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

early and go to the studio. She pushed the book of longings into her bag, made a mental note that Hue had already emptied the cash, and locked the door behind her. She breathed in relief. She didn’t know how people held on to that kind of work, rather, she told herself, she knew how but not why. Why wake up every day to slug it out at some mundane, numbing, repetitive small act? Why be satisfied with that alone, and happy—some people were happy with it.

Heading home, she looked at the city around her. Now, in fact, she noticed lots of people like her staring idly into store windows, sitting in doughnut shops, touching fruit in outside fruit stands, washing clothes in the laundromats, reading newspapers. Tuyen stopped into the Bubble Tea Café and ordered a coffee, took out her book, and waited for someone to sit near her to ask them what they longed for.

It’s like this with this city—you can stand on a simple corner and get taken away in all directions. Depending on the weather, it can be easy or hard. If it’s pleasant, and pleasant is so relative, then the other languages making their way to your ears, plus the language of the air itself, which can be cold and humid or wet and hot, this all sums up into a kind of new vocabulary. No matter who you are, no matter how certain you are of it, you can’t help but feel the thrill of being someone else.

She called Hue the next afternoon at the store to ask if Hue really did need her to come and if everything was all right. She had become caught up in how she was going to execute the collection of longings. She thought of glass, small glass pieces on which the longings could be written and which she would then embed in the lubiao; or should she use paper, perhaps in newsprint, or if only she had the technology, tiny video enactments, or … At any rate, Hue said that she did not mind at all, and one day led to the other and Tuyen promised that for the rest of the time she would call in until Binh returned, but if Hue really needed her, she should call her. It wasn’t that she had lost interest in Binh’s project of finding their brother, it was just she pushed her initial anxiety about it away, thinking that (a) it was highly improbable that Binh would find him; (b) if he did, she would deal with that when it happened; but (c) the chances were so remote; and (d) what was she getting so freaked out about? Binh was off doing the nasty in Thailand. He would return, tell their parents he went looking, get credit for being a good son, and put their minds at rest that everything possible had finally been done, but it was all their fate …

So perhaps cloth; she had decided on cloth. She had strung a huge diaphanous grey-white piece against a wall and was using a calligraphic pen to transfer in her fine handwriting the entries from her book. After several hours of work, she happened on the idea to insert her mother’s letter into the cloth. Of course! She felt a surge of creative recognition that the idea had begun somehow from there. Pen poised, she taxed her memory for the first one she’d read when she heard from the open doorway, “No luck, after all.” She was startled to see Binh in her studio.

He never came up here. He looked dejected. She was uncomfortable. There was a kind of intimacy in his coming to her place that she found alarming. And an intimacy in his look of disappointment.

“You mean, you didn’t find him? Well, what did you expect?”

“He exists, he can be found.”

“But I keep asking you, why? Why do you have to find him? Who cares?”

“They do.”

“Why didn’t they go looking themselves? Long ago then?”

“How can you ask that? They couldn’t leave here … they were scared … they were refugees.… You have no pity.”

“Look, I think they need to forget it. Not forget, but make peace with it. Why do you want to start it up again?”

Binh stared a while at the grey-white hanging cloth on Tuyen’s wall. He read the longings she’d written there.

“So you—you only care about other people. Look at that crap! And look at all this shit on your floor. We’re not Chinese, eh! You’re always pretending. People are real, eh? They’re not just something in your head. You always play around as if everything is a joke. You don’t care about nobody, just yourself.”

“You care about the wrong things. You always did. I know people are real, but everything isn’t fate. They taught us that, but it isn’t true.” She heard herself having the first conversation she could remember with Binh where there wasn’t raw animosity. “I still don’t get what you’re doing.”

“You weren’t the boy. You didn’t get the shit. I want to find him. Let them see who he is, then maybe they’ll get off of my back.”

There was a violent petulance in his voice.

“What shit did you get?” Tuyen rose to challenge him. “Please tell me. It looked pretty good to me. And who cares? You’re grown up. If they’re on your case, why do you live there?”

“Forget it.” He stuffed his hand into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money. “Here, for taking care of the shop. Hue said you really helped her.”

“That’s too much.” Tuyen wondered why Hue had exaggerated.

“No. Take it—I know you don’t have money.”

She didn’t refuse, and an awkward moment followed. They had nothing more to say to each other, but she sensed some hesitation in Binh. He must be a lonely person, she thought. Perhaps in their family it was he and she who were the closest, if not in affections then in all other ways; in the geography of their experiences.

She watched Binh go down to the