The Refugees Read online

  “That’s lovely.” Marcus gently let go of his hand. “What’s number two then?”

  “Hush.” Parrish frowned. “Why not be helpful and take Liem’s bag?”

  With Marcus carrying the duffel bag and trailing behind, Parrish guided Liem through the terminal, hand on elbow. “It must seem very overwhelming to you,” Parrish said, waving in a way that took in the crowds, the terminal, and presumably all of San Francisco. “I can only imagine how strange this all appears. Coming here from England was enough of a culture shock for me.”

  Liem glanced over his shoulder at Marcus. “You come from England, too?”

  “Hong Kong,” Marcus said. “You could say I’m an honorary Englishman.”

  “In any case,” Parrish said, squeezing Liem’s elbow and bending his head to speak more confidentially into Liem’s ear, “you must have had an awful time of it.”

  “No, not very bad.” Liem spoke with nonchalance, even though the prospect of rehearsing his story one more time flooded him with dread. In the four months since he’d fled Saigon, he’d been asked for his story again and again, by sailors, marines, and social workers, their questions becoming all too predictable. What was it like? How do you feel? Isn’t it all so sad? Sometimes he told the curious that what had happened was a long story, which only impelled them to ask for a shorter version. It was this edited account that he offered as Marcus drove the car through the parking garage, into the streets, and onto the freeway. Casting himself as just one more anonymous young refugee, he recounted a drama that began with leaving his parents in Long Xuyen last summer, continued with his work in a so-called tea bar in Saigon, and climaxed with the end of the war. Even this brief version tired him, and as he spoke he leaned his forehead against the window, watching the orderly traffic on the wide highway.

  “So,” he said. “Now I am here.”

  Parrish sighed from the front seat of the sedan. “That war wasn’t just a tragedy,” he said, “but a farce.” Marcus made a noise in his throat that might have been an assent before he turned up the volume on the radio a few notches. A woman was uttering an encomium to a brand of furniture polish, something to bring out the luster without using a duster. “You’ll find the weather here to be cold and gray, even though it’s September,” Marcus said. “In the winter it will rain. Not exactly the monsoon, but you’ll get used to it.” As he drove, he pointed to passing landmarks, the standouts in Liem’s memory being Candlestick Park with its formidable walls, and the choppy, marbled waters of the bay. Then, as traffic from another freeway merged with theirs and the car slowed down, Parrish lowered the volume on the radio and said, “There’s something you need to know about Marcus and myself.”

  A white passenger van, accelerating on the right, blocked Liem’s view of the bay. He turned from the window to meet Parrish’s gaze. “Yes?”

  “We’re a couple,” Parrish announced. Out of the corner of his eye, Liem saw the white van edging forward, past the shrinking blot of moisture left by his forehead on the window. “In the romantic sense,” Parrish added. Liem decided that “in the romantic sense” must be an idiomatic expression, the kind Mrs. Lindemulder had said Americans used often, like “you’re killing me” and “he drives me up the wall.” In idiomatic English, a male couple in the romantic sense must simply mean very close friends, and he smiled politely until he saw Marcus staring at him in the rearview mirror, the gaze sending a nervous tremor through his gut.

  “Okay,” Liem said. “Wow.”

  “I hope you’re not too shocked.”

  “No, no.” The small hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck stiffened as they’d done before whenever another boy, deliberately or by chance, had brushed his elbow, sometimes his knee, while they walked hand-in-hand or sat on park benches with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, watching traffic and girls pass by. “I am liberal.”

  “Then I hope you’ll stay with us.”

  “And open-minded,” he added. In truth he had no other refuge but Parrish’s hospitality, just as there was nowhere else for him to go at the end of the day in Saigon but a crowded room of single men and boys, restless on reed mats as they tried to sleep while breathing air humidified with the odor of bodies worked hard. “Do not worry.”

  “Good,” Marcus said, turning the volume up again, the way one of the boys would around midnight, on his transistor radio, when everyone knew but wouldn’t say that sleep was impossible. Liem’s eyes were closed by then, but he couldn’t help seeing the faces of men he knew casually or had watched in the tea bar, even those of his own roommates. In the darkness, he heard the rustle of mosquito netting as the others masturbated also. The next morning, everyone looked at each other blankly, and nobody spoke of what had occurred the previous evening, as if it were an atrocity in the jungle better left buried.

  He thought he’d forgotten about those nights, had run away from them at last, but now he wondered if the evidence still existed in the lines of his palms. He rubbed his hands uneasily on his jeans as they drove through a neighborhood with bustling sidewalks, trafficked by people of several colors. They were mostly whites and Mexicans, along with some blacks and a scattering of Chinese, none of whom looked twice at the signs in the store windows or the graffiti on the walls, written in a language he’d never seen before: peluquería, chuy es maricón, ritmo latino, dentista, iglesia de cristo, viva la raza!

  After turning onto a street lined with parked cars jammed fender-to-fender, Marcus swung the sedan nose-down into the sloping driveway of a narrow two-story house, upon whose scarlet door was hung, strangely enough, a portrait of the Virgin Mary. “We’re home,” Parrish said. Later Liem would learn that Parrish was an ambivalent Catholic, that the district they lived in was the Mission, and that the name for the house’s architectural style was Victorian, but today all he noticed was its color.

  “Purple?” he said, never having seen a home painted in this fashion before.

  Parrish chuckled and opened his door. “Close,” he said. “It’s mauve.”

  Mrs. Lindemulder had squeezed Liem’s shoulder in the San Diego airport and warned him that in San Francisco the people tended to be unique, an implication he hadn’t understood at the time. Every day for the first few weeks in Parrish’s house, Liem wanted to phone Mrs. Lindemulder and tell her she’d made a huge mistake, but Parrish’s generosity shamed him and prevented him from doing so. Instead, he stood in front of the mirror each morning and told himself there was nobody to fear, except himself. He’d silently said the same thing last year, at summer’s end in ’74, when he bade farewell to his parents at the bus station in Long Xuyen. He hadn’t complained about being dispatched alone to Saigon, several hours north, where he’d be the family’s lifeline. As the eldest son, he had duties, and he was used to working, having done so since leaving school at the age of twelve to shine the boots of American soldiers.

  He’d known them since he was eight, when he began picking through their garbage dumps for tin and cardboard, well-worn Playboy magazines, and unopened C rations. The GIs taught him the rudiments of English, enough for him to find a job years later in Saigon, sweeping the floor of a tea bar on Tu Do Street where the girls pawned themselves for dollars. With persistence, he sandpapered the two discourses of junkyard and whorehouse into a more usable kind of English, good enough to let him understand the rumor passed from one foreign journalist to another in the spring of ’75, six months ago. Thousands would be slaughtered if the city fell to the Communists.

  In April, when rockets and mortars began exploding on the outskirts of the city, the rumor seemed about to come true. Although he hadn’t planned on kicking, shoving, and clawing his way aboard a river barge, he found himself doing so one morning after he saw a black cloud of smoke over the airport, burning on the horizon, lit up by enemy shellfire. A month later he was in Camp Pendleton, San Diego, waiting for sponsorship. He and the other refugees had been res
cued by a Seventh Fleet destroyer in the South China Sea, taken to a makeshift Marine Corps camp at Guam, and then flown to California. As he lay on his cot and listened to children playing hide-and-seek in the alleys between the tents, he tried to forget the people who had clutched at the air as they fell into the river, some knocked down in the scramble, others shot in the back by desperate soldiers clearing a way for their own escape. He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.

  None of this was mentioned in the airmail he posted to his parents, soon after coming to Parrish’s house. It was his second letter home. In June, at Camp Pendleton, he’d dispatched his first airmail care of the resettlement agency. In both cases, assuming no letter would go unread by the Communists, he wrote only of where he lived and how to get in touch with him. He was afraid of endangering his family by marking them as relatives of someone who’d fled, and he was even more afraid the letters might never make it home at all. The only time his family’s fate wasn’t on his mind was during those few seconds after he woke up, in a warm bed under three blankets, remembering dreams in which he spoke perfect English. Then he opened his eyes to see a faint blue glow filtered through foggy windows, the murky and wavering shimmer reminding him of where he was, in a distant city, a foreign place where even the quality of light differed from the tropical glare he’d always known.

  Downstairs, he would find Parrish and Marcus eating breakfast and discussing the local news, international politics, or the latest film. They bickered often, usually in a bantering way, about whether or not they should vote for Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, or whether Ford’s would-be assassin, a San Francisco woman, should get life or death.

  When they began arguing seriously in front of him, he knew he was becoming a part of their household. Sometimes the fights seemed to occur for no reason, as happened one morning in October after Parrish asked about the date of Marcus’s final exams. “Why don’t you take them for me?” Marcus snapped before stalking out of the kitchen. Parrish waited until Marcus ran up the stairs before he leaned over to Liem and said, “It’s the terrible twos. The second year’s the hardest.”

  “Oh, yes?” Liem nodded his head even though he was uncertain, once again, about what Parrish meant. “I see you both yell many times.”

  “Even though he’s older, he’s not as mature as you,” Parrish said. He stirred his coffee, his spoon making figure eights instead of circles. “He hasn’t seen the things you or I have. Of course, when I was his age, I was spoiled and a little lazy too. But I’m better now. My ancestors made their money from means of which I’m ashamed, but there’s no reason why I can’t put my own to some good use. Is there?”

  “No?”

  “No,” Parrish said. Liem understood he was one of the good uses for the money Parrish had earned in two decades as a corporate accountant, a job he’d given up a few years before to work in environmental protection. Although Parrish refused to let Liem pay rent, Liem had found a job anyway. The week after his arrival, he’d wandered through downtown until he came across a liquor store in the heart of the Tenderloin, on the corner of Taylor and Turk. “Help Wanted” was scrawled in soap on the window next to “Se Habla Español.” The book he carried in his pocket, Everyday Dialogues in English, had no scenarios featuring the duo patrolling the corner outside the store, so he said nothing as he brushed by the shivering prostitute with pimples in her cleavage, who dismissed him at a look, and the transvestite with hairy forearms, who did not.

  His shift ran from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, six days a week, his day off on Thursday. He swept the floor and stocked the shelves, cleaned the toilet and wiped the windows, tended the register and then repeated the routine. During downtime, he read his book, hoping for clues on how to talk with Marcus and Parrish, but finding little of use in chapters like “Juan Gonzalez Visits New York City and Has to Ask His Way Around,” or “An Englishman and an American Attend a Football Game.” At the end of his shift, he dragged two garbage bags to a Dumpster down an alley where people with questionable histories urinated and vomited when it was dark, and sometimes when it wasn’t. No matter how much he scrubbed his hands afterward, he sensed they’d never really be clean. The grease and garbage he dealt in had worked their way into his calluses so deeply he imagined that he was forever leaving his fingerprints everywhere.

  By the time he returned to the Victorian, Parrish and Marcus had already finished dinner, and he ate leftovers in the kitchen while they watched television. As soon as he was done, he retreated upstairs, where he showered off the day’s sweat and tried not to think of Marcus’s lean, pale body. The endless hot water left him pliant and calm, and it was in this relaxed state of mind that he opened the door of the bathroom one evening after his shower, wrapped only in a towel, to encounter Marcus padding down the hallway. They faced each other in silence before both stepped to the same side. Then they both stepped to the other side, feet shuffling so awkwardly that the laugh track from the sitcom Parrish was watching downstairs, audible even on the landing, seemed to be directed at them.

  “Excuse me,” Liem said finally, his back slick with sweat from the heat of the long shower. “May I pass?”

  Marcus shrugged, his eyes flickering once over Liem’s body before he bowed slightly, in a mocking fashion, and said, “Yes, you may.”

  Liem hurried past Marcus and into his room. As soon as he shut the door, he leaned against it, ear pressed to wood, but another burst of canned laughter from downstairs made it impossible to hear Marcus’s footsteps fading down the hallway.

  On an overcast Thursday morning in mid-November, Marcus and Liem drove Parrish to the airport. He was spending the weekend in Washington, at a conference on nuclear power’s threat to the environment. As the wind beat against the windows, Parrish explained how the government buried its spent plutonium and uranium in the desert, where they poisoned land and threatened lives for millennia. “And mostly poor lives at that,” Parrish said. “Just think of it as a gigantic minefield in our backyard.” Marcus drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove, but Parrish gave no sign of noticing. On the curb at the airport, his suitcase at his feet, he kissed Marcus good-bye and hugged Liem. “See you Sunday night,” Parrish said before shutting the passenger door behind Liem. Liem was waving through the window, and Parrish was waving back, when Marcus accelerated into traffic without so much as a glance over his shoulder.

  “When’s he going to stop trying to save the world?” Marcus demanded. “It’s getting to be a bore.”

  Liem buckled his seat belt. “But Parrish is a good person.”

  “There’s a reason why saints are martyred. Nobody can stand them.”

  They rode in silence for the next quarter of an hour, until they neared the center of the city. There, the sight of a bakery truck entering the freeway from Army Street made Liem ask, “Are you hungry? I am hungry.”

  “Don’t say I am hungry, say I’m hungry. You have to learn how to use contractions if you want to speak like a native.”

  “I’m hungry. Are you?”

  The restaurant Marcus chose in Chinatown was on Jackson Street and nearly the size of a ballroom, with pillars of dark cherrywood and tasseled red lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Even on a Thursday morning it was noisy and bustling; waitresses in smocks pushed carts up and down the aisles while bow-tied waiters hurried from table to table, checks and pots of tea in hand. They sat by a window overlooking Jackson Street, the sight of Asian crowds comforting to Liem. As the train of carts rolled by, Marcus picked and rejected expertly from the offerings, ordering in Cantonese and explaining in English as the varieties of dim sum were heaped before them in a daunting display, including shiu mai, dumplings of minced pork and scallions, long-stemmed Chinese broccoli, and sliced roasted pork with candied skin the color of watermelon seeds. “Parrish won’t touch those,” Marcus said approvingly as he watched
Liem suck the dimpled skin off a chicken’s foot, leaving only the twiggy bones.

  After the waiter swept away the dishes, they sat quietly with a tin pot of chrysanthemum tea between them. Liem rolled the bottom of his teacup in a circle around a grease stain on the tablecloth before he asked Marcus about his family, something Marcus had never discussed in front of him. All Liem knew about Marcus was that he’d lived in Hong Kong until he was eighteen, that he was enrolled in business administration at San Francisco State but hardly ever went there, and that he worked out at the gym every day. His father, Marcus said with a snort, was an executive at a rubber company who had sent him to study overseas, expecting he would eventually return to help run the business. But three years ago a spiteful ex-lover had mailed his father one of Marcus’s love letters, with candid pictures tucked into the folds. “Very candid pictures,” Marcus said darkly. After that, his father had disowned him, and now Parrish paid his expenses. “Can you imagine anything worse?” Marcus concluded.

  Liem wasn’t sure whether Marcus was referring to the lover’s betrayal, the father’s plans, or Parrish’s money. What he really wanted to know was what “candid” meant, but when Marcus only sipped his tea, not seeming to expect an answer, Liem spoke instead about his own family, all farmers, hawkers, and draftees. Nobody had ever traveled very far from Long Xuyen, unless he was drafted by the army. Liem was the family’s first explorer, and perhaps that was the reason his parents were so anxious at the bus station in Long Xuyen, one of the few moments of his past he recalled with any clarity. The patch of unshaded dirt and cement was crowded with passengers ready to board, holding cartons tied with twine and keeping close watch on their pigs and chickens, shuffling in wire cages. As the heat rose in waves, the odor of human sweat and animal dung, thickened by the dust, rose with it.

  “We raised you well,” his father said, unable to look him in the eye with his own bluish-gray ones, hazy from cataracts. “I know you won’t lose yourself in the city.”