“You look like a nice person, so I’ll be honest as not to waste your time. She’s not here today. She’s rarely ever at the office. In fact, she only meets new clients here.”
“Where is she?” I said.
“I can’t tell you that, but I’ll let her know you stopped by.”
“Can I have a pencil and some paper? I’ll leave a note.”
In the letter, I wrote a brief summary of my life, or at least the summary of a life that I imagined she wanted for me. I told my mother that I worked in a law firm alongside my husband. I even added that it wasn’t my most hoped for career, but I had a daughter to look after. I included a photograph of QQ. She was the only truth I needed to give. After I finished writing, I asked the receptionist to look over the letter for grammatical errors. When she finished reading, she studied my face, I thought, for any resemblance to my mother. She erased a bit at the top of the page.
“It’s too formal. Nobody talks to their mother this way.” I nodded and let her pencil in the more casual pronoun.
As I was leaving, she said, “I’ve worked here nineteen years and I never heard her speak of a daughter.”
“Can you keep the content of the letter private? Don’t let her know you’ve helped me with it,” I said. She agreed and gave me a handful of mints from the jar on her desk. As I turned to leave, she called.
“Wait. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but she’s giving a graduation speech at the International University. Do you know where that is? Let me write it down for you.”
On the way to the university, I ate the candies one by one until they were gone. At the school entrance, students in white shirts, blue skirts and pants stood in groups, chatting excitedly. I could tell this was a wealthy private university, one funded by American or British donors. The students didn’t have that haggard expression typical Vietnamese students often wore, caused by lack of sleep, nourishment, and an excess of both intellectual and physical labor. Here, their shirts were newly starched, their shoes still smelling of leather. Though they wore uniforms, they still tried to express their individual prosperity—the girls with brand name handbags, the boys with belts and shoes. I followed them to the school’s courtyard, where a little of the Vietnamese hierarchy in education was still in place. Thousands of students stood in line. They would not be allowed to sit for the next four or five hours. I found a spot at the back.
The school dean introduced my mother. He listed her accomplishments, claimed that she was a visionary, an example for Vietnamese youth to follow. I was used to hearing praises about my mother since I was a girl, so that I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I was still watching her through a screen. I was not anywhere closer to her now than when I read news about her in New York.
My mother walked on stage. She was in her sixties now, but no one would have known by just looking. From where I stood, she looked the same as when I last saw her at the camp. She wore a knee-length skirt, high heels, and a jacket with shoulder pads that made her look larger than she was. As usual, she commanded attention easily. She spoke as if she were having a conversation with just a few people and not thousands of students. The cadence of her voice was perfectly measured—commanding at times, soft and intimate at others. She told an anecdote of her childhood, of her mother who had ripped up her schoolbooks to use as toilet paper.
“You will meet people who have no use for education. You may have to fight against them to get yours. They might be your own parents,” she said. “But fight you must. Everything in this life can be taken from you—your home, your loved ones, even the clothes on your back—except what you’ve learned. Knowledge is so abstract that it is hard to appreciate, especially in our country where poverty has made us desperate for material wealth. Be curious. Be critical of how little you know.” Then she singled out the female students, encouraging them to stay in the work force despite the cultural pressure to get married and bear children. My stomach tightened when she began speaking of her own life.
“If I had two lives to live, I would have done it differently,” she said. “Anything worth having requires your sacrifice, even your personal happiness.” She paused, as though suddenly at a loss for words. Someone in the crowd cleared his throat. My mother looked up from her podium, her proud, porcelain expression gone. “I had a daughter once. The only thing I taught her, the only thing I knew well, was how to be alone. The most important question about success—the one you should ask yourself—are you ready, when the day comes, to stand alone? You’re all very young now. Someday you’ll understand what I mean.”
My mother looked down at her hands, her face half-turned into the shadows. She looked just the way she did in my childhood memories, bent down at her desk reading loose pages. She was always alone then. Even after I’d spent hours outdoors with the little girl, I’d come back to find her in the same position, her chin in her palm, her other hand clicking the end of a pen. I’d never asked her if she suffered, never thought to. In my vision, the stage seemed to close in; narrower and narrower. I squinted my eyes against the sun—my mother, her thin smile, a few strands of grays that had escaped from her hairclip. I pictured her bare shoulders beneath her jacket, small and soft. I slipped out before the speech was concluded. I thought it would be cruel for her to spot me amongst the crowd, to be forced to look at the face of her personal sacrifice. I couldn’t blame her because she was right. She was meant to do more than just be mine.
I went back to the village.
Kem and QQ pretended to be dead when I came in. It was a game my daughter loved. I put my fingers near their nose and checked for air.
“Oh no. My poor girls,” I said. To this, they pressed their lips harder together to keep themselves from laughing. “I guess I have to revive you.” I put my ears against Kem’s chest and tickled under her arms. The girls kicked and roared happily.
“Mama went for a walk,” Kem told me.
“Mama went for a walk,” QQ repeated.
They squealed and hit each other. On top of the stack of manga, I saw a neatly folded piece of paper. I opened it. The handwriting was squiggly, the ink dark in unnatural places as though the writer was not used to holding a pen.
She deserves more than what I can give her. I don’t only pretend to be mad. The voices get louder every day. It is only a matter of time until I am dragged away to a cell and locked up. I do not want her to remember me like that. No matter what you do with her, I trust your decision.
My hands shook. I wanted to run out and look for her. I wanted to find her under the bridge, walk out to the pond until seaweed and lotus leaves clung to my chest. I wanted to be the one to drag her by the hair as she screamed and fought. I was furious at her insistence on being lost. Once again, she showed that she forgot nothing. She still hadn’t forgiven me for leaving her behind. She’d now abandoned all of us for good. All that was left of her was a little girl, dark-haired and brown-skinned, not unlike her mother. Kem was crawling around the house quicker than a dog could run.
“Get up,” I shouted. “Walk upright like a human being. I never want to see you crawl like that again.”
The next few weeks were a flurry of paperwork, phone calls, visits to various government offices, more phone calls. I had no choice but to delay my trip back to the United States. In the meantime, I rented a motel room for the girls and I. My neighbor advised me from New York on how to speed up the adoption process. We found out that a birth certificate was not submitted for Kem after she was born, not an uncommon occurrence given the frequency of home births and mothers living in the countryside. I had to first obtain this documentation before I could begin the adoption forms. Because Kem’s mother was only missing and not dead, I had to use her letter to me as proof that she wanted to leave her daughter in my care. At that time, the country was going through various changes. Efforts were made to prevent foreigners from adopting Vietnamese orphans due to the embarrassment it cas
t on the country as a place where children were cheaply sold. I learned as much as I could about the process. I explained my plight to Minh, my neighbor’s friend, and he helped me procure a fake birth certificate. “Everything can be bought here if you know the right people,” he said. In front of officials, my Vietnamese was professional and crisp from hours of practice with my script. I treated my American citizenship as a side note, not something they should be concerned with. I had to prove myself a full-blooded Vietnamese with not a drop of foreign influence.
During the first few days, Kem vacillated between not asking where her mother was to screaming, wetting the bed, and slapping QQ. I held her close and told her that a child has many mothers. The first mother was only supposed to stay with her child for an allotted time, until the second one took over. Being a mother was extremely difficult, I told her; that was why the job was divided amongst many women. This was also the first time I spoke to QQ about Lilah, who I said was her first mother.
“I’m your mother now,” I said to Kem.
“Forever? I don’t want a new one ever again,” she said.
“Yes, forever.”
“Who’s Lilah?” QQ said, not understanding what I meant.
“Your mother. She passed away,” I said.
“You’re mommy,” QQ insisted.
“I am now, but she was first.”
This information didn’t upset QQ as I thought it would. She pulled the blanket up to her chin and covered herself and Kem.
“Kem stays with me?” QQ asked me.
“You’re sisters now. From now on you live together.”
The girls were satiated by this news. They covered themselves up entirely with the blanket and whispered to each other inside their safe box of darkness.
Once I passed the initial stage of adopting Kem, my neighbor began to work on it in New York as well. I didn’t anticipate so much time off work, and so ended up having to borrow money from the bank to pay for paperwork fees as well as gifts for less honest officials. I brought baskets filled with fruits, which sat on top of envelopes of money. On the phone, my neighbor warned, “It’s going to be a handful with two girls.”
“They keep each other company. It’s less work,” I said.
“You’re too optimistic.”
“People here raise five, ten kids with barely anything.”
“You went from not wanting to have kids to having two,” he chuckled.
I laughed at this too.
“I suppose what’s yours is yours,” he said.
5
Children don’t forget easily. They only store away events that aren’t consistent with their sense of self, conducive to their well-being. They are fierce survivors, loyal to nothing but their version of the story.
At school, Kem and QQ protected each other. One reinforced the other’s lies. Their teacher told me the other kids taunted my daughters because nobody believed they were sisters by blood. Kem’s skin was a dark brown, her eyes obsidian black, while QQ’s skin was pale, her eyes a zaffre blue. A boy told them their mother must have cheated on their father. They bit his arms until he bled. They never shed a tear from being ridiculed by their classmates. Always, they went back to playing by themselves. Together, they rewrote their origins. Their imagination didn’t allow them to deny those first memories of when they met, so they told themselves that I’d given birth to them both in a hut in Vietnam. We stayed there until they were old enough to travel. In their story, Kem’s mother and I were one, haunted by a malevolent spirit. They feared this figure and avoided mentioning her. Whenever I was angry with them, they whispered to each other that the spirit had gotten into me again.
My neighbor was frustrated with me for not correcting my daughters’ fanciful talk. He also knew that if he tried to, they would count him as another evil spirit, not to be trusted. QQ believed in these stories as much as she did in fairy tales. They were as natural to her as air and breath, but she didn’t depend on them. In her mind, the circles of her reality and imagination overlapped. Unlike QQ, Kem repeated these stories like a mantra; I believed that deep down she doubted them. Once I told Kem of a time when she was younger and loved only to crawl even though she could walk, she immediately asked, “When I was a baby?” It was like she was looking for evidence that I had been there when she was born. In these moments, I gave a vague answer like, “almost a baby,” or changed the topic. More and more I resembled my own mother as I withheld facts and became an accomplice in helping my daughters obscure their origins. I no longer remembered when the girls started calling my neighbor their father. He and I weren’t bothered by this. We were even a little happy. A favorite moment—the four of us went to the movie theater for the first time. My neighbor had asked a woman to take a picture of us in front of the concession stand. I couldn’t get the girls to be still. The photograph was a blur of QQ slinging popcorn at any moving object, Kem’s face purple from trying to suck down a giant Slurpee, my neighbor and I looking on at the shutter pointed at us, helpless. We were, for so long, placeholders for someone else’s wishes, surrogates to memories that weren’t ours. At the press of a camera’s button, its flashlight—our chrysalis—we were just there. Our own beginnings.
It was December again. Kem refused to get out of bed to go to school. I asked my neighbor to take QQ. I checked Kem’s temperature and determined that she didn’t have a fever. She was curled up in a ball on the bed. “Will you stay with me?” she said.
“Mommy needs to work. If you’re very good, I can bring you to my office,” I said.
“My mommy doesn’t work. My mommy is a crazy beggar.”
My hands trembled. She sounded less like a girl and more like a cruel old woman. It was the first time she’d let me know that she knew this about her mother. Even in Vietnam I thought my friend had managed to conceal the truth from her.
“That’s not true, Kem. You see me go to work every day.” It was all I could do to keep my voice steady.
“My mommy begs!” she screamed and sat up in bed. She looked at me as though she was about to leap up on all fours and pull my face off my skull. I stepped back. Ashamed that I was fearful of her, I came closer.
“Is that what you want me to do today?”
She nodded. I was still in pajamas, an old egg stain in the middle of my chest. Though she was a child, she had not asked me for anything. Everything she wanted, QQ would speak on her behalf. Perhaps I wouldn’t have another chance to give her what she really wanted.
“You’re right. That’s what I’d rather do.”
We left the house, both of us still in our night clothes, except she had on a winter jacket and I didn’t. It felt good to be so utterly cold. Kem was calmer but doubtful. It seemed she didn’t think her mother capable of coming back even in another form. We went down an alley. I found a piece of cardboard and Kem wrote on it, Help us. She underlined the words twice. It appeared she had been prepared for this for a long time. We sat down against a wall patched with chewed gums, torn ads, and graffiti. Around us were cigarette butts, necks of broken bottles.
“Do not say a word to anyone,” I instructed her. “Pretend you are mute.”
A few people passed us by. Kem’s expression lifted as the coins fell at our feet. She was like a flower turned up to the rain. She bowed to the generous strangers. A man in disheveled clothing yelled at me, “That little girl needs to be at school!” His breath stank of alcohol.
“Mommy, I want to go home. Can we go home now?” Kem said.
I pretended not to hear her. She tugged on my arms, pushed me, bit my shoulder. I grit my teeth so as not to let out a sound. I am your mother, I thought. I am. I am.
A man in police uniform approached us.
“Ma’am, you can’t be here. We need to talk,” he said. Immediately I stood up, straightened my back and willed good sense back into my face. I told Kem to go sit on a bench a few feet
away. The cop asked for my identifications. I told him where I lived and worked. I explained that my daughter received an assignment on empathy at school. It was her idea to pretend to be homeless. I was a mother. I was an expert liar.
“I couldn’t just let her do it alone,” I said, producing my business card from my wallet.
“Do you need to go so far for an assignment?” he said.
“She takes her school work very seriously.”
For a moment, admiration flashed on his face.
“So have you gathered enough information? Let me take you home. It’s a dangerous business,” he said.
“Yeah, I live over there, but you could walk us so you know I’m telling the truth,” I said.
“It’s dangerous,” he repeated.
“It always is, to pretend to be someone else.”
It had started to snow, the first of the season. Kem’s first ever. I looked at her on the bench, her eyes as open as the sky. “Mommy! Look,” she called my name.
For a few days afterward, Kem clung to me, fearful of losing a mother once more. In the morning after dropping her off at school, I would assure her, “Kem, I’m going to the office now. I’ll be right here when you two get out.” Once, she grinned and said, “You won’t give me away again?” like it was an inside joke between us. Not knowing what to say, I’d chuckled. Usually, she would simply wave goodbye and run off with QQ as though the image of her mother under the banyan tree was completely erased from her mind, as though in acting it out we had removed it from reality.
Now and then, I took out my friend’s last words, which I kept in my wallet. I realized for the first time the difference between us—how I’d tasked myself, given my life to remembering, and she to forgetting. Had she managed to cross the river? Or was she trapped between worlds, unable to shut out past echoes, unable to move on? I pictured her as a young woman walking alone in the street, stopping to rest under the shade of a tree, walking again when it pleased her to. She ate when people gave her food. She slept in the middle of the day, whenever she was tired. After it rained and the dragonflies came out, she looked at them, her eyes laughing. Her surroundings no longer reminded her of anything. She thought nothing at all. She was no longer laden with ghosts; she was free of us all.
If I Had Two Lives Page 23
