Lucky Ticket Read online

  About The Book

  Fortunes rise and fall. One day you have a lucky ticket and get a dinner so good and you eat so much that you think you’ll never need to eat again. You get busy making plans and then the hunger comes looking for you. I’m just an old man selling lucky tickets, but my theory is that we all get our turn in the end. I’ve had my turn at fortune. It was some years ago, maybe 2002, because I remember that was when Sài Gòn was less red and bright with fried chicken signs everywhere.

  A highly original collection of stories by a talented young writer. In the comic-tragic eponymous story, ‘Lucky Ticket’, the narrator, a genial, disabled old man, whose spirit is far from crushed, sells lottery tickets on a street corner in bustling Saigon. In ‘Mekong Love’, two young people in a restrictive society try to find a way to consummate their relationship-in an extraordinary tropical landscape.

  In ‘Abu Dhabi Gently’, a story of dreams and disappointment, of camaraderie and disillusionment, a migrant worker leaves Zanzibar to earn money in the UAE in order to be able to marry his fiancée. ‘White Washed’ depicts a strained friendship between two students in Melbourne, the Vietnamese narrator and a white girl. What does it mean to be Asian? What does it mean to be white? And what makes up identity?

  In Lucky Ticket, Joey Bui introduces a diverse range of characters, all with distinctive voices, and makes us think differently about identity, mixed-race relationships, difficulties between family generations, war and dislocation.

  LUCKY TICKET

  For ông bà ngoại

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Lucky Ticket

  Hey, Brother

  Black Beans and Wine

  Mekong Love

  Dinosaurs

  I Just Want to Hear You Say It

  Abu Dhabi Gently

  Before the Lights Go Out

  The Honourable Man

  Whitewashed

  Hot Days

  A Scholar’s Hands

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Fortunes rise and fall. One day you have a lucky ticket and get a dinner so good and you eat so much that you think you’ll never need to eat again. You get busy making plans and then the hunger comes looking for you.

  I’m just an old man selling lucky tickets, but my theory is that we all get our turn in the end. I’ve had my turn at fortune. It was some years ago, maybe 2002, because I remember that was when Sài Gòn was less red and bright with the fried chicken signs everywhere. Things were not as good, everything was dirty, dirtier than now. I didn’t have this chair then, I was still walking around on my knuckles. See how they’re so big and swollen? They never went back to normal.

  That day in 2002 I walked over to Điện Phú Electronics, like I do every day. I try to do some business on the way. I passed the ladies selling bánh cuốn for breakfast, not very good ones, but I never said so, because sometimes one of them bought a ticket, with a little persuasion from me. That’s a big part of my job, I smile and I laugh all day long. It makes people feel better, and they buy a ticket.

  None of the ladies bought a ticket, but one gives me a bánh cuốn with the rice-paper skin broken. Like I said, not the best bánhcuốn, but how could I refuse? Because the skin was broken, the insides slipped out as I ate it. I wiped my chin and—aiya!—I flicked sauce onto somebody walking by. It was an Asian lady, but she had yellow hair. Bright yellow like the sun.

  I didn’t say anything because I was afraid of spitting more food onto her. She stared at me and I stared at her, still trying to chew up the bánh cuốn. She was strange-looking, her big oval eyes too far apart. A breeze came up and lifted all the yellow hair about her.

  She leaned down, smelling like roses and lotions, and gave me a ticket, number 382918. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

  You can’t explain it any other way. I just knew it was my lucky ticket, number 382918. I put it my pocket.

  I sold twenty tickets by the end of the afternoon. Thinking about this lucky ticket in my pocket, I couldn’t keep it to myself anymore. I finished up early and walked down to find Hiếu, who was working in front of the blind school, to tell him the good news.

  Hiếu is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known. You know the Quốc Văn Giáo Khoa Thư lessons, the ones from school? He could recite them all, word for word. All the poems too, he knew them all. He could tell what any tree was before its fruit had grown. Hiếu had the problem a lot of smart guys have: no one liked him. He was also very fat, mostly in the face. His cheeks pushed up against his eyes and his neck bulged. Now that we were getting old, all the bulges drooped on him. And he was so black, like some of the French guys in the war.

  Because of the way his cheeks were, Hiếu’s speech was not good, so the poems always sounded weird coming out of him, with bs and phs everywhere.

  ‘The beggar wanphs the sweeb gourd rice.’ That’s what he sounded like.

  ‘People care too much about what’s on the outside, that’s the problem with most people,’ I’d tell Hiếu.

  ‘We are the outside, Kiệt! We’re always outside! So why don’t they care about us!’ he’d reply. I’m saying it without the accent so that you can understand. He was funny. I would be jealous if I wasn’t his only friend in the world.

  At night, we used to go and look at Notre Dame cathedral, Hiếu’s favourite place in the city. That was before the police started banning beggars. We stood in the alleyway next to the Sài Gòn Post Office. Everything looked much brighter in the dark, the café lights and motorbike beams, the girls in lipstick. Hiếu would sing ‘Chị Tôi’, ‘My Sister’. His lisp wasn’t so bad when he sang.

  Many years have passed when I come back to my hometown

  I see the leaves grown stale on the bridge

  The shadow of my once beautiful sister

  The shadow of a beauty never loved.

  It was the saddest thing I’d ever known, listening to Hiếu sing ‘Chị Tôi’. It made me think that I’d do anything, anything, if only Hiếu could be in love. Nothing would be worth more to me than for him to be in love.

  My theory is you can’t feel very full without feeling sad, so it’s necessary sometimes to scrape right down to the bottom. We went to Notre Dame so many times just to feel that sad.

  I told him that I had a lucky ticket.

  ‘Too good, too good!’ Hiếu said. ‘Will you finally get me a hooker?’

  ‘I don’t have the money yet.’

  ‘What do you mean! What happened?’

  ‘I just got the ticket, number 382918. I can’t get the money until they announce the results on Thursday.’

  ‘How much money do you have right now?’

  I counted 30,000 đồng from that day, and 120,000 đồng I had saved up. It was just enough for the best seafood dinner you could imagine and a lot of beer. We went to a drinking stall on Thảo Điền. I gave the money to Hiếu so he could show it to the waitress. Because I don’t have legs, I never get seated.

  She picked up a stool for Hiếu and carried it to the back of the alleyway. We ordered plates and plates of snails, even the new fingernail snails that we hadn’t seen before, grilled in garlic and soaked in scallion oil, and raw with lemon and pepper. But Hiếu ate and drank much more than me and then he threw it all up. I saw whole bits of snail meat as thick as my pinky. I wasn’t happy about it, because I had paid a lot for this meal and Hieu hadn’t even chewed it up properly. I can’t stand it when I see or smell anyone else vomiting, so I vomited as well. It was very watery because of the beer, dotted with the green scallion, and all of it pooled under the table.

  The manager came to kick us out, but Hiếu was too drunk to
get up. He said something, but no one could tell what it was because of the grey snail-beer bubbles frothing at his mouth.

  ‘Come on!’ The manager pulled on the collar of Hiếu’s shirt. But Hiếu was so heavy that he slipped and fell backwards. His head thudded on the pavement and the vomit spread a dark circle on his knee.

  ‘Please,’ I said, touching the manager’s leg. ‘My friend is sick.’

  He turned to the waitress. ‘Why are you serving these guys?’

  ‘They had money.’

  ‘We’re just a couple of harmless old fools,’ I said. ‘Can I sell you a lucky ticket?’

  ‘Look, how about this,’ the manager said. ‘I buy a couple of tickets from you, and you get out of here, okay? It’s not good for my business. You understand.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you. I’ll sell you five lucky tickets, 4000 đồng. Bargain, last one free.’

  The funny thing is, I gave him my lucky ticket, 382918, and I didn’t know it until Hieu and I were sitting two streets away from the stall. I reached into my pocket for a feel, thinking that, despite the spoilt dinner, we still had the lucky ticket and the fortune coming. I rifled through the stack of tickets again, and felt hot spasms shooting up my throat. My tears leaked onto the wrong tickets.

  ‘Hey, hey, captain, what’s wrong?’

  He called me captain because I always wore camouflage, and maybe because he was younger than me. But it was camouflage from the Cambodian war, not the Vietnam war, and I was only a foot soldier.

  ‘I gave him my lucky ticket, 382918,’ I sobbed.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ he wailed.

  Hiếu took the stack of tickets, soggy with tears, and spread them out on the pavement in a grid pattern. I watched him examine the number on each one. As he bent over the tickets, his huge belly hung down like a bag. He looked like a very clever and famous gambler laying out his cards. I think I recognised him from a past life. He must be paying now for great greed in his past.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said finally. ‘There is no 382918.’

  ‘What do we do?’ I slumped down and the tin garage door of the clock shop behind me rattled.

  Hiếu rolled over onto his bottom and pushed himself up with determination.

  ‘I’m going to get it back,’ he said.

  He was no longer drunk. He still had that look on his face, the ticket-counting look. He reached down and shook me by the shoulders. ‘They have stolen too much from you. I have to get it back!’ he said, and his grip tightened so much that it hurt. He was fearsome for a moment before he lumbered away, back down the road, to pay the debt he owed from his past.

  I stayed in front of the clock shop, waiting for him to come back. I waited all night. In the morning, a lot of the tickets Hiếu had laid out in a grid pattern had dried and blown away. The rest were stuck to the pavement. The clock shop manager came at 6am and made me mop the front of his shop. I mopped and left the tickets in a dumpster before I left. I never saw Hiếu again, not in front of the blind school or anywhere.

  But my theory is that nothing disappears forever. Nothing really goes away. You’ll see when I tell you what happened next.

  I went back to my corner in front of Điện Phú and I stayed patient. On the good days I made 40,000 đồng and I ate well. Other days I got a packet of gum and I sat chewing and massaging my leg stumps, just thinking about how hungry I was, so hungry that I forgot to do anything else. Other days I can’t remember what I did. One day I met Lượng, who offered me a job.

  Lượng had to clean the toilets at the petrol station on Nguyễn Thơ, where he also pumps. He came to my spot in front of Điện Phú Electronics in a sort of panic, although I soon found out that he always spoke like that, like a cockroach in the corner with a shoe coming for him.

  ‘I can’t bend my neck, see, it’s a condition I’ve always had. I can’t look down,’ he said. It was true, he couldn’t look at me when he spoke. Even though he squatted down to talk to me, he couldn’t bend his neck to look up either.

  It made him look crazy. I’m not saying this because I mind appearances—you know I don’t mind what people look like. But it was a shame for him because he was a young man—I think he was about twenty-eight when I met him—and needed to be looking for a wife. He also smelled like petrol all the time.

  ‘So when I reach down to clean the toilets, I can’t look at where I’m reaching and I keep getting shit all up and down my arms. I was thinking you could do it better, because, you know.’

  He glanced at my stumps.

  ‘To be honest,’ he continued, ‘I feel sorry for vets like you, you really got screwed over, okay? I want to look out for you because you lost out so much, and I see the VC guys in their nice three, four-storey houses. I’m not saying anything about politics, that’s not what I mean, but everybody sees it.’

  He winced.

  ‘Look, where do you sleep?’

  So that I could clean the toilets every day, Lượng offered me some space in the house where he stayed in the Trung Bình projects.

  All of a sudden my life changed without me even trying. It was a kind of good fortune. On the first night, I drew the curtain shut and everything was dark and hushed. There was something about being kept inside like that, pretending there was a great space between my body and the world outside. It felt precious. I will never be able to repay Lượng for a thing like that.

  In the morning, he drove me on his motorbike to the petrol station, talking the whole way.

  ‘I know how I look, I know I look dark and skinny, but I’m actually very clever. I watch things, you see. The way people deal with each other, for example. If you praise a person a little bit, act like their friend, they’re gonna have a hard time saying no to you. You have to do a bit of acting.’

  The work was not bad. I am not squeamish about the things young men are squeamish about. Lượng was right, cleaning the latrines was easier for me because of my stumps. But I had to walk on my knuckles and so the shit got all over my hands and arms. But I didn’t mind. People are washable, I always say.

  Most nights after work I waited at the petrol station and Lượng came along later, smelling of beer and grumpy about something.

  ‘I’m a very hard worker,’ he said on the ride back to Trung Bình. ‘I am always working, even when you think I’m not. I’m working people. When I’m drinking with someone, I’m meeting a possible business partner, see? But success doesn’t come right away. You have to work and work. Please people, please them. When I become rich, every one of my relatives will be shocked by the great gifts I have for them.’

  He was really a boring guy. But in my time with Lượng, I ate every day. Sometimes I shopped while I waited for him in the evenings. I bought blankets from the ladies selling on the corner of Nguyễn Thơ and, one time, I bought a little toy dog with a battery inside. He could bark if I turned on a switch underneath him, but I never did because it would have been too noisy in the house.

  In the summer, Lượng met a girl, Phụng, who also lived in the Trung Bình projects. I remember it was summer because, all night long, Phụng hissed through the curtains about how hot it was.

  ‘Fuck my mother, I can’t stand this heat. Get up, get up, get your body away from me. I can’t stand your fucking disgusting skin touching me and your pores full of pus leaking all over my skin.’

  During sex was the only time Phụng didn’t talk, only grunted. Afterwards, she would exhale with disgust and talk about how repulsive the sex was. Some nights it was a softer pleading.

  ‘Please, please, stay away from me. Please. I feel sick.’

  I listened to her as I drifted in and out of sleep. Sometimes she sobbed between hisses. The curtains were thin and I felt as if her voice was all around me.

  Later in the summer, she started to include me in her ramblings, speaking about me from the other side of the curtains. ‘I bet he’s diseased. Have you seen his hair? Don’t you see the disease caked on his skin? Have you seen t
he way he stares at me? He’s mad, I promise you he’s mad. He’s going to kill us in the middle of the night, you have no idea.’

  My skin crawled every night she was there; I imagined bugs crawling out of her, the tiny yellow kind, the ones you sometimes see flitting through the air and you’re not sure if they’re dust or not.

  From her voice, I guessed Phụng must have been about sixteen. I never saw her. She always came late at night when the curtains were already drawn. Sometimes I watched the girls walk around the projects and tried to guess which one was Phụng, but every girl seemed as sour-looking as the next, and I began imagining different faces for each night of hissing.

  I did a lot of thinking around that time, because I wasn’t able to sleep. I felt afraid everywhere I went, and I didn’t exactly know why. I was afraid of making a noise, of moving, of disturbing someone.

  One night I was riding on the back of Lượng’s motorbike as he crossed the city for a meth order. I saw the lights of Notre Dame between buildings and my vision swam with the glare of the dazzling shopfronts and the bright blue-and-white electronics stores. The soft chatter of the city folk sounded almost like another language.

  I began to sing.

  Many years have passed since we last saw him, the bridge has finished building

  My sister waits until her eyes glaze over cold

  New fruits grow on the bridge and fall down one by one

  My sister is still not loved.

  I had never liked my singing voice, but that night I was moved by the sound of it.

  ‘Stop singing or I’ll throw you off the bike,’ Lượng said.

  I remembered the old sadness, the scrape-to-the-bottom sadness that Hieu and I used to go out to Notre Dame for. I felt a sort of flowing feeling in my chest, like my heart would flood, and I was struck by the idea that it was love’s kind of sadness, that this day was the best I had lived in a long time.

  When I sang the next line, the inside of my mouth pooled with spit.

  My sister is still not loved.

  ‘What the fuck? Are you crying?’ Lượng jerked his shoulder irritably.