the personal amidst the global
This Week in Reading
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans
Three weeks ago, my mother called me to say goodbye to my grandma. She said she didn’t have much time but she wanted her to hear everyone’s voice. I had been cooking dinner, just dropped the garlic and onions into a pan of hot oil. I turned off the stove. I told her that I loved her and that everyone else loved her and that I hoped she was feeling okay and that I hoped I could see her soon. Platitudes. It felt like what someone was supposed to say to their dying grandmother, and no other words presented themselves, so that is what I said.
I wish I could have said something else, something that felt more personal, something that would connect us, but I didn’t know what that would be. I still don’t.
[That same weekend, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd. I deleted Instagram for the weekend, missed the screenshots of tweets and the drama about which events had been endorsed by the cops they were organized to protest. I read the news. I heard helicopters fly over my apartment 24/7 for a week straight.]
I loved my grandmother (I call her Ba, directly, but like everything else, I default to English when describing her to others), but I’m not sure if I knew her. I don’t know if she felt known or seen by me. I worry that she didn’t feel known or seen at all. I know the outline of her life but I’m not sure I know the woman who lived inside of it.
The truth is: I have been mourning her for years, ever since she lost her grasp over English. She was healthy still, just frail, but she lost her English— the third, and final, language she would master in her lifetime. I never bothered to learn her mother tongue—Vietnamese, and I stumbled my way through her second—French—in high school, happy to forget it after four years of fumbled conjugations and an accent that would offend a native speaker. There is a special type of despair that second generation kids hold—the loss of a heritage you were never able to inherit. When someone dies we mourn the end of the relationship we had with them, but moreover—we mourn the loss of the potential relationship we could have shared. The disagreements that could have healed, an intimacy that was never fully realized.
In death, we shrink and flatten. We default to easy narratives, the simple, oft-repeated phrases that seem to swarm around funeral homes and hospitals. “She didn’t feel any pain,” “she lived so much”, “she was at peace.” This is supposed to comfort me—the alleged peace of my grandmother’s final moments. But my grandmother was not a peaceful woman. She nursed her bitterness, her anger, her resentment—for 93 years. It seems tragic, almost, to strip her of that right at the end. What if she had wanted to carry those grudges to the grave! Can I mourn for the way she lost grip over the anger she held sacred?
[Everyday I read about a Black person who has been murdered. Breonna Taylor was an EMT. Elijah McClain played the violin. Oluwatoyin Salau was a 19 year old freedom fighter. Sometimes their lives fall away and only their deaths remain. Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells was found near a river. George Floyd died as a police officer pressed his knee against his neck. Their lives become paragraphs in a newspaper, which becomes a sentence on a cardboard sign, becomes a name chanted in a crowd. How big that crowd is, how small a name is in comparison to the weight of a human life.]
Everyone wants to tell you that their grandma had a cool life, but I’m here to tell you that my grandma actually had the coolest life. Her father was a polygamist. She met her husband in prison. She was shot in the hand by a communist soldier as she fled her family’s land in North Vietnam, couriered bicycles from North to South Vietnam in a black market smuggling operation, fled her home for a second time the night Saigon fell, her family’s passage out of the country on a fishing boat secured by a few well placed bribes.
My grandmother believes she will be reincarnated, so she will be reincarnated. My theory about the afterlife is that we all go wherever we believe we will. If that is heaven, you go to heaven—if you believe in a peaceful fade into nothingness, have at it. But my grandmother will be reincarnated. In some ways she was reincarnated many times within her own life: as a wealthy landowners daughter, as a convict, a mother, a refugee. I wonder if her last life, the one I knew in Seattle, was dull in comparison to the first five decades of her life. Where is the line between peace and boredom?
I was rereading Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans this week (oh yes, remember, this is allegedly a reading newsletter). There is a passage that gutted me the first time I read this book, and it gutted me again, five years later. “She gave money to every other homeless person and stopped to let stray kids remind her how much Jesus and the Hare Krishnas loved her, more for the benefit of their souls than hers. Still, she wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense— if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself. Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.”
When white people talk about their grandparents they describe how sweetly thier grandparents cared for them, baked them cookies, spoiled them. Asian culture is set up in reverse, the young are expected to dote on the elderly. I have never, not once in my entire life, seen my grandmother cook. Younger generations hover around their elders, adjust the pillows behind them, fetch them treats. We would fuss over her at family gatherings while carrying on full conversations around her—a grandmother shaped object to prop up and feed and respect. I had a grandmother for twenty-six years but so often she took the form of an object or a joke or a ridiculous anecdote or a $20 bill crisply folded inside a red envelope. How do you grieve for that?
This is what I want to tell you about my grandmother: her favorite thing to do was to watch the live security camera of the front door of her apartment building. Her favorite-favorite thing was when she got a handicap permit and parked her car next to the front door and she could see it on the security feed. A few years ago she fell and went to the hospital and my mom found an 8-inch kitchen knife stashed under the seat of her walker. “For protection” she assured none of us. She put a sign in her community garden patch wrapped in a plastic bag lecturing whoever had stolen her vegetables. “How do you know they read Vietnamese?” I asked her. “I know they know Vietnamese,” she murmured darkly. She loved fish and chips, but mainly from the Ivar’s at the Northgate Mall. One time she won the lottery but she made my mom collect the winnings because she was worried the government would kick her out of low income housing if they found out she had won $300. I asked her where she got the broken off pick axe she used to weed her garden and she giggled and told me “oh….around.”
I’m telling all these stories wrong—context lost, pivotal sentences conveyed in a language I have never known. As is, they are absurdist fragments. I love them—I hope that is okay, even if they are a truth that erases a bigger truth.
[The world is blown open with tragedy. How do I hold space for my personal grief within the ocean of global grief?]
I hung up the phone with my mom. In my mind, I was already writing this essay, sealing my grief into a glass orb that I could observe at a distance, describe.
Minnar told me that immigrants learn to love wordlessly, and I have to believe she is right. I loved my grandmother and she loved me, regardless if we had the language to express that love. Words of affirmation is a western concept. Vietnamese culture has its own love languages—acts of service, duty, honor. I, forever a child of the soil I was born on, wishes I could have told my grandmother I loved her in a language she understood, but I have to trust that my love transcended language, could be felt in the weight of the hours I spent in her one bedroom apartment, by the ritualistic bowing and greeting and microwaving of lukewarm mugs of water. I have to believe that that was enough.
Further Reading:
I know I "did not talk about" the book I read, but Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self is an amazing short story collection and you should definitely read it. Remember to support black fiction authors as well as those writing explicitly about race! Danielle Evans has a new short story collection out, The Office of Historical Corrections, that I am very excited to pick up.
This essay about grief and multi generational asian women is one that I return to over and over.