ÿþ<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd "> <html xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en"><head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="lamsaochongon.css" type="text/css"> <title>reassemblage.org</title> </head><body> <center> <table width="450"> <tr><td> <b><i>làm sao cho ngon.</i></b> <p>I have been having trouble writing, so I called up my parents and asked them for their stories. This is regarded by academia as  research. I borrowed a riff from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha s <i>Dictee</i> to get started.</p> ---<br /> <p>Mother. At twenty-one years old you are already a mother with one child, three more on the way.</p> <p>Although I know this for a fact, considering my oldest brother s age in relation to hers, I am still in slight disbelief when she tells me.</p> <p> How could you know, you were only in my knee! </p> <p>When I had to perform in front of a crowd in Minneapolis and was getting terribly nervous the afternoon of, I called my mom to help calm my nerves. She told me to just imagine the crowd as cats. But not as dogs, because that would be silly. I didn t actually follow through on her instructions, but thinking about them was enough to have the effect work.</p> <p>At twenty-one years old my mother had just started a family, was living with my father and continuing to grow and sell vegetables as she had done all her life since she was five years old. Potatoes, bananas, beans. She mentions <i>rau muÑng too</i>, and I am reminded of one of my favorite dishes from home, <i>canh rau ay</i>. It s a soup made of cut up bits of the leafy green, with tiny bits of shrimp that my sister L used to hate because she almost chocked on them once. I looked it up on Wikipedia.org afterwards and come across this:  In Vietnam, it once served as a staple vegetable of the poor. Once?</p> <p> Growing up [in Viet Nam] was rough, she said.  Not like here& you just eat and go to school. </p> <p>All I do is eat and go to school. My mother dropped out of school when she was still a little girl, around third grade, and started gardening full-time. She said it was difficult for her to concentrate in school.</p> <p>My mother still gardens, even though we live in the desert of Las Vegas and have to import dirt. There are pomegranate and apple trees, and large pots of rosemary and basil. One time a melon grew unexpectedly, after she had tossed away some rinds and seeds in the backyard. She doesn t compost in the conventional sense; just saves up vegetable peels and egg shells from the day and scatters them amongst the plants, letting nature handle itself on its own.</p> <p>Talking now, we compare the prices of vegetables between Las Vegas and Saint Paul. One dollar for a bundle of spinach? Same there as here. What about cabbage? I don t eat cabbage. Our conversations stop short sometimes.</p> --- <br /> <p>It s not easy to communicate with my parents. There is a language barrier. Perhaps it is better to refer to it as a language border and harken those discourses. Since starting college, I try my best to speak to them primarily in Vietnamese, which is limiting on my part because I never acquired any sophisticated vocabulary, and frustrating on their part because I m always asking them to explain their words. We meet each other at the border, never actually cross.</p> <p> Just like when you speak in English and I don t understand, you don t understand when I speak in Vietnamese. </p> <p>But we still try.</p> <p>I can t talk to my parents without crying, or wanting to cry, be filled with a longing to cry. A release. Everything is bittersweet. When my mother and I say joyous things over the phone, there is a yearning to be there in her presence and see her smile and giggle. L and I get all of our wacky facial expressions from our mom. I get my sensitivity from her too. That s why I cry often.</p> <p>When I talk to my father over the phone, he is always concerned for my health and frequently gives advice on how to take care of my body.  Drink lots of water.  Stay warm. This is his approach on being a good father. I make it a point to ask for him when I am sick or getting sick, so he can go through his litany of how to get better (eat garlic, rest more). I don t always follow through on his instructions, but hearing them is an important first step to my recovery process.</p> ---<br /> <p>Father. At twenty-one years old, you had already been in the South Vietnamese army for three years, and would remain for five more. A soldier, but really a secretary for the majority of the time, working in an office (I imagine.)</p> <p>He says he only fought in the fields for two years. Only.</p> <p>Growing up, when I dawdled about eating my food, my father would tell me,  When I was in the army, we had to finish a bowl of rice in two minutes flat! This was said as a means of encouragement rather than a reprimand. I used to be extra slow about eating my food in the hopes of my father spoon-feeding me to finish. My mother would frown and I knew I eventually had to stop.</p> <p>For my father s fiftieth birthday, my uncle had located a picture of him when he was young and in the army, posing in full regalia. Which wasn t much, but he wore a hat, and I thought he looked just like a cowboy. Seeing him in his youth gave a striking resemblance to my oldest brother. When I compared this photo to that of T s high school graduation, the only difference I could tell was that T had chubbier cheeks.</p> <p>When my father started telling me this story of his army days, he stopped short and said we would have to finish this later, as he would have to look up the proper English translations before he could finish our conversation.</p> <p>I imagine him getting his worn Vietnamese-English dictionary out, thumbing through the paper-thin pages.</p> <p>We keep trying.</p> ---<br /> <p>My father s favorite thing to do is fix things that don t necessary need fixing. He likes to work with his hands. He is a builder. He is currently working on his second bed frame for the house, supposedly for me. He doesn t rest enough for himself.</p> <p>My parents sleep in separate beds because our house now has enough space to afford it. Prior to this, Mom would say that sometimes Dad threw punches in his sleep, alluding to his history in the army. When I was born, my family (two parents, four kids) lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Orange County, and now we have a four-bedroom house in Las Vegas, but it s just my two parents now.</p> <p>My father is still incredibly strong considering his age, but is also incredibly thin and has a small frame. It was an odd moment when I had surpassed him in weight after coming back from my first year in college, but inevitable. When my mother, sister, and I buy him clothes for Father s Day though, we know we have to get size medium or large because he refuses wear anything less than. No one likes being told they are less than what they believe they are, including me.</p> <p>Growing up, I loved watching Norm Abrams  New Yankee Workshop on PBS with my dad, and someday dreamed of being a woodworker, a crafter of beautiful objects. It s the wormholes that add character.</p> <p>Today my parents still work with their hands, though now instead of making new things, they make things seem like new. They are the graveyard shift. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and gets cleaned up by my parents.</p> ---<br /> <p>Every Sunday at home meant church. It was rare not to attend church, and the circumstances needed to warrant such cases of absence had to be extreme. Such as when I was horribly, awfully sick with the flu, aching and vomiting, but even then, my father would ask me,  Are you sure you don t want to go to church? Want, as if it only took conviction in my faith to will me back into health.</p> <p>In high school, I amped up my rebellious nature and resisted attending mass for a few weeks, opting instead to spend the hour at home crying in my closet. It hurt too much to see my parents distressed, and I learned to appreciate being with my whole family during those times since my brothers moved into their own house and I didn t get to see them as much.</p> <p>However, these days when I am away at school, I do not attend church at all. But I do choose Sunday to call home regularly, timed perfectly to catch my family when they would have returned from service and finished brunch. I have to program an alarm on my phone to remind me of this.</p> <p>My parents ask me every week, without fail, if I had gone to church, and I lie to them,  Yes, of course. I usually say that I m going later in the evening, but one time I forgot to call them in the morning, and my mother caught me in the lie that night, and judging from her tone, in my mind unraveled all of the previous lies. But we still keep up this façade anyway. Mama always knows regardless.</p> <p>I carry in my wallet a laminated card I stole from my father of the Virgin Mary with child, and on the reverse a portrait of Saint Vincent. All the women in my family have the saint name Maria, and the men, Vicente. It was Portuguese missionaries who brought Christianity to Viet Nam, not the French as one (I) might presume. I found this out on Wikipedia.org. The internet knows too, sometimes.</p> <p>My favorite story from the Bible is about the five loaves and two fish which fed a multitude of five thousand people. There were twelve baskets of leftovers. Jesus Provides. This is all I need to know.</p> <p>My girlfriend is Catholic.</p> ---<br /> <p>Things I know about my family before there was me:</p> <p>My family fled Viet Nam in the early eighties; I suspect 1982 because my brother A should have still only been a baby at this point. He has a fatty burn scar on his left arm that is said to have come from his reaching for milk that was too hot while still on the boat that my father had helped to build.</p> <p>In the limited books available at my public school, my family was known as  boat people, and I had a hard time imagining how small, crowed boats could make it all the way from the shores of South Viet Nam to California. Upon further inquiry, I pieced together that they came to San Francisco by way of an airplane from Japan.</p> <p>They did not reach the United States until 1984 or so, after some stints in refugee camps in the Philippines, Malaysia, and maybe Indonesia, I can t really remember, before gaining sponsorship by a Christian couple in Georgia. There is a photo of my family, which at this time comprised of my mother, father, and two brothers T and A, plus my cousin T, outside of an administrative building in the Philippines. My mother is young and thin and slightly wary. She said when she first arrived, she weighed but 50 kilos, around 100 pounds. A mother of two. A petite lady.</p> <p>When my sister and I were born in the United States, we both had to be delivered by c-section, which left my mother with deep scars on her underbelly, and fatty tissue that has never gone away.</p> <p>We ruined her. Her American daughters.</p> ---<br /> <p>When we were little, my sister and I had two small plastic yellow chairs with black legs. We would stick our legs underneath them and eat from off the seats like they were TV tray tables. She and I did most things together, as sisters close in age probably do to save their parents time. We wore the same clothes, different sizes, slight variation in colors. We would hide in closets together when company was over. We got confirmed together, even though I was too young to fully comprehend, which only made me more zealous about the affair.</p> <p>My sister would sometimes hit me when she got angry, and my flesh would flush pink, and I would cry and cry, and she would tell me to stop crying, please please be quiet. She was sorry, and if our parents overheard, she would get in trouble. It was always my sister getting in trouble, and I, as youngest, always absolved of any sin. For a time.</p> <p>She made a lot of waves when it came to gaining the privileges of American adolescence. Growing up in America though, we felt these were our rights. Like when and where and how and how often we could go out of the house. Lots of yelling and crying was involved, usually on her part. When these ordeals blew over, she would be too tired to go out anyway.</p> <p>By the time I was in high school, it was okay for me to go over to the same girl s house down the street every Friday night. She eventually became my first girlfriend, and I had to make sure to come home with a batch of cookies or cupcakes as alibi against our other extracurricular activities. My parents never ate them anyway.</p> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> (<a href="http://reassemblage.org/" title="reassemblage.org">return</a>.) </td></tr> </table> </center> </body></html>