I am haunted by the quiet suspicion that the woman before me is devising my murder. At the moment, we’ve resorted to a game of silence. But she is cunning, calculated, waiting with the prowess of a snake, for when I should inevitably misstep, eager. And when a rock is lodged sharply in the tender soles of my feet, when I am struck and bleeding out, is when she’ll resume her move, cradling herself around me, constricting, constricting, constricting, until I am reduced to pulp, utterly unshapeable, unhelpable.
She might even attempt the final act in broad daylight. And no stranger would bat an eye, because some might even argue that the natural state for someone like myself is pulp, deprived of any place to put my belongings. I’ve committed the costly mistake of wanting more, of wanting to deposit seeds in uninhabitable gardens, impossible places. The punishment now is how my flesh spills out of its membrane, irreturnable, unless it is pummeled to bits and pieces and shoveled back into the sac. And this is precisely the woman’s plot: to contain me.
The woman doesn’t believe in “impossible.” She plays with the cards that are already laid. And though she is loyal to nobody but her family, she places the most trust into a singular dream, sewn and tapestried across white Easter fences. Day to day, she peers through the looking glass at the neighbors across the street from her unkempt lawn and oil-spilt driveway furnished with second, thirdhand cars. How might a woman like her get on the other side of a line like that?
It’s a game, she notes. How she wins–no one ever eyes the Broken-English-Nail-Salon-Lady–stout and tacky in her blinged-up t-shirts, dabbling in spa-chair gossip, laughing ambiguously along to pointless idioms–and suspects her of anything. Her lacquer images are hung on the hands of Newport Wives and their spoiled daughters, envied by their Costa Mesa counterparts and their slightly-less spoiled daughters, paid for by their golfer-husbands-slash-dads: “You’ve got to see her–the salon is, like, hum-bel, but they’re, like, the best in the bez-ness.”
Some clients are even outward enough to tell the fifty-something-year-old that she’s “cute.” But that is her advantage. She’s harmless, she’s a cartoon. So she’ll play along. And in the meantime, she’ll sharpen her knives, hiding and nurturing them in artless places. A dangerous woman is a woman with potential. She understands this.
So she kept her biggest potential a secret for almost three whole decades–me.
And with me in mind, she continues slipping under rigid American noses, changing her name every few years and stealthing her way onto their credit card statements. She takes their money, and waits for her turn. Time is no match up against the thunder in her head. Her hands, her body—a total machine. But the very last thing she would’ve expected was that I would turn on her, because of the lightning in my heart.
Janet, Maya, Tracy–and this year, it’s Lucy. My mother mouses from town to town, leaving her nitrocellular mark all over the unpoppable bubble of Orange County, California.
Tonight we meet for the first time in four radio-silent years, attempting to climb over the fence, curious to see each other from the opposite sides of which we swore we’d die on. We’re writhing.
*
Little Saigon, just past midnight, and the Vietnamese never sleep. The dishes are coming to a head, two old women are gossiping behind a sticky cash register, and a grandpa who looks like he used to smoke in aviators is handling crowded trays, balancing bowls like he’s auditioning for the Great Circus.
When the orders begin to lull, Aviator-Grandpa switches off to restocking the tương ớt and dumping even more straws and chopsticks into the already-full containers. These containers would carry more straws and chopsticks and condiments than would be utilized by the end of the night. Not even twenty minutes ago, I had watched one of the other women perform the exact same ritual. Their attention to detail was redundantly impeccable.
In between their rituals, each takes a barely-break to revel by the big glass window. All of the restaurants on this street have big glass windows for at least one of their walls, all facing plazas that, during the day, bustle with coffee-drinkers, optometrist-seers, restaurant-goers, grocery-shoppers, flight-bookers, baguette-stockers, et cetera. It always stuns me how many services a single Westminster plaza offers.
No one around here can sit still for too long, it seems. The Vietnamese practice the art of running errands, running around, preparing for their finally-escape to riches someday. When the buildings start greying and the corners we used to hide in have become too small, the only thing we can count on is our restlessness, our hope that any resizing, any quake, any movement is a step forward, somehow. The traffic here is restless. The kids here are restless. My friends are restless. Even the elderly are restless. We toss and we turn and we do not complain.
And akin to Aviator-Grandpa, my mother is twitchy and fills her hours to a tee, because she fears that standing still will kill her. There is no other option.
*
“Chị, two chrysanthemum teas, please!” Lucy shamelessly yells across the restaurant, flapping her hand in a yoo-hoo-esque way. The lady behind the counter rushes over. I am embarrassed at my mother’s crude resemblance of an impatient child. But she is no child, her age marked by her hollowed-out cheekbones, sunken undereyes, and greyed-out roots that she rids evidence of by dousing her entire head in mahogany box dye. My mother has only ever colored her hair red. She looks tired.
“How was your flight, Con?” Lucy smiles half-faux-warmly at me. Is it uneasiness?
Aviator-Grandpa delivers our wonton noodle soup, the scalding temperatures of the steaming bowls irrelevant to his over-calloused fingers.
“It was fine.”
“Has anything new happened lately?”
“No.”
“Mm. It’s warmer down here, isn’t it?”
Each year, when the temperature drops like a boulder, I find myself on the run from the icy clutches of San Francisco. Around December, Union Square rehashes its annual habit of spooking me, with its gigantic Macy’s embellished in gem-specked wreaths. This year in particular, it was the sight of an unquestionably Vietnamese woman prancing around the entrance, with her Michael Kors crossbody and a bag of Wetzel’s Pretzels mini-bites. I mistake all of them for my mother, who is stuck somewhere else.
“How’s the Captain?”
“He’s at home, watching TV. Probably sleeping by now.”
“Mm.”
“I didn’t tell him we’re meeting tonight.”
“Good.”
“How’s work?”
“It’s fine. Tired.”
“Mm.”
“Where are you staying?”
“A friend’s.” I’d booked a motel only a few minutes away from our house.
“How’s work?”
“It’s good. I switched salons again. More clients there.”
“Where?”
“Long Beach.”
“That’s far, no?”
“Mm. I drive freeways now.”
“Mm.”
And then:
“You know I heard…”
…Money…house…salon…own…married…mother…would be nice…
I say nothing. Lucy and I shovel at grains of rice that aren’t at all stuck to our plates, falling again into the habit of keeping our exchanges brief. I am unsure how thin the line between friend and foe lies. It constantly wavers with us.
The cashier sits down by our table, taking her break.
Is this your daughter?
She’s beautiful.
You should’ve seen her when she was younger. Lucy nudges my head.
She done with school yet?
She’s been done for years.
Where did she go?
[redacted]
My granddaughter goes there.
The old woman turns to me.
“Con biết Sarah Nguyen, không?”
She suddenly glides from Vietnamese to English.
“Say-rah, she very, very smart. She study computer science. She in her room all day. Say she never leave apartment. I say, that O-KEH. You make money, you get me out. No more restaurant. Vacation all the time. She say, ‘O-KEH! I proh-mit, proh-mit.’ I just wait now.”
The grandma throws her hands around all matter-of-factly, vigorously re-enacting their promise to Lucy and me. All of the wrinkles on her face fall into place when she grins, her body only remembering its age when she stands up to head back into the kitchen.
*
Ba wants to see you.
He’s waiting at home.
I told you, I’m not staying at home this time.
I was just saying…
You’re always saying.
O-keh.
*
And where do you think you’re going to get making things? I work with my hands, so you don’t have to use yours.
White people make things. And I made you. What do you know? What do I know?
And if you run off to make things, don’t come home. See if I care. I break my back for you.
My hands hurt, my feet hurt, my entire head hurts! Leave. See if I care.
Am I going to have to keep worrying about you until I die?
*
I’m selfish, Mom.
*
The hands give way to delicate detail. They’re intimate. My mother’s hands, for instance, are dry and indefinitely peeling. She claws at her skin, like a dog burdened by fleas–but the rashes cannot be remedied. It’s a part of the job: the smell, the chemicals that stain her body and her clothes and her bedsheets when she comes home at usual-unusual hours. She’s sick of sinking her fists into oily tubs of Vaseline and squeezing Eucerin bottles until the plastic implodes. Her room is littered with crumpled tubes, each one a shell sucked dry. She falls asleep, waiting on a promise.
I fall asleep, haunted by the promise.
*
And so Alyssa’s hands were the first thing I noticed about her.
Her nails were the work of a mother like mine, manicured and polished to obscure levels of perfection, levels only discernible to a Vietnamese woman, her daughter, and the friends with whom they can revel in exhaustion with. They bask in acetone fumes and sunken Chanel No.5.
Alyssa’s suitcase was splayed out on our coffee table, hoards of her clothes and trinkets and unlimited bags of shrimp chips dispersed on the scene. Pounds of nail polish were scattered across the carpet–you’d think she’d just committed a salon robbery and stopped by H Mart on her way here. Her own nails were decorated in vibrant earth tones, though nothing stood out like her fiery pink hair. I’d never seen a Vietnamese woman with pink hair.
She stared foreignly back at me. Our apartment was assigned to three girls, uncoincidentally all Vietnamese. Each girl seemed timid and reserved upon first glance, hesitant to signal any welcome towards the other. Lucy had instilled in me that friends were rarer than enemies.
*
Suong, Alyssa, and I had been shipped off here from the crappier ends of suburbia, where our parents’ colleagues had often remarked how impressive it was that we not just attended [redacted] but that we were Vietnamese and attended the university. Not much was expected of the Vietnamese where we hailed from.
If our heads weren’t puncturing craters in textbooks Monday through Saturdays, the youth were seen as troublesome and negligent. We took off after half-true caricatures of our aunts and uncles and cousins. Our parents taught us otherwise, perhaps to our own detriment. We learned and feared and suppressed the carefree, the bellowous, the slothlike.
Us three girls would’ve given anything to be Asian-American and not Vietnamese-American. We jumped from one monolith to another, chasing tails that would never meet, eager for the -American to swallow us whole. We were rushing to earn Asian- the same way Asians had to earn the latter. We felt as though we had to prove something for ourselves, for our families and friends.
But like anywhere else, our -American peers often looked the same, talked the same, vacationed the same, and were exhibited as natural businessmen, athletes, and artists. More often than not, our institution’s Nobel Prize winners were white. And more often than not, the Asian-kids took half-hearted pride in cramming themselves into the engineering building.
They kept to themselves, kept their heads down. Many of them grew into even more pompous versions of their ideals when they finally won a six-figure salary under their white bosses-slash-now-friends. They took vacations to every name-brand destination but nothing changed when they arrived back home to their name-brand jobs in their name-brand cars occasionally stocked with their name-brand friends.
Few of them understood prior that they would have to continue keeping their heads down if they wanted to maintain their money and their shiny -American badge, or even better–if they wanted to be permitted the same kind of shoeshine to Asian- as -American.
Lucy would’ve given anything to mother these kinds of children.
But I was always one of the countably few Asians in classrooms designed to discuss humans. In light of the fact itself, I observed that we are not people, people who learn and bend and break. We are machines, machines that don’t talk or ask or need and so are infallible to err. And I adopted a quietness I hadn’t before believed I could fall victim to.
It is never up for discussion what Asian- can be, only what we are. Lucy also taught me this. Suong, Alyssa, and I were overly-reserved, cautious, and quiet, so as not to overstep the miracle we’d been permitted to have. But the truth was, we became awkward and out-of-place, terrified to say that we wanted more.
Akin to our parents, who are we to ask for more?
*
Our search for a place that did not exist grew to suffocate us.
One cold night, I knocked on Suong’s door and Suong knocked on Alyssa’s door. We whispered like our parents were still around and our siblings would tattle. Pooling all of our cash together onto the desk, we set out to find the nearest phở restaurant, in search of one that tasted most like Southern California, one that we could make our spot.
With rattling uncertainty, we took a bus to Oakland, making more detours than worth a single bowl of phở, and when we finally arrived, we squeezed limes dry and munched like koalas at unlimited Thai basil and bean sprouts.
I was terrified of the evening’s inevitable end.
But after that night, the knocks kept coming. Suong would show off her mother’s recipes, and Alyssa would compile a sauce drawer. We had our áo dais shipped up to hang readily in our small wooden closets, eager for our first Tết away from home, eager for any opportunity to wear them.
We went to Chinatown often, eavesdropping when we heard Vietnamese voices lending themselves to an unexpected crowd. We stayed out late and woke up on time. We hosted karaoke in our apartment. In a sea of accustomed silence, we learned to be loud again, like our parents against their own will, like our siblings, our aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmothers and fathers and friends from home. It drove us crazy thinking we might’ve been the only ones.
We eventually passed the soju around, speaking out loud who we wished we were instead.
Suong giggled and reached for the fans hidden away in her desk drawer.
“These ones,” she explained, “are special. They have tails. Messy, messy tails.”
“How does it look when you’re dancing?”
Suong softly flapped the fan out, dispersing its grand, ribbon-like ends. They flitted along in rhythm with the cold air.
“They kind of look like birds. When your eyes are blurry,” giggled Alyssa. “I want to be a bird.””
“Or a butterfly,” I whispered.
“Done. You’re a butterfly. I’ll be a bird. Suong, you can fly with your magic fans.”
Suong continued twirling, carving out air with her ribbons, reckoning wind into a manmade cocoon, warm. Alyssa and I cheered her on with our wings and our whooshes. A place to stop. The entire room felt like a cocoon. Suong’s hands were delicate and gentle.
“If I wasn’t here, I think I’d like to be a dancer. Maybe a dance teacher, even if it doesn’t pay well. Just enough would be nice, I think. Alyssa?” Suong announced the fact prouder than I’d ever seen her.
Alyssa’s cheeks flushed a brighter red. “Speak up!”
*
I don’t know what to do with myself.
You got time.
Doesn’t feel that way.
Well, who’s counting?
My parents are waiting for me to save them.
Is it your job?
What kind of daughter would I be if it wasn’t?
You’d be the funny daughter. You’d make people laugh. An Asian–a Viet–woman on television, writing and telling her own jokes to America. A fucking unicorn. That’s pretty cool to me.
But is it enough?
Someone’s still gotta do it for the rest of us, right?
We can’t be their puppets forever. Right?
*
Alyssa wanted to be a comedian, and she constantly compared herself to the likes of white men on television. And when she finally became a pharmacist, initially only on Saturday nights, Alyssa would also drink to forget that she could not be like the white men she idolized on television. Alyssa understood.
And her death rocked me like a lullaby on a cold night, tender and shaky and dense. My heart ached with nobody to tell. The whisper died in me. I couldn’t help but mourn myself next to her.
*
After the funeral, I quit my accounting job and locked myself away. Lucy rang several times a day, weeks, months. Suong had moved back home but continued teaching fan-dancing on weekends. Mornings through afternoons, I simply sat by my three-paneled window, observing passerbys below. People moved in frames of past, present, and future, and I was getting left behind, again.
And while I preoccupied myself with this distantly-intimate landscape, I had also begun to notice a figure in my bed. The figure, faceless, sat up straight and motionless, existing, it seemed, only to stare at me. It primarily took the shape of my mother.
Wherever I went, I felt its eyes on the back of my head, threatening to strip me. Even under the brightest of suns, the shadow refused to dissolve. But so long as I was distracted by pedestrians like ants up against tall buildings and city performers and steaming hot dog vendors, I could make peace with the shadow during the daytime.
Once, I happened to look down upon a stranger who also happened to be looking up at me. Could he see me? His face was dull, like mine. I’d grown even more averse to mirrors in the past month.
There was a heaviness to his person that I pinned briefly before he turned the corner. I imagined that he might’ve ended up by the ocean or a museum or a bookshop later that day. Grief had whittled me to the bone.
That evening, I took out my stash of paints and canvases, laid to waste in my closet for the years prior. I thought about the man from earlier, his eyes shielded like concrete. I glided across the canvas, wanting to translate the color of his heaviness. Deep, deep red, like blood, like anger, like love. Then blue, like the ocean he might’ve seen that day, like being underwater, illuminated by the sun–like succumbing, like sadness, like peace. Then grey, exhaustion. Each layer loosely covered the last, and when I was finally done, I repainted the entire canvas white.
I’d continue on with this obsession whenever I came across something that struck me. Slowly but surely, more things revealed their whisper to me, just as Suong once had, just like Alyssa had tried. People, places, objects. I wanted to translate the entire world into color then keep it a secret forever. It became instinct to keep the whispers safe.
*
I feel the figure staring at me most when I’m painting. I don’t bother to turn around anymore. But one night, I woke up to it standing before my bed. I stared, trying to disassemble its faceless shades. The shadow seemed tired, standing there, still, like its feet were nailed to the floorboards.
At some point, it climbed into my bed and sat along the edge, motionless as I’d seen it during the day. It stayed like that for a few hours, unmoved each time I drifted in and out of my sleep. When I woke up again, I heard it ease its way down to lay atop my blanket, leaving a gentle space between us. I tossed the other way. The shadow rustled, and I heard it curl into itself. It sobbed.
*
I miss you a lot.
I know.
*
When it’s time to go, I leave a tip in place of my mother. Lucy has only ever dyed her red. She looks tired.
Lucy is impatient, and she is terrified. She is nervous, and it can’t be helped. She is knowing in many ways, unseasoned in others. Lucy wants to know me, again, again, again.
But I am not a child anymore. I am a wounded animal, a shell, and her accuser. I want to learn and bend and break–it can’t be stopped. I am selfish, but the price is mine to pay. I am dying, and I am restless. And if I stop for too long, the whispers, like Lucy and I, will become a thing of the past, hunting me like a shadow.
Xuan Pham says she doesn’t have anything significant to showcase in her bio and was, like, super nervous writing this—just wanted to #keepitreal. She’s an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, and she is NEVER seen without a matcha latte in her hand.
