language Annamese. “It comes from the center region of Indochine, which is Annam. Sometimes the residents of Tonkin are called Tonkinese, and the residents of the south Cochinchinese. It’s all terribly confusing but do try to say anything besides ‘Indochinese’ or else you will sound very new.” Victor learned the customs and the language quite quickly, but nowhere near as fast as Lucie. In the two and a half months that we had been in Hanoi, Lucie had started speaking full sentences, even conversing at length with the staff, which made her a curiosity among les indigènes and a cause for concern in the French community, whose children were rarely allowed to learn the local language. The rich Annamites sent their children to France to be educated, not the opposite, the French women I had met reminded me, but I was never one to prevent learning. It was fascinating to watch the speed of the process, the wheels of her curious mind twirling like a pinwheel. One day she had been shyly hiding under the fabric of her servant’s ao trying to string the few phrases she knew together, and a few weeks later she was telling the same servant stories in Annamese. Now all the servants, from the cook to the chauffeur, were teaching her to write Chinese characters and the more modern, simpler script, Quoc Ngu. She only wrote out a word or two a day, but I knew they were building up in her mind like a pyramid.
Lucie’s nose on my wrist, smelling my orange-flower perfume, brought me back to the present, and I peeked over the bench at Victor, who was next to Lanh, fussing with a pile of papers full of figures. They covered his knees, resting precariously on his beige linen travel suit.
It was a familiar sight. I listened to the sounds of Hanoi as my heart beat quickly, my body refusing to calm down, as we waited for the station to come into view. It was Lucie who spotted it first. “Regarde, maman, the house of a hundred suns!” she exclaimed cheerfully. Since Lanh had told her about that name, she hadn’t called it anything else.
“It’s prettier every time I see it,” I said and patted her exposed leg, thin and muscular like a dancer’s. Victor had wanted Lucie to take ballet lessons, to do a few things in Hanoi that little French girls enjoyed in Paris, but she preferred to run wild—riding her bicycle on the wide streets of our neighborhood, buying penny candy in the open-air markets with the servants—and she was still young enough that her father allowed her to.
“Jessie, close the window, please,” Victor said from the front seat, trying to hold his papers still.
I desperately needed the air but rolled it up immediately anyway. I tilted my hat so I could lean against the glass instead. Though it wasn’t quite right for the winter season, the hat still felt like a talisman, something with a hint of magic instead of just a pretty geranium-colored accessory.
“Do you like the house of a hundred suns better than the Gare Saint-Lazare?” I asked Lucie quietly, getting in my last few phrases in English to her before we stepped into a public place and French took over again. Our home in Paris had been just a ten-minute stroll from Saint-Lazare.
“I’m starting to forget Paris,” she replied in a tiny voice, not wanting to disturb her father.
“It has only been a few months, Lucie,” I said, unable to hide my alarm. “And no one can forget Paris. It’s the most wonderful place in the world. Spend just one day there and it finds its way inside you, even someone young like you. The memories you make in Paris are thicker than cartilage.”
I could tell she was about to ask me what cartilage was, but she paused and laid her head against my arm instead.
“I remember that it rained every day,” she whispered, “and that Mademoiselle DuPont would tell me not to play in the elevator or I would be trapped inside and have to live there forever. In the elevator. But no one lives in elevators, do they?”
“It did not rain every day,” I corrected her.
“The bread in Paris was tastier. But I like rice, too,” she said loudly, and then pressed her lips together when she realized her volume.
“Enough of that, mes chéries,” said Victor, implying our English. “We’re arriving.”
Annamite men and women, most in their straight-cut traditional clothes, moved in a