It’s been exactly 2 years since I’ve come to Russia from
Vietnam in order to study university. Exactly two years since I’ve left the
warm soils of my ancestors for the cold and forbidding land of the Russians. I
don’t really know what to think anymore, I guess I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve
gotten used to eating Chinh’s stale noodles and chewy meat every night, I’ve
gotten used to running an undercover business. It’s strange that when mother
was alive, she made me promise to never become like those that stripped our
family and whipped them on the streets in front of everyone, she begged me to
keep an honest job. The last time I saw her, the day she was sending me off the
Russia, I remember the tears in her eyes, the emotions she was trying to hold
still in her porcelain wrinkled face, the pain and words she was holding back
so that I wouldn’t worry for her. If only she had told us about her troubles,
about the pains she must have been having in her stomach, before it was too
late. I remember when my brother sent me a telegram, two weeks into starting
school, telling me that mother had a cancer in her stomach, that there wasn’t
much time. By the time I came, it was too
late. Now, every time I see anyone who has the same silk black hair and white emerald
skin, anyone who carries those same eyes that knew so much, or smiles the way
she did, I cannot help feeling a pang in my gut. I can’t help remembering her
lying there on the bed, cold as ice, and her eyes, emptied from the life that
once inhabited them so passionately when I left.
Today we just sold a new load, and are impatiently expecting
Chinh’s new investment to bring fruit, the boat hasn’t come yet he says, he has
a plan he says. We’ve been cornering him over and over again asking how he’s
going to manage; he says we’ll see in a matter of days. He says he’s sure it
will work, there’s someone who owes him a favor that will help. I can never
know when to trust him, when his tiny calculating eyes are telling the truth.
It’s especially hard to believe him because he is sick, how can a sick man make
so many plans? Only the devil knows.
An hour ago I watched a group of officers beat a man to
death because he was a bourgeois sympathizer. I watched them kick him until he
puked blood, until he could no longer cry for help, and I sat there until he no
longer twitched from each blow. I don’t know what has gotten into me; I can’t
understand what I’ve become. I did nothing to save that man, all I did was
watch. I felt no pleasure from it, but neither did I feel any pain, it was as
though I were in a trance. I can feel, here in this foreign place so far from
home, I am slowly becoming the type of
man that I hate. I feel it in my blood, I can sense it whenever I walk past a
beggar and no longer feel anything. I am becoming cold in the heart, I feel as
though I can no longer love. I wish I could die, I wish someone would kill me.
I’m too much of a coward to take my own life, I’m to much of a coward to even
save someone else’s. Maybe if I had stepped in they would have killed me to, if
only. Where is this life I’m leading taking me? What is it turning me into to?
No news from Chinh.
No letters from home.
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