The Lotus and the Storm by Lan Cao Page A

approval—but I believe that I have the possibility of courage in me. Inside our father’s jacket, I am something else altogether.
    Almost every morning before school, we take his hands and walk him to his jeep. He calls us by our names. “Khanh.” “Mai.” He calls us good little girls, and because of his prophetic powers and triumphant glance we would become so. I am sure of it.
    But our father also has fears. He fears that wrongness would insinuate itself into our flesh and blood. Not our own wrongness, but the world’s.
    He speaks to us sweetly but with conviction. “You must not trust easily. Trust has to be earned,” he says. “The person who can harm you the most is the one you mistakenly trust.” Judas kissed Jesus and in so doing identified him to enemy soldiers. Brutus, who was made governor of Gaul and allowed into Caesar’s inner circle, led the plot to assassinate him. Oda Nobunaga, one of the greatest military geniuses of all times, had harbored the singular dream of uniting Japan under a single sword but was thwarted by his most trusted general. Nobunaga hid in a monastery and disemboweled himself.
    We listen to our father more to indulge him than to try to understand his warnings. I abandon myself to the certainty of his protection. I remember how he would toss me in the air and inevitably catch me in his arms.
    He pushes us to study. For me, the world is full of facts to be learned. For Khanh, it remains full of mysteries to be solved, beautiful mathematical rules to be discovered. Our father believes that education offers a hope, even if it is an obscure hope, of allaying life’s dangers. He warns us about love. “You must not trust a man to support you.” Love is independence. Love is self-reliance. There is no Prince Charming and Cinderella in our house. Our father does not allow it.
    When Khanh asks if he trusts our mother, he says simply that it is less important whether a man trusts and depends on his wife. It is more important that a woman not find herself dependent on her husband.
    Why? Khanh asks.
    A boy’s life would not be ruined if his love is a mistake, but a girl’s life would be.
    Why? Khanh asks again.
    Boys start life on one side of the equation and girls on another side, our father explains. The boys’ side has additions and the girls’ subtractions. Girls have been unfairly pushed onto the margins where human failings will harm them more. “That,” he said, “is human history.”
    For a moment I feel afraid of him and wish to take flight from his warnings. Until his stories curl back to where they started, to the yearning toward that which is good in the world. Our father always returns to what matters. His face shines with happiness when he kneels to kiss our faces.
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    Our mother too works almost every day but her work does not always take her out of the house. Because our mother comes from a large landowning family, her fortunes have become the foundation of our future. She speaks triumphantly of what the shimmering stretch of her family’s land—pungent black earth—faithfully yields, an accumulation of harvest dawns. But despite the vastness of the land, it is no longer of any use to us. The land, boundless acres of it, is all in unstable territory—government control by day, Vietcong by night. Without the steady rhythm needed to prepare the land for tilling, it can no longer reward us with the fruits of its fertile soil. And so our mother cannot afford to inherit the life of comfort that has been her birthright.
    Our father often speaks of her resilience. The loss of the family’s wealth has not undone her. She has given us a revised but undiminished future—one that depends not on land but on ideas. She has a discerning eye. A piece of land here, in a modest, marginal locale on the outskirts of Saigon, is likely to become prosperous in a