Thôi bọn mình chia tay, thôi bọn mình...chia tay (Let us part ways, let us…part ways)

Frances An 

Coconut milk and ice crunches in my mouth, coating my papillae in a thin, syrupy mixture. I fill the plastic spoon with two pandan noodles, five fake pomegranate seeds, and coconut milk. My equivalent of ‘break-up’ ice cream is chè ba màu. Pandan noodles, red bean, split mung beans and fake pomegranate seeds in coconut milk create a colourful mosaic along the plastic cup. A Chinese-Malaysian friend back in Sydney compared it to iced kacang: super pretty when standing but looks like shit when mixed.

— —

‘We were student and teacher before,’ his breath crackles against the phone’s speaker, ‘We don’t have full control over these things but…it just doesn’t feel right.’ I reimagine the last conversation with my love interest before I flew to Perth. He was my tutor with whom I had maintained contact through Theory Group seminars; an incandescent bulb in the corner illuminated us as if we were life-drawing models. Air conditioning hummed in the background as we sat closer on the stools, knees almost touching, fingers centimetres apart. Today, we are 3677 kilometres apart. I sit on the floor against a brick wall in my apartment.

‘I was under the impression that there was…’ My wrist tilts to place the phone’s microphone against my lips, ‘Something between us.’

‘I did…not feel that. You’re so much younger than me. I’m not into that.’ His words are clipped, as though each word takes up one breath, ‘Well… if that’s all you have to ask, there’s not much good labouring on the point.’ Is that…defensiveness on his end? Unease?

‘I’m sorry,’ I secure the phone in two hands, ‘I’ll go.’

Status (complete): rejection.

Deep down, I pretend we are the couple in ‘Trăng Tàn Trên Hè Phố ‘ (Moon dissolves on the sidewalk), social and life circumstances separating us as we remember better days together, hoping to ‘xây đời mới’ (‘build a new life’) at a better time. Yet regardless of estimated ‘real feelings’, no is no.

Recommendation: comfort-eat Vietnamese food. Even after shops started opening, I had worried too much about my weight to eat out. But today, my body will not accept unsweetened grass jelly with skim milk as real dessert. I want sweetness.

— —

I once joked with him that Vietnamese food was the finest demonstration of situational realism. The parts themselves are commonplace: pork strips, coriander, pate in bánh mì thịt; or coconut milk, jelly, and shaved ice in chè ba màu. However, it is the combinations among all of them that create a ‘Vietnamese flavour.’ It is rarely worthwhile for a household to own three different sorts of pork strips, Vietnamese baguette, carrot strips, cucumber slices, butter and pate. Shops can profit by assembling inexpensive ingredients and selling the final product for two times or even four times the price of the components.

‘Đời ít.’ The shopkeeper tells me. The Vietnamese service people in Sydney usually say 'chờ chút'. Maybe ‘đời ít’ is Northern Vietnamese vernacular. I choose a straw-backed chair in the shade rather than the cage-like chairs under the sun. Two gold statues of young boys with slit eyes stand on either side of the neighbouring restaurant’s entrance, frozen mid-bow. Just as I am trying to work out if the statues are naked or wearing skin-tight qipao shirts, my previous Honours supervisor from Sydney calls me.

‘Frances!’ She shouts over her son who yowls in the background, ‘You didn’t sound so good when I called the other day. Is everything OK?’

‘I…OK,’ I hold the phone away and murmur a cám ơn as the shopkeeper brings me my bánh mì thịt in a paper bag. Should I confide in her? Surely, intellectuals have interpersonal dilemmas all the time, ‘I—is it OK if I mention something to you? Please don’t share this with anyone but…’

— —

‘He’s gay — you didn’t know that? We worked together during a summer research program. He was very involved with queer STEM groups and I know his former partner — who is a man.’

What? I think back to my ‘platonic-or-not’ test on him during the office conversation; after discussing excommunicated members in our families, I popped a ‘thanks for listening — as a friend,’ observing for drooping facial muscles at the ‘friend’ reference. He gave a disappointed chuckle and whispered, ‘I—I’d say more, but we were student and teacher.’ Reading: NOT platonic, 99% confidence.

‘Dunno what messages you were getting from him,’ she chuckles, ‘We see what we wanna see, I guess. Some of the high school boys I’d taught sometimes misunderstood my gestures too.’

Have I just been a 23-year-old teenage girl flattering herself over nothing? I had hoped that the defensiveness and unease I sensed on his end, during our phone call, were suppressed feelings, that we were forbidden lovers caught in society’s arbitrary moral tangles. Statistically, this anticlimactic punchline to my failed (non-)romance makes more sense. No one has ever loved me as I was. My parents threatened to send me to an adoption home in Adelaide after I failed the OC test in Year 3. The years after were family tantrums and me repeating ‘I am a donkey’ in Vietnamese and English on my father’s command. Eventually, I took the hint that no one wanted me and kicked myself out here to Perth for postgraduate studies. Still, I had hoped that this instance could be an outlier, my duyên.

‘Frances, even if he wasn’t gay, I’d try to talk you out of it. He’s so much older than you.’ Is it that bad? I want to ask but she continues, ‘You should be dating nice, young men closer to your age. A tub of ice cream will fix you up.’

A restaurant waiter with dyed platinum hair and spikey studs strides past me, balancing a plate of stir-fried noodles in one arm and seafood salad in another. I realise that the comfy straw chairs belong to the restaurant and the metal cage chairs are the bánh mì thịt's store's. He’s nice enough to leave a heartbroken idiot to cry while waiting for lunch, even if she’s sitting in their seating. The ‘OPEN’ signs flip with loud clatters. I take the hint and sling my backpack over one shoulder.

— —

My ice kacang friend replies to my (non-)romance problem with a five-box long Facebook message copy-pasted from a persuasion attempt with a ‘NO’ voter: it includes a list of her favourite LGBTIQA+ movies and social media groups she’s joined in support for the LGBTIQA+ community. I move the conversation to SPAM. Sweat squelches in my elbow and knee folds. I hate humidity. It reminds me of Sydney weather. I select Băng Tâm and Đặng Thế Luân's performance of Trăng Tàn Trên Hè Phố on my phone. At the song’s conclusion, I echo the final three lines.

Đừng lưu luyến gì đây
(Cease reminiscing)

‘This song is so sad’, I text my mum.

She replies, ‘It’s not too sad compared to some of the others: at least the lovers got to see each other at the end.’

But the contrast between the couple’s joyful memories and inevitable parting is tragic! I just type back, ‘But that’s even sadder.’ My Vietnamese is not good enough to explain literary techniques.

Thôi bọn mình chia tay
(Let us part ways)

This line is to my old friends. I hold no bad feelings; if society bribed me with sympathy, I too would have left a friend to dangle from a skyscraper with its glimmering fish scale windows.

Thôi bọn mình…Chia tay.
(Let us…Part ways)

This line is to ‘me’ who grew up far away; you believed that love, even loves tragically dissolved before circumstance, could reverse history. I regurgitate bits of pandan noodle and squashed seeds. Go on, spit, cry. If your misery casts you on the wrong side of history, accept yourself with the love with which you would have surrendered yourself. Let us go then, you and I, as we always have; we shall part ways with righteous company and xây đời mới!

The remaining coconut milk and ice have melted, leaving a diluted mess with floating red bean skins and regurgitated pandan. It really does look like shit.