“Here! Look, look,” Khai said in a voice I remembered as being loud and brassy and far away. “I’ll show you.”
As I watched, sitting on the ground with my head tilted against the seat of an empty chair, he pulled out a sheet of green-blue paper, shimmering like mermaid’s scales. As he cut, the paper opened up in his hands like a flower or a song, and from the heart of it roared a dragon, filigreed so that you could see the dim lamplight straight through, so that I could see Khai through the sinuous curves of its body.
He let it go, and it flew around the room, wide crocodile mouth opened in a roar.
“Can’t let the king go alone,” said another boy whose name I didn’t catch, and he pulled out a sheet of sunny yellow paper, cutting quickly and producing a shadow puppet of a beautiful lady, though with only a cursory band across her breasts for modesty, I had no idea how much of a lady she could be. She was perfectly flat, and as we watched, clapping and stamping our feet, she pranced along the wall, her head always facing left or right and the angular movements of her arms and legs as much a joy as the dragon’s curves had been.
With a gesture, Khai brought his dragon around to circle the female figure. The dragon’s body waved like a banner, and after a few arching, slithering circles, it came down to wrap around the woman.
“They’re fighting!” I said, and Bai, who was sitting on the ground next to me, her legs stretched out in front of her, made a scornful noise.
“That’s the mountain goddess and the sea king,” she slurred. “And if you think they’re fighting…”
I blushed at her words, fortunate that it could be passed off to the ridiculous alcohol we were somehow still drinking. Now that I was looking for it, no, they were not fighting at all.
“They’re the mother and father of Vietnam,” Bai was saying. “Tonkin. Ha, Vietnam. It can still be Vietnam here. But the dragon and the goddess. Our mother and father.”
Mine too? The voice came from somewhere inside me, and I firmly locked that voice back in the box.
“Why is the father of Vietnam a … a lizard?”
She reached out to backhand my upper arm too hard. I yelped and would have hit her back, but she was talking again.
“A dragon, a dragon, ghost girl,” Bai said. “He was a dragon, and he fell in love with the mountain goddess. They had a hundred strong sons…”
“Sounds painful,” I said, trying to sound flippant, but she gave me a look with eyes as dark as mine, and I had no experience reading them at all. I could have looked at her all night in a kind of narcissistic fascination, taking in how similar she was to me, where she differed. How I would look like her if I didn’t get the faint hairs on my face carefully plucked every week. How much she would look like me if she dusted her eyelids with sparkling green powder.
“It was. She gave birth to them, and then … and then she didn’t want to be married anymore. When she was in the sea with her husband, she missed her mountains, and when he was in the mountains with her, he missed the sea.”
“Did they fight?”
“Of course not. They loved each other. They split up the family instead, half the sons going north into the highlands and half going to meet the sea. That’s why Viet people are the best fishermen in the world and the best mountain climbers too.”
I know that I made some kind of polite noise, and everything broke into fragments after that. Khai and another boy stripped to the waist to prove who was the better fighter when the answer was clearly neither of them. Another boy whose name I didn’t catch accordion-folded a long strip of paper, made a few cuts, and then there were a half-dozen tiny elephants following each other around, fixed together long nose to whippy tails. Bai tried to tell me the story of the two elephant-riding sisters who took on all of China in Vietnam’s pre-history, but I wasn’t able to focus on her for more than a few minutes before my brain wandered away in desperation. I was not good at history, and it felt like everyone in the room was trying to give me some, whether it sat well on me or not.