Dread was stronger than curiosity. I shut my door and jumped into bed shivering, pushing aside my summer textbooks, which were wrapped in brown covers I had cut from a shopping bag and upon which I had scrawled “Math” and “American History.” Perhaps my mother was talking about the famine at the end of the Second World War, when she was nine. Last year, an evening television report on the Ethiopian famine had prompted my mother to mention this other famine while I plucked the gray hairs from her head. “Do you know a dozen children in my village starved to death?” she said, even though I obviously did not know. “Older people, too, sometimes right on the street. One day I found a girl I used to play with dead on her doorstep.” My mother lapsed into silence as she stared at a point on the wall above the television, and I did not say anything. It was the kind of story she told all the time, and in any case, I was too distracted to ask questions. She was paying me for every strand I found and I was intent on my search, each gray hair bringing me one nickel closer to the next issue of Captain America.
In the days and nights that passed, my mother never brought up Mrs. Hoa, but the woman had unsettled her. My mother began talking during our evening bookkeeping, a time when she was usually completely focused on calculating the daily receipts. We worked at the dining table, counting cash, rolling coins into paper packages the size of firecrackers, and stamping the New Saigon’s address onto the back of the personal checks, the Monopoly-money food stamps, and the yellow coupons from Aid to Families with Dependent Children. When I added the sums with a humming mechanical calculator bigger than our rotary telephone, I never needed to look at the keypad. I knew every number’s place by heart. It would be the only time I was ever good at math.
As we did the day’s reckoning, my mother reported on the rumors of former South Vietnamese soldiers organizing not only a guerrilla army in Thailand but also a secret front here in the United States, its purpose to overthrow the Communists. Grimmer than rumors was how unknown assailants had firebombed a Vietnamese newspaper editor’s office in Garden Grove (he died), while another editor had been shot to death, along with his wife, in the doorway of their house in Virginia (the murderers were never caught). “They just said in public what a lot of people already say in private,” my mother said, wetting her fingers on a sponge. “Making peace with the Communists might not be such a bad thing.”
I wrote down figures in a ledger, never looking up. My father and I worked in T-shirts and shorts, but my mother wore only a nightgown of sheer green fabric without a bra. She wasn’t aware of how her breasts swayed like anemones under shallow water, embarrassing me whenever I saw those dark and doleful areolas with their nipples as thick as my index finger. My mother’s breasts were nothing like those of the girls in my class, or so I imagined in fantasies that had been confirmed the week before when I had seen Emmy Tsuchida’s nipple through the gap between two buttons of her shirt, pink and pert, exactly like the eraser on the pencil in my hand. Without raising my gaze from the ledger, I said, “But you always tell me the Communists are bad people.”
“O-ho!” my father said with a chortle. “So you do pay attention. Sometimes I can’t tell what’s going on behind those thick glasses of yours.”
“The Communists are evil.” My mother riffled through a stack of twenty-dollar bills. She had never finished grade school, her father forcing her to stay at home to care for her siblings, and yet she could count money by hand and add figures in her head more quickly than I could on the calculator. “There’s no doubt about it. They don’t believe in God and they don’t believe in money.”
“But they believe in taking other people’s money,” my father said. He spoke often of his auto parts store, which according to his brothers no longer had any parts to sell under Communist ownership. We had lived above the store, and sometimes I wondered if a Communist child was sleeping in my bed, and if so, what kinds of books a Red read, and what kind of movies he saw. Captain America was out of the question, but he must have seen Luke Skywalker crossing light sabers with Darth Vader. I had seen Star Wars a dozen times on videotape, and if anyone was so deprived as to have not watched it even once, then the country in which he lived surely needed a revolution. But my mother would not have agreed. She wrapped a paper band around the twenties and said, “I hate the Communists as much as Mrs. Hoa, but she’s fighting a war that can’t be won. I’m not throwing away my money on a lost cause.”