Inexplicably, I was haunted by a puddle of sand.
In the Connecticut town where my mother lived, close to where I had grown up, a small bit of sidewalk dipped and crumbled. I had stepped around it on holiday or birthday visits, a thing unworthy of note.
Before the pandemic, my mother and I took walks. A temporary truce to our bickering, physical activity, and fresh air made us better. After a row of lichened maples, we’d pass over this rundown and sandy patch before looping cul-de-sacs and slipping quickly past the cemetery on a hill. The quiet grave markers made my mother nervous because she believed in ghosts.
The sidewalk was a sidewalk. Unmemorable. Yet my mind had fixated on this deteriorating asphalt bank ever since I started to make a string of phone calls to my mother in March 2020 about the coronavirus. Normally for important matters, I would make the two-hour commute from Brooklyn to her low-income housing unit to explain things in person. But with the lockdown, I resorted to dialing my mother with almost daily reminders to use hand sanitizer, wash her hands obsessively, and call immediately if she developed a dry cough with a fever. Nonplussed, my mother complained the YMCA was closed. She missed swimming her laps.
“I’m not going to stay cooped up inside,” she told me on the phone one late afternoon. “Everyone’s out walking.”
“You need to at least wrap a scarf around your face,” I said, gazing out my home office window and watching dusk creep over the neighboring brownstones. “Mom, you should walk only where there aren’t a lot of people.”
“But no one is wearing a mask!” she yelled. “You can’t stop me from walking!”
No one was trying to stop her, I repeated. This was a point we retreaded, our communication a rut. You can’t stop me, she insisted before hanging up.
I had been the one who hung up the time before. My sister also phoned with reminders, so my mother must have felt we were harassing her. But until I had confirmation that she took COVID seriously, communication became a stand-off usually until one was left listening to the dial tone. After these seemingly futile phone calls, the sidewalk materialized in my head.
Communication between me and my mother has always been fraught for two reasons. First, English wasn’t her first language, but it was the only one we shared. More so, we often lacked a common cultural context. She emigrated to America forty-five years ago from an ethnic minority Montagnard hamlet in Vietnam. The life she had been born into was one of tending crops and animals, where a fifth-grade education sufficed. Like many first-gen kids, I grew up translating signs, forms, and reformulating what the bank teller said. But only later, as an adult, would I begin to understand how much our miscommunication—and strife!—depended on my assumptions that we shared the same knowledge about the same things.
Example: over the phone with my mother already riled up and rowdy, how do I convey that she needs to maintain six feet from others? Could I assume she was familiar with the size of one foot? Sure, Vietnam followed the metric system, but could I assume any standardized measurement had been useful to her specifically?
Our second communication barrier was schizophrenia and the disorientation that came with it. My mother was diagnosed after my sister, and I were well into adulthood, although I had been a kid when I learned how her eyes darting quickly to the side meant that she was listening to voices only she could hear. Schizophrenia affected cognition and her ability to arrive at rational cause-and-effect conclusions. I’d lose patience when our conversations looped endlessly.
*
I phoned my mother again a few days later.
“It was packed!” she said, giddiness in her voice as she described her trip to Trader Joe’s. But as is often the case, when my mother tries to assure me that all is well and normal, I’m cycling through panic and dread. Immediately, I pictured my mother wandering around for hours, attention utterly scattered. The usual Trader Joe’s trip was a feat of executive functioning for anyone with its carefully calculated array of shiny products in tropical palettes, inviting samples, and free shots of caffeine. That extra layer of awareness needed in the era of COVID—the hypervigilance to avoid touching the face or quickly rubbing her eye—would be for my mother an impossibility. Ordering her groceries was a thing I couldn’t afford either.
The wind blustered outside my window in Brooklyn, dampening the constant wail of ambulance sirens momentarily. The spiraling blackhole of what-ifs made it impossible for me to sit. I paced. The image of the sidewalk reappeared. I remembered it as a bottleneck, a somatic memory of bodily tension. Before the pandemic, I had watched my mother, unaware and spacey, amble along this uneven patch many times as other strollers tried to pass around us quickly. One or two huffed impatiently. Was I conflating that tension with a new one? Was I worried about her physical proximity to someone with COVID? Or was it something else?
She didn’t look East Asian, I reassured myself. The people in her predominately white and wealthy town might mistake her for Indian, Dominican, or Hawaiian because of her darker skin. Inevitably, my mind went there and weighed the possibility that she would be perceived as Asian in a time of anti-Asian racism while living in a town where she was already highly visible—and refused to wear a mask.
Half white, I had grown up ambivalent about identity until I embraced Asian American-ness boldly in college. And yet, here I was, meek in my hope that my mother was undetectable as an Asian person. When mysterious dents and a cracked windshield suddenly appeared on her car last year, she paid for quick repairs, afraid of what people might think of the unsightly damage to her 1995 Nissan. Did the sidewalk haunt me, or was it the feeling of being powerless to aggression around her? Was the scary, invisible thing in the air the coronavirus? Or was it the volatility of fear as an emotion and how it could suddenly expand like gas in a bottle ready to pop, a reactivity that found its release in violence?
And what about how easily I abandoned my sense of identity and community in the face of racism, the knee-jerk response to a threat, and a predictable story of divide and conquer? Was that not a thing to fear also?
My mother survived war. But survival in America meant comprehending quickly when and where one was unwelcome, subtle indicators I had learned to watch for. Being my divorced mother’s eldest daughter and begrudgingly her protector, quietly and in-person, I wanted to explain to that the last thing to fear was the cemetery’s ghosts.
Denial of her condition is one of my mother’s symptoms while being a reluctant caretaker afflicts me. I’ve tried to rid myself of resentment through reflective writing—and, back when I could afford it, therapy. As a kid, I remember my mother’s talk about secret trysts and saboteurs based on the colors of the car passing by our old house. In the whine of car motors, she heard voices speaking specific warnings. I was eleven when I became the object of her paranoia, when home turned into crumbling ground.
The shifting and unsettling emotions of the pandemic gripped me with a similar hypervigilance and anxiety—twin feelings of a childhood trauma as fixed and familiar as family.
*
In late April of 2020, we spoke again. My mother said she saw a person wearing a mask. She had been watching the news, and the ceaseless coverage of the coronavirus seemed to sink in. I had asked a manager of her building to explain basic guidelines and had a friend call her. My boyfriend spoke to her briefly about wearing a mask and avoiding frequent trips to the store because, in a fit of frustration, I quickly passed the phone to him to avoid hanging up.
It helped to hear from people aside from my sister and me. That others cared. Asking for that kind of assistance doesn’t come easily but that was another blockage, a self-inflicted one, I needed to break through.
Ten minutes into the phone call, I started to explain the meaning of contagious.
“Can we talk about something else?” my mother asked.
“Only if you promise you’ll wear something over your face when you go out,” I said.
“I am!” she said. “I wear a scarf.”
It seemed insufficient, but I let it go. Then she told me how her new thing was to turn at the fence, just past the puddling sidewalk, and enter the cemetery. She walked the loop and there was plenty of space for others to get their exercise, too. She was trying to assure me she wasn’t in danger. Picturing her, I wondered about her fear of ghosts.
“Weren’t you scared?”
“No, I wasn’t!” she chirped. “I am so surprised with myself!”
Contributor’s Bio
H’Rina DeTroy is a Brooklyn-based Montagnard American writer. She was the recipient of the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundations Winter 2020 Grant in Literature, and the 2019 Emerging Writer Fellowship at Aspen Word in Memoir. Roxane Gay selected her essay The Vengeance of Elephants for the 2017 Curt Johnson Prose in Creative Nonfiction in December Magazine. An adjunct instructor in New York City, she curates and leads private workshops including the ground-breaking writing workshop Apocalypse Never: Writing Our Origin Stories and Imaginative Futures as Montagnard Americans. In the same spirit of Apocalypse Never, she created Multi-Verses: Writing Our Immigrant Origin Stories, a workshop beginning early May. Check out https://www.hrinadetroy.com/for more info, including access to a sample workshop.
