with several entrances, one of which had an almost tunnel-like hall, like the endless corridors in VA hospitals.
I turned to scan the baggage racks, looking for my new tweed case, when I heard a noise as if the streets of downtown Da Nang had been crowded into the room. What was this, a flashback? I wondered, as I turned toward the stomach-wrenchingly familiar singsong cacophony of Vietnamese language being spoken in frightened, angry, defensive, awed voices, and saw what looked like half of Vietnam come pouring out of the tunnel The familiar gray-violet fearful aura wrapped these people in a fog, but there were sparks of yellow around many, and clear, hopeful turquoise.
Their bodies, normally small and slim, were emaciated now, some bearing sores. Children looked up at their parents with frightened eyes and the parents looked dazed, shell-shocked. Some carried small bundles, others had nothing. No one went to the baggage claim. I had long ago stopped listening to the news or reading the paper, and I couldn't imagine what they were doing there. I thought I was hallucinating. Then I noticed several American people and a couple of fairly well-dressed Vietnamese infiltrating the main crowd, detaching clumps of people who must surely be family groups. Waiting behind the barrier separating the luggage area from the rest of the room stood people with signs. 'Welcome,' they said, in English and in Vietnamese, with names below them. I wanted to cry again. Nobody had been there with signs for us. But at least most of us were familiar with airports, and heavy auto traffic, and how to catch a cab, and had someplace to go, eventually when we got here.
Surely these people couldn't all be visiting relatives in Pasadena?
I watched until the throng disappeared. I found myself searching every child's face for Ahn's or even Hoe's, every young girl's for Mai's or Hue's, every old man's for Huang's, or even Xe's, though I knew he was dead. I knew now I wasn't hallucinating, that these people were not ghosts that had collectively come to haunt us, but I grew fascinated by them. When they stopped pouring in and had been picked up by the welcoming committees, I wandered off to a newsstand to see if there was anything about it. On the third page of the Los Angeles Times, I found a story I almost ignored: 'Hundreds of Boat People Arfive Daily.' But there was a picture with Vietnamese people in it. I scanned those faces too, but didn't see anybody familiar. I didn't understand how the people I had seen could be boat people if they arrived on an airplane, but I took the paper with me back to the baggage claim and watched several more planeloads of people file through the tunnel, people from many countries, but among them some Vietnamese.
I didn't go to Disneyland. Though I knew it was a long shot, I kept thinking, Maybe Ahn will be on the next plane and I'll take him with me.
Wouldn't Disneyland knock babysan's eyes out of their sockets? Finally I got too tired to watch anymore and I checked into a hotel near the airport. But the next day I was back. And I went back every day for the week I had planned to stay, watching the planes, watching people being collected, -searching the faces.
At last, among one of those big crowds, I thought I saw him, a one-legged boy with a crew cut and a thin, frightened face screwed up like a monkey's, ready to irritate everybody by crying. I'd been leaning on the railing near the luggage carousel, and I snapped to my feet and walked forward as if someone were pulling me on a string, toward that boy. Penetrating the crowd wasn't easy, but I did reach him, only to have a woman snatch him into her arms and glare at me.
'Excuse me, what are you doing?' an American voice said behind me.
'That boy I said and then braved his mother's glare and looked at him again. It wasn't Ahn. Too young. He looked like Ahn when he had first come to the hospital, but Ahn would be almost fifteen now. 'I'm sorry,'
I said to the American woman and made a steeple with my hands and bowed to the mother. 'Sin loi, ba.' And to the American woman I said, 'I thought he was a boy I knew in Nam. A friend of mine, a patient actually. I-'
I felt as dazed as they looked as the people poured around me like a stream around a rock. 'I'm sorry,' I said finally.
'No need to be sorry. Wait a sec,' the woman said and signaled to one of her friends with the signs, then took me by the arm, out of the traffic. 'You were in Vietnam?' I nodded. 'What as, a missionary?'
'Army Nurse Corps,' I said.
'No kidding. And you're waiting for your adopted son, is that it?
I shook my head. 'I just thought I recognized him. He-I don't know where he is. I left him in a village.'
'Probably not here, then. We don't get that many peasants with this bunch. Mostly history professors and government people, intellectuals who'd be killed by the new regime if they hadn't escaped. But you never know. They keep sneaking in all kinds of shirttail cousins and old family retainers and what have you that they feel an obligation to. He might make it in with some family.'
'Oh,' I said, disappointed not to find something I didn't even know I was looking for. But I waited with the woman, who told me her name was Shirley Nussbaum, for the next planeload, and she told me about some of the problems the people were having resettling: no apartments, no job skills, worst of all no English. The government gave some hell , but church groups and clubs did most of the sponsoring.
p And of course there was a lot of resistance to the presence of the refugees in some places.
I nodded, only half listening, and took Shirley's address as she shepherded her last group away. I lingered for a while as the crowd drifted away, then headed for the women's room. It looked empty, but then I heard a toilet flush and somebody shrieked. My adrenaline leaped up. A mugging? Heart attack? Somebody just freaking out? I searched every stall, flapping open the doors, until I came to the latched one.
Sobbing issued from within.
'You okay in there?' I asked, knocking on the door. More sobbing.
'Look, can I help you? Are you ill? I'm a nurse. Please, just answer me.' But the sobbing grew louder.
Oh hell, I wouldn't catch anything on the floor of the L.A. airport I hadn't already caught in Nam. I lay down and peered up under the door.
A skinny Vietnamese girl squatted with her feet on the toilet seat. As I watched she leaned back against the flush button and shrieked again. To go through a war, and refugee camps, and a brave new world, only to be freaked out by plumbing. I wriggled under the door, unlatched it, and helped her down from the seat. She couldn't have been more than seven.
She tugged at my hand and I squatted down beside her so I wouldn't look so tall, and scooped her up, t4en showed her how the toilet flushed.
'Where's mamasan, huh, kiddo?' I asked her, and carried her to the sink and showed her how to wash her hands, then carried her out into the lobby. I had Shirley's number, but I didn't need it. Shirley, carrying a toddler, came barreling back through the door, followed by a frightened-looking young woman with a child on each hip and another toddler clinging to her skirts. When Shirley saw us she stopped and put her free hand over her heart, panting exaggeratedly. 'You found her.'
'Yeah,' I said, looking for someone with a free hand to hold her. There wasn't anyone and it would have needed a crowbar to dislodge her fingers.
'Mrs. Huong has too many kids to keep track of, I think. Would you mind walking with us out to the van?'
'Sure,' I said. It didn't look as if I had much choice. When everyone else was seated, Mrs. Huong reached for the little girl. The child clung to the theng around my neck until she was sure her mother had her, and as I released her, her fingers touched the amulet. A warm rush went through me as we formed a triangle, and the energy formed a circuit; a tentative mauve-pink light, a little grayed down, but definitely growing brighter, sprang up among us. Mrs. Huong did not smile, but her expression lightened with relief at another hurdle overcome. Life after war. It happened. I had seen hundreds of people in the last few days who had lived through it, who were still trying to live. And there was nothing I had seen that most of them hadn't seen, nothing I had had to do that many of them hadn't had to do, and maybe worse. I couldn't contaminate them, I couldn't shock them, and yet a kid who had been born and raised amid all that ugly, numbing horror had more awe and wonder at push-button flush toilets than I had at the idea of Disneyland. I watched the van depart and then headed back to the hotel. Shirley would pick me up tomorrow morning, to see some of the temporary facilities her group had arranged for the refugees, and to take me to the airport to meet more. They needed a lot of help, she said. Meanwhile, I had things to do, preparations to make. I wondered if Charlie Heron was still stoned all the time, if he was alive, if he was interested in making a trip to L.A., and if I still
