Things We Lost to the Water

by Eric Nguyen

English was such a strange language. Whereas in Vietnamese, the words told you how they wanted to be pronounced, in English the words remained shrouded in mystery.

For the first time since she’d met him, she realized she was less of a person and more of a test to this man. She was a puzzle to figure out, a jigsaw, a number among other numbers. He lived to serve not humanity but his ideas and career.

Theirs was a house of love, Hương was sure. It was all they ever needed—love. And with love, they would survive. She believed this with all her heart.

“I’m not American!” he would say, reciting from memory what they taught him in school. “I am người Việt Nam. My father teaches the great and honorable literature of our nation. My mother is the daughter of our beautiful countryside.”

We could forget anything and everything, if only we tried, if only we made the effort.

But that feeling—that heavy, dark feeling of having lost something—he would always remember.

She knew everyone had their own pasts they wanted to leave behind. Not secrets, exactly, but something to be guarded just the same, with some guarding it more urgently than others. It gave her a vague feeling that they were the same type of people.

If war had taught her one thing, it was that ideology—how you believed the world should be, what you would die to uphold—was always flawed, and though innocent on its own, it could lead to tragedy.

“Công told them art transcended boundaries, beauty crossed borders. He said, one can’t contain life and the stuff of life. It was impossible, he went on, to imprison that; it was impossible, he said, to imprison beauty and truth, no matter who was in charge of Saigon—no person, no ideology, no misguided boys.

“Hương ơi! I’ve survived the collapse of a country. I’ll survive this. I’m sure I’ll survive anything. Believe it or not, người Việt are like cockroaches. We’ll survive a nuclear bomb!”