After eight years filled with heartaches and losses following the fall of our beloved Saigon, my mother arrived at fifty-seven years old to the New
World alone, just a few years older than I
now. She would die twelve years later of cancer, her work incomplete, her
dreams unfulfilled, her body no longer hers to control. Often, the nine of us would ask, “Had she made a bargain
with God for our freedom?”
Often, I would tell myself, “I was the cause of her
cancer.”
I had always been a headstrong child, and it seemed that without
consciously planning, I had devoted my youthful years to destroy my mother’s world
order. Where she thrived ahead of her time, I recoiled in shame. She wanted to
cut my hair à la garconne to free me
of time wasted in front of the mirror and give me a modern look. I sobbed bitterly
each time she cut my hair short. I hated her each time.
She started talking enigmatically to me about how boys could eat girls and advised me to stay away from them. Her
words sometimes were too blunt, too embarrassing to hear. They disgusted me.
After a failed escape from Vietnam, we were put in
prison together. While I withdrew into my
shell away from my cell mates, she made herself the center of their admiration
by giving them haircuts and curing their illnesses with whatever materials she
could lay hand on: leaves, salt, cow dung, mud…She read their palms to entertain these southern folks, whom I fear one day would turn
against us when they find out about the gold we hid in our cone hats. To
my mother, who by nature was as reserved and socially awkward as I, it was
exactly for that same reason that she befriended them.
While I stubbornly held my head high and kept my wall of silence to preserve our privacy, she erased herself to morph into the role of a simple country woman
with nothing more to say than “your love line shows great promise and one day
you will meet the man of your dream.”
In those years under the communist rules, she was the one in our family to venture into the crowds, attend mandatory meetings,
negotiate with neighbors, take the bus to faraway towns bringing food
to my dad in prison, then later, to me in the concentration camp. She alone took care of my sick
grandmother, tried in vain to revive my dead baby cousin, walked the length of
our boat to get food and water and news from the captain. She was the only one who had not
vomited, perhaps too busy offering comfort to all of us lying like dead fish
around her in our own bile, moaning and crying.
My parents came to USA with nothing but hope for the
future and a willingness to rebuild. Dad spoke fluent English and right away
felt at ease with the American fast and furious way of living. He found work
easily and became an agent for Prudential. He had ventured to USA first from Belgium to
explore the country and decided that we should join him in Los
Angeles, where money spilled out of a machine called the ATM, housing was aplenty, and relatives who arrived as refugees in 1975 had already been well-settled with homes
and cars, their children attending universities, even Ivy Leagues. My mother, the next one to join my dad, had arrived bewildered by the fast-moving cars
on the freeways, the large homes with garage doors that opened up as people were coming home--like magic.
“How can we afford all this luxury?” she had asked, filled with dread, knowing my father’s too-optimistic confidence in “Help yourself, and God will help you” mantra. But mother, she was “like a bird on a branch when it broke,” her literal translation of a Vietnamese idiom when she attempted to describe her situation to her new African American friend from the cosmetology school. Ms. Mercedes, who loved to eat shrimp, was Mom’s first and only American friend because once, in trying to lift my mom’s spirit, she had said, “We were people of the same boat,” a phrase my mother understood very well. She came home to tell us that day, “Didn’t you know my black friend also came here by boat?”
“How can we afford all this luxury?” she had asked, filled with dread, knowing my father’s too-optimistic confidence in “Help yourself, and God will help you” mantra. But mother, she was “like a bird on a branch when it broke,” her literal translation of a Vietnamese idiom when she attempted to describe her situation to her new African American friend from the cosmetology school. Ms. Mercedes, who loved to eat shrimp, was Mom’s first and only American friend because once, in trying to lift my mom’s spirit, she had said, “We were people of the same boat,” a phrase my mother understood very well. She came home to tell us that day, “Didn’t you know my black friend also came here by boat?”
Not only Mom had lost her pharmacist career when she followed Dad’s vision to re-settle here, she also lost her tongue, and with it, some of her
fiery temper. She did not
give up communication easily, though. One of her favorite things to do was to
shop for fruits and vegetables at La Verne’s farmer’s market each Saturday.
These robust and engaging men and women who loved to chat with their customers were whiter than white folks. My mother, who was not unfamiliar with the lively
atmosphere of an outdoor market, navigated the stalls eagerly and touched and
felt everything: the carrots still with leaves, healthy tomatoes still with the taste of the earth, sacks of potatoes and oranges that were “So
cheap,” she exclaimed to us, drunk with happiness to see her money well-stretched. Much more than the grocery, it was
here that she could open her mouth and talk in an infuse of Vietnamese, French,
and French-English, meaning Latin-based English words that she knew well but
pronounced them like they were French, to the amused merchants.
“How much?” Mom would ask, pointing at the huge
watermelon, as her other hand already picked up a slice of the cut fruit
and put it in her mouth. She clicked her tongue in approval when the sweet
juice ran down her throat.
The merchant, a tan older man, didn’t know whom he was
dealing with. He was a talkative man, and seeing here a small lady rather fair,
rather pretty and exotic-looking, with her coy figure and smiling face and an
equally-shy young lady by her side, he launched into a long introductory
verbiage of himself and his fruits, and the farm he owned, which I could only imagine
since the country lulls in his language was also too much for my newly-acquired English.
Finally, there were the mention of some numeric figures and the cue
word, “dollars.”
My mom took the cue, and without batting an eyelash,
counter-offered with, “Five dollars,” which she pronounced “Doll-ah.”
He clearly did not understand a word of what she said. “Pardon
me?” He said, perhaps impressed with her accent and the strange words that had
to be English but that he couldn’t grasp, he who thought he was born into the
language.
“Five doll-ah,” she said again, this time with her five
fingers raised up.
It worked.
“No, no,” he frowned. “I don’t bargain, ma’am! Let’s not
go there.”
“Six,” she said, and started walking away.
He laughed. “OK, I’ll give you for seven and a basket of
strawberries.”
When she ended up in the ICU in her last months of life,
Mother had asked for a wheelchair to go out under the blue sky in a burst of
renewed strength that made us thought she was recovering. Her request sounded like,
“Give me a will chair,” for the will
to fight on and survive another battle. She still had so much to do for the
family, for her oldest son was still single, and her sixth daughter, the troublemaker, me, had married a
Muslim Indian husband who, she assumed, one day would kidnap me to India and
lock me up like in the movie Not
Without My Daughter. Her last two youngest daughters were still in dental school.
“Do it on my left arm. I need my right to work,” she had
told her doctor the day he said he needed to put a chemo line into her vein. She never returned home again.
Rest well, Mom! We all are doing well, and my husband is
the best man any girl could have dreamed of. Please don’t move that Heaven too
much when you see us down here struggling. You are scaring people up there.
Don’t give Dad a hard time too. One of the reason he
lived long was because he was afraid to face you. We love you and remember
you always.