Ru

I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the Year of the Monkey, when the sound of firecrackers exploding in the streets of Saigon mingled with the polyphonic rattle of machine guns. My life's duty was to replace lives that had been lost, to prolong that of my mother. My name, An Tịnh, was a mere variation of hers, An Tĩnh, a single dot under the letter ‘i' separating my peaceful interior from her peaceful environment. But History, with a capital H, flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam. It stripped them of their meaning, reducing them to strange sounds and ending my role as an extension of my mother.

Heaven and hell embraced in the belly of our boat. Deep in the hold, a single, feeble bulb burned day and night, protecting us from the vastness of the sea. We were paralyzed by a hundred-faced monster of fear - fear of pirates, of starvation, of the biscuits soaked in motor oil that were our only food. We no longer flinched when a sick child's urine sprayed us or recoiled from a neighbor's vomit. We were numb, imprisoned by the shoulders and legs of others. My father carried cyanide pills, a final lullaby to put us to sleep forever should we be captured. I did not understand this choice until I became a mother myself and learned how a surgeon in Saigon had sent his five children to sea on five different boats, hoping to save just one.

When I saw my first snowbanks through the airplane window at Mirabel Airport, I felt naked. A landscape so white, so virginal, could only dazzle us after so long in places without light. I was like my son Henri would one day be, a prisoner in his own world, unable to talk or to listen, even though I was neither deaf nor mute. I had no points of reference, no tools to dream. My parents, overqualified for French classes but underqualified for everything else, could not look ahead for themselves, so they looked ahead for us. They did not see the school toilets they scrubbed or the imperial rolls they delivered; they saw only our future, and we followed where their eyes led us. My mother, who once commanded chefs, now learned to clean floors, repeating the proverb from her Saigon classroom: *Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat.*

Before the collapse, she had prepared us. She made me wash floor tiles and clean sprouted beans, one by one, readying us for a time when we would no longer have a floor beneath our feet. In the Malaysian refugee camp, we slept on the red earth. We built a cabin on piles, its walls made of burlap rice bags and its roof a sheet of electric blue plastic. On rainy nights, twenty-five of us would stand in silent complicity, each holding a tin can to catch the dripping water, creating an orchestra of survival. During the day, we crouched over a gigantic pit of excrement, where flies buzzed and maggots crawled in undulating white carpets after a heavy rain. We were saved by an impromptu English teacher whose face gave us a glimpse of a new horizon, one without nauseating smells and rotting fish.

Our old life in Saigon had been dismantled piece by piece. First, a brick wall was erected through our home, giving half to the local police. Then, young Communist inspectors came to make their inventory. They sealed wardrobes filled with my grandmother's Parisian brassieres, which one inspector mistook for his mother's coffee filters. He could not understand why a family would need so many. Those young soldiers, who had marched through the jungle since they were twelve, moved in with us. We did not know if they were enemies or victims, especially when my father played them music and we saw tears carve grooves into their cheeks. They were boys freed from the jungle, just as we would soon be freed from them.

In Canada, the town of Granby was a warm belly that sheltered us. Families lined up to invite us for lunch. A friend named Johanne taught me to sing “I sing the body electric” and took me skating, even though I wore a shirt with a hole in it. Our sponsors bought us mattresses at a flea market, not knowing they were filled with fleas. We threw them out in secret, not wanting to disappoint them, not yet understanding the value of the time and heart they had given us. We were showered with a generosity so vast we felt there was not enough space inside us to receive it all.

My family was a constellation of kings and shadows. My Uncle Two was a king - a charismatic politician with movie-star looks who could charm a minister's wife into a waltz. His daughter, my cousin Sao Mai, was his princess. I was her shadow, trailing behind her at the Cercle sportif de Saigon, belonging neither to the elite in their white tennis clothes nor the barefoot boys who collected the balls. At my house, two mangoes were divided among three children to teach us compromise. At Sao Mai's, there was either no rice in the jar or mountains of lychees and cream puffs. Her parents lived for the whim of the moment, while mine planned for survival.

Years later, I returned to a Vietnam that was no longer mine. The American dream had made me heavier, had given my voice a confidence that marked me as other. A young waiter told me I was too fat to be Vietnamese. A woman selling tofu in a Hanoi market told her neighbors I was from Japan, and that my Vietnamese was coming along nicely. I was a hybrid, half this, half that, belonging everywhere and nowhere. This was a truth I shared with a man I met at a gas station in Quebec. He recognized the vaccination scar on my arm, and in that single mark, our entire shared history was spread out between two gas pumps: the plum blossoms at New Year's, the smell of caramelized fish, the feel of a bamboo stem on our skin.

My memories flow like a small stream, connecting disparate moments in a waking dream. I remember the scent of Bounce fabric softener on a lover's t-shirt in Hanoi, a smell that gave me my first pang of homesickness for a country I had adopted. I remember the man who survived a mock execution in a re-education camp by focusing on the infinite shades of blue in the sky. I remember my children, who taught me the verb “to love,” a love that expels your heart from your rib cage and gives you the power to be a fairy who can blow on a wound to make the pain disappear.

The past exists in fragments, in scars, in glimmers of light. In thirty years, my parents rose from the toilet bowls they scrubbed, and Sao Mai, who once sold cakes made from hand-whipped eggs during power outages, became a modern queen. They are phoenixes reborn from ash, their wings of red and gold decorating my children's sky, showing them that one horizon always hides another, stretching into the unspeakable beauty of renewal. I move forward in the trace of their footsteps, where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby, and an outstretched hand is not just a gesture, but a moment of love.