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| Dad and Mom, in the year that I was born |
Before my mom became a teenager, her parents often traveled and stayed in the city of Saigon for their retail business, the only way to make a decent living. They left behind their three children in their home village of Quang Ngai, sent money, and encouraged the kids to stay in school. Without a mother figure, my mom took over the role of cooking and providing meals for her two older brothers. She’d tell me stories of going grocery shopping in the early morning when the fish were the freshest, and how she’d have to ration 100 grams of meat among the three of them. She taught me to cook because she never saw it as a hobby but an essential life skill. Cooking sustains the belly and feeds the soul. Cooking brings families together for those too-brief moments at the dining table every night before everyone went off again to his or her private life. It encourages conversation, builds bonds.
She is braver than me.
At 31 years of age and with a four-year-old daughter in tow, my mother took the two-year immigration journey out of Viet Nam by boat. Prone to seasickness, I wouldn’t even go on a cruise, and yet there she was, hopping on a small fishing boat in the middle of the night with my father, me drugged in her arms, so that she could give us all a chance at freedom and a better education. Several times along the journey, either by force or for protection, she had to separate from my dad, not knowing if they would successfully meet up again. She spent two years on an Indonesian island, taking English classes while waiting for our legal immigration papers to come through from the States, got in line for food rations, sustained us on rice, salt, and sardines.
She is smaller than me.
I am a mere five feet, but my mom, maybe through some shrinkage due to age, is even tinier. I remember literally measuring myself up to her as I grew, reaching her waist, her chest, and finally one day outgrowing her in height. My mother was born in the year of the Dragon, and she taught me that size has nothing to do with inner strength. She was born small to her mother, and I was born small to her, both of us the only daughters in our family. My grandfather called us both “Baby Kitten” in our youths, teasing us for our petite frame. She is wise like the dragon, with a limitless supply of energy like the dragon, and, when she needs to be, as fierce as the dragon. Tiny can still be mighty, she taught me, and I think of her if I struggle when faced with big people and bigger problems.
She is messier than me.
Keeping a tidy house was never my mother’s forte. Always a working woman, she’d never dream of being unemployed, a keep-busy, financially-independent characteristic that I inherited. Nevertheless, she’d still insist on cooking on a daily basis, spoiling my dad so that he’d never eat day-old leftovers. As a result of a constant supply of fresh dinners that often went unfinished, her refrigerator is a food civil war zone, old food fighting for space with new dishes stacked on top of them. My brothers and I would often stand in front of the fridge and hum the Tetris theme song as we rearranged things, digging through the Neolithic era of sautéed bok choy, dodging the brimming and sludgy sweet-and-sour catfish soup of the Mesolithic, and finally getting to the loaf of bread buried deep in the Paleolithic layer.
She is more hard-working than me.
Her wrinkled hands with some of the fingers now twisted by arthritis have held our hands as we clumsily took our first steps, fed us, comforted us, checked our foreheads for fever. As we stood together across the years, her washing our dinner dishes and me drying, I’d notice how those hands became coated with suds, her thin but bright golden wedding ring occasionally peeking through, and then washed clean by steaming-hot water. From young and smooth, these hands became weathered with age—cooking, cleaning, clipping the stems of a million branches of silk flowers for her floral arrangements that are her retail business.
I may not be as ladylike as she would like, as demure as she would like, as soft-spoken, scientific, or mathematical. But she is successful on many accounts of raising me: instilling both passion and compassion, as well as a strong will to follow my dreams. Plus, I can cook.
People sometimes find themselves having to live without certain things due to hardship or life circumstances. I’m glad that a mother is something I’ve so far never had to live without.
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| Mom and me, 5/14/13 at Belleza Skin Care after her Mother's Day facial |
