Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag

Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen sat down with me in the small tiled room of her family house I am unable to sleep. We shared a glass of cold and sweet water. On a blue plate her mother brought us cake and smiled her betel-black teeth at me but I did not feel strange in the house my country had tried to bomb into dust. In English thick and dazed as blood she told me how she watched our planes cross her childhood’s sky, all the children of Hanoi carried in darkness to mountain hamlets, Nixon’s Christmas bombing. She let me hold her hand, her shy unmoving fingers, and told me how afraid she was those days and how this fear had dug inside her like a worm and lives inside her still, won’t die or go away. And because she’s stronger, she comforted me, said I’m not to blame, the million sorrows alive in her gaze. With the dead we share no common rooms. With the frightened we can’t think straight; no words can bring the burning city back. Outside on Hung Dao Street I tried to say good-bye and held her hand too long so she looked back through traffic towards her house and with her eyes she told me I should leave. All night I ached for her and for myself and nothing I could think or pray would make it stop. Some birds sang morning home across the lake. In small reed boats the lotus gatherers sailed out among their resuming white blossoms. Hanoi, 1990