The Eaves of Heaven Read Free

unruly, graceless city. It might have been uplifting to see the city center, but the bus took a meandering route, veering on the outskirts and turning onto one small street after another until we arrived in Saigon’s Chinatown.
    Compared to Hanoi’s Chinatown, which spanned a few city blocks, Cho Lon was practically a city. It coexisted side by side with Saigon like an unattractive sibling; it was grimy, bustling, cacophonous. The buildings were crammed together, as if they grew on top of one another. Every door was a storefront with bins of goods, produce, and meats spilling onto the sidewalk. Upstairs were offices with placard billboards and living quarters with laundry hanging out the windows. The city generated its own breeze, a mixture of sewage, garbage, aromatic noodle soup, baked buns, dishwater, roast duck, and mildew.
    It was, in fact, the powerhouse of South Vietnam. Cho Lon Chinese controlled the vast majority of trading houses, which also handled the shipping and warehousing of every conceivable commodity for domestic consumption and export.
    The buses delivered us to a three-story hotel on a wide commercial street. Typical of the low-end Chinese establishments, it was a sad, dark, dingy place, manned by a humorless middle-age Chinese who couldn’t summon a greeting or a smile. The lobby was an eight-by-eight-foot space with a wooden bench and a board painted with the hotel rules in Chinese and Viet. It was devoid of decoration—not a single painting, poster, or potted plant. The windowless rooms were small and hot, with clumps of cobwebs in the corners. The ceiling fans did nothing but draw out the reek of mildew and cigarettes from the peeling walls. Stuffy air from the hallway oozed into the rooms through wooden screens above the doors. There was a communal bathroom on each floor. Surprisingly, there was one redeeming feature in the building: the toilet. It was a squat affair with a cast-iron water tank mounted up near the ceiling. Back in Hanoi, where there was no sewage system, we only had pit toilets filled with calcium oxide powder, the compost collected periodically by municipal workers using ox-drawn carts. A flush toilet, I thought, was surely a sign of civilization.
    But Saigon held little prospect for us to make a new life. The first week, Father roamed about town looking for work only to return well after dark empty-handed. With the Chinese manager patrolling the hall to keep people from cooking in the hotel, Stepmother made do with greasy Chinese fare and low-grade rice from street stalls. We gathered on the floor and ate the lukewarm food Stepmother laid on the straw mat.
    Father didn’t eat much. He sat slump-shouldered, shaking his head, talking in his quiet, defeated voice. “There’s nothing. It’s hopeless. They won’t hire me because I’m not Chinese.”
    Stepmother said, “Can you look elsewhere?”
    “The Chinese control everything; they own everything. Look around you; they even got the government contracts to house us northerners.” Father sighed. He had handled a fair amount of government transactions in Hanoi and knew how profitable it could be.
    But it was easy to forget our dire situation because the ultimate entertainment center in Saigon sat directly across the street from the hotel. It was an ugly, enigmatic compound the size of three city blocks enclosed by a tall, corrugated sheet-metal wall, looking very much like a giant construction site. There was not even a single billboard over the gate to hint at what was within. A policeman guarded the entrance and enforced a single rule: No shirt, no entry. Bare feet, body odor, and rags, however, were acceptable. Men, women, and children of all ages passed through at all hours. The place bustled during the day, but at night, it turned into a raging carnival.
    It was owned by Mr. Vien the Seventh, the biggest mafia boss in South Vietnam, who had his own army based in a forest between Saigon and Vung Tau. The establishment