Birds of Paradise Lost

Birds of Paradise Lost

98 Birds of Paradise Lost Mister Qua’s oolong tea from Guangdong was wasted that Thanksgiving morning. As usual we sat at our corner table at the Golden Phoenix, Mister Qua’s restaurant, chatting when Mister Huy ran in as if chased by a ghost. “Undone, absolutely undone,” he yelled and waved the San Jose Mercury News expressively above his bald head. “Mister Bac has committed self-immolation.” “Self-immolation?” I mumbled, and the words vibrated in my throat, swirled between my ears, reigniting that terrifying flame of long ago. The flame blossomed quickly, a flower on fire, a restless, transparent bird of paradise in whose pistil serenely sat a Buddhist monk. “Self-immolation!” I repeated the words again, the meanings sank in finally while the flame soared and flickered, and the monk fell backward, his charred body went into a brief spasm or two and then was perfectly still. “No!” I said. “No!” Mister Qua in the meanwhile had stood up and taken the newspaper from Mister Huy’s hand as if the two of them were engaged in some desultory septuagenarian game of relay. “Are you joking?” he yelled loudly. Heads turned. His three waiters in their red jack- Andrew Lam 99 ets and black bow ties paused with their trays balancing precariously on industrious fingers. “How can this be?” he asked loudly. “I just had lunch with him here last Monday!” Mister Huy shook his head and sighed. “Read, read,” he said. He was almost out of breath, tiny beads of perspiration glistened on his liver-spotted forehead. “Mister Bac went all the way to Washington, D.C., to do it.” What immediately struck me were not the words themselves but the two photographs that accompanied the article. One, the larger, was a blurry image of a figure on fire, a human torch swirling in a fiery circle on a landing of the Capitol building, his face lifted skyward, arms raised above his head as if waiting for a benediction from the heavens. The smaller was the photo of Truong Hoai Bac’s driver’s license, the one I readily recognized: Old Silver Eagle, publisher of the Vietnam Forever, smiling with mischievous eyes to the camera. As I studied the two disparate photos—life versus death—I heard Mister Qua say rather impatiently, “Out loud, Thang, read it out loud, please; you’re the professor.” Thus, on that morning, with the oolong’s bittersweet aftertaste lingering on my palate, I heard myself recite in English to a gathering crowd what turned out to be my oldest and dearest friend’s unexpected obituary: Late Wednesday afternoon a man doused himself in gasoline, marched up the steps of the Capitol building and, upon reaching the first landing , lit a match. John Learner, a tourist from North Dakota, managed to capture a photo (see far right) of the self-immolator who was later identified by the police as Bac Hoai Truong, 65, a Vietnamese American, and an editor and publisher of a Vietnamese language magazine in San Jose, California. According to his youngest daughter, Theresa Truong, 21, a senior at Georgetown University, Mister Truong did not give any indication as to what he was about to do. “He said he came to visit me since I couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving,” she reported through tears. “Then this morning he borrowed my Georgetown U sweatshirt and my car keys. He said he wanted to go for a walk around the monuments but he never came home.” 100 Birds of Paradise Lost The article went on to say that Mister Bac had left a suicide note, one that the paper translated and printed as a sidebar. So at the urging of my friends, I skipped the rest of the reporting and read our friend’s last words and testimony: Letter to the people of the free world, Communism has ruined my country. My homeland is in shambles. I am tormented by thoughts of my people living in despair under the cruel communist regime. I cannot sleep at night thinking about their suffering . I close my eyes and all I see are boat people drowning in the South China Sea and dissidents languishing in horrid prison conditions. Human rights violations in Vietnam are among the worst in the world. I denounce its re-education camps, its malaria-infested New Economic Zones and its continuing arrests of clergymen and intellectuals without...