Grandfather,
I’m home.
I plan to unravel myself in thirty seconds, the time it takes for joss paper to burn. Vietnamese prayers never weighed on me with religious solemnity; yet I used to be scared of praying, because it is the dead I spoke to. What if I think something wrong and get cursed? My mother said prayers are a conversation to our deceased loved ones, who watch over the living, and that’s why the prayer should include a thank-you. I shouldn’t ask for more than good health and good grades.
What if I wish for more?
You materialized when I was twelve. I, struck by inexplicable inspiration, wrote a play for my sixth-grade parents-teacher conference. I wrote musical interludes, stage directions, dialogues, and excerpts for an off-screen narrator to read aloud. I had never seen nor read a play. My friends acted.
A young girl, isolated from the rest of the world by her overly protective mother, yearned for the outside - and eventually escaped. She saw wonders. Wishing to share her delirious joy with the only friend she has - mother, the girl came home, only to find mother dead from a broken heart.
Her last diary entry begged her daughter for forgiveness, explaining her paranoia-induced overprotection by revealing a secret: that she lost her eldest daughter to the elements, and cursed herself to exile.
Grandpa, this was the only piece of creative writing I had ever produced in my entire life, and it ended with the main character confused. Suspended indefinitely in the parallel world of the play. There was no what-happened-next. The parents at the conference paid no mind to what literally was a child’s play; you would have, though. My mother found the manuscript and showed it off to my aunties. They all told me you would have been so happy, “he’s also a writer”, sending questions blooming in my mind. What did you write? Did you write stories about locked-away girls and their grief-stricken mothers? Did you write poems, scripts, musical interludes? No one told me - they just told me you were a writer, a man of literature, and so was I. At the age of twelve, I was a man of literature.
Maybe writer simply means someone who writes, and who writes well. Whose letters look nice.
I learnt to read before I learnt how to write. The first thing I learnt how to read was a newspaper column about the Vietnamese Prime Minister, not a children’s book - which my friends were always puzzled about. The first English word I learnt was “lux”, on a shampoo bottle; because I could not pronounce it. I asked my father, who explained to me that the word is “wrong” because it’s English, which allows for impossible sounds. I am now making impossible sounds on the daily.
I learned because I could not pronounce. I read because I could not yet write. It was always one or the other - I experienced our tongue in binaries, barren of duality.
In first grade, I won the District’s First Prize in Handwriting against three hundred other seven-year-olds. Great news for me. Our people believe we can tell the personality and future of a person through their handwriting. This belief system solidified in a feng-shui-esque science, which my father is a master of. Yet he himself facilitated my handwriting-downfall with ballpoint pens, which “destroy the child’s hand form” according to my mother. He must have thought my handwriting was already formed - my fate was decided; and in adulthood, there were more factors in making oneself understood than standard textbook cursive: substance, speed, and accuracy. Fate reading is complete; it is only ever untrue in interpretations (our culture is always wholly defined, isn’t it?). Post-ballpoint-pens, I became a scribbler. Scribbled when waiting for music class to start, when spending the awkward stretch of time during family gatherings where I arrived too early to eat and too late (and too young) to help the women. Rest assured that my fate was decided on my prize-winning, no-hooks-missing, perfect-o’s, dotted-i’s-and-crossed-t’s, whole handwriting, definitely not my scribbling.
I left earnest writings behind me in the wake of my adolescence, latching on to a new language. English is impossible not just because the sounds are foreign to my tongue, but because it grants me a new identity, one where I can be confident in addressing everyone as “you” and myself as “I”, independent of the need to constantly redefine myself based on my listener. How I hide behind it. I am never older, younger, more reckless, never less familiar, more grateful, less alien. I am an ambiguous self, never fragmented by the constant redefinitions, therefore I am whole. I had not been speaking Vietnamese for a full six months when a new flock of Vietnamese freshmen came to my college. They chirped in Vietnamese to me, naturally, and I was stunned: in their voices I heard an expectant question, beckoning me to offer my vulnerability in return. I am compelled to assert myself as chị - gendered, aged, experienced, authoritative. The mask of impossible sounds allows me to disguise my true identity. I deferred my authority to a language greater than me to decide, and its verdict is tricky like a genie’s: I am allowed to be ambiguous at the cost of not being myself. Wholeness at the cost of insincerity.
Grandpa, I read your writing last year, way after I had ceased to be a man of literature. It reminded me a little bit of my silly sixth-grade play. Lots of grief, isolation and broken hearts. Someone died at the end. Loan Cung Trang - madness in the kingdom of the moon.
A poet fell in love with a woman whose village forbade love and individual expression. He was banished to a forest where he had a lot of musings and eventually died alone. In contrast, the woman, while almost lost her mind with grief, eventually miraculously recovered. She forgot about the poet, got married and had children - a normal, well-defined life (as opposed to the poet’s hazy end of life; honestly I wasn’t even sure at which point in the book he died - there were a good 5 pages at any point during which he could have actually died).
But your writing ended with me confused! Who were you writing to? Another genius bothered by the human condition? Did you see yourself as such a genius? Your poetry was ridden with implicit snarky sarcasm about the government and the Americans alike, all of which evaded the scrutiny of the officer
who checked all published works for anti-revolutionary sentiments - meaning they were very, extremely implicit. Did you find amusement in it? I don’t know! You were writing in our language, which is supposed to lay bare the soul. Our every word is soaked in tongue, harmonies and tones, hyper aware of itself in relation to the universe. So how come I don’t know who you are?
I always thought praying would become easier if I knew the person I’m praying to. I would know better the odds of me getting cursed, and my mind would be at peace. When I would think-pray,
"Dear respected and beloved grandpa, I miss and respect you. I hope you can protect and grant my family and I good health and success. Thank you so very much."
I would think-think,
"How do we decide which foods our ancestors like? Did someone tell us? Is there a way… How can you be dead for a bit, come back and then report on that? What if grandpa really hates white cut chicken.... Oh wait, mom said we should be grateful for all foods. I guess it’s the same for them. Sorry grandpa if you don’t like white cut chicken. I don’t either and we both have to be grateful for it. But I won’t complain to mom though
...Okay, time’s up."
But now I understand - it’s not just the intrusive thoughts that disturb me. It’s the vulnerability. In the thirty seconds it takes to pray, there are two lines of thoughts in my head and in both of them I am vulnerable. There is no escape from the vulnerability that fuels our language, that decides which pronouns I use and whether I add an ạ at the end of my line. The vulnerability that dictates someone else, greater and grander than me, is gaining full access to my mortal mind and the childish chaos that it’s desperately trying to suppress. The vulnerability bestowed upon me at birth, destined to haunt me like a curse, that I briefly, insincerely eluded by speaking in a different tongue.
Reading is like praying. I think-read and I think-think. When I read, I am looking into a fraction of the author’s mind. And like a prayer, he is also reading me back. He expects me and wields the power to alter my course of thoughts - without my authority or control - molding me into a different person in the time it takes for me to read his works. By the end of the work, I will only think-think, but as a different person. There will be my pre-reading self and post-reading self. Vulnerability is amplified in writing. I watch as myself morphs into another person without my authority, through ideas and - heavens forbid - feedback. I will never be the same.
Grandpa, I offered you my vulnerability. I expected something in return, not just vulnerability, but honesty. I expected in earnest of any writers I read, but more so you. You are family. Your name is part of mine. Your legacy is part of my inheritance. We share a sacred identity that I had never shared with anyone else, for a fraction of my young life - at twelve years old. That of a writer.
I craved a conversation, desperately wanted through my prayers. Now I understand: asking for a final answer, one that I could use to rationalize my identity, is my last defense against vulnerability. I once sought wholeness in the unchanging fate readings, the definite handwriting tellings, the no-redefinitions-required foreign language; now I will simply accept un-wholeness. Grandpa, I so hoped that reading your book or learning how to pray correctly will be the missing piece I need for understanding my self and my inheritance. For my peace. But there’s no real catalyst. I unearthed myself. I wrote. I read, prayed, let myself be heard, heard myself. I chipped off the wall of my own fixation on wholeness and perfection. So this… is what being a man of literature is about. A writer is just someone whose acceptance of vulnerability is intensified, whose quest for self-peace is channeled through letters; whose humanity is amplified.
Grandpa, I am a writer.
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