Sitting up during twilight hours holding two bottles to newborn twins forces one to slow down and feel the full brunt of patience with every clock tick of the second hand. With no hands free to scroll aimlessly on a phone, I’m consequently forced to nudge the mind to wander and spin its cogs vacantly. My medulla oblongata careening in its cranium while my writhing infants lap up formula with a voracious appetite.
And wander the mind does. Largely toward the confirmation that having newborns isn’t easy. And having twins just doubles the amount of sleeplessness. And the trifecta is having twins that are half white and half Vietnamese so we occupy what Gloria Anzaldúa called liminal space together as one big happy mixed-race family. Existing as either and neither simultaneously somehow. During these early few weeks straddling the border betwixt the two contrapuntal worlds, I’ve learned, also manifests via their perpetually dueling grandmothers.
My Vietnamese mother subscribes to sometimes bewildering cultural superstitions when it comes to newborns, which occasionally will clash with the ingrained beliefs and sometimes just as bizarre customs of my white mother-in-law—beliefs that collide in our dual-bassinets due to circumstance but, lest we forget, are also unified in unerring affection for our mewling children.
The stereotype of the coddling Asian grandmother is on full display whenever she darkens our doorstep. My mother was a refugee and a part of the vast Vietnamese diaspora that arrived as boat people in the 1980s, fleeing an era and geography of high infant mortality so that many of these beliefs and ceremonies are imperative and not to be trifled with lest we endure the gravest of consequences. The infant mortality rate of Vietnam during the 1980s was 46 deaths per 1,000 live births. And the peak of grief is the loss of an infant in Vietnamese culture. One such superstition is the idea of not leaving the house during dusk hours with the babies due to roving malicious spirits potentially hovering and fawning over our unsuspecting children. This admonishment for refusing to be cooped up nightly was met with a healthy dose of skepticism from the other grandmother. Reciprocally, my mother balks at the white grandmother’s insistence that a baby needs to be jostled up and down after a bottle to loosen any trapped gas from within and must always wear a wool cap no matter the ambient temperature. Scientifically sound? Questionable. And, woe, I’m perennially caught in the crossfire of observing harmless traditions and the eye rolls and derision of some perplexed matronly relative.
A 2024 Pew Research Center survey clocked that 88% of Vietnamese adults believe in chuyện ma and that spirits inhabit this plane and that an ancestor has helped them at some point. Which might explain yet another custom that might arch a few eyebrows: the value of inherited hand-me-downs over store-bought baby clothing, which does appeal to more modern sensibilities of not contributing to the mountains of waste that the baby industry churns out on a daily basis. Though the Vietnamese impetus for secondhand clothes isn’t as much an emphasis on environmental conscientiousness but rather on avoiding the unwanted adoration of, again, random envious phantoms that seemingly pervade the aether around newborn infants at any given moment. The more moth-bitten the swaddle, the more distance between sneaky sauntering spectres and our babies, it would seem.
The conflict between the two nurturing grandmothers would often fortify into loggerhead territory. An occasion for entrenched digging-in-of-heels would be the tradition of never fawning over a baby’s cuteness but rather slinging mild sneers at said child to trick any eavesdropping ghosts that might be baited to harm any adorable nearby infants. Preposterous? A little. One would reason that a supernatural being would have better things to do with eternity than bother babies all the livelong day. But reason is bundled up and chucked out the window when it comes to superstitions. I suppose if any logic were attached to them, they wouldn’t be superstitions in the first place.
Our respective grandmothers may caterwaul over the best practices in which to rear our caught-in-the-geriatric-crossfire newborn twins. A veritable war of attrition just like the Vietnam War itself. But common ground can be tread and navigated when the shared objective is the overall wellbeing of the children. It’s not like any of these superstitions involve avoiding vaccines or leeches or anything. Though some of these superstitions are baffling, ultimately and at the end of the day, they’re mostly innocuous and the core of the conflict more rooted in ego and blind resolve than anything.
So I continue to sit and rock my children and watch the early morning sunlight stream through the blinds and interrupt my reverie. And count myself surely fortunate that we have such good intentioned and impassioned support during this challenging and sleep-stretched time. And I can’t help but to think of Bill Wither’s dignified anthem to the caring force that was his own grandmother:
Grandma’s hands used to hand me a piece of candy.
Grandma’s hands picked me up each time I fell.
Grandma’s hands, boy they really came in handy
She’d say, “Mattie, don’t you whip that boy.
What you want to spank him for?
He didn’t drop no apple core,”
But I don’t have Grandma anymore,
If I get to heaven I’ll look for
Grandma’s hands.
I’m glad my children have an opportunity to bond with their easily objectionable grandmothers, and take full advantage of the remaining time they have together. I can take solace in knowing that when the two mighty matriarchs do finally shuffle off this mortal coil and depart this existence, they can settle amongst themselves once and for all what ghosts actually do in the afterlife.
Tommy Vinh Bui is a librarian and doctoral student. He was a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Central Asia and a 2018-19 Arts for LA Cultural Policy Fellow for the City of Inglewood. His work has been featured in the Wende Museum exhibition Vietnam in Transition, 1976-present about the multi-layered intersection of arts, history, and memory since the end of the Vietnam War.
