pilgrimage

For seven months from summer to winter in 2003, you and Lan stay in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris, where English is rarely heard and Americans rarely seen, a few steps from métro Voltaire. You are newly married, and you have just been tenured. You cannot be fired, short of committing a crime, and so you are here not to write another scholarly book—

your best friend from high school tells

you he keeps your academic book

by his bedside to help him

fall asleep

—but to write your book of short stories while living in a one-­bedroom apartment on the third floor of an unadorned building on the unfashionable rue Richard Lenoir. No Haussmannian splendor and no elevator, but you and Lan are young and in love, with only one suitcase each.

If going to Paris, a city famous for its writers, is a literary pilgrimage for you, Ba Má visit you in Paris that fall intent on a religious pilgrimage. Their idea of a good time: visiting the major Catholic shrines of western Europe. Over five days, you escort them to Lourdes in southwestern France and Fátima in Portugal, with a stop in London. You pack a bottle of whiskey to relieve the stress, but are proud of yourself for orchestrating this vacation of a lifetime for Ba Má.

This is their fourth international voyage. Their first was fleeing their homeland. If forced migrations make one cosmopolitan, then refugees and migrants would be considered some of the world’s best-traveled people. They are far more worldly than those who never leave their countries and yet look down on these cosmonauts, whose odds of surviving their journeys are as bad or worse than those of astronauts.

To see for yourself where Ba Má’s epic journey began, you make a pilgrimage to Nghĩa Yên, your father’s quê, in 2004, as soon as you leave Paris. A child of the diaspora returning to the quê is a kind of pilgrim. Where your parents were born and spent their childhoods is a shrine. And you, who do not believe in God, believe in Ba Má.

You prepare carefully for this visit, which you do in your thirty-third year. During your first trip in 2002, you were a tourist. For this occasion, you are a student. You study academic Vietnamese for several months at the Việt Nam National University in Sài Gòn, aka Hồ Chí Minh City, if by studying one means going to lots of nightclubs and bars, including after-class sessions with your sole male teacher. It is he who tells you that in Vietnamese culture the father’s quê is the son’s quê as well. Between the two of you, you can easily drink ten large bottles of Tiger beer, which the waiter brings in a crate. You study very, very hard.

You rehearse the complex terminology of familial honorifics so you know what to call a paternal uncle versus a maternal aunt. But no one warns you, least of all Ba Má, that the people of Nghĩa Yên, Đức Thọ, Hà Tĩnh, speak such a peculiar, regional dialect that even the word for water is different. So this is why I sometimes find it hard to understand your parents, Lan says.

Only then do you realize you have grown up

being spoken to in a Vietnamese that

perplexes other Vietnamese.

This explains everything!

You are delivered to your quê by the bombastic husband of your cousin, daughter of a paternal uncle. She comes from a family who feels indebted to Ba Má for having sent money to help them survive the rationing years after war’s end. You plan to take the train from Hà Nội to Vinh, the nearest large city, but the bombastic husband insists on taking you in his chauffeured Mercedes. The bombastic husband, a businessman with a swimming pool in his urban gated mansion, is the new Việt Nam with its capitalist hopes. Your father’s brothers are the old Việt Nam. Rural and poor. The three of them and many of their children and grandchildren are waiting for you when you finally arrive at the ancestral home late in the evening. At least two dozen people, from the elderly to the tiny. Is this what it means to be Vietnamese? Never to be alone?

Unfortunately, you like to be alone.

The ancestral home is a walled compound with three houses, one for each uncle. Your paternal grandfather, whom you never met, built this compound. When you tell one of your language teachers that the compound has running water and electricity, she is impressed. Your quê has a reputation for being a difficult place to live.

Nghĩa Yên is where Ba was born, but you do not visit your own birthplace because Ba says, You can never go back to Ban Mê Thuột. He believes the communists will persecute you for being his son. You have no such fear because you have no memory. But you also cannot disobey him, though you have disobeyed him many times before. Mostly you follow this command out of respect, but Ba also succeeds in planting a tree of fear inside of you. What if he is right?

Your sister, chị Tuyết, who still lives in Ban Mê Thuột, now Buôn Ma Thuột, comes to meet you in Nha Trang, the beachside city where Má fled with your brother and you in 1975. Your rendezvous is the house Ba Má owned during the war years, a few blocks from the beach. You take a taxi from your budget hotel and arrive on a quiet side street drenched in sunlight. The house is modest by suburban California standards and middle class by Vietnamese standards, with a gated courtyard in which motorbikes are parked. Ba Má let her oldest sister live in the house during the war, and somehow during those years your aunt divided the villa—this is what Ba Má call the house—in two to rent out half of it. Ba Má mention this story once or twice, bemused. Your aunt is now the owner. How she managed to keep the house after the communist victory, you never find out. You never ask.

You are glad someone in your family got to keep the house. You just wish it were your sister. But you do not bring this up, given the shakiness of your Vietnamese. Conversations proceed with you catching 50 to 80 percent of what is being said, enough to understand the gist but salted with just enough doubt that you can’t be certain you’ve heard what you’ve heard. Your usual method of conversation is to keep asking questions and let the other person respond, but even that is limited if you are unwilling to ask certain questions.

What did she think when she saw your backs, when

she closed the door, when she was all alone? What was

the next morning like? The day after? What did the

cadres say when they came for the house and threw

her out? What was her time like on the volunteer

youth brigade after the war? Where was she sent? For

how long? How did she meet her husband?

All these questions come to you now, but none occur to you at your aunt’s house near the beach, or if they did, you couldn’t ask. Or would you even dare to ask

what does it feel like to be the adopted one?

You don’t recall then what Kingston wrote to you after her seminar:

Questions are creative and dangerous.

To ask a question is to be open to change.

Sometimes you wonder what your life would have been like if Ba Má had not succeeded in leaving. It is your sister who has lived this other life. She stayed but did not get to keep the family home and business in Buôn Ma Thuột or the house in Nha Trang. Má, on fleeing Ban Mê Thuột, had left behind gold that she could not carry and instructed her sisters to share it with your sister. Your aunts never did so. Another reason not to return to Buôn Ma Thuột is that you have no desire to meet these aunts who you feel cheated your sister.

You last saw her twenty-nine years ago, a moment you do not remember because you were four. You have only ever seen your sister in two photos, taken in her young adulthood. The woman you meet is a mother of two in her forties. Fashionable. With makeup. You marvel at each other’s presence, at each other’s faces. She cries. You do not. After her tears come smiles and laughter for both of you. You learn that she likes to sing. And have fun. Having fun is something Ba Má, your brother, and you find difficult. You are a serious family.

If you had been left behind, you would probably feel unlucky,

resentful, envious, conflicted, abandoned, betrayed. If your

sister feels any of those things, or has ever felt any of them,

she shows no sign. She appears only happy to see you.

At your aunt’s dinner table, your sister, whom you knew by her nickname of Tuyết but who now calls herself by her proper name of Hương, wears a sleeveless leopard print dress. Your aunt and your cousins laugh about the time Ba Má finally returned home in the early 1990s on their third international trip, as soon as the United States reestablished political relations and lifted the embargo it had imposed in 1975—a soft war after the hard war. Your relatives are amused because of your father’s paranoia, how he insisted on keeping his and your mother’s suitcases under their bed for fear that someone would disturb their contents. But given that your aunt’s house was once his, perhaps he was justified.

Ba is the eldest son. A dutiful man who loves his family, a faithful Catholic who believes in helping the poor, he must have felt his obligations to his parents and siblings keenly. But the financial and emotional costs must have been heavy: three brothers and a sister on Ba’s side, five sisters and a brother on Má’s side, as well as all their children. And your (adopted) sister.

In advance of your own visit to your quê, Ba gave you a list of relatives and the amount of money each one will get from you. You have, for each relative, an envelope with American dollars, as Ba Má undoubtedly did as well. On the Thanksgiving after their return from Việt Nam, Ba—who had previously insisted on your absolute Vietnameseness—proclaims, over the turkey, We’re Americans now.

They never return after that.

You remember their quê, the compound crowded with relatives, the vast green farmland stretching beyond the walls. That land sinks into utter darkness once night falls, and you understand why Ba Má cannot return to the quê for good. They have traveled too far in both space and time. As have you.

Your only connection to your quê is a silken thread of memory and feeling, invisible to the human eye. You wish you could say that after twenty-nine years of distance from your sister, you pulled on that thread to bring you closer to her. But you did not. Or could not. Seeing your sister in Nha Trang is, for you, a kind of pilgrimage, a ritual visit to see someone enshrined in your memory. But having conducted the pilgrimage, there may be no need to return.

Your relationship with your sister is a war casualty. Or perhaps your inability to have a relationship with her is a war casualty. Or perhaps in any parallel universe you would still be emotionally numb.

If the war dismembered your

relationship with your sister,

did Ba Má disremember her?

You cannot speak for Ba Má, but you certainly have. Your sister, Tuyết, is an absent presence; your (adopted) sister, Hương, is a present absence. Never having quite forgotten your sister, you have never quite re membered her either. You cannot blame the war or anyone else for this, the way you see her as if she were still rooted to the earth and you were on the moon. Or Facebook, which is where you see her now nearly every day, visible but distant.

Astronauts eventually return to Earth. But cosmonauts like Ba Má permanently escape the gravity of home.

Is this the root of your own willingness to leave home?

San José too small for you as, perhaps, the quê

of Nghĩa Yên became for Ba Má?

Nostalgia is, literally, homesickness,

with those afflicted yearning for

their home. But what to call

being sick of home?

For devout Catholics, the real home is not earth but Heaven, their longing for it perpetual. How else to ascend and fulfill that desire but by becoming a one-way cosmonaut, voyager, risk-taker? Nothing riskier than faith in what cannot be seen, heard, touched.

Your parents call their object of faith God.

You call yours justice. All of you, in

your own ways, are true believers.

Thus, Ba Má’s second international trip, around 1988, is a pilgrimage to the Vatican and Jerusalem with their church. That trip’s sequel is this European pilgrimage in 2003 for which you are the tour guide. The bright colors of the architecture in Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl, remind you of Disneyland. Tourist shops sell crucifixes of every size, plates adorned with the Pope, Virgin Mary statues, snow globes, and lockets. You buy a cologne-sized bottle of holy water for your father-in-law. Your parents bathe in this holy water while you wait outside the baths. Devotees light candles as they promenade through narrow streets to evening Mass, while formations of nuns glide by in black and gray habits.

Fátima impresses you with its severity. Nestled in green mountains and supposedly named after a Moorish princess kidnapped by a Christian knight, Fátima commemorates another Virgin Mary sighting. Visitors approach a grand basilica with a towering spire by crossing an expansive square. Those desperate for the Virgin Mary’s help shuffle across the square on their knees. In grimmer days, the knees of the faithful would be bloody and bruised. Now the pilgrims wear kneepads. Ba Má pray at Fátima but do not crawl. They do not need a miracle. They have already saved themselves, with the aid of the U.S. government and God.

You never tell Ba Má you are an atheist because you do not want to upset them. Protecting Ba Má is how you show you love them, even if they do not know it, even as you do not remember all the unspoken ways they love you. Being their tour guide is another way of showing love. Ba Má put themselves in your care as someone finally an adult. Getting married is the first real sign of your adulthood. Grandchildren is what they want next, but fatherhood terrifies you.

You buy yourself time with this pilgrimage. Surprisingly, you enjoy yourself, happy to see Ba Má delighted as you escort them to the Eiffel Tower and Versailles, Buckingham Palace and Lisbon. Ba Má prefer the cleanliness of London over the dirtiness of Paris. In the Paris Métro, Má laughs recalling how, as a girl, she rode the bus without a fare, hiding underneath a seat.

Years later you will understand this memory when

you take an oversold night train through central

Việt Nam, third class, kids sleeping under your wood

bench, a stranger dozing on a stool in the aisle,

forehead against your chest.

Your terror of fatherhood comes partly from seeing what motherhood inflicts on Má. The mother of your childhood wields a beautiful smile. She loves to adorn herself. She is statuesque and elegant, authoritative and powerful. But the SàiGòn Mới exhausts her, ages her, diminishes her. Or maybe she would shrink anyway as you grow and reach her height, then exceed it. In your teen years, you begin to notice the age in her face, the way you see the age in your own face now, compared to the freshness of your children. They absorb your life as you absorbed Ba Má’s.

But this pilgrimage signals the end of

sacrifice. The war years, long past.

SàiGòn Mới, no more.

You will take them to all the Catholic shrines in the world. You might even go back with them to Việt Nam, to re member.

It is the fall of 2003. Má is healthy.

Neither of you know that in two years

nothing will be the same, ever again,

for her. Or you. Or me.