On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Read online

  Among the empty plates stained from the baked ziti, I sang that same song as Paul listened. After, he simply clapped, then we washed up. I had forgotten that Paul, too, understands Vietnamese, having picked it up during the war.

  “I’m sorry,” I say now, watching the red light pool under his eyes. “It’s a stupid song anyway.”

  Outside, the wind is driving through the maples, their rinsed leaves slap against the clapboard siding. “Let’s just make some coffee or something, Grandpa.”

  “Right.” He pauses, mulling something over, then rises to his feet. “Let me just put on my slippers. I’m always cold in the mornings. I swear something’s wrong with me. It’s getting old. Your body heat retreats to your center until one day your feet are ice.” He almost laughs but rubs his chin instead, then raises his arm, as if to strike at something in front of him—and then the click, the lamp goes out, the room now swept with a violet stillness. From the shadow, his voice: “I’m glad you’re here, Little Dog.”

  * * *

  —

  “Why do they say black?” you asked weeks earlier, back in Hartford, pointing to Tiger Woods on the TV screen. You squinted at the white ball on the tee. “His mom is Taiwanese, I’ve seen her face, but they always say black. Shouldn’t they at least say half yellow?” You folded your bag of Doritos, tucked it under your arm. “How come?” You tilted your head, waiting for my answer.

  When I said that I didn’t know, you raised your eyebrows. “What do you mean?” You grabbed the controller and turned up the volume. “Listen closely, and tell us why this man is not Taiwanese,” you said, running your hand through your hair. Your eyes followed Woods as he walked back and forth across the screen, periodically crouching to gauge his stroke. There was no mention, at the moment, of his ethnic makeup, and the answer you wanted never came. You stretched a strand of hair before your face, examining it. “I need to get more curlers.”

  Lan, who was sitting on the floor beside us, said, without looking up from the apple she was peeling, “That boy don’t look Taiwanese to me. He looks Puerto Rican.”

  You gave me a look, leaned back, and sighed. “Everything good is always somewhere else,” you said after a while, and changed the channel.

  * * *

  —

  When we arrived in America in 1990, color was one of the first things we knew of yet knew nothing about. Once we stepped inside our one-bedroom apartment in the predominantly Latinx neighborhood on Franklin Avenue that winter, the rules of color, and with it our faces, had changed. Lan, who, back in Vietnam, was considered dark, was now lighter. And you, Ma—so fair you would “pass” for white, like the time we were in the Sears department store and the blond clerk, bending down to stroke my hair, asked you whether I was “yours or adopted.” Only when you stuttered, your English garbled, gone, head lowered, did she realize her mistake. Even when you looked the part, your tongue outed you.

  One does not “pass” in America, it seems, without English.

  “No, madam,” I said to the woman in my ESL English. “That’s my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much. I am seven. Next year I will be eight. I’m doing fine. I feel good how about you? Merry Christmas Happy New Year.” The deluge was exactly eighty percent of the language I knew at the time and I shivered in pure delight as the words flew out of me.

  You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers and sons, is considered taboo—so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus. You would playfully slap my head and say, “This huge noggin nearly tore up my asshole!”

  Startled, her perm throbbing, the clerk turned and clacked away on her heels. You looked down at me. “What the hell did you say?”

  * * *

  —

  In 1966, in between his two tours in Vietnam, Earl Dennison Woods, a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, was stationed in Thailand. There, he met Kultida Punsawad, a Thai native and secretary for the US Army office in Bangkok. After dating for a year, Earl and Kultida moved to Brooklyn, New York, where, in 1969, they got married. Earl would return to Vietnam for one final tour, from 1970 to 1971, right before American involvement in the conflict began to decline. By the time Saigon fell, Earl officially retired from military service to begin his new life, and most important, raise his new son—born only six months after the last US helicopter lifted from the American embassy in Saigon.

  The boy’s birth name, according to an ESPN profile I read a while back, was Eldrick Tont Woods. His first name a unique formulation of the E in “Earl” and ending in the K in “Kultida.” His parents, whose home in Brooklyn was often vandalized due to their interracial marriage, decided to stand at each end of their son’s name, like pillars. Eldrick’s middle name, Tont, is a traditional Thai name given to him by his mother. However, shortly after his birth, the boy obtained a nickname that would soon become famous across the globe.

  Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, one of the greatest golfers in the world is, like you, Ma, a direct product of the war in Vietnam.

  * * *

  —

  Paul and I are in his garden harvesting fresh basil for a pesto recipe he promised to teach me. We successfully avoid talking about the past, having brushed by it earlier that morning. We talk, instead, of cage-free eggs. He pauses from his picking, pulls his cap over his brow and lectures, with steeled intensity, on how antibiotics cause infections in commercially farmed hens, that the bees are dying and how, without them, the country would lose its entire food supply in less than three months, how you should cook olive oil on low heat because burning it would release free radicals that cause cancer.

  We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.

  In the next yard, a neighbor starts up his leaf blower. The leaves flutter and land in the street with a series of little clicks. When Paul bends to tug at a braid of ragweed, the photo in his pocket falls out, landing faceup on the grass. A black-and-white Polaroid, slightly larger than a box of matches, it shows a group of young people with faces smeared by laughter. Despite Paul’s quickness—sticking it back in his pocket soon as it lands—I make out the two faces I know too well: Paul and Lan, their arms around each other, eyes burning with an exuberance so rare it looks fake.

  In the kitchen, Paul pours me a bowl of Raisin Bran with water—just how I like it. He plops down at the table, takes off his cap, and reaches for one of the already rolled joints lined, like thin sticks of packaged sugar, inside a porcelain teacup. Three years ago, Paul was diagnosed with cancer, something he believed was brought on by his contact with Agent Orange during his tour. The tumor was on the nape of his neck, right above the spinal cord. Luckily, the doctors caught it before it invaded his brain. After a year of failed chemotherapy, they decided to operate. The whole process, from diagnosis to remission, took nearly two years.

  Leaning back now in his chair, Paul cups a flame in his palm and pulls it through the joint’s length. He sucks, the tip intensifying as I watch. He smokes the way one smokes after a funeral. On the kitchen wall behind him are colored-pencil drawings of Civil War generals I had made for a school project. You had sent them to Paul months earlier. The smoke blows across the primary-colored profile of Stonewall Jackson, then fades.

  Before bringing me to Paul’s, you sat me down on your bed back in Hartford, took a long drag on your cigarette, and just said it.

  “Listen. No, look at me right here, I’m serious. Listen.” You put both hands on my shoulder, the smoke thickening around us. “He’s not your grandfather. Okay?”

  The words entered me as if through a vein.

  “Which means he’s not my father either. Got it? Look at me.” When you’re nine, you know when to shut your mouth, so I did, thinking you were only upset, that all daughters must say this, at some point, of their fathers. But you kept going, your voice calm and cool, like stone
s being laid, one by one, upon a long wall. You said that when Lan met Paul that night in the bar in Saigon, Lan was already four months pregnant. The father, the real one, was just another American john—faceless, nameless, less. Except for you. All that remains of him is you, is me. “Your grandfather is nobody.” You sat back, the cigarette returned to your lips.

  Up to that point I thought I had, if nothing else, a tether to this country, a grandfather, one with a face, an identity, a man who could read and write, one who called me on my birthdays, whom I was a part of, whose American name ran inside my blood. Now that cord was cut. Your face and hair a mess, you got up to flick the Marlboro into the sink. “Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you. Everything.”

  Leaning into the table now, the photo safely tucked in his shirt pocket, Paul starts to tell me what I already know. “Hey,” he says, eyes glazed with reefer. “I’m not who I am. I mean . . .” He dabs the joint into his half-full glass of water. It hisses. My Raisin Bran, untouched, crackles in its red clay bowl. “I’m not what your mamma says I am.” His gaze is lowered as he tells it, his rhythm cut with odd pauses, at times slipping into near-whisper, like a man cleaning his rifle at daybreak and talking to himself. And I let him run his mind. I let him empty. I didn’t stop him because you don’t stop nothing when you’re nine.

  * * *

  —

  One evening, during his final tour in Vietnam, Earl Woods found himself pinned down by enemy fire. The American fire base he was stationed at was about to be overrun by a large North Vietnamese and Viet Cong contingent. Most of the American GIs had already evacuated. Woods was not alone—beside him, hunkered down in their two-jeep caravan, was Lieutenant Colonel Vuong Dang Phong. Phong, as Woods described him, was a ferocious pilot and commander, with a ruthless eye for detail. He was also a dear friend. As the enemy poured in around the abandoned base, Phong turned to Woods, assuring him they’ll live through it.

  For the next four hours, the two friends sat in their jeeps, their olive uniforms darkened with sweat. Woods clutched his M-79 grenade launcher as Phong held the jeeps’ machine-gun turret. In this way, they survived the night. After, the two would share a drink in Phong’s room back at base camp—and laugh, discussing baseball, jazz, and philosophy.

  All through his time in Vietnam, Phong was Woods’s confidant. Perhaps such strong bonds are inevitable between men who trust each other with their lives. Perhaps it was their mutual otherness that drew them close, Woods being both black and Native American, growing up in the segregated American South, and Phong, a sworn enemy to half of his countrymen in an army run, at its core, by white American generals. Whatever the case, before Woods left Vietnam, the two swore to find each other after the helicopters, bombers, and napalm had lifted. Neither of them knew it would be the last time they saw each other.

  Being a high-ranking colonel, Phong was captured by the North Vietnamese authorities thirty-nine days after Saigon was taken. He was sent to a reeducation camp where he was tortured, starved, and committed to forced labor.

  A year later, at age forty-seven, Phong died while in detainment. His grave would not be discovered until a decade later, when his children unearthed his bones for reburial near his home province—the final gravestone reading Vuong Dang Phong.

  But to Earl Woods, his friend was known as none other than “Tiger Phong”—or simply Tiger, a nickname Woods had given him for his ferocity in battle.

  On December 30, 1975, a year before Tiger Phong’s death and across the world from Phong’s jail cell, Earl was in Cypress, California, cradling a newborn boy in his arms. The boy already had the name Eldrick but, staring into the infant’s eyes, Earl knew the boy would have to be named after his best friend, Tiger. “Someday, my old friend would see him on television . . . and say, ‘That must be Woody’s kid,’ and we’d find each other again,” Earl later said in an interview.

  Tiger Phong died of heart failure, most likely brought on by poor nutrition and exhaustion at the camp. But for a brief eight months in 1975 and 1976, the two most important Tigers in Earl Woods’s life were alive at once, sharing the same planet, one at the fragile end of a brutal history, the other just beginning a legacy of his own. The name “Tiger,” but also Earl himself, had become a bridge.

  When Earl finally heard news of Tiger Phong’s death, Tiger Woods had already won his first Masters. “Boy, does this ever hurt,” Earl said. “I’ve got that old feeling in my stomach, that combat feeling.”

  * * *

  —

  I remember the day you went to your first church service. Junior’s dad was a light-skinned Dominican, his ma a black Cuban, and they worshipped at the Baptist church on Prospect Ave., where no one asked them why they rolled their r’s or where they really came from. I had already gone to the church with the Ramirezes a handful of times, when I’d sleep over on Saturday and wake up attending services in Junior’s borrowed Sunday best. That day, after being invited by Dionne, you decided to go—out of politeness but also because the church gave out nearly expired groceries donated by local supermarkets.

  You and I were the only yellow faces in the church. But when Dionne and Miguel introduced us to their friends, we were received with warm smiles. “Welcome to my father’s house,” people kept saying. And I remember wondering how so many people could be related, could all come from the same dad.

  I was enamored of the verve, torque, and tone of the pastor’s voice, his sermon on Noah’s Ark inflected with hesitations, rhetorical questions amplified by long silences that intensified the story’s effect. I loved the way the pastor’s hands moved, flowed, as if his sentences had to be shaken off him in order to reach us. It was, to me, a new kind of embodiment, one akin to magic, one I’d glimpsed only partially in Lan’s own storytelling.

  But that day, it was the song that offered me a new angle of seeing the world, which is to say, seeing you. Once the piano and organ roared into the first thick chords of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” everyone in the congregation rose, shuffling, and let their arms fly out above them, some turning in circles. Hundreds of boots and heels hammered the wooden floors. In the blurred gyrations, the twirling coats and scarfs, I felt a pinch on my wrist. Your fingernails were white as they dug into my skin. Your face—eyes closed—lifted toward the ceiling, you were saying something to the fresco of angels above us.

  At first I couldn’t hear through the sound of clapping and shouting. It was all a kaleidoscope of color and movement as fat organ and trumpet notes boomed through the pews from the brass band. I wrested my arm from your grip. When I leaned in, I heard your words underneath the song—you were speaking to your father. Your real one. Cheeks wet with tears, you nearly shouted. “Where are you, Ba?” you demanded in Vietnamese, shifting from foot to foot. “Where the hell are you? Come get me! Get me out of here! Come back and get me.” It might have been the first time Vietnamese was ever spoken in that church. But no one glared at you with questions in their eyes. No one made a double take at the yellow-white woman speaking her own tongue. Throughout the pews other people were also shouting, in excitement, joy, anger, or exasperation. It was there, inside the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong.

  I stared at the toddler-sized plaster of Jesus hanging to the side of the pulpit. His skin seemed to throb from the stamping feet. He was regarding his petrified toes with an expression of fatigued bewilderment, as if he had just woken from a deep sleep only to find himself nailed red and forever to this world. I studied him for so long that when I turned to your white sneakers I half expected a pool of blood under your feet.

  Days later, I would hear “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” coming from the kitchen. You were at the table, practicing your manicurist techniques on rubber mannequin hands. Dionne had given you a tape of gospel songs, and you hummed along as you worked, as the disembodied hands, their fingers lustered with candy colors, sprouted along the kitchen counte
rs, their palms open, like the ones back in that church. But unlike the darker hands in the Ramirezes’ congregation, the ones in your kitchen were pink and beige, the only shades they came in.

  * * *

  —

  1964: When commencing his mass bombing campaign in North Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, then chief of staff of the US Air Force, said he planned on bombing the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Ages.” To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time. The US military would end up releasing over ten thousand tons of bombs in a country no larger than the size of California—surpassing the number of bombs deployed in all of WWII combined.

  1997: Tiger Woods wins the Masters Tournament, his first major championship in professional golf.

  1998: Vietnam opens its first professional golf course, which was designed on a rice paddy formerly bombed by the US Air Force. One of the playing holes was made by filling in a bomb crater.

  * * *

  —

  Paul finishes his portion of the story. And I want to tell him. I want to say that his daughter who is not his daughter was a half-white child in Go Cong, which meant the children called her ghost-girl, called Lan a traitor and a whore for sleeping with the enemy. How they cut her auburn-tinted hair while she walked home from the market, arms full with baskets of bananas and green squash, so that when she got home, there’d be only a few locks left above her forehead. How when she ran out of hair, they slapped buffalo shit on her face and shoulders to make her brown again, as if to be born lighter was a wrong that could be reversed. Maybe this is why, I realize now, it mattered to you what they called Tiger Woods on TV, how you needed color to be a fixed and inviolable fact.