On an American billboard in 1975, two hands are cracking a white egg against a black backdrop, the yolk glistens mid-flight, identical in hue to the golden arches printed beside it.
Mid-flight, my father absently stares at his brother’s leg, which may or may not contain a bullet wound.
Though he is sitting still, he is moving faster than he ever has before.
* * *
Back in his homeland, half of me exists inside an egg my mother hasn’t yet expelled.
Together, we are rounded up, moving north to a reeducation camp.
Where she will encounter gruel instead of cháo. Flies instead of rice.
* * *
The flies gather around her bowl like photojournalists racing to the execution of a Việt Cộng officer on the streets of Chợ Lớn.
* * *
Chợ Lớn, or “big market,” is the largest Chinatown in the world.
Despite Việt Nam’s persecution of the Chinese following a border war in 1979.
If you treat someone ill enough, they will try to leave.
* * *
Before this war, there was another war, and before that war, another war, yet another one, and another, et al.
Warn.
I say “et al.” (which translates to ‘and others’) instead of “et cetera” because there are many authors to a war, and the line of wars and their authors is too long to untangle here.
Warnauthorn
* * *
To type a superscript, you have to press Control-Shift-Command-Plus Sign. The first three keys are clustered near one another.
War control shift command + War shift control command + War command shift control +
The order in which they occur doesn’t matter; the result is the same: Warn.
* * *
The first time I heard “Việt Cộng” I actually heard “việt con,” which was exactly what I was, a Vietnamese child.
A child precedes and follows a war. We use different words for during.
Hostage, soldier, victim. Shooter, killer, Charlie. Body beside, body below, parts of the body.
* * *
Is it worse if the child goes unnoticed, dead or alive? Intact or in parts?
“In my country,” my mother says, “a child shows love by listening to her parents without question.”
But what if the parents are wrong?
* * *
Việt Cộng, việt con, con viết. If I fail to use the right diacritics, I fail to say what I mean.
In Vietnamese, the meaning of a word depends on the tones of each vowel.
In order to remember the sounds of each tone, I rely on words that rhyme: viết, giết. Giết, viết.
Con biết giết không?
* * *
If I mispronounce or misspell, I end up with something else entirely.
Con vịt.
A duck will try to fly, even after decapitation. It flaps and flaps, unable to right a wrong.
* * *
In 1986, a country reopens market doors. But đổi mới happens every time something ends.
When an American diplomat invites your family to the airport on April 25, 1975.
When you move out of your parents’ Californian home and into your husband’s.
If, when you give birth, not knowing that your son will take his own life 24 years later, is this life change a new one, or part of the longer chain of changes which began once the war ended?
Actually, where is the beginning, that war, or the one before it?
* * *
Đổi mới, not đời mới.
Đời đổi, so you must open yourself to it.
* * *
I lost my first tongue when my parents forbade me from using it. At first, it was an equitable exchange of borders: they spoke to me in Vietnamese, I replied in English.
Perhaps my parents thought they were building a mini colony in a suburban cul-de-sac. Did you see that Asian family moving in, my neighbors must’ve asked one other. A bright yolk enclosed in a white, smooth-pored egg.
It is through language that colonization quietly takes over one’s imagination.
I thought the Vietnamese word for faucet was robinet.
* * *
For me, to be American is not to go back to Vietnam, but to fly there for the first time.
In Vietnam, they know immediately where I am from.
* * *
Vòi nước. I looked it up. “Tentacle (for) water,” if you break down the phrase. My father’s French Catholic school nudging him to wash his hands beneath the robinet.
“The nuns, they hit your left hand until you learn to write right-handed,” he told me once.
* * *
With a cul-de-sac, you have to exit where you entered. But there’s space to turn around.
A native egg exits the ovary, never turning back.
Inside the womb, a fetus will toss and turn frequently during pregnancy. My brother took his life in the garage, a place where he arrived the day my parents brought him home from the hospital nursery.
* * *
It may be best to decolonize my lost tongue before retrieving it. To do so, I need to rescind the tacit permission French took in entering my mouth.
I will spit it out, spit it out, spit it out.
But how to scrub the tentacle of imagination?
* * *
In my faucet there wages a war. Rages a war.
* * *
Decolonization is not as simple as closing a door. It begins by picking up where my four-year-old self left off.
What will happen when I can tell my story in my mother tongue?
* * *
I am strolling with my father through the corridors of Chợ Lớn, eating an egg tart from one of the vendors.
It is my first visit, my father’s first since his flight.
* * *
Flying out of X1’s mouth, a bite of an egg tart mistaken for a lemon one.
Spitting, the first white boy I loved said, “What was that?”
* * *
The egg tart, a custard tart, emerged in the 20th century Canton from trade with Britain. East meets west.
A variant in Macau emerged at the intersection of Cantonese and Portuguese colonizing influences.
* * *
There is a dish originating in Huế made of rice and tapioca flours, steamed in tiny saucers. Sometimes, mashed mung bean is placed in the center of the soft, white cakes. Bánh bèo.
“Doesn’t it look just like a fried egg,” my mother exclaims, stacking our empty dishes like poker chips.
It is her first time back in the country after 37 years away, and she and my father have been spatting all the way up Việt Nam’s spine.
* * *
I am nearly as old as she has been gone, and it has been that long since I left her body.
How many eggs remain, eggs I still carry, eggs my mother carried in carrying me along.
For a time. Meaning that time has passed. Time passes.
* * *
Concurrent with time, so many objects, persons, places drift along, passing those who do not move.
You can change drastically even if you stand still.
* * *
It is Thursday in the only pub on the main street of a small town in central Pennsylvania, and my trivia team is tied with an old biker one named “The Merkins” across the way.
“What is the name of the Japanese egg noodle dish?” the host announces.
As someone filled with knowledge often useless, a dish I know well lights up inside my mind. The Hiroshima variant, I want to say, and our team writes down okonomiyaki. But when the answers are revealed, the host says, “Egg foo young.”
My face goes flat as a pancake omelette.
* * *
Doi Moi, a restaurant I nearly walk past in D.C. “Exploding with rich flavor and vibrant color, doi moi embraces the collision of Vietnamese and French culture . . .”
A Vietnamese street food joint reimagined through the gaze of others, then regurgitated under neon lights into bowls bigger than my face.
There is nothing new about this place, and I would have stopped for a bite had the line not spilled out the door, snaking around the sidewalk patio.
* * *
At Doi Moi, they garnish inverted conical bowls of phở with huge canoe-cut bones.
Put a decorative bone in my bowl and I’ll use it as a weapon.
* * *
“Every year, I think you get angrier,” the spouse says to me.
* * *
“Where do you want to go?” a mid-fifties law professor I met in France asked me, as we ate pork belly buns outside of ChoLon Modern Asian in downtown Denver.
ChoLon because of Chef Lon’s “extensive culinary travels throughout Asia.” A menu boasting of “inspired interpretations of traditional dishes found across the exotic Far East.”
“We can go anywhere, I’ll take you anywhere. Money is no object.”
How did I end up here?
* * *
It was the week before I met my spouse, after moving to Denver for my Ph.D.
“You’ll be a ‘Doctor’” my mother sang, giddy at the prospect.
* * *
If you travel far enough East, you end up in the west, then back East again. Directions, like all things relational, depend on where you are, or who’s telling you what.
Territorial disputes continue in the South China Sea. Or the Eastern Sea, as Việt Nam calls it.
The Vietnam War, kháng chiến chống Mỹ, a war in a sequence of wars in a place known as Indochina.
* * *
From the beginning, my mother warned me against “puppy love.” Then she warned against the affections of white men.
“In college, I had a mathematics professor . . .” she begins.
* * *
When talking about white people, my parents use the phrase “Nước Mỹ,” or American.
If the American is Black, then “Người Mỹ da đen,” so as to color inside the imagination. For everyone else, the words chosen are those which indicate where someone’s racial origins reside, even if the person is, like them, an American.
“I don’t rent to white people,” my mother says.
“But what about the tenants in the Cherry house?” I ask.
“They are French,” she replies, “Very good people.”
* * *
Let me tell you about the French. When they decided to expand their empire, they destroyed a citadel in Gia Định, reducing the city’s population by 80%.
After wresting control, the French used slave and convict labor to fuel a building spree in the area which came to be known as Sài Gòn.
When you are on a spree, you are unrestrained and nothing yet has stopped you.
* * *
Set in French Indochina, Marguerite Duras’ novel, The Lover, follows the clandestine romance of a French adolescent of unfortunate financial circumstance and an older Chinese business magnate.
A scene from the film adaptation: amid a spree of afternoons fucking, the nude girl languidly drags her body down a few short steps, lengthening the distance from her lover.
* * *
We don’t talk explicitly enough about power and money in relationships.
I don’t know how to separate power and money from love, so I am choosing to separate myself from my mother.
Each day I choose again to remain separated, and it is hard, because, despite everything, I _____ her.
Fuck filial piety, I tell my therapist, and every week we talk about my desire to reach out to my parents.
I can’t. I won’t. I shouldn’t.
* * *
“If you talk or write about our family, we will be forced to take action,” my mother said the last time we spoke. I knew what she meant by “take action,” since she had previously threatened to sue for slander.
Truth, like a directional, is relative.
* * *
Let me tell you about my mother.
