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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mythago" data-source="post: 3380767" data-attributes="member: 3019">carpedavid will be going on to the next round. Apologies for not having a complete story--between trial and some medical BS I did not have time to do everything and still function. Here is what I had so far.---    Tuong had lived in the egg-yellow stucco house with his mother and pictures of his dead father for as long as he could remember. He rode his bike under the freeway and played stickball with the other kids whose fathers had brought them across the ocean after America lost the war; the lucky ones still had a daddy at home, either still in the Navy or working in the civil service. Most of the other kids’ mothers were Vietnamese, or Hmong, or even Montagnard. Tuong didn’t know what he was. He asked once, and his mother looked away and said “American. We are American, like your father.” His mother never spoke a word of anything but English until the night Grandpa Le came to their home.    Tuong was watching a Peanuts special on the little television set his mother had won for being Employee of the Month at the factory, where she sewed work shirts for the Navy men while Tuong was at school or riding bikes with his friends. Someone pounded on the door. Tuong turned to ask his mother who would be bothering them so late in the evening—all of his friends would be doing homework, or watching TV like him—and she stood, staring at the door, hugging a soapy plate to her chest like a shield.     Whoever was at the door banged on it again, as though they’d never heard of a doorbell.  A voice shouted something in a language Tuong didn’t know. His mother walked to the door, still gripping the plate. She moved slowly, with dread, as though she were being called to an execution. Tuong shrank into the couch and tried to pretend that the angry voice at the door was just one of the parents in the cartoon, making wah-wah-wah noises that meant nothing, and whoever it was would go away and stop frightening  them.    The old man standing on their doorstep was no taller than his mother. Tuong was surprised, because his mother was so little; even at ten years of age, he was almost as tall as she, and his teacher, Miss Rayburn, towered over her at parent-teacher meetings.     His mother bowed to the old man and said something in that strange language that sounded like a bag of nails dragged over concrete. The old man pushed rudely past her into the living room and turned slowly, arrogantly, as if judging their tiny home: the shelves displaying Tuong’s school photographs, the rows of pans hung on the kitchen wall, the small color television singing the praises of Dolly Madison snack cakes. The man’s gaze lingered on the photograph of Tuong’s father and mother on the day of their wedding, his father in his Navy uniform, his mother in a white cotton dress Tuong knew she’d sewed herself. The old man’s gaze finally settled on Tuong.     “Tuong,” his mother said, her voice high and trembling like a frightened girl’s, “this is my father, your grandfather, Le. He—he has come a long way from Vietnam to see us.”    The old man stared at Tuong. He ignored Tuong’s mother completely. “To see you,” he said in thick English. “And from Vietnam, yes. This time. We have had to move around much, after the war. The Americans kept our enemies away, but that is all gone now. We look out for ourselves.”    Tuong blinked. The language his grandfather and mother spoke was nothing like the Vietnamese his friends’ mothers spoke. It seemed familiar, as if he had heard it a long time ago, but he had never heard it from his mother, who refused even to learn Vietnamese or Laotian to talk to his friends’ mothers. “Grandfather,” he asked, “are we Vietnamese?”    The old man looked over his shoulder. Tuong’s mother flinched as if he had slapped her. “Vietnamese,” he said. “Is that what you have told him?”    “Grandfather, no,” said Tuong. He was suddenly very afraid for his mother, who he had always thought made out of iron.  “We are American.”    Grandfather Le turned back to Tuong. He reached over and turned the television off with an ugly snap. The house was abruptly silent.    “We are not people of any country,” he said. “I am here to teach you the traditions, because your mother was too weak. We cannot return to our homeland yet, the war is still not over for our kind. We will teach you here.”    The door slammed open again and strange, short men crowded the narrow hallway. They were carrying Grandfather Le’s baggage. Tuong’s mother began to cry.#    Tuong did not go out to play with his friends the next day, as he usually would. Grandfather Le ejected his mother from her small bedroom and took it for himself, unpacking a collection of wooden boxes and mold-smelling old suitcases. Grandfather Le seemed to have few clothes, but he had brought many strange books, things carved out of wood, odd draperies that he hung in the bedroom and across the drapes to block out the sunlight. Grandfather Le berated Tuong’s mother in that strange language, seeming to order her to cook strange rice dishes or to put away household items Grandfather Le found objectionable. His mother cringed as if his words were blows.    To Tuong, Grandfather Le was kind, as if they were old friends.    He spent the rest of his summer learning the strange language Grandfather Le called Chauchau. Tuong learned it easily; he struggled with some of the unfamiliar glottal stops and pauses, but it was as if he had just forgotten the words, and it merely took a bit of help from Grandfather Le to bring it back to his mind. He thought that there might be some sort of writing, the way he’d learned to print his A-B-Cs in grade school, but Grandfather Le never asked him to write. The mildewed books that crowded his mother’s home stayed firmly closed.     One day, Grandfather Le took him on an outing. Tuong rode in the back of an old pickup truck while Grandfather Le rode in the cab with the strange men who had brought his baggage. They talked the whole way in Chauchau. Tuong couldn’t hear them over the wind and the cars rushing past them on the highway. They drove most of the day, and slept in the bed of the truck, under the stars. They came to a flat land in the desert filled with more of the short, stocky men like his grandfather’s helpers, all of them talking in the same language, amiable to each other but watchful, as if they expected danger to strike at any moment. Tuong sat, bored, while the men danced and chanted, catching a few words here and there. When the sun was high, he joined a line of men waiting to enter a small clearing in the middle of the crowd. Tuong was motioned to sit down. A boy slightly older than he took a sharp implement and shaved the hair on both sides of his head. [1] The boy nicked his right ear and it bled freely; Grandfather Le carefully blotted the cut with a white handkerchief, which he put away in his pocket.     Tuong’s mother wept when she saw his new haircut. Grandfather Le smirked.    When Tuong was eleven, he was awakened in the dark of night by the sounds of his grandfather and his mother arguing. He was surprised to hear his mother speaking Chauchau, and even more surprised to hear that she was speaking back to Grandfather Le.    “He is old enough,” said Grandfather Le. “Much longer and She may become impatient.”    “He is a child!” his mother shouted. “You can’t do this to him!”    “Of course I can. Your own brother—“    “I married an American so that my sons would not be chosen for this!”    “Do you think She cares who you—“ Grandfather Le used a word Tuong did not understand. “You do not wish to be Chauchau? Then you are bhak dzon. You are no longer one of us. But your son is.”    His mother wailed. Tuong jumped out of bed. He reached for the doorknob and was thrown back by a wave of something that was not light, by a sound that was not a scream. A terrible smell filled the air, something that made him think of meat gone rotten, the sick perfume of a dead pigeon bloating in the hot San Diego sun.    The door swung open. Grandpa Le stood in the doorway, looking as calm as if he’d come to bring Tuong a late-night glass of water.[1] <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=28023" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=28023</a></blockquote>

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