By McAmond Nguyen Thi Tu

"I used to have absolute faith in a Supreme Being. I believed that God had created the earth, darkness and light. That He had created all creatures on earth, including the human race. I believed in an invisible and benevolent Almighty. That He watched over everything on earth. Yes, I did believe in all of this, a long, long time ago."

She suddenly stopped. All eyes were on her. She remained silent as if to draw even more attention from her classmates.

"Yet, with every day passing by, the more I saw and heard of everything happening around me, the more I recognised that there was something uncertain that lingered."

The class continued to listen intently, listening to Dung Judas, hearing her heresy. All of St. Mary’s private high school had dubbed this Vietnamese girl with that name.

She was courageous and she was not that thin-skinned. She asked: "Why do you label Judas as a treacherous man? Among the 12 Apostles of Christ, Judas is the most brilliant in the New Testament because he helps Jesus save mankind."

Her teachers didn’t like her either. They likened her to the shadow of Satan. She would question their teachings, almost maliciously. People wondered why she had such a sharp tongue. She was very good at imitating the American actor George Carlin. One day, when the music teacher was sick, she stood in front of the class and imitated George Carlin by giving a speech on religion.

"War, death, disease, hunger and poverty, thievery, deception, corruption, debauchery and so many other evils. Who among us does not admit that this world has been become more crazy and horrible?"

With this, the entire class rose to their feet, shouting in protest, "Shut up! You, heathen!"

The head of the class, a fat black girl, stood up and called on her classmates to get under control, and asked Dung to go back to her seat. But Dung’s powerful voice overwhelmed them all.

"If man finds it imperative to have a person or thing to worship and respect, I’d rather choose the sun. Why the sun? It is a tangible thing that I can see. The sun gives me everything I need in life like heat, light, food, colourful flowers in the park, a beautiful reflection on the lake. It’s easy to worship the sun. There is no mystery, no miracle, no flaunting rituals. What I appreciate about the sun is that it has never told me that from when I came into this earth, that I am a mean, cruel person who needs its salvation."

Usually, her antics were treated as a joke. This time, however, she was not given a warning and kicked out of school. It took a few days for the school’s Discipline Council to decide to expel her. The headmaster, a priest, looked sad, mainly out of sympathy for her father. Her father was told to transfer her to public school.

"The environment there should be stricter and more challenging. I wish you the best of luck in ensuring she has a good upbringing. She’s an intelligent girl, but...." the head master trailed off, smiled politely, and shook hands with her father.

At the dinner table that evening, her father went into a rage, throwing everything he could get his hands on at her – dishes, bowls, cutlery, all the while shouting:

"You damned girl! I can hardly believe you’re my daughter."

When her mother finally rushed to stop him, she was already covered in blood, and running to her room. She had to be hospitalised the next morning.

Two policemen appeared at her father’s work the next day, an electronics factory. This was the third time her father had been visited by the police in Canada for verbally and physically abusing his children. The first time was when she was still in primary school. Even at such a young age, her father wasn’t happy with her, so he hit her on the head with a vacuum cleaner. Her teacher found out about it the next day, and reported it to the police. After paying US$5,000 for his lawyer and an endorsement from his wife, he got off with a six-month conditional suspension.

She was sent to live in a room downstairs. While the courts had sent her father free, she never forgave either of her parents for putting her back into that abusive home.

***

As she grew up, she spent more and more time out with friends. When she stayed out overnight, and her mother asked her whereabouts, she would only answer: "My friend’s," and then disappear into her room. But once, when she didn’t come home for three days, her mother began to panic. While her father had vowed to ignore her, her mother was making herself sick with worry. She called all of her friends, asking where her daughter was, but nobody knew. She called the school, but it wouldn’t start for another week, so her only choice was to call the police.

It was that fall that Dung’s name and photo was put on the list of missing children.

***

"Try to eat some Vietnamese food," her mother had always said to her. "It’s a part of your roots."

Dung would only shrug her shoulders. She thought that braised fish smelled funny, and she didn’t like fish sauce. She didn’t eat Hue beef noodle soup because she thought the noodles looked like worms. Every week, her mother gave in and bought her sandwiches, pizzas and frozen foods. The one thing she did like fresh were pine mushrooms, which were very rare and expensive. This kind of mushroom had a peculiar smell which she called "the smell of paradise". When her mother asked her why it smelled like paradise, she tried to explain in her poor Vietnamese: "The smell of paradise is like... the smell of many things put together, like the smell of earth, the smell of pine trees and the smell...." she paused. "The smell of cinnamon!"

Her mother did not understand this English word, so Dung ran upstairs and fetched the English-Vietnamese dictionary. From up there, she yelled the meaning of the word to her mother in the kitchen: "the smell of que?"

She was in grade two back then. For one assignment, she was asked to write about what she wanted to do when she grew up. She wrote: "I want to become a pine mushroom researcher." Asked to explain why, she continued: "Because pine mushrooms smell like paradise." She then drew a pine forest with mushrooms cropping up randomly from the soil. When the teacher marked the assignments, on Dung’s paper she underlined ‘smell of paradise’ and put a big question mark next to it. Dung never explained it to her teacher.

When she was in grade eight, she took part in a poetry contest and she won second prize. Her mother couldn’t read it, because it was in English, but her father did and replied:

"What the hell is the point of this?"

Later, he refused to give her the $30 to buy the book her poem was published in. She found a way to buy it anyways, and her father found it in her room one day. He looked through it, and saw her poem entitled ‘The Smell of Paradise’, which spoke of wild mushrooms as a gift from heaven, that humans had spent centuries trying to grow without any results.

***

Some say that children’s characteristics are influenced by the emotions of their mothers during pregnancy. Dung’s father had asked her mother to get an abortion, as they were waiting for his parents to come from Vietnam so they could be married. Her mother had tried to get rid of the baby, taking some Chinese medicine, but the baby girl in her womb survived. Her mother’s belly continued to grow day by day. Her grandmother was mad at her father for organising the wedding in Canada without waiting for their parents. When her grandmother finally made it to Canada, Dung was a year old. With all of this controversy, her grandmother could not be happy to meet Dung. The child always seemed sad and as she grew up, she grew increasingly strange. Wherever she went, she made trouble, and her grandmother always blamed her mother for not going to church to pray, let alone to bring her daughter up right.

Her father’s mother had two main issues blocking her love for her grandchild. First, her mother came from the south of Viet Nam and second, her mother was not a Christian. Her mother’s education was poor. She only finished the fifth grade, as she had grown up in the poor countryside of Western Go Cong. She had run away to Canada on a boat with her sister when she was 19.

Dung’s mother once said to her husband:

"It’s quite normal for a mother-in-law to hate her daughter-in-law, but Dung is your flesh and blood. She is your mother’s granddaughter, and you should love her unconditionally."

He never told her what he really thought, what his family thought. They had doubts about her fidelity while she had lived in the refugee camp. Some of his friends joked that he should get a DNA test.

He once confessed that he married his wife out of convenience. She still dreamt about her first love at home that she had to say good-bye to. Her reasons for loving her husband were that his English was good and he had graduated from university as an electrical engineer. He was unemployed when they first met and still in school, so her mother had taken him in. They lived together in a rented house and she gave him over $10,000 to pay for his tuition. It wasn’t until she was pregnant that they spoke about marriage.

Dung’s mother worked hard to get what she had. She worked many jobs for three years to save money to buy a house. She had earned respect from the local community. Three weeks after she had given birth, her mother went back to work. She worked at a supermarket during the day, and cleaned at a casino at night. On weekends, she worked at a pho shop. With all of her jobs combined, she made more than her husband. When Dung’s father was finished work, he stayed at home and worked on his computer. On top of her three jobs, she also did all the housework.

While her mother-in-law had grown to appreciate her hard work, she still wondered why she refused to practice worshipping Christ.

Dung’s mother sometimes felt sorry for herself because she couldn’t brag about her daughter. She even wondered why she had named her daughter Tran Thi My Dung.

When she pregnant, she was arguing with her husband all the time, so much that they were on the verge of divorce. They stayed together because she fought to keep the marriage.

When Dung first went to school, her classmates teased her because of her name, which meant ‘shit’ in English. She cried in class when her classmates poked fun at her. The teacher would try to reassure her and ask the class to stop. When recess came, they were free to tease her again. A Chinese boy in her class teased her so much, that she stabbed him in the cheek with a pencil.

Her parents had to come to school. Her father had asked her to apologise to everyone, but she just stood in front of the class without saying a word. Finally she announced that she didn’t feel bad for what she had done, only regret for not cutting the boycruel tongue. Nobody had stood up for her, not even her teacher. The headmaster said children are usually only this cruel at this age when they experience abuse at home. He continued that the family environment was a decisive factor in the formation of their child’s character.

One month later, Dung got into another fight with a group of white girls in the class next door while standing up for an Indian student. But without listening to this, the teacher just punished her by making her stay in at recess for three solid weeks. She announced to the whole class that the teacher was biased and racist. After that, she was suspended from school for three days and her parents had to come into school again.

Dung was getting a reputation as the worst behaving girl in the entire school. She seemed ready to fight just about anyone.

As she was finishing the third grade, her grandmother asked her parents to take her to church to be baptised and send her to the Christian school.

On top of her regular school, she was also learning Vietnamese every Sunday. Right from the first lesson, she had gotten into trouble. The students had to speak Vietnamese in class, so any student who used English would be fined 25 cents, which was put into a crystal piggy bank placed on the desk. If a student didn’t have money on them, they had to write IOUs.

The children had all been born in Canada, so they spoke only a bit in Vietnamese. In their first lesson, Dung broke the rule five times. She waited for the break to throw the piggy bank into the trash bin. The teacher punished her by making her write out why she was bad. She started to write in English, and so the teacher demanded she take it home and ask her parents to help her write in Vietnamese.

At her second lesson, she again got into trouble. Her father finally gave up and pulled her out of Vietnamese lessons.

She didn’t like going to Vietnamese church at all. Her father told her that by going, she could learn Vietnamese in a casual setting. Every Sunday, after the sermon, the priest had a moral lesson for children. The lesson on that day was about the end of the world and Christ’s punishment. He told the children about all kinds of torturous punishments Christ would take out on sinners as they listened silently.

Out of the crowd, Dung stood up and said:

"Father, you have always said that God’s love to humans is unconditional and boundless, particularly to children. God wanted all of us to love each other and pardon each other. So why did God talk about ways to torture humans so barbarously?"

The priest was caught off guard, and tried to cover up.

"Do you know the fastest way to hell? It is through arrogance and doubt about God’s words," he answered.

From school, to Vietnamese classes, to the church, Dung didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. Wherever she went, she found herself alone. Other parents did not even let their children play with her until she was in the 10th grade, when they couldn’t control much of what their children did anyways. After she was kicked out of the Christian school, she attended public school, but her trouble followed her. She ran away the week before the start of the new school year. Her mother had bought her two pine mushrooms for her upcoming birthday, on September 1st. But she never came home to claim them.

***

It was a mid-autumn day. Pine mushroom harvest time was setting upon the Cranberry forest northwest of British Columbia province.

For years in Canadian history, at the end of August, people came in big crowds to set up tents here for a few weeks before the frost sent them further south. They brought along plastic pails, buckets and sticks, even guns and fierce dogs to help them along the deep trek into the forest to hunt for the mushroom they call ‘king of all the wild mushrooms’. The group gathered mushrooms during the daytime and sold them at night: sorting, weighing and getting cash on the spot. The collectors could earn up to $1,000 a day. The boxes of mushrooms were brought to Vancouver at night so that they could be sent to Tokyo the next day, where they were worth double, or even triple. Pine mushrooms are expensive because of their rarity. Their heads are as big as apples, and the stems grow as long as 10cm. The milky white mushrooms only grow in 40 or 50-year-old pine forests, and they appear on the surface for only a few days a year. For the Japanese, the pine mushrooms are a trued delicacy. They are called matsutake in Japanese, and they symbolise fertility, reproduction, prosperity and happiness.

Among those mushroom pickers that season was a Lao couple. They had spent the entire morning searching for mushrooms with no luck. Wandering hopeless, the wife suddenly saw a large white cap covered with a mass of moss and sand. Overjoyed, she called out her husband. As he came up to her, she reached down to pick up the cap, but then suddenly screamed and threw it back to the ground. The cap turned out to be a human skull. Her husband got a whiff of a strong cinnamon taste mixed with the smell of pine trees. His wife cried, as they both caught a glimpse of snowy white mushrooms shining brightly in the sun around the foot of an old pine tree.

***

The police also found a white shoe covered in mud with ‘Made in Vietnam’ written inside. There were a few other bones scattered about, and through DNA testing they found that the skull and bones were what was left of Dung. Her mother later confirmed that it was her shoe that they had bought for her on their visit home to Go Cong.

One woman who had taken part in the previous year’s harvest season, recalled that about a year ago, a short Asian girl had come here with a white man. She was one of the best mushroom pickers that year. She said she liked to see the sunlight and breathe in the fresh forest air. About a week later, they didn’t see her any more. The man and the tent were also gone.

Could she have been eaten by grizzly bears? Did the man kill her to take her money? Nothing was ever concluding, and Dung’s death remained as mysterious as her disappearance.

The only conclusions that were made came from the DNA test. The tests confirmed that girl really was her father’s flesh and blood. (VNS)

Translated by Manh Chuong

This is a short version of the original story Mui Thien Dang in Vietnamese.