little brother for English lessons. Why desire their presence outside of bed when their vocabulary is limited to conversations that go on behind closed doors? They told me I didn’t understand a thing. They needed those young girls for a totally different reason—to restore their youth. When they looked at those young girls, they saw their own youth, filled with dreams and possibilities. The girls gave them something: the illusion that they hadn’t made a mess of their lives, or, at the very least, the strength and the urge to start over. Without them they felt disillusioned, sad. Sad at having never loved enough and having never been loved enough. Disillusioned because money hadn’t brought them happiness, except in countries where for five dollars they could obtain an hour of happiness, or at least some affection, company, attention. For five dollars they got a clumsily made-up girl who came for a coffee or a beer with them and roared with laughter because the man had just said the Vietnamese word
urinate
instead of
pepper
, two words differentiated only by an accent, a tone that is nearly imperceptible to the untrained ear. A single accent for a single moment of happiness.
O ne night, as I followed into a restaurant a man with a slashed earlobe like that of one of the Communist soldiers who’d lived in my family home in Saigon, I saw through the slit between two panels of a private room six girls lined up against the wall, teetering in their high heels, faces heavily made up, bodies frail, skin shivering, totally naked in the flickering light from the fluorescent tubes. Together, six men took aim at the girls, each with a tightly rolled American hundred-dollar bill, folded in half around a taut rubber band. The bills crossed the smoky room at the crazy speed of projectiles, finally landing on the girls’ translucent skin.
D uring my first months in Vietnam, I was very flattered when people thought I was my boss’s escort, in spite of my designer suit and my high heels, because it meant that I was still young, slim, fragile. But after witnessing the scene where the girls had to bend down to pick up the hundred-dollar bills wadded at their feet, I stopped feeling flattered out of respect for them, because behind their dreamy bodies and their youth, they carried all the invisible weight of Vietnam’s history, like the women with hunched backs.
Like some of the girls whose skin was too delicate, who couldn’t bear the weight, I left before the third volley. I left the restaurant deafened not by the sound of clinking glasses but by the imperceptible sound of the shock of bills against their skin. I left the restaurant, my head filled with the resonance of the stoic silence of the girls who’d stayed behind, who had the strength to strip the money of its power, becoming untouchable, invincible.
W hen I meet young girls in Montreal or elsewhere who injure their bodies intentionally, deliberately, who want permanent scars to be drawn on their skin, I can’t help secretly wishing they could meet other young girls whose permanent scars are so deep they’re invisible to the naked eye. I would like to seat them face to face and hear them make comparisons between a wanted scar and an inflicted scar, one that’s paid for, the other that pays off, one visible, the other impenetrable, one inordinately sensitive, the other unfathomable, one drawn, the other misshapen.
A unt Seven also has a scar, on her lower belly, the trace of one of her escapades in the maze of alleys where she inched her way between the vendors of ice and of slippers, between squabbling neighbours, angry women and men with erections. Which of these men was the father of her child? No one dared to question Aunt Seven because they’d had to lie to her during her pregnancy to protect her from her own belly by concealing it under the habit of the nuns at the Couvent des Oiseaux. The nuns called her Josette and showed her how to write her name in large
urinate
instead of
pepper
, two words differentiated only by an accent, a tone that is nearly imperceptible to the untrained ear. A single accent for a single moment of happiness.
O ne night, as I followed into a restaurant a man with a slashed earlobe like that of one of the Communist soldiers who’d lived in my family home in Saigon, I saw through the slit between two panels of a private room six girls lined up against the wall, teetering in their high heels, faces heavily made up, bodies frail, skin shivering, totally naked in the flickering light from the fluorescent tubes. Together, six men took aim at the girls, each with a tightly rolled American hundred-dollar bill, folded in half around a taut rubber band. The bills crossed the smoky room at the crazy speed of projectiles, finally landing on the girls’ translucent skin.
D uring my first months in Vietnam, I was very flattered when people thought I was my boss’s escort, in spite of my designer suit and my high heels, because it meant that I was still young, slim, fragile. But after witnessing the scene where the girls had to bend down to pick up the hundred-dollar bills wadded at their feet, I stopped feeling flattered out of respect for them, because behind their dreamy bodies and their youth, they carried all the invisible weight of Vietnam’s history, like the women with hunched backs.
Like some of the girls whose skin was too delicate, who couldn’t bear the weight, I left before the third volley. I left the restaurant deafened not by the sound of clinking glasses but by the imperceptible sound of the shock of bills against their skin. I left the restaurant, my head filled with the resonance of the stoic silence of the girls who’d stayed behind, who had the strength to strip the money of its power, becoming untouchable, invincible.
W hen I meet young girls in Montreal or elsewhere who injure their bodies intentionally, deliberately, who want permanent scars to be drawn on their skin, I can’t help secretly wishing they could meet other young girls whose permanent scars are so deep they’re invisible to the naked eye. I would like to seat them face to face and hear them make comparisons between a wanted scar and an inflicted scar, one that’s paid for, the other that pays off, one visible, the other impenetrable, one inordinately sensitive, the other unfathomable, one drawn, the other misshapen.
A unt Seven also has a scar, on her lower belly, the trace of one of her escapades in the maze of alleys where she inched her way between the vendors of ice and of slippers, between squabbling neighbours, angry women and men with erections. Which of these men was the father of her child? No one dared to question Aunt Seven because they’d had to lie to her during her pregnancy to protect her from her own belly by concealing it under the habit of the nuns at the Couvent des Oiseaux. The nuns called her Josette and showed her how to write her name in large
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