Insurgency

August, 1963, Hue

Everything felt hot and sticky, enveloping my body like a cocoon. I was a furnace, burning, constantly burning. The brightest stars burn the hottest. Well I didn’t want to be a star, suffocating in my own heat, I would give anything to be like Ba, cool and calm like a river.

My parents must have known that I wasn’t going to be tranquil. They always said I was a firecracker from birth, wailing like I was furious at having been forced through such an ordeal. Angry from birth, they said, angry to death. That was always why Ba was my favourite - it wasn’t a secret anymore, Ma was well aware - he was everything peaceful that I was not. When I took to raging against everything, fighting every rule and expectation, he would just flow with it, his resistance silent as he travelled the expected course, until he reached a bend that he could course down. “Water flows, rocks erode.” It was his favourite saying.

Rocks also erode when you hit them.

Nothing seemed to diminish the fire within me, the never ending heat. I thirsted for something that would break the monotonous warmth flowing through me, but in the dead of summer, the air was stale itself. It hadn’t rained in a week and the earth seemed to be reaching its point of defeat, cracking and drying as it sucked up every lick of moisture from the air. We were all suffering.

Casting my eyes around my empty room, as if anything would have changed since this morning. I was searching for an answer to my rage, yet my room was as clueless as me. I caught sight of my reflection. It was always something that had jarred me. What I saw didn’t match. It never did.

I’d see my reflection - my long black hair, sharp square jaw, too small eyes - and feel complete confusion at the stranger staring back at me. Nothing matched, nothing fit with who I was. I would go about my day waiting for some stranger to pop out behind me, to clear up the random person who I had caught in the mirror, but they never would. Days, sometimes weeks if I was lucky would pass by, and the strange encounter would fade from my memory until I spotted another mirror and the same unknown girl would stare back at me. When I was younger I thought I had a twin sister. But when I noticed that they changed with me, copied me, I gave up that hope.

I didn’t want her here now. I wanted to be alone. Wanted to smoulder and shout and fight against the world and all its stupid injustices without another soul taunting me. I didn’t want this foreign entity here mocking me. Why couldn’t I see myself in the mirror?

My hands reached to my head with scissors, tugging at my hair like it was the solution.

When Ba entered the room, he simply stared at the pile of hair covering the floor for a moment, then, as if he expected as much, continued towards my bed patting the spot beside him. That was Ba: forever unshakeable. He was never a man of many words, the silence ensuing more than familiar, yet I didn’t like it. That was another difference between us; he could sit in silence for hours on end, simply observing those around him. I was never one to keep my mouth shut. So much for Ngon.

“It suits you.” He paused again, considering each word, “Ma told me what happened,” there was no indication as to what he thought; the man was impossible to read. Was he also disappointed with me? I hadn’t meant to storm off - I never did, really - I had just felt that bubbling feeling, like I was about to explode.

I truly had tried, though that would never mean much to Ma. Tried to conform, and be what they wanted. Tried to shove down all the feelings that stewed within me, that I couldn’t explain. I even tried to be the perfect daughter, the perfect woman: keep my mouth shut, be humble and all the other pointless skills that made me marriageable.

Well marriagable to a man.

“Con gai, did I ever tell you the story of the Trung sisters?” He asked it like a question, but no answer was required. There was no point in explaining why some old wive’s tale would be no help, wouldn’t change who I was - who I was trying not to be.

“A long time ago, when Vietnam was a very different place, there were two sisters. These two sisters were fierce and courageous, and bowed down to nobody,” he paused, side-eying me, “especially not for any man. They were also forged in flames, like you. Outraged at the oppression within their home, at the foreign rulers from China who did not respect Vietnam and her people. The eldest sister, Trung Trac, was so distraught that she decided to take action. She raised an army of loyal VIetnamese and fought against the Han army. And the both of them won.

“The two sisters became queens of Vietnam. Warrior Queens.” Ba’s voice quietned to barely a whisper, as if the words he had just spoken were some great secret.

I waited patiently for him to continue ( I wasn’t very patient so it didn’t last long).

“What happened to the warrior queens?”

Despite my question, Ba refused to look at me, his gaze fixed on the far corner of my tattered rug. “They ruled for three great years. Three prosperous, peaceful years. But the world couldn’t accept them. The world couldn’t accept women like them: who were different, who were stronger than men and didn’t act like women. The world couldn’t trust strong queens like them.

The Han army came back after three years. This time they were stronger, deadly, more determined. They showed no mercy towards the Vietnamese.” No more needed to be said. I knew what he meant, in more ways than one.

Finally, as if broken from his trance, Ba turned his head towards me, his eyes finding mine, “The world doesn’t take kindly to those who don’t fit in. It doesn’t like things it can’t understand, can’t name or explain. But that doesn’t mean you let it defeat you. You are your own warrior queen, Duy Anh. Just because they beat you doesn’t mean you stop fighting.”

Instinctively my hand reached for my now jaw length hair, shorn in a jagged line. At that moment it felt like Ba understood me better than I understood myself.

We stayed like that for a while, sitting in the silence we’d created. Ba seemed so lost in his own thoughts that I dared not bother him. I just sat and stared. Stared at the person in the mirror staring back at me.

I’d never seen them before, their features foreign to me yet somehow they felt so recognisable. The intense stare meeting mine, the small pursed lips, the short sharp hair. I still wasn’t sure who the person was when Ba finally left, they still felt like a strange memory; a person I had met long ago but not since. But whoever they were, they felt like they were meant to be there.