Un bref instant de splendeur

It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it
is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest
through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to
absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now—as Lan called
to me, “Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother.” And we
knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper
arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief
to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor, connected to each
other by touch, made something like the word family.

Back in the apartment, we had no oxtail. But we did have three mood rings,
one glinting on each of our fingers. You were lying facedown on a blanket
spread on the floor with Lan straddled across your back, kneading the knots
and stiff cords from your shoulders. The greenish TV light made us all seem
underwater. Lan was mumbling another monologue from one of her lives,
each sentence a remix of the last, and interrupted herself only to ask you
where it hurt.
Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a
third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In
which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage,
can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.
It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it
is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest
through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to
absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now—as Lan called
to me, “Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother.” And we
knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper
arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief
to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor, connected to each
other by touch, made something like the word family.
You groaned with relief as we worked your muscles loose, unraveling
you with nothing but our own weight. You lifted your finger and, speaking
into the blanket, said, “Am I happy?”
It wasn’t until I saw the mood ring that I realized you were asking me,
once more, to interpret another portion of America. Before I could answer,
Lan thrust her hand before my nose. “Check me too, Little Dog—am I
happy?” It could be, in writing you here, I am writing to everyone—for how
can there be a private space if there is no safe space, if a boy’s name can
both shield him and turn him into an animal at once?
“Yes. You’re both happy,” I answered, knowing nothing. “You’re both
happy, Ma. Yes,” I said again. Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or
whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in
cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love,
at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?
“I’m happy!” Lan threw her arms in the air. “I’m happy on my boat. My
boat, see?” She pointed to your arms, splayed out like oars, she and I on
each side. I looked down and saw it, the brown, yellowish floorboards
swirling into muddy currents. I saw the weak ebb thick with grease and
dead grass. We weren’t rowing, but adrift. We were clinging to a mother the
size of a raft until the mother beneath us grew stiff with sleep. And we soon
fell silent as the raft took us all down this great brown river called America,
finally happy.

With Lan, one of my tasks was to take a pair of tweezers and pluck, one
by one, the grey hairs from her head. “The snow in my hair,” she explained,
“it makes my head itch. Will you pluck my itchy hairs, Little Dog? The
snow is rooting into me.” She slid a pair of tweezers between my fingers,
“Make Grandma young today, okay?” she said real quiet, grinning.
For this work I was paid in stories. After positioning her head under the
window’s light, I would kneel on a pillow behind her, the tweezers ready in
my grip. She would start to talk, her tone dropping an octave, drifting deep
into a narrative. Mostly, as was her way, she rambled, the tales cycling one
after another. They spiraled out from her mind only to return the next week
with the same introduction: “Now this one, Little Dog, this one will really
take you out. You ready? Are you even interested in what I’m saying?
Good. Because I never lie.” A familiar story would follow, punctuated with
the same dramatic pauses and inflections during moments of suspense or
crucial turns. I’d mouth along with the sentences, as if watching a film for
the umpteenth time—a movie made by Lan’s words and animated by my
imagination. In this way, we collaborated.
As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with
fantastical landscapes as open into them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal
the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys,
of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of
rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells
written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.
There were personal stories too. Like the time she told of how you were
born, of the white American serviceman deployed on a navy destroyer in
Cam Ranh Bay. How Lan met him wearing her purple áo dài, the split sides
billowing behind her under the bar lights as she walked. How, by then, she
had already left her first husband from an arranged marriage. How, as a
young woman living in a wartime city for the first time with no family, it
was her body, her purple dress, that kept her alive. As she spoke, my hand
slowed, then stilled. I was engrossed in the film playing across the
apartment walls. I had forgotten myself into her story, had lost my way,
willingly, until she reached back and swatted my thigh. “Hey, don’t you
sleep on me now!” But I wasn’t asleep. I was standing next to her as her
purple dress swayed in the smoky bar, the glasses clinking under the scent
of motor oil and cigars, of vodka and gunsmoke from the soldiers’
uniforms.
“Help me, Little Dog.” She pressed my hands to her chest. “Help me
stay young, get this snow off of my life—get it all off my life.” I came to
know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery,
that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room
filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the
hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us.

Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to
expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance
increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.
Lan, through her stories, was also traveling in a spiral. As I listened,
there would be moments when the story would change—not much, just a
minuscule detail, the time of day, the color of someone’s shirt, two air raids
instead of three, an AK-47 instead of a 9mm, the daughter laughing, not
crying. Shifts in the narrative would occur—the past never a fixed and
dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we
are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.
“Make me young again,” Lan said. “Make me black again, not snow like
this, Little Dog. Not snow.”
But the truth is I don’t know, Ma. I have theories I write down then
erase and walk away from the desk. I put the kettle on and let the sound of
boiling water change my mind. What’s your theory—about anything? I
know if I asked you, you’d laugh, covering your mouth, a gesture common
among the girls in your childhood village, one you’ve kept all your life,
even with your naturally straight teeth. You’d say no, theories are for people
with too much time and not enough determination. But I know of one.
We were on a plane to California—do you remember this? You were
giving him, my father, another chance, even with your nose still crooked
from his countless backhands. I was six and we had left Lan behind in
Hartford with Mai. At one point on the flight, the turbulence got so bad I
bounced on the seat, my entire tiny self lifted clean off the cushion, then
yanked down by the seatbelt. I started to cry. You wrapped one arm around
my shoulders, leaned in, your weight absorbing the plane’s throttle. Then
you pointed to the thick cloud-bands outside the window and said, “When
we get this high up, the clouds turn into boulders—hard rocks—that’s what
you’re feeling.” Your lips grazing my ear, your tone soothing, I examined
the massive granite-colored mountains across the sky’s horizon. Yes, of
course the plane shook. We were moving through rocks, our flight a
supernatural perseverance of passage. Because to go back to that man took
that kind of magic. The plane should rattle, it should nearly shatter. With the
laws of the universe made new, I sat back and watched as we broke through
one mountain after another.

No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For
the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is
stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a
void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without
losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the
one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level.

As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse
after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom
again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our
Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed.
Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese,
but entirely in war.
That night I promised myself I’d never be wordless when you needed
me to speak for you. So began my career as our family’s official interpreter.
From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I
could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a
mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.
When you worked for a year at the clock factory, I called your boss and
said, in my most polite diction, that my mother would like her hours
reduced. Why? Because she was exhausted, because she was falling asleep
in the bathtub after she came home from work, and that I was afraid she
would drown. A week later your hours were cut. Or the times, so many
times, I would call the Victoria’s Secret catalog, ordering you bras,
underwear, leggings. How the call ladies, after confusion from the
prepubescent voice on the other end, relished in a boy buying lingerie for
his mother. They awww’d into the phone, often throwing in free shipping.
And they would ask me about school, cartoons I was watching, they would
tell me about their own sons, that you, my mother, must be so happy.
I don’t know if you’re happy, Ma. I never asked.

One night, a day or two before Independence Day, the neighbors were
shooting fireworks from a rooftop down the block. Phosphorescent streaks
raked up the purple, light-polluted sky and shredded into huge explosions
that reverberated through our apartment. I was asleep on the living room
floor, wedged between you and Lan, when I felt the warmth of her body,
which was pressed all night against my back, vanish. When I turned, she
was on her knees, scratching wildly at the blankets. Before I could ask what
was wrong, her hand, cold and wet, grabbed my mouth. She placed her
finger over her lips.
“Shhh. If you scream,” I heard her say, “the mortars will know where
we are.”
The streetlight in her eyes reflecting jaundiced pools on her dark face.
She grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the window, where we
crouched, huddled under the sill, listening to the bangs ricochet above us.
Slowly, she guided me into her lap and we waited.
She went on, in whispered bursts, about the mortars, her hand
periodically covering my lower face—the scent of garlic and Tiger Balm
sharp in my nose. We must have sat for two hours like that, her heartbeat
steady on my back as the room began to grey, then washed in indigo,
revealing two sleeping forms swaddled in blankets and stretched across the
floor before us: you and your sister, Mai. You resembled soft mountain
ranges on a snowy tundra. My family, I thought, was this silent arctic
landscape, placid at last after a night of artillery fire. When Lan’s chin grew
heavy on my shoulder, her exhales evening out in my ear, I knew she had
finally joined her daughters in sleep, and the snow in July—smooth, total,
and nameless—was all I could see.

The time, at thirteen, when I finally said stop. Your hand in the air, my
cheek bone stinging from the first blow. “Stop, Ma. Quit it. Please.” I
looked at you hard, the way I had learned, by then, to look into the eyes of
my bullies. You turned away and, saying nothing, put on your brown wool
coat and walked to the store. “I’m getting eggs,” you said over your
shoulder, as if nothing had happened. But we both knew you’d never hit me
again.
Monarchs that survived the migration passed this message down to their
children. The memory of family members lost from the initial winter was
woven into their genes.
When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only
your name and not what you left behind?
The time I woke into an ink-blue hour, my head—no, the house—filled
with soft music. My feet on cool hardwood, I walked to your room. Your
bed was empty. “Ma,” I said, still as a cut flower over the music. It was
Chopin, and it was coming from the closet. The door etched in reddish
light, like the entrance to a place on fire. I sat outside it, listening to the
overture and, underneath that, your steady breathing. I don’t know how long
I was there. But at one point I went back to bed, pulled the covers to my
chin until it stopped, not the song but my shaking. “Ma,” I said again, to no
one, “come back. Come back out.”

I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly
three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside
a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.
If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we
are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood,
sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to
fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to
outlast.

The time, in New York City, a week after cousin Phuong died in the car
wreck, I stepped onto the uptown 2 train and saw his face, clear and round
as the doors opened, looking right at me, alive. I gasped—but knew better,
that it was only a man who resembled him. Still, it upended me to see what
I thought I’d never see again—the features so exact, heavy jaw, open brow.
His name lunged to the fore of my mouth before I caught it. Aboveground, I
sat on a hydrant and called you. “Ma, I saw him,” I breathed. “Ma, I swear I
saw him. I know it’s stupid but I saw Phuong on the train.” I was having a
panic attack. And you knew it. For a while you said nothing, then started to
hum the melody to “Happy Birthday.” It was not my birthday but it was the
only song you knew in English, and you kept going. And I listened, the
phone pressed so hard to my ear that, hours later, a pink rectangle was still
imprinted on my cheek.

Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in
season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs
along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story
of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles,
more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not
make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return;
only the future revisits the past.