Love Like Hate by Linh Dinh

get out
. She could barely eat anyway. At four months, she stayed in bed all day. Even in hundred-degree heat, she’d be under a mound of blankets, in complete darkness, shivering. She could not stomach anything the servant placed in front of her.
    “What is this?”
    “Crab soup with bamboo shoots, ma’am.”
    “You know I hate canned bamboo shoots!”
    “You always liked it before, ma’am.”
    “And this crab stinks. Is it spoiled?”
    “No, of course not. I can add some sesame oil, if you like.”
    “Please take it away and let me sleep.”
    The war kept up its intensity and Hoang Long had to skip hisleave a few times. In 1971, he came home just twice and had to cut short his stay both times. “You must understand,” he explained to his worried wife, “I cannot be away from my men at a time like this.” In June 1971, as Hoang Long was fighting in Long Khanh, Kim Lan went to Hung Vuong Hospital to give birth to a boy weighing just four pounds. She named him Cun.
    Cun resembled a naked mole rat at birth and would go on to resemble a naked mole rat for the rest of his life. When his teeth started to sprout, he even bit his mom several times a day. He also liked to bite other children and pinch them, especially on the inner thighs. He cried all day and night and rejected whatever his mom fed him—carrots, peas, pap or pabulum. Disagreeing with all baby formulas, he refuted both milk and soy, spat out Good Start and threw up the Dutch Girl. Exasperated, Kim Lan went to a medicine man and got a red string with a black bead to tie around Cun’s neck. This was supposed to calm him down but she saw zero improvement in her son’s mood or behavior. As Cun grew a little older, he never passed up an opportunity to yank an animal’s tail or ear or squash anything that could be squashed. If he saw a live crab, he would immediately sever its antennae and wait impatiently for an eye to stick out so he could pinch it and roll it between his fingers.
    When Hoang Long came home for Christmas of 1971, he saw Cun for the first time. He was so disappointed he could not even feign a smile.
This has to be the ugliest baby ever
, he shook his head.
Could this be someone else’s child? Has she been screwing around with some of these losers loitering in the café? Look at how she banters with them, always laughing and giggling. A married woman shouldn’t be giggling with strangers
. But as he looked more closely at the horrible mouse child, he noticed that the smirking mouth was unmistakably his own.
    Kim Lan could clearly see her husband’s discomfort toward Cun. More troubling to her, however, was the fact that he was not wearing his wedding ring. She had never seen him without his ring. Even odder, the skin where the ring should be didn’t appearany lighter. His entire finger was uniformly brown. She was about to say something, but for some reason, unclear even to herself, she decided to let it pass. On his next leave, he was wearing his ring again.
    Kim Lan also noticed that her husband seemed more tired yet more restless with each visit. He didn’t take her out to restaurants like he used to. “I just want to stay home,” he said. “It’s so nice just to be home. I don’t want to deal with the noise and the glares and looking at people stuffing their faces. It disgusts me to see people laughing and eating in a restaurant. People in Saigon act as if there’s no war going on. All the restaurants and movie theaters are filled with hippie draft dodgers in bell-bottom pants!”
    “Why don’t we go to the zoo then? It’d give Cun a chance to see the animals.”
    “All he’ll see there are the freaks! The zoo has been taken over by hippies!”
    “How do you know? You haven’t been there since before we got married. Remember how we used to take long romantic walks through the zoo?”
    Hoang Long simply closed his eyes, scrunched up his face and sighed. The phrase “long romantic walks” had apparently upset some