1.
At five years old,
death to me was the horrendous stench that eventually led to grim discoveries— of
lizards flattened in door-jambs; of dead mice when the cats left them
decapitated behind some cupboards or inside closets; of a cat, one of many strays
who roamed the rooftops and screamed morbidly many nights. My maids said the
cats were crying for love, but they were secretive creatures, and no one could
ever catch them at their lovemaking.
When they found that
cat, waterlogged to three times its normal size, it had been down to the bottom
of the cistern and up again, floating on the surface of the water pumped daily from
our well. I remember the sound of the pump going—chugga chug chug. Years later, the engine of our escape boat
reminded me of that pump, and for no reason the sound of fighting cats and their
nightly screams came back to me, as I hugged my knees looking out to the moon
through the prison bars, thinking back to my rosier childhood, wishing that the
mouse crawling on the wooden beams of my jail cells would be back behind some
walls. One time long ago, reading in my bed I looked up to find a tiny black
mouse scurrying in broad daylight. I threw my flip flop sandal at it to make it
go away and killed it instantly. I didn’t know I was good at target throwing. I
didn’t aim to kill, but there it was, the mouse, dead, bashed in, with a trail
of blood trickling from its head. The dead cat wasn’t my doing. It probably fell.
No one remembered hearing anything unusual in the nights before its drowning.
They recalled the silence afterward but thought the cat had moved away to have babies.
Ma had found a
whole litter of pink kittens inside her wardrobe. Their mewing alerted her. She
had dug her head deep into the piles of clothing—some folded, others thrown in
haphazardly, poking around amidst her ao
dai and blouses and pushing through her myriad things to look for the
source of the muted crying. Or was it chirping? Could it be birds? Or mice? The
mother cat put out its sharp claws, hissing like a snake and Ma jumped and
banged her head onto the closet door. The swelling was the size of a ping- pong
ball under my fingers.
Then Grandpa died.
Death was the violent fragrance of white tuberoses. The tea leaves that covered
his body so he would not smell. For three days he lay in that coffin, and
someone was always present so that no black cat would jump over him and make
him rise again.
On the third day of
his death, I was cantering downstairs from grandma’s room with my cousin Mai. A
faint light above gave us the hint of the stairsteps below. We tried to come
down as fast as we could, chased by our own shadows and a sudden fear of
darkness. We just turned a corner from the dimmed landing when the rapping began
from the direction of the dining room, where the casket was left opened with ong noi’s body under a layer of dark tea
leaves. I grasped Mai’s hand. We froze. The rapping turned into hammering and became
more urgent, and I could hear a voice faintly whispering, “Let me out.”
The hour between
sunset and night was the time when shadows dance and ghosts free themselves
from the underworld. On one wall of the tenebrous stairwell hung a deer head
with two marble eyes. Next to it was a large painting of the last supper. Mai flopped
down on the step, pulling me after her.
“Grandpa,” we both
uttered.
She covered her ears
and started whimpering. I outdid her with my howling to the point that I could
no longer hear Grandpa’s demand to be let out. Shushing my cousin, I took my
fingers out of my ears. The sudden silence was even more terrifying than the
loud hammering. It meant one thing: Grandpa had figured out how to climb out of
the box that they had laid him in. He was coming after two little girls, me
mostly, because it was my job to hunt crickets for his parrots. Soon he would come
up the stairs to us, the long tail of his black silk tunic flowing, and he
would call like he used to before his long sickness, “Hong-My. Come. Any crunchy
crickets today for Grandpa?”
I screamed with
all my might. Ah, ah…tongue knocking against teeth, teeth chattering inside
skull, eyes closed to avoid seeing Grandpa walking up.
Cold hands wrapped
my shoulders. Ah, ah! I was beyond myself. I tried to run but my feet were
useless blocks of rubber. Then, from behind me Grandma’s concerned voice, “Hong-My,
what’s the matter? Why are you girls crying?”
No, it wasn’t Grandpa,
we were told. The undertakers were nailing shut the coffin to take Grandpa to
his final rest.
“Wipe your tears,”
Grandma said softly. “Don’t be sad. Grandpa is in God’s hand.”
2.
Grandma
left home a few months before us with my two youngest sisters in 1979. I didn’t
miss them, although every time the hour chimed, I thought of Grandma’s vacant
room downstairs. Everything was left as it was—everything meaning whatever she
could bring with her when she sold her house from across our courtyard and
moved in with us: her large mahogany bed, the mattress covered by a white cotton
sheet, her white pillow waiting for her gray head, a big cross hung on the
wall, the cuckoo that counted the time for the next rosary or Mass before the
church bell pealed. I don’t know why their absence didn’t bring any sadness,
not a shred of tears or any lingering memory afterward of our separation.
Perhaps
I knew we would soon follow them; and we did—I, fifteen years old, riding on a
hired motorbike in the monsoon rain for eight to ten hours with another lady in
our group, driven by a male driver unknown to both of us, while my parents and
younger brother took the bus. The plan was that once arrived to our
destination, we would regroup and be taxied out in small groups to our boat on
a glorious sail to freedom. My dad’s beautifully-crafted plan splintered to
pieces the night we headed out in single file through the swamp filled with
mosquitoes. We never met my dad’s group nor rejoined Grandma and my two
sisters. The engine of our boat overheated, its chugga chug chug suddenly silenced in the middle of the ocean. Bobbing
under that upside-down bowl of a sky, I prayed with Ma and my little brother
for our lives. When they fished us up we were thankful to be thrown into jail.
Grandma, left stranded and deprived of her daily medicines for several months with
my sisters in a village deep inside the forests of U Minh, fell into a coma.
She died when she was finally rescued home.
She
died alone in my aunt’s home. Pa and his sister had taken turns keeping vigil
by her bedside, but she drew her last breath when both were momentarily away. The
lesson learned in 1954 had not prepared them for the final collapse of the
republic in 1975. Of her eleven children, only two daughters had luckily escaped
during the chaotic evacuation of Saigon and re-settled in the US. Of her eight
sons, one died from starvation and over-exertion. Two were held inside some
unknown concentration camps. Another was hiding to avoid sharing the fates of
his two older brothers, while his other older brother’s whereabouts were hard
to trace, because he too was trying to escape and could be looking for a boat,
or languishing in some prison.
When
Grandma breathed her last, I might have been struggling in a cloud of wet flies
to carry two heavy vats of human feces out from the women cells. Had I look up
to the patch of blue sky above the prison walls stranded in barbed wires, I could
have seen Grandma’s soul fly past toward Heaven. She had finally escaped and no
communists could hold her back against her wish. She too, had gone to the eternal
bliss, like Grandpa, although under very different circumstances.
Grandpa
had been buried in all possible fanfare. A military band led the long
procession of mourners shrouded in white crepes. His sons marched behind the
funeral van, their arms in black bands, their hands wielding canes as tradition
dictated, followed by his daughters and daughters-in-law, huddling and sobbing
under white head covers. Next were his numerous grandchildren, with long, white
bands tied around their heads, with distant relatives and friends of the family
close behind.
Grandma,
however, was quickly interred, her final home roughly marked.
3.
A
black cat slings by, her stomach low to the ground, perhaps heavy with kittens.
Perhaps she is just a typical American cat, overfed and indulged by the love of
her people. Later, the sight of her silently bathing in the sunlight without a
care brings me back to a faraway place where cats screamed in the night and
mice dwelt alongside cats and humans.
I
remember Grandpa and miss his calling. “Hong-My, no crickets yet?”
At
death, my father looked so much like his father, with high cheekbones and
without much flesh on his face. Death smelled of freshly-cut roses, their red
petals dropping like blood. Did he go where his father had gone, to a place
where they both could call home, though they had departed from oceans apart?
To
all refugees and immigrants,
