Vi by Kim Thúy

Author:Kim Thúy [Thúy, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2018-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

PUDONG

~

east bank

A YI CONFIRMED that the State was beginning to know Louis and Hà very well indeed, since one day she showed them the notebook containing the names of all visitors and the length of their stay at the house. She had to submit it to the city authorities every week. Someone somewhere in a neon-lit office knew that Hà wrote in Vietnamese in her diary when she suddenly awoke during the night, that Louis owned a Rolex watch from the 1940s that he’d inherited from his father, that the couple made significant donations to Tibetan schools…On the other hand, I’m sure that he did not hear Louis often declaring at breakfast that he woke up beside the most beautiful woman in the world, nor see him savouring the pleasure he derived from caressing Hà’s ebony hair, cut straight across like a Japanese doll’s. Louis would have been able to pick out Hà in a crowd just from the shape of her calves. He gazed at her lovingly every time she referred to herself in the Asiatic manner, placing her index finger on the end of her nose instead of against her chest, as Westerners do. I always saw him walking with Hà’s hand in his.

Every day, he affixed a new quotation to the bathroom mirror. Hà would invite me to read them with her. Together, we looked for unknown words in the dictionary, and tried to grasp the meaning before Louis returned at the end of the day. “What is your kiss?—The lick of a flame,” by Victor Hugo, enabled Hà to teach me the difference between kissing with the mouth in Western culture and with the nose in Vietnamese. While the one tastes, the other smells, which explains the word thơm (perfume) for requesting or offering a kiss between young Vietnamese. The quotation “If you loved me and I loved you, how I would love you,” by Paul Géraldy, confused tenses. Was the mood wishful or regretful? We did not continue the discussion because Hà reacted very strongly to the word “regret”: “Promise me that you will never have any regrets. Never.”

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