Listen, Slowly: Chapters 1–7

One little glance would encourage another diatribe about connecting with my roots. They’re his roots, not mine.

Dad goes to Vietnam every summer already, but he’ll be too busy hiking toward the most remote mountain to set up a one-man surgical clinic to fix cleft palates and acute burns.

Every June, the chosen kids and their extended families travel for days to reach his clinic, forsaking their crops and animals.

There’s no way Ông is alive. I’m being logical here. Bà can be wishy-washy, and Dad can indulge her all he wants, but facts are facts.

Every year, they still do a ceremony for The Day Saigon Fell. It’s been thirty-five years, still...solemn faces, solemn faces.

Even if Ông were still alive, and that’s a gargantuan if, wouldn’t he have found Bà by now? As a man of science, Dad will have to concede to the only rational choice left: sending me and Bà home.

I can’t help that my voice does a sassy singsong.
“Don’t talk like a girl with a runaway tongue, you know better.”

We will land in Vietnam, Ông will not be there to greet us, we will cry and light some incense, then home home home.

Her hair is mostly white now, really thin, she’s seventy-nine, you know, so the onion at her nape, what she calls her bun, is much smaller than the ones I used to make with her hair before napping with her.

The dress, knee-length and split to the waist to create cumbersome back and front panels, is worn with flowy silk pants and high heels.

And why does every employee look like they just stepped out of a magazine? All clean and sleek and poised.

Actually, anyone with big boobs would look ridiculous in a demure yet body-hugging áo dài, designed for slim frames.

I tried to be relentless but charming in my questioning, like the reporter I might be one day, but Mom looked like she might cry, and she never cries, then Dad shooed me away.

I would have to be rolling on the ground, flames sprouting out my ears, blood shooting out my nostrils for him to give me a modicum of sympathy.

Away from the airport, it’s green and more green rice paddies.

There’s no reason for him to get uppity. He’s been thinking about Vietnam and its many confusing parts way longer than I have.

We’re all in one tiny room in an antiquated hotel because Dad feels guilty living in luxury.

Dad keeps trying to interrupt but the detective can’t control the hundreds of words gushing from his mouth. Bà is enthralled.

I should have kept learning Vietnamese. But who knew I’d be listening to Bà's most important conversation ever through a cordial yet incomprehensible prune?

“I think you’re going to love it. Now before I let you go, your SAT word for the day is one of my favorites. Ephemeral, e-p-h-e...”

Mom and Bà love Scarlett O’Hara. So do all Vietnamese women, according to this other PBS documentary where a professor talks about how the whole country is obsessed with love, war, suffering, and resilience.

Of course, I could only buy food that was cooked, nothing raw or washed in unboiled water. Dad has gone on and on about how my stomach needs time to acclimate to local bacteria, parasites, worms, what have you.

I already had to endure a tetanus shot and a malaria pill as big as my thumb.

I will not, I mean it, I will not touch my fingers to my face, which Mom has admonished me against since birth.

Our passenger door opens and someone lifts Bà into a padded, high-backed wicker chair.

Are the villagers clairvoyant? Am I giving off some signal?

Someone else asks, “Are you obedient?”
It’s so annoying when people ask questions with preconceived answers. The man should just come out and say, “I expect you to listen to your parents or you’ll shame every ancestor going back four thousand years of Vietnamese history.”

In the backyard, Út sits with her pet under a pergola-like frame covered with vines of bitter melons.

She holds up my right arm and meticulously rubs the ointment on each pink dot.

But I can’t reason with Bà about Tiger Balm, which she has anointed with the power to blast away headaches, backaches, joint aches, stomachaches, nausea, seasickness, carsickness, burns, bites, gas, congestion...just to name a few.

I quickly stick my finger into the jar, scoop out a pungent glob and pretend to rub it on my bites.

But the third day, four men with muscles like twisted laundry carried me in a palanquin to his parents' door.

I pushed an armoire against the door and sat on the floor counting the thumps from my heart.

Mom packed for me, all capris, as I was too busy seething.

I actually kiss the cell. I should have known Mom would find a way to circumvent Dad’s ban on anything electronic, as not to show off.

“Good aft’noon, miss. My name is Minh. I would be honored to serve as your translator if you can forgive my incompetent English. I am studyin’ on scholarship and will return as a junior to a boardin’ high school near Houston. As you can witness, I am still in the learnin’ stage.”

“The men who do not want or cannot get jobs in the city or in the government live and work there, and boys who do not pass the rigorous test into a city high school train there. That way no male finds idle time.”

“The men who do not want or cannot get jobs in the city or in the government live and work there, and boys who do not pass the rigorous test into a city high school train there. That way no male finds idle time.”

Inside, on tile, dozens of dogs with lolling tongues lie half asleep.

There’s no word for teenager in Vietnamese, miss. Numbers in English go from ten to eleven to twelve, then thirteen, fourteen. So the jump from twelve to thirteen has cultural plus spellin’ ramifications. But in Vietnamese, we say ten, then ten one, ten two, ten three, ten four, so there’s no change.