Thư Cho Bà Ngoại
Dear Grandma,
I woke up this morning at 7am. Just like everyday, I showered and got dressed for work. When I checked my email, I saw a note that said you died yesterday, at 10am Vietnam time. The text of the message seemed so unreal, it stunned me to silence. The emails I get usually announce sales at LL Bean and Banana Republic, was I really hearing about your death through the same medium, on the same screen, with the same gmail graphic interface and font colors? I think I tried to hope it was just another advertisement . . .
Grandma, I cried on the bus on the way to work this morning. Usually I sit on the bus and read the Wall St. Journal, gleaning economic news across the world. Today I just held the paper in my hands and cried, like a little girl. I tried to tell myself that this was inappropriate, crying on a bus full of strangers going to work. It occurred to me that I was on a bus in Chicago, Illinois, in the middle of winter, surrounded by an ordinary day, by twenty-some Americans who thought it was an ordinary day. And that in one seat on this bus, there was a little girl weeping over the death of an old woman in Saigon. That just made me cry more.
At the corner of Clark and LaSalle, I thought about when I was young and you came to visit us. You never brought fancy gifts like other relatives who came who gave us chewing gum or chocolate or a teddy bear. You only brought these little sponge cakes shaped like clam shells, because I think they were all you could afford. I loved those little cakes. When we went to America and mom took me to the Vietnamese supermarket in Little Saigon, I saw those little cakes for 50 cents a pack. I told mom those were “bánh bà ngoại” and brought a whole bunch and didn’t even eat but two. I still don’t know what they’re really called, they’ll always be grandma cakes to me.
I remembered the second days of Tết at your house, how all of my mom’s side would come. You and my aunts made so much food, trays of bánh chưng, bánh tét, sweet cakes, half a dozen kinds of mứt, candies, watermelon, watermelon seeds. I remembered how the bowls at your house were different from the bowls at my dad’s house, they had blue stripes and were darker, with no gold lining and no bright red flowers and made with a thicker, cruder ceramic. Your chopsticks were wooden and not ivory like at my dad’s house. The loft at the top was dark and squeaky when we climbed it. We chuc Tet everyone, ate and told stories to each other. Dì Út would always tease me and my sisters. We laughed a lot. At lunch everyone went out to the little front yard and watched dượng Út light a strip of firecrackers. Pui and Thu and my sisters and I played hopscotch in the front yard. In the afternoon, we ran out to the head of the alleyway to buy a chunk of ice, that would get smashed up into little cubes, and everyone drank a cold glass of water. When it was time to leave, I was always so sad.
The bus was now at State and Washington St, almost at the office. I got off at Monroe and started crying again. “Stop this, stop it,” I rebuked myself, to be crying in the middle of the busy sidewalk, in Chicago, Illinois.
I know that you loved my mom so much, and that you took care of her whenever she was sad about her life. She told me the stories, that when she was sad and overworked and exhausted, you would be sad with her and you would say, “con về nhà má nghỉ nè con”. And when she came home, you took care of her. She could sleep and rest because in your house, she wasn’t a mother of three, a full-time teacher, a wife, a daughter-in-law. You gently protected her like only a mom could protect a daughter. Maybe people were with her when she was happy, but you were always there to endure the heartbreaks and exhaustion with her. You were her mom like she is a mom to me.
Mom often told me that “bà ngoại tội nghiệp lắm con ơi,” because you were a simple person who did not ask for a lot out of life. In the end, you never got the chance to see America, to sleep on a bed with a mattress, or to sit in an air-conditioned room. Instead, you lost one of your daughters to America, because she left with her husband’s family in order to give her children (me) something, and in the course of doing that, took herself, your daughter, away from you. In sunny Orange County, in Little Saigon, I see old Vietnamese men and women wandering the shops, drinking coffee, eating pho and playing chess. I know they have their heartbreaks too, but when I think of you in Vietnam, squatting on the ground washing pots in the kitchen, in the dark, my heart breaks a little more. Here in America, we ate 5-course meals at Chinese restaurants with white tablecloths and a wait staff, and told jokes over fortune cookies, paid the check and went home. I know you always made your own food because you were vegetarian, and you ate one dish, and washed the one pot you used to cook it in with your bare hands.
When I came to visit in 2004, it had been ten years and I was twenty year olds. You were older and weaker, but otherwise just as I remembered you. Your house looked identical to what it was ten years ago, even the wooden walls still had the same paint, and the tablecloth was the very same one that was there when I was nine years old. For two nights, I slept with you on the divan, you brought out blankets and put up the mosquito net, like you have been doing every night for so many years. I had fun doing that with you. I thought we could do it again, the next time I visit.
I didn’t write you very many letters when I was growing up in America, too busy fretting about adolescence and fitting in with American life. I didn’t talk about you much to anyone, my friends, and only some of them, just knew I had “a grandma in Vietnam”. You weren’t the most-discussed relative in our family. The only person I ever talked about you with was mom, but then she always seemed so sad when talking about you. So I never discussed, never thought about you at length. I guess some people would be surprised that I was so impacted by your passing. I’m not. My favorite memories of childhood, the deepest and most heartfelt ones were somehow related to you, or related to the things that you came to represent for me. By the standards of a developed, professionalized society like America, you would be insignificant. A woman who only attended the second grade, had no career to speak of, gave birth to six children, lived in a tiny house, was overprotective of her children to the extent that they became afraid of life, who did not forge ahead in livelihood, who was passive. But Grandma, to me, you had the most love and forgiveness of anyone. You were the most simple and accepting and around you, we all felt we would be loved. Now that you're gone, I'm scared that a part of me will die with you, the part that was 10 years old and believed in this love, in this kind of life, the part that holds on to something in Vietnam, because I didn't realize it, but that something was embodied in you.
You make me reflect about my life. Material things and social climbing never seemed to matter that much to you. Maybe I’m romanticizing and maybe they did not matter because you didn’t have it in you to grab them. Still, the fact is you weren’t consumed by them. You just lived a simple life. When others looked down on you, you did not protest but just went on doing as you were. You were so kind, too kind, but still so very kind. You, and your passing, reminds me that life can be best lived without fancy cars, a big paycheck, a powerful position, but instead with quiet dignity. You remind me that life is full of heartbreaks, and that the human condition is made most poignant by these twisting pains. You teach me that chịu khổ is an essential, enlivening part of life. It makes for the most soulful bonds and a kinder existence.
It occurs to me that by many conventional standards, I don’t even know you that well. I don’t know your favorite food, places you would’ve wanted to visit, what your parents were like, where your home village is. I don’t know what your strongest longings were, what would have made you happy. Maybe grandkids are not supposed to know these things about their grandparents. Maybe no one ever asked you. I’d like to know because I want to know if you were happy in your final years. I’d like to know what you thought about when lying in bed those final months. I really want to know that you know you were loved, that someone held your hand, wiped your forehead with gentle care, and did their best to provide you with dignity when it was probably difficult for you to feel any. I guess it’s my way of saying that all these things mattered to me, but I forgot about them until it was too late.
Your passing made me realize that all we want for each other is to be happy. Where I am now, I see many lifepaths ridden with agendas, ambitions, drive. And I also see many misalignments of standards, arguments arising from contradictions between lives separated by continents, age, culture, place and generation. So we argue, we accuse, we try to provide and then we feel hurt when the effort isn’t appreciated as strongly as we expected. But maybe we should just ask. If I had just asked you what made you happy, I could try to give it to you instead of spending my time toiling for something I assume you would want, and then arguing about it. This is also me thinking about my parents. I persuaded myself into thinking I took this job partly for my parents, to make money to provide for them, to make them proud. But what do they want? They are old too, maybe what makes them happy, maybe all they really want, is for their children, for us, to be around. Maybe I took this job for selfish reasons, and I should admit that. Maybe I should realize that my parents’ time is short too, and that these are supposed to be their golden years.
I wish that you had been able to be with my family for just a week or a day. To meet your sons-in-law, to see the house we live in now, to know that your grandchildren are generally happy. Our family is just coming to the stage of its development where it begins to blossom, and I’m so sad that you never got to see that. I am also sad for my sisters to have never gotten the chance to see you since we left Vietnam.
It seems so stupid but I never thought you could die. You are my first experience with death, before you, I never knew that death was so final. I’m sorry I didn’t write you a letter, I’m sorry I didn’t call because I felt awkward. Now you’re gone and it’s forever. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I just wish I had the chance to say something to you, that I love you, “hello”, “goodbye”, anything.
Grandma, I cried at work today when I was typing a memo to a client, because I put on the same Vietnamese music I always listen to and somehow it made me think about you. I cried in the coffee room while microwaving my lunch, I wandered into a conference room and cried, I stared at a white wall and cried. I cried in the most random moments, without any filter or dam or control holding things back. I cried in the cab on the way home. I didn’t want to do any work, I just wanted to bolt out the door and run away, to where I didn’t know, but just to run until I could scream out my anger, my guilt, my sorrow and my grief over your leaving.
More than anything, I want you to be happy. What I fear the most is that you died thinking you had no one, that your life did not matter, that nobody cared about this old woman in a bed in a tiny flat in Saigon, tended to by her widowed, 70-year old daughter. I want you to feel that your life was important, and your suffering and sacrifices were not for nothing, they gave us our lives. I want you to know that I think about you a lot, and I try to remember the things you taught me, not through any words, but just by living your life. I want you to know that even though I never said it, Grandma, I love you.
I woke up this morning at 7am. Just like everyday, I showered and got dressed for work. When I checked my email, I saw a note that said you died yesterday, at 10am Vietnam time. The text of the message seemed so unreal, it stunned me to silence. The emails I get usually announce sales at LL Bean and Banana Republic, was I really hearing about your death through the same medium, on the same screen, with the same gmail graphic interface and font colors? I think I tried to hope it was just another advertisement . . .
Grandma, I cried on the bus on the way to work this morning. Usually I sit on the bus and read the Wall St. Journal, gleaning economic news across the world. Today I just held the paper in my hands and cried, like a little girl. I tried to tell myself that this was inappropriate, crying on a bus full of strangers going to work. It occurred to me that I was on a bus in Chicago, Illinois, in the middle of winter, surrounded by an ordinary day, by twenty-some Americans who thought it was an ordinary day. And that in one seat on this bus, there was a little girl weeping over the death of an old woman in Saigon. That just made me cry more.
At the corner of Clark and LaSalle, I thought about when I was young and you came to visit us. You never brought fancy gifts like other relatives who came who gave us chewing gum or chocolate or a teddy bear. You only brought these little sponge cakes shaped like clam shells, because I think they were all you could afford. I loved those little cakes. When we went to America and mom took me to the Vietnamese supermarket in Little Saigon, I saw those little cakes for 50 cents a pack. I told mom those were “bánh bà ngoại” and brought a whole bunch and didn’t even eat but two. I still don’t know what they’re really called, they’ll always be grandma cakes to me.
I remembered the second days of Tết at your house, how all of my mom’s side would come. You and my aunts made so much food, trays of bánh chưng, bánh tét, sweet cakes, half a dozen kinds of mứt, candies, watermelon, watermelon seeds. I remembered how the bowls at your house were different from the bowls at my dad’s house, they had blue stripes and were darker, with no gold lining and no bright red flowers and made with a thicker, cruder ceramic. Your chopsticks were wooden and not ivory like at my dad’s house. The loft at the top was dark and squeaky when we climbed it. We chuc Tet everyone, ate and told stories to each other. Dì Út would always tease me and my sisters. We laughed a lot. At lunch everyone went out to the little front yard and watched dượng Út light a strip of firecrackers. Pui and Thu and my sisters and I played hopscotch in the front yard. In the afternoon, we ran out to the head of the alleyway to buy a chunk of ice, that would get smashed up into little cubes, and everyone drank a cold glass of water. When it was time to leave, I was always so sad.
The bus was now at State and Washington St, almost at the office. I got off at Monroe and started crying again. “Stop this, stop it,” I rebuked myself, to be crying in the middle of the busy sidewalk, in Chicago, Illinois.
I know that you loved my mom so much, and that you took care of her whenever she was sad about her life. She told me the stories, that when she was sad and overworked and exhausted, you would be sad with her and you would say, “con về nhà má nghỉ nè con”. And when she came home, you took care of her. She could sleep and rest because in your house, she wasn’t a mother of three, a full-time teacher, a wife, a daughter-in-law. You gently protected her like only a mom could protect a daughter. Maybe people were with her when she was happy, but you were always there to endure the heartbreaks and exhaustion with her. You were her mom like she is a mom to me.
Mom often told me that “bà ngoại tội nghiệp lắm con ơi,” because you were a simple person who did not ask for a lot out of life. In the end, you never got the chance to see America, to sleep on a bed with a mattress, or to sit in an air-conditioned room. Instead, you lost one of your daughters to America, because she left with her husband’s family in order to give her children (me) something, and in the course of doing that, took herself, your daughter, away from you. In sunny Orange County, in Little Saigon, I see old Vietnamese men and women wandering the shops, drinking coffee, eating pho and playing chess. I know they have their heartbreaks too, but when I think of you in Vietnam, squatting on the ground washing pots in the kitchen, in the dark, my heart breaks a little more. Here in America, we ate 5-course meals at Chinese restaurants with white tablecloths and a wait staff, and told jokes over fortune cookies, paid the check and went home. I know you always made your own food because you were vegetarian, and you ate one dish, and washed the one pot you used to cook it in with your bare hands.
When I came to visit in 2004, it had been ten years and I was twenty year olds. You were older and weaker, but otherwise just as I remembered you. Your house looked identical to what it was ten years ago, even the wooden walls still had the same paint, and the tablecloth was the very same one that was there when I was nine years old. For two nights, I slept with you on the divan, you brought out blankets and put up the mosquito net, like you have been doing every night for so many years. I had fun doing that with you. I thought we could do it again, the next time I visit.
I didn’t write you very many letters when I was growing up in America, too busy fretting about adolescence and fitting in with American life. I didn’t talk about you much to anyone, my friends, and only some of them, just knew I had “a grandma in Vietnam”. You weren’t the most-discussed relative in our family. The only person I ever talked about you with was mom, but then she always seemed so sad when talking about you. So I never discussed, never thought about you at length. I guess some people would be surprised that I was so impacted by your passing. I’m not. My favorite memories of childhood, the deepest and most heartfelt ones were somehow related to you, or related to the things that you came to represent for me. By the standards of a developed, professionalized society like America, you would be insignificant. A woman who only attended the second grade, had no career to speak of, gave birth to six children, lived in a tiny house, was overprotective of her children to the extent that they became afraid of life, who did not forge ahead in livelihood, who was passive. But Grandma, to me, you had the most love and forgiveness of anyone. You were the most simple and accepting and around you, we all felt we would be loved. Now that you're gone, I'm scared that a part of me will die with you, the part that was 10 years old and believed in this love, in this kind of life, the part that holds on to something in Vietnam, because I didn't realize it, but that something was embodied in you.
You make me reflect about my life. Material things and social climbing never seemed to matter that much to you. Maybe I’m romanticizing and maybe they did not matter because you didn’t have it in you to grab them. Still, the fact is you weren’t consumed by them. You just lived a simple life. When others looked down on you, you did not protest but just went on doing as you were. You were so kind, too kind, but still so very kind. You, and your passing, reminds me that life can be best lived without fancy cars, a big paycheck, a powerful position, but instead with quiet dignity. You remind me that life is full of heartbreaks, and that the human condition is made most poignant by these twisting pains. You teach me that chịu khổ is an essential, enlivening part of life. It makes for the most soulful bonds and a kinder existence.
It occurs to me that by many conventional standards, I don’t even know you that well. I don’t know your favorite food, places you would’ve wanted to visit, what your parents were like, where your home village is. I don’t know what your strongest longings were, what would have made you happy. Maybe grandkids are not supposed to know these things about their grandparents. Maybe no one ever asked you. I’d like to know because I want to know if you were happy in your final years. I’d like to know what you thought about when lying in bed those final months. I really want to know that you know you were loved, that someone held your hand, wiped your forehead with gentle care, and did their best to provide you with dignity when it was probably difficult for you to feel any. I guess it’s my way of saying that all these things mattered to me, but I forgot about them until it was too late.
Your passing made me realize that all we want for each other is to be happy. Where I am now, I see many lifepaths ridden with agendas, ambitions, drive. And I also see many misalignments of standards, arguments arising from contradictions between lives separated by continents, age, culture, place and generation. So we argue, we accuse, we try to provide and then we feel hurt when the effort isn’t appreciated as strongly as we expected. But maybe we should just ask. If I had just asked you what made you happy, I could try to give it to you instead of spending my time toiling for something I assume you would want, and then arguing about it. This is also me thinking about my parents. I persuaded myself into thinking I took this job partly for my parents, to make money to provide for them, to make them proud. But what do they want? They are old too, maybe what makes them happy, maybe all they really want, is for their children, for us, to be around. Maybe I took this job for selfish reasons, and I should admit that. Maybe I should realize that my parents’ time is short too, and that these are supposed to be their golden years.
I wish that you had been able to be with my family for just a week or a day. To meet your sons-in-law, to see the house we live in now, to know that your grandchildren are generally happy. Our family is just coming to the stage of its development where it begins to blossom, and I’m so sad that you never got to see that. I am also sad for my sisters to have never gotten the chance to see you since we left Vietnam.
It seems so stupid but I never thought you could die. You are my first experience with death, before you, I never knew that death was so final. I’m sorry I didn’t write you a letter, I’m sorry I didn’t call because I felt awkward. Now you’re gone and it’s forever. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I just wish I had the chance to say something to you, that I love you, “hello”, “goodbye”, anything.
Grandma, I cried at work today when I was typing a memo to a client, because I put on the same Vietnamese music I always listen to and somehow it made me think about you. I cried in the coffee room while microwaving my lunch, I wandered into a conference room and cried, I stared at a white wall and cried. I cried in the most random moments, without any filter or dam or control holding things back. I cried in the cab on the way home. I didn’t want to do any work, I just wanted to bolt out the door and run away, to where I didn’t know, but just to run until I could scream out my anger, my guilt, my sorrow and my grief over your leaving.
More than anything, I want you to be happy. What I fear the most is that you died thinking you had no one, that your life did not matter, that nobody cared about this old woman in a bed in a tiny flat in Saigon, tended to by her widowed, 70-year old daughter. I want you to feel that your life was important, and your suffering and sacrifices were not for nothing, they gave us our lives. I want you to know that I think about you a lot, and I try to remember the things you taught me, not through any words, but just by living your life. I want you to know that even though I never said it, Grandma, I love you.
posted by Quang Tran at 2:51 AM
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