Thuy Phan
Summer, 1998
When the plane touched the tarmac, I knew my mom and I were somewhere else because of the smell – exhaust fumes mixed with grassy herbs and overripe jackfruit – in a country that was my country and not my country, and all I could feel was the sweat rolling out of my pores, and when we arrived at my aunt’s house in the suburbs of Saigon – the house where I would have grown up if my mom had to leave me behind in Vietnam six years ago – I strangely felt like I was at home, like I could have possessed that same nostalgic, dreamy childhood my mom had there before the North Vietnamese Army declared liberation and rolled into the streets, the same streets where I would play badminton with my cousins – the siblings I never had – and I can’t remember whether I knew about my younger half-brother yet during that summer of ‘98, when my mom and I returned for the first time, but I knew I had a father who had a whole life without me there, and that was fine, because all I cared about that summer was running around with my cousins, peering over the shoulders of the neighborhood kids who played Street Fighter on an old TV and Nintendo console in the foyer of the house next door, chasing dragonflies that floated on the crest of a breeze through the church courtyard, chewing refrigerated red green yellow orange gummy bears until our jaws hurt, grimacing at the jars of snake whiskies at the liquor shop a few doors down, making pork floss by picking at a big block of dry meat with our fingers, singing Celine Dion songs on the karaoke system in the living room, where I fell and slammed my right cheek on the slick marble tiled floors, and I cried and cried and cried until my mom gently placed her hand on my bruised face, to calm the nerves, and I didn’t yet know that in twenty years’ time, I would cry and cry again when my mom touched another nerve by urging me to return to this country that feels less like my country the older I become, to visit a father whose absence took up too much space in my life, and while I believe I have now made peace with this absence, I often think about why I cannot remember what should have been the most monumental moment in my life during that summer I turned eight. Meeting my father.
The Word for Bowl
Content warnings include mentions of war and famine.
“Chén is the southern word for bowl,” my Vietnamese instructor says on Zoom. “The northern word is bát.”
“Bát,” I repeat. As the word leaps off my tongue, the wormhole opens, a gaping throat, vibrating with the tones of diacritical marks. It swallows the tiles of faces on my screen until all I can see is a younger version of myself –
Ten years old, sitting at the kitchen table in the house where she used to live with her grandparents, their hair still black, gait still lithe and steady, wrinkles not as deep. Grandpa mashes hard boiled eggs with fish sauce and Grandma asks if the granddaughter wants a bát of rice. The girl nods, but she does not yet understand that her grandparents carried this word in their mouths from Hanoi, before crossing the 17th parallel in 1954 as teenagers, in a mass exodus down to Saigon. They do not talk about this displacement, just like they do not talk about colonization or hunger or lost relatives.
“Ask Grandma and Grandpa,” I implore the girl, “to tell us everything about their lives, everything they want us to remember. Before it’s too late.”
But the girl doesn’t care for neither history nor inheritance. She only cares about growing up and getting out. I watch her scrape her bowl clean, filling her mouth with rice and English and Spanish and French and Hindi and business jargon. Languages that will move her farther and farther from her grandparents’ kitchen table over the next two decades. I watch the years pass until the grandparents grow gaunt and gray. I witness the girl turn into a woman who realizes she possesses nothing but empty bowls to bequeath to future generations.
Why is it that we only become afraid of losing things when we are at the edge of losing them?
The wormhole pinches shut when my Zoom class ends. It is not too late – not yet. My grandparents are still sitting at their kitchen table, so that is where I will return. I will ask for their black-and-white photos. I will ask them for their stories.
They will dole out brief accounts, small morsels to appease me: during the war, Grandma worked at the airport in Saigon, washing clothes for five-star generals. Grandpa transported GI’s into the city for the bars, cafes, cigarettes, and hugging-girls.
They will not mention the uncle who left home during the Great Famine in search for food and vanished without a trace. Nor will they describe huddling in a makeshift bomb shelter with their children on Liberation Day. These are not the memories they care to leave me with.
Instead, my grandparents will ask, “Do you want some rice?”
Even if I’ve already eaten, I will still nod, hungry for more. I will reach out for their bát of rice and place the grains on my tongue, hoping the rice will transmute into memories of them that I can swallow. Hoping I can contain inside of myself all the things I am afraid of losing.
Thuy Phan is a Vietnamese American writer born in Saigon and raised in the Greater Boston area. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Solstice, Pangyrus, WBUR Cognoscenti, and DVAN’s diaCRITICS. Thuy is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator and Essay Incubator Programs. She is currently at work on her first book, a memoir-in-essays on time travel, identity, and estrangement. When she’s not writing, Thuy creates literary-themed cocktail pairings for books by diverse writers on her Instagram account @mixaphoria.