His life in New York was very full and very full of joy. The fullness came from the constant studying, while the joy came from the fruits of his study, which for him was mastery of language after language after language. Soon Hoa could speak Italian with the mobsters he bought his submarine sandwiches from, Spanish with the sweaty woman who cleaned his apartment, Korean with the war veteran who did his dry-cleaning, Arabic with the falafel vendors on Central Park South, English with his colleagues, and finally Mandarin Chinese with the woman he began an affair with.

Her name was Ran and she enraptured him more than anyone had since his brother. She was a kind of writer student, who wanted thoroughly to be a Beatnik. Her English was unintelligible, and her strict Confucian upbringing forbade her from missing the classes at Barnard her family was paying so much for. This made hitchhiking to San Francisco – hitchhiking in general for that matter – that much more difficult. Hoa tried to help bring out her inner aimless bum. He would accompany her on outings to Boston or, if they were ambitious, to Canada. On the road, they met enough foreign people to satisfy Hoa’s hunger for language. During a long weekend in Montreal, Hoa argued at length over who France’s greatest poet really was with a Canadian professor. Ran unexpectedly gave her support for Hoa’s candidate – Hugo – in perfect Parisian French. He’d had no idea she could speak French. He decided there to marry Ran.

***

Of course, if either of his parents were alive, this would have been impossible. What kind of self-respecting Vietnamese man would marry a Chinese girl? Regrettably, he still had one older sibling. His sister Khue arranged for Hoa to marry a quiet little Vietnamese girl. She wrote a curt letter to him: “Time to get married. Have found a bride. Keep studying. Have you read the new Camus? K.” Hoa found himself wishing his sister had been exploded by that bomb in the jungles west of Hue with his brothers; he thought Camus was an overrated prick: why would he write a terrible philosophy book instead of a novel (The Rebel was also panned by Sartre that year)?

On a wet day in January, Hoa decided to elope with Ran, but as he was pulling his valise across the living room of his apartment, he ran into a quiet little Vietnamese girl – Mit, his arranged bride. She had been sent there using the last of her family’s money. She was descended from the Thai royal family, and they had had to sell off the last remaining pieces of royal jewelry to afford the plane ticket to New York. Mit had taken a cab directly to Hoa’s apartment; she had nowhere else to stay. Hoa didn’t know what to do with her. He gave her a bowl of rice and took the subway uptown to meet with Ran.

Earlier that day, Ran went to a lecture given by Jack Kerouac to prepare for the adventure that lay ahead. Kerouac was a mumbling mess of a drunk on stage, and afterward backstage when Ran tried to shake his hand, he stumbled onto her and they kissed. She said something to the effect that she had a boyfriend, but of course Kerouac didn’t understand her terrible English. He just stayed there on top of her kissing her neck. She managed to get out a few words in French (Kerouac’s parents were from Quebec). He didn’t catch those words either. Instead he asked her back “chez lui,” but then he realized he didn’t have a place of his own in the city, and they ended up back “chez elle.” Hoa walked into Ran’s apartment to find his girlfriend having sex with a famous author on the hardwood floor.

“Il parle français,” was all she could think to say when she saw Hoa there in the doorway.

Hoa returned home to his little Vietnamese girl. They were married on a spring day in Central Park. After finally finishing his masterpiece English-Vietnamese dictionary –  “Webster of Vietnam” the critics called him – he took his family, which now included two little twin daughters, back to Saigon.

***

Saigon was a miserable place for Hoa. He was the most famous scholar in the country, and he had no reason to keep on working. There were no Barths or Sartres to compete with. He was also sick of speaking Vietnamese. He had no one to speak in different languages with but his wife. And her Thai was so much better than his – and Thai was such a low-class language and, really, she had an unfair advantage because she grew up there – that he soon stopped speaking it altogether. Instead he tried to teach his little girls English. They were American citizens after all. He extolled the virtues of America, that great melting pot of cultures. He gave them peanut butter to show off to their friends. He would force Mit to cook outlandish dishes to satisfy his need for diversity. Luckily, she was a good cook, so they rarely fought. Talking about America only served to expand his longing to return there.

His opportunity to emigrate arrived in due course. As the war escalated, it became clear that Vietnam might not be the safest place to raise a family. Thanks to his daughters’ citizenship the family was allowed to leave until the Americans could finally kill that terrible poetry critic and his dirty Vietcong friends.

In DC now, and working as a translator for the CIA, Hoa was at first very happy. As it turned out, though, Washington and America did not live up to the grand expectations he had built up for his family. The food really wasn’t that multicultural, and neither were the people. In fact, most of the diversity in DC came from the African-American population, and because they didn’t speak a different language, they didn’t seem all that diverse to Hoa’s way of thinking. Hoa grew to hate his work, and considered it beneath him. Of course, in America, he was just another person with a doctorate, and with a degree in practically useless East Asian Languages. He couldn’t find another job. Hoa began to wish for a return to Vietnam where he was considered the genius he really was.

***

His opportunity to repatriate did not arrive. Word was leaking through that this was not a war the US could win. The dreaded words “troop withdrawal” began to appear in the papers. In principle, Hoa was against war, but he was also against communism and bad literary criticism. So, in the end, he wrote an article in the Washington Post supporting the continued presence of the US military in Vietnam.

There was a great lashing out against the hawk Nguyen Hoa. All the hippie liberals called for his head. They accused him of naming his daughter “American bomber”. Her name was actually My Huyen – “American (as in born in) Jet (as in jet black),” but hippie liberals rarely understand subtlety. Hoa was let go from his job in Langley to avoid greater outcry, and was allowed to leave DC. He settled in Carbondale, Illinois, mainly because Southern Illinois University was the only college dumb enough to create a Vietnamese language department in the late 60s.

Carbondale, surprisingly, proved even less of a cultural hotspot than Washington. Hoa was growing sick of the America he found himself in. He began to resent these arrogant Americans, who were so untrustworthy of his Vietnamese family. Soon, he even resented their idiotic Midwestern drawl. He no longer spoke English with his daughters – Vietnamese was the only language allowed in his house. The man who had always loved all languages, grew to hate all but one.

In 1975, Ho Chi Minh’s forces took Saigon, soon to be renamed after its conqueror. That same year Hoa taught his daughters to play the zither. Mit cooked only Vietnamese cuisine. She had to grow her own herbs in their backyard, because no one sold the right ones at the Safeway in town. Hoa stopped writing dictionaries and literary criticism, and decided to write a memoir. He found himself lingering over the day he crashed into the “Arret” sign.  Each day as he sat down to write about his experiences in the lycee, he would curse his luck for not avoiding that sign in Hanoi next to the river. He could have become a general instead of an academic, he reasoned to himself. It took him 25 years to finish his memoir. He called it From the City inside the Red River.

 ***

His last surviving sibling, his sister Khue, was killed soon after the fall of Saigon. She threw a shoe at Ho during the victory parade. It was generally assumed she was a pro-American activist, but if anyone had read the note on the shoe, it would have been clear that she too was rebuking his literary criticism. Her brother would have been proud that she hadn’t forgotten her principles.

By Max Wilson