What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

Tuan. Perhaps they took a liberty here and there, made a deliberate misrepresentation or two along the way. Binh would later finance certain operations in what is called illegal human traffic, but which he saw as the free flow of goods and labour. And Tuyen, a little more esoteric but with the same surrealist bent and without the masculinist charm of her brother, but perhaps with a little more intellectual rigour, would become a Dadaist, making everything useful useless and vice versa in her chaotic apartment.

But back then, right after school, Ai, Lam, Binh, and Tuyen had to report to the restaurant to clean tables or wash dishes or chop vegetables endlessly for the freezer. They served soups with beef and mint and sprouts, and chicken on rice, and Singapore noodles. Ai and Lam and Binh worked dutifully and without chafing, but Tuyen complained constantly. She cut things carelessly, she broke glasses, and she left a mess with the dishes. She bawled the customers out if they didn’t use English. Her father put her on the cash register, where at least her passion for numbers and patterns kept her interested. Nevertheless, she was wilful and rude, overcharging and arguing when the restaurant was crowded and everyone feeling rushed. Lunchtime and six to nine-thirty were their busiest times. Then, while they cleaned up late at night, Tuyen did her homework at one of the tables.

She remembered all this in a rush, moving around the cluttered kitchen, the eternal cooker blinking. No matter the size of their kitchens over the years, they were always cluttered. She felt a sense of comfort and contradiction. What was that unease? she wondered. Why had she wanted as far back as she could remember to “not be them”? Not be Vietnamese. It was nothing that they had taught her. They were so definitely who they were. She felt outside of herself, outside of them. Which is why she’d found Carla. She wanted to be more than them. More what? she asked herself now. Damn. All she’d come here to do was borrow money and get back downtown, and all she had done was dig up uncontrollable feelings.

Her father came back into the kitchen, dressed in street clothes. He grunted at Tuyen, moving toward the fridge.

“You still here? You change your mind?”

“Bo …” He raised his hand, stopping her, poured himself a glass of water, added bitters, and drank slowly.

“Your mother’s sleeping. Don’t wake her, eh?”

“Bo”—Tuyen added pleading to her voice—“are you going downtown? Can I get a ride? I need your help, Bo.” She placed her words where she knew he would find them. “Need” and “help” always appealed to him. Her voice was wanting, if not childish.

“Hmmm,” he said, giving in.

She would apologize to him on the way into the city. Smarter or not, she loved her father. She had to apologize for touching that vulnerable spot that she had been unable to translate in all her years as her parents’ interlocutor. She had not even been able to get the story fully spoken.

SIX

JACKIE WAS SEARCHING for yet another cigarette when Oku caught up with her. Oku wished he had one to give her. He wished that he had anything to give her since he had obviously stepped across a very thin line with her at Tuyen’s. He’d teased her before about the German boyfriend, but he hadn’t heard himself do it with quite the venom of a while ago. Or quite the childishness. Was it because somehow he felt that he was losing ground, that she seemed more distant? That he hadn’t seen her for some time or that they, meaning Carla, Tuyen, and himself, were seeing less and less of her these days? Or was it just his inability to find the words to tell her how he felt? Maybe some fumbling sex between them, once, a long time ago was not enough to be a declaration of love.

It was the women’s washroom at the Lula Lounge one night, when Jackie dragged him in, daring him to do it to her right there. The laughing-giggling-blurry high of her pulling him into the stall, opening his shirt, biting his left nipple. Yes, he remembered it was his left nipple. He remembered everything about the sex. Especially the breathless laughing sound she made when he went into her. He remembered everything, but she didn’t. At least it seemed to make no difference to her now. They had gone back to the dance floor and danced all night as if they were not in the middle of a packed room but in each other’s skin. He had licked the musky sweat off her neck, she’d held him with both arms around his waist, running her hands up his back. When the party was over, they had stood outside on the sidewalk, at first waiting for Tuyen and Carla, whom they’d lost in the crowd, oblivious to them. Not seeing them, they thought of hailing a cab, but Jackie told him to walk her home instead. And they’d walked along Dundas Street hugging and dancing and trying to trip each other.

It was three in the morning and they were both still high and drunk when they got to Ab und Zu, Jackie’s store on Queen Street. She let herself in, turning and brushing her hand against his face. Oku hadn’t thought of Reiner, but the door closing brought the cold fact of him. He’d quickly hailed a passing cab and gone home. The next time he saw Jackie it was as if, for her, nothing had taken place. She had been so casual with him, he felt upset. He felt like not talking to her, but this tack didn’t work either. It wasn’t as if nothing had happened, it was as if what had happened was meaningless to her, like hanging out, or laughing, or having something to eat. After that she seemed uninterested in him. So he wrote her poems.

But poems, obviously written for her and