Drunken Love, Que Son [jenna bush book club TXT] 📗

lovers and to humanity, I almost feel guilty of murder, Shakespeare thinks. But things are going to be different this time. The story of my two new lovers, Adam and Eve, will end happily, I am determined to see to that. I am still forming the story in my head and before the night is over I will have it all written out in my brain. In any case, Romeo and Juliet were dead, the whole world knows that, and it was a done deal, there is nothing I can do about it. Shakespeare believes he was reborn just to rewrite the story of Romeo and Juliet. Now heavily drunk, he says to himself what will happen next, I have laid out the personal history of Adam but what about Eve? What kind of a girl is she? What are her circumstances when she crosses path with Adam. What happens when they lay eyes on one another for the first time? Shakespeare says I have to figure this shit out before I get all tangled up and lose my way in the jungle of my alcohol-induced imagination.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

Shakespeare has Adam's story laid out up to the time he came to America, now what about Eve? He has a problem. Adam is a man, and Shakespeare is also a man, they understand one another, one can even say each is a copy of the other, and so creating one another's character is not so difficult. Not the case with Eve. Because not only she is a woman, but neither Adam nor Shakespeare is familiar with her life before she appears on the scene. They don’t know much about her family, where she comes from. But lack of facts does not deter Shakespeare.

 

Eve was born into a family with many brothers and sisters. The family's main income was her father's meager monthly salary as a civil servant. So they were poor. With many mouths to feed, her mother had to supplement the family's income by selling spicy beef noodle soup: each morning the front porch of the house was turned into a noodle stand serving people in the neighborhood, and it was closed when breakfast hours ended. And the parents managed to put all their children in school. Eve was a cute little girl who went to the neighborhood grammar school every day in her colorful short skirt and a white shirt and she had her hair tied into two bundles on both sides of her head. Like any child, she just grew up, crying one moment and smiling the next, and most of the time she was happy despite the circumstances. She was considered the prettiest girl in the family. With all the sisters and brothers, she was particularly fond of the sister who was only one year older than she. They played together and went to school together and slept together and they often asked if they loved one another and the answer was always yes. This sister later played a role in Eve's life as a girl in love. Eve grew up a happy child.

 

At thirteen Eve had her first period. The first time she bled, she panicked and went crying to her mother in the middle of the night and the mother smiled and told her not to worry, there was nothing to be afraid of, that it happened to all the girls and from now on it would happened to her every month and for many years to come. She took her daughter to the kitchen where the water was and asked her to take off her panties and washed off the blood which was now running down her legs. Eve asked her mother why does it happen to girls, does it happen to boys too? Her mother said no it does not happen to boys it only happens to girls. Eve then went back to bed but what her mother had said did not reassure her. She still felt confused. But there was no pain despite the bleeding, and soon she fell back to sleep. The next morning she went to school and told one of her closest friends about the bleeding and the friend was surprised and Eve said that it would happen to you too and the friend said really? The second time it happened Eve felt very uncomfortable all three days of bleeding and it interrupted her study and play. Her mother gave her sanitary napkins to wear during the bleeding days and said Eve would now keep a supply of the napkins for herself just for days like these. This thing happened to women every month, her mother told her, and further explained that without it she would not be able to make babies. And Eve asked her mother does it happen to you too and she said yes it has happened to me too and it is still happening.

 

And so it went until one morning in March, 1975. That spring morning Eve was in bed when she suddenly heard commotions outside her house and she came out and saw children ran excitedly through the maze of the neighborhood toward the main road. They shouted that the communists were coming and let's go look at them. Eve ran after them, but her father yelled at her to stop. Her father was a civil servant working for the old regime and he was apprehensive about how the new rulers would treat people like him. Some friends of the family had come to the house the days before and discussed with her father about evacuation. But her father refused to go, saying that with a large family like his and with so little money, getting away was impractical. Eve watched what was going on without understanding much. School had been closed for a month to make room for the refugees and she had been spending her days hanging out with friends in the neighborhood. She was 15 years old.

 

The day after the communist takeover a man in an olive uniform came to the house and told her father to report to the local police station and register for reeducation. Her father did so, and three days later he was taken away. He disappeared for two weeks and when he returned he said he was kept along with hundreds of others in a camp outside the city and was treated well but had to listen to endless lectures about the crimes of the American aggressors and the old Sai Gon regime. He also learned about the virtues of socialism and about the new regime: it was the true representative of the peasants, the workers, and all the people whom for many years had been suffering at the hands of the Americans and their puppets. But her father added that officers of the defeated army were still kept in the camp and they were going to be transferred to other camps for a longer education.

 

Without a job, her father stayed home and did nothing and he started to sell valuables for money to buy rice. Her mother continued to sell beef noodle soup out of the house. There was very little money left. And with so many children, her parents were talking about marrying off the girls, the oldest was twenty.

 

Eve, 15 years old, went back to school a month after things quieted down and continued the ninth grade. Now the students did not have to wear uniforms anymore. Girls could go to school in pajamas and boy could wear pants and shirts in whatever color they wanted, whereas before girls must wear white ao-dai and boys wore blue trousers and white shirts. And she started to learn about Socialism, Communism, Karl Marx, Uncle Ho, revolutions, class struggles--and she took it all in without questions. At nights, when she did homework and her father looked over her shoulders, he was annoyed by what they were teaching her. Her brothers and sisters also went back to school but some of them dropped out after just a few months. The ones who dropped out followed the mother into the market to buy and sell things. Her father took his bicycle to the hamlet's bus station and transported goods for a fee. Like everyone else, the family felt the extreme hardship of peace, the bottom had fallen out and people must scramble to find their daily meals. Eve and two other younger siblings were spared from the struggle, they were still too young. She continued to go to school but she noticed the worries on the faces of her parents when they sat down in the evening for dinners--now a greatly reduced affair. There wasn't enough rice for the whole family, and some nights Eve went to bed feeling empty in her stomach.

 

Then one day the sister she loved got married. It was the one closest to her, the one who was one year older than her. This sister married a 20-year-old son of well-to-do family that had two houses on the city's main street. So one girl left the family; and only a few months later, the oldest girl also left to marry someone in Sai Gon. Except for the brothers, Eve now only had one sister near her.

 

One day Eve said to her mother she wanted to quit school and go with her to the market. Her mother said no, and her father also said no. But Eve stopped going to school anyway, and insisted that she be taken along to the market. Her mother eventually gave in. She gave Eve some money and told her to go buy things from people at the train stations then resell them in the market. Eve did so, and was happy to bring home a little money every evening and give it to her mother. She was then 16 years old. Eve thought if she had been older, her parents would have found her a husband and she would leave the family, relieving her parents of a burden.

 

While still in school, Eve had been followed by many boys and even received secret letters from them. She did not pay attention to anyone of them, but a few of her friends were having boyfriends. She looked at the boys curiously but because they were so different she did not want to have anything to do with them. And besides, she was very shy. She grew up with the teaching that boys and girls should always be separated until marriage. And she did not know that there might be such a feeling called love between a boy and a girl.

 

But Eve was haunted since she was 12 years old by an image of a strange boy and she did not understand why. Sometimes while she was day dreaming the face of that boy appeared before her eyes, he had dark skin and thick lips and he looked at her with curiously inquiring eyes. Eve had never seen a boy like that in school or anywhere, but whenever his face appeared, even when her eyes were open, she felt a vague longing, an unexplained desire to see him physically, to be with him, to be his friend. The image followed her through the years and showed itself to her whenever she let her mind drift. But she never told anyone about this because it was too strange to understand, let alone put into words. It was her secret.

 

Meanwhile, two of her brothers continued to go to school, but the oldest one had joined the army and was sent to the western border to defend the country from periodic sneak attacks from the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia.

 

One evening her father came home from a weekly neighborhood meeting and said to his wife and children that the authority had ordered them to vacate the city and go to the "New Economic Zones," a new economic policy intended to relieve the cities of unproductive people, people who had no real means of making a living. They