Ocean Vuong, who is probably every young Vietnamese American's favorite poet right now, once wrote:
"Every word I write here is a word farther from you, Ma."
At least, that's what I think he wrote. I had trouble finding the real thing in my hazy 1:11 AM self.
Me. Ba.
It's true.
For every new English word I learn, another Vietnamese word grows hazier or, is lost. Fizzing out. Connections between firing neurons to make the word, a word, snapped.
And that scares the shit out of me.
I dread the day that I learn another English word. Which is every day.
All the history in your heads, is written in the neurons of your minds. Telling my mind. What it knows. What it thinks it knows.
Memory is selective and self-serving all too many times. I bet your stories are too. Stories often are, but...
I'm trying to put together what it is I'm losing exactly.
Why does it feel like I'm losing? A lot of little somethings? Trillions of possibilities: many of them I see share the same ending.
My great great grandkids won't even know.
Any bit as much as I know.
Or anything at all of what you both know.
Me. Ba.
What will become of all that we know? What's going to happen to the history we fought so hard to protect? What history is left to spell out? My kids and their kids and their kids are going to never, not as much, not as much as we do. And I even can't. I can't even articulate what happened of our ancestors either.
I'm so so so sad. I know it's inevitable but god.
What a hefty goal it is, to desire rememberance.
And with every new English word I use,
like
"rememberance,"
I'm losing it.
It feels like a ticking time bomb that when it explodes, shatters all the time, all the memories, the glass reflecting myself back.
I taught my mother how to play a bit of "For the love of a princess" from Braveheart on the piano tonight.
It's a song I've been playing for years and the one she always requests I play at the end of almost every day.
"Play that song I like, Ngoc."
And it's always "for the love of a princess."
She tells me it makes her feel nostalgic, wistful, and that all the beauty that ever existed, she's seen before, she sees through this song.
This song gives her the words to tell me that it makes her feel like she's deeply connected with all the mountains she grew up with. The rivers and the birds and maybe that boy from her past and the yams and all the things that stabbed her bare feet. And me. I'm pulling her heart strings over here haha, and I'm leaving to study abroad soon. In less than a week. My papers aren't even together yet, YIKES, but
I'm leaving super soon.
I wanted to leave her with the memory of how to play this song by herself.
So if she misses all the memories of her youth, or of me, that she can access those feelings through music any time at all.
Teaching her to memorize it was for naught. She doesn't know how to read music or play any instrument outside of the drums.
It was her idea and a brilliant one too; I taped numbers on the piano keys so she'll know which ones to play in order.
She soon picked it up and eventually, just a tap away from accessing it.
All it took was being a willing and supportive teacher and she was smilinggg. And she wanted to stay longer and longer to continue practicing the 13 or 14 notes she now learned.
I would have stayed there for as long as she wanted.
I wanted to give her something new, like all the things she's given me.
There's a lot of words I don't know in Vietnamese.
There's a lot of notes my mom doesn't know how to play.
There's a lot of good memories that slipped my dad's mind.
And part of preserving memory is making memory.
I don't think I'll ever forget the way my mom and I danced to Michael Buble's "Sway" tonight or the way we hopped like mad to Careless Whisper even if it was a saaaad song.
I may not have all the important memories of my ancestors in me, but I do know that I'm a ready student.
Perhaps I'll never truly know enough. Or ask enough or the right questions. But I want to. I want to know enough to at least be a willing and supportive teacher to my kids. Know enough to pique and keep their interest so that they have the initiative to search for answers on their own, should I no longer be alive.
Just as my parents instilled in me.
Haha, I don't have kids yet, but say 10 years from now, when they exist--
I want them to feel as proud, as I do, about the Nguyen Khoa family line. About the Huynhs and their great-grand father who died plowing the infertile dirt, hopeful for food -- the ultimate act of love. About their grandma's resilience and courage and kindness, how she forgives even the most unkind of people. How she prefers Popeyes to Canes, and how their mom and aunt would quickly agree to disagree. About their grandpa who's always retelling the same stories because he wants to keep the conversation going. How he once fought and lost a war. How he drove their mom and aunt to mostly anywhere they wanted, as long as they were with their girlfriends. And their great grandma who would cook anything they wanted, perhaps the same egg and rice dish that their mom loved eating after school in her elementary school years.
I'm tearing up.
I really am. I can't believe that there's going to be a day when I'm going to be a mother. And though these darn kids don't exist yet, I love them already. I want so much for them. I want for them all the things I had and more. I want them to know about the history I lived with, was surrounded with, was choked with.
I can hardly believe that as I write this, that I'm going on to do some amazing things. I'm super proud and scared for myself. Study abroad in Singapore (AND IM ROOMING WITH ONE OF MY BEST FRIENDS AHHH). Internship with the State Department in the bureau I've always wanted. And.. finishing my last year at Smith. And hopefully, back to Houston.
Back to home. To the mall. To the dress shopping and the book shopping and my favorite underground curry place.
Having kids is going to be amazing, I'm just not ready for the sharing. Would I ever tell the stories well enough? Would I have enough words, no, the right words? To relay it. Would I inspire the same curiosity my parents inspired in me?
To look up at the moon and say, "I want to stay out here, stay and stare and wonder about all these things I don't know about. So let's make a wish."
I do know they're probably going to be super cute, if they look anything like me when I was a toddler. Pft.
There's a lot to remember but I'll do well to remember it all too well.
At least for myself.
"Why doesn't grandma eat meat when there's a full moon out?" my grandkids would whisper.
"Something about her dad doing the same. Buddhist stuff," the eldest grandkid would reply.
"hehe, Bootyism," the other grandkid would snicker. That one's definitely mine.
(I'll make them Taylor Swift fans too.)
Your girl,
Ngoc
P.S. This episode was chaOTIC. It started on a fearful note of wth is going to happen to all these things that I know about my family and the history I was taught to value. All this history would just be less and less as future generations exist. AHH.
I just want my grandparents and parents to live on. If not physically, that they live on in memory. And at some point, I won't have any control over that. We were in no one's memory when we were first born, and then after, we were. Then we die, and...yeah, hah..
okie.
