Grass Roof, Tin Roof

by Dao Strom

  I had wanted to wear black but it was not acceptable. When I asked why, one of my uncles said, “It is just Vietnamese custom.” He did not look me in the eye, and his expression was disapproving and disgusted. Sitting through the service, I felt not like myself, uncomfortably ordinary, in the khaki pants and white button-down shirt I had finally agreed to.

  My sister was wearing a white dress; our cousins had taken her shopping. Thien wore a white head sash, willingly, with the rest of them.

  All in Vietnamese, the service was a mix of the traditional and the sentimental. A woman thinner and prettier than most in the room stood after the priest and a number of my mother’s sisters and brothers and friends had spoken, and she began to sing. She sang with exaggeration, dipping and swaying and tilting her head back at the appropriate moments, the accompanying synthesized strings and guitar solos piped into the speakers from a soundboard to the side of the stage; a spiky-haired boy in a white shirt and skinny tie sat over the controls. Onstage in her near-glittering white ao dai, the woman had hair that was a sheer black mane down her back; her hands were small and clasped gently round the bulbous black microphone. It was a vulgar and incongruous sight; tacky but excruciatingly well intentioned. A memory occurred to me: the melody was familiar. One of our cousins leaned over to tell us, “It is old folk song from Vietnam. Your mother like this one very much, when she younger. Very famous song.” He paused, listening, then translated for us:

  Because I love you so, I give you my shirt—

  When I come home my mom ask,

  I say the wind blew it away,

  as I crossed over the bridge

  “Oh, something like that,” he cut himself off with a sheepish laugh. He was gay (everyone knew this except his parents). We had always referred to him as “the card maker” because our mother once noted he had a talent for it, handmade greeting cards, though actually he worked as an engineer. “It is very serious love song, like oh-I-die-for-you love song, you know.” He spoke earnestly, in a whisper, but with an undertone that denoted an easy awareness of and even a comfortableness with absurdity. “Maybe the girl very poor, own only one shirt, who know.”

  The singer’s voice was tremulous and sincere, the words guttural yet delicate-sounding, as if her tongue was attempting to strangle them before they got out clearly. The song seemed literally to drip, as all these songs did. I thought this but was transported nonetheless.

  Their hands were upon us like a flurry of moths, and only occasionally did I comprehend a word or two as they surrounded us, held us, positioned us. They were a people unafraid of handling one another. There was a casual disregard for personal space. Cruelly I thought, this is how come they can crowd together inside small cars, laughing about it and unembarrassed. We were told we must pose for photographs in various ensembles: all her sisters, all her brothers, brothers and sisters together, children separately, the whole family together standing close, tall ones in the back, little ones in the front, the three generations of women, the three generations of men, et cetera. The adults straightened their white head sashes and kept their mouths solemn. Afterward it was the hands again, on my shoulders, on my back, this aunt saying go with that cousin; that aunt saying come with me; this old girlfriend of my mother’s insisting on another snapshot, clasping my hand in hers, squeezing. Her skin was thin and dry. The little nieces wanted to hang on to my arms; they thought Beth and I were pretty, they told their mothers, who were our older cousins or cousins-in-law, and I overheard. I knew some of their names but not all. Once my mother had tallied them and counted forty-eight. First and second cousins, that is. You might think this was something I’d have felt the weight of, but I felt as light as paper, a scrap of ash among them. My mother was the sixth of eleven in her family, which put her exactly in the middle. Five older and five younger than she. (I’d heard that middle children are always the ones cursed.) She had been the third of her siblings to die: there were two older brothers who had died a long time ago, when they all still lived in Vietnam.

  In the parking lot, the male cousins and uncles and in-laws shouted back and forth in a mix of Vietnamese and English; they seemed joyous and argumentative, raising their voices over the roofs of their cars, trying to give directions or make plans or finish a joke, something. I didn’t know. I stood quietly and waited wherever I was pushed. So did my sister. They will sweep you into their fold invitingly and entirely oblivious to the dangers of anonymity, I thought. It was not for me. Something in me struggled like a snake, choking me from the inside. My brother was off with the other boy cousins, ducking his head into the car to ask, “Okay, you guys are okay, right?”

  “I lost my virginity to a married woman,” said my brother later that night. The two of us were in one of the upstairs bedrooms of a cousin’s house, watching MTV, a treat for me, since in our father’s house there was no TV, let alone cable. Downstairs the adults were eating around the kitchen table, laughing and crying and bantering loudly. Beth was off in another room with our cousins, and music was playing down the hall in another cousin’s bedroom. It had been like this all day and evening, the comfort and chaos of a crowded house. I sort of liked it but sort of didn’t. Every now and then some new adult came in to touch our heads or offer us food, insist, really, and I found it irritating that all they could think to offer us was food, not conversation.

  “Six months ago,” said Thien. “Don’t talk to Beth about this, okay? Her name was Janice. She was my boss’s friend’s wife. Twenty-seven years old.” He said this proudly; he was only twenty-two. “She wasn’t happy in her marriage. She still isn’t but she’s still married to him, of course. When she told me she couldn’t see me anymore, you know what?” He was lying on his back on the bed, hands tucked behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “I cried.”

  “Really?” The thought of my brother crying was almost too much for me to manage. It was like seeing my mother without her eyeglasses when she woke in the mornings or right before bed—how beady and vulnerable her eyes looked then. I wanted my brother to share more with me. “Did you cry in front of her?”

  “She cried, too. It was sad.”

  I could not fathom this form of pain, try as I might. I had liked boys, some of them a lot, but never to this point. I thought it must have to do with him, my brother, some inherent flaw.

  “We only slept together once,” said Thien, “but we were kind of hanging out a lot before that. It seemed like we were getting to be good friends. It’s hard for guys and girls to stay friends, though, I think.”

  “Is she Vietnamese?” I asked, trying to picture the kind of woman—no kind I could easily imagine—who would go so far as to cry for my brother.

  “No. She’s white,” he said. “That’s the funny thing. I can’t help it, but I tend to be attracted to Caucasian girls. Even though all our cousins date Vietnamese girls, I just haven’t met any I actually like. They’re all kind of the same. They care about what car you drive and money and clothes, they’re kind of shallow like that. It sucks, though, because how often do you see a Caucasian woman dating an Asian guy, you know?”

  I agreed, though I thought maybe I should act more encouraging toward him.

  “I think I have low self-esteem,” said my brother, making “low self-esteem” sound like one big word, a phenomenon. As if one should be proud to stake a claim here. “Because of Dad,” he went on. “I didn’t really realize it till I came to live down here, how badly he speaks about other people all the time, especially Vietnamese. He used to call Mom’s sisters ‘peasants’ and ‘barbarians,’ when the truth is he doesn’t know the first thing about them, really. Our aunts said Mom was a bad mother, you know? For letting Dad kick me out of the house and not keeping us all together and then not helping pay for my college or anything. I loved Mom, though. I think she just didn’t have the strength to leave Dad. You know that’s what it takes to leave someone, strength. You wouldn’t think so, but that’s the truth. Janice didn’t have it, either. Her husband is a
jerk, too. Dad used to say so many mean things about Mom. I remember once he said she smelled. That was the reason he had to stop sleeping in the same room as her. Because he couldn’t stand it anymore, her smell. That’s what he said.”

  There was something in this admission, this glimpse into my parents, that repulsed yet didn’t surprise me. I didn’t turn away from the TV, but I narrowed my eyes, to concentrate on what my brother was saying.

  “Dad didn’t like her cooking,” I said noncommittally, just to keep my brother talking.

  “Dad doesn’t like a lot of things,” said Thien. “You know what I think? I think Dad is a racist.” This was another of those words. He pronounced it with an almost proud horror.

  I twisted around to look at him.

  “You could be one, too,” he said. “It’s like a disease, you know. Kids learn it from their parents and they grow up and pass it on. You can have it even toward your own kind, even toward yourself, and not even realize it. It’s like low self-esteem. It’s a disease, really.”

  “Thien, what are you talking about?” I said sharply. It came back to me at that moment, the small feeling of power I’d felt when I said “I don’t think so” to Cody when he tried to offer me his Bible on the day my mother had died.

  “I’m talking about Dad. What do you think?” Thien retorted, flustered. “I’ve been talking about Dad for like fifteen minutes now. Because I’m worried about you and Beth. I think you need to look at yourselves. I did. And I realized a lot about Mom and Dad, how they messed us up in a lot of ways. Everyone has to look at themselves someday, I just think.”

  “I’ve already thought about all that,” I said, and just then I believed it. “A long time ago,” I added. Then I turned back to the music videos.

  What I couldn’t tell any of them, though, was what I kept inside myself—it might be a flood or a flowering, this feeling that might just as easily break as enlighten me, I thought, as I tried to understand myself emotionally in relation to the rest of my family. I didn’t trust any of them, I found, couldn’t remember when I last had. I had always wanted to turn to strangers. (Dimly I could remember crying in a department store as a young child—somehow I had become separated from my parents—and a kind woman gave me a package of M&Ms, like a reward for getting lost, that burned brighter in my memory than any other part of the experience.) Now I wanted someone to hold me, someone who would never show me his weaknesses, who in fact had no weaknesses. Yes, I thought this must be possible. A being with no needs, no complaints, no overwhelming desires, and together we could go forward independently. He would be kind and wisely discriminating. He would be beautiful in a subtle way. He would be clever yet profoundly, ironically compassionate, with the capacity to take in everything and not bat an eyelid. He would be sympathetic when a woman lost a piece of jewelry but restrained when saying good-byes or hellos. He would be playful and wisecracking on the surface but deep in hidden pain beneath. We would recognize each other in trivial asides, without speaking directly about anything. And he would also pity and slightly admire—but no longer feel attached to—his own parents, as would I. For they had been our guides into this world and had taught us the pain of humanity, but now they had led us as far as they could and we would have to go on without and despite them.

  The plane had to circle above the Sacramento Valley fog for months, it seemed, before we were able to land. My sister and I walked up the long enclosed passageway to the terminal gate on precarious, sleeping legs; we blinked into the fluorescent lights. Our father was waiting in the terminal, his hands clutched around dog leashes. The dogs were in the car, fogging up the windows because he could not leave them at home alone, he said.

  Years later, I found some words my mother had written in a yellow spiral notebook. I don’t know when exactly she’d begun writing this, or to whom, if anybody, these words were directed, don’t know whether it was a journal entry or the start of a story. It was only one line, not even complete, and it was on the first page. The rest of the notebook was empty. The words were in Vietnamese: O my dear T, how many tired nights we and that was it. Who was the mysterious T? I could believe it was myself she was addressing, using my Vietnamese birth name Thuy, but with such angst, why? Or maybe it was my brother, the other T? Or was it some oblique address to herself or to an old friend, unnameable, an old lover maybe, a code for some other topic or affair she’d had reasons not to share with us? I ransacked her other papers for answers. I read many of her books. I asked her sisters to translate letters she’d written. Nothing has revealed as much as those few words, this barely begun line—the hazards, the contingencies of it. Often I have thought: How shall I respond? And I do.

  4. GUAM, 1975

  My brother has told me about clinging to the legs and riding on the boots of American GIs in the refugee camp in Guam where we waited a month for passage to the States in May 1975. They were impressively large, these men, and utterly fascinating to my brother, who was nine. The soldiers assisted the Red Cross workers, hauling supplies, setting up tents, handing out blankets, food rations, medicines. With rifles on their shoulders, they patroled the fenced perimeters of the camp, and my brother and the other boys he played with would watch them. Sometimes they would dare each other to run up behind and touch the soldiers—on the leg, the hand—or say one of the few English phrases they'd recently learned: “Hello, how you do?” or “You number one!” or “Goddamnit.” The soldiers would say words in return and make friendly gestures, but my brother could not understand English well. The first few times this happened he froze in shyness, then took off running again the second the soldier's conversation paused. Steadily he grew bolder, though, and lingered longer, as the other boys did.

  The GIs gave them small items—packs of gum, a cigarette or two, a candy bar, magazines or comic books, a pencil, a dogtag, wallet pictures of themselves in uniform, and, occasionally, swigs of soda or beer. Some soldiers played with the boys, swinging them around, turning them upside down, hoisting them high onto their shoulders. One time, a boy, as he was being let down, wrapped himself around his soldier’s leg, and the soldier proceeded to walk with him sitting on his boot. The other boys thought this was hilarious. Soon it became a ritual game between the boys and the soldiers. Each time the boys saw a soldier walking by, they would run after him, and whoever reached him first would throw himself at the soldier’s khaki-covered leg and clamp on. The soldiers mostly humored them, plodding on without pause, or feigning confusion and effort at walking. The boys would hold on for as long as they could, usually just ten or twenty yards, from one end of a row of barracks to the other, then would fall away, rolling across the ground and dramatically acting out a death. There were one or two boys who were clingers to a more severe degree, however, and inadvertently Thien became one of these. Something in a particular soldier’s presence caught him one afternoon. He could not let go. For more than half an hour, he clung to this soldier’s leg, and the soldier took him on all his errands, to the laundry room, to the post office, to the area behind the mess hall where GIs and kitchen staff stood to smoke, to a building full of other soldiers to get some papers signed. The soldier never glanced down to acknowledge Thien, but his silence was powerful—it exuded a manner of benevolence that was extremely mellow, personal, and unusual. Thien hung on despite the discomfort of sitting so long in this position (his hands were leaving sweat marks on the soldier’s pants) and the soldier let him. When others passed and made comments or pointed, the soldier responded only in brief, semiserious tones; that he did not laugh or joke with his peers told Thien something. There was an agreement between them, he and this soldier.

  The ride ended when an older American, not in uniform, passed them crossing the commons and barked some commands at Thien’s soldier who, now, at last, turned his face toward Thien. His eyes were small in his wide, smooth face, giving the impression that they looked out from somewhere hidden. His look was apologetic but conspiratorial. Thien grinned in understanding, let go, went o
n his way. For days afterward, though, this soldier’s expressions and mannerisms stayed with Thien. He tried to copy them, to smile with a small upturn of his lips and exude the same mysterious, accepting silence. Remembering the soldier was slightly pigeon-toed, Thien began to turn his toes in when he walked. He looked for the soldier to pass their area of the camp every day. Finally, he spotted the soldier one evening outside the mess hall, standing beside another boy, one of those whom Thien played with regularly. The soldier had his hand on the other boy’s shoulder. When Thien saw this, a bottled fury rose inside him. He rushed at the other boy, knocking them both to the ground. The two wrestled and rolled in the dirt, pulling hair and clawing at faces.