By now the people in the village had heard the story: back in the Truong Son Mountains, May had lost her leg guarding a tunnel where a group of soldiers were recovering from malaria. Mr. Ninh had been one of those soldiers. He owed his life to May and her sacrifice. The construction workers knew that Mr. Ninh had walked up and down the length of the Chau riverbank looking for the Truong Son girl who had saved his life.
“Maybe May will get married soon,” the villagers gossiped.
May was living now with Cun in a new house near the river. She often sang lullabies at night to put him to sleep.
Nobody knew exactly what had happened between May and Mr. Ninh. It was possible that the construction workers exaggerated the romance and turned it into a legend. But there was at least one undeniable truth: at night, if the workers didn’t hear May’s singing to Cun coming from the newly built house, they couldn’t fall asleep.
At night, the Chau River turned a silvery color. Nature seemed to be in perfect harmony. Millions of shining stars illuminated the sky and the ground. Exhausted, the villagers fell into a deep sleep. The air smelled of grass mixed with wet mud. The Chau River seemed restless—waves lapped against the shore.
Through the night, one could hear May singing a lullaby to put Cun to sleep. Her sweet voice echoed across the river. The construction workers stopped welding and listened. Her voice was deep and melancholic and bitter. It touched their hearts. The singing flowed into the nocturnal sounds of the river and the smells of nature.
13 / STORMS
NGUYEN THI MAI PHUONG
Nguyen Thi Mai Phuong was born in 1977 in Bac Giang in Northern Vietnam and is a member of the Bac Giang Province Association of Literature and Arts. She is the author of three collections of short fiction. Although she was born after the war, many of her short stories are about veterans in the postwar period, works inspired by the stories of her father and his friends who fought. “Storms” deals with one of the most insidious and persistent legacies of America’s involvement in Vietnam: dioxin poisoning. During the war, the U.S. military used chemical defoliants like Agent Orange to shear back thousands of acres of the jungle foliage that covers much of the Vietnamese countryside. The dioxins contained in the defoliant mixture are known to cause severe health problems in humans, including cancers and birth defects in the children of those exposed even decades earlier. An estimated three million Vietnamese have experienced health issues related to dioxin poisoning, and the cleanup of certain “hot spot” toxic zones continues to this day.
Her name was Hoa Binh, “Peace.” Her frail legs seemed to drag along the ground as she walked. Seventeen was usually an age associated with strength, an age when one was capable of snapping off the horn of a water buffalo. But Hoa Binh was thin and weak, like a cabbage leaf that had been left too long in boiling water. Her skin was pale and her nipples protruded underneath her shirt, physical traits that suggested she was still just a young girl.
As for her face, the villagers said, “People with Down syndrome all look alike.” But Hoa Binh was not a person with Down syndrome. When she was born, she seemed normal like everyone else, but as she got older she became scrawny and frail. Fortunately her mind remained sharp. Although the village children laughed at her skinny bamboo-stalk legs under her silk pajama pants, she paid them no attention. She forced herself to get used to people’s judgmental stares and tried to forget the tormenting pain of her body.
It was said that every family had one unlucky person who bore all the bad karma for everyone else.
Hoa Binh eventually had learned to live with her constant discomfort and endless anxiety. But in the past few days she’d started to have the feeling that a new storm was approaching.
One night, she dreamed that a group of villagers had tied her to a wattle tree at the entrance of the village and cut off her long, silky hair. She screamed as chunks of her hair fell to the ground. When she woke up she had an anxious feeling that something horrible was about to happen. It made her feel extremely sad, like the time she’d tried to catch a praying mantis that was running along the window sill but had stumbled over her stalklike legs and fallen down. Her father eventually had come over and silently picked her up off the ground.
Everything would be okay, Hoa Binh thought, as long as her younger siblings remained healthy. Every morning she got up early and sat by her brother, Tu Do, and her sister, Hanh Phuc, as they slept. She wanted to make sure their legs were still normal. They were only in fifth and ninth grade; there was still a long way ahead, and who knew what would happen? Hoa Binh herself had dropped out of school after eighth grade because of her physical problems and because she wanted to help her mother, a woman who masked her innermost emotions with endless household chores.
Hoa Binh’s father was a fastidious and cranky man. For work, he biked around the village delivering letters. He seemed unable to get over his memories of the war. He still heard artillery fire during meals and while he slept. He was suspicious and exacting in everything he did, as if he were still psychologically preparing to fight the enemy. The neighbors called him Crazy Trong. He was obsessively punctual. Whenever his wife complained about this he would yell, “If you acted like that in battle, the enemy would blow
