by Jade Hidle
| I’ve never said that before. I do not call you this now because you earned it. You are my maternal grandfather by blood, but my mother has never met you, let alone me. Even though the man who eventually became my grandfather met my grandmother in a Saigon bar-brothel just as you did, he married her and put in the work of grandfathering me. He microwaved eggs and sausage for breakfast. Told me war stories that were supposed to help me with my homework. Poured me whiskey on sleepless nights. Despite all of this, I never called him ông ngoại either. He did not speak our language. This is the only way that you are more connected to me. Yet you still don’t know I exist. I’m a teacher—for others, technically—mostly, I am the student. I’ve been told that, back in the place and time in which you met my grandmother, teachers were well respected. And not only because of the bamboo switches. They were valued for knowing. But all my teaching starts from not knowing. My students and I work on asking specific questions, ones that will make relationships last longer than the night you spent with Bà Ngoại. For example, I say in my teacher’s voice, What are you most proud of? What scares you? Where would you go if time and money were inexhaustible? Then, half-joking, How do you feel about your mother? What made you choose the woman who became my grandmother, ông ngoại? Was her dancing better than the other bar girls’? (In the time I knew her, she only danced in jest by grabbing her breasts and shimmying her whole body like a cartoon robot on the fritz.) Her freckled skin? (It will look soft but fragile as pudding when her robe shifts in the nursing home.) Her bouffant beehive? (In the end, when remembering and forgetting were all the same to her, she only wore a baseball cap to cover what was and wasn’t left of the hair you probably nestled your face in for the time you paid for—or stole.) When you were close to her—dancing, drinking, exchanging, lying—did you know then that you would become one of countless stories she refused to tell? Can you ever sense—a tingle, or the heat of someone looking at you—when we project onto your shadow our myths and longing? Your absence is the reason I don’t understand this patriarchal filial piety others always think rules our people. When students say that they are scared of their dads, their dads who make the rules, or that they look to their grandfathers as moral compasses, I am only able to hear, not feel, their stories. Our women ruled. That’s why your great granddaughter carries Lady Trieu’s name. She is part of a long line, whether you’re part of it or not. We didn’t need you. We walked with elephants, all their memories etched on their skin. Did you ever wonder who came after? My mother, your daughter? Me, your granddaughter? Your three great-granddaughters who I’ll only tell about you if they learn to ask? All of these women who would remember you if you hadn’t already forgotten us—can you even imagine who we’ve become? All of my traits I’ve traced back to who I know: my great grandmother’s favorite colors, my grandmother’s cheekbones and laugh, my mother’s fingernail beds and insomnia and wounded eyes. Or maybe it’s because I can only see what I know. And all I know is through women—the women who raised me, who cut and healed. There are still parts of me, though, that I can’t recognize. Others tell me that those traits are uniquely me, but it’s hard to believe I’m new, that I’m an only. I am searching for answers in who you were. What did I inherit from you? Are you the root of my double-jointed thumbs or the way my feet curve into each other or my gag reflex to onions or the flashes of anger when I can’t recognize myself? Did you fall sick or die in a way that foretells my own? That column on my medical chart has always been blank. Where are you buried or burned or roaming? Or are you still living in spite of forgetting? Without Bà Ngoại we’re all seeds rescattered. If you’d been here, would you have been the centripetal force that kept us together in the wake of her death? I wonder if I’d be spending my Sundays with more siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews and some guys we call Chú all slurping duck off its bones, hurling jokes about you that were only possible because you let us know you so well. In the middle of the home you’d created for us you could put your arm around your daughter, my mother, or—maybe my fantasy is reaching too far now–just hand her a chả giò and in that moment you could’ve undone all her flailing for love in men who beat her, stalked her, lied to her, stole from her, couldn’t see her, and maybe then I would not be so afraid to tell you all of this, to ask questions at a screen. That’s probably not fair. Why do I imagine that you could be a hero? Am I mimicking the voice of the others? I don’t know who you were/are/would have been. So, tell me: who? What should I call you? Do you want to know my name and what it means? Let me teach you. I’ll be your student, and you’ll be mine. Listen to Dear ông ngoại, here |
Jade Hidle (she/her/hers) is a Vietnamese-Irish-Norwegian writer and educator. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her travel memoir, The Return to Viet Nam, was published by Transcurrent Press in 2016, and her work has also been featured in Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Northwest, Columbia Journal, and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s diacritics.org. You can follow her on Instagram at @jadethidle.