Words

I started associating words with meaning when I was riding wedged between my parents on their motor scooter in Viet Nam. As we coasted slowly through the Saigon streets, my mom pointed out the word “Pho” to me, illuminated in a green neon glow, a luring lantern in the muggy and bustling night scene. Such an awe-inspiring three-letter word, and my three-year-old self immediately grasped the concept that a building bearing this sign would house the comforting, homey smell of rice noodles in beef broth.

My cognitive world took a shift after my family immigrated to the United States. The tonal, monosyllabic Vietnamese language on which  my ears had been trained suddenly made way to something foreign called English. Thrust into a kindergarten where everyone spoke and understood it, I tried learning through observing actions and body language what I was expected to do. I counted colorful blocks to learn my numbers, traced dotted letters to study my alphabet. Strung together, the letters made words. Strung together, the words made sentences. Strung together, the sentences made meaning. I traced my hand under the big block words of an illustrated Rabbit and Panda book, finally able to read my first sentence, “The sun went up.”

Beyond the basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication, numbers continued to be elusive to me in their infinite mystery, but I latched onto words, following thrilling worlds in books and shows like “Reading Rainbow” with LeVar Burton.

In fifth grade, my teacher had us write stories from our imagination, any theme at all. When he handed my draft back to me, penciled in a blunt No. 2 about a cowgirl and her horse, he mentioned, “You have a way with words.” I knew even by then that I was hopeless at math; I was so pleased to hear that I may have undiscovered talent elsewhere.

In middle school, there was an essay contest in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a school where nerds were made fun of and jocks were cool. Secretly, I wrote an essay and entered. Weeks later, along with morning announcements over the intercom, the three winners of the essay contest were also announced. I held my breath in that split-second before the names were read...and exhaled when one of those names was mine. The prize was a trip to Red Robin burger restaurant with the teacher sponsoring the contest, Mr. Lewis. I had never been to a "fancy" burger restaurant before--my family subsisted mainly on home-cooked meals and rarely ever ventured into American restaurants to dine. The two other contest winners were amused at how much I marveled over the huge menu of burgers in so many combinations. My eyes glossed over the words, but my mind wasn't really paying attention. Instead, I was touched by the triumph, that a pen, a few pieces of paper, and the words I learned to shape were the things that brought me to this winner's table.

In high school Spanish class, my teacher posed a question as we were learning the vocabulary for the human body: “Cual es la funcion de la lengua?” What is the function of the tongue?

We threw out Spanish words from our physiology repository in attempt to answer the question: “To talk.” “To taste.” “To swallow.”

“What else?” the teacher asked, and when we all seemed tongue-tied, she offered, “Isn’t it possible that the tongue is one of the most powerful parts of the human body? It shapes words, and words can heal, words can wound.” Strung together, words are powerful. They can inspire. They can destroy. They remain immortal, passed down as literature through centuries after everything corporeal has turned to dust.

In college, I chose a creative writing major after working up the guts to venture away from my “undeclared” start. I spent my undergrad and graduate years reading, writing, studying, and living in stories. I refined my understanding of what makes things worth reading. Studied sentences and their mechanics.  Developed an ear for documenting dialogue. Learned to shape what my heart was feeling and lay it bare on a sheet of 8.5x11” paper.

I ventured into the corporate world, armed with a Technical Writing certificate. It was different from writing stories all day. I wrestled with the meaning of complex technology and gave up pen and paper to fumble my way through sophisticated authoring software. I confided in a friend of mine that in this left-brain/right-brain transition, I was afraid of losing my ability to write creatively. “That’s a part of you that no one can take away,” she assured. And in the end, taming the incomprehensible to make intended meaning clear to a given audience, I realized that I was still playing with words.

There’s nothing like the discombobulating feeling of being alienated from writing. It’s like your air gets cut off. You lose sleep from want of it. “All you writers are afflicted,” a college professor had said to us during a lecture, “by the sheer need for creation. The lust for wanting to put words on a page. You don’t just want to do it. You have to do it to survive.” Writing gives me purpose and direction. Without it, I feel like a husk at the mercy of an indifferent wind, a dried up shell housing only emptiness where once there was substance and heart.

They may not be much, only words. But I cling on to them with all I have, for they shape and define me. As the Bee Gees say,

“It's only words

And words are all I have

To take your heart away.”

Graveside

The things that I say to my deceased grandfather are private. Standing by the side of his grave on a summer afternoon, I begin a mental conversation with him. It has been a long time since I last visited, maybe years. Months after he died, I still saw him in my dreams. He doesn’t visit me anymore, maybe payback for me being as delinquent to his graveside. Everything looks different from when I’ve seen it last. There are still the familiar tombstones worn by age and weather—the marble carving of the twelve apostles standing in a circle and facing out, the huge mausoleums dedicated to a Mother and a Father, the sleeping cherub guarding a baby’s grave, one who had passed through life far too quickly to enjoy living it. 

But there are so many new graves now, decorated with silk flowers bursting with color and windmills spinning furiously in the ground, giving the illusion of life and movement when all else is silent and still. I get the driving directions wrong as I look for the Lion’s Gates. I wander the vicinity of my grandpa’s grave, shoes sinking in the soft, tilled ground, looking for his monument. I hear his crotchety old voice as I find it and approach—“Lost again, Little Kitten? Because you haven’t visited for so long. No wonder you don’t know where I lay anymore.” I stand there and ignore his goading as I had done when he still lived. I tell him what had come to pass, what is currently happening, what I hope are things that will come to be.

My next-door neighbor recently passed away from Lymphoma. He was only 46. He welcomed us to the neighborhood when we first moved in; he gave us home-improvement advice; he was one of those neighbors that made us feel lazy as he would always put out holiday decorations first or keep his yard flourishing when our own lawn was shriveling up and we would only care to take a nap. I have donned black funeral dresses far too often this year, sat in pews as services were held, remembering the dead. My neighbor is survived by his wife of 11 years and his son, who had just turned 4 this summer. I think about the distant future and inevitable separation with my own husband and cannot bear the loss. We humans are destined to go to the grave as we entered the womb—alone. I think about the blue-eyed, blond boy—asking where his father is, why can’t he visit, why they don’t talk to each other anymore—and try to swallow my pain.

My neighbor will be buried at the same cemetery where my grandfather rests. I think of spiritual lives intersecting in a different plane, across time and space. My mom says my grandpa’s Buddhist soul had long since transitioned from this world to be reincarnated, and maybe it’s because I was brought up with Western ideologies, but I feel that he watches over me still. In his crotchety sort of way. Complaining that I don’t eat enough, tiny kitten that I am, or reminding me to make my bed each morning, not to let the house get too dirty. Thanks, Gramps, for instilling my early onset of OCD. As I bid him goodbye and walk back to my car, I concentrate on the warm sunlight on my skin. The fresh breeze blowing across the rolling hillside. The comfort of love. The laughter of friends. I take these things and try to fill, with their small but reassuring presence, the emptiness in my heart.

Mom



Dad and Mom, in the year that I was born

She is more domestic than me.

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.



Mom and me, 5/14/13 at Belleza Skin Care after her Mother's Day facial



People Who Go Places

One of my favorite lines from S.E. Hinton’s Tex, a beloved adolescent novel, goes, “There are people who go places and people who stay. . .” When I was young, working retail in my parent’s businesses, growing up in the less-than-utopia Eastside San Jose, being the minority enrolled in the few Honors’ classes offered in under-sourced and under-budgeted middle and high schools, I was desperate to be one of those people who go places. My husband recently asked me, “Do you often think about the future?” I responded, “Well, when you grew up like I did, you either obsessively planned a future for yourself, or you accepted that you didn’t have much of one.” So, I studied, got my coveted college degrees. I moved out. I got to see a little bit of the world through recent travels. I pushed at my spheres of comfort to get a glimpse of what lies beyond.

Recently, important people in my life are going places, too.

My instructor at Aikido of Silicon Valley, Michael O’Quin, is moving back to Louisiana after 15 years of teaching at the dojo to care for his elderly mother.


With O'Quin (left) and MacAllister (right) Sensei at the farewell dinner

I met him four years ago, when the days turned dark faster and I wandered the premises of a private high school, looking for the training room where the aikido students met. I had spoken to O’Quin Sensei on the phone to inquire about Aikido of Silicon Valley. I thought I’d be the one asking the questions: How long are classes? Where can I change? How much are the fees? But instead, he asked me, “What are you looking to get out of aikido?” That stopped me, rehearsed questions flying out of my head. I didn’t know. I practiced it in college for a few years. I had about five years of hiatus since then. I needed the exercise. But really, it felt like I was looking for something I lost. So, slightly lost I wandered, looking for the obscure dojo at King’s Academy High School on a rainy night. And it was O’Quin Sensei who found me, who led me the rest of the way and brought me home.

In Susan Shillinglaw’s California Literature class, where we read and discussed Steinbeck and C.Y. Lee, I met Kate Evans: tall, confident, happy blonde who always wears a smile.



With Kate at Vyne near SJSU

Some classmates you see for a full semester and then never again. Some classmates become lifelong friends with you, inseparable. And some you get to know a little in class, lose touch with for many years, and then find yourself immersed in the most important and memorable aspects of their life. When we crossed paths while walking to class one day, Kate asked me, “How do you picture your future? Do you want kids?” Loaded down by too many Norton Anthologies and graduate units, I responded, “I do, but really not thinking about that right now.”


The hall of Faculty Offices Building, home of English teachers' offices and where I once worked before the corporate world.



English Dept Awards list, winners posted. I'll never forget the feeling of looking with anticipation at this list when it got posted and finally seeing my name under some of the creative writing awards.

 After college, Kate stayed at SJSU to teach, and I moved on to join the corporate world. I saw her occasionally at campus readings, and then not at all. . . until I was engaged, and my husband and I decided to ask her to officiate our wedding. What followed were emails, dinners, and meet-ups to work on my ceremony script, getting to know each other’s spouses better, and sharing pre-matrimonial celebrations. Kate, always the over-achiever, actually got engaged shortly after me and snuck in her Hawaii-based wedding before my own. She came to my bridal shower to play games like “pin the flower on the wedding dress,” and I came to her limo-riding, wine-tasting bonanza, where we shared appetizers in good company and danced together in front of a live band as the stars came out.

Very soon, Kate will head off with her husband on a world tour. With their personal belongings given to others or stored away, they’ll be visiting places such as Australia, Hong Kong, India, and Sri Lanka, spending the upcoming year (and beyond!) as travelers. Kate is a strong believer of serendipity and how one positive, happy event often dominoes to create other positive, happy events. She performed a poetry reading at her cousin’s wedding and caught the bouquet. She and I got married, and she officiated my wedding. Recently, some friends of mine asked me to officiate theirs. For our last meet-up before she heads off, Kate passed along a black leather portfolio, the same one she used to contain my ceremony script, so that it could once again be put to use for another wedding. During our meet-up, she asked, “You two want kids?” And the future is now, and I confidently answered, “Yes, Kate. We do.”


Kate's office, on her last day of teaching. You will be missed.


After recovering from a cold and coming back to work at Telenav one day, I discovered that I had a new across-the-aisle cube neighbor, Karen Sudre. We stumbled past our computer chairs in our too-tight cubes to shake hands, and what resulted was almost six years of an amazing friendship. We designed department signs together and worked on localization/translation projects, both being kind of grammar/punctuation snobs. We laughed over punny sentences, rode horses, ice skated, scaled Planet Granite rocks, shot pool, played air hockey, bowled, barbecued hot dogs for donations, and walked the Making Strides fundraiser. Yes, our jobs at times can be extremely stressful, I know. Karen’s been there for me through those giant milestones in life, like buying a house and getting married. I watched her oldest son grow up and walk down the aisle as my handsome ring bearer. I got to know her daughter since she was born. We celebrated promotions and vented through those not-so-glorious moments. She makes work life humanizing, and sane. As our company expanded, we moved further from each other, putting more space between our cubes, and finally ending up on different floors of our office building, but still touching bases and enjoying each other’s company at occasional lunches and corporate gatherings. Next week, after a five-year tenure, Karen will move even further, leaving Telenav to start at Yahoo. May she excel in her new role at localization project management. . . and exercise the powers of self-control over the unlimited, free corporate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.


With Karen, 5/10/13. One week left at Telenav!


I used to think that The People Who Stay are the ones getting left behind, the ones missing out on all the living they should be doing, such as in Dr. Seuss’s “Oh, the Places You’ll Go,” where the dreaded Waiting Place is mentioned. You just hope that

“Somehow you'll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You'll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.

With banner flip-flapping,
once more you'll ride high!
Ready for anything under the sky.”

In reality, we are moving all the time, not on one determined trajectory but on unique pathways that are right for us. Once in a while, they criss-cross, and we reconnect with beloved companions who may travel in parallel with us for a time, or simply say farewell and move on. When you’ve done as much “going” as you need to do and are ready to settle down and “stay” for a while, you get to appreciate your current place, too. The familiarity of well-known surroundings, family, and friends. The calmness of a sunny afternoon spent in lazy leisure. The quiet place where you can just relax, break out your brainstorming cap, and plan for what lies ahead.

For The People Who Go Places, we Stayers wish you pleasant adventures. May you unearth new thrills in undiscovered places, and may happiness forever light your pathway as you forge ahead to find all the things you seek.

Giddy 'Yap for Tung's Birthday

Here are some highlights from Tung's birthday bash. We went horseback riding at the nearby Ed Levin Park, followed by a Mexican feast at La Milpa, and ending at home for some mocha cake and champagne.

At the start of the ride

Me on Orchid

Teepee along the trail

Steph on her horse

View from atop my horse, Orchid

Some mustard is still left blooming

View of the lake near Odin's dog park

On the trail. Feeling like real cowboys/girls.

Finished with the 1-hour ride

Duong and Johnny rein it in

Liane, with cowboy in her genes!

Strawberry daquiri made with wine

The crew at La Milpa for lunch

Cheese enchiladas and beef taco

Tung and his chicken burrito muy grande

Another year celebrated with another mocha cake

Pampas Anniversary Dinner

To celebrate a "dual" anniversary of Duong's and Johnny's and Tung's and my old anniversary in March before we got married, the four of us went to Pampas in Palo Alto, a Rodizzio-style restaurant where waiters bear large cuts of meats around. Some interesting things on the menu include marinaded chicken hearts and roasted pineapples, the latter being surprisingly bursting with juicy flavor. I'm inspired to pop my own pineapples on the grill from now on.

Salad buffet with generous fixins'

Meat, meat, and more meat!

The spicy "Frango Picante," chicken marinated with garlic, chile, and vinegar, was one of my favorites

Wine from home. A good Cab to go with all that meat.

Anniversary couple #1

Anniversary couple #2

Season of Cherry Blossoms

I love it when the cherry blossoms bloom. Since adopting Odin, I've been taking him on daily morning walks, all the more reason to appreciate these ephemeral petals. Winter is a bland season, with trees bare-naked and resting, devoid of colors and scents. In springtime, the birds burst into song, with the bright buds of the cherry blossoms heralding the coming of newness. The air is subtly marked with the sweet scent of flowers; greens, pinks, and reds start to dot the streets along my walk. One day they are but tight buds furled on brown branches:

And before you know, it, they bloom forth in color, striking against an incomparably blue spring sky:

The pink trees are the most prolific, paper-thin petals so numerous that they cake the branches:

The branches reach upward toward the sun, the warm source that drives their built-in clocks, coaxing them to come forth.

 There had always been a fantastical source to my admiration of cherry blossoms. When I see a cluster of trees, I am reminded of a favorite childhood epic saga, The Condor Heroes, set in China, filmed in Hong Kong, and dubbed in Vietnamese. My dad used to rent the 10 to 20 VHS tapes of different sword-fighting sagas to keep me entertained, and in The Condor Heroes, the heroine, Hoang Dung lives on a well-fortified island, Dao Dao Hoa (Island of the Cherry Blossoms) with her father. When she sneaks off to Mainland China to see the world, she meets her husband-to-be, Quoc Tinh. The two have many adventures together in a fun, carefree, slightly awkward teenage-first-love-coming-of-age story, until he angers her one day and she runs back to hide on her home island. There is a certain way to walk through the maze of cherry blossom trees surrounding the periphery of the island, and without knowing the correct path, one could get lost and disoriented, never finding the way out. Hoang Dung traps Quoc Tinh in the maze for a time before finally reluctantly forgiving him and helping him out.

There is a Vietnamese old wives' tale cautioning people against planting cherry blossoms in their front yard if they have a daughter. Chances are, a rogue boy will become enamored with the cherry blossoms' beauty, symbolic of the frail demeanor and innocent beauty of daughters, and steal her away from her family.

The cherry blossom is a Japanese icon, and annual festivals celebrate Japanese-American sister cities, hearkening to the 1912 gift of cherry blossom trees from Tokyo to Washington D.C. as a gesture of friendship.

 White cherry blossom trees are striking, too, a soft snow robe draping delicately on dark tree branches:

Most of all, cherry blossoms are symbolic of the swift and ephemeral human life, here and gone in the blink of an eye. The swiftly blooming, swiftly fading blossoms give way within just a few weeks' time to dark leaves that hang on the tree for the rest of the year until winter winds cause them to shed. Pathways are littered with the pink flowers, and soft springtime breezes blow the delicate petals in the air, raining pink confetti on me as I walk.

As Ezra Pound writes about their evanescence:

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."