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

Tuc couldn’t get a good foothold there. He said he needed some place more fluid. We backtracked up the testicle of Malaysia to Thailand. It was a raggedy retreat. It took us a year and a half, maybe two, maybe three—I don’t know how many times we were beaten up or jailed. But Loc Tuc would squirm us out of it with the teachings of the prophet, and his pretence of being a devout man and an important man who had suffered under the communists in Vietnam.

He was from Loc Ninh, so he said, but he had spent the war in Saigon, and when the country boys from the north walked into Saigon his teachings about hard work got a going over. He claimed he was connected by family to a general in the southern army, and though he was questioned and questioned and sent to a camp for re-education, he finally bought his way out with money from the family. One minute he was from Loc Ninh, one minute he was from Khe San, the next time he was from Ha Tien, then from Nha Trang. Sometimes he was a friend of Thieu, the next his cousin’s sister-in-law was General Diem’s mistress. He even claimed to have made a daring escape from Chi Hoa Prison. He even claimed to be a friend of Thich Quang Duc, the monk who had doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in Saigon. That is when Loc Tuc wanted to seem elegant. That monk, he told me, was protesting the persecution of Buddhists. I don’t know why he told me these stories, they didn’t matter to me. But I suppose I was his only audience, and as meagre as that was, a storyteller always tries to impress. I didn’t have any stories, so what the hell, I listened. I was the wrong person to impress.

SIXTEEN

EVERY FOUR YEARS, June in the city is crazy. Cars speed about flying emblems of various nationalities. Resurgent identities are lifted and dashed. Small neighbourhoods that seemed at least slightly reconciled break into sovereign bodies. It’s all because of soccer.

The World Cup is this year, and today it is raining. Korea is playing Italy in Japan. Up on St. Clair Avenue, in the Italian neighbourhood, they’re biting their nails over espressos and San Romano beer. Any minute now they hope to launch out into the street waving the tricolour and screaming Francesco Totti’s name. They’re prepared to wear black and go so far as to cut their wrists if the blues don’t win. In Korea Town on Bloor Street, the same, except their hopes are more modest, given that Korea’s team has gone farther than any in history and the Italians are formidable. When Ahn Jung-Hwan scored the golden goal, from St. Clair to the old Little Italy on College Street the Italians declared days of mourning. In Korea Town, where Binh has his store uncomfortably wedged between a grocery store and restaurant, red flags, red T-shirts, red headbands, “red devils” screams, have burst out of the bars and restaurants, honking cars full of people have suddenly jammed streets. Exquisite screams of exaltation can be heard. The Koreans have erupted in a street party too sweet to mean anything less than world domination. The rain is incessant, yet it doesn’t stop some; the sidewalks are crammed and tears are flowing so much it’s impossible to make out what’s falling from the skies and what’s falling from faces.

Tuyen loved World Cup. She loved being in the middle of whirling people, people spinning on emotion. She’d been with her camera to every street party this June. To Little Italy, to the English pub, where the reactions are exuberant as a soccer riot in Manchester but contained within four walls; she stood outside of the German pub and was shy to take pictures; at the Brazilian cevejaria on College Street she danced the samba in between shots. Today she heard the honking horns heading up to Bloor Street, and she collected her gear and raced up Bathurst to Korea Town. As she left the apartment, she heard a television announcer say, “I didn’t know we had a Korea Town in the city.” Asshole, she thought, you wouldn’t. You fuckers live as if we don’t live here. She wasn’t Korean, of course, but World Cup made her feel that way. No Vietnamese team had made it, so today she was Korean.

The fool on the television made her fly all the faster up the street. Tuyen began snapping photographs as soon as she hit the intersection. There was one of six or seven teenaged boys streaming a twenty-foot red flag; there was the rain beating down on a girl, her body outstretched through a car window. Tuyen found a vantage point on top of a parked car. The owners were so happy themselves, they didn’t mind. The traffic was backed up for blocks. Korean flags drenched with rain slapped about. Car horns made a rhythm, and the whole of Korea Town was lit up despite the downpour.

Tuyen felt elated, infected by the mood on the street. It reminded her of a year ago, when she and Oku went to Quebec to demonstrate against globalization. Oku had joined the black anarchists. They were both always trying to find something tingling on the skin, something where their blood rushed to their heads and they felt alive. She had taken her camera and Oku his balaclava and thick gloves for throwing back tear-gas canisters. The night before, they had watched videos of Japanese demonstrators, impressed by the riot gear protesters in Tokyo had. “There,” Oku said, “they didn’t have this bullshit talk about peaceful demonstrations, they came out knowing there would be trouble.” Carla was nowhere around for this. She watched the protest on TV, disconnected and passionless. Tuyen had tried to persuade her to go with them, wanting to get her out of that stark apartment—a futon, a crate for a table, two