Robert Olen Butler by A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Author:A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain [Mountain, A Good Scent from a Strange]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Vietnamese Americans
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 1992-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

RELIC

You may be surprised to learn that a man from Vietnam owns one of John Lennon's shoes. Not only one of John Lennon's shoes. One shoe that he was wearing when he was shot to death in front of the Dakota apartment building. That man is me, and I have money, of course, to buy this thing. I was a very wealthy man in my former country, before the spineless poor threw down their guns and let the communists take over. Something comes into your head as I speak: This is a hard man, a man of no caring; how can he speak of the "spineless poor"? I do not mean to say that these people are poor because they are cowards. I am saying that being poor can take away a man's courage. For those who are poor, being beaten down, robbed of rights, repressed under the worst possible form of tyranny is not enough worse than just being poor. Why should they risk the pain and the maiming and the death for so little benefit? If I was a poor man, I, too, would be spineless.

But I had wealth in Vietnam and that gave me courage enough even to sail away on the South China Sea, sail away from all those things I owned and come to a foreign country and start again with nothing. That is what I did. I came at last to New Orleans, Louisiana, and because I was once from North Vietnam and was Catholic, I ended up among my own people far east in Orleans Parish, in a community called Versailles, named after an apartment complex they put us in as refugees. I lived in such a place for a time. The ceilings were hardly eight feet high and there was no veranda, nowhere even to hang a wind chime. The emptiness of the rooms threatened to cast me down, take my courage.

In Saigon, I owned many wonderful things: furniture of teak, inlaid with scenes made of tiles of ivory and pearl, showing how the Tru'ng sisters threw out the Chinese from our country in the year 40 A.D.; a part of an oracle bone from the earliest times of my country, the bone of some animal killed by ritual and carved with the future in Chinese characters; a dagger with a stag's antler handle in bronze. You might think that things like this should have protected me from what happened. There is much power in objects. My church teaches that clearly. A fragment of bone from a saint's body, a bit of skin, a lock of hair—all of these things have great power to do miracles, to cure, to heal.

But you see, though the Tru'ng sisters threw the Chinese out, just one year later the Chinese returned and the Tru'ng sisters had to retreat, and finally, in the year 43, they threw themselves into a river and drowned. And the oracle bone, though I did not know exactly what it said, probably dealt with events long past or maybe even foresaw this very world where I have ended up.

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