Love Like Hate by Linh Dinh Page A

chemical balance in him. Kim Lan understood Hoang Long’s irritation with hippies—she hated them, too—but her husband was hardly home when he was at home. He barely dealt with her at all. Instead of talking to his wife, he spent most of his time watching TV, either the American station showing
Bonanza, I Love Lucy
, or
Bewitched
, or folk opera, news, or sports on the Vietnamese channel. Instead of eating with a bowl and chopsticks at the table, he preferred his food on an individual plate, so he could eat and watch TV at the same time. He loved his sixteen-inch Fuji black and white, with its long, splaying legs and side-closing doors. It was the centerpiece of the house. He never played with his son. If Cun was making too much noise, he would snap, “Get this kid to shut up,will you?” Once, as he was watching soccer and Cun was crying, he even yelled, “Shut the fuck up or I’ll smack your face!”
    “Is that a way to talk to your son?” Kim Lan protested.
    “Burma is ahead by a goal,” Hoang Long replied, all tense, his body hunched up in front of the TV, five empty bottles of beer on the floor next to his chair. “Be quiet!”
    At halftime, seeing that she was angry, he patted her on the butt and joked, “That kid is nothing but a screaming and shitting machine!”
    Chopping onions, she had her head turned away from him, and did not respond.
    “Chopping onions again, huh?” He sighed, suppressing a burp. “What are you making?”
    Again she did not respond. They stood an inch apart, his hot breath fanning her upper arm. Seeing her knife starting to tremble, he shook his head, grabbed another beer and went back to the TV. Cun had passed out from crying.
Is it that time of the month?
he wondered.
There is plenty of time left. We can still come back. It’s not over until it’s over
.
    Burma was ranked sixty-seventh in the world in 1973, South Vietnam eighty-second, and the match ended three to two in Burma’s favor. All of Saigon groaned at the final whistle. Some bettors lost their houses that day. Crouching in their dark tunnels or lying on hammocks under triple-canopied jungles, the Vietcong also groaned, their ears glued to American-made radios. Away from home, from civilization, at war, horny and nostalgic, there was no better friend than your radio. There were rumors among them that the ARVN had a piss-seeking missile. This American military dream weapon could sniff out urea from the sky. To piss against tree or bush was to flirt with eternity, insist on nirvana. It was only safe to urinate into bodies of water. The guerrillas placed a bucket of piss out in the open as a decoy and, sure enough, it was immediately zapped by a piss-seeking missile.
    The guerrillas had their own ingenious weapons. They fashionedbooby traps out of bamboo, mud, beach chairs and beer cans. They smeared human shit onto punji stakes to cause deadly infection. They even catapulted beehives at their enemy. (The rumor about Americans shooting flash-frozen bees from air guns was absolutely not true. Hurled through the warm tropical air, the bees were supposed to revive to sting the enemy.)
    Drunk and reeling from the loss to Burma, Hoang Long reflected that, short of war, nothing triggered more collective euphoria or despair than the final score of a game. Yet nothing was more meaningless or ephemeral, its dubious significance erased with the result of the very next match. The next day, Vietnam defeated Laos five to one, Sheffield United undressed and humiliated Arsenal five to zero, and the Red Sox edged the Orioles two to one. A defeat in sport was merely a symbolic death, just as death was merely symbolic so long as it happened to somebody else.
    Hoang Long had never kissed Kim Lan before, but now he didn’t even hug her. He had called call her “honey” and “sweetie,” but now his endearment for her was “your mother,” as in “Your mother take care, OK?” as he walked out the door.

8THE TRUTH
    I n truth, it