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

not worse than then equal to the difficulty they were having in the city. The marriage hurt the pride of Eve's father. Therefore when he found out that Eve had fallen in love with a boy from that family, he was very unhappy: not another boy from that family, he swore. He ordered her to forget about Adam because he had decided that there would be no marriage between her and that boy. Even though fearful of the father who she called a brutal dictator, Eve was determined not to give in to his demand. She loved Adam and would be his wife and no one else's, she said to her father. And he beat her. The mother could not do anything to stop the beatings because she was fearful of her husband too. The father was the authority in the family and he would not tolerate disobedience.

 

While Adam was doing forced labor in the mountains, Eve continued to live with her family in the new economic zone and she daily endured the physical and verbal abuse from her father. It was one of the most unhappy periods of her life. She thought about Adam days and nights and the longing crystallized in her heart and made her face look melancholy at all times. She stopped talking to others, withdrawing into herself, doing her daily chores in the fields and in the house like a robot, and spoke only when spoken to. Her love for him and her faith in a future union with him gave her the strength to endure the sufferings and the abuse. Every night going to bed she cried under the blanket and talked to him about what happened to her during the day and she heard him talk back to her too as if they were face to face in bed. Once or twice she thought about ending her life. But when she thought about him and her hope of seeing him and becoming his wife in the future, she felt stronger and became less bothered by the thought of suicide. I must live to see him, she said to herself.

 

Eve was twenty two years old and had been in love with Adam for five years. Other families in the same collective had asked for Eve's hands for their sons and whenever the father saw a boy from a family he liked, he told her she must get married. Every time her father approached her with the demand that she marry someone he had chosen for her, she rejected it, each and every time. The beatings continued, but it only made her more stubborn.

 

"You know who I want," she said to her father.

 

"But that boy is not around. And you don’t know if you’re going to see him again!"

 

"I don't care. I can wait!"

 

Shakespeare is increasingly fearful that these two lovers' fate might end up like that of Romeo and Juliet.

 

One day Eve told her parents she was going back to Da Nang because she did not like the life in the collective anymore. After some petitioning, the collective agreed to give her travel documents. When Eve arrived in the city, she learned from her sister that Adam was no longer around, he had left the country after escaping from the labor camp. Eve felt devastated when she heard the news. But her faith in their future together said to her that this separation did not mean that was the end to their relationship, but she would see him again, one way or another. And she decided to stay in the city. She found a job as a dressmaker in a tailor shop in the market .

 

Everyday after work, she went back to the house and sat in Adam's room, and she even slept in it if her brother-in-law allowed. When she was in his room she went into the drawers and found the journals he had left behind. He was a prolific writer. Eve found not only journals in volumes after volumes of his daily life before he went to the camp, and the entries were almost daily, she found collections of short stories also. She sat and read them all. She saw in her mind a tortured soul of a young man growing up in a prolonged spiritual crisis. He wrote about his confusion and his inquiries into the meaning of life. He wrote about his desperation and hopelessness, his days struggling with emptiness and depression, and his suicidal thoughts. Eve felt painful when she was reading his journals and most of the time she read under the candle light in the middle of the night when she was unable to sleep. But when she got to the notes about his feelings for her, their love, his missing her, she felt happy and rewarded. In one of those notes, Adam wrote that he had known many girls but Eve was the only one he loved, and he not only loved her, he was crazy about her and he loved her with his entire being. She thought one day not very far, she would see him again and they would be happy together again and would never part again. That was her faith, but how she was going to do that, she had no idea. She might try to escape too, but she was too poor, and her family was poor, they could not afford to pay for her escape. But she was determined to find a way.

 

Two months after coming back to the Da Nang, Eve received a letter from Adam, written from Hong Kong. It was night. She was happy because in her hands she saw not a piece of paper but a treasure. Words from him. However, the letter was short and strange. It looked as if he was drunk when he was writing it. It was a crumpled and stained piece of paper that contained only 25 words. He wrote that he missed her very much but he was afraid that he might not be able to see her again. And that was it. When she was reading the note, Adam's brother came into the room and asked what she was doing there and she said she had just received a letter from Adam and the brother told her to give it to him but she said no and the brother said if you don’t give that letter to me you must leave the house. She put the letter in her pocket then stood up and walked out. It was midnight. She could not understand why Adam’s brother treated her like that. What was the matter with him? She walked toward the center of the city where her grandfather's house was. The streets were completely empty. She was afraid and she walked fast. Two men on a bicycle rolled by and they appeared to be drunk and as they biked past her they said dirty things to her as if she was a streetwalker. After that night, she never returned to that house again but told her sister to let her know if there were letters for her from Adam. She lived with her grandfather and continued to work at the tailor shop in the market. She saved and sent money to her parents in the economic zone. And she wrote to him, telling him to wait for her, they would see one another again. But as days went by, she became more and more restless. Every street corners reminded her of him, and the longing for him became more and more intense. She must find a way to escape, she told herself, only then she might find him. And she thought, because the economic zone in Ca Mau province was near the sea, there might be a better chance to do so. She had to go back. And she went back.

 

In the zone, her father returned to his old ways, demanding that she get married. But still she said no. She belonged to Adam and believed that she would reunite with him one of these days. A family in the collective was making plans to escape and they approached Eve's father and said that if she agreed to marry their son, the two would go together. She said no. She was determined to do it her own way, she would work hard and save money to pay for her own passage, and did not want to be indebt to anyone who might force her to betray Adam.

 

As times went by and the money she made and saved remained meager, she became desperate. So she wrote to Adam, asking him if he had money to spare, send her some to help finance the escape--because she could no longer stand the separation. Months passed and still she received no reply from him whom by this time had settled in the US. Then she wrote to him again even though mailing a letter overseas cost a day's wage. She thought perhaps he did not have the money she was asking for, and that was why he did not answer her. In the subsequent letters, she wrote and told him not to worry if he did not have money, because one way or another she would make the journey, and that he must have faith in her and wait for her, that she would be with him soon, that she was praying for him everyday, that he must not drink too much and too late in the night, and she asked him to send her a picture of his. Then everyday she looked out for the mailman. And everyday it was the same disappointment--the mailman had nothing for her. She wondered if Adam had received her letters or if they had got lost. And she continued to work hard to save money and reject the advances of people trying to marry her and everyday she waited for news from Adam but no news from him ever came. Meanwhile, her father would not relent on his treatment of her. Everyday he scolded and accused her of being a burden on the family, and if he was angry enough, he beat her. One day, getting a hold on Adam’s address in America, he wrote to him asking him what did he do to Eve that made her so obsessed with him, and added that if he truly loved her, he must pay for her escape to join him because she was now twenty two years old and must get married; and if he could not--and this was what Eve‘s father was hoping for--he must let her know in the form of a rejection letter so she might abandon her senseless hope and go on with her own life. Eve did not know about the letter her father wrote to Adam.

 

One morning two months after the angry words from the father to Adam, Eve received a letter from him. At last. She felt vindicated that her faith in him had proven right, that he still loved and remembered and thought about her. She was happy. There was no one in the house when the letter arrived and she went to a corner and sat down on a stool and hold the letter in her hand as if it was the most fragile thing in the world. On the white envelope at the upper right corner was a stamp with an American flag, and underneath it was her name in his familiar handwriting, her address, and in the upper left corner was his name and address. She studied all the details on the face of the envelope including the red postmark. She felt an intense joy she had never felt for a long time. Then she turned the envelope over and carefully opened it with a scissor, taking care not to damage the paper inside. Her breath quickened and her heart beat wilder, perhaps he was answering her prayers, perhaps now he had money to help her