She got home that afternoon to find her mother crying.
Okay, a new level of expressing emotion could be good, right? Or had she unwittingly set in motion a flying-out-of-control/mother-misery-increasing-forever thing?
“Mama, hi. Are you—can I get you anything?”
“No.” Her mother plucked a rumpled tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan and blew her nose. “Maybe some water.”
Vân Ước poured two glasses of cold water from the jug in the fridge and gave one to her mother.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“Ha! It’s all the talking that makes me cry. But they say it’s ‘normal,’” her mother said. “It’s ‘okay’ to cry.”
“Of course it’s okay.”
Her mother looked at her. “Listen to you—you are like a mother to me. Again.” But her mother didn’t sound happy about it; she looked fed up, actually.
Well, Vân Ước was fed up, too.
She’d always been comforted by how many words there were in the English language—more than a million. With so many words surely anything could be said, everything could be understood.
But what did the volume of words matter in any language when she couldn’t even manage to ask the simplest questions? Will you tell me your story? Will you let me into my own family? Isn’t it my story, too?
Enough!
She went into her parents’ room and slipped the photo of the two small girls from under the paper lining in her mother’s drawer. She brought it out and sat down with her mother. “I know I shouldn’t have looked.”
Her mother took the photo, sighed, and sipped the water. “It’s me and Hoa Nhung.”
“Please talk to me.”
“I will start with a wish. When the boat landed…” Her mother nodded and paused, as though changing her mind.
Vân Ước held her breath. Even though her mother was skipping the whole chapter about what happened before they left Vietnam, and everything that might have happened during the journey itself, she was offering a fragment of her story. When the boat landed… Vân Ước was hungry, even for a morsel, just a crumb of story. She let maybe a minute pass. She could hear someone bumping around at Jess’s. It would be Jess starting to get things ready for dinner.
“When the boat landed?” she prompted softly.
“It was a beach in Malaysia. We were taken by truck to the refugee camp.”
“Who took you?”
“The army. Army officers. They gave us some food and water—just what they had with them.”
“And the wish?”
“We spent a lot of time on the beach. It was so hot. But still, I walked up and down along the water’s edge. And I was wishing. Wishing just one thing. Wishing that my arms could turn into wings—wide, strong wings with long, white feathers.” Her mother’s eyes were filling with tears again. Vân Ước patted her hand. Her mother wiped her eyes, smiling. “I never stopped wishing, but they didn’t change into wings.”
“Where did you want to go?”
“All I wanted was to fly across the sea, back to Vietnam, and be in my mother’s arms again. I missed her so much. I couldn’t bear to be parted from her.”
“But you had to leave?”
“She wanted us to go. We knew it was our only hope for a life.”
Vân Ước was scared to breathe, worried that she might break the talking spell. “I would miss you like that, Mama, if I had to leave.”
Her mother gave her a tired smile. “No, con, not like that. My mother and I spoke the same language. You and I—our language is different.”
Vân Ước felt guilty (again) that she’d dropped Vietnamese classes. But there wasn’t time. It didn’t have a role in her academic schedule, and that had to take priority. It was true her English was much better than her parents’, and their Vietnamese was much better than hers, so they ended up communicating in the in-between zone of basic Vietnamese with a smattering of even more basic English, like three primary-school-aged children.
“I could go back and study more,” she offered.
“It’s not just language. It’s… the whole culture.”
Vân Ước knew the truth of that. How could she deny it, having felt the thousand injustices of her parents not understanding the life they had chosen for her?
“For my mother I had only respect and obedience. For her mother she had only respect and obedience…”
“I respect you, Ma.”
“In the way that you can.” Her mother nodded. “You’re a good girl. But it is not the same. That chain has been broken. You have independence. Ba and I want that for you. But everything here is different. And that’s still hard for me.”
“But not bad?”
“No, not bad! You will have a good life. But the old life is gone forever.”
Vân Ước felt the stab of a sad truth: she and her mother would never be as close as her mother and grandmother had been.
Her mother got up, stretched her tidy, graceful frame, and headed for the kitchen. Vân Ước wanted to be able to offer her some comfort, but what could she say? Her mother was right. The two of them represented an irreconcilable cultural split. Distance between them was inevitable.
“Thanks for talking to me,” she said.
“Talking, huh! That’s enough for now.” Her mother pushed her hair back dismissively and straightened her cardigan. “Như Mai is always saying to the group, Talk about your feelings, talk about your memories. And now I am sad again. Because of all the talking! Off you go now. Time for homework.”
But first Vân Ước wrapped her mother in a hug. In her usual prickly way—all shrug and elbow—Mama resisted initially, but relaxed for a moment and hugged back before patting Vân Ước’s shoulder impatiently and pushing her gently in the direction of her room. “Study now!”
It only felt half as annoying as usual.