I
Motion sickness runs on my mother’s side of the family.
My three sisters and I have inherited it to varying degrees. The two youngest, Lan and Linh, fight over the passenger seat, arguing over who is more likely to vomit. Lan wins, pointing out that she had yogurt for breakfast. Linh, the baby, grumpily resigns herself to the back declaring, “We’ll switch halfway!”
Two years my junior, Phi settles for the middle seat. Controlling her viewpoint by looking out the windshield, her only request is that anything dangling from the rearview mirror be removed. The swaying movement of air fresheners, beads or baubles reminds her body that it is in motion.
I am the eldest. And as eldest daughters often do, I am able to endure a little bit of suffering. So, I settle into the backseat, crack the window and prepare to concentrate on a sliver of the horizon.
Mom is driving. Shorter than all her daughters, she hops up and pulls herself into the driver’s seat. The car is comically large for our family of petite women. Mom has packed the trunk so full of food and equipment, I ask her, “Are you ok to see out the back?” She nods and starts the engine.
Mom must drive, more sensitive to motion sickness than all of us combined. As long as she is in control, she is impervious to the illness.
Sometimes I wonder how our family developed the ailment. Surely, the only high speed our ancestors would have encountered, farming in rural Vietnam, was on the back of a sauntering water buffalo. Perhaps it was the French, in the later colonial period, who brought over cars and rails. It would have been exhilarating and petrifying for the first of my ancestors to step foot on moving machinery.
But it isn’t man-made movement that proves my family’s worst foe. It is the sea’s unpredictable undulating swells and currents that tested my family’s ability to push through our genetic weakness.
II
Long after the French brought their cars and shortly after the Americans brought their bombs, our Bà nearly died from sea sickness.
Forced to flee their home in Saigon, my grandparents plotted different avenues of escape from a country they no longer recognized. Mom’s two eldest siblings, blessed and burdened with little ones, forged papers to fake a Chinese identity. The Communists were allowing ethnic Chinese to leave Vietnam freely. Ông, grandfather, and Bà, grandmother, reasoned it would be too dangerous for their small grandchildren to be smuggled out of the country. A crying baby could be a death sentence, alerting authorities, or worse…pirates.
And so they traded their savings for forged papers and Mom, Bà, Ông and the rest of her siblings stole away on fishing boats. Packed tightly in a vessel with more people than it should hold, Mom lost the feeling in her legs.
The waves roiled and tossed the small boat as it searched for weeks for someone to rescue them. Perhaps an American Naval ship or a humanitarian group would come to their aid. When they hit the open sea, Bà couldn’t keep any food down. She was so ill, Ông thought she would surely die.
It’s easy to imagine Bà being sick. My whole life I’ve only known her as such.
Growing up, I visited Bà regularly but never had a conversation with her. Bà never learned how to speak English and I never learned how to speak Vietnamese. Chào Bà con về. “Grandma, I’m going home” was the only phrase I ever said, repeated to her, bowing dutifully as I left her house.
Later, the language barrier didn’t matter because Parkinson’s Disease took her voice. Nevertheless, Bà found a way to communicate with me.
With shaking hands and wobbly legs, she grasped my arm – an iron grip, despite her illness. She waited until Mom wasn’t looking and led me to her bedroom where she pointed to a cookie tin. I opened it. Inside was cash and lì xì—lucky red envelopes. Normally reserved for Lunar New Year, Bà kept a stash of the envelopes on hand all year round.
Unsure whether to help, for fear of appearing greedy, I watched painfully as she struggled to grasp the bills. She pressed an envelope into my hands. Không. “No,” I said. Wordlessly, she insisted, pressing harder.
But then Mom found us. Mẹ nó đã có đủ rồi. “Mother, she has enough already!” Mom chided. There was something unnerving about watching my mother scold her own mother. An order in the world, broken. I stood there awkwardly, wondering if I should keep the money.
It wasn’t until Bà was gone that I realized how desperately I wanted to know her. I never asked her about her life, how it felt leaving Vietnam on a small fishing boat. What was she thinking as the motion sickness consumed her? Did she regret leaving home? I only know what Mom, my aunts, and uncles have told me.
Born in Hanoi, Northern Vietnam to bamboo mat weavers, Bà was fifteen when she married. She never went to school and was raised a devout Catholic. By World War II she had borne six little boys. When the Japanese invaded and dumped the rice into the sea, one by one, five of her little boys died from famine. Only my uncle, the second eldest, survived.
When the Communists claimed victory, driving out the French, she fled south with her family to the safety of Saigon. She had five more children and opened a successful bookstore with Ông. Safe at last.
But then the Americans failed her and she watched as her children’s schools were shut down, as inflation, poverty and the growing threat of re-education camps ravaged South Vietnam. So, for the second time, she left everything behind and fled her home. Which brought her here – to this country. The country that would give her grandchildren who only know how to say, Chào Bà con về. “Grandma, I’m going home.”
III
My head presses against the cool glass of the car window. Phi has fallen asleep, head bopping softly to the rhythm of the road. Mom is playing a Celine Dion album in French. The barren landscape whizzes by as we accelerate down the highway. So much nothingness.
Movement and migration are part of the human story, whether forced or otherwise. Pushed and pulled by the forces of power-hungry men, Bà was coerced into motion, unable to achieve the stagnation her body craved. And then she succumbed to an illness that confined her to a corporal prison and a country that wasn’t her own. She sacrificed so much to bring her children to safety. To have grandchildren born into a safe land. Even if that land was home to the men who caused hers so much destruction.
But if the French hadn’t colonised, if the Japanese hadn’t butchered, if the Communists hadn’t persisted, if the Americans hadn’t betrayed, would I even exist?
I was Bà and Ông’s first mixed grandchild. Peering into my bassinet those first few hours after I was born, they took stock of what parts of me were theirs. Thick black hair carpeting my cone-shaped head, large dark brown eyes and yellow-tinged skin confirmed that I, too, was a descendant of dragons and faeries.
As Vietnam’s creation myth goes, Âu Cơ was an immortal mountain fairy, a gentle healer who tended to the sick and weary. Lạc Long Quân was a dragon lord who claimed dominion over the sea. Having fallen in love, the unlikely pair settled in a land nestled between the mountains and the sea, bearing children who would become the Vietnamese.
Like my mythical ancestors before me, I was also the product of an unlikely pairing.
Mom is the youngest child in her family. When she arrived in the United States as a girl of sixteen, it was fall 1979. Kentucky’s mid-western foliage blanketed the streets in vibrant gold, amber and ruby. Having never experienced four seasons, Mom marvelled at the changing leaves. She was determined to change too.
Learning English was difficult. Those hard consonant sounds, especially after ‘Ws’, stuck in her mouth like a gelatinous dessert. She was jealous of the white girls in her high school, whose cheeks prettily blushed pink, until she learned their trick of applying rouge. She acquired a taste for fried chicken and triumphantly claimed her first pair of leather cowboy boots from a pile of donations for refugees. Enchanted by this new culture, Mom vowed to transform into an American.
The transformation was nearly complete when she found herself an American husband. Dad was a mustachioed, hazel-eyed country boy from Ohio, towering over her at six feet tall. Gentle and goofy, he relished in teaching Mom new English words, especially bad ones. In return, she taught him how to order at Vietnamese restaurants.
They had met at work. Mom, now living with her family in California, was employed to clean fish tanks at a marine science institute. Dad, a scientist raising sea urchins for genetic research, was charmed by Mom’s mischievous sense of humor. She was studying biology, one of the first in her family to attend college, and Dad helped to edit her papers in English.
The fairy had found her dragon.
I was born at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century—a century that witnessed endless conflict. Civil wars tore countries apart, a few revolutions found success, and two world wars claimed millions of lives. Violence and upheaval paved the path to my existence.
With practiced hands, Bà plucked me from my bassinet. She and Ông examined me closely. There it was. Extending between my eyes was the unmistakable bridge of a Western nose.
IV
Mom pulls off the freeway. Dust billows around the car, crunching the gravel, as it grinds to a halt. Phi’s eyes flicker open as she yawns and stretches. Lan and Linh hastily unclick their belts, scrambling to be free. I hear the pop of the gas cap. “I’ll fill her up,” I offer.
The gas station sits lonely on the terrain. Uniform lines of steel and concrete contrast the jagged beige hills and cacti. Tumbleweed skitters by, just like in the movies.
Leaning against the car, I watch Linh skip out of the shop, iced tea in hand. She crosses the parking lot with a girlish gait and pauses to pet what must be the gas station’s resident cat.
Now at the height of her adolescence, I watch in painful recognition as she discovers her otherness alongside her unwieldy changing body. Her dark green eyes, pale skin, mousy brown hair and smattering of freckles belie half our heritage.
“No one believes Mom is my mom,” she confided in me once. It’s an experience different from mine. I’ve typically walked through the world without having to explain myself. But Linh’s white-presenting features have forced her to assert her identity.
Last year, Linh developed a crush on a boy at school. His wavy blonde hair, bleached by the California sun, and lean tanned body was reminiscent of the men she idolized in her surf magazines. On the playground she watched from a distance as he peacocked. His alpha status was earned by his ability to shove other boys to the ground and kick a ball as high and far as his pubescent body could make it go. Captured by his confidence, Linh felt that unexplained stir of attraction. Primal. An instinct drew her to him, yet she was unable to summon the courage to speak to him.
One night after softball practice Linh’s phone lit up. Sk8er05 is following you. A message appeared in her inbox:
so do u like me or wut?
Her heart raced. Taking a deep breath, her thumbs hungrily pecked at the glass screen like ravenous sparrows.
ya kinda i guess
Three dots blinked on…then off.
do u eat dog?
i heard u r a rice face slut
V
Dusk purples the desert sky. The last bars of orange light recede behind the mountainous horizon. Mom squints at the road ahead. There’s a couple hours left of our journey.
“Stick on the headlights,” I suggest. The dashboard flashes on, knobs and buttons glowing green. Road signs reflect back an otherworldly halo. Mom leans forward, shifting in her seat. She glances back at me and hesitantly asks, “Do you think you can drive?”
The rest stop is empty. Only the fluorescent illumination radiating from a vending machine offers light in the growing darkness. Mom leaves the car running, headlights trained on a vacant concrete bathroom marked with a female pictogram.
“I can’t go in there. It’s so creepy,” Lan whines. Phi rolls her eyes, “I’ll go with you but if I get murdered too, I swear.” The pair scurry towards the building nervously.
Mom presses a button and the trunk yawns open. The careful work of Tetrised luggage threatens to topple over. Shimmying out a cooler wedged amidst the pile, she removes a plastic-wrapped tray of food that we picked up earlier that morning, driving through Little Saigon.
Aromatic sweet rice perfumes the air. Mom offers me a spoon. We lean against the car and snack on the sticky orange treat. Linh, lured out of the car by the intoxicating scent, joins in. Twinkling stars begin to appear as the sky deepens to a midnight blue.
The road is quiet. My hands grip the wheel as I navigate the increasingly winding path. Mom is holding a bottle of green liquid up to her nostrils. The tiny glass bottle is a staple of Eastern medicine, with a promise to cure headaches, upset stomach and aching joints. Its pungent eucalyptus aroma permeates the enclosed space.
We’re climbing the mountain now. The car snakes through rock, hugging the sheer cliff face. Mom’s head is lolling. Clutching the green bottle tightly, she takes deep audible breaths. “Mom, are you ok?” I ask. She shakes her head. “There’s nowhere to pull over,” I panic.
We have no choice but to keep moving. Lan grabs an empty bag and places it in Mom’s lap. I attempt to smoothly navigate the twisting road but it has been laid out before us. There’s no escaping the curves and bends. Mom moans.
We are trapped in the inertia that has propelled our family. A force so strong, our ancestors could not fight the collective will of those who cranked the lever, spun the wheel, shovelled the coal, displaced the water, pushed the pedal. We are in motion and there’s no way to stop.
Mom retches. The mingled smell of sweet rice, eucalyptus and bile fill the car. She sighs, defeated.
“Do you feel better?” I ask. She closes her eyes. I roll down her window. The cool night air expels the stench. “We’re nearly there,” I assure her.
And we are compelled forward. Always forward.
Brigid Leahy is a Vietnamese-Irish-American playwright, screenwriter and actor originally from Orange County, California and currently based in Dublin, Ireland. She is the co-writer and co-producer of the award-winning short film Good Chips, which went on to receive the Writer’s Guild of Ireland Zebbie Award for Best Short Film script and Best Short Film at the 2023 Viet Film Festival. The feature film adaptation of Good Chips received development funding from Screen Ireland and was selected for Black List x CAPE. In 2024, she was awarded the Irish Arts Council Theatre Project Award for her play DADDY ISSUES. She holds a B.A. in History from UCLA and M.Phil in Public History and Cultural Heritage from Trinity College Dublin. www.brigidleahy.com
