The Reeducation of Cherry Truong Read online

  For Amélie

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1978: To Kim-Ly Vo from Tuyet Truong

  Prologue: Cherry

  1980: To Cuc Bui from Hung Truong

  1. Hoa

  1980: To Kim-Ly Vo from Tuyet Truong

  2. Cherry

  1983: To Cuc Bui from Hung Truong

  3. Hoa

  1980: To Kim-Ly Vo from Tuyet Truong

  4. Kim-Ly

  1984: To Cuc Bui from Hung Truong

  5. Xuan

  1981: To Kim-Ly Vo from Tuyet Truong

  6. Cherry

  1985: To Cuc Bui from Hung Truong

  7. Cam

  1982: To Kim-Ly Vo from Tuyet Truong

  8. Kim-Ly

  1986: To Cuc Bui from Hung Truong

  9. Hoa

  1987: To Cuc Bui from Hung Truong

  10. Cherry

  1983: To Kim-Ly Vo from Tuyet Truong

  11. Sanh

  1984: To Kim-Ly Vo from Tuyet Truong

  12. Cherry

  Family Tree

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Aimee Phan

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1978

  Kim-Ly Vo

  Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

  Mother, I hope this finds you well. I think about you and our family often. I think about you every hour of every day.

  I know you are angry. I wish I could explain the circumstances that forced me to do what I did, but I don’t know who else could be reading this letter. I can only ask that you trust me, a difficult and perhaps impossible request. Please believe me. This wasn’t my choice.

  Why couldn’t I tell you? Why didn’t I respect you enough to tell you personally? I tried to find the words, but they would not come. How can you tell your own mother that you are abandoning her? What kind of daughter would do that?

  I am not that kind of daughter. I will make this up to you. If you’ve taught me anything, it is that determination will help me endure and overcome even the most trying situation. This is what I struggle with now, yet I remember you and our family, and I know we will see each other again. I promise you.

  Your devoted daughter

  Tuyet Truong

  Pulau Bidong, Malaysia

  Prologue

  CHERRY

  SAIGON, VIETNAM, 2001

  Cherry releases the grip around her brother, steadying her trembling feet onto the hot, bright concrete. Lum jumps off his motorbike, leaving his sister to dig her fingernails into their seat, battling vertigo. After inhaling several hot muggy breaths, her eyes finally open.

  Identical plots of demarcated land and bleached sidewalks surround her. Wooden beams and smooth stone piles litter the construction site. Men in bright-yellow polo shirts and black jeans crouch along the ground, planting new trees and arranging signs advertising the new housing division. Her gaze resettles on her brother. Lum is beaming.

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  “It’s Orange County,” she says.

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s better.”

  They squeeze between a cement mixer and a mud-splattered orange tractor. “It’s still in the early stages,” Lum says almost apologetically as local contractors in hard helmets and goggles stand under a trailer awning examining blueprints. “We’re going to bring in mature landscaping for the border, not like those flimsy baby-stick trees at other subdivisions. Lawns for every home. We’re working on the irrigation system with a Hong Kong company.” Ahead, construction workers monitor a backhoe clawing the earth and spitting piles of dirt into a white truck. Cherry shakes the dust from their hour-long motorbike ride out of her flip-flops—first the left foot, then the right.

  Her brother had told them that he worked as a manager in a housing development company, but Cherry never imagined this. All these employees, the layers of responsibility. Surrounded by waist-high piles of wooden beams, they cross the lot toward a single French country-style house. She tries to keep up with her brother, but her steps feel heavy from jet lag, having only landed in Saigon fourteen hours earlier. Instead of touring landmarks or museums, she gazes at the exterior of a house that nearly replicates their parents’ home in Newport Lake. Even the materials look similar, alternating between creamy stucco and stone. The bare windows reveal the progress inside: unfinished plywood, rolls of insulation, cans of paint scattered about.

  “This is what you’ve been doing?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” Lum says, looking triumphant. “Are you surprised?”

  “No,” she says, forcing a smile. “I just thought you hated tract housing.” Cherry’s eyes travel to her brother, then the house, then back at him. The arched doorways, the skinny turret. Years have passed since he has been home, but he cannot ignore the resemblance.

  “I was young,” Lum says, an uneasy smile distorting his face. “Aren’t you glad I’ve grown up?”

  If only their parents were standing here, too, so they could see their transformed son: the responsible, successful Lum.

  The construction foreman waves for her brother. Cherry stumbles across the graveled site, careful not to get in anyone’s way. Her head feels dusty, heat presses on her eyes. The development walls loom so high she cannot see the rice fields and shantytowns outside of them. Near the entry gates, several crew members cluster for a cigarette break. Their eyes skim Cherry’s small waist and bare legs. She asks for a cigarette; they hesitate briefly, but eventually hand one over.

  “You’re Mr. Truong’s sister?” a man with a long mustache and a baseball cap asks, offering his lighter. “From America?”

  Cherry nods, trying to downplay her struggle with the Zippo lighter.

  “He’s a smart man,” he says. “All this? His idea.”

  Arms crossed, Lum looks absorbed in discussion with his colleague. His face is confident, contemplative, an expression Cherry doesn’t recognize at all. Suddenly, his image doubles, then multiplies. Cherry blinks a few times and turns away.

  “We’re very proud of him,” she says, coughing up some dust.

  “Wait until you see the finished product. You’ll be happy.” He gestures up to a sign.

  Cherry hadn’t noticed it when they drove in. On a clean yellow billboard, in red block letters, her eyes take a minute to focus: THE FUTURE SITE OF NEW LITTLE SAIGON … THE COMFORTS OF AMERICA, IN YOUR TRUE HOME, VIETNAM.

  * * *

  Three months ago, the day her acceptance letter arrived, Cherry didn’t open the envelope. She volunteered at the neonatal care unit at the hospital Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and her mother didn’t see any reason to delay the celebration. The white manila envelope was large and thick, full of forms to fill out. Schools didn’t waste extra paper on rejects.

  Driving home, she passed her relatives’ cars along the sidewalk and in the driveway. Her cousin Dat’s Lexus sat parked in front of their neighbor’s house, and he would only come for news from UC Irvine, his medical school alma mater. He also attended Irvine as an undergraduate, just like Cherry, the only school that mattered to her family.

  “Congratulations, Cherry!” Auntie Hien gushed, smothering Cherry’s face with one of her trademark sniffing kisses. “Do you want to specialize in pediatrics? Dermatology?”

  “Anesthesiology,” Uncle Chinh predicted. “That’s where all the money is. Anesthesiology, like Dat, right?”

  At the dining room table next to the prominently displayed acceptance letter, Cherry’s mother fretted over a pristine violet sheet cake. In bright-blue piping gel, she carefully scrawled “Doctor Cherry Truong” atop the buttercream frosting.

  “Your father is suppose
d to be back with the ice cream,” her mother complained when Cherry approached her side. “I ask him to do one thing and he can’t even get that right.”

  They waited ten more minutes before her mother decided to proceed with the celebrations. Uncle Chinh arranged the family around the cake to take pictures. Then the relatives took turns handing her envelopes full of money to use on books and school supplies. Auntie Tri reminded Cherry to smile with her teeth. In a rare slip of affection, Grandmother Vo kissed Cherry on the cheek, proud that at least one granddaughter had graduated from college, and was on her way to medical school.

  “I was smart like you once,” Grandmother Vo said. “But I was expected to raise a family. I never had your opportunities. Don’t squander them.”

  As Cherry walked away, her grandmother quietly passed Cherry’s mother a folded check, their slender, elegant fingers briefly touching. The tuition deposit for UC Irvine. Their discretion wasn’t necessary. Of all her medical school applications, Cherry hadn’t bothered applying for financial aid to UC Irvine. It was the one school Grandmother Vo had agreed to fully fund.

  Her cousins Duyen and Linh sat on the staircase. They’d come straight from their shifts at the beauty salon, and were complaining about Kim, the new hairstylist whom they believed was stealing their clients. Cherry sat on the stair below them, where she had a view of the garage door, to keep a lookout for her dad.

  “Are you going to call your brother?” Duyen asked, as she passed Cherry a fried vegetable cracker from her plate.

  “I haven’t had the chance to read the letter myself,” Cherry said.

  “No,” Duyen said, shaking her head impatiently. “About the wedding.”

  In the corner of the living room, Dat and his fiancée, Quynh, sat on the dragonfly-embroidered couch, showing their aunts the proofs from their engagement photo session. Their engagement was a well-known eventuality, since they were only waiting for Quynh to finish pharmacy school. When Quynh waved, Cherry smiled insincerely and looked away. Cherry had not told Lum. She wondered if anyone else in the family had.

  “We looked yesterday for the bridesmaids’ dresses,” Linh said. “She wanted this awful tangerine shade, but I talked her into choosing green. Green is still a nice summer color, right?” Since Quynh had no sisters, and her only female cousin still lived back in Vietnam, she had asked Cherry, Duyen, and Linh to stand in her wedding.

  “The guest list is already up to three hundred,” Linh continued. “They’re going to have to reserve two ballroom spaces.”

  “Who could they be inviting?” Cherry asked.

  “Their friends, colleagues from my brother’s clinic, our parents’ friends,” Duyen said, shrugging her tanned shoulders.

  “Dat doesn’t have any friends.”

  “Cherry,” Duyen scolded.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Besides Quynh’s friends and our family, no one likes him. Is he going to invite strangers?”

  “What’s your problem?” Duyen asked, giving her cousin a sharp look.

  “Quynh and Lum broke up years ago,” Linh reminded her. “Can’t you just get over it?”

  Cherry ignored her, allowing them to return to their silly debate over dress colors. She hated when they ganged up on her, pinching history between their overmanicured fingers. She looked across the living room again, where Quynh chatted with her future mother-in-law and Dat dabbed his sweaty forehead with a napkin. When they were little, people used to mistake Dat and Cherry for siblings, assuming Lum and Duyen were brother and sister. It never failed to aggravate her. Cherry didn’t want to look like Dat.

  “So we were thinking Maui,” Linh said.

  “Sorry?” Cherry asked, refocusing on her cousins.

  “For your graduation present,” Duyen said, softly pushing on Cherry’s hip with her bare foot.

  “Oh, right.” Another dangling carrot toward UC Irvine. With the money they’d be saving for living expenses—because naturally Cherry would live at home—Grandmother Vo had offered Cherry and her two cousins a vacation. “Why Maui?”

  “Grandmother already rented that condo for Dat and Quynh in August,” Linh said.

  “You want to go with them on their honeymoon?”

  “The condo has three bedrooms. We already talked about it before you came and they’re fine with it.”

  The prospect of spending two weeks tagging along on her cousin’s honeymoon sounded like a punishment. This vacation was supposed to be a reward for all her hard work. She wanted to spend it with someone important to her.

  The garage door opened and Cherry’s father wandered in, holding a plastic grocery bag. He smiled at the guests until her mother approached him and impatiently tugged at his arm. Cherry immediately stood.

  “What do you mean you got lost?” her mother asked as Cherry walked up to them. “We’ve been going to that supermarket for years.”

  “They were doing construction work on Jamboree. I had to take a detour.”

  Her mother peeked inside the grocery bag. “I told you vanilla ice cream,” she said. “Who is going to eat all this mint chocolate?”

  “Mint is Cherry’s favorite,” her father replied.

  “It is,” Cherry agreed quietly, taking the bag from him. “I love it.”

  The next morning, Cherry brought up the idea of going to Vietnam. Her grandmother and parents rejected it: too far, too expensive, too risky.

  “You let Lum live there for five years,” Cherry reminded them.

  “He’s a boy,” her father said. “And it wasn’t supposed to be for that long.”

  “Some playboy will target you,” Grandmother Vo said, “and trick you into marrying him for a visa. I’ve seen it happen before, trust me. Remember that Lam girl?”

  “What happened to Hawaii?” her mother asked.

  “I don’t want to lie on a beach and chase after boys,” Cherry said. “I want to see my brother.”

  They finally relented, purchasing Cherry a ticket to spend a month in Vietnam. No one else wanted to go with her. Her parents had to work. Linh and Duyen claimed they didn’t want to get stuck in Vietnam, like they heard had happened to others returning to the motherland. But because Cherry wasn’t born there, she probably wouldn’t have such trouble. No one could mistake Cherry for anything else but an American.

  “Maybe you can talk some sense back into your brother,” Grandmother Vo said. “Bring him back to where he belongs.” She was not specific on the where, which was not surprising. Lum’s former bedroom had long since been transformed into a guest room and Grandmother Vo’s occasional abode, his clothing, posters, and CDs packed up in cobwebbed boxes in the garage.

  The day before Cherry was supposed to leave, her mother had a bad dream. She normally wasn’t superstitious, and even as she described it to them the next morning—the threatening Communist police officers; the dark, rat-infested jail cells—Cherry couldn’t help wondering if she was making it up as she went along, recalling melodramatic scenes from an old movie she once saw on television.

  “You can save the trip for another time,” her mother finally concluded. “How about next summer? Daddy can ask for vacation leave, and then we can go with you.”

  “Why can’t I still go now?” Cherry asked.

  “Fine,” she said. “Don’t listen to me. You never do.”

  Later that evening, Cherry’s father softly knocked on her bedroom door and tried to play peacemaker. “She is scared,” he said. “She doesn’t want both of her children so far away from her.”

  “No one’s stopping her from coming with me. She’s always saying how much she misses Lum. Here’s her chance to see him.”

  “Mommy needs more time,” he said. “Leaving Vietnam was difficult for her. It was for all of us.”

  Cherry did not press her father to elaborate. She knew better. This was all she knew of her parents’ departure from Vietnam: they escaped by boat and landed in Malaysia. Her parents and brother left for America, while her father’s relatives reloca
ted to France. Then Cherry was born.

  “What else do you need to know?” her mother would say. “That’s what happened.”

  “But why did you and Dad choose America?”

  “Are you unhappy here? Haven’t we given you a good future? Why are you complaining?”

  “I’m not,” Cherry would answer. “I just want to know more. I want to know what it was like.”

  “Such silly questions. How is knowing how poor and desperate we were going to help you? These things will only distract you, pollute your brain. Look at the problems in your textbooks. Those are the answers you want. Those are the ones that will help you.”

  * * *

  Aside from the afternoon tour of the housing project, Cherry has barely seen her brother. Lum’s company is at a crucial stage in the project, days away from their grand unveiling to clients, and he can’t afford to go sightseeing. He leaves her every morning at the house with Grandaunt and Granduncle Tran.

  It’s not so bad. She has a month. She likes exploring the house where her grandparents lived, sleeping in the bedroom that once belonged to her parents. Cherry’s grandparents gave their house to the Trans before escaping the country. The tall, gray concrete house with creaky floors and paper-thin walls sits in a middle-class neighborhood surrounded by other homes just like it. The shady winding street crackles with women young and elderly cooking outside their front doors, trucks and scooters rattling by, and children chasing one another in overlapping, endless games of tag. At night, Cherry listens to the thumps of the water pipes constantly adjusting to the changes in pressure. She imagines one of them bursting, flooding the house, forcing them all out.

  Spending so much time with the Trans, Cherry understands why Lum hasn’t bothered moving out. They are his ideal parents: compulsively doting upon him, preparing his meals, and pressing his clothes, without ever questioning his comings and goings or scolding his table manners. Having lost two sons in the war—the youngest, Cherry’s father’s age—Lum’s presence is more than enough to fill them with excited chatter at dinnertime.

  In the daylight, Cherry can best recognize Grandaunt’s resemblance to Grandpère, the same lion’s nose and widow’s peak forehead. While these features accentuated Grandpère’s stern demeanor, Cherry finds them unsettling and severe on Grandaunt’s face. Granduncle appears less intimidating, a chubby squat man with ice-white hair and a sneeze that can shake the kitchen table. He and Grandaunt owned a tailor shop that catered to foreigners during the war; after the Fall of Saigon, the Communist police forced their business to close. Eventually, through persistent networking with the local government, they landed a uniform contract for the primary schools in Ho Chi Minh City, which allowed them to reopen their shop.