The Best We Could Do

Maybe being their child simply means that I will always feel the weight of their past.

Proximity and closeness are not the same.

How much of ME is my own and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?

To understand how my father became the way he was, I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy. It took a long time to learn the right questions to ask.

Má leaves me but I'm not alone, and a terrifying thought creeps into my head. Family is now something I have created and not just something I was born into.

This - not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture - is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to run when the shit hits the fan. My refugee reflex.

Every casualty in war is someone's grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover.

Have our parents ever looked at us and felt slightly… disappointed? Such high hopes, so much possibility, to fall short. And though my parents took us far away from the site of their grief… certain shadows stretched far, casting a gray stillness over our childhood… hinting at a darkness we did not understand but could always FEEL.

I remember being excited about seeing snow for the very first time.

In the dark apartment in San Diego, I grew up with the terrified boy who became my father.

How did we get to such a lonely place? We live so close to each other and yet feel so far apart. I keep looking toward the past…tracing our journey in reverse…over the ocean through the war, seeking an origin story that will set everything right.

But maybe being their child simply means that I will always feel the weight of their past. Nothing that happened makes me special. But my life is a gift that is too great - a debt I can never repay.

That first week of parenting was the hardest week of my life, and the only time I ever felt called upon to be HEROIC.

Though my world was small, I would sometimes dream of being free in it.

I imagined the lanes of car lights as two rivers - one going to heaven... ours to hell.

We live so close to each other and yet feel so far apart.

If I bridged the gap between past and the present... I could fill the void between my parents in me. And that if I could see Viet Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost... I would see my parents as real people... and learn to love them better.

I recognize what it is NOT, and now I understand - proximity and closeness are not the same

If I surrender I'm afraid I'll want a full retreat- to go all the way back. To be the baby and not the mother.

(...) but now at forty, I know that our time on earth is finite. What becomes of us after we die? Do we live on in what we leave to our children? How much of me is my own, and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined? I used to imagine that history had infused my parents' lives with the dust of a cataclysmic explosion. That it had seeped through their skin and become part of their blood. That being my father's child, I, too, was a product of war...and being my mother's child, could never measure up to her. But maybe being their child simply means that I will always feel the weight of their pasts.

Alone with my son and feeling COMPETENT about it for the first time, I relaxed and started to speak to him. ‘Child, it’s Mother.’ I could hear echoes of my mother’s voice speaking to me in my own childhood…but I could feel the voice coming from my own throat. As a child, I thought my mother’s voice was beautiful. She hated it, but I loved its raspiness. ‘We are about to go home.’ ‘We ARE going home.’ When my mother spoke to me, she spoke softly, the tones of Vietnamese giving it music- not high and reedy, but scratchy and bluesy. I always wished I had her voice.