Saigon, Louisiana

Never mind that I had known nothing but the smooth asphalt of the suburbs for 18 years; this trailer park off of a New Orleans highway felt foreign for so many other reasons. There was the white gravel sabotaging my high heels, the barefoot kids flinging tiny firecrackers into the sky, the bowlegged mutt slurping Wonderbread and canned beans, and the Vietnamese men lazing on a porch.

They called me over: “Hello! Miss!” Two days previous, I had come tramping up this way, hoping to find someone to tell me the story I was looking for. Thousands of Vietnamese immigrants had settled on the outskirts of the Big Easy, choosing a steamy, tropical climate much like the one they had left behind. They lived in bedroom communities and saw each other every Sunday at Mass. A walk away from the porch was a strip mall promising tattoos, manicures, and groceries, and the clerks greeted customers in their language. It’s easy to get by without English, so that’s what many do.

I wanted to write about men who slaved for a fisherman’s wage so they could eventually return to their home country and their wives and kids—but, tongueless, I hadn’t yet gotten anybody to talk.

It was a sticky Saturday, and the sun was fast disappearing. The men, tan from the harsh Gulf sun, drank Budweisers. It was an evening like any other, only I was there.

“Hi,” I said, grinning wider than a Cheshire cat and clutching my car keys, my passport out. “I was hoping to do this story”—but blank looks stopped me. Six of them didn’t speak English, and just two could stutter translations and awkward inquiries. My name was April—A-pril. I’d try a chicken wing; no beer, thanks.

Soon, my novelty wore thin, and they returned to their conversation. The cool green bottles became exclamation points—but what provoked them, I didn’t know. I would never get my story without the right questions. The right questions were in Vietnamese.

Around the time when these men were first settling in Louisiana, single-language homes were á la mode. Don’t ever speak Vietnamese, the doctor told my mother, who had left Saigon after it became Ho Chi Minh City. Your daughter won’t learn English right.

So my mother only practiced the rhythms of her tongue every two or three years on family visits. When I decided that I, too, wanted in, I was long past the age to master the delicate accents, and I deserted the whim. It was simpler to skip over my middle name—Hoang-Ngoc, an unpronounceable compound word that means “yellow jade”—and abbreviate.

But the men on the porch hardly believed my excuses. If I listened, I would understand, they told me.

And I did. Even if I had heard it infrequently, their speech was familiar, a forgotten song replayed on the radio. I knew the sudden dips and pauses of the smooth vowels; the up-downs and down-ups of the accents; the way a thought strung out along one-syllable words will end, hesitantly, like a question mark. It was the same song I had heard in my aunt’s house and at my grandparents’ dinner table. It sounded like deep bowls of noodle soup and bright fish sauce, incense burning in a dark temple and the yellow dust of Saigon, cool tiles on the floor and quick rain falling in impenetrable sheets. The words were nothing. I knew the language.

The chicken wings grew cold. I jangled my keys. It was too late, I told the men. I stepped off the porch and found my Jetta, safe in the strip mall’s parking lot, and sped at 60 miles per hour back to my high-ceilinged room off Fontainebleau Drive. It was quiet.

April H.N. Yee ’08, a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House, is a magazine and news editor of The Crimson. She is working at the city desk of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans this summer, and hopes that HUDS adds beignets to its menu next year.