When the second plane crashed into the south tower of that building, the three of us were huddled around a vinyl-topped folding table at Hotel Joy Joy, learning to play blackjack from Deborah.
I was losing again.
“Baby, don’t hit on sixteen. The dealer always stays on fifteen.” Deborah, still so glamorous in the heat, had a way of speaking—a feathered drawl that echoed off even the chipped whitewash from the hotel’s stucco walls. She called everyone “baby,” even me. Fitting, as babies were the only thing we ever thought about back then.
The Hotel Joy Joy wasn’t even a hotel, just the only building south of My Tho that had a foreigner license. Every morning Liên An would emerge from the back first floor room where her family slept, climb the spotless tile stairs to the second floor, and knock on our doors to wake us up. By the time we made it downstairs—after jockeying for position in front of the lone bathroom sink and a cold water shower—we’d be greeted to a downstairs breakfast of sticky rice with dried, shredded chicken and mango.
“Proper breakfast for mothers-to-be,” Liên An would always intone. I think we, and the women who came before us, were her private amusement.
We just thought it was a big night for plane crashes. Unlucky, sure, and even tragic for those poor souls traveling on that plane, but we hadn’t yet seen those looping CNN pictures. We hadn’t yet heard the TV reports of galvanic smoke and people jumping. We were halfway around the world, waiting to adopt our babies in a two-floor hotel 45 miles southwest of Ho Chi Minh City.
◆
“Sticky rice again?”
“Ladies, not in front of the help.” Deborah looked at Bernie, then at Liên An, who always ignored our little squabbles, too busy with washing or cooking or handling her husband. Our fights weren’t ever serious, just the petty things that bubbled out of our enforced togetherness: three white chicks stuck in the middle of the jungle, like Bernie used to say.
Dr. Phúoc had asked us all to wait for three weeks, and we didn’t have much choice anyway with the fabled red tape of Vietnamese bureaucracy: exit visas for the baby, visas for us, proper fees paid, our documented residency in the country. Plus, there was a “mild fever” roaming around the orphanage, and Dr. Phúoc wanted the babies to be healthy before they traveled out of the country. “Not to worry, the babies are safe, and we will also take good care of you, Mesdames.” Very courtly, spry even, for an elderly country doctor. Deborah said she adored his French accent. I couldn’t tell the difference.
Bernie had been prepared to spend a month in Viet Nam, so three weeks wasn’t a surprise. I didn’t mind the wait, thought it was exciting to meet such new people, especially Deborah with her allure of old money, though I think she was getting antsy. We only had a thirty day tourist visa, so if the babies couldn’t be released in three weeks, if they were still sick, we’d be in trouble. Strange that an overpopulated country of 80 million would miss three newborns. As Bernie kept saying, you’d think they’d want one less street kid running around selling postcards and shining shoes.
Deborah kept complaining about it, said she had wanted to go to Hawai‘i for a week or so. Bernie and I just raised our eyebrows at each other. How many mothers would take a newborn baby to the islands?
Bernie was older, in her early fifties, and the only one of us to really remember the war. Sometimes, during those afternoon rain squalls when we couldn’t leave the hotel, she would tell us how the TV showed dead people each night in time for dinner. The numbing emptiness of it all. She said that we couldn’t even begin to imagine a loss as wide and deep as all that. She pointed out those missing Vietnamese we never met, that lost generation of Vietnamese men between young Liên An and old Dr. Phúoc, all those missing people.
◆
Danny, my high school sweetheart, and I divorced the previous March, before I had even had a chance to get pregnant. He kept saying that was a good thing, a real good thing, no strings to bind us together.
So he left our house, dog, and the six-and-a-half years were shared.
It’s so easy these days to just vanish from people’s lives. On my really bad days, when I stayed home from the office all swollen and shaking and ragged from the sobbing, I leafed through my old photo albums and marveled at my vanished friends. High school best-friends-forever, college sweethearts, Danny. I wonder how I ever let them go. I wonder how lonely we all eventually become.
A girl from the office stopped by after work one day to bring me some chicken soup. And just to keep me company, just to make conversation while she fed Rufus and freshened his water, she told me about how this married couple she knew had recently adopted a girl in Viet Nam.
Much easier than China. Cheaper, too. No wait list or anything. No time-consuming background checks. No age limits for the parents. They’ve got scads of baby girls that they don’t know what to do with. The boys they keep, but the girls—probably you’d save a life if you adopted over there. You should hear what they do to newborn girls, leave them in the jungle or something for tigers or something. And of course, that Asian stigma against adoption. They’d rather see us Americans take their babies away to a new life than adopt baby girls themselves.
I called a few agencies, arranged for a temporary medical leave of absence, and packed a suitcase knowing only that I would name my daughter something beautiful and Vietnamese.
It’s not that I particularly wanted a baby from another country, but I needed one. Right then. I needed to matter to someone else. To make her need me, too.
◆
I knew we wouldn’t be living in five-star, big city splendor, but I had at least thought we’d be stationed in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, not this tiny backwater—a bruising two-hour bus ride south, in the heart of the Mekong Delta, where the only foreigners that visit are UNESCO health engineers and expectant mothers.
Bernie told me that everyone chooses to live in town; it’s so much easier to arrange the daily visits to the Catholic orphanage that keeps our babies, that keeps all the unclaimed baby girls from Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong.
“All of us mothers stay at Hotel Joy Joy, sweetie. We don’t have much choice.” I had just stepped off the local bus, my face streaked in red clay dust while the Vietnamese driver jabbered on about my fee.
“The woman at my agency never said anything about that.”
“You should go through Mary next time,” Bernie said as she unrolled three one-hundred-thousand dong bills from her money belt and waved it just inside the bus driver’s rolled-down window.
She smiled at my gaping mouth as the bus rumbled off towards Long Xuyên. “Less than twenty bucks. Don’t worry about it, honey. Just Monopoly paper. You’re the second. We’re just waiting for our third before Dr. Phúoc finishes processing the paperwork.”
Dr. Phúoc was genteel, came to meet us once a day with updates about the babies’ health, answered our questions about the lush greenery and Vietnamese customs, and took us out on motorbike trips to lush fields he promised were bloody battlefields in the war.
By the time Deborah came three days later, I had already become bored with the numbing heat, the river tours of the snake farms, and the daily schedule of baby visiting and waiting. Even a former beauty pageant queen seemed par for the course, just as surreal as the two hour monsoons that drove up the humidity and the hordes of children that screeched and pointed at us as we walked up and down the one-lane highway connecting the hotel and orphanage.
They all loved Deborah’s blonde hair, kept trying to touch her. But she never minded. Bernie said that Deborah just loved any attention, but I think Bernie was jealous. Anyone would’ve been.
In the evenings, we had nothing but kerosene lanterns, Bernie’s card decks, and ourselves for entertainment. Each night, after Liên An had put her family to bed, swept the floors, and parked the family motorbikes inside the front hall, we would play cards, betting roasted watermelon seeds that stained our fingertips with red dye. We learned blackjack and draw poker and baccarat. We listened to the hum of cicadas over electric generators. We gossiped about love.
◆
Bernie expected love to be a fickle Cupid, wounding people with indiscriminate arrows, like her six-year-old nephew Brian did every Thanksgiving. How he’d run around in his stained corduroys and shoot Nerf arrows that didn’t hurt as much as they hit its targets at inopportune moments, like the time his arrow nailed his older brother Mark in the crotch right when he was pouring red wine for the grownups. Love was inconvenient, but you dealt with it.
Bernie and her husband Roger tried to get pregnant for years, until they discovered that her tubes were pretty much beyond repair. After nearly two decades of wanting a baby and trying to convince Roger about adopting, Bernie flew here alone, rather than risk a divorce. He’s the perfect husband, except for the adoption thing, she’d say. Women in their fifties had babies all the time nowadays, she’d say. They were doing okay financially, probably the only couple in Reno with a paid-off mortgage and zero credit card debt.
She told us that working for a bank in Reno was the worst kind of job you’d imagine. Everyone in Reno has bad bank stories, not just the chronic gamblers with foreclosed mortgages, or the newly divorced in double-wides with no disposable cash, but the regular people who depend on those condescending tourist dollars.
Years later, after everything happened, Bernie will tell me how those planes affected Reno for at least a year and a half, how even the casinos closed one day a week to save on energy costs. She will whisper all this into the phone as she sits on her kitchen’s cool linoleum floor, and I will wonder who she is afraid will overhear: her perfect husband or her new sleeping, baby girl.
◆
About a week after we heard about the World Trade Center, we went to Ho Chi Minh City on the first morning bus to watch the CNN Asia feeds and read the op-ed pieces in the International Herald Tribune. We indulged in air conditioning and a little American junk food. Deborah brought her Lonely Planet along, and she cheerfully told us when we passed war ruins or “battle remnants” as if we were typical tourists. But we were different, there on our own mission.
That evening, as we walked back to Hotel Joy Joy, Dr. Phúoc cornered us with his motorbike, screeching his hand-polished Honda four feet from us. Bernie and I backed away from the throttled and growling bike, stepped off the gravel shoulder into the thick, waist-high weeds lining each side of the road.
I thought he was mad at us for disrupting our daily visitation schedule; Bernie and Deborah were worried something had happened to our babies.
“Do you agree with your president?” Dr. Phúoc asked. He talked faster than normal, lost his careful enunciation, spit in his haste. “Do you agree with this war he is thinking about starting?”
None of us answered. It wasn’t as if we were to blame for our country’s politics. But we had to say something. What if he refused to let us take our babies home? I was too shocked to speak.
Suddenly, as if realizing the impropriety of an old Vietnamese man yelling at three white American women in the middle of a public street, Dr. Phúoc muttered something in Vietnamese and tore back towards town.
“That was interesting.”
“Shut up, Deborah.”
I stared at Bernie. We’d never snapped at each other before. Not like that. I guess we were all still in shock. About how the world keeps changing. About how war keeps creeping into the edges of this small country.
◆
We were in the orphanage, choosing our babies, when we had our second fight.
The newest-born babies were laid out in rows, each dressed in a cotton diaper and placed in her own wooden crib. A nurse in a blue habit and plastic slippers worked through the nursery of fifty cribs, lifting each baby up in turn and gently rocking her. Each crib was unique, and the newer cribs stood out brightly against the faded yellow paint and the dusty marbled tile. The resulting mishmash of gathered and donated wooden furniture softened the precision of the fifty nearly-identical baby girls, all of them under a year old.
The more severe Catholic nuns in black promised that the Buddhist nun in blue was young, but very good with the children. She had helped soothe the babies during the fever outbreak. Only a very few were lost.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do; I felt a little indecent just plucking a baby out, like I was fruit shopping at Safeway, but the Buddhist nun guided me over to two cribs that she pushed gently together.
“Twins. Lucky.”
Each crib was marked with a chart; each chart was labeled with a carefully lettered name. Mai and Hoa. Completely identical, smelling faintly of little girl and rice.
“Oh baby, they’re beautiful. Wouldn’t it be neat if we were their mothers? We’d be twin-mothers-in-law!”
Mai, hearing Deborah’s drawl, started squealing and screaming. I picked her up, on instinct, and held her head against my chest.
“And she’s even a singer! Just like me.”
Deborah had it in her head that she and I should each adopt one of the twins, but I sensed Bernie was angry at being left out. When we started talking about who we wanted to pick, Bernie and Deborah started arguing about fairness. We finally drew straws to determine the order: Bernie, me, and Deborah. I’m not sure why we kept arguing like this in our last week together. We were all normally functioning adults in our own lives, but here, just us, we were girls playing with Barbies again, sniping at each other like younger sisters.
Deborah was livid. But even if Bernie chose one of the twins, I would have let Deborah have the other. I could’ve always found another. Bernie, though, paced around the room, and stopped by one of the oldest cribs in peeling paint: Phuong. Phoenix. The Buddhist nun marked Phuong’s chart with a large red scrawl.
I nodded at Mai, who had slept so well in my arms, and the Buddhist nun marked her chart.
“But I want Mai.” Deborah crossed her arms, despite the heat.
“Deborah, sweetie, take the twin. Take Hoa.”
“No, that’s okay,” I interrupted. “If Deborah really really loves Mai—”
“Yes, I do, baby. Mai is perfect. Listen to her cry, what great lungs. She’ll be a famous singer someday. Swear to God.”
“Sweetie,” Bernie said in a hushed aside, “you chose her first. She should be yours.”
“It’s okay. I can take the twin. I choose Hoa.”
The Buddhist nun re-annotated Mai’s chart and marked Hoa’s. Deborah had Mai, and I had Hoa. I was okay with that, despite Bernie’s murderous looks. They were sisters, after all, identical twins. Mai’s crib was next to Hoa’s. Deborah was my daughter’s sister’s mother. I was more than okay; I was happy.
◆
Deborah thought love was a disease-ridden rat, carrying something like the bubonic plague. Love was an infectious and enfeebling epidemic, constantly making people do stupid things. Deborah married her Texas oilman, but she didn’t want a family at first, even though he wanted an heir. And Deborah finally acquiesced, as long as they could adopt.
I wondered why Deborah didn’t adopt from Russia or Eastern Europe, especially if her husband wanted an heir that might look more like them. It wasn’t as if Deborah was too old like Bernie, or too impulsive like me. After Deborah left, Bernie said that Deborah went to Viet Nam to embarrass her husband.
But I doubt that’s right. It can’t be right.
One afternoon, when Deborah and I were sitting in Liên An’s plastic chairs and drinking coconut sinh tô shakes, Deborah told me about one of the Miss Texas pageants. About a pregnant contestant, who wasn’t really showing yet. About how Deborah found her sobbing in the hotel bathroom stall. About how Deborah had touched her arm and thought about how many abortion clinics she and her family protested against growing up. About how Deborah had only wanted to touch the faces of those terrified high school and college girls who braved the picket lines to step inside those clinics. “You should’ve seen their eyes.”
And maybe one of those girls she spat at was young and Asian and terrified. That’s why I think Deborah wanted to adopt from Vietnam.
◆
There are only so many times that plane can hit that building in your head. But I still dream about it at night. After watching that same clip, over and over again on CNN, after hearing the black box tapes rebroadcast over Voice of America, after waking up drenched in sweat under a shimmering, gauzy mosquito net, how can we raise children in a world like this? Are we saving our baby girls, bringing them home with us? They said that those terrorists were Americans from other countries, that everyone thought they were just normal American guys, with jobs and wives and families. Would Hoa ever be as American as I needed her to be?
We promised that they’d all know each other. And even Deborah felt safe making this breezy guarantee. Maybe we’d pretend to arrange visits, but Bernie and I knew that we’d be the ones who would see each other—Bernie had no doubt that she’d never see Deborah again.
But I’m different. I chose Deborah’s baby’s twin sister. Hoa would be forever bonded with her sister. Maybe Hoa would be a singer, too. Just like Mai.
◆
We all knew something was wrong that morning.
Liên An rushed us out of bed, earlier than usual, and we saw a nun sitting at our card table in the front room. We ran towards the orphanage, without a morning shower or explanation, Bernie still in her pajamas and the nun trailing behind us.
Dr. Phúoc stood in front of the nursery’s barred door.
“One of the babies died last night. Natural causes; no accidents. She just died.”
“Please, do you know which one? What’s her name?”
“Mai.”
Deborah wailed her sorrow, and there was nothing anyone could do. Bernie and I felt lucky, invincible even. But we took care not to show how grateful we were as we half-carried Deborah back to the hotel.
“Mesdames, the nurse was checking on the babies as usual. One twin was crying, and when the nurse held her, she noticed that her sister was cold. There was nothing we could do.”
Liên An brewed a special artichoke tea and cooked something warm with green onions to take to Deborah’s room.
Bernie and I played awkward tricks of bridge and made hushed plans for our futures. Will you teach her Vietnamese? When will you tell her how she was adopted? Bernie was worried because she lives in Reno where there aren’t a lot of Vietnamese.
Why didn’t we acknowledge that someone’s baby had just died?
I tried to comfort Deborah, but she pushed me out of her room.
◆
My job flew me to New York City last year.
I saw a Broadway musical, visited the Statue of Liberty, walked through Central Park, and, while cabbing back from the Ellis Island ferry stand, accidentally passed through Ground Zero.
It’s just an empty space.
It’s not a hole, not a blast site, but an absence, sheltered by crowding skyscrapers. An empty battlefield, just like the ones Dr. Phúoc showed us.
I heard a bored teenager ask, “What are we supposed to be looking at?”
How do you cry for a baby you hardly knew?
◆
Liên An took me to the gilded temple on the outskirts of town. We knelt and burned incense, and I saw the Buddhist nun crying silently.
“I did a bad thing.” The young woman in the blue habit whispered to me just outside the temple walls. We stood in the humid night, next to the dimly lit chè stand, while Liên An sat on her motorbike, coolly waiting for us to finish. “I did not mean to confuse the Doctor. I only put Mai in Hoa’s crib for the afternoon. And then Hoa, she dies!”
I need my baby.
“So which baby is dead? Mai? Or Hoa?”
“Hoa is dead. But I screamed when she felt cold, when she die. And the doctor come in and think Mai is the dead baby!”
“Why did you put Mai in Hoa’s crib?”
“They have to know each other’s lives—I do not know when they will next see each other. You Americans might never let them know each other. I put them together. I know who is who. I never mix them up. At least now the girl will dream of the other one. You will tell. You will not get in trouble. You will tell if you think you must.”
The young nun left me, newly unburdened. I walked slowly to Liên An.
Hoa is dead. But on the official yellowing paper, it was Mai.
This was the deal I made with God: if Deborah woke up the next morning and noticed something different with Hoa, any comment, any doubt, I would confess what the nurse told me. If not, Mai would become my little Hoa.
◆
Deborah left in the middle of the night. We didn’t know how. When I woke up, Liên An was mopping the floor of Deborah’s room, pretending that she never existed. She could have chosen another baby. Why come all this way, and for nothing?
Bernie and I ate breakfast in silence, trying to reconfigure our broken relationship, almost as if we never really knew each other. Bernie said that she and Deborah had talked the night before. Bernie said I wouldn’t understand.
Of course, I was overjoyed at keeping my baby, exultant and jubilant. Yet I felt pity for Deborah and her loss, guilt for my own child’s dead sister. And Bernie and I, we both began to realize how precarious our little table of cards is. How mean the world is outside our Hotel Joy Joy. How easily it seeps in.
◆
I think that love is a wounded bird. A small, caged animal that keeps trying to flee, that panics as it starts to enjoy its captivity. Some strange creature that becomes oppressive in its need, that can turn pity into a weapon. Love demands so much from you, just takes and takes and never gives back, even as it drains all that is you away.
I imagine the day my seven year-old daughter will sing in her second grade talent show. Perhaps the chalky primary school auditorium will remind her of another echoing room of fifty wooden cribs and screaming baby girls. Perhaps she’ll be scared, but I’ll know she can sing. I’ll smooth her crushed velvet dress, brush her long silken hair, and tell her a story about how her aunt Deborah said she’d be a famous singer someday.
I’ll tell her about two large planes that crashed into towers, and about a Buddhist nurse in blue who made sure she shared at least one dream with her twin sister. She won’t understand any of this, won’t even remember anything beyond the words to the song she will be singing, but I’ll whisper all of this in her ear.
I can see her now, moving forward and shuffling her feet across the bare stage until she reaches the soft circle of warm light. And maybe, just maybe, as her piano starts the accompaniment and she starts to sing, she will see her dead sister’s ghost wave to her in the audience.
And she will know what it means to love. And what it means to be the one left behind.