Ticket to Childhood Read online

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2014 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the address above.

  Copyright © 2009 by Nguyen Nhat Anh

  English translation copyright © 2014 by William Naythons

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1032-0

  “Give me a ticket to childhood …”

  —ROBERT ROJDESVENSKY

  Contents

  Copyright

  1. When the day is done

  2. Wonderful parents

  3. Naming the world

  4. As sad as sad can be!

  5. As one grows older

  6. I am Little Mui

  7. How long can I be a good boy?

  8. How we became killers

  9. Does anybody have the time?

  10. And I have sunk

  11. Wild dog camp

  12. Train without a conductor

  About the Author

  1. When the day is done

  One day, I suddenly realized that life was dull and boring.

  The first time this happened, I was eight.

  I had the same feeling at fifteen, when I failed my high school entrance exam; at twenty-four, when I got my heart broken; at thirty-three, when I lost my job; and at forty, when I was fully employed and happily married, but then it didn’t matter.

  There are many shades of boredom, though, and eight was a dark year: I felt that the future had nothing in store for me.

  Many years later, I would discover that philosophers had, for millennia, been turning their minds inside out like a pocket looking for the meaning of life, to no avail. But when I was eight, I understood: there was nothing new out there.

  The same sun shone every day; the same curtain of darkness dropped every night; the wind in the eaves, and in the trees, moaned the same moans; the same birds sang their same songs; the crickets always chirped the same chirping; and it was true for the chickens squawking the same squawks. In short, all of life was of a sameness: worn out and dull.

  Before going to bed every night, I knew for sure what the next day would bring.

  Let me tell you: In the morning, I would try my best not to get out of bed. I would pretend to be fast asleep, ignoring my mother’s voice and lying there like a log while she shook my shoulders and tickled my feet. Once she roused me, I had to go brush my teeth and wash my face before being forced to sit at the breakfast table, listlessly chewing on something disgusting. My mother’s major concern was to make me (and the whole family, for that matter) eat balanced meals, whereas the only food I really liked—instant noodles—she considered junk.

  It is good to care about your health, obviously, especially as you get older. Who would deny it? Not me. A journalist once asked me which of humanity’s most common cares worried me the most: health, love, or money. Love, I said, was first, and health was second, and money can’t buy either, or so they say.

  But that’s for adults to think about. At eight, I didn’t like to eat balanced meals, and was forced to eat them, which I did reluctantly, which is why my mother always complained about me.

  After finishing breakfast, I’d hurry to find my schoolbooks and to load my backpack. I’d find one book on top of the TV, another on the refrigerator, and still another buried in a pile of bedding. Of course I’d forget something, as I always did. And then I’d dash out of the house.

  I walked to school, because it was near my house, but I never had a chance to enjoy the walk—I always had to run because I always got up late, brushed my teeth late, ate breakfast late, and wasted a lot of time searching for my stuff. Of this cycle my father said: “Son, when I was your age, I always neatly loaded my backpack the night before, so the next morning, I just grabbed it!” I don’t know if this was true or not—I obviously wasn’t around at the time—but now that I’m my father’s age, I say the same thing to my kids. I also boast about hundreds of other sensible things that I also never actually did. Sometimes, for our own reasons, we make up a story about our past, and keep repeating it until we can’t remember that we made it up, and if we continue to tell the same story over and over, we end up believing it.

  Anyway, as I said, that’s adult stuff.

  Now back to my story about being eight.

  I always took a seat in the back of the classroom. It was a gloomy spot, but it gave me the chance to chat, argue, or play tricks without fear of being caught by the teacher. But the best thing about sitting in the back was that the teacher never called me to the front to recite a lesson.

  How did I get away with this? Think about it: you probably have a lot of friends who aren’t on your mind all the time, right? Our memories have limited storage space, like a closet, so the names and faces that don’t get a lot of use are stored in the back, where you forget them until you see a familiar face on the street. Then, suddenly, you remember they exist. “Hey, weird—I haven’t seen him for ages,” you think. “Last year, when I was broke, he lent me a twenty.”

  Likewise with my teacher: out of sight, out of mind. The thick hedge of dark heads in front of me blocked her view of my face, which obstructed her recall of my name, so she forgot to call on me.

  Here’s how we referred to school in those days: wearing out the seat of your pants, because we spent so much time sitting on a hard bench. (But let’s not be coy—let’s call it what it really was: jail.) I didn’t like a single subject: not math, not calligraphy, not reading, not dictation. I only liked recess.

  Who was the adult benefactor that invented recess? What a genius! Recess is an open door. It’s an open door in your brain that lets the teacher’s droning whoosh out like so much hot air, and it’s the door of a cage that frees you to forget your cares.

  My friends and I spent those precious moments of freedom playing football or marbles. More often, though, we got our thrills from chasing each other, fighting, or wrestling until the neatly-groomed students who had sat so quietly wearing out their pants looked like a bunch of hooligans with bloody knuckles and black eyes, dressed in their mothers’ dishrags.

  Maybe you’re wondering why, under the circumstances, I don’t tell a story about the fun we had after school. That’s because there wasn’t any. We just went from one form of house arrest to another.

  I’m not exaggerating. Every day, when I went home for lunch, I was welcomed at the front gate by the same worried look on my mother’s face, the same grimace on my father’s.

  “Why do you always look like a dead water rat, son?”

  Thus spoke my mother.

  My father fumed like a dragon: “You got in a fight again?”

  “My friends hit me and I hit them back.”

  When my father took a step toward me with a violent expression, my mother interceded:

  “Please don’t. He’s been beaten up badly enough!”

  My mother and I shared a habit of dramatizing things for effect. I followed her into the house, smiling secretly.

  After that, as you can probably imagine, my mother would shove me into the bathroom. When I was as clean and fragrant as a bowl of steamed rice, she began to salve my wounds with so much
colored goo that I looked like a gecko.

  Of course, after that, I was grounded. This meant that I couldn’t pick on the little kids in the neighborhood, who made for decent sparring partners when I didn’t have my schoolmates to knock around.

  What did I do after lunch, when I was eight years old?

  Well, I took a nap!

  Putting your kid down for a nap is like tying your cow to a post so it doesn’t stray or cause damage that would rile the neighbors, who would come over and raise hell. Parents all over the world know this.

  In fact, contrary to the common wisdom, naps have no health benefits for eight-year-olds. For old people, yes. With age, your health deteriorates; hard work takes its toll, and a good night’s sleep isn’t enough to repair all the damage. So it’s true, a little nap can help the elderly—that is, people as old as thirty or forty—get back to the workday with a clearer head, so that they don’t smash a thumb with a hammer or lose control of their bladder.

  But if you have lived on this planet for only eight years, a nap makes no sense. And in some cultures—in America, for example, where people wouldn’t think of climbing into bed after lunch—kids aren’t forced to nap, either. At least that’s what I’ve heard.

  When I was eight, of course, I wasn’t thinking in global terms about local customs. I just knew that when my father took a nap, he forced me to take one, too, like the farmer who tethers his cow when he lies down for his own rest. So I lay beside him on the couch, heaving restless sighs at the thought of my friends exchanging punches outside.

  “Stop fidgeting! How can you sleep that way?” my father said, and I pretended to obey him. I lay still but my eyes were still open.

  “Shut your eyes!” my father added. But how did he know they were open if his own lids were closed?

  I tried closing my eyes, but I just succeeded in narrowing them, like the slats of a shutter, because the eyeballs were still moving.

  “Are you sleeping yet?” my father asked a little while later. How stupid is that? If I told him I was fast asleep, which I always did, he knew that I wasn’t.

  I lay like that, bored stiff, and feeling very sorry for myself, until I dozed off without knowing it.

  When I woke up, it was back to the old routine: splash some water on my face, march straight to the desk, start my homework.

  Sometimes, I was allowed a little outdoor playtime, but only under my mother’s attentive gaze (she was inside, spying on me from some secret vantage point I never discovered), and I was limited to sissy games like hopscotch or blind man’s bluff. Later, I wised up and figured out how to sweet talk my mother into letting me have “study dates” at my friends’ houses. Away from her watch, I could do what I wanted.

  After my little break—if I got one—it was back to work. The more I read, the more I forgot, but I nattered on, reciting my lessons like a parrot in order to make my mother confident enough of my diligence to leave me alone and start cooking.

  As the evening wore on, my boredom knew no bounds: while the rice was cooking, I wearily memorized page after page. When the rice was ready, I wearily ate it. Then, wearily, I went back to my books. I wasn’t allowed to budge until I had memorized all the lessons for the next day.

  It was my father who tested me, and unlike my mother, he was so thorough, determined, and unforgiving that he might have had a brilliant career as a policeman, a judge, or a tax official. He was never moved by my fatigue or by my tears, nor did he show any sympathy for the pathetic look on my face—I resembled nothing less than a spent galley slave on the brink of death.

  It went like this:

  “I’m all done, dad.”

  He approaches with a suspicious look: “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure!”

  He begins to test me, and I immediately contradict myself by flubbing the very answers that were best rehearsed. How did this happen? Did I bang my head and have a concussion without knowing it?

  “Take another go at it, son!” my father commanded, and then he turned back to his newspaper. The aggressive way he rustled its pages as he settled into his chair was a kind of warning: he would read it ten times, if necessary, down to the smallest ad for used tires, while I learned my lessons to his satisfaction. But now the words in my textbook swarmed on the page like enemy soldiers. To memorize them was to defeat them, and they seemed determined to resist me.

  You can probably guess the outcome of this battle. By the time I mastered my lesson even just passably, sleep, like quicksand, was dragging me under.

  Thus ended one day in my life.

  2. Wonderful parents

  So there you have a day in my life.

  One is enough. There is no need to describe other days, as every day was the same. “A day like any other day,” as the saying goes.

  Another way to put it is to call my life totally monotonous. The definition of monotony is dull, endless repetition. (Mono = one; tono = note.)

  Only later did I find out that adults take a kinder view of repetition—they call it stability.

  A lot of people will tell you that happiness means landing their dream job. Their plans come true—wow, life is great! Maybe it’s also great if you can predict a country’s economic growth rate.

  But wouldn’t it be a nightmare if you could also predict your emotional growth rate? Wouldn’t it spoil things if you could know, for sure, that in a month’s time, you would meet someone special; in three months, fall in love; in six months, get engaged; and so on?

  Many young people strategize their future like they’re planning an economy: age twenty-two, graduate from college; twenty-five, get married; twenty-seven, get a promotion; thirty, first kid. And so on. What precision! But if you try to live life by clockwork, if everything takes place as if according to a schedule, is there any room left for emotion? Yet I’ve discovered that one man’s boring rut is another man’s domestic harmony. It’s all a matter of opinion.

  I’ve been off on an adult tangent here, talking about married life. So let me get back to my subject: what happened when I was eight.

  But the truth is that the story I’m going to tell is related to the business of husbands and wives (a mostly depressing business) if only in the form of a game, one that kids that age love to play, without the caution that they bring to marriage as grownups, when the stakes are real.

  I got married to my neighbor Ti, a girl with a missing tooth.

  Ti was by no means beautiful. She had wild curly hair, big ears, and a swarthy complexion from her long days in the sun. And the tooth didn’t help.

  But I was willing to accept Ti as my wife, just because she liked me and obeyed me at all times. To tell the truth, I was in love with Tun, because she was the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, and had adorable dimples. But I didn’t marry Tun because I often saw her mooning at a tall boy named Hai, who was a year older than me. I didn’t know, at the time, that my feelings about Tun and Hai had a name—jealousy.

  I hated them, but you’ll see what I did about it.

  So, following the advice you always hear from some cynical old aunts and uncles—choose the one who loves you, not the one you love, especially if they don’t love you back—I married Ti. And we had been married for about five minutes before we had twins: a son and a daughter. Can you guess their names?

  • • •

  “Where are you, Hai?” I called in a loud grumpy voice.

  “I’m here, dad,” Hai answered brightly, and he came running.

  “Bring me some water!” I commanded.

  (Hai was playing my son, Tun, my daughter.)

  Seeing Tun giggle, Hai became stubborn:

  “I’m doing my homework.”

  “Doing your homework?” I shouted. “You slacker!”

  Hai gouged out his earwax with a finger so he could hear more clearly:

  “Doing homework makes me a slacker?”

  “Exactly! Good boys run and jump, climb trees, swim in the river, and get into fights. They don’t
waste their time on homework.”

  Hai couldn’t believe his father’s miraculous derangement.

  “Okay, I’ll go pick a fight now!”

  He ran off, and I was extremely delighted. I had found a way to make life less boring.

  “Tun!” I shouted.

  “Yes, dad. Want me to bring you some water?”

  “Don’t get smart with me,” I growled. “I’m not thirsty anymore.”

  Then I made a show of exploding:

  “I hate intelligent children who can memorize their lessons in the blink of an eye!”

  Tun was confused. She cowered.

  “No, no, no. My memory is a sieve. I’m very stupid.”

  “That’s a good daughter then,” I said. I rummaged in my pocket for a piece of candy, stuck there from the day before. “Here’s a reward!”

  Tun took the candy with surprise. She didn’t know why a parent would reward stupidity. Maybe it was a trick. So she didn’t dare to eat it.

  I was about to tell Tun to eat the candy when Hai rushed into the house, out of breath.

  “You’ve been fighting?” I asked hopefully.

  “Yes, dad,” Hai replied. “I took on ten boys!”

  “Bravo,” I said fondly, “but why are your clothes …”

  “It’s okay, dad,” Hai replied nervously. “I worked them over, alright, but my clothes …”

  “You little devil!” I interrupted. “How can you have been in a proper brawl without ruining your clothes or bruising your face?”

  Hai looked stunned at my outburst. He didn’t know how to react except by stammering:

  “Well … well … but … but …”

  “What do you mean, ‘well well, but but?’” I cuffed him on the ear.

  My wife was puzzled by my pedagogical methods. “But it was good of him to keep his clothes clean,” she said.

  “What do you know?” I sputtered at her. (I was so angry that spit came out of my mouth, but luckily it missed her eye.) “A fight isn’t a tea party! His ancestors would have been ashamed to see him come home from a battle with clean clothes!”