Ticket to Childhood Read online

  People talk about the income gap between rich and poor, but what gap is harder to close than the justice gap between children and adults!

  That gap had never yawned greater than it did on the rainy morning when the four of us huddled in my living room, Hai and I with bruised faces, Tun and Ti with circles under their eyes, drawing up the indictment of our progenitors. The next step was obvious: a trial!

  After a brief power struggle, Hai and Tun won the role of the judges. (He argued that he was the eldest; she argued that she was the fairest. Ti never argued, and I couldn’t win on either count.)

  So Ti and I had to play the defendants.

  Hai pounded on the table with a wooden spoon. “This court will now come to order! Defendants please rise! You, sir,” he said to me, snarling, but using the proper honorific. “Do you know how late it is? Where have you been all night?”

  In the role of Ti’s father, I mumbled an apology. “Well, I met a colleague from the office, we got carried away discussing business, we had a few drinks, and one thing …”

  “Last week, you ‘had a few drinks,’ as you put it. You rode your scooter straight into a tree, and you wound up at the emergency room. Is that not correct?”

  It was all true: everyone thought that Ti’s father was a goner, but all he needed were a few stitches, and he was back at work the next day.

  I enunciated very slowly, the way drunks do when they’re trying to sound sober. I was getting into it. “I do remember it, Your Honor.”

  “Then why are you drunk again today? If you kick the bucket, who will support your daughter? Losing one parent is bad enough, but losing two is”—he searched for a suitably horrific word—“unacceptably careless!”

  I bowed my head, and groveled:

  “I know I was wrong.”

  Hai looked at me fiercely:

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  Now Tun fixed her steely gaze on poor Ti.

  “Madam,” she said. “You stand accused of insulting your daughter!”

  “That’s not true!” Ti cried. “I have always loved her!”

  “The other day, you took her shopping, is that correct?”

  “Yes, we went to the Chinese market.”

  “And you were considering two cotton blouses, am I right?”

  “Yes, one was yellow, with white polka dots, and one was blue, with a ruffled collar.”

  “And your daughter liked, nay loved, the yellow one—please correct me if I’m wrong.”

  “But, but …”

  “Yet you told her that the blue one was ‘much nicer;’ that ‘yellow showed the dirt,’ and so forth. You completely ignored her taste and feelings in the matter, and bought the one you liked yourself!”

  Ti, in a blue blouse, started giggling.

  “Madam, this is no laughing matter, I assure you! And we are not only speaking of a single shopping trip, are we Madam? You have deprived your daughter of her free will not only in the matter of the blouse in question, but when it comes to socks!” (We were now all cracked up, except for Tun, who was keeping a straight face.) “And not only socks … even underpants! The most intimate decision a girl can make!”

  “I’m sor—sor … ry, Your Honor,” Ti managed to gasp, doubled over with guffaws.

  The trial lasted several hours. We got our resentments out of our systems. It was like a great purge. Regrettably, though, our joy and triumph were ephemeral. Later that evening, when I walked Hai home, we were met at the door by his father.

  “Where have you been?” he shouted at Hai. “Why are you home so late? Do you know what time it is?”

  10. And I have sunk

  Hai and Tun now flatly denied that any such trial had ever taken place. Commit such a sacrilege? Not Mr. Hai, the CEO, nor Madam Tun, the Headmistress! But Ti and I had not only been the defendants—we were the witnesses!

  Retrieving these images from the closet of my memory, I feel a pleasant wave of nostalgia. It is like finding some precious souvenir from a happy trip that’s been stored for years on a top shelf and suddenly turns up in a spring cleaning.

  But even though I have forgotten many scenes from my past, I have tried, as an adult, to see myself through a child’s eyes: not perfect, in other words; not always conscious of myself; a little ridiculous, maybe—like a man unaware of his open fly.

  In fact, our personality needs the corrective of a little comic humbling, from time to time. “Hey, Mister, the cucumber has left the salad …” Many adults pay more attention to the tidiness of their appearance than to the zippers of their character, which, carelessly left open, expose its faults. But they are less observant of themselves, in this respect, than children are of them. Or they close ranks in embarrassment, and pretend not to notice.

  The way that Hai and Tun dealt with their embarrassment at my paper—the unzipping of our childhood—is a case in point. All children are poets, who hear the music and see the colors of letters on a page—magic portals to a wilderness without fixed meanings, where intuition shows you the way. All that adults see are the neat rows of black lines, the building blocks of definitions. And Hai and Tun would have censored my paper with the ink of reason.

  Another metaphor: Adults like to keep the cobwebs out of their attics—to clean up the past, as Hai and Tun tried to do. But when you brush those cobwebs away, you may—as Ti perceived so astutely—be brushing off diamond dust.

  Well, what I have been writing is now no longer a scholarly treatise on children for an international science workshop. A treatise must be sober and factual—written with the ink of reason. But a work of fiction has no such constraints. So let me add a disclaimer here: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely (or almost) coincidental.”

  And let me add a further disclaimer: there was never an eight-year-old boy in Vietnam who asked an eight-year-old girl to “get into bed” with him. Four children never once tried their parents in absentia for crimes against intuition. A lovely little garden of plum trees (they were actually pretty sorry to begin with) was never destroyed in a search for buried treasure. A foot was never a mouth, a hat was never a notebook, and no one ate rice from a wash basin. UNESCO can get on with its important work without worrying about a worldwide epidemic of childhood boredom.

  I’m not afraid, now, of how Hai and Tun will react when they read this. I am afraid, however, what my parents will think. And not only them, but all the parents in the world. I’m afraid they may see themselves as the mothers and fathers in the story. But I’m also hopeful that if this tale disillusions them about their model children, it will also remind them that they, too, were once less than model children. And, after all, we turned out all right: A CEO, a Headmistress, a writer, and a mother of five with a husband who loves her missing tooth.

  But if the parents who read this are disillusioned, the kids who read it may be, too—and that was intentional on my part. Yes, children, knowledge is a real treasure, but don’t confuse, as parents do, knowledge with degrees. And when you hear grownups talking about love, remember my own mistake: it’s not about dimples, or instant noodles.

  My daughter no longer asks me why men have nipples, or why thunder follows lightning, or why blood is red, and the sky is blue. But some of her questions are hard to answer.

  “They say that marriage is the grave of love. Is that true, dad?”

  I thought of Ti’s happy marriage, and of others, less successful. “It’s only a grave,” I replied, “if two people dig it. Marriage teaches you to love, but like anything worth learning, you have to work at it. And lazy students may find themselves expelled.”

  • • •

  I was not lazy, but I still suffered an expulsion.

  I remember the day that Tun moved away. Her father got a good job in the city, and the family followed him.

  A day before she left, I took the risk of borrowing Uncle Nhien’s cellphone and texted her:

  Shall we meet to say goodbye this evening? I’m so very sad!


  “Little Mui wants to see you,” Tun’s mother told her. She wasn’t angry with me anymore.

  So Little Mui and Tun drank some sweet soup together, at the Hai Dot café. A breeze was blowing off the river, and it was the first time that I felt what I now know is adult sadness.

  Many people are afraid of sadness, but I’m not one of them. I’m only afraid of boredom. Sadness, in that respect, is an excellent remedy, since it expands to fill almost any void.

  When I fell in love, sadness was the subject of my first verses:

  Since I made friends with you,

  I have known what sadness is

  And sadness has also known me

  If sadness comes tomorrow

  It will just knock at the door of a friend’s house …

  So, sadness rang my bell on the day that Tun left.

  I was watching her spooning soup into her mouth, focused on eating. She ate three bowls in a row. Later I found out that girls often eat when they are sad, though a newly divorced man I know told me the same thing: “food fills the emptiness in my heart.”

  But when she had finished her three bowls of soup, she began to weep. She had eaten three times more than I did, and now she cried six times more. Her face was as wet as if she had been sitting in the rain. Then she glanced at me rapidly and ran outside.

  And that was all there was: eating and weeping. Neither of us spoke a word.

  Ten years later, I met Tun again when I came to the city for college. (Hai was already there; Ti was my classmate.)

  The four of us had many happy reunions over the years. But I never told Tun how much I had loved her as a child.

  Another ten years elapsed—we were both twenty-eight, and Tun was about to get married—when I confessed the feelings I’d once had for her.

  “I liked you too,” she said calmly.

  “Then why did you go with Hai?”

  “Because I felt too much for you,” she answered.

  Tun’s confession left me stupefied. I couldn’t lift myself from the chair until long after she was gone—leaving a wedding invitation on the table.

  Can a boy of eight understand a girl? Can a man pushing thirty understand a woman? And does anyone in love understand himself?

  11. Wild dog camp

  The soul at birth is like a lake whose surface is unruffled until life skips the first pebble of sorrow across it.

  Great, now you know, and I can change the subject to something lighter: raising wild dogs.

  This was the project that Hai, Ti and I got into after Tun left, when we noticed that our town was full of strays. Some of them teamed up in packs, the way homeless children do.

  One them hung around my house, and I started feeding it scraps. Then I said to Hai and Ti:

  “We’ll start a wild dog farm.”

  “What for?” Ti asked, flabbergasted.

  “We’ll train them to obey us.”

  “What for?” Hai insisted.

  “To sell them, you idiot, we’ll make piles of money!”

  Financial independence from grownups is every child’s dream.

  Our farm was based at Ti’s house, which was bigger then Hai’s or mine. Also, her father was out almost all day.

  Hai and I were in charge of the training, though we fought over it, until Ti suggested, ever sensible, that we take turns.

  Hai was working with an ugly little mutt whose improbable name was Prince.

  He threw a shoe across the living room, and ordered Prince to fetch it.

  “Great! Now bring it to me!” Hai shouted, when Prince pounced on the shoe.

  But the mutt pretended to be deaf, and ran straight out of the house.

  Five minutes later, Hai had recovered Prince and tried again, but this time without shouting.

  “Bring it here,” he whispered softly.

  Prince hesitated for a moment, dropped the shoe, and obediently trotted back.

  This went on for a while. Ti and I were hysterical.

  “Watch me,” I said, “If you want to be a successful trainer, you have to use brib­ery. Whether it’s a dog, a dolphin, or a big cat, tamers always reward obedience with a treat.”

  I asked Ti to break a rice cake into small pieces.

  “Listen, you little mutt!” I told him. “If you bring me the shoe, you’ll get a delicious cracker.”

  Prince was salivating—he understood the cracker part, all right.

  “No shoe, no cracker!” I admonished him.

  Prince still didn’t get it. Or he was making fun of me.

  Hai also made fun of me:

  “Teaching Prince to disobey is really simple. Even Ti could do it, I bet!”

  “Okay, maybe we have to teach by example,” I conceded.

  So I got down on all fours, Ti threw the shoe across the room, and I crawled over to it. I started to pick it up in my hand—it was filthy—but I figured that wouldn’t help Prince get the concept, so, suppressing my gag reflex, I mouthed it. Meanwhile, though, Prince had managed to gobble up the cracker.

  “What sort of student are you?” I yelled at him. “You are the dog. I am the human.

  I chased Prince around the room, rabidly, but he escaped, and thus ended our first training session at the dog farm.

  The following week, we didn’t make any progress, except at enraging our parents.

  When all their leftovers began disappearing, Hai’s mother got suspicious, as did mine.

  When they found out that we were raising wild dogs at Ti’s house, our fathers went berserk.

  “I will cut your hands off if you continue stealing food,” my father threatened me. Hai’s father must have threatened him with the same measure. All he brought to the table, so to speak, were globs of burnt rice.

  Oddly enough, the one parent whose outrage would have been justified was very calm. Ti’s father didn’t utter a word of complaint, and Hai and I were so impressed by his magnanimity that we began to think of him as an enlightened being. That opinion was revised when we noticed that the dogs at the farm kept disappearing.

  At first, we thought they had managed to escape the pen we had rigged, inexpertly, out of scavenged chicken wire. But then Ti caught her father and Hai’s father drinking at old Ba Duc’s pub. As she watched in horror, Ba Duc emerged from the kitchen with a steaming tray of … Avert your eyes, children. Yes, that’s what had happened to our dogs. They wound up on the barbecue. What a world full of grief.

  So the dog camp folded, and our money-making schemes collapsed with it. It was lucky for Ti’s father that Tun had moved away—we would surely have tried him for his bestial treachery.

  12. Train without a conductor

  Many Asians find dog meat delicious. Some allege that it’s the favorite food in South Korea. And that’s why a lot of Western celebrities objected when South Korea was chosen to host the 2002 World Cup: canine rights.

  People in the West are horrified at the thought of eating dogs. Their priorities, I have heard, are as follows: children, women, pets, husbands.

  Within a kilometer of my house, there are at least five restaurants serving exotic meats—not only dog (that’s not exotic here) but weasel, snake, anteater, porcupine, lizard and ostrich.

  I’ve tried a few, from time to time, but I still prefer beef, pork and chicken. After millennia of culinary experiments, in which our ancestors ingested any sort of wild protein they could find—from frogs to mammoths—they decided that domesticated meat from cattle, pigs, and hens was superior in taste and tenderness, if not lowest in cholesterol. (If dinner is grazing, rooting, or pecking in your backyard, it’s also easier to catch.)

  And yes, people eat dogs. But to a child, ingesting dog meat seems as barbaric and repulsive as cannibalizing your best friend.

  Closing the farm was a painful decision, but what else could we do? With heavy hearts, Hai, Ti, and I carried each dog in our arms to a place by the river where we figured they could scavenge from the fishing boats and the dump. We turned home in sorrow—only to
realize, when we got back to Ti’s, that those sly mutts had followed us! Against her instincts, therefore, kind-hearted Ti locked her front gate and felt wretched every time she looked up from the table or the TV and saw those sad canine eyes staring yearningly at her lighted windows.

  The day the last dog slunk away, its tail between its legs, was the saddest day of our lives.

  • • •

  Tun’s departure, followed by the dog farm fiasco, was too much loss to take. It was, in a way, the end of my childhood. I became pensive, and napping no longer seemed like a punishment. I lost my enthusiasm for changing the world. I had railed at my helplessness, but now I surrendered to it. Adults, I realized, tend to avoid life’s uncharted waters and paddle along in shallow manmade canals, just like vehicles obeying traffic rules. And it’s all for the sake of safety.

  Adults have their good qualities, of course. Now that I am one, I can say so. I’m even proud of my responsible “adult” behavior. And children have their blind spots. They take parental love for granted. (The kids who complain the loudest are often the ones who are loved the best. It takes a certain security to be critical. But I’m philosophizing again.)

  Two days after this story was published, I was shaken to see a familiar car pull up at my door. It was Hai’s car, and at first I imagined he had come to quarrel with me. But then Tun got out. Each one carried an armload of books.

  “Huh? Hey? What? Why …” I was at a loss for words.

  But Hai was grinning broadly:

  “We’ve come to congratulate you,” he said.

  I looked stupidly at their piles of books—my book, I realized!

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “What do you think? We’ve bought a carload of these, and we want your autograph.”

  I still didn’t get it. “So you’re not angry with me?”

  “Why should we be angry?” Tun asked coyly.

  “You blockhead!” Hai cried in a booming voice. “We ganged up on you to stop you wasting a beautiful story on a boring conference paper that no one outside the lecture hall would read!”