If a quiet library with towering walls of books and hushed patrons and my own leather armchair is my vision of eternal bliss, this refrigerator is, if not Hell, then a purgatory with tiled floors, brightly lit hallways, bland meals under plastic covers, incapacitated patients, the constant bustle of nurses, therapists, visitors, the buzz of televisions.
I have never seen anyone
reading a book in
this purgatory.
Most of the staff, clad in nursing scrubs or polo shirts and chinos, are Filipinas. American colonization in the Philippines created this route for nurses to come to the United States, while draining the Philippines of its own medical professionals and depriving the children left behind of their mothers, exported to take care of others around the world.
Where is the televised dramatic comedy about these
women? Call it “Filipinas.” Or “Feelings.” All those
Filipina actors and dancers who worked in
“Miss Saigon” are waiting.
As I numbly watch the patients, they lie numbly in their beds or sit numbly in wheelchairs in the hallways. Old and ill, or old and dying. Occasionally, someone screams. I do not want to end up here.
My mother stays for days, or weeks, or months. I can’t remember.
What I do re member is that this time is different from the other times.
While driving my brother and father away from one visit with Má, I realize that Má will not get better. As they discuss Má’s condition, I understand that Má will never descend from her surreality to our reality, except for occasional, brief visits. I am ambushed by myself, sobs and tears rupturing the wall that separates you and me, me and myself. It has been fourteen years since I was so waylaid by myself, when Má was in the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward the first time.
Neither my father nor brother says a word as I grip the wheel and struggle to see through tears.
I recover. I get hold of myself. I put you back where you belong.
My father and brother resume their conversation. I
resume driving.
We never speak of this moment.
After the nursing facility releases Má, Ba brings her body home. But not her mind. Not fully. Her thoughts travel most of the time through a different, parallel universe. Still, she sometimes returns to our reality, enough to notice how Ba, beginning at age seventy-two, when he should be circumnavigating the world via Boeing, remains earthbound. Homebound. He cares for Má without complaint for the next ten years, ignoring entreaties from my brother and me to hire the help that he can easily afford.
As a child, I watched Ba cook dinner, shop for groceries, vacuum the house. The typical Vietnamese man is allergic to these chores. This routine of mundane deeds, I understand later, is love.
In 2012, the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke,
whose work I admire, makes “Amour,” about a
loving husband and wife in their eighties.
A stroke disables the wife, leaving her
helpless and in her husband’s care. Out of
deep love, he suffocates her, and he is
then alone, perhaps even dead,
in their Parisian apartment.
Haneke. Always a crowd-pleaser.
Not the right director to make
a movie about Ba Má.
Their amour is about endurance. Both know how to suffer and sacrifice, without the reward of recognition from anyone but their sons, without the drama of a murder-suicide or a crucifixion.
Má’s many medications, arrayed in a repurposed cookie tin, prevent such theatrics. The meds calm her. Reduce the chance of self-harm. Keep her from breaking fully free from our reality. So tightly is she leashed in orbit that Má is very quiet, moves slowly, does little. But she recognizes me and Ellison, my son, and her other grandchildren, even if the glow of recognition quickly fades.
Unlike Haneke’s two-hour, seven-minute movie,
this quiet play, as slow and puzzling as
“Happy Days” by Samuel Beckett,
goes on for a decade.
Beckett also wrote, in “The Unnamable,”
You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
How appropriate for refugees, of whom
Beckett was one. As for Ba Má,
they have only ever gone on
and on and on.
Má will not count as one of war’s casualties, but what do you call someone who loses her country, much of her wealth, her family, her parents, her (adopted) daughter, and her peace of mind because of the war?
So many of war’s casualties are never counted. Never commemorated, never named on walls, never written about in novels and plays, never featured in movies. The refugees, the suicides, the disabled, the unsheltered, the traumatized, the ones who have departed this reality. The ones never known.
Vietnamese people, how do you separate what is unique to you from the trauma of war, colonization, the division and reunification of the country?
from becoming a refugee or staying behind?
from being the child of refugees, soldiers, survivors?
from being the child of those who didn’t survive?
from being Vietnamese?
How do you separate yourself and your memories from History?
How do you separate your presence from so many absences?
Questions I can only
ask, never answer.
•
In 2015, after a decade of taking care of Má by himself, my then eighty-two-year-old father surrenders. Ba moves Má to the kind of benevolent nursing home seen in movies or soap operas, hushed and carpeted, a piano in the common room that my father plays for my mother when he visits. He taught himself to play the piano as an adult and the mandolin in his old age.
Sometimes I wonder what he could have become if he had
the education my son has, with his private piano teacher.
But then he would not be the father he became, and
I would not be the person I am.
My mother stays in the nursing home’s memory-care unit, again staffed almost wholly by Filipinas, where residents eat together in a sunlit dining room with silverware, plates, table service, and bland food with very little salt. She is as still as water in a plugged sink. Her pills don’t always work. One day I learn that she has broken her arm by jumping on and then falling off her bed, or so the staff says. A doctor, whom I never see, adjusts her meds. Her arm, permanently injured, huddles against her body or floats by her side, useless.
I cannot now re member if it is her left or right arm.
In 2018, Má’s condition worsens. She needs X-rays, MRIs. The memory-care unit can no longer attend to her. She returns to the nursing facility, the setting for a horror movie more frightening than anything Hollywood can dream up. A Hollywood drama is finished in a couple of hours, but finishing off a human being can take much longer than that. In Má’s case, thirteen years of slow erosion, a death inflicted cell by cell on her body and mind.
Ba calls for a priest. A middle-aged one with graying hair soon arrives in his black uniform with its white collar. He stands over Má’s bed to bestow last rites, delivers the words in Vietnamese. I don’t understand the words. Má doesn’t open her eyes.
The rites are done in a few seconds, the priest present for a few minutes. I expect solemnity from the Vietnamese holy man, a pat on the shoulder for Ba, but the man offers no words of care, not even pretending to share in the sorrow of my father. The priest could have been washing dishes for all the feeling he exhibits as he makes the sign of the cross.
Father. Son. Holy Ghost.
Ba. Me. And this—
memory, history, memorial—
this spectral thing I was already thinking of as
Má lay dying, my art the closest I come to the
spiritual. Or the ghoulish. I looked at Má then,
as I had many times earlier, and thought:
How will I write about this?
About her? And
her ghost?
I expect more from this Vietnamese priest. But I say nothing. Ba is thankful, shakes the priest’s hand, bows a little. If my father is grateful, who am I, the ingrate, to say anything. Perhaps when I am aged and shaky and vulnerable like Ba, I, too, will be grateful.
We bring Má back to her suburban house. The vast, verdant lawn is now an expanse of dirt, Ba too tired and distracted to maintain it. I sleep in an upstairs bedroom, the same one I slept in the last two years of high school. It’s December. The house is cool, especially the downstairs bedroom where Má sleeps. We wheel her rented hospital bed into the family room, with its television that has barely been watched since Má fell ill and the stereo system no one listened to even when Má was well. Background music is not a part of family life. The house is usually as silent as an empty church. There is no soundtrack as I watch December 22nd turn to December 23rd while Má takes her last breaths, thirteen years almost to the day from her final breakdown. Ba, my brother, my sister-in-law, and I are the only witnesses.
Má was born in 1937 as Nguyễn Thị Bãy, a poor girl in a poor northern Vietnamese village. She dies in 2018 as Linda Kim Nguyen, American citizen, traveller of a life both ordinary and epic.
At seventeen, she married and became a refugee for the first time.
At seventeen, I almost did not
graduate from high school
because I nearly failed
precalculus.
At thirty-eight, a mother of two biological sons and one adopted daughter, Má became a refugee for the second time, her sequel starting in an alien country.
At thirty-eight, I, with
no children, struggled
with writing a short
story about Má.
Má’s first name is Bãy. Giving children numbers as names was common in rural Việt Nam. Families often had so many children. Some would not survive. Why give a girl a real name?
As a girl, the seventh child, she deserved no more.
Má hated this birth name. In her last decades, she wanted to be called by her American name, Linda. But both her names feel alien on my tongue. I never called her by her name, only Mẹ as a child, Má as an adult. Her refugee path shaped even what I called her. Northerners say Mẹ, southerners say Má, and I, as always, am somewhere in between.
Most Americans who met Má probably saw only her mortal, unextraordinary coil. If they knew anything about her, they might know she had been a shopkeeper, businesswoman, refugee. If they knew nothing about her, she was another Asian woman who did not speak good English. Mẹ, or Má, never wanted to mention that she had received only a grade-school education. I am telling on her, and yet she should be told on, even if it is not my secret to tell. Look at what Má accomplished with just a grade-school education, overcoming everything—almost everything—except her mind.
Defeated, like so many
heroes, not by others
but by herself.
A hero but not a soldier. People like Má who will not be remembered by History are also a part of History, drafted as reluctant players in horrific wars. And the wars of the twentieth century—including the ones in Việt Nam—killed at least as many civilians as soldiers.
Civilian stories can be war stories, too.
Perhaps what happened to my mother was simply her body and mind’s fate. But History and war took their turns hammering Má. Unnerving her. Breaking her.
My mother, child
of colonization
and war.
Me, grandchild
of colonization
and war.
Also the child of Ba Má, who chose each other. For all that Má was lost to us for so many years, my father’s love was not lost to her. She saw this reality from the orbit of her surreality. I know because the last words Má says on her hospital bed in the family room before she says the Lord’s Prayer with my father are for my father, to my father:
Em yêu anh.
This I will translate, even if the
translation is not enough:
I love you.
After the Lord’s Prayer, silence.
My brother the doctor gives Má morphine
while my sister-in-law the doctor watches.
Má’s eyes are long closed. Her breathing
slows.
I lean close to tell Má in Vietnamese that I love her.
She lived a good life. A life of hard work and
sacrifice. A heroic life. A life that
demanded so much strength,
devotion, and love.
I don’t know where Má
found those qualities. But I am
the beneficiary. These words, this faith
in her, this betrayal of her, are the outcome.
Má’s eyes do not open. She gives no sign of hearing.
Her breathing finally stops. It is midnight.
Her journey on this earth, complete.
My mother is mine and my
mother is also Other to me.
My brother makes a phone call. In an hour,
a courteous stranger who might be Filipino arrives
with a gurney, fills out a form, takes away my mother,
leaves the empty hospital bed in the family room,
and drives my mother into the night.
I remember Má loved me.
Everything else
I can forget. ♦
This is drawn from “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial.”