My mother will not count as one of war’s casualties. But what do you call someone who loses her country, her parents, her peace of mind, because of war?
In order to re member yourself and your mother, you examine the paper fragments of your past. Sometime before the fall of 1990, you visit your mother in what you remember as the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward. In a fitful, fragmentary journal you keep in college, you describe yourself as feelingA dictionary calls a neurosisReally? You perceive this ward, its patients, and your mother asNone of the patients, your mother included, appears to be a member of your reality.
Má sees these checkered pants as the sort that delinquent Vietnamese refugee youth wear as they smoke, hang out with the opposite sex, do poorly in school, style their hair into outrageous heights, and go to night clubs and garage parties, all that is good and fun in your mind and wild and destructive in Má’s imagination. She berates you, says you are not respectable and proper, that you are dooming your future. She orders you to return the pants. You do.
—but to write your book of short stories while living in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an unadorned building on the unfashionable Rue Richard Lenoir. No Haussmannian splendor and no elevator, but you and Lan are young and in love, with only one suitcase each. Fátima impresses you with its severity. Nestled in green mountains and supposedly named after a Moorish princess kidnapped by a Christian knight, Fátima commemorates other Virgin Mary sightings. Visitors approach a grand basilica with a towering spire by crossing an expansive square. Those desperate for the Virgin Mary’s help shuffle across the square on their knees. In grimmer days, the knees of the faithful would be bloody and bruised. Now the pilgrims can wear kneepads.
Only through writing about you can I attempt to re member not only you but also myself. And, perhaps, in writing and re membering, you and me, engaged in this delicate dialectic, can become something greater than the sum of our disjointed parts.Ba no longer remembers Fátima and Lourdes, visits I now seize on as cherished memories of a time when Má inhabited this reality and I was a good son.Those curtains in that hotel room, he says wistfully.
A year later, in December, 2005, during the Christmas holiday, I sit on this sofa, stunned. Something in Má has suddenly broken. After the doctors release my mother from detention, after she leaves the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward, after we gather the legal documents Ba needs to control Má’s fate, we deliver my mother to a nursing facility.
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