Who Are You Writing For?

Mostly, I write for myself. For the sheer joy of see­ing some­thing true crys­tal­lize on the page. But you're right — 30,000 word works just don't get made that way. The first one I wrote was for the envi­ron­ment, the sec­ond for Singapore women, and this one for my chil­dren … to give them a sense of what being part of the Vietnamese dias­pora means. Here's fif­teen min­utes from yesterday's pages -

In the liv­ing room Huong screams, “Trời đát ơi! … Heaven and earth!”

He rushes back out to his wife, bang­ing against Kim as she pushes past him to the kitchen. Kim pounces on the tele­phone there, bangs out Jake’s num­ber into the key­pad on the receiver. But, still she can’t get through. ‘All lines are busy’ the robotic ATT voice tells her. ‘Please try again’ it beeps repeat­edly. She doesn’t seem to under­stand it’s just a machine and screams at it, beg­ging it to please … please … please con­nect her, it’s a mat­ter of life and death.

Hunched over the phone by an open gas flame and an elec­tric pot com­ing to boil, Kim doesn’t see the build­ing col­laps­ing. Like a tin­ker toy exper­i­ment gone wrong it folds gen­tly into itself in a cloud of ris­ing dust, tak­ing down the Morgan Stanley offices where Jake usu­ally is at ten o’clock on week­day morn­ings. Dematerializing in less than five min­utes.
“Son-in-law!” Huong sud­denly makes the con­nec­tion, and faints onto the sofa.
She brings Sixth, who’s been hold­ing on to her mes­mer­ized by the events on the screen, down on top of her. As he top­ples over, he kicks the cof­fee table into the TV screen.
The pot of soup boils over, scald­ing Kim on the legs.
“Fuck,” Kim screams over and over, at the pot … the phone … the stove.
She throws the phone at the pot. It clat­ters once, then falls away to rock help­lessly in the open gas flame. The flame licks at the phone, melt­ing the plas­tic and releas­ing a heavy sweet odor that stings her nos­trils. On the counter, the pot con­tin­ues to seeth, fiery orange soup surg­ing over the pot’s edge to hiss spits of steam onto the kitchen counter. See .… ssseeee … if you .…can sstoppp … can ssstopp mmmeee … it taunts. Kim wrenches the elec­tric plug from the pot, hurls its its con­tents at the kitchen sink. She doesn’t feel the boil­ing mix of crab meat, toma­toes, and pun­gent fer­mented shrimp splash­ing onto her arms and thighs, spat­ter­ing her with lit­tle blis­ters. The pot seems to smash onto the floor tiles and crack them of its own accord, to spin on its side, clang­ing like the gong’s at her grandfather’s funeral as if pos­sessed by some grief other than her own.

The clang­ing sur­rounds her, the smell of burn­ing fills her nose, her mouth, her throat. She can’t breathe. She doesn’t want to. She falls on her knees, cov­er­ing the pot with her body, let­ting it’s heat sear her chest and her stom­ach. She will let her­self be burnt like Jake is burn­ing. Together, they’ll suf­fo­cate in the fumes. It’s in their genes. We’re peo­ple who die from fumes, in fire, she remem­bers cry­ing to Jake at Thi’s funeral. His grand par­ents in the gas ovens of Auschwitz, the flames lick­ing at the guard in her Youngest Uncle’s oil depot, her lit­tle sis­ter in the nail salon. She holds her breath. Wills the end to come.

Sixth is by her side, lift­ing her her up. Wiping crab soup off her face, her neck and her shoul­ders with the soft­est of touches. Huong has her mobile in her hand. She hands it to her daugh­ter. ‘Called in sick today’ Jake’s mes­sage shines out at Kim from the screen. She sits up straight, begins to scroll down the screen. There are mes­sages from friends, wor­ried notes from Nina and from her broth­ers, another mes­sage from Jake. It says ‘Dad went to work’ and noth­ing else. She turns to the TV, but the screen is dead, cracked when Sixth kicked the cof­fee table into it. The dis­em­bod­ied voice of the news­caster com­ing out of the black­ened box says the North Tower has col­lapsed and with it most of the bond trad­ing firm of Cantor Fitzpatrick, her employers.