Lang Ly was twenty-two and whiling away her days in the cavernous old 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.

Her story
Lang Ly appeared in her pajamas, clutching a huge white teddy bear. She crept onto the mat, her face fresh and clean without its layer of makeup, and told me of her childhood.

Her father had worked as a menial at the airport during the war, and in consequence spent five years in a re-education camp after the Fall. His wife and child were sent into the barren hinterlands, to farm rice and vegetables during the rainy season and starve in the dry. For four years they sold their jewelry, bit by bit, and when it was gone her grandparents paid off the police to secure them permission to live in My Tho. Armed with a pre-war business education, Lang Ly's mother found a job as secretary in a sugar plant, and eventually started her own factory.

In the meantime, Ly's father had been released from the camps and reunited with his family. His wartime collaboration was a brand that would forever mar his prospects under the new regime. He tried again and again to secure a job despite the generous income from his wife's mill. At last, convinced that there was no future for him in Communist Vietnam, he determined to escape his past, brave the high seas and make a new beginning in a land where others before him had found unfettered wealth and happiness.

His wife refused, utterly. When he persisted she fought back with bloody visions of cutthroat pirates, rape and murder, of bloated blue corpses and starving, stick-like children. Lang Ly, just fifteen, lay on her mat and covered her head with a pillow to shut out the images that had taken shape in her imagination, to haunt her dreams and unguarded thoughts.

The arguments continued, spoken in low, harsh whispers that wouldn't carry beyond the woven bamboo walls to the neighbors and through them, the police. The one had a dream, the other a hard-won life and a child to raise.

And because there could be no compromise, they separated.

One morning Lang Ly awoke with the sun streaming onto her pillow, where a note from her father lay beside a blood-red hibiscus bloom.

In utmost secrecy he had gathered a thousand dollars and sought out those who took a pot of gold in return for the dream at the end of the rainbow. Even as she read, he was on his way to the Delta, to slip like a wraith through the spear-like mangroves, find a candlelit paddle boat and make his way to the waiting ship with dozens of other tiny craft, their lights like fireflies converging on a sacred banyan tree.

But the note spoke of none of these things. It told her only that he loved her, and that she must think of him as dead and try not to grieve. He admonished her to take care of her mother and be a dutiful daughter, always.

Two years went by without a word. Lang Ly placed his photo beside the tangerines and teacups on the ancestral altar, and lit incense for his departed soul. Then one day a letter came. He was in a crowded refugee camp in the Philippines, waiting to be processed for transshipment to America. He wrote over and over how much he loved her and missed her and wanted her by his side. He made no mention of his wife, her mother.

Lang Ly kept the letter secret from her family for an entire year, not daring to share the news of her father's survival and thus be forced to share the letter itself. How could she? It said not a word about her mother, not even a polite inquiry after her health.

In time, her father reached his promised land. The ambition that drove him from his home and family held him in good stead, and he soon built two furniture factories and employed a dozen men.

Lang Ly paused and pulled out a plastic photo album. It was filled with a hundred snapshots of her father, standing rigid and unsmiling in front of several dozen monuments. He had a horizontal face with narrow eyes and thin lips squished between a pointy chin and receding hairline. His expression was as stiff and unapproachable as the statues he had chosen to pose beside.

"Why," I asked, "didn't he sponsor you to go to America long ago?"

Lang Ly blushed and faltered for a moment, then flipped over the album to several photos tucked into the last page. "My father had nine children by another wife," she explained and pointed at an older woman with a bitter face, surrounded by a crowd of polished young men and women staring smugly into the camera. "He left them all to come live with my mother. When he went to America he could only sponsor one wife, and she was his first."

her future
University was unavailable to a daughter of the South Vietnamese army. All of Lang Ly's hopes centered on America. Her aunt had migrated to California nearly a decade ago and soon afterwards sponsored her mother. Lang Ly was meant to go with her as a dependent, but a few weeks before the tickets arrived she turned twenty-one and so had to begin the process all over again. In the meantime, her father sent her one hundred dollars a month to live on, which she meted out to her cousin for household expenses and squirreled away for minor luxuries. She had bought a video player and expensive electric organ, but her toilet had no toilet paper and her mosquito net was old and torn. She never rode her moped without first donning purple, elbow length gloves and a snappy hat festooned with ribbons. She had lived in My Tho all of her adult life but refused to visit its attractions without a proper chaperone, and so rarely ventured beyond the local baker and the marketplace. She had her heart set on going to Berkeley. I thought of rollerblades, hashish and hip music and wondered if her purple gloves would protect her.

Excerpt from Hitchhiking Vietnam