The lovers
Lang Ly was a young lady of twenty-two. She lived in My Tho, whiling away her days in a cavernous old ex-sugar mill, waiting for her father to import her to America. Every evening and morning, after lighting incense sticks on the altars of her Buddhist ancestors, she tuned her short-wave to the Voice of America and scribbled their lectures into cheap notepads, to study and decipher until the next scheduled broadcast. After eight years of almost religious discipline, she had learned to speak flawless English, hardening her consonants and carefully conjugating her verbs. In her spare time she studied the photos her father sent her of her sophisticated siblings, standing in front of the mirror experimenting with an eyebrow-plucker and shades of rouge. She had two housemates: a younger cousin who did the cleaning, cooking and laundry, and a pregnant mongrel with an attentive face and teats covered with mosquito bites.

Chau had the dinner-plate face and button nose, and a curious laugh that sounded like a skin-diver who had inadvertently taken water through his snorkel. He was twenty five and looked eighteen. He was my Communist guide on my bicycle trip through the Mekong, and I detested him.

 

The story...
Lang Ly found me wandering in the marketplace. "Get on!" she said gaily, and patted the seat of her bike. "Chau say you'll be leaving soon for the village!"

She was fairly bubbling over with news. "Cousin Emma says Chau was asking many questions about me while we were gone!" she shouted over her shoulder while we slalomed through mid-afternoon traffic on our way home.

I asked why, hoping that her association with a foreigner wouldn't lead to future interrogations, or worse. I'd heard stories.

"I don't know," she yelled, then grinned. "Maybe he likes me!" She seemed delighted by the idea. "He's had such a difficult childhood, you know. Just like me."

"Really?" I said. I had no idea.

"He was the youngest in a family of twelve and his parents couldn't feed him, so they gave him to his grandmother, just like that!" The old woman had apparently put him out on the street at the age of six to sell fried dough to the early morning market vendors. For years he wandered the streets barefoot, calling out "ban meeei!" until his throat burned and his head ached from the terrible weight of the rattan basket. Lang Ly shook her head in disbelief at such cruelty. "And so when he turned twelve he had no choice but to run away and become a street orphan in Saigon!" After eight years of cold and hungry nights, he'd finally cajoled his way into evening school. The Party quickly noticed his outstanding talent and hastened to recruit him. He regularly sent money to his ungrateful family and held no grudge against his tyrannous grandmother. "He even attended her funeral in his best suit with a pair of wreaths to lay on her grave!" Lang Ly sighed and fell silent.

I wondered if this was the Communist version of a romance novel, and squashed the urge to mention Chau's extended family in Saigon or the pretty young thing in the Mekong. We hurried home to see the silver-tongued Casanova again.

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