Ice Cream Girl to Hotel Owner

[Lankham Hotel in Pakse, 4/22/23]

Near the end of WWII, Allied bombing destroyed cities, roads, bridges and railways in many countries, so millions were killed outright, millions starved to death and millions more were reduced to walking skeletons.

(Think Holocaust, with a capitalized H.)

By 1943, Japanese occupied Vietnam was on her knees, for Japan was losing. Everything was in disarray. Worse, American bombs would soon drop.

Desperate, a Hanoi couple escaped to Laos. In Sekong, they found work as farm laborers. Arriving with three children, they had four more.

In 1950, their fifth child was born. That’s our ice cream girl. Among her siblings, only boys had any schooling, and barely. Still, she remembered her father reciting poetry to her out loud, from memory. He also read passages to her from Vietnamese detective novels.

By this time, they had moved to Pakse, where there was a Vietnamese bookstore run by a Cholon Chinese. With little money, most people just rented books by the day. As a child in Saigon in the 1970’s, I also rented books.

The war between the Communist-led Viet Minh against the French spilled into Laos. Injured Viet Minh fighters were nursed back to health inside the ice cream girl’s home. Just a baby then, she remembers none of that.

At thirteen-years-old, she hit the street with only one flavor of ice cream, with a tub she had to rent. Her Lao language skill was poor, since she had only lived among Vietnamese. Worse, her parents had forbidden her to play with Lao children. They envisioned her marrying a nice Vietnamese man, to produce many Vietnamese children.

Since others could offer many more choices, she had few customers. After nearly a year of trying to sell ice cream, she switched to seasonal fruits. This went much better.

Around this time, she also asked her dad to teach her how to read and write, so ABC she learnt, but she had no paper to write down lessons. To this day, her spelling is shaky.

At 22, she married a nice Vietnamese young man, a carpenter. He made the heavy table and bench I’m sitting at right now. Together, they decided to open a pho restaurant. Buying an entire cow or buffalo, he’d slaughter it.

That wasn’t legal, however, so the cops showed up. Of course, they just wanted money, but they couldn’t cough it up, so he was jailed for three months. Out, he got his butcher permit. Besides selling pho, he also made furniture and even became a building contractor.

Nearly two decades later, they were ready to build the four-story Lankham Hotel, my home for the last 20 days. Its design, they got from a TV commercial. Each time it came on, they would sketch really quickly additional details.

They had six children by then, with the two oldest already married, then the sky fell on her head. On a trip to Vietnam, her husband was killed in a car accident. He was 48, she was 44.

In Pakse, there are two Vietnamese cemeteries, Buddhist and Catholic. Viets are also buried at the 19th century Wat Luang, the city’s oldest. The hotel owner’s husband is interred at a Lao temple slightly out of the way, however. She chose it for its beauty and spaciousness. She didn’t like all those bodies so crowded together at Wat Luang.

As for his grave, it’s a mausoleum with bronze flower vase and incense holder. Since she was too distraught to give clear instructions, it’s built in a weird, sort of classical style. There is nothing remotely like it at that temple. Heartbreaking lines of poetry, she had inscribed.

Missing him so much, she often slept there. One night when she was absent, thieves broke into the mausoleum to steal the flower vase and incense holder. Remembering this, she had to laugh, but with her body leaned over to the side, as if collapsing.

With their father gone and the future so uncertain, she told her four kids still at home to get a college education. Though only studying seriously for the first time, they ended up with scholarships to Thailand, China, Japan and Australia. Each returned with a degree. The boy who went to Thailand even managed to snag an additional scholarship to the US, where he got his master’s degree in one year.

Of her children’s success in life, she remarked that they had not only helped themselves and their family, but made their nation proud, and by nation, she meant Laos. None has become a beggar or thief, she said.

In all traditional societies, boys must become men, often by passing specific tests. Vietnamese push this further by thinking one must work to become human, “thành người.” In Nguyễn Huy Thiệp’s 1988 short story, “Cún,” a man says, “My father is Cún. In his short life all he wanted was to become human, but couldn’t.”

Interesting, too, Cún’s death in 1944, for that’s when an unprecedented famine started that would kill at least a million people. Near the end of her life, my grandma finally talked about this directly. Senile, she would rave about seeing such and such in the middle of the road.

Telling me her story, the hotel owner would occasionally lapse into poetry, with lines quoted from folk poems, or Bà Huyện Thanh Quan and Nguyễn Du, two 19th century poets. Up until the last two generations, most Vietnamese could readily quote at least a handful of poets.

Losing her mind in the aftermath of her husband’s abrupt departure, she was slowly healed by Nguyễn Du’s poetry, with lines first heard from her father.

Though he wanted nothing more than to see his native village outside Hanoi again, this was denied, so she went there in his stead. There, she hired workers to restore graves of her ancestors. So long neglected, they had sunken into the ground.

[Vietnamese in Pakse, 5/3/23]

[Vietnamese in Pakse, 4/28/23]

[Pakse, 5/1/23]

[Amor Fati in Pakse, 5/1/23]