Thirteen Harbors

I

I took a new wife for my husband.

Maybe the strangest thing ever to happen at Yen Ha village, the bride was my good friend, a woman who had passed the age for marriage but for a long time had desired a child, and wanted a husband. Besides making the match, I helped my husband’s sister and mother during the engagement ceremony and wedding, preparing dishes for their celebration.

There is a saying, A girl has twelve harbors, meaning only at the last will she find shelter. It took me thirteen.

II

I had gone into labor the first time at noon.

It was the fifth lunar month and the harvest was nearly finished. I had brought rice and corn and sweet potatoes to the harvesters in the field. Grasshoppers swarmed over the paddy, their wings clacking and sputtering. The harvesters had to throw down their sickles and chase after them. Kicking through the stubble, I waded into the paddy too. Suddenly I had a pain in my belly that very rapidly became worse and worse. I threw my grasshoppers into my hat and held my belly. My water broke, soaking my trousers before I reached the field’s edge. I called to my husband. Bewildered, he dropped the unfinished sheaf of rice plants from his hands, ran over and lowered me in his arms to the ground. My mother-in-law nearly lost her head sending our nephew for a midwife. But it was too late. I gave birth right there on the wet earth, surrounded by the new rice plants on one side and the stubble of the old on the other.

“There’s so much . . . the earth is soaked . . . oh!” cried my mother-in-law.

Terrified by my mother-in-law’s mournful cry, I raised my head to look at my belly, and nearly fainted when I saw what I had given birth to: instead of a baby, just a piece of bloody, red meat. It had a dark mouth which looked like a fish running aground and yawning before dying. The mud-spattered harvesters gathered round, splashing and tramping in from all over the field.

“Put it in a pot and bury it in the Serpent Mound,” said someone.

“No, put it on a banana tree raft and float it down the river,” said another.

After this, I didn’t leave the house and cried all the time, my silent husband looking after me as carefully as a little child. Tears brimmed in my mother-in-law’s eyes when she looked at my emaciated face. She treated me like her own daughter.

One day, I asked her sadly, “Mother, how have I come to this?”

She breathed a sigh and said, “All the members of our family are kind-hearted people. We did not sow the breeze that resulted in this whirlwind on your body.”

Just then, my husband accidentally dropped a pot of medicine. The pot broke and the wet yellow medicine plopped all over the floor, its steam rising.

I lost sleep frequently. Sometimes in my dreams I saw the harvesters wearing conical hats, sitting on the lawn and smoking tobacco while waiting for that piece of meat to stop yawning. After a while they put it in a terracotta pot. Then they took it to the Serpent Mound and buried it. Sometimes I had another dream in which they put my piece of red meat on a banana tree raft and floated it down the Hoang Long. Then a serpent monster with long black hair would surface from the depths and push the raft back to the riverbank. After either of these dreams I would wake with a start, yelling, “Give back my baby! Give me my baby!”

Opening my eyes, I’d find my husband holding me in his arms, my body cold with sweat. He held me this way through many nightmares.

III

During the summer of the year of the rooster, there was little rain in our village, but the water roared in from upstream for a whole week, catching my village in a heavy flood. The river flowed full of big logs and branches. The dike broke at midnight, releasing a thunderous swell. Dogs howled, and the chickens clucked madly, inciting the cows and buffaloes and goats to bawl and break down the gates of their stables. Panicky villagers ran here and there seeking safety. Just as I climbed to the top of a banyan tree, the river swallowed the village. I sat in the tree for hours, calling in the dim moonlight for my mother, terrified the serpent monster would come and drown me. Under the pull of the water, the banyan first began to lean, then uprooted and washed away. Hungry and exhausted, I was swept away by the flood.

I awoke the next morning to find myself sprawled on the Serpent Mound. Many villagers had gathered there, some standing, some sitting on their heels. The floodwaters moiled all around us.

A dog barked. My mother-in-law looked at me sadly, surprising me when she said: “It was the serpent monster that saved you and brought you to the mound.”

At sixteen, I had met a team of archaeology students who came to my village to excavate the Serpent Mound. I knew one of the students, a boy named Tao, who had also grown up in Yen Ha village. He seemed to sympathize with me and liked to tease me. They excavated all week without finding anything but the shells of mussels and shipworms, animal bones and a wooden plank. Before replacing the dirt, Tao threw a straw doll into the pit.

“It’s magic to use against any girl who might love and then betray me,” he said. “It will turn the traitor into a serpent monster.”

All the students laughed while I blushed with shame and confusion. Later, when we fell in love with each other, I asked him about the straw doll, but he wouldn’t answer except with an enigmatic smile.

Despite the students’ failure to turn anything up, stories about the mound persisted. One had it that during a moonlit night, a dense mist covered the river. The waves popped and echoed from a cave carved by the river in a limestone karst. A thief returning home in the dark could not find a ferry, so he began to remove his clothes, intending to carry them across on his head with the things he had stolen. Just then, a fishing boat glided silently to the riverbank. A boatgirl whose ragged shirt exposed her breast sat at the rudder.

“Come aboard,” she said. “I’ll take you across.”

The thief climbed into the boat and, thinking indecent thoughts, happily found no one else aboard. When they reached the middle of the river, he advanced on the girl. Without hesitation, she slipped over the edge of the boat into the water, where he saw that only the upper part of her body appeared to be human. The lower half tapered into the long, wriggling tail of a serpent. Horror welled up inside him as he realized he had just embraced a serpent monster. Dumbfounded, he watched the head, bare shoulders, and breasts of the girl emerge from the water. With both hands on the bow, she tipped the boat to let the water rush in, sinking it immediately. The thief could have drowned, but fortunately the current pushed him to shore instead. Trembling, he scrambled up the bank, but the serpent monster called him back: “Don’t go! You forgot your bag.”

When he turned, he found the girl as he first saw her. Her dry trouser cuffs had been rolled up around her thighs, revealing pale, human legs. She stood in the boat at the river’s edge, holding the bag out to him, its many stolen things and the bag itself all completely dry. She let the bag drop to shore, then rowed into the mist and disappeared. After that night, obsessed with those events, the thief suffered from bouts of madness for half a year.

But to me, half a year is nothing: all my young life has been haunted by the serpent monster and the misty harbor.

IV

My husband’s name was Lang. As a soldier bound for the front, he received a few weeks of leave before going to war. At first he didn’t want to get married. Instead, he spent most of his time wandering around the village visiting relatives and friends, laughing and joking and drinking as if he would not return. When the leave was nearly finished, under great pressure from his mother, he hastened to find a woman who would agree to marry him. I met him while still grieving for Tao, who I’d heard had died at the front.

As a bride I was taken to my husband’s house by boat. While the wedding party went ashore, I dipped water into a large gourd jar. According to village custom, this water would be used to wash the feet of my husband’s mother. I don’t know when the custom became popular in these villages, but people say it helps to prevent the fatal rivalry between mothers- and daughters-in-law, and I think they might be right. Before the wedding, my mother gave me the dry gourd jar along with instructions for acting and working as a good daughter-in-law.

Of course at that time, I knew the saying, A girl has twelve harbors, but I didn’t yet know how many I would have to pass.

The wedding procession climbed slowly up the hill to where a large crowd had gathered and was shouting angrily. Suddenly I recognized Tao, my former lover, in the middle with a whitewashed flat basket hung around his neck that said, I am a deserter. I couldn’t believe the man burdened with that flat basket was my lover. When all the areas in the north had been overwhelmed by American bombing, most schools had closed, and Tao joined the army. It had been reported that he had died in a battle on the front line. But now, the rumor running through the crowd had him so afraid of battle that he shot himself in the foot. Court-martialed, he had been sent home to be reeducated, which now appeared to mean being paraded around the village by a group of militiamen who condemned him as a deserter and traitor to his country. Tao limped ahead, followed by the militiamen carrying their AK-47s on their shoulders, urging him to call out: “I am a coward! I betrayed my country!” Many kids followed them, jeering and repeating in unison: “I am a coward! I betrayed my country!”

Walking by the side of my husband, feeling such a pang in my heart, I did not know what to say.

One day after the wedding, Lang left for the front. We had no idea how long it would be before we met each other again. He tried to hide his sorrow, rushing through his farewells and leaving the village quickly.

V

During the war, a woman suffered terribly living without her husband. Many endless and sleepless nights I lay on the bed, longing for a kiss or an embrace. Heartbroken, I would cover my face with his old shirt. I suffered much more just before my time of the month, when my breasts would swell with a slight pain and my cheeks turn pink, my eyes glittering with desire.

During those long nights, many things happened in my imagination. When I smelled his shirt, it seemed I could smell the faint odor of his breath as well. But this only worked for a short while. To distract myself, I had to put paddy into the grinder and husk rice all night long. Sometimes I went to the well and ceaselessly poured buckets of cold water over my body, and sometimes I would go to my mother-in-law’s bed and lie by her side because her breath was similar to my husband’s.

Since my mother-in-law had her own experience of the days waiting for her husband from the front, she knew how I felt and thought she could help me. She put Lang’s underwear in a pan and simmered them over a low flame, stirring them with a stick while murmuring her prayers. She believed this ritual helped a daughter-in-law be faithful to a husband far away.

Yen Ha village had two places along the riverside where villagers usually came to bathe: one upstream for women, the other, some two hundred meters downstream, for men. The women usually waded into the river without taking off their clothes. Away from the bank where the water rose high to their chests, they would roll their shirts to their heads like turbans and swim and wash themselves.

One of my many troubles came from bathing at this river. On a hot day while walking with his men along the riverside, the chief of the militia discovered Tao and me swimming together. The chief bitterly hated draft dodgers and deserters. It galled him to believe these cowards seemed to have the time and opportunity to flirt with the wives of the soldiers fighting on the front lines. Of course he felt so strongly about it because his own wife had been caught having an affair with a ferryboat worker and later became pregnant. As a result, he often spied on the women who talked with the workers at the riverside.

“I had a cramp,” I insisted to the chief. “This man saved me from drowning.”

Frightened, Tao stammered, “I heard her . . . cry for help when I . . . when I brought my . . . buffalo cart . . . to the river.”

The militiamen wanted to take me and Tao to the Commune Administration, where they would interrogate us about our relationship. Tao wore only pants and walked lamely behind me. My black silk trousers clung wetly to my skin. I hadn’t had time to put on my blouse, so I had just a camisole on my upper body. Suddenly, the chief told me to stop and put on my blouse. He changed his mind about the interrogation and sent me home. “I’m letting you go,” he said, “not because you deserve it, but out of consideration for the man at the front.” Nevertheless, as I walked away, I heard him cursing me behind my back, complaining about “faithless women.”

VI

When the war ended, my husband came home. Seeing him return whole and unharmed loosed a flood of happiness, both in me as well as the rest of the family. But Lang became peevish just a few days later. The incident at the river had made me notorious in the village, and I had no idea how to explain my relationship with Tao to him. One evening, a host of friends and relatives came to our house, celebrating Lang’s return as merrily as if it were Tet. But after they left, a funeral gloom settled on our home.

Sensing the cause of his mood, my mother-in-law said to Lang, “I’m sorry for not having been able to keep a good reputation for your wife.”

“I survived the war for many years,” said Lang, “only to have this bad reputation kill me now.”

Coldly, I said, “I am your wife. Only you can know whether I’ve been faithful or not.”

Embarrassed and surprised, Lang mulled over what I had said. He could not decide whether to make our marriage work or to divorce me. As a soldier who had been far away from home for such a long time, it was difficult for him to know his own heart.

One night shortly thereafter, during a windy and very cool full moon, no one in the village could sleep. Nearly everyone gathered outside to enjoy the moonlight sparkling between the fishing boats anchored on the Hoang Long. But Lang and I stayed inside, lying on the bed and listening to the continuous clatter echoing back from the river where the fishermen knocked oars against their hulls to attract fish. When Lang’s hand accidentally brushed against my body, I took it in my own. With this one touch, everything changed and we embraced each other passionately.

My mother-in-law got up early the next morning. She sat on the verandah, combing her hair and looking toward our bedroom now and then. When Lang stepped from our room, he sat by her side.

“Luckily, I kept my patience these past few days,” he said. “If not, I might have murdered that bastard deserter, Tao, and ruined my marriage.”

“What do you mean?” asked his mother.

“The one night after my marriage before I left for the war was Sao’s time of the month,” said Lang. “We just held each other and wept.”

“Do you mean your wife is still a virgin?”

“Yes, until last night.”

My mother-in-law was embarrassed and sat quietly. I stepped from the bedroom and rolled my hair with my hands. When gazing at myself in the mirror, I found my eyes bright and flowing with happiness. Then I sat by her side with a light heart.

“I didn’t believe the rumor about you,” she said. “But we had no witness to restore your reputation until now. Forgive me and don’t be angry with me for what I’ve allowed to happen to you.”

I laid my hand on her arm. “I am not angry with anyone. And I’ve never been afraid of anything, except that the war would prevent my husband from coming home. Only he could truly know how I’ve longed for his return.”

VII

I gave birth to pieces of red meat at the end of my second, third, and fourth pregnancies. Frightened and sad, my mother-in-law spent most of her praying to the Buddha. But Buddha never came to help us. People say, A wife’s one hundred joys are not her husband’s debts, the members of my husband’s family were virtuous, and yet I still had to bear this burden. Where did it come from?

I would not have thought it possible, but my womb produced even greater terrors during my fifth pregnancy. Several round balls of red meat emerged this time, like the red, leathery eggs a serpent monster might lay. But neither human nor devil would hatch from what I had carried for so many months and with so much pain.

Some villagers began to despise and shun me. One day, a pack of kids followed me, shouting, “Crazy woman! Crazy woman!”

Later my husband told me about the things I couldn’t remember doing. I lost many hours wandering along the side of the Hoang Long river, slipping into the water, taking wild flowers and scattering them on the shore. Apparently I did this many times. Once I went to the Serpent Mound, where many small memorials had been raised for all the village’s dead children. But I didn’t know which ones belonged to my pieces of red meat.

VIII

One night the river ran low, and my husband and I went shrimping. Boat lamps sparkled all over the water, and the shrimp eyes reflecting the light became innumerable red dots glittering just beneath the surface. Once we had cast the net on the river, Lang pitched a tent for us on the Serpent Mound. If there were very few shrimp or fish to catch, we would sleep in the tent until morning. But this night, after catching half a basket of shrimp, I became tired and went to the tent to rest. Some time in the night I heard a woman call: “Give back my baby!”

A woman stepped down from the top of the mound, shouting: “They drowned my baby at the river. Help me! Give back my baby!”

“Are you crazy?” I told her. “You don’t have a baby, you never . . .”

“Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “That’s my baby! Don’t drown my baby, please.”

I looked to where she pointed on the river and saw Tao putting pieces of red meat on a banana tree raft. The woman jumped down from the riverbank into the water. Then a serpent with a girl’s upper body and long black hair rose to the surface and pushed the raft to shore. My heart filled with terror and I looked around, but Tao and the raft had disappeared. Only a flock of wild white ducks flew low over the river, quacking.

“Sao! Sao!” Lang clapped my shoulders. ”Are you okay?”

“It was Mrs. Sao who called for help,” I said, still not fully conscious. “It was Mrs. Sao who jumped down to the river and turned into the serpent.”

“Are you out of your mind? You are Sao, my wife.” His eyes searched my own. “Let’s go to the river, let’s cast the net.”

And so we cast the net until dawn.

On the way to the market to sell the shrimp, I met Tao, who carried terracotta pots in his buffalo cart.

“I hate those pots, Tao,” I said. “They look terrible. Stop carrying them in your cart.”

“Okay, but why do you hate them so much?”

I told him about my nightmare and said, “Do you remember when you came with the students to excavate the Serpent Mound, and you buried a straw doll in the pit? Why did you do that?”

Tao laughed. “It made no sense. I was just teasing. But the straw doll legend is real, from the war between Vietnam and the Cham, who lived here many centuries ago. Under the reign of Tran Nghe Tong, the Cham navy came up the Hoang Long river from the sea, killing many people and burning the villages along the river. But strangely, they did nothing to Yen Ha village. When Tran Khat Chan, the Vietnamese general, defeated Che Bong Nga, the Cham general, the invaders fled to the sea. Only our village survived the war intact. But three months later, a lot of things became known more terrible than the fate of the villages destroyed by war. Scores of unmarried girls in our village turned out to be pregnant.

“The elders shaved the girls’ heads and marked them with lime, then tied the girls to banana tree rafts and floated them down the river. But although the rafts floated downstream in the morning, by evening they had been pushed back to the village by hundreds of shrimp, fish, serpents, and turtles. The elders became angry and directed the young men in the village to push the rafts downstream, but again and again they came back. Finally, the villagers gave up and freed the poor girls from their punishment. Many months later these girls gave birth to curly haired, dark-skinned and wild-eyed children who didn’t have the same flesh and blood as the villagers.

“Among those women, one gave birth to a piece of red meat with a round mouth that looked like a copper penny. Immediately, the villagers took the piece of red meat for a devil and floated it down the river. The young woman went mad, screaming incessantly: ‘Give back my baby! Give me my baby!’ At night, she went to the Hoang Long to look for her child. She waded into the river, swimming and diving all over, but could not find her baby. At last, exhausted, she slipped under the water and drowned. Then by some magic her body transformed into a serpent and washed ashore. The villagers buried the serpent body with copper pennies, tortoise shells, and a girl-shaped straw doll on an island in the middle of the river. They even built a tomb for her. That’s how this place became the Serpent Mound. They hoped honoring her would help to prevent such a terrible thing from happening again. The legend says the woman’s soul still wanders the river and caves it passes. When a person might drown in the river, the woman changes into a serpent and saves her life.

“To pray for that woman’s soul, you should put a clod of earth on the mound. Have you?”

“No, we didn’t know.”

“That’s too bad. You should do it now.”

IX

My husband and I walked the twelve kilometers into town to receive medical exams at the provincial hospital. The doctor told us: “Both of you are in good health and none of your test results explain Mrs. Sao’s abnormal childbirths. We’d like you to visit a hospital in Hanoi, if you can you get there.”

Lang told me to sell a cow at the market. His mother gave us a pair of earrings. Lang’s younger sister gave us two breeding pigs, and my mother gave us a hundred kilos of paddy. We sold it all, except the earrings, which we planned to use to pay for medicine. “Nothing is more important than life,” we thought. “If we have our health, we can make more money.”

We went to the hospital in Hanoi and had at least ten different kinds of tests. The doctor finally said he could find nothing wrong with me, but he wanted to have a private talk with Lang, and asked me to leave the room.

Afterward, Lang told me the doctor said the dioxin level in his blood was very high. He took him to a laboratory to see hundreds of glass jars containing various kinds of deformed fetuses. The doctor explained: “In some cases, soldiers affected by Agent Orange can still give birth to normal children, but who knows what will happen when their children have children, or when all this will end?”

After returning home, Lang lay quietly on the bed for three days. His face sagged with exhaustion, making him look much older than his age.

“My darling,” he said finally, “I don’t want to lie to you. The doctor thinks I’ve been affected by Agent Orange. He thinks if we keep trying to have children, we’ll probably keep having these deformities.”

“Agent Orange?” I exclaimed. “You must have known!”

“How could I know?” said Lang. “I feel fine. But after speaking with the doctor, I thought about the defoliated forests we had to cross. We drank water from streams running through them and even put some in our canteens. Once, in the jungle, we watched American planes flying slowly overhead spraying a dense white mist. A few days later, the leaves shriveled and came down easily in the breeze. All the trees withered and turned the color of death.”

Wrapped in my husband’s heart, I felt a pain there like one I’d not yet seen. Withered and bitter myself, I had no comfort to pour into him.

X

Lang received a letter from Ha Van Nenh, a former comrade, announcing that his new wife had just given birth to a son. Lang asked me to prepare some gifts for a visit to Nenh’s family: a dozen eggs and several kilos of sticky rice.

Nenh’s family lived in a stilt house built on a green hill in the mountains. When we arrived, the door was open, and the sound of a baby crying came from inside. A little girl, with no arms and no hair on her red head, stood by the stilts baring her teeth in a grin like a monkey. Afraid to be bitten, I hid behind my husband.

Surprised and pleased to see us, Nenh welcomed us to his home. Nenh’s wife, Thuy, carried her baby in her arms and gave us a cheery hello.

“Your wife looks young and healthy,” I told Nenh, and asked her to let me hold the baby.

“My first wife had three pregnancies,” said Nenh, “but each produced deformities like you see with this one here. After her birth, my wife was so tired and frightened she abandoned us. Thuy is my new wife.”

Suddenly during the conversation, Lang’s face turned white. “Where did you get these water barrels?” he asked.

Nenh said after the war, he had been assigned to a project building a veterans’ cemetery. He and his friends had found many barrels scattered in the forest that they thought might be used for water. One of Nenh’s comrades was a lorry driver, and helped transport the barrels to their villages in the North.

“My god! What stupidity!” cried Lang. “You’ve brought death to your family. These defoliant containers are what deformed your children.”

Nenh’s face wrinkled and turned pale.

XI

After returning home from Nenh’s, Lang told his mother about Nenh’s marrying a new wife who gave birth to a healthy son. After thinking it over for several days, Lang explained his decision for making a change in our lives: ”A new marriage might bring us better luck. Who knows?”

Lang said he hoped if I married a healthy man, I might have normal children and a good family. Upset by Lang’s proposal, I kept silent for many days.

One day, when Lang was out, my mother-in-law came to my bedroom and asked, “What do you think for the future of your little family?”

“I have no idea,” I said. I still didn’t want to talk. But she was patient with me, despite my disrespectful tone.

“I am not so selfish as to think only of Lang,” said my mother-in-law. “I have always treated you as my own daughter. I wish some change would be good for both of you.”

“So you want me to leave my husband and allow him to marry a new wife,” I said, crying. “But can you be sure his new wife will give birth to a healthy child?”

“No one could be sure of anything in such a situation,” she said, “but let’s try.” Suddenly she knelt down to me. “My darling, I beg you to show mercy to Lang, to our family and to yourself. You might have a better life with a healthy husband.”

“Oh, Mother!” I said, taking her hands in mine. “I am grateful for your kindness and good will, but let me think carefully before I tell you what I feel we must do.”

Sadly, I found myself clinging to the hope for a normal life and child and agreed with my mother-in-law to try again, repeating in my mind what Lang had said: “Who knows?”

XII

After helping my husband marry a new wife, I went back to my own mother’s home, where she took pity on me, weeping. Half a year passed. I couldn’t forget the days and nights when Lang and I worked hard for our living, the smell of sweat from his shirt and face, the long days when I expected good or bad news of him from the front, or the long nights when we slept in the tent by the river and cast our nets for shrimp. Of course, neither could I forget my five terrible births.

I often went to the riverside at sunset and looked at my former husband’s house, where the cook smoke rose from the thatch roof into the sky. Did he remember me when he slept with his new wife?

I knew the cause of my misfortune after visiting the hospital with Lang, but the straw doll Tao buried in the Serpent Mound still haunted me. One day I took a pick and shovel and crossed the river to the Serpent Mound. I dug for hours.

I had just begun to drag out a skeleton when Tao drifted by in his boat.

“Tao,” I cried, “This is the serpent monster that destroyed my life.”

“That’s crazy,” said Tao. “That story was just a joke.”

“This isn’t a skeleton of a serpent monster?”

“It’s just some animal.”

“Why did you lie to me? That serpent monster story has haunted me for so long.”

“Forget the serpent monster,” he said. “You have something more important to worry about.”

I looked at him expectantly.

“Stay calm, okay? Lang’s new wife has just given birth to eleven pieces of red meat.”

I began to tremble.

“Sao, my darling . . . ”

A ringing sounded in my ears. “Lang and me,” I murmured, “it’s hard to tell who’s more miserable.”

XIII

I had to cross the river again.

My friend could not bear the burden of my husband’s house. After the miscarriage, she left quickly. Lang clenched his teeth and endured the disaster, even while his mother had become seriously ill. They needed my help more than ever, leaving me no choice but to try my thirteenth harbor.

I chose to cross at night. A dense mist covered the river, the ferry barely visible from the flickering of the boatgirl’s cookfire. Once on board, I noticed the many terracotta pots inside the boat, and my limbs went limp with fear. When we reached the middle of the river, dozens of banana tree rafts began to bump into us, blocking our way. The boatgirl used her pole to repel the rafts. But after one raft had been pushed away, another came back again, swarming with the others all around. “We can’t get through here,” cried the boatgirl. “We have to turn back and cross somewhere else.”

“This is the last harbor,” I insisted. “We must cross here.”

I helped the girl push the rafts away. Finally they dispersed, and the ferry crossed the river, my hardest crossing yet.

Once ashore, I turned to the river and found the banana tree rafts had vanished. The boat and the boatgirl sank into the mist, and the last thing I saw was the terracotta pots under the boat’s dim light fading away.