JAN LEE

The Witch of Cathedral Street

When looking for something to do with my children over the slow summer holidays, I came across a book which had been a childhood favorite: Kids’ America – a big book of crafts, exploration, history, art projects, and general whimsy. One chapter told me everything I needed to know about pirates, and another about circuses.

One of my old favorites used to be the page about how to be a fortune-teller: the authors showed a diagram of the palm of the hand, with various hard-to-contradict claims like, “a jagged ‘life’ line indicates that you are creative, but scared and cautious during childhood” or “gaps in the ‘head’ line show that you will experience hardships before you experience success” or “lines on the edge of the hand indicate great romances in your life – someday.” I thought they were tremendous fun, and memorized many of them to try on my middle-school friends.

I never did run off to join the circus, but I went off to seek my fortune abroad. After college and a stint in Eastern Europe, I moved with my boyfriend to Hanoi, Vietnam in the early 1990s, just after the American embargo was lifted. He was studying Vietnamese traditional music; I taught English. We rented a tall, skinny house on an alleyway in Hanoi, behind the Catholic Cathedral. It was made of concrete slabs, with poorly whitewashed walls and tiled floors, completely unfurnished when we arrived except for a couple of foam mattresses and some old masks hanging on the walls, ethnic minority crafts of some kind, left there by a previous tenant. We had to outfit it with whatever we could find: a rattan sofa with beautiful blue cushions; an old Soviet oven; white chairs made of blow-molded plastic.

The neighborhood was noisy from the cathedral bells, the shouts of traveling vendors “Ai đóng gạo không?!” (Who wants to scoop rice?!) or “Bánh mỳ nóng ơi!” (Hot bread, hey!), and relentless motorbike engines and horns. It was cheerful and crowded, dusty and generally run-down, and perpetually lacking a reliable water supply.

It was also the kind of neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else’s business, and even the most frivolous gossip traveled incredibly fast. Once, I bought a pair of silk pajamas. When I arrived home, my neighbors, sitting out in front of their houses, asked me what I had bought and how much it was. We chatted for a minute. Then I dropped off my purchase and cycled to the bike shop at the end of the alleyway, to get something repaired. By the time I arrived at the shop, around 200m away, the repairman opened the conversation with, “So, I heard you bought a pair of silk pajamas for 80,000 đồng!”

In those days foreigners were very rare, and those who could speak some Vietnamese were even rarer, so I became quite a local curiosity. Only Tĩnh, who lived next door, who had been a “guest worker” in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet era, was a bit more worldly. Naturally, the kids in the alleyway were tremendously inquisitive. One gap-toothed little rascal was constantly running into our house and seeing how far he could get up the winding staircase before I chased him out. Experasted, I eventually told him that our house was full of ghosts, so he’d better watch out. He wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not. He snuck in, one twilight, as I was holding the door open to buy an aluminum saucepan lid from the wandering pot and pan vendor. Upon seeing the grimacing old masks hanging on the wall in the gloom of the stairwell, he tore out of the house shouting, “MA! MA ĐẤY!” (GHOSTS! GHOSTS THERE!) and I almost collapsed laughing, trying to explain to the pot and pan seller what was happening.

We became very close to Tĩnh, as well as his wife Tân and their 12-year-old daughter Phượng. I sat with them many evenings, snacking on melon seeds, learning about local life and sharing stories from abroad. They were boundlessly kind to us. Tân even introduced her best friend to us, an old factory-mate, when we needed a housekeeper; Lan ended up working with us as long as we lived there and was in many ways my most valuable instructor on all things Vietnamese.

I spent a great deal of time learning how to cook on my thousand-watt, ungrounded “Мечта-8” oven, manufactured in what was then the Belarusian province of USSR, and sold to me from the side of Trần Hưng Đạo Street as “just as good as new”.

 One evening I wandered over after dinner, and found young Phượng playing at palm reading. She made a few attempts to interpret the lines on my hand, but couldn’t come up with much. I was delighted to take a turn, dredging up my old knowledge from Kids’ America. I told her that she was creative, but had been scared and cautious during childhood. I also informed her that she would have two great romances in her life, including one marriage, and at least three children – someday. She laughed and blushed at the idea of the great romances and her future children.

Her mother came up, smiling. “Do me, do me!” she asked, excited. I duly informed her that her future wealth would come from hard work and not from inheritance, and that she would experience hardships before she experienced success.

“But what’s this?” I noticed. “I see that you have two great romances in your life, but one of them happens after your marriage!” Laughing, I told her she had an exciting old age to look forward to.

We had to move away from that alley when the landlord demanded the house back. Three or four years later, we ended up in a larger, square-built place in the northern part of the city, not far from Trức Bạch Lake. The people on that street were equally gossipy but less welcoming, so I spent more time at home with Lan than I did out in the neighborhood.

I commented to Lan one day that the neighbors were a bit less friendly, to which she agreed readily. She casually mentioned that everyone in the old neighborhood had indeed been more friendly.

“But of course,” she said, “that’s because they wanted to stay on your good side.”

“Why? Because I’m a foreigner?”

“No, you know.”

“What?”

“Well, obviously because they knew you’re a phù thủy – a witch.”

To put it bluntly, this was not what I had understood about the relationship between me and my former neighbors. “A what?”

“Well, we all knew, really. Remember when you read Tân’s palm, and knew all about her affair?”

“Her what? Her affair?”

“Yes, the one she had with that man, when Tĩnh was overseas in Czechoslovakia. She got together with the guy from our factory. When you read her palm, she hadn’t told a soul about it, except for me, because I was her best friend and we worked together, and Tĩnh, because she had to tell him when he got back. But you had barely met her and you already saw right through her.”

“I did?”

“Yes, of course. You said clearly she had had a romance after marriage.”

“Sure, but that was just …”

“And anyway, you admitted it yourself – don’t you remember when you told the children about the ghosts you kept in the house?”

“Well, that was only …”

Lan assured me that she knew me well, and trusted me not to use my powers for evil. Had she not worked for me for several years already? Anyway, never mind, she’d see me later – it was time to go grocery shopping, and everyone knows that you need to get to the market early if you want the best vegetables.

The people in that new neighborhood were nice enough, always ready to do business or engage in conversation. Somehow, however, we never got to the level of sitting and eating melon seeds together or reading each other’s palms. And whenever I visited the old neighborhood, I made sure to stay strictly polite.

And these days, far away and in a different land, I tell my children to be careful and always obey their mother: for isn’t it true that she is a powerful witch? In fact, an entire neighborhood can testify to it! Indeed, they’d better study hard and learn all they can from books like Kids’ America – because you never know when it might come in handy.

Jan Lee is a digital native, who first published via Telnet in the 1990s. Jan usually writes science fiction and political allegory, and has work published or forthcoming in Culinary Origami, Dark Winter, Deathcap and Hemlock, Diet Milk, Maenad Review, Penumbra, Soft Star Magazine, and Whimsical Press, as well as various anthologies. Jan’s story “The History of Liberia” has been recognized by the Writers of the Future Contest. Short stories by Jan Lee are collected in the book Route One and Other Stories, available on Amazon. Jan is Editor-in-Chief of The Apostrophe, the quarterly magazine of the Hong Kong Writers Circle.