My mom and I have always butted heads. At least, until the pandemic occurred.
A month after the world shut down and we were all suddenly forced to quarantine, I began taking my mom to a local food pantry. Located on the northeast side of town, this was a pantry that she used to visit with her friend Nhung. Once a month, she told me, they drove to this pantry together to get food, which normally consisted of a variety of things that she didn’t particularly eat—macaroni pasta, Rice-a-Roni, canned beans and peaches, boxes of generic cereal—but no matter. They went and it was an experience, for neither one of them knew what they’d get. The joy of discovery was enough. However, they stopped going when she got cancer and had to go in for chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
Around the same time, she’d gotten a coveted spot at a senior housing facility. It was fall of 2019 when we helped her move in to a 500 square foot apartment that she’d been waiting for three years. Built in the early 90s (or perhaps 2000s, I’ll never know), the apartment itself looked like it hadn’t been updated at all since it was built. Laminate flooring. Gray linoleum countertops. Popcorn ceilings. Beige walls that made it appear darker than it actually was. Wooden beams around the edges of doors. Those sliding wooden closets. A small refrigerator.
Still, the apartment was a first for my mom. Ever since my dad passed away, my mom had been living with various people and their families. She was without a permanent address for a long time. Now, you’re probably wondering why she didn’t live with me or my brothers. Well, she did. She lived with all of us at one point or another, but soon we all realized that she was a difficult person to live with. She had her own particular quirks and flaws, like everyone else, but she was more vocal about it. The longest she ever lasted was my brother Long’s apartment—that was about two years, until she got fed up with something. I never knew why.
So everyone in her immediate circle breathed a sigh of relief when she finally got her own apartment, one that she can actually afford. Unfortunately, her moving in also coincided with her diagnosis. Thus, she stopped going to the food pantry with her friend. Six months later, in April 2020, she was done. Everything had gone well. Her doctors were optimistic when her tests came back clear. She was a tough woman and it showed.
Of course, I did not know how tough she was, physically or emotionally, because I never really talked about it with her. You see, in Vietnamese culture (and possibly in other Asian cultures as well), we embrace our pain and discomfort on the inside. Sure, we groan and moan about our aching bodies and how that makes us feel, but overall, you never talk deeply about any mental issues if you have one. And you certainly do not sit around and ponder why you got cancer and if it was ever going to come back.
Thus, once she got clearance from the doctors, my mom wanted to go back to the food pantry. At the time, I’d just lost my cushy accounting job at an engineering company (of course, I did not tell her this; I let her assume that I was working from home). My feelings about my mom were at best, blasé and at worst, indignant. At her doctors’ suggestion, she’d stopped driving, which she was not happy about. My mom has always relished in the independence that driving affords you. “You can go anywhere anytime,” she said back in the day when I was still learning how to drive. “And nobody can you tell you otherwise!” she added.
Undeterred, I was not convinced. I took my time getting my drivers’ license, which only frustrated her even more. How on earth did I manage to fail when she’d paid for one of the best (Vietnamese) driving instructors in town? Why, oh why? She called it a wash.
I finally got my license, though, when I was twenty four. The subsequent years I hardly ever went to see her. This was because I could not keep track of where she was living. It seemed like she moved every six months to a year. Our distance became greater the more she moved. While she kept moving, I stayed put in my own apartment for years.
Fast forward to April 2020, she was living in her new apartment and there was an influx of food, she told me. She’d heard that many organizations were donating. So she asked me to take her to the pantry, and I agreed because I had more time on my hands. On days when my husband was home with the kids, I’d drive her to the pantry, which by this time, was very busy. We lined up with the other cars outside and waited for thirty minutes, sometimes longer.
While we waited in the car together, silence ensued. At first, we didn’t talk much. We just stared into the distance while we listened to classical Vietnamese music that I’d queued up on Spotify for her. Every once in a while, though, she’d drop a few words here and there. Once, we talked about life insurance. Another time, we talked about my kids and how they were doing at home.
Very platonic, I know.
But somehow, we kept coming back. Soon, I was taking her to the grocery store every Saturday, and I’d bring my kids along. We formed a tradition of going both to an Asian supermarket and a regular one like WinCo. Soon, we grew more comfortable in each other’s company and began to talk more. Every once in a while, she’d drop bits of information about her youth in our conversations. She’d tell me about her mom, who’d died suddenly from a car accident when she was in her early twenties, or stories about my dad, or what she did to feed her family back in those days in postwar Vietnam. But I never felt comfortable talking about my dad. This is because the grief is too much to bear, and I didn’t want to bring up the past. I didn’t want to think about what could have been.
Anyway, I assumed that she didn’t want to talk about my dad either. It wasn’t until I heard a call out for an essay contest sponsored by a local magazine that I decided I wanted to know more about my dad. After all, I knew very little about his youth. What was he like before I was born? What kind of a husband was he? What kind of dreams did he have?
So on a December afternoon, two years after she moved into her apartment, I finally mustered up the courage to call my mom and ask her to tell me their story. And she told me, alright. It was like the floodgates had been opened. She went on for almost an hour about everything (or almost everything) that happened when they were in their twenties and thirties. It was a very precarious time in their lives. My mom’s story is so intertwined with my dad’s story that it was hard to distinguish one story without thinking about the other.
My reaction bordered between shock, surprise and awe. Just hearing the story from my mom’s point of view helped me understand the complicated woman on the other end of the line. Finally, I understood why she was so adamant about keeping our religion, why she wanted me to get my drivers’ license so quickly, why she was so frugal and uptight sometimes, why she didn’t want me to study fashion design in college.
Now that I know my parents’ story, I realized that our relationship has been primarily based on misunderstanding. I didn’t understand her because I didn’t really know her.
A lot of things get lost in trenches when we don’t stop to listen to other people’s stories. But once we know, it becomes clearer why that person is the way they are. I thought about this as I was reemerging from NaNoWriMo, where I spent a month writing 50,000 words of a very bad novel. At the time, I didn’t know what exactly the kind of story I wanted to write. So I wrote something just for the experience. Once I learned of my parents’ story, it became very clear that this was the story I’m meant to write.
Ever since January 6th, I’ve been waking up early to write a novel, a work of fiction based on my parents’ story. Trying to write a novel when you have other responsibilities is not easy. Waking up at 4 a.m. is not easy. Even waking up at 5 a.m. is not easy, but I feel a responsibility to this story, a kinship to it. I’m afraid that if I don’t tell this story, no one else will. Someday, my mom will no longer be around, and her story will be lost forever, and that would be a tragedy. Their story touches on many pivotal moments in history, and it is only on the page that it can live, where it should live. I’m putting a fictional spin on it to make it slightly more exciting and showcase the beauty of the country that I come from, the country so damaged by war, but one that I’m proud to be born into.
Speaking of stories…
While we’re on the subject of daughters telling their mothers’ stories, here’s what my daughter Lily wrote about me, based on her dad’s prompt: “Write a nice story about mom.” Everything is 100% true, by the way :)
In case you missed it…
Question of the week:
What kind of family stories do you tell? Or do you not tell any at all? Have you ever sat down and listened to someone in your family tell a story from their perspective? If so, what did you learn about them? If not, why not? Reply and let me know!