PodCastle 434: The Ghost Years - a podcast by Escape Artists, Inc

* Author : Nghi Vo

* Narrator : Tatiana Gomberg

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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PodCastle 434: The Ghost Years is a PodCastle original.





Rated PG-13.

The Ghost Years

by Nghi Vo

The year I turned ten, the war almost ended. The Chinese army fell back beyond the northern border of Cao B?ng, leaving behind thousands of widows, wide swathes of burned ground, and their great war bells in their haste.

These bells were of the ancient kind, tongueless but elegant and struck with enormous logs swung from their own frames. They filled the battlefield with sonorous thunder, and the crews that manned them were said to be fanatical, as devoted to their bells as they never were to their commanders. They were left sinking in the black mud along the border, and the Resplendent Phoenix Army brought back news of their silence. We don’t know what happened to their crews.

There was talk of melting them down, perhaps into a war memorial, but the bells, two hundred or more scattered along Vietnam’s long northern border, were still in disputed territory.

Besides, the war was not over yet. We all knew that. The bells stayed, silent and dreaming in the mire.



My name is Cho Doan, and I am the only daughter of Nguyen Mai and Cho Tuan. My father was an apothecary who came to Th?ng Long with nothing more than a little bit of money and a pet lizard that he carried in his sleeve.

He stopped to rest in the shade of an apitong tree just outside of the city, where there was a gang of pretty girls clustered in the shade and reading each other poetry. There was one girl in a pale orange aoi dai that fluttered daintily around her knees. She laughed when she saw the lizard poking its green head out of my father’s sleeve, and he liked her laugh so much, he took her all the way to Th?ng Long to be his wife.

I was born with a full head of black hair that fluffed up like a chick’s when it was dry. It was all black, black as tar, black as good earth, but then when I was six months old, a patch of it at my right temple fell out. Well, no matter, I still had plenty left, and my grandmother would play with me, kissing the bald spot and massaging it with her fingertips so it would grow back as black and strong as the rest, but it didn’t. It grew back white tinged with cream, like the lotus flowers that massed on the river after the typhoons.

“She was born in the year of the pig, and I ate pork the night before it happened,” my grandmother declared, and she became a vegetarian on the spot. My parents tried to tell her that her meal had nothing to do with my hair, but it was no use. She never ate another bit of meat after that day, and though my hair never turned black, I liked it well enough, and my friends thought it was pretty.

There’s another story about how my mother’s youngest sister disappeared. There was a man involved, and money taken from her family’s shop. Maybe she was living in Saigon, far away from the war and rich as only a smuggler’s bride can be, or maybe she was dead, killed for the promise of love and that money stolen from her sleeping parents. No one told me that story, and I had to piece it together over fifteen years of overheard whispers and sorrowful pauses.

My family exists in the stories we tell each other about each other, and in that, we are very much like our country. The Vietnamese were born from the marriage of a dragon from the sea and a goddess from the mountain. They lived together long enough to have one hundred children,

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