Only the Heart Read Online Free Page B

daily.
    I was a kid, and it was fun being there with my cousins and the children of our parents’ friends. Even if the stories were dumb.
    After 1975 we only went back to Saigon the one time. The communists renamed it Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh — Ho Chi Minh City — in honour of their dead leader, and for us it was like the old city died with the name. But the memories remained, dragging their feet around inside our heads like the ghosts from all those midnight stories.

3
    PRIME POSITION
    TOAN’S STORY
    My father was lucky. If you can call six months in a re-education camp lucky.
    In some countries, he said, they wouldn’t have wasted their time “re-educating” him. They’d just have taken him out and shot him. The winners make the rules — on torture, murder … whatever.
    But there wasn’t too much of that after the war. At least, not in our part of the country. Maybe everyone had had their fill of killing in the long years before.
    Of course, getting shot was still a real possibility.
    But that wasn’t why we decided to leave.
    It was the uncertainty. Never knowing from one day to the next what was going to be demanded of you. Never being able to speak your thoughts without looking over your shoulder first. You’d think that dying was the worst thing you could imagine happening, but I guess for some people it isn’t. For some people it isn’t even pain they fear.
    It’s a future stretching out ahead of you without any hope of freedom.
    I know. Freedom is just a word. One that politicians love to use to justify things they can’t justify any other way. The communists were fighting for freedom — so was my father. So were the Americans … and every soldier since the first caveman hit someone over the head with a sharp rock.
    But it’s a real thing. And in the end, it’s all about who has control. Of what you own, of what you build. Of who you are.
    Take my grandfather. He wasn’t a wealthy man, but everything he had he’d built from nothing. He hadn’t inherited it, he hadn’t stolen it. He’d earned it. It was his. At least, that was how he saw it.
    Then, at the age of sixty-nine, reality struck.
    For most people it might not have seemed like much, but to my grandfather it was devastating. His shop — our home — was a three-storey structure on the main street of Rach Gia. So when the new government decided to put up a propaganda post — a pair of those huge speakers they use to broadcast the Party line to the masses — where could be more perfect than the roof of my grandfather’s home? There was no discussion; they just arrived one day and began assembling it.
    I remember he stood in the street all day, looking up as they worked.
    After that, the broadcasts and the music became a part of our existence, but my grandfather never mentioned them, never reacted. As if he could deny they existed.
    Even though he died inside a little every time the speakers thundered into life.
    I loved my grandfather.
    He was full of great stories.
    Like the time my mother was going off at me for not doing something she’d already told me to do a dozen times. I was only a kid, but I was learning fast. I knew what was women’s work, and I knew I was on my way to being a man.
    My grandfather just looked at my mother, shook his head and took me aside.
    â€œIt isn’t man’s work …”I began, but he put his fingers to my lips.
    â€œAnd you are not yet a man. So you cannot use it as an excuse to be lazy.”
    I’d already had the lecture a hundred times from my mother. Being the youngest son makes you spoiled and lazy … I didn’t expect to get it again. Not from my grandfather. He was supposed to be on my side.
    He stared at me for a long time. But then he smiled, and I could sense a story coming.
    â€œIn China there was once a lazy young man,” he began. “He came from a wealthy