Braver Than You Think

by Maggie Downs

  Those first bras were white and pale pink with tiny rosettes sewn into the front strap at the base of the two cups (and I use the term “cups” loosely, because that’s how they hung on me). They were delicate, but I wasn’t. That boy at my school intended to insult me, to steal my power. But even at that young age I knew clothing could act as armor, even the pieces that hid under a uniform. I felt mightier when I had them on.

  The Vietnamese shopkeeper emerges, one bra in hand, and a look of calm washes over her face. She plops down a pretty white lace bra with cups as big and round as soup bowls. She nudges it my way and says, “Try.”

  So I try. There is no dressing room, so I stretch the bra on top of my brown dress. I swear every woman in the circle around me is holding her breath—they’re invested in this too. I strike a pose and model it for the crowd. They clap. Success!

  Next comes the part where we haggle over the price. However, after rummaging through hundreds of bras and finding only one that fits, there is little room for negotiation. I want that bra, and the shopkeeper knows it. She asks for the equivalent of seven dollars, and I pay it, happily.

  THE BRA WAS THE FINAL ITEM I HAD TO PACK BEFORE LEAVING Hanoi and continuing on to the next part of my journey. I hoist my backpack onto my shoulders, then catch a ride on a scooter that zips through the congested and lively streets of frenetic Hanoi. The driver drops me off at a travel company storefront, where a bus is waiting to take me to my next destination. And it’s an emotional one.

  I know of the bay only from photos, but the place in those images looks dramatic, mystical, dreamy. Like nothing else I’ve seen before on earth. The water is either emerald green, turquoise, or sapphire blue, depending on the light and time of day. Clusters of craggy gray limestone formations rise from the bay like mythical creatures. It’s fitting, since “Ha Long” in Vietnamese means “descending dragon.”

  Legend has it that centuries ago, the newly formed country of Vietnam faced fierce invaders who approached by sea. In retaliation, the jade emperor, who served as the king of heaven, sent a mother dragon and her children to earth to help Vietnam’s people defend their country. When the mighty mother dragon and her babies appeared, they breathed fire and spat out pieces of jade the size of mountains, forming a barrier that the battleships couldn’t navigate. The enemies who couldn’t maneuver around the walls were destroyed; the rest retreated. Over time, the massive jade chunks turned into 1,600 islands of different shapes and sizes, giving us the Ha Long Bay we see today.

  When I began this backpacking trip, I told myself it would be a success if I just made it to Ha Long Bay. It was a mental thing, the part of this journey I had to complete. On some of my roughest days, Ha Long Bay was my carrot at the end of a stick; to keep going I looked at images of misty islands among emerald-tinted water.

  I don’t know what sparked this desire. My mom never dreamt of Vietnam. It was not a place she wanted to go. Because my dad served in the air force in Vietnam, it was only the backdrop of war and conflict for her. It was the place that took her husband for a year, the reason he was away from his children, the reason she received letters instead of his touch.

  But I don’t carry any of that. My dad never talked about his time in Vietnam, and my history classes at school never managed to make it to the Vietnam War era, so I have nothing to imprint upon this country. Nothing but postcard fantasy images of farmers in conical hats walking through terraces of rice paddies in the Sapa countryside, the colorful merchant houses that line old town Hoi An, and spellbinding Ha Long Bay.

  The bus arrives, and it brings me to my home for the weekend, a wooden junk ship with broad, brick-colored sails. They look like scalloped shells cupping the modest breeze. The ship is three levels high with a sundeck on top. My cabin is located along the main deck. After I drop my luggage inside the cabin and open my door again, it looks as though I could step directly onto the water if not for a slender, polished wood railing.

  The weather is sunny and calm, the water placid and clear enough that I see multitudes of fish swimming beside the boat as we skim through the bay. Our day involves a trip to Sung Sot grotto, which means surprise grotto, an impressive cavern that was rediscovered by the French in the early 1900s; kayaking around the islands, past pearl farms and homes on stilts; and a dinner cruise at sunset. The captain of this ship maneuvers our boat into a spot that seems to be far away from other cruise ships, but after he sets anchor, more boats gather around us. And then we have a karaoke party.

  When I imagined myself in Ha Long Bay, I didn’t expect I’d be drinking watery Saigon Special beer and belting out Bon Jovi on a tinny mic. But that’s what I got, and I am not disappointed in the least.

  We never experience the world exactly as it is. We bring our expectations to a moment, and then we see that through varying lenses of hope, grief, and disappointment—especially the despair that descends when something doesn’t live up to the idea we have constructed. That’s why it’s difficult for travel to meet expectations, and why places don’t live up to the hype. They can’t. We spend our lives chasing the excitement of the new and the flutter of anticipation, but travel means reckoning with real life.

  I think if I came to Ha Long Bay as the same traveler who started my trip just under a year ago, I would have been disappointed by the more commercial, touristy aspects. But what I’m learning is that making memories involves accepting the world the way it comes to you, not the way you wish it to be. It’s bellowing “Livin’ on a Prayer” under kitschy rainbow-colored lights while floating through one of the most exquisite natural landscapes on earth. It’s meeting a place as is.

  In the morning, I wake before almost anyone else on the junk. Everything is quiet. I open the cabin door, and I am greeted by a misty green morning. The fog slithers around the limestone rocks, jagged tops peeking over the clouds. I am so close to the water, but the smell here is not briny or fishy; it’s more like wet garden. The air is chilly enough that I pull a sarong over my shoulders, but anything else would be too heavy as the sun rises gentle gold and abundant.

  My mom didn’t know enough about Vietnam to have wanted this, but she would have been enchanted by the juxtaposition of the ragged stone and glass-like water, the calmness that settles with the early morning mist, the ghosts of dragons.

  Seeing Ha Long Bay at sunrise is like discovering the key that opens my lock. I stand here for a long time feeling the full weight of this moment and the ease of it too.

  If I accept the world as is, that means me too. The bay is still, I feel alone in it, and I am not lonely.

  In this instant, I am grateful; I’m practically spilling over. When my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, I thought my world was ending. Instead it was just cracking open, finding a way to let something else inside.

  There was a time when I thought the world wasn’t available to me. My lot in life was that I was from small-town Ohio, and that’s where I would stay, even though I desperately wanted to leave. I didn’t think I had the skills necessary to do anything else; I didn’t think I was capable of following through on my dreams. Now I can’t imagine going back to that emotional place ever again. I have been shaken loose, propelled forward, inspired.

  The foggy morning gives way to a brilliant afternoon. I spend it with my new friends from the boat. We sprawl out on the sundeck, and when it gets too warm, everyone begins to cannonball into the water, three stories below. Everyone but me.

  I stand on top of the railing, one hand clinging to a pole alongside the boat. Everyone below is smiling and laughing, urging me to jump, but I’m frightened. Yes, I have jumped out of airplanes. But when you’re looking out of a plane, nothing is relative, so the height barely registers. Here I am fully aware of how high I am and how far I have to fall.

  “Do it,” yells a woman from Ireland. “Let go.”

  I screw my eyes shut, take a deep breath, and loosen my grip. Before I even have time to be frightened, I am plunged into the deep and bob to the surfa
ce again. I had braced for the hit of cold water, but the bay is bathtub warm, like an embrace. Around me the gentle waves seem to sparkle with glitter as they shift in the sunlight. The protruding rock islands are a vivid shamrock color, the sky a deep teal. Treading water, I am no longer looking at Ha Long Bay or absorbing it from a distance, I am a part of it.

  Loving my mom through Alzheimer’s was like ten years of digging a tunnel with a spoon, only to discover that the hole I made was a grave. But if my family was going to have that trauma anyway, if we were going to have to dig that grave alongside her, at least I have discovered the magical place on the other side of it all.

  My mother deliberately brought me into this world, and I can finally say I’ve made good on that deal. I am here. I am alive. I am floating in Ha Long Bay, a place that unfolds generously green and merciful, waiting for me to jump so it can show me how buoyant I am.

  Look for the Flowers

  WHEN I THINK ABOUT MY MOM NOW, THERE ARE ALMOST always flowers: the lily of the valley soap she treasured from Germany, the marigolds and geraniums she planted in the flower boxes of our front yard, the intoxicating purple hyacinth she bought every Easter. Her clothes were dotted with blooms, and when it came time to choose art to hang above our living room couch, she picked out an oil painting with splashy red poppies. In one of my first memories, I’m toddling around our overgrown backyard, where morning glories and tall grasses wove through the chain-link fence like vibrant yarn on a loom; my mom plucks a honeysuckle blossom and holds it to my fat, eager tongue so I can drink the syrupy nectar.

  It seems strange then that my mom was buried in a frozen, flowerless landscape. Perhaps there were flower arrangements at her funeral service—that seems probable—but if there were, I don’t remember them.

  What we did have was a bare, gnarled tree branch, about the length of my arm, which I stuck inside of a vase at the funeral home. I left paper tags on the table next to the vase and asked guests to write their memories of my mom and hang them from the branch.

  My family thought it was a silly thing, and as I was trying to make the display perfect, someone pulled me aside to say, “It’s okay if you don’t have the tree branch. You don’t have to do this.” I insisted.

  I can’t articulate why it was so important for me to create that tree branch of remembered moments. Maybe I wanted to know that my mom’s life mattered to someone other than me, and the paper tags were a tangible representation. Maybe I simply wanted to take all these memories of my mother and hold them for myself. Maybe I just wanted to watch as the rootless, broken branch—plucked from my parents’ backyard on an ashen afternoon—flourished into something beautiful.

  As the visiting hours progressed, the bare, naked branch became a blooming thing, each stick coming alive with origami-like blossoms, shivering. It was proof that even in a world without my mom, things could still thrive.

  It’s been four months since my mom was buried, and I’m a long way from where she rests. I’m headed toward a jungle in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia, looking for something equally rootless—the rafflesia, the world’s largest flower.

  These flowers might be massive, but even so they are difficult to locate. They are rare and temperamental, only blooming for four to five days at a time. Sometimes there aren’t any flowers for months. The plant’s existence has also been threatened by a diminishing habitat, with sizable amounts of rainforest cleared for palm oil plantations or land development, which has made the rafflesia even scarcer.

  As much as I love the adventure of a trek and finding things on my own, that’s not an option in this situation. Because the rafflesia teeters on the verge of extinction and is considered a protected species, I have to hire a guide to venture anywhere near the flower. Also the rafflesia that grows in this part of Malaysia is found only on native land; only those in the Orang Asli tribe (or guides educated by the tribe) know where to find it.

  My guide drives a navy blue Land Rover that looks like it has been dipped in caramel. Muddy caramel. Oozy mud coats the lower two-thirds of the vehicle, and I have no idea where this guy has been or where he’s taking me, but I buckle up for a bumpy ride. He slides his slight frame into the driver’s seat, and when he looks into the rearview mirror, I catch sight of his bulbous, bloodshot eyes. A silver marijuana leaf dangles on the chain around his neck. A laminated poem is posted above the steering wheel:

  Stoners live and stoners die

  Fuck the world, let’s get high.

  Pot’s a plant, it grows in the ground,

  If God didn’t like it, it wouldn’t be around.

  So drink 151 and smoke a bowl,

  Party hard and rock and roll.

  To all you preps who think you’re cool,

  Fuck you, bitches. Stoners rule!

  The man is a plant lover. That’s all I’m saying.

  Our drive is two hours on bone-jarring roads. At one point I am launched from my seat toward the ceiling, even though I’m wearing a seat belt, and I almost bruise myself on the roof.

  Suddenly, at a remarkably unremarkable part of the road, the guide hits the brakes and turns off the ignition. Outside the vehicle, there are no paths and no signs, just a snarl of jungle. He motions for me to follow along.

  The mud is ankle-deep, and the trek is a slog. We maneuver our bodies between trees, around prickly plants, through black and buzzy clouds of insects. We cross several bridges that don’t look like bridges. They are nothing more than sticks of bamboo laid across ravines, with mud flowing fast and furious several feet below. One bridge in particular gives me pause, even though my guide has no problem crossing it. He seems annoyed when I hesitate.

  “That’s not a bridge,” I say. “That’s a big pair of chopsticks.”

  “It’s bridge,” he insists.

  As I eye the chopsticks that are supposedly a bridge, a monkey scurries across it, and I swear he does a taunting dance at the end.

  I reluctantly follow the primate’s lead, though at a much slower place. But as I cautiously step forward, the sticks that form the bridge begin to roll, then fall away. The guide grasps my hand, pulling me up the slurpy side of the cliff just as I’m about to lose balance. Standing upright and looking back at the crumbled span, I have never felt more like Indiana Jones in my life.

  We continue walking into the green vegetation, pushing leaves aside like heavy stage curtains. Sweat rolls down my back, and my loose tank top sticks to my skin.

  “Shhh,” the guide says. I don’t know why he’s whispering, but I am also quiet though I move with fervor. I am not a gardener or a woman who makes a hobby out of plants, but somehow finding this flower has become the most important thing to me at this moment in time. I need to see it. The guide halts, points his hand, and motions for me to gaze upon the majestic rafflesia bud.

  It looks like a cabbage. A rotting cabbage. It’s black but tinged with red, the color of goth nail polish, and it’s the size of a bowling ball.

  We move deeper into the jungle, again walking in silence, hiking a half mile before we see the bloom. It’s substantial enough that it can be spotted from a distance, and it’s vivid red. The color of my mom’s favorite lipstick. It’s also enormous, about as big around as a bistro table. My large feet look shrunken just standing next to it.

  The petals are spongy, like a mushroom, with dots of fungus around the inside lip of the bloom. Inside, the central column is studded with projections, each the size of a pinkie finger but pointed like spikes.

  This is a bizarre plant, with no leaves, no stems, no roots, not even any chlorophyll; technically it’s an endoparasite that grows within vines. The flower is the only part that makes its way into the world and lives outside the host.

  I blow gently on the bloom, and the scent that wafts back is a putrid mash-up of rotting hamburger and rotting fish. This is why the rafflesia is more commonly known as a corpse flower or corpse lily. (Not to be confused with the titan arum, an equally stinky plant that is called “corpse flower�
� for the same reason.)

  I’ve had to cultivate a certain amount of faith to continue moving through the world. Along the way my grandmother died, immediately followed by the death of my mom, leaving me untethered, unmoored, aimless. I kept going because I knew there had to be something better ahead. I kept going because I didn’t know how to turn back.

  This flower before me, growing vibrantly and brilliantly in the midst of the jungle, seems to exist as a manifestation of that hope. It flourishes despite being rootless.

  Sometimes I wonder what else I could have done for my mom. But what else was there to do? I couldn’t have gone home to Ohio to wait bedside while she died. I am confident that those who are dying want their loved ones to live, which is exactly what my mom would have wanted for me. Why waste precious time suffering? And so I have carried her with me from Machu Picchu to the Great Pyramid to the convergence of seas. I chose life over her death.

  And I will choose life again and again. I will spend the next week ambling over the tea plantations and floral hills of Malaysia. I will travel to South Korea, where I will eat plump kimchi dumplings in Seoul that pop sour and hot in my mouth and stay in chic, pulsing Hongdae, where music throbs all night long. I will travel past fences swathed in razor wire, landmines, and a river outfitted with metal spikes into the Demilitarized Zone that straddles North and South Korea. Stepping outside of the Joint Security Area, I will see North Korean tourists across the border; we aren’t allowed to wave, but we will see each other. They’ll take photos of me taking photos of them.