by Ali Wong
On top of all that, he was a former bad boy. My boyfriend prior to him listened to NPR and was obsessed with Freaks and Geeks. Hai was from the hood in San Diego and had a tattoo of his last name, Truong, in cursive, on his arm. He had been to jail for grand theft auto in his teens, and told me about how when he first went in there, he got into a fight right away and didn’t back down. He told me how important it was to stand your ground in those scenarios, because if he hadn’t, the beatings would’ve only increased. But eventually he got his shit together and he transferred to UC Berkeley junior year. He was like a modern-day Vietnamese version of John Travolta’s character in Grease and I wanted him to dance his way right into my bee-gee spot.
At the beginning of the semester, the program director asked if any of us were interested in volunteering at a children’s hospital. Everyone raised their hands enthusiastically except for me and Hai. That was the exact moment I officially fell in love with him. He said to me: “We did not come to Vietnam to help children. We came to help ourselves.” Which was 100 percent true. Nothing against sick children, but unless they came charging out of my vagina, I don’t want to be wiping their noses and their butts. Hai was brutally honest and unapologetic. HOT.
I loved his sense of adventure. On the second day of the program, Hai, Asiroh, and I bought bicycles and used them as our main method of transportation instead of taxis. One night while biking around Hoàn Kiềm Lake, he and I got stuck in monsoon rain and had to pedal through brown water that came up to our knees (and reminded me of my bond with Asiroh!). Since both of us wore glasses we could barely see and fell over multiple times into the street river. Instead of complaining about getting dirty, or our shirts uncomfortably clinging to our bodies, we laughed the entire time. When he dropped me off at my homestay doorstep, I was hoping he’d finally kiss me in the rain like in the movies. Instead he just said, “That was fun, Ali,” and then pedaled away.
We were spending so much time together and I had such strong feelings for him, but I couldn’t tell if he was into it or not. One night, the program director took all of us out to eat snake in a village right outside of Hanoi. Now any good ethnic studies major can tell you a million different ways that The Temple of Doom is problematic, from the bastardization of Hindu culture to Short Round’s accent. But this was some straight Indiana Jones shit. At this restaurant, which was essentially someone’s house, there were cages full of cobras. I picked one and then a man unceremoniously whipped it against the floor. Then he severed the head, which continued to move on the ground for a couple of minutes. Then he drained its blood, which was then combined with gin to drink during the meal. The snake man then slit the reptile’s entire belly and grabbed the still-beating cobra heart. He dropped it in a shot glass full of gin and I wanted that heart inside me immediately. It’s apparently very unusual for women to drink it. Vietnamese men generally fight over it because it’s said to boost male virility, but I didn’t care—I was drinking that heart. Then the snake man took out the liver and drained the black bile, which he also combined with gin to drink during the meal. He then skinned and butchered the rest of the snake right in front of us and prepared nine dishes with that one snake: fried snake, snake rinds, snake soup, steamed snake, barbecued snake, snake and corn, etc. The two girls on our program who happened to speak the best Vietnamese were horrified and refused to eat it. Instead they picked at some kernels of steamed white rice, while I rolled my eyes because the doughy white guy ate the shit out of it. Those of us who were deciding to enjoy life found out that snake is delicious. It tasted like a cross between fish, chicken, and being a fucking badass.
That snake certainly boosted my virility. That night, full of gin, bile, and snake blood, I stood outside knocking on and yelling through Hai’s door, begging him to have sex with me and professing that I was madly in love with him. I was knocking so hard I almost broke the glass. Poor Asiroh had to hold me back and was probably tempted to splash water on my face to sober me up. Luckily Hai wasn’t even in his room.
All of the wondering if he felt the same way was killing me. Instead of just asking him like a decent person, I decided to sneak into his dorm room and read his diary. I knew that it was a gross violation of his privacy, but love makes you crazy, and when I found an entry dedicated to me, the guilt vanished.
The entry started off great. He wrote about how much he loved spending time with me, how much fun I was, how I made him laugh. But then it quickly transitioned to this sentence: “I just don’t see Ali as a sexual partner. All of that hair. On her legs, in her armpits, and on her upper lip.” Thank goodness he hadn’t seen my colossal bush—otherwise I’m certain that would have made the list of “problem areas.”
Most people would feel motivated to do a big makeover to get the guy to like them. After all, he literally spelled out exactly what I needed to change. And I would have, but I was too lazy to do anything about my body hair. I didn’t shave my armpits. I didn’t wax my mustache, and I didn’t do jack shit about my leg hair. I had also just come off that very empowering Ani DiFranco/Liz Phair summer in Hawai’i where we didn’t need any man’s approval and had a great fucking time. It made me angry that he couldn’t just mentally slash and burn through all the hair to see that I was a very beautiful woman underneath it all. YOU shave my body, Hai…with your MIND.
A few days later, we went to a fortune-teller who was real as fuck. She wasn’t one of those hoodwinkers who just validates wishful thinking. She told one girl on the program that her future would consist of a miscarriage, a couple abortions, and three divorces. And she got paid to tell her that. The poor girl was so depressed afterward she started smoking. That same fortune-teller told me I would marry a man who was the same race as me, who wore glasses, and that we would have four kids.
So I thought, She means I’m gonna marry Hai! YAY! All I had to do was wait for him to come to his senses. Then one day, we were lying side by side in bed, facing the ceiling, and he said, “I think we should talk about our feelings for each other.” This was it. I was so excited that I started to panic a little. I hadn’t splashed water on my vagina to wash out the pussy flakes, but this guy picked his nose in front of everyone, so whatever.
“Yes, we absolutely should,” I said as I turned to him. But he stayed facing the ceiling.
“I know you have feelings for me, but I see you as more of a friend.”
It broke my heart. I said, “This is torture. I can’t handle this anymore.” And I got up and left the room.
The next morning, I thought about not sitting next to him in the front seats of the van, but quickly realized I would only be punishing myself more if I deprived myself of that fun ride to school. Plus everyone else in the van would know something was wrong and I didn’t want to draw more attention to my humiliation. It was awkward between us for the first couple of days after he banished me to The Friend Zone. But I made a decision to have fun and do my best to make amends with the classic sad reality of: He’s just not that into you.
Then, a couple weeks later, right before Thanksgiving, he told me that he actually did like me. He kissed me in that same twin bed where he had rejected me earlier. For the rest of the semester, we spent a bunch of our nights in that twin bed, watching bootleg DVDs of American classics that cost one dollar on his Dell laptop. Our favorite was Cape Fear. We would repeat “Counselor” to each other and laugh our heads off. On the weekends we loved to explore and go shopping. We got matching backpacks, bootleg North Face jackets, and fake Nike sneakers (when we played tennis the soles flew right off). I sat in his lap as we wheeled around the country in a cyclo, being fully present in the feeling of how magical it was to fall in love in Vietnam.
When the program ended a few months later, Hai and I decided to try to continue our relationship in the States. I was in L.A., he was in Berkeley, and I always wanted to make plans to see each other. He got tired of making plans. He constantly lost important thing
s like his passport, wallet, and keys, and I got tired of tracking them down. Soon after, we broke up.
Hai turned out to be a very nomadic man who didn’t want to settle down, but we are still in each other’s lives. You can be friends with ex-partners, don’t believe the bullshit that you can’t. If a person was once inside of you, that automatically makes them a special and unique person in your life. I mean, how many people will you ever let inside of you? (That’s a rhetorical question. I do NOT want to know. My number is a mystery but I think it’s somewhere in the teens. Yikes. Why the hell am I telling you all of this?!)
Hai lives somewhere between the Bay Area, Denver, San Diego, and Saigon. Whenever I go to Vietnam I make sure to visit him if he’s living there. He’ll always pick me up and drop me off at my hotel. I’ll ride on the back of his motorbike and we’ll reminisce about how much fun we had on that program together. We have coached and soothed one another through heartbreak over others. He’s seen me through several boyfriends and supported me through my miscarriage and my father’s death. He’s a good friend to me.
When he’s in San Diego I always make sure to see him there as well. We’ll eat at a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant on El Cajon Boulevard, where everything is under eight dollars, someone is always taking a nap on a cot behind the cash register, and everyone is in flip-flops. The last time I went, I brought my mom and Mari with me. When my mom asked Hai what he was up to, he told her that he was growing marijuana and contemplating converting a sprinter van into a home for himself. My mom smiled throughout the meal and ate her pho, nodding her head. After we said goodbye, my mom said, “Thank God you didn’t marry him, Ali.” I’m glad too, because otherwise we wouldn’t be the great friends we are today. We would be divorced because his pinky nail gave our kids staph infections.
* * *
I decided to go to Vietnam because I grew up so disproportionately Chinese American. My dad was kind of an imperialist in that way, where he just dominated the culture of our home. He thought the Chinese people’s contributions, culture, and history were superior and that everything Vietnamese was essentially derivative of his proud Chinese culture. To prove his point, he once said, “Name three signature characteristics of Vietnamese culture that aren’t actually Chinese.”
I replied, “Fish sauce, the áo dài [a traditional Vietnamese dress], and…”
After struggling to name a third characteristic, my dad smiled, leaned back into his brown leather chair, and said, “Exactly.”
We were very distant from my mother’s family because my dad loathed my mom’s siblings. She had thirteen so he was bound not to get along with a healthy percentage of them. It’s a good thing that my grandma never lived to see me complain about having two kids when she had fourteen. My mom sometimes forgets which of her siblings are still alive. I don’t know any Vietnamese person who doesn’t have an uncle with a gambling problem and an auntie that’s straight up greedy and evil. I had grown up spending the holidays with my dad’s side of the family and attended this Chinatown youth center that my dad had gone to as a boy.
In our house, we ate mostly Cantonese food. We’d always eat at the same restaurant, Ming River, on Geary Boulevard, and order the same dishes every time: fillet of rock cod with bitter melon, salt baked chicken, and garlic fried ong choy. We almost never went to Vietnamese restaurants, and when we did, my mom hated how my dad would have to order through her and she’d be forced to play translator for everyone. It exhausted her. And, because most Vietnamese people in the United States are from the south of Vietnam, they often found it difficult to understand my mom’s central accent. One Vietnamese man told me that listening to a Hue accent was the equivalent of someone saying “Shubba Shubba Shubba” in English when what they meant to say was “How much for extra tendon?” So it was just easier for us to go eat Chinese food.
The end result was that I was extremely familiar with where my dad grew up but had little sense of my mom’s childhood home, her neighborhood, what her culture was like, how she dressed, or what she ate. She was like Don Draper except I didn’t want to climb on top of her every time I saw her on-screen.
My mom visited me during my semester abroad. Getting to see her speak with comfort and ease in her native tongue, in the country where she was born, made me really happy. But it also made me sad—I had not previously known what a confident and funny person she actually was. But it was undeniable on her home turf. She suddenly became this beaming extrovert. It made me think about the hardships she faced when she came to the United States and how she must have built up a crazy thick shell to survive. She first lived in the Midwest, where people yelled “ching chong” at her wherever she went. Then she moved to San Francisco, where she encountered Chinese people who were total snobs to her. They were my dad’s friends who were born in the United States, and some of them treated my mom like mogwai from Gremlins. “Whatever you do, don’t get water on her!”
She and I recently watched the movie Brooklyn together. Saoirse Ronan plays an Irish immigrant adjusting to life in the United States. My mom hated the movie and said, “That white lady going through Ellis Island was like a country club compared to my experience trying to get by in America.” And when I think back on witnessing her in her home country, when she visited me, I can see what a shock and how lonely it must have been when she went to the United States—from being surrounded by all these people who look like you, talk like you, accept your existence inherently, to living permanently in a place where all the opposites are true.
When she first got here, a dentist took one look at her teeth and said she had “the mouth of a caveman.” I used to think it was funny, like you might when you read that, but the truth is that American society, while being so rife with opportunity and so incredible in so many ways, also generally made her feel primitive. And I thought about all the private school parents at my school, and how it must have been so strange for her to have to socialize with them, talking about debutante balls and being pressured to donate money to a school for which she was already breaking her back to pay the tuition. Now that I am a parent at a private school, and even having grown up in that system, I find it hard to talk to those parents. And I find it excruciating to donate money to anything besides my sneaker collection fund. Imagine what she must have felt.
Witnessing all of those hardworking female street vendors in Vietnam also made me understand why my mom felt so passionate about me and my sisters working. While we were in Vietnam together, she explained that the country had a history of always being in wartime, so women were expected to rise to the occasion of making money for the family. Vietnamese women were always ready to take over roles traditionally filled by men, like A League of Their Own (but where everyone is Marla Hooch). I also understood why my mom wasn’t into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice. In a culture entrenched in wartime, those who chose to be unhappy or to refuse gluten didn’t last long.
* * *
My mom is from Hue, a central part of Vietnam, and I got to meet a lot of her cousins who still live there. Growing up in such a small town, my mom came from this culture of extreme gossip. Everyone thrives off talking about relatives and neighbors: “Tuyet is so rich now that each of her four daughters has a Sony Discman!” “Long is marrying a smart but not so beautiful woman. Kind of like a Vietnamese Andrea Zuckerman.” “The man across the street has such bad knees, he forced his poor wife to sew tiny pillows so he can kneel on them when he watches Face/Off.” Vietnamese people demand to know how much you paid for anything because their single worst nightmare is overpaying. So part of the gossiping was them trying to productively collect pricing information because, especially back then, nothing had a set price. It was up to the people to locate the median price they should pay for an item through intensive surveying. It used to drive me crazy, how nosy my mom wa
s. But I came to see that for her, it was a necessary way of life. Paying two dollars extra for a colander was not an option.
After my program ended I stayed with my mom’s cousin, who lived with her mother, sisters, daughters, and husband in Hue. It was powerful to experience many generations living under one roof. I am not used to living with someone who is ninety but everyone in Vietnam, at some point, lives with a grandma who is ninety years old. There is no such thing as an “old folks home” in Vietnam. The senior citizens’ rec center is just their house, where they raised their kids and help raise their grandkids. When you become an adult, you learn to become a caretaker of your parents, the way they took care of you when you were a child. There is a huge benefit to having all of those generations living in one house. There’s so much oral history passed down from grandparents, but maybe more important, there’s built-in childcare. Grandparents in Vietnam take care of their grandkids and it keeps them active and stimulated. They also take care of their daughters and daughters-in-law when they have babies (for free!). Being a new mother isn’t such a lonely experience because you have your own mother and/or your mother-in-law right there in your own home. I thought about this so much when I first had Mari. I tried to replicate it as best I could by surrounding myself with as many women as possible and planning for my family to visit often for support. But it’s also probably super annoying to have your mom in your house permanently, let’s be real. I mean nothing is free. I max out when Grandma stays more than four nights. I know she seems nice, but she insists on microwaving a bowl of leftovers covered in plastic wrap when I have told her a thousand times that plastic is gonna melt and kill us!