all about your mother, or your 1980s,

episode III

The 1980s deposit in you a sediment of confusion and emotion that requires decades for you to sift through. In sifting through these feelings, you learn how to be a writer. The confusion and emotion are due at least partly to watching Ba Má struggle through the hardest decade of their lives in the United States, until the thirteen years beginning in 2005, when your mother falls gravely ill. She never recovers.

Your brother the doctor tells you Má’s diagnosis.

Twice. You cannot or will not remember, any

more than you can recall the names of her many

medications, so you ask him to email you, so you

can write it down, so you can remember. Major

depression, anh Tùng writes you. Don’t mention

the other part.

You do not witness every day of those thirteen years. Only Ba does. You are, however, present for every day of the 1980s, until leaving for your last-choice university in 1988. You pack your few belongings into anh Tùng’s Acura Integra, and he drives you south down the I-5 to Southern California, a long, monotonous stretch of road flanked by farms, orchards, and ranches, whose only blessing for those passing through is that it is the fastest route by car through Central California. Your destination is the unironically named Inland Empire, which, unlike San José, will at least have a movie named after it by David Lynch. Much less popular than the song by Dionne Warwick, but more hipster cred. Once there, anh Tùng buys you sheets, pillowcases, a bike. He gives you his college-era stereo speakers, heavy wooden boxes that you keep for thirty years. Your parents give you, among other things, a rice cooker, which, by the end of your first year, becomes a laboratory for black mold growing on uneaten rice.

You are thrilled to get as far away as you can from San José, even if it is only 330 miles to your Inland Empire. Only many years later do you feel a degree of shame. Ba Má sacrificed so much for you. And you repay them by fleeing.

The truth is your years in San José damage you, but what is the cause of that damage? Your future teacher Maxine Hong Kingston, who grew up in Stockton in the 1950s, only a couple of hours from San José, put it this way:

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things

in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to

childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who

marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?

What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?131

As for you, how do you disentangle the peculiarities of your family and your lives from adolescence and testosterone, high literature and pornography, San José and Hollywood? What is your own personal strangeness and what is the dismemberment?

Leaving San José behind means not writing about it, putting time and space between it and you. The Silicon Valley is L.A.132 minus twenty years, your high school classmate Peter Malae writes in his novel What We Are, and perhaps that is why, after two decades of living in Los Angeles, you finally find it bearable, if not comfortable, to return to San José.

During those twenty years, you return only to visit your parents, the occasions suffocating you with a feeling of being an alien in a consumerist city where people work, shop, and raise children until they die, or so it seems to you. But maybe you resemble Malae’s narrator, who says:

I was a native son of the Silicon Valley,

however much I disavowed it in

gesture and attitude.133

In the 1980s, Silicon Valley is being born. Apple is beginning its domination of the world. Somewhere and everywhere in San José, Vietnamese refugees work on assembly lines or do piecework at home, soldering microchips, some of which end up in the Atari video game console that Ba Má buy for you in middle school, along with the occasional game cartridge that costs an exorbitant thirty or more dollars, proof that you were not always neglected. Malae—whose Samoan father and uncle both fought with AMERICATM in Việt Nam134—describes the feel of your quadrant of San José, driving

down Alum Rock, its ruined lanes unreadable, and there are paisas at every street corner, on bikes, on scooters, at bus stops, taquerias with futbol posters of Mexico vs. Argentina over the door, signs diverting traffic around mounds of gravel that have been uprooted and left in the sun, pho houses stuffed with Vietnamese hunched over their steaming bowls of noodles and rice, and straggler whites using forks and talking (you can tell even from outside) way too loud, and beauty salons proprietored by women named Tiffany Le and Michelle Nguyen, their names in English and Vietnamese detailed in flowery pink paint on the windows, a Dunkin’ Donuts with no one in it, a triangular eyesore still called Wienerschnitzel, Walgreen’s, 76, 7-Eleven, the bright yellow foothills in the nearing horizon rising slower than the sun.135

Turning right on Capitol Expressway, you drive to the home of the AMERICAN DREAMTM that your parents buy in South San José. They move in 1987 to this new upper-middle-class subdivision of nearly identical houses: two stories, stucco walls, Spanish tile roofs, a green carpet of lawn, and twenty-three hundred square feet of space, at the base of those bright yellow foothills and on a quiet cul-de-sac, far from any freeway. Ba Má hire a moving company, itself a luxury, to transport your belongings to the new house, which feels like a mansion with its towering cathedral ceiling in the living room. The red velour sofa has disappeared, replaced by brand-new white leather furniture that matches the white walls and evokes the sleek decor of Miami Vice.

Your bedroom, on the second floor, was the nursery for the previous owner. Someone’s effort to remove the baby’s decorations has made it worse, leaving ragged and torn remnants of a strip of wallpaper running beneath the low ceilings, featuring pastel teddy bears banging on drums. More than thirty years later, the teddy bears are still there.

Your parents no longer run the SàiGòn Mới, renting it out instead and opening a jewelry store next door. 759 South Tenth Street would seem far away except you drive past it every Sunday returning from Vietnamese Mass. Seeing that brown house every weekend and then every time you return to San José and go to Mass with Ba Má still does not make it easy to write about it. Eventually you write a short story about that house and that time, featuring a mother very much like Má and a father not like Ba. The story is titled “War Years” because you cannot separate that era of the SàiGòn Mới from the war’s shadow.

You have never forgotten about Má telling you how a thief armed with a hand grenade attempted to rob their store on Ama Trang Long street in Ban Mê Thuột. You were two and do not remember the man with a grenade, or Ama Trang Long street. Is this your first brush with violence and perhaps death?

Your second is the invasion of

your hometown and the refugee

flight from Sài Gòn.

Your third is when you, a child, run across

South Tenth Street on a red light and get

bumped by a pickup truck whose driver

has slammed on the brakes, sending you

flying ten or fifteen feet. You are not too

smart. The shaken driver walks you to the

7-Eleven a few feet away from your near-

death experience. He buys you a toy car

and some Bazooka bubble gum, the one

with a comic printed on the inside of the

wrapper.

Your fourth is with Ba Má, when you finally

experience and remember what their life

has sometimes been like.

You are sixteen, the summer after your junior year, and beginning to feel like a young man. You replace the glasses you have worn since the second grade with contact lenses. Your father no longer cuts your hair, and you have begun a lifelong journey to find the perfect stylist. You are working at Great America, and Ba shows you he loves you by taking an hour off every day from the SàiGòn Mới to drive you there. You take the bus home and, without complaint, eat what Ba Má make for dinner.

After the table is cleared, you help with the day’s accounting. Spread out on the dinner table are cash in bills and coins, checks, and occasional money orders, with half the day’s revenue comprising food stamps and coupons from Women, Infants and Children and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

AFDC coupons are big and yellow, while food stamps come in the bright colors of Monopoly money. You apply red ink to the stamp pad and stamp the back of each of the coupons, food stamps, and checks with the name and address of the SàiGòn Mới. You sort the cash, enter the amounts in the ledger, and punch the numbers without looking at the calculator.

You know these numbers by heart.

You do not feel wealthy or even middle class, though you are the latter, perhaps better. Your parents do not believe in allowances, fashionable clothes, or vacations, but you never hunger. For food. You attend private school. You borrow books from the library, but until your job at Great America you own none outside of schoolbooks. Then you use your wages to buy secondhand books and comic books.

To make up for all the things they do not allow you, Ba Má give you the biggest room in the house, the master bedroom with its view of the freeway entrance ramp. This luxury is not like what you see on television, where the master bedroom is always reserved for the parents. From the 1950s, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet feature happy smiling white people, fathers and mothers with handsome children in tasteful middle-class homes. Not a freeway in sight. From the 1960s and 1970s, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and Happy Days offer more of the same, except the white people are in color instead of black and white. Also no freeways.

Is this exotic display of what white

people wear, eat, and say to each

other fantasy or reality?

You enjoy comedies about Black people, too: The Jeffersons, Good Times, Diff’rent Strokes, Sanford and Son. Even a show with a Chicano protagonist, Chico and the Man. But no comedy exists about people who look like you.

And nothing is funny about your family. A movie of your family’s life in the brown house might be made by Wayne Wang, whose 1980s movies Eat a Bowl of Tea and Dim Sum capture the claustrophobia and struggle of Chinese immigrant life. Households without music or laughter, genuine or canned. Plenty of tears, so little joy.

At day’s end, your parents are too tired to be joyful. Nothing’s funny about refugee life. Right?

Nothing funny about iron bars on the windows.

Nothing funny about Ba checking all the doors and windows before bed.

Nothing funny about telling you not to open the door to strangers,

not after being robbed with a grenade and shot on Christmas Eve.

The knock on the door comes on a summer evening. Still daylight outside. Your parents wear the casual clothes they change into after work, white undershirt and shorts for Ba, semitransparent nightgown for Má. You are all barefoot. You don’t remember what you are wearing, but it is likely the clothes that you consider cool: a T-shirt with a surfing logo, blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up and twisted to taper at the ankles for the pegged look that is the fashion among your high school classmates.

The knock can be heard by all of you, since there is never any music in your house, no news on the radio or television, no TV turned on while dinner is being prepared or eaten. No one comes to the house unannounced except Jehovah’s Witnesses. All three of you head for the front door, a few steps from the kitchen. Má arrives first. She looks through the peephole and says, Allô?

I have a package for you, he calls.

If he were a Vietnamese stranger, Má would never have opened the door. Does she open the door because he is a white man? Speaking English? Even if he is not the postman?

Má unlocks the dead bolt, peers through the slightly open door. It takes him an instant to shove past her. Behind his back is not a package but a black revolver with a long, slim barrel. The gunman’s hair is dirty blond. He wears a faded blue denim jacket. To you he is old, but gazing back from the crest of your middle age, you see that he is young, perhaps in his mid-twenties. He points the gun at Má, at Ba, at you, yelling, Get down!

For an eternal second, there is no past, no future, just the present and the muzzle of the gun. You can still see the barrel of the gun, a .22. A very small caliber, not like Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum. Afraid of acting afraid, you do not scream, beg, cry, or say anything. This is not happening to you. This cannot be real. When Ba kneels, so do you.

Part of you feels immortal. Part of you

thinks you will die because you do

not want to be embarrassed.

The gunman’s attention focuses on you and your father, the men of the house. Poor guy. He is not a professional, though he is enough of a pro to have followed Ba Má home from the SàiGòn Mới. If he were a real professional, would he have ignored Má, standing by his side? Does he see her as a weak, hysterical woman? Does he overlook her because she is an Asian lady with poor English? The kind of Asian woman he has likely seen so many times just from randomly watching TV? The anonymous older, silent women in street scenes and marketplaces and brothels who serve as the backdrop to the attractive young Asian women in movies like The World of Suzie Wong and Sayonara?

He underestimates Má.

So many people have misread her,

including you.

Má, by the door, sees that he is not looking at her but at you and Ba, sinking to your knees. Má’s scream shocks the gunman, Ba, you. The scream stuns all of you into paralysis for a moment, enough for Má to dash by the gunman and run outside, still screaming.

Astonished, he turns and starts after her, and you are thankful he is not a professional, because if he were, maybe he would have shot Má or tried to. But he doesn’t, and the moment he crosses the threshold, his back to you, Ba leaps up, slams the door shut, and locks it, stranding the gunman outside.

With Má.

Through the movie screen of the living room window, its red curtains drawn back, you see her, Má, fleeing down the sidewalk in front of the evening traffic flowing toward the freeway. The drivers and passengers must be amazed to see a woman in her nightgown. Watching the spectacle, they are unaware that she is running for her life, running to save her life.

And yours.

Again.