43
Love
Dear Josh,
Sometimes, I can feel the weight of your stare as I feign sleep in those torturous minutes before I fully awaken. Your grip on my hand has tightened; that’s what probably woke me in the first instance. I can feel your love. I can feel you trying desperately to save the image of my face in some special place that might be immune to the amnesiac effects of time. I can feel your fear as you unwillingly envision a life without me—how will you comfort the girls like I can; how will you plan the birthday parties and arrange the girls’ schedules; how will you fix all the things that break in our home; how will you do all this while still working your demanding job and maintaining the stellar course of your career? In turn, in my own mind’s eye, I can see you cleaning out our closets and bathroom drawers to dispose of all my things. I can see you bringing flowers to my grave. I can see you watching what were once “our” favorite TV shows after the girls have gone to bed, in the dark, alone, the television casting its eerie blue light on your face, which seems to be permanently sculpted in sadness. My heart aches for you, but I don’t know how to help you. Beyond solving all the logistical problems caused by my death, what can I say or do to alleviate the pain, to make losing me easier for you, if that is even possible? Just as I felt compelled to write the girls a letter, I feel a compulsion to do the same for you in an attempt to help, for to not do so would be a great failure by me as your wife.
When I hug you now, when I scratch your head, when I lie in the crook of your arm, I feel distinctly the finitude of our time together in this life. I try so hard to feel and remember everything I can in a single touch, every pore in my body and soul open to you and you alone, as if I can somehow brand your skin, your hair, your very essence into my soul, so I can take you with me when I leave this world. Does it help you to know this? Understand, Josh, that until I met you, at age thirty, it felt like I had been waiting my whole life for you. Does it help you to know this, too? I’ve always believed in soul mates, in that one person (or maybe two people) who would effortlessly and seamlessly slip into my life and heart as if he had always been there. At ages ten and twelve and fourteen and sixteen and eighteen, I would lie awake at night, wondering where you were at that very moment, the boy who would one day be the man who would be the love of my life, my Mr. Darcy, my tall, dark, and handsome. What can I say? I’ve always been a hopeless romantic.
The truth is that nothing I say or do will help you as much as time. Time, that undefinable thing that marks the passing of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades; that thing that seems to stretch often agonizingly into eternity and yet is also cruelly gone too quickly; that thing that waits and hurries for, and otherwise spares, nothing and no one; that thing that makes us forget, or at the very least blunts, the good and the bad. Remember how Mia was a day overdue, and you, impatient, were freaking out and demanded that I get induced (which I ignored)? Now she’s about to turn eight. In the interim, our faces have aged, imperceptibly in the day-to-day but oh so noticeably when we look back at different moments, as recorded by the photos that do not lie about the passage of time. Time has made you and me forget almost every detail of the night we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, the night we started to fall in love with one another. Was it fifty-eight or sixty degrees? Was it windy as we looked upon the millions of sparkling lights that constitute the Manhattan skyline? What were you wearing?
Time has robbed our minds of those many beautiful and rich details, and for better or worse, it has also robbed us of that unique euphoria of falling in love. The intense excitement and anxiety of falling in love are only memories now, impersonal almost, as if it all happened to somebody else. Sometimes, I wish I could relive those moments, just push a button and for a few glorious minutes travel back in time and be that young, ecstatic woman falling in love with the man of her dreams all over again. But the laws of existence don’t allow that. By the same token, I don’t remember the innumerable fights we’ve had, either, not even the worst ones, in which we threatened divorce. I don’t remember what they were about. I know there were occasions when I was so angry I wanted to smack you in the face, but I can’t make myself feel that rage now. Time cares not that you are the man of my dreams, nor does it care about the most egregious wrongs we have committed against one another; it cares not whether the experiences and emotions were wanted or unwanted, loved or hated; it does not discriminate. Eventually, time dulls everything. It removes the intensity of the purest of joys and the hottest of rages and, yes, even the most heartbreaking of sorrows.
I remember when my grandmother died, when I was twenty; it was the most painful experience of my young life. I remember crying on the flight back to school. I remember crying through my midterms. My family and I (when I was in town) used to go visit her grave site all the time. She who had been the center of our family was sorely missed. But over the years, the visits became less frequent. Weekly visits became monthly and then only on holidays and then annually and then not at all. I haven’t been to her grave site in fifteen years. My life and everyone else’s life continued. We all grew older. We got married. We had our own children. We went on with the business of living.
One day soon, my whole existence, everything that I am and have been to you, will be memory, growing more distant with the passing of each day. One day, you’ll wake up and you won’t remember my face easily anymore. You won’t remember my smell anymore. You won’t remember if I liked chocolate ice cream or not. You won’t remember so many things that you might have once thought you could never forget. Or maybe you failed to think of me for one hour or two or three, or for a day. You may even stop visiting me at my grave site with any regularity. I want you to know that that is okay, that that is how it should be, that that is what I want it to be.
Time’s amnesiac power is necessary and healthy, for it encourages life and living, allowing room for new experiences and new emotions, which come with engaging in the present and being vested in the future, and places our memories where they should be—in the past, to be accessed when we need and want them. And perhaps most important and relevant to you, time allows for the gaping wounds of the past to close so that we can move forward, so that even the most painful experiences can be remembered with some objectivity, from which we can learn and grow. I want you to go on living, Josh. I want you to obsess about sports. I want you to dine in fine restaurants. I want you to travel the world. I want you to raise our children to the best of your ability, which will require you to be so very present and focused on the here and now.
In the ultimate act of living, I even want you to love again. As hard as that is for me to say, I really do.
We’ve spent much time over the last four years talking about the Slutty Second Wife, a name I gave the woman who would replace me within days of my diagnosis. Actually, I have been the one talking about her, while you just rolled your eyes. And I wouldn’t call it talking; it was more like railing, threatening, and ranting. There are women who write letters to their replacements on their deathbeds, wishing them well, but I’m sorry—I can’t. I’m not that generous.
I worry that she will be a gold digger, preying on you in your vulnerable state. I worry that she will be like Cinderella’s evil stepmother. I worry that she will seek to destroy all traces of me from your and the girls’ lives. I fear that she will not prioritize the girls spending time in Los Angeles so that they can continue their relationship with my family, that she will not care about preserving my legacy. I fear that she will brainwash you, and in the stress and business of life, you will forget what was important to me and all the promises you made me to honor my wishes for the girls. Will she completely redesign this apartment to erase as much of me as she can from the home that I built for you and the girls? Or worse yet, will she force you to sell this apartment, which I created for you and the girls to enjoy for years to come? As you know, I have hun
dreds of worries like these. You tell me to have faith in you. You tell me to trust in your ability to make the right decisions. But it’s hard for me.
Remember the big argument we had about how much time would have to elapse before you could appropriately start dating, get engaged, get married? You googled and recited to me statistics, percentages, about how soon after a spouse’s death the surviving spouse engages in a sexual encounter, in a serious relationship, marriage. There were dramatic differences between widows and widowers, with the widowers doing all of the above much sooner than the widows. For example, 7 percent of widows engaged in a sexual encounter within one year of their spouses’ death, whereas 51 percent of widowers did the same. I was horrified and disgusted. Men are inherently so weak and incapable of caring for themselves and being alone. You talked about being engaged a year after I died, married after two at the latest. I was upset, furious at you. Are you so weak and pathetic?
Granted, you’ve had a long time to prepare for my death. It’s not as if my death will be a surprise. But even so, instinctively, I felt like there should be some minimal amount of time to show due respect to me. But how much is the right amount of time?
I have thought about that question a lot. And here’s my answer, which I’m going to give you in a roundabout manner, by way of stories.
As I said before, I’ve always been a hopeless romantic. I suppose it was a reaction to the complete absence of romance in my childhood (except, of course, for what I saw on the screen and read in the romance novels devoured in secret, the ones my father forbade me from reading). Pragmatism was the guiding principle of love and marriage in my immigrant household. Have you ever seen my parents kiss, even on the cheek? Exactly. Neither have I. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen them even touch one another with any kind of affection. I never saw that between my grandparents, my father’s parents, the ones I grew up around. Romantic love was simply not a part of my family tradition.
My grandparents’ marriage was arranged when they were still children, despite the fact that they lived in different countries. My grandmother was from a little village in Hainan, a lush island off the coast of southern China. My grandfather’s parents had also been born in Hainan, but he himself had been born in Vietnam after his parents immigrated there to start what would become a successful business in trading spices and other valuable commodities, like elephant tusks and rhino horns. The families knew and liked each other. My grandfather’s family was well off; my grandmother was young, strong, and healthy. At fourteen, she was plucked from everything and everyone she had ever known and taken to Vietnam on a multiweek boat journey by a stranger, her future husband’s maternal grandfather. There, she had to learn a new language and a new way of life that revolved around commerce, and not farming or the land. There, she resentfully did as her domineering mother-in-law commanded while my great-grandmother spent most days gambling. There, she cared for her boy-husband and his seven younger brothers and sisters, even breast-feeding his youngest brother as she breast-fed her own firstborn son. My grandmother cooked, cleaned, sewed, and even massaged the stubs that were my great-grandmother’s feet; Great-Grandmother grew up in an era when bound feet no bigger than three inches were a mark of erotic beauty, and so she must have deplored my grandmother’s grotesquely large feet. My grandmother was effectively a servant in her own home, and her boy-husband did nothing to improve her situation. He did as his mother wished, and no doubt saw his wife’s travails as part of a cultural rite of passage in the centuries-old power play between mother and daughter-in-law. There was no romantic love between my grandparents, at least not the kind of love I would have wanted. Theirs was a love born of familiarity, habit, obligation. My grandfather kept at least one mistress and had at least one child with her, a girl. I’m sure my grandmother knew about them because my grandmother knew everything, but she never spoke of them. When my grandmother died, after nearly sixty years of marriage, my grandfather grieved for her for a brief period of time, and then he went to China to retrieve and marry my grandmother’s sister, a widow, who would take care of him in his later years. An excellent example of a man who couldn’t cope.
My parents’ story was marginally better. My mother was beautiful, truly. In the small town in which I would later be born, my mother’s beauty caught my grandmother’s eye. Her firstborn son was twenty-four; it was time for him to get married. She asked around about this pretty girl who walked past the house four times a day, back and forth from the school where she taught first grade. Her parents were from Hainan, too, although she had been born in Vietnam. The eldest of six children. Not a rich family but a perfectly respectable family, and her beauty could not be ignored. So my grandmother dispatched a matchmaker to my mother’s house in Hoi An to broach the possibility of a union. My maternal grandparents were ecstatic. My mother was not. She had seen my father—a pale-skinned man, handsome enough—from a distance. But my mother felt she, at twenty-two, was too young to get married. She longed for adventure. She wanted to work at a different job, something other than teaching, like for the Americans at the army store. But her father wouldn’t allow her to mix with the Americans, for doing so was an invitation to corruption, scandal, and ruin.
Her parents pressured her to agree to the marriage. They said that given my father’s family’s reputation and wealth, my mother might not get a better offer, that marrying well was her single greatest duty to her parents and younger siblings. She agreed, and thus began a brief courtship that had to be organized around the war. My father had been drafted, but my grandmother had bribed enough people to ensure that he would serve as a captain’s driver and not fight on the front lines. When he wasn’t on duty, he would ride his motorcycle to visit my mother on Saturdays in Hoi An, a two-hour trip that he had to wait to embark on until late morning to ensure that the American and South Vietnamese forces had sufficient time to clear the roads of any land mines that might have been planted overnight by the Vietcong.
My parents married on the sixth day of the eleventh month of the lunar calendar in the Year of the Monkey, also known as Christmas Day 1968. It was chosen because the people who knew such things said it was an auspicious day, a day that portended good fortune and many blessings. They married in Da Nang, with my mother and her family and friends traveling there several days beforehand and staying at a hotel to ensure that the trouble and inconvenience of war—torn-up roads and unexpected skirmishes—would not interrupt the festivities.
When I ask my mother if she loved my father when she married him, she says no; she says that she grew to love him over the years. Theirs was also a love born of familiarity, habit, obligation; a love born of surviving a war, Communism, and emigration together. Growing up, I didn’t see the love. Mostly, I saw lots of fighting, primarily my dad yelling at my mom, to the point where I thought he was verbally abusive. Maybe his anger came from the stresses of resettling in a new country, where he was nothing when he had once been something. Things got better through the years, as my father mellowed with age, as my mother grew more confident in this new country and learned to fight back. Nonetheless, I swore that I never wanted that kind of marriage, and certainly not that kind of love.
It didn’t seem like my father wanted love for me at all. I once asked him when I was in high school, even as my many Asian friends were sneaking around dating behind their parents’ backs, when I could have a boyfriend. He said not until I had graduated college, that all that “boyfriend-girlfriend nonsense” was a distraction from school and that he wouldn’t permit such indecency. I remember when we dropped my sister off at Berkeley for her freshman year, as we drove around campus my father would point to the girls wearing skimpy tank tops and makeup, and he’d say with the utmost derision, “Look at those slutty girls.” I was just entering eighth grade, but the message was loud and clear. My father wanted me to not be one of those slutty girls. No boyfriends. I had to focus on academic excellence.
Since I couldn’t drive because of my vision issues, my father always dreamed of becoming my driver one day. He had it all planned out; I could get him a cellphone and buy him a car, and whenever I needed a ride, all I had to do was call him and he would come pick me up and take me wherever I needed to go. My father had endless patience when it came to driving, and driving me in particular. There was never mention of a husband or children in his dream scenario. I vaguely wondered if my father would drive me on dates and evenings out with my friends (for which, horror of horrors, I might dress like a slut).
It wasn’t until much later that I realized why there was never mention of a husband or children for me, why my father always stressed education (more with me than with my siblings) and therefore financial independence. It all made sense after my mother told me about my grandmother’s failed attempt to have me killed at two months of age, and my parents’ complicity in that attempt. Back then, in Vietnam, they were simply trying to save me from a life of miserable blindness, unmarriageability, and childlessness. After all, a girl’s worth rested solely on her ability to get married and have children. While it was true that coming to America had saved some of my vision and that in America there was more help and opportunity for people with disabilities, my parents still saw me as a helpless blind baby, deficient, undesirable; to them I was still probably unmarriageable.
The Unwinding of the Miracle Page 28
