White Belief

After the war, the government started a campaign to number all the trees in the city. Let the future be as bounteous as the trees, it said. Then a few disappeared. One was found inside Baba’s rice bowl. It had small red lights for eyes and a voice like a swarm of moths. He calls to tell me it only eats white things, but in our tongue white sounds almost like moon. I ask him if the tree is easy to get along with, if he doesn’t mind the dark, but he doesn’t seem to understand.

When I was a little girl Baba told me every tree was named by a god. Most days after school, Baba taught me to say each of them, to speak in the language of the gods. Every time we named one, a host of sparrows rose into the sky.

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Baba says he woke up in the middle of the night with the tree draped over his knees. It was in full blossom, and was holding a piece of his foot in the middle of its trunk. When he stood up, hundreds of white petals fell across the wooden floor, perfectly bright at the edges, like frost. He’d gone to take a photo to show me, but then they all stretched themselves into wings and took to the night.

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Once Baba said: on the moon is a many-limbed tree that had suffered greatly. Each limb translatable into a dream. When I asked how it got there, how it left the earth, he said when one of its roots was cut, all the prayers it devoured came streaming out.

Sometimes, Baba tells me, he’d hear a girl’s voice coming out of the tree, from a space so vast it might have reached the heavens. It sounded tentative, muffled as if in an enormous coat. Each time, outside his window, the sky would pale, like a wound before it bleeds.

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He once tried to pull the girl from the tree. Then he realized the girl couldn’t be removed unless he wanted to lose his arms.

I learn from Baba that there is a place we are all tree. We blinker in and out of it. He said we had to burrow deep in loss to get there, to empty ourselves of every belief, story, and clump of hair. I tried this the other day when Baba was out somewhere else. I don’t know where. I went in deep and found myself on the moon, full of pearly foreign light. How strange, I thought. The moon smelled of rice and leaves.

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Baba calls to say he dreamed a river of tiny white eyes. They were advancing towards him.

Before he woke, Baba says, it took his shoes and even his skin.

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When my eyes reopen, Baba wipes the sleep from my eyes. Baba wipes the leaves from my feet. His hands as soft as petals. I recognize the knit of a scar across his temple. I think he’s staying this time before I notice that his sweater is coming apart. I hold a strand of it in my fist, as if it would save me. Leaves fall across my chest. They shift in the wind.

When Baba vanishes back into the night, the threads that had unraveled lay in piles on the ground. I kick at the ones about my toes. Then they start to harden and divide into countless branches.

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Generations have passed since the trees began to disappear. Once every year people came together to mourn the missing trees. Even the remaining trees mourned. We could tell by the way their eyes rained.

We’d speak their names into the air with our mouths tightly shut. We’d watch it like tea or incense smoke, our silence, dissolving into wind in place of numbers. Above us, birds would shrink and vanish as water in the sun.

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Every now and then, I would hear Baba’s steady breathing just over the pain, from a clear space, like a forgotten dream. When I wake, I’d scatter his leaves across the ground and find all of them changing into broken porcelain. There would be an image of a girl on each piece. Behind her, the delicate black of a sky in which no moon hung.

Uyen Phuong Dang is a Vietnamese American writer born in Saigon, Vietnam. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, X-R-A-Y, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues. She is currently back in Saigon, researching gods and ghosts. You can follow her writings at uyenpdang.com.