Tribute to My Mother

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?”

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.

For a Moment the Sky Is Empty

There are things to be said. No doubt.

And in one way or another

they will be said. But to whom tell

the silences? With whom share them

now? For a moment the sky is

empty and then there was a bird.

(From “There Are Things to be Said” by Cid Corman)

Migratory birds are programmed to move south annually. From birth, they were groomed to endure the hardship of their flight; to follow in formation, to shift with the winds and rest only at sundown. On the contrary, refugees fleeing war are thrown head first unprepared into the unknown, facing possible death.

It was time to face our challenges. We had to leave our home and seek freedom, like the birds seeking a more tolerable climate in order to survive.  Like these migrating birds, we had to leave before the first frost set in, before the collapse of the food supply, before the real danger was even palpable. We had to depart when the sun was still warm, the trees green with leaves and insects abundant. Already the wind had changed direction.  At the end of the 1975-1976 school year, our innocent world began to topple. We were informed that our school would not reopen for us but would be turned into a state-owned university. We would have to withdraw our school records and enroll with our home district. I was dumb-struck. What would I find in my school district, among the people I had never met?  How should I fit in with the local girls who donned their white traditional tunics and boys from blue-collar homes?

One August dawn, our family departed from home. The younger kids left with Mom on a hired cyclo to a bus station located in Bình-Ðông, Chợ Lớn, about 45 minutes away from home. Half an hour later, Dad pedaled out on his bike. It was to be dumped at his friend’s home and Dad would take a cyclo to the rendezvous place. I was the last person to leave home for the bus depot with Mrs. Duyệt, a stranger to me until then.

Early dawn was the intercity bus station’s busiest time. A strong odor of diesel fuel, wet mud, and human sweat attacked our noses at once, laced with a whiff of food aroma contributed by the snack peddlers.

The ticket window was already closed. “Sold out,” a sign said. It was expected that we would be obtaining our tickets from the black market, which was now in full swing purveying the coveted items, in a cacophony of price haggles, bargaining charades, and ensuing tirades of grotesque cusses. It was a strangest place to be dragged into for the first time in my life. I was completely dependent on a person I hardly knew, whose face I hadn’t had enough time to study, whose ample bodice I stuck close, lest I would be lost in this chaotic place.

From afar I spied the familiar sights of my dad and felt reassured of my safety. I knew enough to not call out for him. He was not supposed to be anyone I knew. I was myself supposed to be a countrygirl in my black pajamas, my baba top bought for this occasion, with holes at the elbows, a paddy hat in hand, and the stranger by my side my dear aunt Duyet.

The hours ticked by fast as I witnessed the craze for boarding passes around me. I followed my aunt from one line to the next, as she huffed and puffed in her pursuit of one man after another to secure two seats on the designated bus, pre-arranged for our group, whose members arrived separately. I knew nothing of the rest of the people in our group, except for my immediate family and one or two members who had come home to discuss the escape with Dad. Since the day we returned home from the Embassy's rooftop, I dutifully obeyed my parents without their having to explain anything. It was understood that the less said between us, the better. I was constantly reading them instead, their body signals, their facial expressions, my mom’s unspoken gaze, my dad’s head movements. Then my younger brother and sisters would look up to me for cues to follow. Our new code of conduct was fast adhered. One learned the signs of danger very fast at young age, and survival mode immediately kicked in.

The sun was now high up and hot, and just like that, the black market ceased its frantic operation. The buses were leaving in clouds of black smoke, with trails of children running after them to offer the passengers their last chance of snack, chanting “five for five” instead of “three for five.” The two of us, Mrs. Duyệt and I, were still ticketless. I saw Dad gesticulating wildly in a hot debate with a motorcyclist. Then Dad, too, disappeared. I was speechless still, but my mind was racing for possible answers. What does this all mean?

As if to answer my question, Mrs Duyet motioned me toward a motorcycle, where the man previously engaged in heated discussion with Dad stood waiting. “This is our ride,” she simply said, as the man, hatless, his toes stuck out from a cheap pair of flip-flops, kickstarted his gear. Not daring to protest, I approached the first chauffeured motorbike, xe ôm, of my life, about to discover the latest mode of transportation called “embraced ride,” adopted overnight post April 1975, in response to the shortage of motored transportation. A gigantic question loomed large in my head, “How? Where do I sit?”

I had ride with him on my brother’s man Suzuki and loved our ride together each and every time, especially when cocooned in the back of his poncho as he varoomed us through the monsoon rain to my school friend’s home. At fifteen years old, I had seen my fair share of Saigon’s innovative transportation. A whole family could pile up on one motorcycle. Poor children traveled inside baskets carried by their mothers, as she hawked her traveling market from neighborhood to neighborhood. Limbless veterans scooted around on pieces of lumbers equipped with wheels. We had xe lam, or Lambretta, a converted motorcycle encased in a metal frame completed with a roof for up to thirteen to fifteen passengers, with three sitting in front, including the driver, and up to thirteen in the back. I had traveled in both pedaled and motorcyclos.

I had ride on bike, propelled by my friend who, for the distance she traveled together with me, pushed me with her foot as she motored her moped to save me from the ardeous pedaling between home and school.

But I did not look forward to this new awkward situation. We, two urban women, would be traveling an eight-hour trip gluing on the back of a strange man. I could plainly see that the only option available to me was to either sit hugging the man or coyly behind my protector, although that would place me off the cushioned seat, on the porte baggage. I chose the latter. Mrs Duyet mounted behind the motorist and hung on to the driver like a cat to a tree, leaving a small gap for me to lodge myself in. My thighs cradled her large behind like we were two monkeys on a circus ride.

Soon, we were hat-to-hat on the tarred highway, carrying forward by the wind and sun, our cityscape far behind us. The rice fields on both sides of the highway zoomed by in a blur. The scorching sun kept us in focus, then soon it was drawing shadows of tree branches and leaves, and our own shadows riding in tandem to the darker passing lane underneath. The shadows, like our past, trying to catch up to us as we fled southward in search of our future. 

We traveled through small towns, then out into the open again, gliding past more rice paddies in an expanse of thin, bare stalks. They waved to us from their pools of murky water, chanting in chorus, “Goodbye. Adieu! We are stuck here, deep in the mud. But lucky you are flying away.”  The black buffalos did not care to say goodbye, but sadness was in their eyes. 

I had avoided to circle Mrs Duyet’s voluminous waist with my arms, using my hands instead to brace against the metal frame of the luggage carrier to prop myself up, since I could feel I was sliding off from the tiny space reserved to me, but my butt had gone numb and could no longer feel the frame underneath it to let me know whether I was still somewhere on that metal horse, which coursed on furiously, or would find myself flat on my face on the street in the next lunge and lurch, while the other two eloped toward the sunset. The white Pan Am bag, stuffed full with my two poetry diaries, a change of clothes, two sets of underwear, and small girly keepsakes, which I had worn sideway, weighed heavily on my shoulders now.

Had it been hours? My head, wind whipped, sun stroked, rattled by the roaring engine, was befuddled. Bumped and bounced with each swerve and dip of the road beneath, all the bones in my body felt as if they were all loosened and about to crumple in a heap.

But finally, we stopped. The motorist excused himself and went behind a tree to relieve himself, his back still visible to us. I looked on with envy, because my bladder had been pushing in agony for some time now. But how would I find privacy on the road? I didn’t have the courage to answer my body’s demand, so I let it suffer for my pride.

The road took us back into an indeterminable stretch of dirt, with the leaning sun throwing patches of orange into the sky.  Our past and future played a tag game along the deserted road for the longest time until the sun fell back into the far horizon, yielding the open space to the chiller air.

As we headed west, the sky became heavy with clouds—thick, dark and wooly, until they blocked off the horizon and blanketed us from above, pushing the heavy dampness into our lungs, while the slivering dirt road slipped quickly by underneath. Then, the monsoon clouds burst, pouring down all the water that the dragon had drank. I restrained myself no longer. The warm liquid washed down with the torrential rain unnoticed. Thunder clapped across the darkened sky.

We pushed forward, gaining minute distances, but onward, onward. Many times, when the feverish bike skipped a track and skittered dangerously over the muddy ground, I felt myself slipping further away. I braced both my shaking legs onto Mrs. Duyệt’s bouncy thighs to inch myself forward, forgetting hunger, ignoring chill, and concentrating on only one thing: to remain on that metallic horse.

We were now one three-head beast fighting the sheets of steely rain, bending low on hunched backs, shoulders to shoulders. In the final hour, the open mouth of a large rocky mountain swallowed us. We squeezed our way through towering walls that looked like giant sentinels in white costumes. It seemed a hundred thousand years had gone by, and I had been lost into a surreal, crystallized world blanketed in a thick, liquefied substance. I strained my blurred vision to locate myself, but my senses were bewildered.

The last trek was finally over. We stopped by a dark roadside, thereupon Mrs. Duyệt dismounted. “I’d be right back,” she murmured into my ears and walked into the black abyss. I was left alone in the cold night with the man, whose eyes glistened like the blade of a knife. My senses sprang on heightened alert. I was old enough to understand a woman’s fragility in nature, where man and beast borrowed forms. I stood apart and kept my silence. As time dragged by, the silence between became oppressive. The man started inquiring about my destination, and the reasons for our urgent travel. I gave him incoherent answers, making myself as stupid as I could, behaving the way of an awkward mountain goat. He couldn’t draw any sense out of my convoluted replies and gave up his small talk. After what seemed like an eternity, to my relief Mrs. Duyệt returned. She had found the designated house. She paid the man then led the way to the end of a road, where a wooden dwelling stood on stilts above black water. 

The entrance door opened into a spacious home constructed of heavy oak. The soaring beams supported a high ceiling of wooden planks. The warm abode swept me into its peaceful, tidy interior, where dancing halo of lantern lights dripped gold. I, on the contrary, was dripping water like a piece of wet sheet as I was led deeper inside, leaving puddles behind instead of footprints. At different corners of the house, the sleeping areas were being readied. White netting hung like unfurling sails of a gigantic ship; I, the prisoner princess, was being sold to foreign lands. 

I bobbed gently to the host, a tiny and frail patriarch with luminous skin and white hair. He welcomed us with a benevolent smile and introduced his wife, who busied herself by pulling shyly at the bed nets. I stared in disbelief. Here was a lady just barely older than me, fresh as spring, her shiny skin gleaming under the soft light. She untied her cascade of velvety hair and was in the process of combing through it with a large plastic comb. We nodded discreetly at each other, exchanging looks, interpreting each other’s motives in our actions.  She must have been simply curious about this lost city girl whose outlook indicated a privileged life and was now in pursuit of some unknown happiness, while my staring eyes screamed out loud to her: “Why? You…a mere girl, wife of an octogenarian. Are you nuts?” Then the young lady calmly returned to her task, as I was led to a bathroom in the back. I pushed open a creaky half-door to step into a small wooden enclosure. In a corner trembled the flame of a small candle, revealing in its shadowy light two fifty-gallon wooden barrels, filled to the brim with water. I closed the door and breathed in my solitude, recovering slowly from the shock of my travel, my eyes slowly adjusting to the soft light to curiously inspect the small stall I was in. I peeled off my soaked outfit, shivering, yet craving the therapeutic shower. There were thin gaps between the floor planks, made especially to drain out the wastewater. Through it reflected the black river below.

In this part of the country, homes were built on tall columns above the steep riverbanks. Many owners were fish farmers, feeding their stocks of catfishes conveniently with their own waste; the best food was human excrements. The fish thrived; their fatty meat was the main item in all recipes.

I searched for a scoop and found it hung neatly by the drum, next to a small cake of white soap. Above the drum, I saw an array of bamboo poles, designed skillfully to bring in rainwater. I washed myself slowly, and slowly, my beaten spirit was restored as the layers of road grime were rinsed off. I began to savor the novel environment and hungrily soaked my memory with flashing images and sounds of this lifetime adventure, intending on retelling my experience one day. In the quiet night, the sound of splashing water reverberated from below, waking the jumping fish.

Ravenous, I changed into a fresh set of black pants and black bà ba to join Mrs. Duyệt and our old host for dinner. A crockpot of steamed rice was exhaling a delicious perfume. A large bowl of catfish cooked in a thin watery soup of tomatoes, pineapple, ginger and white mung bean sprout sat waiting.

Afterward, I was led into one of the rooms dominated by a tall covered bed alcove. I was again by myself. My PanAm bag was on the floor, containing in its familiarity my whole universe, a soft reminder of a family somewhere waiting. I pulled out my diaries and, reading them for a last time while crying softly, tore off the pages, and tossed the shredded pieces of my childhood into the water below. This was the farthest I planned to carry my treasure with me, for they belonged to my past, too dangerous for me if I was caught by the authorities.

Through the wooden planks, I saw the white shapes floating toward the open river. Then I slumped onto the thick cotton pillow, burying into it my youthful dreams, yearning nothing more than the warm bosom of home.

The next day, I woke to a glorious morning full of sunshine.  The wretched outfit that I had washed and hung out to dry in the bathroom stall had been moved outdoor. It was dancing joyously now and when I found it again, it waved to me as if I was the one needing to be brought back. I was told to change quickly so that we could rejoin the rest of the group. We were led on foot through an endless rice field. In the middle of this leafy ocean stood a small thatch hut.

It was there that I rejoined my mom and siblings in a solemn atmosphere. Something wasn’t right. A man named Uncle Thanh was still fussing about something. Mrs. Duyệt joined in the conversation and through Mom’s retelling, I learned that Dad had been captured midway to Hà Tiên. For the sake of the whole group, Dad immediately stepped down from the bus as ordered. He was last seen escorted at gunpoint toward the village.

Uncle Thanh jumped in angrily, “Didn’t you see him, dressed up all black like a peasant but wearing shiny leather shoes?”.

Another man shook his head and clucked his tongue, “The Omega watch was on his wrist. And a gold pen in his pocket. A gold pen….” 

Somebody else added, “He stuck out like a sore thumb! Of course they’d notice him.”  Mom’s face was drained, but fierceness burned through her eyes. She said, eerily calm: “Now, I need to decide. I don’t know if we should continue with you all or return home to wait for Anh Khoa’s news.” 

 “I think you should continue with us,” Uncle Thanh advised. “We’ve come this far. He’ll follow you and the kids later. It’ll be easier for him to take care of himself without a family.” 

Mrs. Duyệt’s voice rose, her words well measured, “In my opinion you should go back, but let us take the children along. They’ll be fine with the group. You return for your husband.”

They spoke under their breath, but the air was dense with the intensity of their collective emotions. There was a long silence when Mom debated internally, her eyes closed. When she finally made eye contact with the worried faces around her, her voice cracked: “I’ll stay back, and the children. We’ll take the next boat.” It was that resolute. Short and clear. Her determination was at once respected, and no one tried to convince her otherwise. Our group split that night. We took a bus home the next day, while the rest of the people continued their journey across the ocean.

For months, my mother combed through all the provinces around Hà Tiên in search of my dad. At each detention center that she visited, she sent in a roll of sticky rice bearing Dad’s name, and waited for its rejection as undeliverable. Then, one day, oh joy—her roll of rice wasn’t returned. My mother didn’t accept her hunch so easily. She told the jail guard that she had sent the food to the wrong place. He told her it had gone to the correct recipient, and to prove their point, they escorted Dad out, a haggard man with twinkling eyes. Mom had found her husband. He then knew she had stayed back for him, tethered to him by her intense love.

He had been placed in a high-security prison. “Your husband was a flight risk,” the young guard of merely sixteen or seventeen said, shoving Mom’s bribing cash into his pocket. “He tried to break away.”

When Mom told my aunt about this, I was stunned. Dad, jail breaking? Dad, running like a rabbit at gunpoint across the field? In my mind I saw him stumble, then get back on his feet, fumbling for his eyeglasses. I saw him claw wildly for a defeated freedom.

But all I saw that day in my mother’s demeanor was steel. It was her turn to lead our family.