Letters to Poetwig: Strong Like Me

Dear Baby,

I wasn’t supposed to live long enough to have you. In fact, I was only 3 years old in the year I was supposed to die from a brand of baby powder that entered the Viet Nam market as the latest and greatest import, but ended up being toxic to infants. So many of them crowded the hospital just a few weeks to months after usage. The powder caused high fevers, seizures, and skin lesions and peeling. Even hospitals in the hustling and bustling city of Saigon did not meet health and safety codes as here in America. The bed sheets were often ridden with bed bugs and did not get laundered for as long as a patient decided to stick around.

They told me they rushed me up and down the hospital stairs, to different floors and wards to get diagnoses and treatment, my Uncle Ut there to carry me when my parents’ strength gave out. They told me my seizures shook the bed, and that I was drifting constantly in and out of consciousness, seemingly losing the battle toward the end of my hospital stay. They told me a boy next to me died from this poison, his body covered by a thin white sheet and his gurney wheeled out of the room we shared in the middle of the night, his distraught mother trailing after.

My own mother was constantly by my side, talking to me, singing to me, coaxing my little spirit to stay strong and stay with her. Her first baby that lived, her only daughter, her little girl. In the midst of being lost in the fog of my unconsciousness, in the shadows that live between nightmares and dreams, it was my mother’s voice that brought me back to the land of the living.

I healed from near death, with scars of stretchmarks raking across the surface of my hips and thighs and bumps of discoloration along the back of my arms. I survived an immigration experience as one of the “boat people” during my growing years, living on an Indonesian island for two years, eating a ration of rice, salt, soy sauce, and sardines, developing digestive problems and stomach worms from lack of nutrition and fresh fruits and vegetables.

In America, we live in abundance now, and I cater to your every craving, from fruits in the morning, to Taco Bell nachos and Little Caesar’s pizza for lunch, to potato chips for staving off nausea in the evenings. There are days when I wonder whether you’re doing alright, days when my symptoms leave me and I wonder if you’re growing as you should. This worry nips at me like a winter night’s frost. This is when I lay my hand on my stomach and talk to you, coaxing you to grow. I want you to give me some sign for reassurance, as small as you are, with no way of telling me. But remember this, my little one, that when I was most far gone, when it felt easier to slip away and depart from this life, it was my mother’s voice that coaxed me back to earth, as I hope it will be with you now.

In middle and high school where young girls especially prided their vanity, I was ashamed of donning summer dresses and swimsuits for waterpark field trips. I’ll never know the milky-smooth skin that normal girls are blessed with. I hid my poisoned past--stretch marks and arm bumps--with modest layers of clothing. I wondered if I would find a man who would be willing to love a woman so scarred. Luckily, your father sees past these things, to my humor, my sass, my spunk. As my vanity shrank and my self-confidence grew, I came to look at my aberrations as battle scars, as a visible attestation of my willpower, through an incident that not every child was lucky enough, or strong enough, to live through.

It is the tiger’s stripes, strange like stretchmarks, that makes him unique and lends him his strength and beauty, one part bold like the sun, one part dark and mysterious like the moon so he could stalk in shadows. Though you cannot yet talk to me, I talk to you daily, so you will be comforted and strengthened by your own mother’s voice, so you know you are loved. And despite the stress of a hundred diagnostic tests—to see if your blood is compatible with mine, to check if you have Patau’s or Edward’s or Down’s Syndrome, to look for the perfection of your heart—deep down, I know that you must be ok. Because you are made of my essence, built from my spirit. You are of me, and from me, and that makes you strong like me.