The Orange Gown

My mother. She was sick. She was sick in an orange gown. Or was that the color of her tray? They told me she had to go away but they didn’t say what for. I asked for her everyday. Some days I waited patiently. Some days I threw a tantrum and couldn’t stop crying. Then one day they drove me to a hospital and she was there with a needle sticking out of her arm and a tube that followed her everywhere. She was so different then. I never knew how beautiful she was. I couldn’t pay attention to what she said because I was busy wondering about the tube. She probably told me to behave and I probably lied about misbehaving.

Her curly black hair always held back with a headband was shaved off when she finally came home. She wore a gray robe with brown beads around her neck and prayed three times a day. The smell of incense scattered the apartment and stuck to our clothes. Her chanting was mesmerizing. The sound of the gong signaled the start of her chant and the beginning of quiet time. If I wanted to make any noise, I had better do it in the bedroom and pray that she couldn’t hear me. At supper my mother cooked two different meals: one vegetarian and one for the omnivores. Her food looked bland, always consisting of some variance of tofu and soy sauce. She insisted that I eat like she did but my eyes followed my siblings’ chopsticks. They always fought and whatever they were fighting for, it must have been good. I slept next to her. Huddled in the warmth of her body, I felt the world was safe again.

When she resumed the consumption of meat, she purchased a wig. The wig looked real if you’ve never seen her bald but to me, watching her put it on was like watching a comedy sketch that was funny but unconvincing. She’d laugh at herself every now and then. She never wore fancy clothes like other moms sometime did. There was a rumor that one mom in our neighborhood was seen with another man but it was just a rumor. I think it started because that mom wore fancy clothes. My mom said rumors were bad and if you spread them, the devil would cut your tongue off after you die. I’ve heard my mom talk about other moms but she was a devout buddhist so it may have been okay. She had a friend who while she was married was dating another man. They always held hands whenever they were together. They also fought a lot and the friend would call my mother to complain about him. She never said anything about her husband but I knew he existed because one day she stopped seeing the other man. My mother dated only one man here in America. I used to count my blessings after he packed his bags and left. Well, he didn’t live with us but he came around so often that his presence felt permanent. I hated him but never had the gall to say so. One day after my brother took a good beating from him, he put my mother’s boyfriend in his place. You cannot hit me. You are not my father! The words struggled their way through tears and brought the room to a standstill. I thought for sure the man was going to beat the living daylights out of my brother. But he stopped. As I stared at the metal bar on our window while my brother stood frozen in a corner with tears streaming down his face, the man let his arm fall feebly hitting nothing but molecules. He told my mother when she came home insinuating that she didn’t know how to teach her children. They too argued a lot and my mother probably picked up the phone to dial her friend, this time to do the talking. Their fights were never particularly loud or violent but they made us uneasy. My mother did however break his head with a bottle once. I didn’t see it happen but I saw her wrapping his head with a piece of cloth afterwards. His visits became more infrequent until he stopped coming around altogether. I was too busy celebrating to notice whether or not my mother ever cried.

My mother lived a single life since then raising the four of us while sending money back to support her eldest daughter in Vietnam and a countless number of other relatives whom we probably have never heard of or even met. She was the only single mother in our neighborhood. The only Vietnamese woman who didn’t have a man to help rear her children. We were poorer than our neighbors but that was something that my mother came to accept. She didn’t wear fancy clothes because she had no one to wear them for. Neither did she buy us fancy clothes because our relatives in Vietnam were either dying or poor. She made us eat all of our food, even the last grain of rice because there were children starving in Africa. She made us believe that we should empathize with those children but she forbade me from having black friends. I came to accept the many paradoxes that my mother would have.

My mother came home from Vietnam two nights ago but I have yet to call her. Tonight, I went through photographs I found at my sister’s house this past weekend. They were of my family’s first few years in America. In the pictures, I see my mother, a resilient woman who lived a very lonely life for the past thirty years.

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Think on Thee

I’m not sure how I came across his page. A mutual friend provided the path to our connection but why I decided to browse that mutual friend’s “friend list” I no longer recall nor is the reason relevant to the surge of emotion that would surface in the days following. I’ve been back now about four times; each time to check if he’s made any updates since January and each time to have a second, third, fourth read of his witty remarks. His diction radiated a special kind of confidence that could only belong to a man whose days were never marked by the struts and frets of a poor player on an empty stage. And because of this he always knew how to punctuate–never misplacing a period for an exclamation mark.

There must have been at least a couple of times when I was living in the Financial District that I took out stationery papers purchased from Papyrus to begin my letter to him. Every attempt was met with indecision until finally I gave up and moved on to more complicated problems. I never quite figured out how to say hello again. Hello just seemed like a thing of the past: outdated, trivial and silly once you’ve outgrown adolescence. Besides hello I had nothing else to report. I wasn’t getting married, wasn’t on my deathbed and I didn’t have a job that added any value to society.

I continued to think of him on occasions. Sometime fancying myself sending him a package with a copy of The New Yorker neatly wrapped inside and on page thirty-two is my first published short story. How would he react? What red marks would he adorn the pages this time?  Would he detect borrowed thoughts from Munro, Sedaris, or Lahiri? But even I know that that’s ridiculous. The only thing the New Yorker would accept from me is forty bucks a year for my subscription which includes a free gift to a friend. I suck at life and I suck more at creating my own fantasy.

“We crave connection” someone wrote on his wall. Took the words right out of my keyboard. I craved connection too. I wanted to extract from him the things he said to me years ago. Verbatim. As though our relationship never changed and as though his impression of me is still pristine. Ngoc Cong, the girl who slept in the library and ate books. Ate books. Yeah, he really did say that. Figuratively of course. I wanted inspiration from anecdotes and citations. I wanted to produce awe and be the recipient of it. But that kind of connection is not a facebook connection. It’s a connection that’s in a time capsule locked in my memory of him and of myself as we were then. It’s a connection that took three hundred and sixty-five days to build and many more years to re-examine. A facebook connection would at most give me fifteen lines, broken down by three-sentence paragraphs. This left me with a dying appetite as I clicked the home icon bringing me to my default search engine. What useless knowledge should I look up today?

 

Six Feet Below

Somewhere six feet below a plot of land rests a man I once knew.

Tu from Temple just passed away two days ago, the text message read. It was Thursday afternoon. While the sun was beating against the window to my back, I opened up this message from my brother. I almost never hear from him. On the few occasions when I do, I would get a call instead. Perhaps he knew it was inconvenient for me to speak or perhaps this wasn’t the sort of news he wanted to break over the phone so he resorted to an electronic transmission which although impersonal, was the safer form of communication. He was at the wake he informed me. Brother Anh, Brother Vu and Sister Lien said “hello”, his text message ended. I couldn’t help but wonder why my brother had suddenly reached out to me: was it to pass along this message or was it to inform me of Tu’s death? After all, I wasn’t particularly close to Tu. It felt strange that I should be a recipient of this news–almost like an invasion of privacy.  

Tu was six or seven years older, an age gap that was neither wide enough for me to treat him with deference belonging to adults nor narrow enough for me to have with him the intimacy shared by peers. Although we spent a vast amount of time together, I couldn’t say I knew him well. He was tall, handsome and had a precocious artistic talent for drawing–that much I knew. When my sister got married, she paid him fifty dollars to create a wedding sign that hung on our front door on her wedding day.

The rest of my day went by without further disturbance. The quietness produced a deep sense of sadness, one that belonged to a person who had just lost someone of immense significance. The absence of that relationship didn’t stop me from feeling the pervasive sadness every time I thought of him. Tu existed in my memory as a living, vivacious boy. He and I together with many of the Vietnamese kids in the Bronx shared the same childhood that could be dated back to a specific time and place. The temple on Andrews Street, erected in the eighties, was our second home and the bodies that filled that place every Sunday belonged to a group of people whom we called our family. The news of his sudden death was a like a small fracture in a cup that was beginning to threaten the foundation of its structure. The truth was I had blocked the accident out of my memory and the tragedy that befell on Tu years after my mother forced me to withdraw from Gia Dinh Phat Tu (GDPT), our Buddhist youth group. The scandal which eventually led to the eviction of the head monk filled my mother’s heart with skepticism. I was too young to understand the complications that the adults in my life brought to my world. My mother tried to justify her decision with condemnations against those who ran the Temple. She called it a conspiracy, corruption and greed. I ended up being collateral damage as my mother took away the one thing that I looked forward to most while I waited for the long dreadful week to come to an end. Tu’s death now brought back memories of a different childhood–one that was painted with a few dark colors.

The news that wasn’t meant for me left me wanting more. How did he die and how did he live? What day was two days ago? Wednesday, Tuesday, Tuesday–the same day that Lina posted a message mourning the death of her cousin, Steven Nguyen. I had forgotten his Americanized name just as I had forgotten his abdication of that name for a spiritual one. On Sundays I would catch a glimpse of him standing among the monks donned in a gray robe and bald head. He lived in a different world and why he left ours was always unclear to me. I had forgotten that he was caught in the fire that burned down the temple. I had forgotten how the fire spared him from death but showed him no mercy from life. From that day on, he lived through an oxygen tank sans legs. My brother brought the same news to me then. My reaction was one of disbelief followed by amnesia.

I logged on to facebook, the only connection other than my brother that I had to Tu. I perused through Lina’s message and friend list hoping to find something else, anything else that could tell me more about him. I left Lina a message and went home and cried that night. I cried every time I closed my eyes and pictured him. I pictured him and then pictured myself as him, as his mother and as his sister. My vicarious life pained me and made me wonder why I never reached out to him or why I never bothered to find out more from my brother. It was too late. He was gone. He was one of us for many Sundays through many years of song and dance, shared food and prayers, and a shared love for life, religion and culture. To be able to reconnect with him now meant a resuscitation of that part of my childhood.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Instantaneous. That was the word used to describe his death. Instantaneous. Interrupted. A thought unfinished. A life interrupted.

A couple of years ago when my friend’s (also neighbor at the time) father died from a stroke, I mourned for about a week. Each night when I’d come home from work my thoughts would stray next door and I’d cried. It wasn’t because his death confounded me; I mourned because I couldn’t understand how they, particularly his wife, could go on living. Her steps, breath, and movements were a mystery to me.  
I left the vigil around 7:30pm tonight. We had been there over seven hours and I must have cried that many times if not more. Our emotions fluctuated with hers. They mirrored hers to be more exact. It was hard not to cry when she cried. Her pain permeated deep into my skin until I found myself choking in her tears. How can you help a soul that wants to expire?

I thought about him, her husband. I’ve only met him once. Heard a lot of stories about him, about their lives together, but I couldn’t say I knew him well or at all. While she yelled out his name and professed that he was everything to her I thought about how much love she has for him. Her pain is mine magnified one thousand times yet here I am possibly without ever having a person to feel that infinite love for.

The Woman and the Girl

I walk around in a formless body. My sweater over-sized and my rubber boots two sizes too big. In the rain I walk with heavy steps. From behind you confuse me for a girl whose eight to three schedule consists of a lunch period. From up front you confirm your supposition. At thirty, I live in a sexless body; not yet a woman and not quite a girl.

When I could afford to buy my own clothes I discovered the use for cardigans. An extra layer on top of a blouse, a cotton shirt or a knit sweater was the solution to hiding my skinny, awkward self. The more mass I had, the closer I was to becoming a woman. I wore my cardigan almost everyday, careful not to expose my elbow or have naked the skin of my forearm. On days when I didn’t have a clean cardigan, I’d replace it with a sweater, the thicker the better. Angora was my preference for it added a little fluff. Illusion can compensate for genetics. That was how I dressed in my early twenties: my fashion dictated by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy.

And then I met D. The cardigan went away and the layers began to shed. For the first time in my life I felt beautiful. I felt sexy. I felt in me somewhere there was a woman, a gender, a prominent x chromosome and I was proud to wear myself naked. I lived in brand new skin, unabashed by my bony arm. When D and I were no longer together that woman was still there. She and I, the girl, existed as twins. One body, two selves.

The woman wore high heels, sunbathed in sheep meadows and drank in meat packing, forgetting her aspersion for loud music and obnoxious men who think she gave two cents about their profession. The girl skated in central park, swing danced in Lincoln Center, joined a skeeball league and talked about Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia. They lived together alternating their lifestyles, each with a desire to become the other person. But the girl went away. The woman met a man and the girl went away.

Sometimes I looked for her in my paintings but she wasn’t there. My strokes too deliberate and my colors too contrived. The “General’s Dormant Profile”¹ was not the same as “Praying Mantis”² or the “The Fall of Icarus.”³ Her spirit was from a different era.

After I came back from China, I enrolled in a #wing-chun school. Although the decision was prompted by my obsession with martial arts, wing chun became a test of my endurance and self-will. On my first day of class I found myself face to face with the girl. She was there in her awkward tiny body with bony arms staring at me the same way I at her. My heart palpitated with embarrassment and anxiety. My clothes too loose and shapeless and my movement clumsy and fragile. For a moment I was sorry she came back.

For more than three weeks now I take the F train to 63rd and Lexington almost everyday after six. The girl rides with me. She reminds me of my love for adventure and spontaneity. She reminds me that I can do this. In my rubber boots my steps are heavy but deliberate. I quicken the pace when I worry there may not be time. Time to change and time to examine myself before I let others examine me. In the locker room I put on my uniform, clothes that were meant for kids. The labels read “XXS” to remind me that my body is still in a time-warp. My classmates imagine me young. When I tell them I’m thirty, their faces contort with disbelief. In the mirror I perform my drill, committing every move to memory but my muscles won’t allow it. My tan sau⁴ bends at an awkward angle, not quite one thirty-five. My fingers shake when I pull back my wu sau⁵. Si hing⁶ tells me to think of it as the buddha palm. I haven’t been to a temple in a long time. I haven’t thought about my religion except when I hear tet⁷ music. I try to think of it as the buddha palm, lifting my wrist to extend my fingers. I should feel a pinch he says. I move my palm back, elbow bent, and this time a little steadier. My body is foreign to me. I only recognize it as someone from my past. The woman that I have been for the last few years is now the girl. In front of si hing, I feel like a child.

1. “The General’s Dormant Profile”  

2. “Praying Mantis” 

3. “The Fall of Icarus” 

4. Tan sau. A wing chun technique also known as palm-up arm.

5. Wau sau. Guard hand

6. Si hing. Older Kung fu brother

7. Tet. Vietnamese word for Lunar New Year.

In five minutes

In five minutes I will move on from this malaise.

The Wall

After a year of sharing a five hundred square feet space with another human being–and no walls to block the other person off when one of us has temporarily gone insane, it is a miracle I haven’t lost my mind. The closest thing that we have to a wall is a Japanese paper screen that stands about six feet tall, just barely enough to cover my co-habitant’s head. The wall conveniently goes up when peaceful coexistence is threatened. But in an all out war, a door is needed. We have only one such door. The acting out door. The door that communicates profanity as it slams against the wall, doing your dirty bidding for you. That door is our bathroom door. However, there are only a handful of occasions when you can slam a bathroom door during a fight and not look odd while doing it. Unless your quarrel by happenstance took place right before a bowel emergency, slamming the bathroom door is like shooting your rifle straight up; it does no damage and is a waste of your ammunition. The only other viable option is the apartment door if ever we decide we want the doorman to know that there is a freak show happening in 1F.  “Can you hear me? I just heard a loud thump down by 1F. Quick! Send in the neighbors. Copy.” That’s not something I ever want to hear on a walkie talkie no matter how badly I want to strangle my partner. So the apartment door is left unharmed, its hinges still intact. The Japanese wall is folded away when a treaty is signed. But like most treaties, ours is bound to be dishonored.

Cohabitation isn’t new to me. I was seasoned for the job some years ago. After four years, I quit without notice. If you ask me, somethings are better off experiencing later in life. Take opera for example: bring your sixteen year old kid to the Metropolitan and five minutes into the first aria you will find him hovered in his hoodie, hoping no one will recognize him. Thirty minutes later he will be out cold. I don’t care if Renee Fleming is on that stage, the opera isn’t meant for the young. But at thirty you’ve listened to enough crap that Carmen will be a breath of fresh air. Young people aren’t always ready for cohabitation the same way they’re not ready to appreciate good music. When you are twenty you believe that red roses and a mixed cd signify love. Holidays actually mean something so you convince yourself to spend the money you don’t have. You’ve been in as many relationships as the number of thumbs you have. We’re not counting the time you were in the third grade and Raymond asked you to be his girlfriend. You said yes because everybody else was doing it and the whole thing lasted five days, none of which he ever picked up the phone to call you. After two months into your relationship, you think you’ve fallen in love and after one year, you feel you’re ready to move in. When you’ve graduated and have the financial freedom to travel and meet new people in new places, when you find your circle of acquaintances is evermore expanding, you begin to question the growth of your personal relationship. When you realize that you are not the same people you were when you first met, you begin to wonder whether marriage would fix it or if you should take the braver and harder course of action and break it off. You will come up with excuses because you are scared and comfortable but in the end, if you are true to yourself, you will do the right thing. It will be the hardest decision you’ve had to make and you didn’t do it without learning along the way that the music you’ve been listening to is full of crap. You grow and you learn to filter out the crap from your life.

I’m not arguing that everyone in their twenties is not suited to have a live-in relationship. Some people are better equipped than others. Some people grow together. Others don’t but this all comes with life experience, something that a twenty year old will have very little to claim in his resume.

I lived a free life before I met my boyfriend. By free I mean irresponsible. I used to come home to stuff animals with whom at times I had a more human relationship than I did with real people. I had roommates and they were mostly boys. I like living with boys. They don’t give a shit. I like people who don’t give a shit especially when it is about me. My room always looked like it never recovered from Katrina. That never bothered me nor any of the boys I dated. I never had to worry about what’s on the dinner menu. A hot dog topped with sriracha sauce is what I considered a meal. When the last pack of ramen noodles disappeared, there was always delivery. I ate anything and sometimes nothing at all. My mother wasn’t around to feed me or rip my ears off about my bad eating habits. I didn’t need to stop whatever that I was working on to sit down to a meal. I came and went as I wished, sometimes sleeping over at another boy’s apartment and sometimes coming home past three in the morning, the hour which my mother used to say only vampires would traverse the streets. To assert my freedom, I became a nocturnal creature. Gone were those days when I was under my mother’s care and tyranny. It felt good to be free.

I gave up that freedom to become my mother when I moved in with my boyfriend. The undercurrent of change took me by surprise. I started to repeat the same things my mother used to say to me–“why don’t you take out the garbage,” “eat your food, it’s getting cold”–so much that it made me sick of hearing my own voice. I found myself thinking about what to make for dinner in the middle of the day and worrying about whether we have enough milk in the fridge. After a long day of work, I’d come home to more work. There was always socks on the coffee table or hidden behind the couch cushion. The sink was always full and stained with tomato sauce and the loads of laundry were endless. A cleaner comes once a month but unless we wanted to live like rats, somebody had to lift a finger. My mother took care of four children, a feat I could never see myself doing, while I had only myself and Ross to look after. I could no longer come home to a pile of dirty clothes and eat left overs that had been in the fridge for over two days. The change was arduous. It drove me mad until nightfall, when I could hear someone else’s heart beating other than my own.

Living with my boyfriend has brought me one step closer to insanity while reassuring me that there is no other person I’d rather grow insane with. The contrast between us is just enough so that others do not confuse me for him or him for me. “This must be Ross’s book, The Selfish Gene, and this New Yorker subscription no doubt belongs to Ngoc” is the kind of observation one can make about Ross and me.  I have a strong disdain for people who lose a sense of who they are once they’re in a relationship. It is very much like the girlfriend you once knew. She stops coming to the salsa class you both took and then one day you run into her sitting with her boyfriend and a bunch of his guy friends in a bar with a basketball game playing in the background. You find out later that she invited herself. She doesn’t even like basketball. I’m too much of a narcissist, a breed common among social media users, to fall into that trap. I’d rather spend hours in front of my camera doing a music video of myself or painting my own portrait than go to a sporting event which I don’t enjoy just so I can keep an eye on my boyfriend. I microblog because it is an act of self aggrandizement; I never write about anything that’s useful to anybody. If anything, being in a relationship gave me excuses to turn down invitations to parties and social outings that make me uncomfortable. That was something I could never do as a single woman. “What do you mean you’re busy tonight?” is an assertion I always hear when I try to excuse myself from attending another mindless party. I can’t make an argument against “you have nothing better to do” because the truth was, I really had nothing else going for me except the desire to be anti-social but that was never an acceptable answer to anyone. When the boyfriend came in the picture, I blamed everything on him: “Ross wants to see a movie tonight” or “Ross isn’t feeling well, I should stay in to take his temperature.” To my friends, Ross was a needy person but that was enough to keep them at bay and allow me to be introverted, guilt-free. Nevertheless, when you are living with someone you’re bound to be influenced by one another to some degree. When that person’s ethnic background is different from yours, cultural diffusion is inevitable. My boyfriend greets my mother in Vietnamese and the name Wong Kar Wai actually means something to him and I eat more pasta now than I ever did before and Star Wars references don’t always go undetected by me. The result is I become less of a FOB and he more of a comedian who can now with impunity add Asians to his repertoire of politically incorrect observations.

The five hundred square feet shared space may be a madhouse but the experience of living in it is unique and challenging. It is the kind of experience you take when you have outgrown your youth’s desire to be stupid. When you have developed the temperament and are ready to deal with real life problems, you invest your time in building something with someone else. The result is unknown but some risks are worth taking.

The Soldier without a Name

Vietnam. The word feels like a distant relative, someone with whom you have no strong connections, yet when you finally meet him, you are obliged to inquire into his past. Sometime later you find out that his history is a part of your history, whether large or small. The older I become, the more Vietnam seems to me like a picture that is out of focus. It is as if the person who took the photo decided to change the angle just before the flash went off–what is left is a narrative of mixed feelings and mixed interpretation.

When I was younger, I could picture Vietnam as if I had lived there and saw it with my own eyes. My memory grew up even before I did and in it sometime I saw myself, a young girl, with my back touching the back of a water buffalo as we spread ourselves across the eastern sky. Like in the pictures of the calendars we would buy in Chinatown right before Tet, the water buffalo and I, the child, were always happy.

My imagination educated me about my past. I could summarize my family’s history in verses sung by Huong Lan and Duy Quang. Their voices would reverberate against our walls, long after my siblings left for school. It was only after I grew older, into my adulthood, did my vision of Vietnam become a nebulous recollection of Pham Duy’s songs and cheap Chinatown trinkets. The Vietnam I knew so well now fades into obscurity, leaving me ever more uncertain of the place from where I came.

Memories are the things which history is built upon. Imperfect as they may be, they teach us how to feel. Without them, we exist only in a vacuum of the present. I left Vietnam at the age of two–too young to take any with me.

I met Ana a week after New Year’s. At a party where I felt out of place, she sought out my company as though I were a peer despite the twenty-seven year gap between us. Our connection was brought about by a common denominator–Vietnam. Ana’s brother died in 1954 in what might have been the battle of Dien Bien Phu. He was among the Germans who enlisted in the French army through the French Foreign Legion. After he was sent to Vietnam, his family never saw him again. He left no footprint behind except for a photo in which he was dressed in a uniform standing next to a Vietnamese woman. I could not tell from the picture what the woman’s relation to Ana’s brother was. Ana told me of her desire to search for her brother’s grave. I kept my opinion to myself, the same way I did years ago when my sister, unannounced, began looking for her father.

When my sister finally spoke of her secret plan to find her father, she was met with apathy. My mother laughed it off, dismissing my sister’s feat as a case of temporary insanity. But I had caught my sister talking to our neighbor’s husband, a white man who served in Vietnam. Although I didn’t take my sister seriously, I could not help but feel deeply disturbed. I never understood why she needed to find a man who was never a part of our lives. She had a family, she had us. And what on earth would we want with a white man in our home, I thought. What would we feed him? And how was he going to communicate with our mother? Surely, the oddity of the situation outweighed any benefit my sister could have gained. “And how would you find him?” I remember asking, feigning interest just enough to get more information. “The government has a database with all the records of everyone who fought in Vietnam. I just need to find a Vietnam Veteran who has permission to look at it. Aunt Thoa’s husband said he would ask his friends.” I was convinced that it was a bad idea and I wondered why my mother did not simply put it to an end. She could have rebuked my sister and if that didn’t work she could have used force which was often her preference for disciplanary action when we could not sit still, forgot to do our homework, or failed to use chopsticks at dinner. I was certain my sister’s crime far exceeded the misdemeanors my brothers and I committed. What could be worse than having a white man invade a Vietnamese home? But my mother never rebuked my sister or exerted force to crush her foolish attempts to bring back the soldier whose name my mother had long forgotten. I was forced to wait until one day when my sister stopped talking about him.

While the War divided my country, it brought my family to America. My sister’s father, without knowing, gave my mother the greatest gift of her life, my sister, the passport to America for my mother and her children. It is to him and to America that my mother owes her allegiance. She taught us to love this country, to embrace our new world when we came here in the Winter of 1983. Perhaps I too owe my sister’s father a little something. Vietnam was the place of my birth, the roots of my genetic make-up, but it is America that has given me the opportunity to become the person I am today, for better or for worse. My background is as messy as the Vietnam war. To some degree, you can say, it is messy because of the War. The war removed my mother from her home, separated her from her family while it robbed her children of their identities.  As a result I grew up uncertain of who I am; I breathed America but lived in the skin of a Vietnamese woman. I never saw myself fitting in, anywhere really. And furthermore, I have yet to embrace the label of being an American, because that I am not. It took me a good twenty years to truly accept that I am Vietnamese, perhaps not without a few mutations, but at heart a Vietnamese.

Vietnam. The Pacific Ocean separates it from me. It is the place of my birth yet to it, I am a Foreigner. I was born after the war, after the Americans had left and my mother reunited with her daughter, my half-American, half-Vietnamese sister. My birth was a quiet one, characterized by the unimportance of it, except that it followed the death of my father. My father passed away before I was born and my mother was left a single parent, for the third time of her life. Her marriage to him, like my birth, was equally unimportant. It was part of an arranged marriage that was not preceeded with tales of romance. After my father’s death, my mother struggled to support the four of us: my two brothers, my sister and I. In 1983, my mother’s application for political asylum was finally accepted. However, because I fell ill to what might have been smallpox, my family was forced to stay in the country longer than expected. I was quarantined in a hospital for many months while my mother paid daily visits to bathe and apply ointment on me. When I recovered we left Vietnam for the Philippines where we stayed in a refugee camp for two months. My mother reported that we had curry chicken daily. To this day, she refuses to eat curry because of it. At the end of the two months, my family was brought to America. I do not remember much of my life in Vietnam after that.