The Music Stopped

It is 7pm on a Sunday evening. I am having dinner with my parents, before driving back to LA for the week. Mom puts on one of her favorite CD's, the singer Ha Thanh, who has an extremely clear, light and airy voice. I have grown to love this singer's voice as well, as it floats into the air some of my favorite of the old songs, bringing me a sense of familiar home and memories, as well as exquisite beauty within each note. To hear Mom describe Ha Thanh's voice is to see real passion. Mom does not use fancy vocabulary or metaphors to describe, but rather, draws out her normal words and emphasizes with tone, "It's sooo light and each time I hear, it becomes so GOOD and so BEAUTIFUL! Mẹ thấy hay ơơơơơơi là hay, hay QUÁ!".

I ask Mom why I had never heard Ha Thanh among her cassettes when we were still living in Vietnam. Mom says that after 1975, Ha Thanh only sang certain songs that she was allowed to sing, and those were not the songs that Mom loved. Of course, the concept of censorship is not new to me, especially after years of studying and following social movements. But this time, censorship put side by side with Mom's expressive love for this music and its romance, and my own appreciation, it hit me personally. Briefly, I had to imagine how it could be that one day, the music stopped. All the songs you grew up with, fell in love over, cried over, was inspired by, one day they all just stopped. You were not allowed to hear them any more. In the streets, flames were engulfing cassette tapes and books in huge piles. Then what happened? Who were you, and who could you become?

Then, I got in my car and drove off to LA for the week.

Uncle Six

I have seen one picture of Uncle Six. He is a little boy, around eight years old, he looks cute and smart. He is squatting on the ground (to my recollection). I know that Uncle Six died when he was a boy.

Uncle Six was born with a disease. His bones grew faster than his muscles, so that he could not walk very well. Uncle Six only went to first grade. After that, he could not move well enough to walk anymore so he couldn't go to school with the other kids. He stayed home. In the mornings, his mom or sisters carried him out to the living room, where he could sit and watch the neighbors passing by, and listen to the radio. Uncle Six was a smart boy. He read a lot, maybe because he couldn't do anything else, books and newspapers. He would sit there and read. And he drew pictures, just like the ones he saw in the newspaper comics, pictures of people speaking with little speech bubbles, pictures of objects emitting light through lines blasting off their radiance, Uncle Six sat there and drew and drew and drew. When he was eight years old, Uncle Six had surgery. He went to the hospital and they opened up both of his legs and pulled his muscles. He was in the hospital for a year, just eight years old. His Mom moved into the hospital to live with and take care of him. Uncle Six eventually came back home. He wore a metal brace and it helped him to practice walking. He would walk around the house, front to back, back to front. But his legs never recovered and eventually, he could not move anymore. Uncle Six lied in one place, all day, every day. Just lying in one place, his sense of hearing developed into something amazing. Hearing footsteps, he could tell exactly who was coming over to visit. If any object in the house fell out of place, Uncle Six knew where it happened. If something dropped and rolled under the bed, Uncle Six would say, "It's under the bed, in that corner over there", and there they found it. Everyone loved your Uncle Six.

Eventually, his immune system gave up fighting. Uncle Six died on the 29th of December in the Lunar Year, right before Tet, in 1968. It was fortunate that he died that day because we could bury him. The next day, on the 30th, the Communists fought their way all the way into Saigon, and all the roads were shut. In fact, right before that, our neighbor had gone back to his village to visit his mother. There, the communists ambushed that house and shot him. They thought he was someone else, someone in the Southern government that they were looking for, and shot him. Then they said, "No, it isn't him" and sent his body back home to our neighbor's house, right next door. I still remember the neighbor had to do something with the body, but they couldn't bury it. They broke down the front door to their house, and put his body on it, and carried it off on the door to somewhere else.

Deciding

There was a recurring hesitance that could be attributed to fear. It was safer to hold on to the existing, or at least, to passively allow it to exist by simply not speaking the counterfact that if spoken, would immediately and irreversibly change reality. She was in that place. The space that allowed itself to exist, where to use a trite but entirely applicable phrase, "it was easy". She felt like a runner who had rounded the track so many times. The turns were second nature, and putting one foot in front of another was an act as natural as breathing. Now, the thought occurred to stop, a serious thought. But her legs continued to carry her, one in front of the other. She wanted to stop, but also didn't want to stop, wanted to run, but also didn't want to run. Until it became indecipherable exactly what "want" was.

The decision was entirely in her hands. But it was like a heavy rock on the road, it would not fade away or melt away or change shape on its own or through anyone else's energy. No, it required conscious exertion on her part to move. There was no other course of action. Which was, of course, the difficult part. Most difficult because she would be moving it while not knowing what other boulders lay ahead, while only knowing that today, it must be moved. And what about tomorrow? There was no way to figure that out, and the thinking about it continued without reaching conclusions.

But, today, she knows that the rock must move. It will not do to sit idle in the same position for another 365 days, she thought. Her mind and body know.

How terrible would it be to write for 365 days, to self-structure her entire life, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Perhaps it will be terrible. Perhaps it will be wonderful. She could gather herself, spread her mind out in the garden and trace its life, connect its webs, spin to the light something that was only hovering in darkness this whole time. She could hike under the sun, have habits, make investments, read the morning paper, ride her bicycle. The challenge is that all of it will have to be self directed, self created. It will ask her to be not only smart, but also a free and responsible human being, more so than she has ever been.

She did not reach a conclusion. The writing comforted her.