He received the letter in the mail, enveloped between the week’s full-colored grocery ads and bank statements for previous tenants named James and Marina.  The letter was addressed from Ho Chi Minh City, written in a reluctant blue crawl where, just six years prior, the word “Saigon” would have been.  The scribble of message hovered above and occasionally below the lines of a sheet of paper with frayed edges – probably a quick rip from a spiral notebook he had also left behind.

The words covered less than half a page, an anomaly for his mother who could write pages upon hand-written pages about the pork she had caramelized on a Monday, the less vibrant shades of pink and red in the skins of dragon fruit and rambutan at the market, and all the metaphors she could summon about mountains, oceans, wind, rain, mothers, sons, and fathers.

Instead, the Vietnamese was brief:

 At “thank you,” he stood staring at the inked letters, watching the diacritics blend into the vowels and consonants.  “Bao, your father is dead” blurred with “The Viet Cong sent a letter,” forming a fragmented blue line.  He blinked, trying to separate the words.  The siren of an ambulance wailed and broke his concentration from the mess of foreign sentences.  He estimated that he had been staring for ten minutes.  After re-reading “500 USD,” he folded the letter along its well-worn lines and shoved it into the back pocket of his black slacks.  It was time to go to work.

This time, it was a 6-hour evening shift at the Café Du Monde.  He stood alone at the large industrial sink in the kitchen’s back corner, the sleeves of his white button-down rolled up to the biceps, washing the lipstick, loose coffee grinds, and powdered sugar off of porcelain mugs and plates.  He was allotted one smoke break and one coffee break, both of which he took at the sink – five or so minutes with his cigarette, ten sips of chicory coffee to stay awake.  He poured the rest of the Café Du Monde coffee and whole milk concoction down the sink, where it swirled with the already muddied water.  By then, a stack of cups, dozens of plates, and three pans coated in frying grease had already begun to clutter the sink.

“Where’s your hat?” his supervisor asked while shutting the washroom door behind him, breaking the consistent hum of tourist chatter about their visits to Bourbon Street and shrimp po’ boys at Mother’s down the street.  He hated the white paper forage hat that he was required to wear, despite being hidden away from entranced customers in the café’s main covered patio.  The hat fell off when he had to maneuver large pans into the sink, and went limp on his head from the steam of near-scalding water.

“This hat makes me feel fucking stupid,,” he wanted to say.  Instead, his eyes alternated between the opaque sink water emanating lines of heat, the double-knotted shoelaces of his supervisor’s black Oxfords, and the damp paper hat he had thrown atop a garbage heap of beignet pieces.  The sink gurgled as it drained, momentarily silencing the wordless exchange.

“When I talk to you, you answer, you hear me?” said his supervisor taking two steps forward – the steel toe of the Oxfords nearly rubbing against the mesh of tennis shoes. 

He heard a sizzle from the adjacent room – the hiss of dough hitting hot vegetable oil in the deep fryer.  He heard the murmurs of conversation from the main patio.  “Fuck this hat,” he wanted to hear himself say.

He tried to reach behind his back, where his holster would have been.  His fingers felt the outline of the folded plea for 500 USD protruding from his back pocket.  He thought of the last time he had seen his father alive – at a karaoke in Cho Lon when Phouc Binh fell to the communists.  His father had rounded up every warm body at his government office and purchased bottles of Tsingtao for everyone he could point to.

“Bao, drink,” his father had said to him, shoving a green beer bottle into his hands.  “Better piss away our money before the Viet Cong do.”

He had downed the bottle of Tsingtao and ordered one more as he watched his father unravel his tie and sing Que Sera Sera. 

“I asked, ‘Where is your hat?’” His boss repeated.

“Fuck this hat and this job,” he would have said in normal circumstances.

Instead, enveloped in the kitchen’s heat, he began to weep.

“Hey, did war make you a pussy or something?” his supervisor said surprised by the muffled sobs.  He took two steps back with his steel toe Oxfords.  “Stop crying and get back to work.”

He wiped the perspiration and tears from his cheeks and leaned against the warm metal of the industrial sink.  The edges of the letter pressed through fabric, lightly piercing his body.  He lit one of last two Marlboros from his breast pocket.  “Didn’t cry when they told you Saigon was gone and you couldn’t go home,” he thought wrapping his lips around the filter of the cigarette.  “Not even a cry when Huy drunkenly kicked you in the nuts for accidently drinking his Remy.”

He exhaled, watching smoke linger before him, spreading and fading into the room’s humid air. 

“Over a fucking hat,” he said in sharp Vietnamese.

He let out a chuckle that trailed into a sigh.  Then, he reached into the waste bucket and picked up the forage hat.  

It was midnight when he left the Café Du Monde and walked to the nearest ATM on Decatur Street – a small machine with faded buttons inside an over-priced liquor store.  He was hoping for a mental calculation mistake, a delay in cashing a rent check, or a windfall, but he was right:  10 dollars overdrawn, 15 dollars in savings.  Not even enough to withdraw the 20-dollar minimum.

He went through the recent purchases in his head: a dozen eggs that he had fried every morning and eaten with day-old beignets.  A six-pack of Bud Light split with the friend he had accosted for Thursday night company.  A lotto ticket that he and Huy had desperately scratched off at midnight in the middle of a liquor store.  They promised to buy a fishing boat and dinners for women with their winnings.  There was the three dollars’ worth of quarters to wash and dry his uniform.  A pack of Marlboros, a bar of soap, a roll of toilet paper, and a small black pocket comb from the drug store.  The rent of apartment that was split six ways with every Vietnamese man he could befriend in the city.   

He took the bus the back to New Orleans East with a token he could spend on nothing else.  Looking out the window, watching the lights of neighborhood homes turn into a time-lapse, he thought about all the ways his father could have died.  In Biloxi, as he was collecting eggs on a chicken farm one morning, there was a rumor that they were sticking Southern Vietnamese into leftover American Conex boxes, leaving them to burn in the corrugated metal during the peak of a dry season.   In Jackson, as he mopped the floor of a Chinese restaurant, two of his comrades spoke of families having to live off a fistful of white rice every week.  “Lucky we’re in America,” he heard one of them say, chuckling as the man patted his penguinesque stomach that peeked over the belted waist of his pants.  As the bus inched closer to his apartment complex, he thought about how his father could have killed himself: after the last helicopter flew from the American Embassy, after the Viet Cong drove their tanks through Saigon, after he ran home to burn all of his papers with a candle from their alter.  A few blocks away from his apartment, he forced himself to stop.

In the two-bedroom apartment, he walked past unfolded shirts, a tray of cigarette butts, and a half-drunken bottle of Remy Martin on a glass coffee table they had hauled from a corner two blocks away.  It was too early for drunken Vietnamese men to return from karaoke and interrogate him about where he had been or if he had managed to find or buy a fuck.  Under the couch, he had hid a yellow, rusted biscuit tin.  He sat on the couch, the tin in his lap, and lit his last cigarette.  With his free hand, he excavated through the layers of Vietnamese photos in the tin, which concealed the old Smith & Wesson pistol he used with the Americans and a stack of postcards and magnets from Baton Rogue and New Orleans that he’d intended to send home months ago.  This time, it would have to be the silver Seiko watch.

--

At the nearest 24-hour pawnshop on Gentilly Boulevard, he showed the pawnbroker the watch.  The pawnbroker eyed the Seiko for a moment and turned back to an episode of Cops on his handheld television.

“60 dollars,” the pawnbroker muttered, impatiently watching two police officers march a shirtless man away from a dilapidated house. 

Writhing for words, he began tracing numbers with his fingers in the air.  The pawnbroker, irritated by the sight of a Vietnamese man gesturing widely in his store, relented and gave him a pen and a spiral pad.  The “600” he wrote elicited a verbal “No,” the “550” a strikethrough with a pen.  The pawnbroker returned to his viewing of Cops, delighted that the new sought-after criminal was a woman.

He grabbed the pen back to write more and more offers.

With each subsequent refusal of a “450” and a “325,” he paused to calm his quarreling thoughts.  With each slash of an offer, he mentally reduced the amount of rice and fruit that could be placed at his father’s alter.  At “275” he promised himself that he would never return to this pawnshop like this again.  With “225” he felt homesick. 

Finally, he relinquished a “120.” 

With a nod, the pawnbroker opened a drawer.  Licking his fingers, the pawnbroker counted six bills and pushed them across the counter.  He placed his hands on top of the bills, watching the pawnbroker thumb the dials of the Seiko. He wrapped the bills in the paper riddled with the offers and refusals and carefully placed it in the envelope from Ho Chi Minh City.

--

           

He walked to his apartment from the 24-hour pawnshop on Gentilly Boulevard while clutching the envelope of money sitting deep in his pockets.  He imagined his father’s watch in the pawnshop window, sandwiched between an alto saxophone dented at the bell and a battery-less hand drill.  Among the clutter, he could see the shimmer of the two-decades old silver links that escaped unblemished from Vietnam to Mississippi, tarnish-free from a light weekly polish with his father’s old jeweler’s cloth.  At two different stoplights, he wondered if it were too late to buy back what he had given away.

Without his watch, he guessed from the rare sight of cars and the moist air that it was two in the morning.  The sunless, damp heat invited the nipping of mosquitos on his skin.  He swatted at the pests with his free hand in part from their nuisance, but mainly to avert his attention from thoughts of his father’s death spliced with images of his watch on an American man’s arm.  He wondered, waiting for another mosquito, if there was enough for his mother’s train ticket and whether it would ever be safe enough to go home.  He felt the light sting of a mosquito ready to be swatted.

At the apartment, he found Huy splayed across the couch still dressed in the shale collared shirt of his machinist uniform.  From the first bedroom, the gargled snores of two others reverberated and filled the apartment.  He reached for the yellow, rusted biscuit tin under the couch.  The rustle of photos and revolver against tin startled Huy from his sleep.  

"Back so late?” Huy asked, yawning through his Vietnamese.

“I was working an extra shift.”  

“If you’re working so much, you must have enough to pay me back for the Remy and the eggs you took last week,” Huy said, exuding a bitter stench of Bud Light and the last embers of a cigarette.

“I can’t.”

“I don’t know why you’re making pastries and coffee for white people.  It’s a job for a woman."

“Not now.”   

“You get paid like a woman.”

He grabbed Huy’s arm, firmly gripping the flesh of the forearm until he could feel the bone.  Alarmed by his own impulse, he searched for words to justify the tight grasp.

“My father is dead and I need to send money back for the funeral,” he slowly stammered, loosening his hold.  “I’ll pay you back for the Remy when I find more money.” 

He heard a distant “Fuck, I’m sorry, brother” as he walked to the bathroom with the rusted biscuit tin and a pen.  Locking the bathroom door, he placed the rusted biscuit tin on the basin of the sink.  The tin’s tapestry of photos – a series consisting of his holding a spoon after winning an impromptu ban beo eating contest against his father in Saigon and his head and shoulders peeking above the Vung Tao water on a family vacation – contrasted with the image reflected in the medicine cabinet mirror.  Splotches of toothpaste water dotted the mirror, framing a head of hair that he cut clumsily on his own every few weeks using a pair of kitchen scissors.  His cheeks had hollowed over time from the battle between Saigon memories and war memories.  His once-thick shoulders had flattened – fatigued, he had stopped lifting the unused five-gallon water bottle in the kitchen while the others were sleeping.

In the biscuit tin, he lifted the revolver and arbitrarily chose a postcard from the stack underneath it.  He turned on the overhead fan of the bathroom and lit the last cigarette from his breast pocket.  Smoldering cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, elbow stabilizing post card on the discolored porcelain of the sink basin, he abbreviated his Vietnamese message:

Before placing the postcard into the envelope with the six bills, he turned it over to see what he had picked.  Broad cursive cut across fern plants hanging over the iron balconies of an auburn creole townhouse.  A man played a trombone as he reclined against a wall.  It read: New Orleans Heritage Festival 1982.

Click here to learn more about the technical and theoretical framework for this piece.

Text by: Jennifer Nguyen; Photos and video gathered from various sources.  Top panel: The last chopper out of Saigon at the U.S. Embassy; Second panel:  Vietnamese workers at the Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, LA;  Third panel:  An American chopper delivering a Conex container during the Vietnam War; Fourth panel (from left to right): A market in Versailles (the Vietnamese enclave of New Orleans), street signs at the intersection of Saigon Dr. and Palace in New Orleans, Vietnamese American gardeners in New Orleans.