The Gypsy Village

Mid - 1980's, near Da Nang, South Vietnam1

Thuy died around the time that An was born.2

Their father Thang Van Nguyen was walking under the bare nakedness of the defoliated jungle ... the leaves had been stripped from the trees during wartime deforesting campaigns, leaving them like stark black skeletons reaching out with wiry arms. He quickened his pace, then ran, warm from the humidity of summer and the suffocating thick, salty air. He announced his return home in a loud voice, and there was his wife Nhu crying.3

"What?" he shook his head.4

"Thuy," she said.5

"Thuy ... " Nguyen repeated. He had slammed the door behind him, and chips of the peeling turquoise paint fall in clods off the door frame. Their house in the village was an old one, made half of stucco and half of bug-eaten wood with a shrine to buddha erected outside surrounded by offerings of fruit and decorated by a red and gold velor banner with Chinese characters that no one in their family could read.6

Nguyen nodded. He threw the sack of rice down at his feet and watched his wife cry. Where were the neighbors? Why hadn't they come by to say anything?7

"She was very, very sick ... " he said, then, "Today I will bury my daughter ..."8

There was an stark absence of mourning that day. The day was long ... during the summer when the daylight hours droned on past eight o'clock and the sticky warmth lasted through the night. The fan had broken in the Thang household ... four dead flies clogged its rungs as it lay useless next to the dusty carpet they slept on at night. They sat on the bare floor and ate sticky rice and soupy noodles soaked in beef broth like any other night.9

Nguyen's chopsticks made a clanging sound down on the rice bowl when An began to cry ... wood against wood.10

"Why ... " he looked at his tiny son with shriveled sallow skin and shook his head with perhaps a silent prayer to the ancestors that their next child would not be so unfortunate. Nhu's mother told them that An would die, too. He was too small and his heart and lungs were too weak.11

"His appearance is like a demon!" she had told Nhu. She was very old -- Nhu was her youngest child and one she had borne late in life.12

Nguyen and Nhu never forgot that the village called their last remaining child worse names ... freakish and ugly with a cleft palate marring his mouth with a gape across the lip, one arm completely missing but for a fingerless stump above what would have been the elbow, and a twisted club foot that he would drag behind him for the rest of his life.13

An ... they had named him. "Peace". But the child cried, beating his head in a restless fit as though he had anything but peace.14

"We aren't the only unlucky family," Nhu reminded her husband the last time he had let the senseless word "why" fall out from his mouth. "So many children are being born in Da Nang worse off than that ..."15

It was true. Later Nhu's mother suggested handing the little boy off to the Friendship Village orphanage where rooms of abandoned children hideously deformed by the war time chemicals lay neglected to cry in sad messes of twisted limbs and bulbous heads with swollen brains.16

"We can't leave our child," Nhu had insisted to her mother. "Even if the village will say bad things about us ... spead ugly lies and say that we have offended our ancestors. We cannot. Abandoning your own child is inhuman. Even animals don't abandon their children."17

They had seen planes fly over Da Nang, year after year, during the war, with thick clouds of chemical defoliant streaming in misty bursts and descending on the jungle like a deadly fog. Years later the scant trees stood naked of their foliage, which had not grown back. And children suffered.18

"What is it?" Nguyen had asked the first time he had seen it.19

His friend shook his head. Later it had a name, "Agent Orange". They talked about it incessantly in Da Nang, men argued about it over games of backgammon and cards as they smoked, and the women told stories of the horrific children born as freaks as a result of exposure.20

"But the children are like this," Nhu had once said, long before Thuy and An were even born. "And there isn't anything we can do. One day the Americans will pay compensation. They have to. It's their way."21

Thuy died before seeing a full year. An was one of the lucky victims, because he had a mind and could speak and more than that looked human. Perhaps Thuy was one of the lucky ones as well.22