Soft Hands

 

Photo by Redicul Pict on Unsplash

Trinh Hua was an elderly and frail Vietnamese woman from a village north of Saigon. She wore a nón lá, a conical straw hat, to protect her from the fierce Texas sun and a Mao-style jacket to warm her in the winter. She longed for her home country. She wanted to be buried there, in the land of her husband and son, but her doctor had forbidden her to travel. To return to her village would mean thirteen hours of blood-clotting time in the air, and more hours of bouncing her frail body over rutted roads. She will die, sadly, in her adopted country. She did not want to be buried here in this dry dusty soil, but in the damp earth of home.

Each day, she walked to her job as cook in a Vietnamese restaurant a mile distant from what she called her “little American House” deep in a Dallas barrio. On arriving home on a hot August day, she saw a burly man pace the sidewalk in front of her home. He scowled at her as she approached him. He had a two-day beard and wore a baseball hat and a t-shirt that displayed a Military-style rifle over an American flag. When she came abreast of him, he glared at her.

“Asian bitch,” he said.

The remark stunned her. What did he say? She looked at him in expectation of an elaboration on the comment that would reveal her ancient ears had misheard him. As she met his eyes the world exploded in a sea of flashing lights. Pain exploded from a punch to her face that broke teeth. She fell onto the hot sidewalk. The man knelt over her. He hit her again. Again. And again. He kicked her, breaking a couple of ribs. Then he walked away.

The brain could not handle the agonizing pain. She passed out.

Roberto Salazar stepped out onto his porch to retrieve the daily mail. Glancing up the street he saw a woman lying on the sidewalk and a man with a thick middle and a baseball hat walk briskly away. Roberto stepped down to ground level and rushed to the street.

“Hey!” he called to the retreating figure.

The man ignored him, got into a car at the end of the block and sped away. Roberto called the police. An ambulance arrived a few minutes after the arrival of four police squad cars. A young officer questioned Roberto and the occupants of houses on both sides of the street. Only Roberto had seen any of the event. The Texas heat had driven the street’s residents into the depths of their homes. The ambulance sped away. The young officer passed out calling cards to nearby residents. “Call this number if you think of anything you might have seen or heard,” he said, repeating the line like a mantra.at each doorway.

Then, the police departed, leaving nothing but blood stains on the sidewalk to tell the story of Trinh Hua’s ordeal.

Trinh Hua fled her village more than half-a-century earlier, after the Americans had destroyed it with their helicopters and artillery and the villagers lived among the crumbling walls of their homes, sleeping under tarps and cooking over open fires. When the Yankees left, the Viet Cong came in to kill those who had cooperated with the Americans. Her husband was implicated in an anti-Communist plot by a jealous neighbor and taken away. Trinh did not hear from him again.

With her only son, she escaped to Saigon and the protection of the Americans. That protection did not last, though. The Americans left and the army of the north swept into the city with their automatic weapons and their political officers to interrogate the inhabitants for confessions of anti-socialist behavior. A military officer rounded up a group of men and paraded them to a square, where she was forced to watch as her beautiful son was pressed down to his knees and was sent to his death by a bullet behind his ear for no better reason than that he wore glasses and had soft hands.

“There is no room,” the officer said, “in the new Vietnam for intellectual parasites. Labor will be honored. Those who do not labor will die.” Her son collapsed to the ground as the sound of the shot reached her. She wailed, broken by the brutality of it as he fell.

After the murders of her family, she gave all the money she had and all she could borrow to a smuggler and escaped in a leaky boat, sailing across a vast ocean, unlikely to survive, to America. She learned the strange language spoken in her adopted country. She adapted to her new homeland, living at the edge of a Mexican barrio in the Southwest, and grew old there. The government in Vietnam loosened its authoritarian hold on its people, but Trinh did not trust them. She remained in the barrio, among alien people who spoke an alien language. She did not like the dry heat, the traffic, the Yankees with their fine clothes and their big cars, and the haste of life in their sprawling cities, but there was freedom there in the barrio.

Roberto visited Trinh at the hospital whenever he could take the time. “The poor woman has no one,” he said to his wife when she complained about his time away from home. “I hope that, if some gringo thug attacks any one of the lonely abuelas on our street, someone will show her care.” He paused. “Would you want to know la anciana lies in her hospital bed with no visitor, no one to care?”

“All right,” she said. “Go care for her, but don’t stay long. The gringo that tried to kill her might have a similar opinion about Latina women whose husbands are away.”

On her release from the sprawling medical complex nearby, Roberto drove her to her “little American house.” Scarred, limping, and short of breath, she called her employer to report that she had chosen to retire. The beating, the pain, and the long recuperation had made her fearful of the streets, of strangers, and above all, cowardly men who beat old women for no better reason than that they looked “different.”

Following her return home, Roberto drove her to her medical appointments and to buy groceries and pharmaceuticals. He walked down the street, past the blood-stained sidewalk, to visit her once or twice weekly to look in on her and let her know someone cared. Latinos, even those who have adapted to the customs of another land, honor their abuelas — their grandmothers. He sometimes takes spicy quesadillas or menudo to her. She laughs at the richness of it and offers a dish of Pho to him.

When he leaves at the end of the day, Trinh stands in the front yard of her house to admire her little American home, for just a moment. “Home is not in the land that abandons you, but in the one that shelters you,” she says to her long-dead husband and son. Then, she goes inside, into the cool air, and locks the door behind her.

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