The Eaves of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

do nothing but continue to live in our smelly shack and watch our savings trickle away.
    In Hanoi, even our servants had better living quarters. It seemed amazing to me, the distance we had fallen within the span of five short years, from living like princes to eking out a living in a mud hole serving noodles. Stepmother, who came from a wealthy family, endured the hardship courageously without a single complaint. I decided that if she could bear it, so could I. My little sister Huong was only five years old, and baby Hoang was two. My brothers Hung and Hong were in their early teens, too young to fully comprehend our predicament.
    The person who fared most poorly was my cousin Tan.
    “It’s a spiraling descent,” Tan told me when we were alone. “We will keep going down and down. It’s time we look out for ourselves and find a way out of here.”
    Tan’s refusal to work created an embarrassing and awkward situation for Father. While the whole family pitched in to make ends meet, Tan left to look for employment downtown. He came home only to eat and sleep, avoiding even the smallest task because he considered the noodle business beneath our station. Tan told me several times that he couldn’t believe Father had put us in this dump while he had enough money for a decent house like Uncle Ty’s. Tan talked about joining the armed forces like his half-brother Lang, who enlisted in the navy after arriving in Saigon with Aunt Thuan and her children.
    “I can’t leave my family,” I said. “I want to finish high school and go to college.”
    “I’m going to look for work as a secretary or clerk.”
    I wished Tan luck, but I thought it was hopeless. He was still thinking like a rich kid. Tan would never stoop to restaurant, construction, or any other manual labor. But in a way, I was thinking like a rich kid as well; I was expecting that I would have the time and leisure to study.
    “You still have hope because we haven’t hit the bottom yet,” Tan said and laughed with a sneer.
    I had to turn away to hide the blood rising to my face. It was a controlled staccato laugh filled with disdain. Tan and I were closer than brothers, best friends since we were toddlers, but there were times I could barely keep my fist from smashing into his face.
    Two months after we received our
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diplomas for graduating from the eleventh grade, a major achievement at the time, Tan successfully enlisted in the air force. He was following in the footsteps of his older half-brother Lang. Tan left immediately for basic training and vanished from our lives.
             
    A LETTER came from Tan one afternoon. My landlady gave it to me when I returned from my classes. I took it down to the beach, where I now swam daily. The evening fishermen hadn’t stirred from their naps to prepare their boats. A group of children played on a wrecked skiff far to the south. I sat on the sand and opened the letter. There was a photograph of Tan, grinning, the Eiffel Tower in the background. Tan said he wasn’t tall enough to be a pilot so they transferred him to Morocco for aircraft mechanic training. It was the time of his life. A virgin when he left home, Tan was now drinking whisky, dancing in clubs, and sleeping with bar girls. Women were fantastic, he wrote; not all of them were like the working girls we had seen up north. He urged me to start dating. He said life was passing me by. It made me chuckle to imagine Tan carousing in the bars, wrist-deep in cards, a girl on his arm, behaving like one of the drunken French soldiers we had had to deal with at our inn in Hanoi.
    I often thought of him when I came down to the beach. Before coming to Phan Thiet, I had seen the sea only once. Tan and I were fifteen then and had ridden a bus all the way from Hanoi to Do Son on the shore of Ha Long Bay. A gray, blustery day of needling rain, we stood on the wind-teased beach and compared the churning, frothing ocean before us against what we had read