Birds of Paradise Lost by Andrew Lam

Author:Andrew Lam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59709-278-4
Publisher: Red Hen Press

Birds of Paradise Lost

Mister Qua’s oolong tea from Guangdong was wasted that Thanksgiving morning. As usual we sat at our corner table at the Golden Phoenix, Mister Qua’s restaurant, chatting when Mister Huy ran in as if chased by a ghost. “Undone, absolutely undone,” he yelled and waved the San Jose Mercury News expressively above his bald head. “Mister Bac has committed self-immolation.”

“Self-immolation?” I mumbled, and the words vibrated in my throat, swirled between my ears, reigniting that terrifying flame of long ago. The flame blossomed quickly, a flower on fire, a restless, transparent bird of paradise in whose pistil serenely sat a Buddhist monk. “Self-immolation!” I repeated the words again, the meanings sank in finally while the flame soared and flickered, and the monk fell backward, his charred body went into a brief spasm or two and then was perfectly still. “No!” I said. “No!”

Mister Qua in the meanwhile had stood up and taken the newspaper from Mister Huy’s hand as if the two of them were engaged in some desultory septuagenarian game of relay. “Are you joking?” he yelled loudly. Heads turned. His three waiters in their red jackets and black bow ties paused with their trays balancing precariously on industrious fingers. “How can this be?” he asked loudly. “I just had lunch with him here last Monday!”

Mister Huy shook his head and sighed. “Read, read,” he said. He was almost out of breath, tiny beads of perspiration glistened on his liver-spotted forehead. “Mister Bac went all the way to Washington, D.C., to do it.”

What immediately struck me were not the words themselves but the two photographs that accompanied the article. One, the larger, was a blurry image of a figure on fire, a human torch swirling in a fiery circle on a landing of the Capitol building, his face lifted skyward, arms raised above his head as if waiting for a benediction from the heavens. The smaller was the photo of Truong Hoai Bac’s driver’s license, the one I readily recognized: Old Silver Eagle, publisher of the Vietnam Forever, smiling with mischievous eyes to the camera. As I studied the two disparate photos—life versus death—I heard Mister Qua say rather impatiently, “Out loud, Thang, read it out loud, please; you’re the professor.”

Thus, on that morning, with the oolong’s bittersweet aftertaste lingering on my palate, I heard myself recite in English to a gathering crowd what turned out to be my oldest and dearest friend’s unexpected obituary:

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