By Hồ Anh Thái

What is it about so many people falling from high-rises these days?

It’s the kind of question you might find posed in the Opinions forum of a newspaper. Instead it had been raised inside his own kitchen.

First his wife slipped. A plate of sizzling octopus, stir-fried with mung bean sprouts being borne from the stove to the dining table flew from her hands and smashed into pieces on that slippery wooden floor. She fell hard, rolled, struggled up onto her hands and knees. Luckily no bones were broken. He rushed over and helped her up. As their daughter picked up the broken pieces of plate and swept the floor, she felt compelled to tell her mother a story about somebody having a stroke after slipping in a bathroom.

The husband chimed in: hey, that’s nothing. There was this guy just walking next to a railing, slipped and fell from the 13th floor. Died instantly.

"Shut up!  I have a little spill  in the kitchen and you guys out-do each other with tales of strokes and death," said the wife.

She sighed. Really, what was it with so many people falling off high buildings these days?

***

That was the question that had triggered a family round-table discussion. With the loss of the stir-fried octopus and mung bean sprouts, the couple and their daughter rolled up their sleeves, cooked up some stir-fried beef with leaf mustard, and served up countless anecdotes to each other about slipping accidents.

One man had suddenly fallen from the 7th floor of a convention center. Slipped. Another woman fell from the window of her office, situated on the 9th floor. She had also slipped. A Vietnamese executive meeting with a colleague from a neighbouring country fell from the 11th floor. He was reported to have slipped.

It was inexplicable. The guard railings in those buildings are as strong as the ramparts of  a citadel, as the saying goes; they ranged in height from 1.2 to 1.5 meters. One couldn’t just fall over them, even if one accidentally slipped. The only way would be to climb onto a chair and step over them. But none of the fallers had any reason to commit suicide. One was being groomed to replace his boss, who was approaching retirement. The aforesaid woman had just been promoted to head a management board after a spate of in-fighting with two other rivals in the same company. The third man was embroiled in a copyright dispute over charges of plagiarism levelled by several colleagues in the same research department. And another woman was fleeing from room to room to avoid a scene with the jealous wife of her boyfriend who had stormed into the office.

Every death had occured on a clear day, absent any rain or high winds. Subsequent investigations yielded the same verdict, time and again: the subjects fell to their deaths from high floors after they slipped.

All of this left in their wakes many questions and rumours, or; to use a trendy phrase, conspiracy theories. It isn’t that easy to accidentally slip. But even if one does, one won’t simply fall from a height. Several people would have to get together and toss one over the guardrailing.

Back at the kitchen round-table conference, the wife, washing the leaf mustard, theorized that those people were killed  because they knew too much. The husband, slicing beef, countered that root of the problem lay in harbouring too many ambitions. The daughter, smiling over her iPad, glanced up when she heard her mother’s suggestion that too much knowledge was the primary cause. She reported to her parents that her little brother had a terrible habit of not sitting still in the living room when visiting somebody’s home; instead he would run directly into their bedrooms. It was what he did as well whenever he visited his friend’s house; head straight into the bedroom. The girl scolded her brother: "You shouldn’t do that, even if you only want to go inside and play with your friend."

The mother picked up the thread: "You can’t just run into somebody’s bedroom; nobody wants  family secrets revealed."

The father warned: "It isn’t a matter of what you like or dislike. I forbid you from now on to run into anyone’s bedroom. What of they were counting stacks of dollar bills they got as bribe or arranging packets of drugs, and some kid suddenly runs in on them. Even if that boy is their nephew or their child’s best friend, they’ll still grab him by the neck, sweep him off the ground and throw him over the guardrail. Then they’d swear that he had slipped."

According to the father, this wasn't any conspiracy theory. It was reality.   

***

Nevertheless, his wife maintained, there may be another reason why so many people slip. No, not because of ambition, lust or knowledge. They slip, perhaps, because they have yet to assume a high-rise culture.

In the past, when apartment buildings had five floors at most and guardrails were low, hardly anybody slipped and fell. It WAS only when high-rise apartment and multi-floor office buildings mushroomed up all over the place that people started dropping like falling figs. They were suffering what was being called “the high-rise complex.”

A proper high-rise culture  had yet to develop. How can one cultivate a high-rise culture when human culture itself hasn’t been perfected? Building too many high-rises with no planning wasn’t any different than building monumental theatres without training artists to perform in them. Or audiences who knew how to watch and listen.

If one possessed a proper high-rise culture, one certainly wouldn’t walk their pets without muzzles, or let them run wild, or cuddle them on elevators without caring a bit whether they smelled terrible or were a nuisance to people who don’t love them all that much. In a proper high-rise culture, one won’t spit in elevators, litter the hallways, or toss diapers over their neighbours’ hand-rails. One won’t tap lit cigar embers into a trash bag, then put the bag into the trash room, and nearly burn down the whole building. One won’t leave an apartment without turning off electrical devices, running the risk of burning the whole place down. In a proper high-rise culture, one won’t see guests off to the elevator, talking loudly in the hallway, while one’s 5-year-old girl climbs up on a chair next to the guard railing and reaches over to catch a mantis on a bougainvillea branch, and fall to her death from the 9th floor. Which really happened. The girl had fallen to the ground from the 9th floor.

According to one conspiracy theory, that girl had flown to heaven. Thanks to her parents’ hospitality and talkativeness.

***

All the while his parents and older sister were talking, the little boy’s eyes were glued to his iPhone, but his ears didn’t miss a word from the family seminar about slipping and falling. Upon hearing about the 5-year-old girl falling from the 9th floor, he shouted, "I know her, I know her. She fell into a spongy container on the back of a shipper’s motorbike. She didn’t die."

The little boy’s interruption made his sister remember something else. Their old uncle, who lived in a house in town, faulted apartment residents for being nosy and resolutely refused to sell his house to move to some high-rise.

"There’s nothing so special about living in an apartment," he said. “I used to live in an old-style apartment building, just five stories high. In the summer, I had to go down to the ground floor to pump water, or else carry buckets of water up the stairs. There’s nothing luxurious about apartment-living."

"Even if you live in a fancy high-rise apartment building, your electricity and water supply will absolutely break down someday. If the situation drags on, you’ll have to call a water company to deliver water. Then you’ll have to carry it up all these stairs. Imagine that. There’s nothing luxurious about apartment-living.”

"In theory, fire engine ladders can reach as high as the 8th floor, but in reality, you can’t be sure. I left my first apartment to buy a private house, which is a sign of upward mobility. Now you tell me to sell my private house to move to an apartment. Which is backward mobility. No, I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.”

For his own house, the uncle hired a maid who happened to be talkative. She had a way of embellishing the story of the 5-year-old girl who fell from the 9th floor. She said that from what she’d heard, that little girl was cruel at heart. She used to torment a cat by tying a rag to its tail and setting the cloth on fire. The cat would shriek and run all over the building, almost setting it on fire. Luckily, it only managed to set off the alarm and send the whole building into chaos. People recalled how on that day, the girl had seen a praying mantis crawling along a branch of bougainvillea on the balcony. She climbed up, intending to catch the mantis in order to torture it, break off its claws and tear off its wings. She waited until her parents had taken their guests to the elevator, then took a chair to the balcony and climbed onto it. When she stretched out her arm to seize the mantis, she fell. Or so people said.

All of this the maid had heard from others. Of course, she hadn’t seen the accident with her own eyes. It was just another conspiracy theory, to repeat that trendy phrase again. Of course, the maid didn’t just stick to the bare details; she sprinkled them with additional commentary.

“That little chit had a hell of a lot of luck. She dropped right into a container filled with foam. She’ll grow up in some extraordinary gangsterly way. According to the newspaper, at 5 years old and 40 kg, by the time she reached the ground from the 9th floor, that girl would have the impact equivalent of 200 kg. Imagine if she had landed on somebody’s head.”  

Afterward, the maid herself experienced an epilogue that the whole family, husband and wife and their two children, would never forget. It was as if her tale of the little girl’s fall-induced weight impact was a prophecy. On the 23rd day of lunar December, or Kitchen Guardians’ Day, when the kitchen gods are supposed to ride a fish to fly to heaven to report on human affairs over the past year, the uncle walked out onto the pavement in front of his house and saw a golden-carp vendor passing by. Little yellow-reddish carps were swimming inside cellophane bags.The uncle asked to buy a few of the goldfish to release in honour of the holy day, even though he knew all too well that a goldfish released at one end of the sewer would be re-caught at the other end, and sold all over again. A school of fish released into a lake would be immediately caught in somebody’s net and sold once more. Several times over. It was similar to human trafficking, with 18-year-old girls being sold and re-sold repeatedly. Everybody knows the formula. Buying fish and birds to release is thus just cruelty disguised as mercy. The mouth sings prayers, but the heart is filled with daggers. The old uncle who hated modern high-rise apartment buildings still loved this depraved tradition of fish releasing.

At that moment, the maid was watering a few flower pots on the balcony, which was on the first floor, right above the uncle’s head. Being nosy by nature, she pricked her ears up to hear the conversation below. She leaned over the railing and called down to her boss not to buy that kind of fish, which was a fake Chinese fish painted over to resemble a golden carp. That paint would peel off on its way to heaven with the kitchen gods, like the make-up running off a girl’s face when she sweated. In a short while, she, the maid, would run out to the street market and buy a better fish for him. No sooner did she utter these words than she lost her balance, wobbled, flailed, and fell over the hand-rail.

Everybody knew the ending of this story. Just like the 5-year-old girl who fell from the 9th floor, the maid didn’t die nor suffer any serious injuries. She had only fallen from the first floor.

The only problem was that she fell right onto her boss’s head. That old uncle lost his Lunar New Year holiday, as he had to lie in bed nursing his neck in a plaster cast, but he still thanked his lucky stars. He was fortunate his neck didn’t break.  If his fate was to slip, he couldn’t escape it. He would slip, if not from a high-rise apartment, then from the first floor of a street-front house. If it wasn’t he who slipped, then his maid would. Even luckier, the girl only weighed 70 kilograms, and fell only a distance of four meters from the first floor before she landed on his head with a mass of 100 kilograms. 100 kg. Straight down on his head.

At the moment the family seminar reached this point, the little boy clutched his iPhone and ran over to the balcony, and there looked down and around, as if to estimate how high from the ground his 15th floor was, and how many kilograms he would weigh if he fell with his current mass. His parents shrieked loudly in unison as if to chase away bad spirits. "Get inside. Right now."

The stir-fried beef with leaf mustard was done. The wife carried this dish over with another plate filled with steaming fried banana cakes. It suddenly dawned on her what had earlier caused her to slip. Perhaps when she was slicing the bananas, a small piece had fallen down onto the floor.

The little boy picked up a banana cake with his bare hands, intending to eat it first. His sister immediately shouted: "You have to eat rice before eating cakes."

His mother also shouted: "You can’t eat banana cakes. Your final semester exams are coming! Do you want to slip on a banana skin?"(*)

His father chimed in, remarking that the exam room was quite high up, on the 6th floor.

Translated by Đỗ Linh

Adated by Wayne Karlin

(*) Vietnamese people believe that students should not eat bananas before an exam, because they will fail, just like slipping on a banana peel.