The Girl Who Played Go

83

In class Huong is nervously digging her nails into the desk. I pass her a note: “Stop it! You’re driving me crazy with your scratching.”

“Please don’t be hard on me,” she replies in a careful hand, “I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

“Jing has asked me to go to Peking with him. Come with us! He’ll get you a passport and a ticket, and we’ll be free there!”

“You can never trust a coward,” she scrawls. “You should pity him, but don’t go with him.”

“Jing’s not like the others.”

“A traitor is a traitor. Be careful!”

“If you go back to the country with your father and you marry the stranger,” I write more slowly, “you’ll only betray yourself, then you’ll know how it feels to be a coward.”

“Leave me alone, I’ve made my choice, and I’m not taking a chance in Peking. You can’t run away from reality, you can’t run away from life. Stay here!” she begs. “War is about to break out here in the homeland. No one’s going to escape the horror.”

“Now you sound like a married woman. Has your father brainwashed you?”

“I’ve been thinking. All I want is a man in my life. That’s all.”

Huong seems different today, she seems strange.

“We’ve been tricked by fiction,” she writes. “Love and passion are just monstrous creations dreamed up by writers. Why would I dream of freedom if it isn’t the way to love? If love doesn’t exist, why not be at least a happy prisoner of life? Suffering’s inevitable, so why shouldn’t it be rewarded by the pleasures of clothes and jewelry.”

“Have you gone mad? Why are you coming out with all this rubbish?”

A long time passes before Huong replies, her pen scratching squeakily on the scrap of paper: “I’ve never admitted this to you, but I met a banker two years ago and I became his mistress yesterday. He will come collect me from school later and he’ll set me up in one of his houses. He will pay my father a substantial sum and I won’t have to see the old man again.”

As I wonder which of the two of us has lost her senses, our frantic correspondence is interrupted by the bell. I put my things in my bag and leave the room without saying a word to Huong.

“You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you?” she says, stopping me in the street.

I shake my head and start to move away from her quickly. She throws herself after me.

“Please,” she begs, “don’t abandon me! Don’t go to Peking! I can feel something terrible will happen to you there. Swear to me that you won’t see Jing again. Swear to me that you’ll stay! I’ll tell your parents. They’ll shut you in…”

As I barge past her she trips and falls. I immediately regret knocking her down, but I can’t find it in myself to hold out a hand to help her up, and I run away.