Word: ng
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...they knew who we were: the children born in America who didn’t speak our mother’s language, who had never been to Vietnam, who had never met our grandfather who died four years earlier. As we came to know, they were Ông Ngoai ’s neighbors, children who picked his fruit, two of the few people who had watched...
...children eagerly led us the rest of the way. After crossing a narrow footbridge, our family’s former hut emerged from a dense thicket of lychee trees. It was a modest brown and green construction that Ông Ngoai had built himself. He weaved chutes of bamboo together for the walls; he bound thatch together for the roof. The floor was smoothed dirt covered by scratchy mats and the bed was flattened bamboo draped with scraps of cloth. A black and white picture of him sat on the altar to the left of his bed, his image...
After making offerings at Ông Ngoai’s grave and battling through torrential rain, I traveled back with my family to their home in downtown Saigon. When Ma was seven her family moved into the city so the children could find jobs. My mother carried buckets of water, hanging from a long stick crossing her shoulders, from the city well to people’s houses; the lack of indoor plumbing at that time assured her of employment. Suzanne and I wandered through the market surrounding our family’s home, trying to envision...
...letters no longer exist. In 1975, when North Vietnam took over the South, my grandmother burned them. She had to destroy the family’s ties to America as the new government searched homes looking for evidence of treachery and conspiracy. I traveled to Ông Ngoai’s farm with a subconscious hope he’d greet me in those tall grasses but I had to settle for a tomb and an old picture instead. The memories my mother has forgotten, the artifacts that have been destroyed, the people who have died—each...
...don’t, however, live our lives in a vacuum. In truth, the story of my life begins on Ông Ngoai’s farm and in those alleys where my mother learned about survival. Poverty, toil and war—these are the things that shaped her survivalist mentality. This mentality remains a constant point of contention between us. When I took a late leave of absence last semester, she ridiculed the notion of “taking time...