Foreign

There is a retreat happening at Hoc Vien Quoc Te, the temple in the neighborhood my sister warned me against.  Today, dozens of monks and nuns chanted in memory of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk known for immolating himself during the American War and now often referred to as a bodhisattva.  

The image is very famous: a small man in an orange robe, sitting in full lotus on a city street, and the flames draping his body like a satin sheet and sweeping up into the air like curly red hair blowing in the wind.  His body remained still.  

I wore the grey suit and the grey robe that lay people wear.  The henna markings on my hands that I received on the beach at Itapua have mostly faded.  Almost all of my hair is gone.  I cannot detect in this desert empire the spinning presence of the orishas.  The daily expression, 'nao, obrigada,' which I'd nearly perfected, is now meaningless.  Brasil has left me.  

Some people at the temple looked at me from a strange and inquiring angle.  The corners of their eyes said many things: 'Who is she?'  'Why is she here?'  'Where is she from?'  'Is she a child of the War?'  I am accustomed to those looks.  I just smile and bow in return.

I am sometimes mistaken for an Amerasian because I know what to do in the temple, and it isn't every day that a non-Vietnamese like myself appears in grey and correctly chants the names of the buddhas and knows who is Thay and who is Su-Co.  

I have been asked, 'Your father is American?'  I answer, 'Yes, and my mother too.'  

At other times, I have been asked, 'You are Indian?'  Meaning India, the birthplace of our modern Buddha, not Cherokee or Choctaw (from whom I do in part spring.)  'No,' I tell them, 'I'm American.'

Once, one woman very brazenly told me, 'I think you are Mexican, right?'  'No,' I told her, 'I'm not.  I'm a Buddhist.'

There are no Vietnamese to speak of in Brasil.  There are Japanese and Chinese.  I saw them every day, walking through the streets and driving in the life-sucking traffic and speaking a Portuguese that sounded brand new to me.  I saw them eating feijoada and shopping in the Livraria Cultura.  I saw them waiting for the bus, at the end of a line thirty people long, and offering Jehovah's Witness literature at the public market in Liberdade.  I saw them walking in pairs, very old men holding onto very old women with canes and vests and feet smaller than mine.  I saw them carrying bags and briefcases.

They did not see me.