“If I remember correctly, you must be Mr. Suu. It’s been thirty years …”
“Yes. It’s me, Mr. Sang.” Mr. Suu used his right hand to shake Mr. Sang’s hand and his left hand to push the door open. “Please come in.”
“I probably don’t need to repeat what I said,” Mr. Sang said.
“Of course not. So when will you move in?”
“In fifteen days,” Lam Quang Vinh, Mr. Sang’s son, replied rudely.
“In fact, we didn’t intend to make this request, but you have ruined this house too much,” said a woman wearing a blue dress, a white fur jacket, and lots of valuable jewelry. She spoke in an intentionally demeaning tone because she saw sweet potatoes growing in the tennis court and pumpkins and gourds in the flower garden.
With the help of the authorities, everything was settled to make sure each party’s requests were satisfied. In short,
1. The plaintiff was compensated with a small amount of money equal to the cost of Mr. Suu and his wife’s labor invested in gardening and raising pigs for the last three years.
2. While waiting for a new house, Mr. Suu and his wife were “allowed” to reside temporarily in one of the compartments of the horse stable.
Both parties agreed to comply with these conditions.
Under Mr. Sang’s ownership, the mansion was restored to its original beauty, as well as its elegant, artistic, and bourgeois look. The mansion became the headquarters of The Viet-kieu Trading Company and symbolized the restoration of bourgeois power. The attractive word “Viet-kieu,” associated with dreams of huge investments in U.S. dollars, became irresistible to some communist opportunists who had once subverted the former regime with their own blood.
Two months after the grand opening of the company, thanks to the use of the word “investment” in an advertisement, cars with various kinds of license plates came frequently to visit the Villa Pensée. People said that once, when the chairwoman of the company had donated thousands of dollars to renovate a military cemetery, the vice president of the province had, by mistake, called her “Comrade.” The following day, the news talked about this incident as if it were a thank you to her from thousands of fallen soldiers in their graves.
Things like that happened every day, and Mr. Suu witnessed all of it. At first he was not very pleased, but gradually, thanks to the influence of propaganda, he told himself, It has been fifteen years.… We’re all Vietnamese anyway. He even lost hope in the authorities’ promise to move him and his wife out of the horse stable and into a new house. He stopped feeling angry about it. There had been promise after promise, but nothing happened. Then one day the president of a suburban ward, after taking into consideration Mr. Suu’s situation, gave him a piece of land on the outskirts of town. The only problem was finding the money to build a house.
Mr. Suu wrote to his son in the Soviet Union to ask for help. His reply was full of complaints, and no money was enclosed: “Dad, you don’t understand how I live, work, and earn money here. But let me tell you this: Stop hoping, because I am just a ‘slave’ abroad.”
In order to prove that his passion for horses had not been killed by thirteen years in the reeducation camp, Lam Quang Sang selected ten horses from various regions of the country and raised them on the grounds of the Villa Pensée. Every day he paid people to cut grass for the horses. He paid so well that many people wanted the job. Mr. Sang said that he was simply “helping” people, especially those who had known him in the past. Eventually Mr. Suu and his wife were hired to be in charge of cutting grass for the horses; they worked to save enough money to build their own house.
The victorious colonel, Mr. Suu, appreciated the generosity of Mr. Sang, a defeated major, and with his “military dignity” he guaranteed Mr. Sang high-quality grass. It seemed Mr. Suu had forgotten that he had once done this kind of work before, forty years earlier.
When Mr. Suu was able to save about two-thirds of the money needed to build a new house, his son returned, completely empty-handed after seven years of working abroad. He admitted to his parents his own mistakes and unwise behavior due to his attempts to “save face.” His father did the math in his head and could estimate how much money his son had spent to keep his own “dignity” abroad. He had lived, essentially, with the extravagance of a rich person.
The son rested for one week and then decided to help his parents financially so that they would no longer have to smell horse manure every day. He went door to door looking for work, but no place needed to hire the kind of labor he did, so he, an expert in swinging a five-kilogram hammer, trained in an industrially advanced country, was jobless.
There was no other option left for him, so the son followed in his father’s footsteps: he too began cutting grass to feed Mr. Sang’s horses.
It was a roasting hot afternoon. The father, the mother, and the son were soaked in sweat. The sugarcane grass was tall and overgrown, up to their chests. Its leaves were sharp, leaving scratches on their faces. Since his return, the son had been angry and frustrated due to his unemployment. He cursed: “Life is unfair. Some people always have a wonderful life while others suffer permanently.”
“If you’re tired, go home first. Dad and I will try to fill up another sack of grass and go home later,” his mother said in a loving tone, as she always did.
“You two go home whenever you want. I’m leaving,” he replied without looking at them and walked away.
He walked through the gate of the mansion and toward the
