A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

by Robert Olen Butler

I say that desire can lead to unhappiness, and so can a strong belief. I can sit for long hours from the late afternoon and into the darkness of night and I do not feel compelled to watch anything or hear anything or do anything. I can think about Thp and I can fold my hands together and at those times there is no hatred at all within me.

I drew close to my wife, but only briefly did my arm rise and hold her. That was the same as all the other forgotten gestures of my life.

It’s like eating too many apples. You take a bite now and you can make yourself remember that apples are sweet, but it is like the apple in your mouth is not even there. You eat too many apples and all you can do is remember them. So this man who comes with his strange face and sounds sad when he talks about Vietnam because he was so happy there—I don’t know what to make of him and so I take him to my room and he is very happy about that.

H Chí Minh also can mean “very intelligent starch-paste,” and that’s what we thought of the new name, me and some friends of mine who also had American fathers. We would meet at the French cemetery on Phan Thanh Gin Street and talk about our city—H, for short; starch-paste.

it is a terrible thing to be married to a beautiful woman.

He felt like a boy carrying a flower across a schoolyard to a girl he’d been watching all year and now his courage was strong enough to move his legs but not strong enough to give him a voice or enough breath.

Something comes into your head as I speak: This is a hard man, a man of no caring; how can he speak of the “spineless poor"? I do not mean to say that these people are poor because they are cowards. I am saying that being poor can take away a man’s courage. For those who are poor, being beaten down, robbed of rights, repressed under the worst possible form of tyranny is not enough worse than just being poor. Why should they risk the pain and the maiming and the death for so little benefit? If I was a poor man, I, too, would be spineless.

I realized something with a shock that I actually had come to understand slowly all along. Like suddenly noticing that you are old. The little things gather for a long time, but one morning you look in the mirror and you understand them in a flash.