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Overview
“Cultures clash, but love conquers, with some fascinating twists and plenty of intimate details.” —Kirkus Reviews
James Sullivan's Over the Moat details his travels in Vietnam to bicycle from Saigon to Hanoi. He has just finished graduate school and has an assignment to write a magazine story about a country that is still subject to a U.S. trade embargo. But in Hue, the old imperial capital of Vietnam, the planned three-month bike trip in the fall of 1992 takes a detour.
Here, in a city spliced by the famed Perfume River and filled with French baroque villas, he finds himself bicycling over a moat to visit a beautiful shop girl who lives amid the ruins of the last imperial dynasty of Vietnam. She falls for him, but there's a catch. Several other suitors are vying for her hand, and one of them is an official with the city's police force. Over the Moat is the story of Sullivan's efforts to win Thuy's favor while immersing himself in Vietnamese culture, of kindly insinuating himself in Thuy's colorful and warm family, and of learning how to create a common language based on love and understanding.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466871946 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 489 KB |
About the Author
James Sullivan was born and raised in Quincy, Massachusetts, and attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His journalism has appeared in a number of national magazines. He lives with his wife Thuy and their two children in Scarborough, Maine.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
EVEN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, the cyclo drivers were trying to line up clients. "You go boom-boom?" a driver asked, coasting to a stop beside me.
"No boom-boom," I said.
"I know good place you go boom-boom."
"No."
"Ma-sah?" he asked. "Very good ma-sah near here."
Massage was the euphemism for boomboom. I looked back at the door to the Hotel Trang An. I was sure, when I left our room, that Relin was almost ready to go. But in the last couple of days, I'd been realizing that I couldn't be sure about anything anymore.
The cyclo driver asked several more questions, which I ignored, then came down off the high saddle of his rickshaw pedicab, pulled up the brake, and circled my mountain bike, appraising the technology as a fellow cyclist.
"Not Russian," he said, confirming it.
"Khong lien xo," I said, repeating his words in Vietnamese.
He caught his breath, astonished. It didn't take much.
From across the street, a savvy young student in a red kerchief, the vanguard of a whole bunch of kids trudging home from school, hailed me with a sharp salute. "Hello do-la," he called out.
Soon I was surrounded by earnest young students, chirruping questions: What your name? Where are you from? How old are you? What the time? What your job? I humored them with fibs about Fred from Alaska. They didn't care about my responses, only that they could elicit one. An older student then embarked upon an advanced set of getting-to-know-you questions, common all over the country: How much you earn for one month? Do you have a lover?
"It's like a greatest-hits package," Relin called down from our Trang An window. "The whole trip all over again. The kids, the cyclo driver. And look, here comes the banana saleswoman."
I looked at a wristwatch I wasn't wearing. "Isn't there a train to catch?"
"I was just letting you have this moment," Relin said, ducking back inside. "The trip's a rap, Fred," I could hear him saying out of sight. "We pulled it off."
"Not French," the cyclo driver said, confirming that.
I shook my head.
"Australian?"
He was circling around, I could tell. "American."
"Ohhhhh," he stepped back, as if floored, but rebounded with a grin. "First time you come back my country?"
I looked at him. He was older than me by a generation, and his shirt front was a pastiche of nonsensical English phrases: Delightful Mind. Enjoyed the Members. Three Dear Boys Have a Top Sense Feeling. I tried to remember if I'd run across him during my previous five days in Hanoi or anywhere else in the two months I'd been bicycling up from Saigon. I didn't think so.
"Come back? Come back since when?" I asked.
My question seemed to make him shy, as if I'd asked for the revelation of an embarrassment. He flicked his fingers beside either ear, puffed his cheeks, and imitated the sounds of bombs exploding. Since the war? Was this my first time back since the war?
This was January 1993. In the States, they were still asking for my I.D. But this was Vietnam, where much had petrified since 1975, including the cyclo driver's perception of what an American looked like. To him, perhaps, we would always be young and earnest and up to something.
"My first time in Vietnam. I'm twenty-seven," I said.
"When you come back America?"
"Go back" was what he meant. "Two days."
Across the street, two boys lit firecrackers from a burning stick of joss and flipped them shamelessly into the wheels of passing traffic, fast, one after another, like addicts. The driver frowned with exaggerated disgust. He counted the digits of one hand with the thumb of his other. "In four days, the Tet New Year."
*
I followed Relin through dense downtown traffic, most of it two-wheeled and some of it four-legged. Though midday, it looked as if many people were returning home for the holiday already, carrying boughs of vibrant pink peach blossoms like torches; strapped to the backs of many bicycles were tiny potted orange trees called kumquats. I kept losing sight of Relin as he weaved through the traffic, and every time I caught sight of his Day-Glo yellow Gore-Tex he was a little further ahead. Beside a lime-juice vendor, he stopped and waited.
"Fancy me waiting for you," he said.
"My chain needs oil."
"No it doesn't. You got a grand total of one, maybe two more kilometers to go before we box these boys."
He refolded his map of Hanoi, squaring off a grid that would take us to the station. I ordered a lime juice from the old woman and oiled my chain just in case.
"We don't have time," he said, glancing at a watch that bulged off his wrist.
He'd shaved the goatee he'd grown over the previous two months. In one of the mesh side pockets of his panniers, there was a Thailand guidebook he'd bought used at a travelers' café. We'd made reservations on a Thai Air flight out of Saigon. One week to recoup on an island in the Andamann Sea, where we would also write a magazine article about our trip, then back to the States.
"Do they celebrate Tet in Thailand?" I asked.
"No, just lethargy, and on Koh Pi Pi, the sunset."
Relin rarely got ahead of himself this way. He was the most unhurried person I'd ever met. But it had been raining since we'd ridden in to Hanoi, the ceiling of clouds lower every day, the faint, gray drizzle casting a spell over everything. It would be sunny on that island.
In the maze of streets that lay between us and the train station, I lost him. As trailer, it was my responsibility to keep my eye on Relin; we'd decided this on the bike trip. But I'd lost him somehow and now found myself following four high school girls, pedaling side by side in formation. They sat perfectly erect on their bike seats, their long black hair fanned out beneath their sun hats, immaculate in their white ao dai dresses, like a mobile tableau en route to another exhibit.
I made several uninformed turns, operating on hunches, before I stopped, really lost now, and looked down at the transparent map case on my handlebar pannier. I hadn't changed the map since Hue. It was drawn in blue pen on a four-by-six-inch spiral notebook page. Thuy could have pointed out her address on a city map, but I'd asked her to draw one and then watched her, the peculiar decisions she made for iconography: parallel lines for the roads we'd take, crescents for gates and bridges, a square box for the landmark bazaar near her house, all rendered in a hand so light and so steady, she could have been at homework.
We were to visit for tea. That was all, tea and light conversation as we'd been having all the way up Highway 1. That afternoon before tea, Relin and I had worked on our language skills, reading from disintegrating phrase books we'd picked up in Saigon. I memorized new questions and worked on pronunciation with a hotel concierge who bolstered my confidence, telling me I spoke "Vietnamee very goose."
I also figured on a number of ways to work Relin's girlfriend into the conversation. Something about the years they had been together. How he valued the gymnastics of witty banter in a relationship. How compatible they were. I knew otherwise. I'd paid attention to a recent phone call and heard lots of disgruntled sighs and expensive gaps of silence. But I needed her now. That evening, as we'd pedaled over Hue's Perfume River, I asked about Deborah.
"Why are we talking about her now?" Relin asked.
"I'm sure we'll be talking about her later," I said.
"No lover," Relin said, braking to make his point. "If they ask the question about the lover tonight, I don't have one."
"Judas."
"Don't flatter me."
I looked upriver as passengers on a sampan leaned over the gunwales and let loose a flotilla of colorful paper lanterns, each guttering votive light symbolic of a wish released. "No promises," I said.
"Okay, then what was the name of that girl who lived in the guest house next to ours on Bui Vien in Saigon?"
"The girl I bought bananas from?"
"Bananas? It looked like more than bananas to me."
"Baloney."
"Right, but I'm the only one who'll know it. Tonight, no Deborah."
At the flag-tower bastion, a giant billboard rendition of Ho Chi Minh, illuminated by klieg lights, smiled down on us. We turned right off Le Duan Street and tunneled fifty feet through one of the Citadel's arched gates, per the salesclerk's directions.
Inside, the neighborhood was blacked out, and the clouds were spitting rain. At roadside, vendors sold liter bottles of amber-colored petrol, made luminescent by an oil lamp set among them. We spanned another body of water, a canal perhaps, and I checked my bearings against the map. My cheap Chinese flashlight lit a gatepost numbered in the thirties. The numbers dropped at the next gatepost, then rose again.
We doubled back to the Citadel gate and made a fresh start. The house numbers rose sequentially, then plummeted suddenly, then began to seesaw randomly. Sometimes there were two numbers, separated by a slash mark; other times, a letter was affixed to the numeral; other times there was a tiny bis superscript.
After twenty minutes up and down, I steered into the small front yard of a home that didn't have a numeric designation but looked to be the right place. Motorcycle frames littered the front yard, and tarpaulin rice bags covered the windows. A bare-chested man came to the door, smoking a cigarette.
"Day la nha gia dinh Nguyen?" I asked. Is this the Nguyen home?
"Vang," he said. Yes.
Three more men filled the doorway behind him, one carrying an oil lamp, another with a clear jug of rice wine in which I could see the coil of a large drowned snake. "Where you from?" one of the drunks blurted.
"Nha gia dinh Nguyen?" I repeated my question.
"Vang," the first man said again. He didn't move. He tossed his cigarette into a puddle, and I listened to the fizzle.
I kicked down the stand of my bike. The house was tiny, a single room, and I could see the legs of someone jutting into the light of the doorway.
"I've read about those snakes in rice wine," Relin said, setting his kickstand. "They only drown the poisonous ones, often for medicinal purposes, as a cure for night blindness, but as an aphrodisiac too."
"Thuy o' day?" I asked.
"Khong," the bare-chested man said. No.
"Day la nha so muoi sau?" Relin asked. Is this house number sixteen?
"Khong," he said.
We wheeled out quickly but drew no closer to number sixteen. In other peoples' courtyards, they'd give my map a cursory glance, turn it over, find nothing interesting, and invite us in for tea.
In the midst of our search, the power flickered on. A satisfied groan of half-surprise went up in the neighborhood, like people responding to marginally impressive fireworks. But finding the right number sixteen proved no more promising in the light. More than forty minutes late now, I remembered the time a girl had given me her phone number, and it turned out to be a joke shop. When I saw her again, I told her she had given me the wrong number, and she told me she had not.
"Want to call it a night?" Relin asked.
"One more house."
I went on to another house, and another, and another. I shined my flashlight in the faces of other people, most of whom actually answered to the name Nguyen. A maze of Nguyens. A house of mirrors, I thought, pulling out of one courtyard a second time. Relin stopped following me. He parked beneath a streetlight, and I passed him, going one way and volleying back the other.
I went over a bridge and coasted down, straining to listen more carefully now, as if that's what I hadn't been doing. Beyond the motorbikes and the erratic buzz of a broken fluorescent light tube, I could hear the plaintive call of a small girl's voice, "My ... my ... my." She was standing in her pajamas between two gate pillars, disconcertingly short in the darkness, piping the one word at regular intervals. The word meant "American," and for one seized moment as the girl fastened her eyes on me, I had this feeling that I'd been found out here in this less traveled part of the city. But the word, inflected another way, the way she was sounding it, was the word for "bread." She was simply calling for one of the bread peddlers who were out on their nightly rounds.
Relin joined me, and we started back in silence. I was trying to persuade myself that this map did not lead to a joke shop and at the same time trying to figure out why the hell that mattered if it did. I was on a bike trip. In Vietnam. In a small city I could not have placed on a map six months earlier. All of that was supposed to preclude the disappointment that now had a grip on me. It was ridiculous, and the light laughter we heard from the bicyclists trailing us seemed to confirm that.
When those cyclists flanked us, I glanced at two women, cloaked in hooded ponchos and rigidly attentive of the road ahead. They kept to our pace in silence as we passed into a brightly lit stretch outside the local market, and when I glanced over again, I found Thuy, her profile glistening with beads of rain that had begun falling again.
"You're very late," she said without looking over.
"We had trouble."
"I know. Do you know, when you didn't come my house, my young sister and I, we came to look for you?"
I craned my head to the side and nodded at her sister, then looked back at Thuy. The drawstring of her hood was tightened so that only her face showed, small and pear-shaped like a silent film actress. Her lips were shining with gloss and moisture, and for a desperate moment I wished for something to go wrong here, for the revelation of a broken tooth or a cloud in her eye not seen before, something to let me off the hook, to let me turn away and remember that she was beautiful except for that. Instead, she swerved her eyes to glance at Relin, who was moving in off the road, then swerved them back, a gorgeous little gesture that floored me: She looked like this and did things like that.
"Why so much trouble?" she asked.
I didn't want to blame her map or my inability to count house numbers. I told her it was tricky, and left it at that, but she knew I'd had trouble with her map, and maybe she had guessed that I had second-guessed her ability to provide directions. She produced a small flashlight from beneath her poncho and shined it on my map cover. "Do you see, here is the market?" She snapped off her light, case closed.
A nervous silence possessed me, and I shuddered with it, wondering what I might say to her and why I should be feeling this way. I was here on a bike trip. Hers was a face I was supposed to photograph, and keep that way, no other. That was all.
"I ... we were trying to follow the house numbers," I said finally. "To number sixteen."
"Yes, I see," she said. "I'm sorry. But my mother, she doesn't like."
"What doesn't she like?"
"Number 116. In fact, we live at 116. But my mother, she doesn't like such the number. The fortune-teller advised against it. She likes better the number, for example, 16."
"So she just took 100 numbers away from your house?" I wondered. "Doesn't that make problems?" "No." She laughed. "Do you know, my city is very small and many people know my family."
*
Until the previous spring, Vietnam had meant little to me. I knew where Asia was and knew some people who'd traveled there, but that was it. I didn't have a history of fascination with the Far East, like Relin, or with the Vietnam War, like guys in my generation who could quote from Apocalypse Now, chapter and verse. I'd never taken a class in East Asian studies. When I thought of Buddhism, I thought of Jack Kerouac.
When I graduated from school that year, I planned to go home to Boston with my master's degree. I looked forward to it. I'd lived away since college, in Maine and California and Iowa, and for a while I had thought I would never go back home. But after two years in the Midwest, I'd begun to believe that my previous distaste for the city and the culture I had grown up in was a phase that was over now. And then one day after class, David Relin mentioned plans to spend the following year in Bangkok.
"What's in Bangkok?"
"A staging area," he said. "A hub, right in the middle of it all. Angkor Wat. Plain of Jars. Vietnam. Vietnam's opening up. They're letting travelers in now, and I've been looking at some maps, at a highway built by the colonial French. It runs up the coast from Saigon to Hanoi, and it looks perfect for motorbike or mountain bike."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Over The Moat"
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Copyright © 2004 James Sullivan.
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