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Writing Contest 2009
Fiction Winner
Teresa Coates
Portland Community College
SUBJECT: Predisposition
On Mondays, I tutor siblings Hibiki and Gakuto in their family's apartment overlooking Hanoi's West Lake. The rich Japanese and Korean ex-pats live here, transferred to Vietnam's capital by LG, Sony and companies I've never heard of. Each class session we sit at their round dining table, equipped with pencils, workbooks and a small cassette tape player to play the little songs that accompany each lesson. The juvenile tunes are meant to reinforce the focus of each lesson (animals, verb tense, prepositional phrases), but only annoy me and disrupt the flow. Their mother requires the materials be used exactly as prescribed, so I play the cassette tape every time the icon appears in the lesson plan. And every time, I silently pray the gears will slip and the machine will inhale the tape. So far, it hasn't happened.
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I spend two hours with Mr. Hung. We meet in his office at the Hanoi Sports Department where he leads the country's fencing program. Thankfully, he doesn't use workbooks or audiocassettes. Instead, we spend our hour together making tone notations and practicing his speaking skills. Every time we meet he has a story for me; last week he explained his decade-long study to become a skillful fortune-teller. A geomancer, to be specific. "Maybe ten more years and then I will be good enough."
While I teach, my own son and daughter are across town, hanging out somewhere in the small hotel that we've been calling home for the past three weeks. After our two-month volunteer stint in central Vietnam, we headed north, not yet ready to leave the country but without a job or home. We happened upon this hotel on our the first day in Hanoi and have resided there since. When I'm away the kids stay in our new abode—Room 503 at the Hanoi Holidays Hotel. Stuart, my Internet savvy 14-year-old, languishes online whenever he can, dragging the laptop down the spiral marble staircase of the hotel until he gets a better wi-fi connection. Audrey, at 9 years old, spends much of the time I'm gone watching the Discovery Channel and practicing English with the hotel clerk. They are on a first name basis now.
As we leave for dinner, Audrey calls out: "Bye, Huyen!"
"Goodbye, Miss Audrey."
"You know her name?" The familiarity surprises me; I'd never even thought to ask.
I had never intended for the hotel to become our home, but despite daily Internet searches, scouring English-language newspapers and scoping out housing posters in the cafes of the Old Quarter, I've found none that will work for us. There are plenty of single rooms for rent around the area, perfect for young college grads spending some time abroad, but for a family of three, we will need more than a single twin bed in a small bedroom.
Living in a hotel isn't easy, especially for the kids, but most days they don't seem to mind at all. Every day we stay here I am grateful for their ability to accept the chaos of this itinerant life. After two months of living with others while volunteering at orphanages in Tam Ky, we've acquired a taste for loose schedules and close quarters and none of us—the teenage son, the nearly-tween daughter, or I—want to go back to the States yet. This new life is too interesting to leave, but if I don't find a better job and a place to live in the next week, we'll have to. The bank account is nearly drained and I can't allow my children to be homeless and penniless in a foreign country. I have to find a way to make this work.
Subject: Dad is fine.
Messages that start like this are never good news. Dad is fine is really just code for Dad could have died, but he didn't. Like six years ago when I got the call from my mom: "Dad's fine, but I wanted to let you know he's in the hospital. He fell off a ladder and through a plate-glass window. He had surgery this morning." Now I'm afraid to open the email from my sister, Marcella, afraid of what she has to tell me, but I have to.
Dad is fine, but I thought you should know that he had a heart attack this morning and is in the hospital.
Never able to hide my inner thoughts from my facial expressions, Stuart notices the furrowed brow and pinched eyes. I don't know how to explain without suddenly crying, so I just turn the computer and make him read it himself.
Try not to worry. Dad's fine. he'll be home in a day or two.
I was nine, like my daughter is now, when my paternal grandfather died. Slain, like so many other grandparents, great-aunts, and second cousins, by heart failure. My grandmother died of massive heart failure a decade later. My dad, it seems, has inherited both his parents' heart troubles. The bane of genetics is that your father can abandon you as a child and you'll still have his heart defect. You can eat your mother's vegetarian cooking and still inherit her high cholesterol. Genetics can be cruel.
I have to teach my English 3A class this afternoon, but I can't stop thinking about my dad and heart attacks and wondering about my own genetic inheritance. According to the second email my sister sent this morning, he'd been feeling some pains in his chest, some shortness of breath for the past couple of weeks. I want to ask him why he had ignored the signs, but I know the answer—he knew it was bound to happen. His mother had been a decade younger when she'd had her first heart attack and every year or two after that she had another until, sixteen years later, she finally succumbed to a series of strokes intermixed with heart attacks. Now my dad is following the course set for him by genetics and a life-long love of eggs and bacon for breakfast.
"Okay. Please turn to page 42," I tell my class at Apollo, a local academy where I teach 12- and 13-year-olds every Saturday and Sunday. "Hung," I call on one of the students. "Will you read the first paragraph?"
He reads carefully and slowly, taking time with the pronunciation of each word. He looks at me with frightened eyes when he doesn't know how to say a word. "Miserable," I say. "Miz-er-uh-bull." I feel miserable. "Tom was miserable in the rain." I smile at Hung, but he just nods his head and continues reading. "It was very cold and he was getting very wet. He needed to find shelter." We continue reading the text, but my mind wanders and more than a few times, the students fall silent and watch me until I stir from my thoughts.
"Miss Teresa?"
Finished with the reading, Hung pulls me back from my worried thoughts.
"Good work, Hung. Now, who wants to play a game?"
When I make it back to the hotel after class, I join Audrey at the bank of computers that line the wall between lobby and dining room. Antiquated PCs, they work for little more than checking email and keeping children occupied with games. Audrey has spent enough time on them to grow quite adept at manipulating the lines, circles and colors available in Paint, managing to draw entire landscapes. She often adds a caption or a title: Rice Fields, Mrs. Hanh is the best cook!, Stuart on the beach. There's a file just for her art on the computer farthest to the left where she saves her rough-hewn pixel drawings before transferring them to a flash-drive and onto our own laptop. She's spent the entire morning creating images and playing with Huyen's toddler son in the lobby.
"Where's your brother?" I ask, her hand still glued to the computer mouse. Her face leans in toward the screen as she perfects the lines of a yellow sun.
"Huh? What? Stuart?"
I nod, frustrated by her current obsession.
"Oh, he's upstairs, playing Runescape."
I disrupt her concentration again to tell her our lunch plans—we'll walk to Papa Joe's, our favorite lunch spot near Hoan Kiem, then hit the DVD shop again. We've cycled through the dozen movies that we've bought during our travels. They're low-cost entertainment; for each we pay 20,000VND—just over a dollar. One of the benefits of piracy in Asia? Low, low prices. But even if I was willing to spend 15USD as I would stateside, there isn't anywhere to buy legal copies. The Vietnamese are adept at making knock-offs and DVDs are no exception.
Sometime, it seems like nothing here is real.
Three weeks and four days after arriving in Hanoi, and two days before I've marked on the calendar "Buy tix home," there is an ad for a teaching job in Thanh Hoa. I don't know where Thanh Hoa is, but the position comes with housing and good pay. According to their posting on The New Hanoian website, it's 20USD an hour, teaching twenty hours a week with a three-month contract that includes on-campus housing with our own kitchen, computer with internet and cable TV. I'm most excited about a kitchen. We've managed to subsist on fried-egg-and-toast breakfasts prepared by Huyen's brother, reconstituted ramen noodle lunches and dinners at more than a dozen restaurants in the Hoan Kiem district. I am so ready to cook my own food again. Stuart will be happy to have an entire campus to wander and Audrey just wants to get out of Hanoi's Old Quarter. It sounds perfect.
Subject: Grandpa
The stark subject line doesn't bode well and as I read the email, another from my bearer-of-bad-news sister, the pressure builds in my chest. Grandpa Passey is dying. For years he's argued with diabetes, trying to sneak candy around the disease, willing to give up his toes one by one. Now it's come for his eyes and his vision is going. His kidneys are shutting down. The doctors said he needed to come in twice a week for dialysis, but after one treatment he refuses any more. He prefers to die.
Now’s the time and I have to decide: go back to the States or stay in Vietnam. I go through with the job interview and by the end they ask me to take the position in Thanh Hoa. I want to accept it. I want to stay here in this land of rice fields and tropical fruit. We've worked so hard and sacrificed so much to be here on this grand adventure that I don't want to give up now. But, I don't want to be the wayward daughter, either. I know I won't be able to convince my grandfather to have his blood washed twice a week if he just wants it to be the end. And I won't be able to save my dad the next time he has a heart attack. My family. My own children. Who deserves what is something I can't put neatly into a little box; I can't easily compare my maternal obligations with my duty to my progenitors. I owe them both.
At nearly five o'clock the taxi arrives to pick us up and together with Huyen’s brother, we haul our luggage down the stairs and pile them in. Suitcases, then duffle bags then backpacks. I pay more than $472 for our month's stay at the Hanoi Holidays Hotel—including breakfasts, laundry service and a day trip to Ha Long Bay. Huyen hands me our passports. I want to hug her goodbye, thank her for all the little things she's done, but that's not acceptable here in Vietnam. Instead I extend my palm, taking her almost child-size hand between both of mine and give her a gentle squeeze. "Càm on" I say. Thank you. We nod together and I let go.
From inside the glass doors of her hotel, she waves to us as the taxi pulls away, heading to Thanh Hoa.