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I Didn’t Know
- University of Georgia Press
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42 I Didn’t Know A white marble statue the size of a cat, demure as a cat, squats on a shelf by an east window, smiling under dust and the ink my childish pen traced in its contours. Cracked with water-swollen wedges from one of five stone mountains (the one they call “Heaven”), carved with an iron adze and chisels by a craftsman at Non Nuoc, it sits now, amused, surrounded by my son’s Babar, Nessie, George, Elmo, and a Harrod’s bear in a Guard’s bearskin hat. I didn’t know for a long time that my mother bought the little statue in Ben Thanh in 1963, expatriated it to southern Illinois locked in a cabinet of wonder the size of a coffin that also held old leis, a tiger-skin pocketbook, a concubine’s wooden headrest, a Thai Ramayana rubbing of a demon seducing a maiden, a junk made of the amber and ebony horn of water buffalo, silk kimonos for man and wife. A thousand petit treasures in the trunk, amid other clutter in the closedoff bedroom with her other curations: a grocery sack of my Kodachrome father (gone), chintz china of my father’s mother (dead), the treadle Singer of her own mother (dead), the horsehair blanket her Daddy (dead) lay across his lap in his Ford motorcar.All the exotic dry rot without context or catalog, jewel-headed insects in a black widow’s web. She smiled when I begged to see, pleased at my interest, happy to help me hold ivory chopsticks, proud to tell old stories, how Vietnamese on the street asked to touch my sister’s golden hair, how her maid Phuong, a i didn’t know 43 clever girl but confused, had asked, “Madame want soup? Madame want soap?” My mother served all memories, savory, sweet, or bitter, equally. How a man in the market had had his nose cut off by Communists, you could see into his skull; how the Saigon nurses couldn’t contain their pleasure that I was born a boy; how she was there when Thich Quang Duc immolated himself in protest; that the human body, anyone, everyone, melts like butter if there’s enough heat, she said. I didn’t know that about democracy. Oh, people are all alike, she assured me. Old Man Poorson in his market on our street (where I bought firecrackers she forbade) cheated his people on loaves of bread—let alone meat! Pulpit penitents, tears running down their cheeks—all cheating bastards, she said, those men bawling in church on Sunday (while my friends and I giggled over new lyrics to old hymns) and balling their secretaries Monday noon in the Herrin Motel. She didn’t much care for the manager of Woolworth’s either but made me apologize to him when I stole a little View-Master Jesus on a keychain. If you held it to the sun, He gazed upon you. I was four, and my cheeks burned from it. She smiled down at me with compassion and mercy. My mother made me laugh, impressions of a schizophrenic cousin, doing the bickering voices; hulking across our living room like a local boor, my school’s principal; her mimicking wheedle-dee-dee of the American consul in Saigon, who counseled with the voice of Slim Pickens to return home to our compound near Ton Son Nhut after my father tried to slap me from her arms. The bull dyke who lived next to us in Saigon, a woman ex-Marine, no b.s. there, boy, she told me she would have whacked your father in the head with a Griswold cast-iron skillet while he slept. I didn’t know that so my mother told me and we laughed. She smiled when she packed me off to show-and-tell at Bible camp with her white marble Buddha, a rare appearance for the little guy, in on the joke I didn’t yet get. Her Daddy had been an alderman in that church, but my mother resigned as secretary due to their complete and total hypocrisy, jerks who looked down on a single mother when it was your father the one ran off with that whore. Now hurry or you’ll miss it entirely. As long as it [44.197.191.240] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:44 GMT) 44 i didn’t know was on the way, we drove past that woman’s house...