Page 67 of A Banh Mi for Two
“Mom, không sao dâu. Bà Ngo?i không sao dâu,” I find myself telling her. It’s okay, Mom. Grandma’s okay. We’re okay.
Aunt Hi?n touches my shoulder and nods toward the corridor. “Go,” she says.
Mom follows me outside, grabbing my arm and pulling me close. The walls don’t feel as suffocating anymore. Fresh air greets us outside as the humidity hovers around us. I’ve been so used to this city’s heat and humidity that I can’t recall what California’s dry heat feels like. Mom stares at the herb garden out front, carefully inspecting the leaves.
“I planted this.”
Blinking, I imagine a younger version of Mom hunched over a pile of dirt, meticulously planting these herbs—the plants are still alive, too. “Oh. Wow.”
Still inspecting the plants, she seems lost in her thoughts. I wonder what she’s thinking about. So much has happened to her in the past forty-eight hours, and in this moment, I feel guilty for snapping back at her. Dusting herself off, she gets up and turns to me. “Vivi, come here.”
I stiffen up immediately and do what she says.
The words spill out of me. “I’m sorry, Mom. I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. Or said all those awful things. I should have tried to understand you more.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “Mommy need to try to understand you more, con.”
“I didn’t want to disappoint you at all. I know that I shouldn’t ask, because of the pain that it causes you, but I can’t stop wondering about the past because it’s a piece of my history, too.”
She rubs her hands up and down my arms as if apologizing. “I know. I’ve hurt you very much, right?”
Tears well up again, and I can barely see her face in front of me. She tries wiping them from my cheeks, but I just let them fall. “Not as much as I probably hurt you.”
Shaking her head, Mom embraces me again and lets my head rest on her shoulder this time. “It’s been really hard for Mommy for a long time, con.”
I squeeze her hand. “I want to hear, Mom. I’m ready. You can trust me.”
This is the truth I’ve been waiting for.
She inhales sharply. “My relationship with your bà ngo?i hasn’t always been the best. We fought. A lot. She… has the tendency to scream.”
I nod, recalling what Bà Ngo?i had said to me when I visited her the first time—when Bà Ngo?i screamed Mom’s name.
“Your ông ngo?i die early. Your grandpa was in the South Vietnamese Army and when he went to reeducation camp, he came back nhu ngu?i xa l?. Like he wasn’t my dad anymore.”
My chest tightens as I imagine Grandpa returning home to our family, the horrors he witnessed and endured. The loss of the person he used to be because the war took it from him.
From all of us.
“It must have been so hard,” I say, sniffling. “How did you leave?”
She sighs. “There was a boy.”
My heart twists. I already know where this is going. “Was he your first love?” It’s weird imagining Mom also in love in Vi?t Nam, falling for someone in this city under this very sky.
“He was. And I wanted to leave with him—look toward a place where I could find hope and survive. Hope because I’d find a job and send money back home. Hope that someday, I’d bring my mother and sister across the ocean, too. Your grandma begged me not to go—to not be so foolish and follow a boy to somewhere so far away from home. But I was so young, and so I ended up getting on that boat with the boy.”
“What… happened to him?”
She gulped. “He left me the moment we got to Hong Kong. Married another woman. It’s shameful, isn’t it? For me to leave everything I had here and follow him.”
“Oh.” So Mom was at sea and came to the United States all by herself. I can’t imagine that, can’t imagine all the trauma and hurt she had to endure. “I don’t think it’s shameful, Mom. You were young and lost, and yet you still kept going. And now I’m here, alive and in this world because of you.”
I squeeze her, feeling her slumped shoulders against mine.
“To this day, I… I can sometimes see those memories in my nightmares—and the places I never want to revisit. I thought I could protect you by not bringing you here, by shielding you away from this country and everything that it has taken from me. But a lot of it was… shame, too, shame that I left my family for a boy. Shame that I spent so many years alone in America, sleeping in a nail salon by myself.”
I imagine a younger Mom running through this very yard, chasing her sister, and walking through the same roads that I have taken. Holding her tightly, I think about her on a small boat, confused and lost. I think about her alone in California, coming home with blisters and crying because she just wants to go home.
