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By Root 395 0

and then of the jade, soothing the pain. Tender flesh. Tender flesh. She was given a matching pair for her ears. "Tenderness," she was told, would have other meanings as well, those relating to matters of the heart. But that was long ago. After she came to his house, "tenderness" would mean only her flesh tender with pain. Jade, she was told, is a living, breathing stone. It would grow old with her, chronicling the passage of time. Kept in a box, it would remain a cloudy green brew. Worn against the body, jade would gradually deepen in color, melting away its own whitish veins. Only in old age would jade reward her with its true character and hue. A thing she could look forward to, she was told. He took them from her on the day that I was born. "She will survive, but she will never give birth again," the midwife informed him. Jade in the palm of his hand cooled his rage, lessened his ire toward such shoddy goods. A slight dimple in each lobe is all that I, her lastborn, would ever see.

Sorrow preys on the unprotected openings, the eyes, ears, mouth, and heart. Do not speak, see, hear, or feel. Pain is allayed, and sadness will subside. Ignorance, I was beginning to learn, is best for someone like me.

"I, myself, prefer humor," Bão said on our first night together at sea.

"But, I like the name I have."

"I'm not talking about throwing away your name, you dumb ass. The new name isn't for you. It's for them. TÔiNgườiĐiên, AnhĐẹpTrai, TôiYêuEm..." he began listing for me his chosen names. After the third one, we were laughing so hard he could get no further. We rolled on our bunks, him on the top and me on the bottom. In between gasps of air, he told me that they never know which is the given name and which is the surname, so it usually comes out all at once. It made life worth living, Bão said, when he could hear, "Hey, IAmCrazy, if you're late again, I'm throwing your lazy butt right off this boat, and I don't mean when we reach shore! Do you understand me, IAmCrazy?" or "Come over here, GoodLookingBrother, you call this deck clean?" or, his personal favorite, "ILoveYou! Hurry up with those crates! ILoveYou, a trained monkey can do a better job!"

By then, laughter had performed a miracle, separating me from my body, allowing me to forget at least for a while that there was a storm raging inside and out. The sky and the water had turned the same shade of pitch, and seasickness had been taking me by the ankles and throwing me headfirst into the waves. Bão must have heard my groaning and feeble protests, which he knew were useless. My body had to first let go of land before it could survive at sea. It is the body's stubborn resistance and violent refusal that are solely at fault, producing sham symptoms, tricking the mind into believing that the culprit is the ocean. It was unusual for Bão, actually it was unheard of for him as I would later learn, but that night he never stopped talking. He knew that the sickness would have to pass on its own, that sometimes the sound of a human voice is a steady raft on a lurching sea.

He usually worked, he told me, on large shipping liners, which carried more than seven hundred passengers and crew. Most recently Bão had crewed on a liner called the Latouche Tréville, which, like the Niobe, made its primary run between Saigon and Marseilles. He would have never considered a freighter as bare-bones as the Niobe, he said, but he was broke, and having no money at sea, he had learned, is better than having no money on land. All meals are taken care of, and there is nothing on board to buy except, maybe, cigarettes or a bottle of gin. There are also no women on board or none who are for sale. "A great money saver," Bão assured me. It was only my first night at sea, and the Niobe, despite everything, did not seem so shabby to me. So I asked him why the Latouche Tréville was that much better. "Even the ship's cooks had cooks!" Bão replied, jumping off his bunk, leaning his upper body into mine.

Even the ship's cooks had cooks? How in hell does that affect you? I wanted to know but did not ask.