In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you.
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.
—Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart
I remember the first time I told her I didn’t want kids, that I
could not imagine myself in that role. She asked me, who
will take care of you when you’re older? I explained to her
that, to me, having kids is like being shot in the foot right
before you run a marathon: you never had a chance.
Did we ever have a chance Mom?
I would want to do it right or not do it at all and there is no
right so I’m taking myself out of the running. It was a
choice, one I had made long before I dared to utter it aloud.
What did you used to tell me? “You only have one mother.”
It’s a simple fact but it’s also a warning.
And then she said, will you take care of me when I’m
older?
I will. You know I will. You know I will, right?
That’s the problem. Daughterhood was always posited to
me as a return on investment–a debt that I had to start
repaying the second my body separated from hers. A belief
that a daughter is only as good as she gives. A reminder
that I am not owed love but, in fact, owe it. And who
deserves that fate? What child deserves a clawing monster
in her throat that whispers: more, more, more!
Did you not feel this way with your mother? Have you not
already paid the price of daughterhood? Does the world
need another girl without a mother? Can’t we stop this
cycle in the name of mercy?
My grandmother: the woman I only knew through half-spoken words and whispered truths. The woman I have only met in my dreams. The woman who I can only remember through my mother. A living memory. A walking ghost. Her name means snow. I wonder if she knew what would happen.1 How the cards would lay, how the snow would fall. I wonder if she meant to be gentle and pure but found herself burning when she hit the pavement. I wonder if she convinced herself she did the best she could.
My grandmother, the woman whose story I already know:
When she was young, Tuyết always turned her face away from the sun, for it was too bright, too harsh, too searing on her white face. She learned this from her mother whose darkened skin served as proof of the sun’s ability to char and melt. Tuyết was her family’s way out: she was the fairest girl in the village, a beautiful white flake on brown ground. A girl like that can marry rich. A girl like that will not have to spend the rest of her life burning in heat.
Under the shade of a palm tree, she looks out to the paddy fields. Her mother is bent in half, looming over the stalks, almost as if she was praying to her reflection in the murky waters, a shadowed face floating amidst bright clouds. She watches as her mother’s hands reach out and pick a handful of rice and place it in a basket and on and on and on like that–a lifetime spent bent over yourself to feed another. Little Tuyết promised herself then and there that her life would be different, but she rolls up her pant legs and mimics her mother. She reaches out, picks a handful of rice and puts it in the basket. Then she picks another handful and stuffs it into her pocket. That night, she’ll stay up later than she should, removing brown kernels from green jackets, whispering a little prayer into every grain and laying them out on her windowsill. When she wakes up she’ll wonder why the grains are still dirty, why the sun could not blanch them into the white kernels she always ate. Little does she know that white rice is an anomaly, a feat of engineering. All white rice starts out as brown rice. The grains are sheared into empty husks to be stripped to their color. This milling process increases the shelf life but removes so much nutrition that it must be artificially refortified, its worth had to be put back in. Not understanding this, Tuyết crushes the kernels in her palm and throws them out the window. She will take this as a sign and curse the sun. For she knows its power; she has seen white colonels wrapped in green jackets drop from the sun and land in the paddy fields.
Later, she will meet a boy who, too, saw what she saw and tried to blanche himself in the sun. She will marry this dirty, brown boy who wrapped himself in green and tried to fly to the sun. The boy, never having read the myth of Icarus, will still fall into the same fate: he will betray his father all the same and fly toward a bright white light that burns him.
Tuyết, never having read the myth of Helen, will still fall into the same fate: the face that launched a thousand ships that will carry her, her husband and their two daughters to strange and hostile shores. There, they live as four empty husks, baking themselves in the sun to try and bring back what little color they had left.
What a gift it is to believe that we are born alone and we die alone.
That someone, something out there owes me unalienable rights?
That maybe, in a different world, I was born in credit.
It feels like you own me but I look down and my feet are
free. Did you ever worry that I would run away? Where
would I have to go?
I will not believe in fate or destiny or obligation or boundedness. I
will untangle our fates. I will turn my back on her and rewrite this
destiny I see us so clearly heading into. We will be alone,
untouched, untethered to anything that could hurt us.
I wanted to look in another direction but somehow, I am
always looking at you. Was this always to be our fate?
Indebted to each other? Indebted to the world? I think it
hurts too much, Mom. Is it supposed to hurt this much?
Our bodies will be etched into the stained-glass windows of a
church just so someone could grovel at our feet, pray to us for
forgiveness.
Were you and I always destined to be you and I?
I will untether myself to everyone and everything and open myself
up to the gentle indifference of the world.
Mom, did you bind your feet to free mine?
And I will call this freedom, even though I know it is a lie.
Mom, I think I have become so blinded by the glare of my
own beacon that I can no longer see you on the horizon. I
told myself I was alone but every time I look at my hands, I
mistake them for yours.
I want to believe differently, to think otherwise, but that makes me
feel like a mad scientist: contaminating test tubes to obtain the
desired result. And if I must solely see things clinically, then dear
God, let me find the cure. Allow me the distinction of being the
first to discover how to hold myself, then my mother, then
everyone else.
Mom, all I am is you. But how can I tell you this in my
broken Vietnamese? What if you hear it in your broken
English? How must you hear my words? How can I get you
to understand me? How do I get back to you?
I have never heard my grandmother’s story but I think I can remember it being told to me.
I have never touched my grandmother’s hands but I think I can remember them on my cheeks. I have never felt my grandmother’s lips but I think I can remember them on my forehead.
I have never felt my grandmother’s arms but I think I can remember them wrapped around me.
I can remember being loved because my mother was loved.
This was a love that was owed to me and I can still feel its phantoms.
I know I owe love because my mother owes love.
I know I am owed love because my mother was owed love.
1 “On April 29, 1975, North Vietnamese troops shelled Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base. U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin then ordered the evacuation of Saigon. As a signal to Americans in Saigon that the evacuation had begun, Armed Forces Radio started to play ‘White Christmas’ on repeat.” https://diplomacy.state.gov/stories/fall-of-saigon-1975-american-diplomats-refugees/.
Vi To is a graduate of Vassar College with a Bachelor’s Degree of Arts in Political Science and Drama. She was born in Sài Gòn and spent the first six years of her childhood there. After writing her thesis at Vassar called “American Abridgements: Writing With and Against the Archive of My Mother, My Motherland, My Mother Tongue,” Vi is currently working out how to tell her mother that she is a writer (and also be one). You can find more of her writing on, of course, on Substack: https://vituongto.substack.com.
