I Have to Leave So That I Can Return

By Thu Anh Nguyen

I am always leaving, and I want them to be prepared. Before summer suddenly turns into Fall, before all the leaves have hit the ground, I make sure I have somewhere else to go. I have to leave so that I can return, so that I can make it through the bitter cold months of winter. It’s my own way of preserving myself; I am the best and most ripe at the height of harvest, and I can last all year only if we spend some time working on me, getting me ready for the long haul.

This leave-taking is the natural rhythm of my family. It’s the way of refugees, which we four became after the Vietnam war ended.

First, Dad tried to leave on a boat, without us.

Then the four of us left together, on a plane. You would think that leaving the only language and family you have to land in the country that helped you destroy yourself would be the hard thing, but it turns out that you don’t find a place to land right away.

The first place we leave in the United States is California because we don’t know anyone there. Then we leave Houma, a town so tiny in Louisiana, that I still describe it as “near New Orleans.” Dad barely made a living on the shrimping boats, and came home reeking every night. Mom couldn’t find a job, and we couldn’t continue living with their friends even though they begged us to stay.

Mom got worried when Dad was held up at gunpoint one evening even though he claimed it was no big deal, and the guy just wanted a ride. The final straw, when it was too much to bear to stay, was when their friends offered to adopt me and my brother.

We settled in Florida, but the leaving never stopped.

This leave-taking is the natural rhythm of my family. It’s the way of mothers, which I never understood until I became my own mother.

Mom had periods every few years when she went silent. She was a storm we couldn’t forecast. She did not make any announcements, but acted like she was going to run an errand, or go to Ba Noi’s house. Then she just didn’t come home for a few days.

Did I worry about her when she was gone? Did I miss her? Did I know, somewhere beyond knowing, that she was going to come back? I know now that she did not have to come back. She was always beautiful, and she was the one who knew how to do the important things: the caring, the laundering, the feeding, the sheltering. She could have made a new family. More likely, she could have gone it alone, not have to hand her weekly paycheck to any man, slice apples for children to snack on, or pretend to smile when our restaurant customers complimented her on her English. She could have been gloriously invisible, untethered.

I can’t distinguish these fantasies I have for her from my own.

Mom always returned, and I still don’t know where she went. My brother doesn’t even remember that she left at all (or he’s not letting himself remember). My dad never acknowledged it beyond having to make us hot dogs with buttered rice for dinner.

I learned from my parents that you leave to survive. I don’t think I will leave my children or my husband, but how can I know for sure? What do I really know of disaster?

My leaving is less significant than theirs in every way, but it is also how I survive. When I am seventeen, I move out of my parents’ house. I don’t speak to my father for a few years, not until I am financially independent. I don’t fully reconcile with him until I am dating someone so beyond his reproach, he has nothing to say to me about it. I have finally learned to harness patriarchal oppression to my advantage.

And every couple of weeks, when I speak to my mom on the phone, I hang up on her in the middle of a conversation. I am 41 years old, and I am still having to find a way out. During one particularly circuitous and brutal conversation recently, she asked me, “why do you have to be this way?” You know my response. This is all you’ve taught me.

Overcome by Water

By Thu Anh Nguyen

Sunglasses Sales Pitch

By Thu Anh Nguyen

Here is where we try.
You have told me that you don’t know
how to keep a precious thing,
but I am going to be so easy
to love. I promise. I can be practical
if that’s what it takes. You don’t have to be
panicked by my beauty.

Just think about how I go with anything,
fit neatly into your bag, stay snug
on your head like a crown, like a sign
that reads: I am responsible!
You can trust me!

You are barely looking at me now,
and I can see it already:
you are grieving my loss.
You know it’s coming, and you would
shield yourself from it.

Symbols Are Not Excuses

By Thu Anh Nguyen

I am learning a lesson that I cannot welcome
about arteries and lungs
and all the things that can go wrong.
What went wrong yesterday was my ceiling fell in
and then the desk broke.
It would have been symbolic for go home
but symbols are not excuses.

And the day before, and for many days before that one,
I had been learning about brothers and fathers,
how they can make jokes with machines beeping in the background,
even while the blood is being drawn,
and each breath measured.

I can’t call the right people to fix the ceiling because
how can I possibly think about that when I am busy
learning for the first time about my aunt,
the ugly one who snapped chickens’ necks,
who was a prostitute?

I put books under the desk to prop it back up
so that everything will look like it’s supposed to
while I am looking out my window,
my mind bending back toward home
like a leaf toward light.

I can hear the burrowing owls,
my father’s raspy, wet breath,
and my own whisper too. I say go gently.
What use am I pushing against it, against his heart?
As if I stood a chance against a desk, a ceiling,
or any real thing.

Proximity

By Thu Anh Nguyen

This is a house warmed with worry,
and still, he’s cold all the time under his knit cap and gloves.

She has to put his socks on for him, one at a time,
slip them on in a way that pretends he still has dignity,

that he doesn’t want to just run out the doors,
shirtless and deep brown, and not as tired as he is now.

I have come home to witness this, to pretend
that I can’t see how he is not himself anymore.

We come home because so much meaning
has to do with proximity:

When I was younger, it was too much—unbearable—
the kind of love that makes you move out when you are seventeen.

But now, I think, no one else will ever worry if I am working
too much or too hard, if I leave early in the morning, in the cold dark.

Who will tell me if I am raising the kind of kids who will come home
when I need them, to warm me, to bear witness to me?

Mud

By Thu Anh Nguyen

When you forget to take off your shoes
before entering, what it means to
wear white in your hair (doom),
how many times to flick the incense
before surrendering to Buddha,
you know that you have been
away too long.

If only there were fewer ways to
address a relative and
fewer relatives to address,
one less obstacle to
bridging the inevitable discomfort,
crossing the distance from
Here to There.

* * *

The slippery sweetness,
desserts passed from mouth
to mouth, mother to child,
every precaution taken,
(even before birth)
a daily diet of fresh papaya
ensures a perfect complexion.

Bui doi are the dirt of life,
orphan children,
life’s dirt
rising.
An unlucky child, the first born—a girl
with no understanding
of what it means to be unwanted.

Huge almond eyes
foretell of bright future,
journeys made far and wide
in the pursuit of her
hard-worked-for perfection,
to show her how much
she is wanted.

* * *

Winds, like change,
stir things up and
the dirt rises
like air,
in air,
God knows where,
a land
forsaken.

The pure sense of things,
of good and bad,
clean and dirty,
lost
amongst bad people
who are always clean,
scrubbing white the girl,
undoing her world.

Precautions taken forgotten,
rituals erased by routine.
Building a new land inside old people is like
taking the bui out of doi,
dirt out of life,
building sandcastles
out of mud children.

* * *

What we have lost
is not nearly as much as
what we have gained, and if
anything was ever done,
it was with more joy than pain,
a priceless future bought,
lifting dirt
from the ground after rain.

Tradition

By Thu Anh Nguyen

They Called Us Wetbacks

By Thu Anh Nguyen

Mom's Viet Kitchen

By Thu Anh Nguyen & Nguyen Khoi Nguyen