Translator's Note (2025)

(set: _thisChapter to "Dearest Vivian...")\ (if: not($unlockedChapters contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedChapters to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">Letter to Vivian</div>\ <h1>Dearest Vivian,</h1>\ I hope this letter finds you well, if it finds you at all. Do read on, as this time, I’ll not ask for your reply. I simply ask that you read this till the end. I’ll not trouble you much with the old talks anymore; I’ve grown tired of it myself. Since my last letter a few years ago, I no longer quarrel with the church fathers, nor do I have much wish to relitigate matters of [[the afterlife->Family Road Trip]]. I simply stopped coming to church. These days, I much prefer taking canoeing trips when my health allows it. This particular November has been surprisingly mild, much milder than you might remember it. In fact, I might even go canoeing after finishing this letter. Hopefully, I won't take too long, and the lakes still hasn’t frozen over. It’s so beautiful right before winter proper. I can feel like I belong in the world, even if it’s not this one. [[I still pray->Catholic School Girl]] in my own time. The dreams still visit me. There - that will be the only time you see me mentioning it. I only did it so you know that I have found peace and will not burden you as I have. With that out of the way, consider the rest of this letter to be purely a correspondence from one colleague to another, regarding a matter of professional and literary interest. A favor. Don’t tell your mother this. [[//Continue reading the letter...//->A Favor]]

(set: _thisChapter to "A Favor")\ (if: not($unlockedChapters contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedChapters to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">Letter to Vivian</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I understand that it is not seemly of me to keep things from [[your mother->A Family Emergency]]. However, decorum and jurisprudence are two different things. If it were left to my sister, she might never want anything to end up at your desk. But you are an adult and can decide for yourself on what is right for you. What your mother must know, she will in her own way. And when she does, well, you always know what to say. You will find along with this letter a package. You might recognize it. Yes, it is the very same thing, not a copy. I think it is the only substantial work of translation that I have ever done outside of my employment with Voices. So much for a career. No matter. I’ve had a good run. If it wasn’t for the [[Duragesic->Vivian’s Visit]], I might have spent a bit more time transcribing it and sending a copy electronically to you instead. But that would mean having to retype a decade's worth of typewriting, and these days, I can barely sit for long. The computers seem to hate me anyhow. For now, I'll stick with my trusty typewriter - if you'll excuse some of the stuck keys in this letter. What is mine is now yours. Read the translation over and edit it as you please. Or disregard my attempt entirely and start from fresh. Take any amount of time or liberty. I even had initially planned to ask you to have it published, but given the climate down in Texas, I think it might be an unreasonable request after all. And yes, I have thought of calling up my old contacts here in Queens, but even if I hadn’t been made a pariah, I wouldn’t trust them over you. You will also find the original Vietnamese in the same package as well - which I will henceforth call “the pile”. It has not been published in the mainland yet, and when you see it, you will get a sense why. The church is stricter over there than in New York, and their censors are more fervent than in Texas. It is ostensibly a work of naive literature, a one-off affair, and the person who sent it to me has stipulated that the author should only be credited pseudonymously. No, I do not think that this contact of mine has sufficient permission from the author’s family either. More on that later. At first glance, it is an unordered, loose-leaf collection of drafts of about five to seven different novels, but it has been my working theory that it is the same story iterated upon over the course of many years, dating all the way back to a bit after the liberation. Vivian, what you have in your hands right now is, for a lack of a better term, a new gospel. I have tried my best to index and annotate the original loose-leaf, so you’ll know that I have reasons for my approach, and that some basic forensic will reveal an undeniable throughline across all stories, for they are one. My translation treats them as a single work, which I believe to be a direct mystical account. However, that is a theological matter, and I'm done arguing over those things. For our role, we should keep to what we have been trained to do - translate. If you disagree that the pile does represent discrete works, and that my translation has been misguided from the start, then you should disregard my manuscript. I no longer feel very protective of my work as I have years ago. It is all in your hand now. I understand that you have misgivings about [[the ethics of my methods->Our Role]] - that I’ve been too comfortable with a manuscript of dubious provenance, that I’ve exercised too much editorial liberty on someone else’s work, especially when that someone has no recourse for complaint - that I’ve been a thief. Over the years since we last spoke, I’ve come to appreciate and share those concerns as well. Please know that when I first started down this path, I was under the admitted lazy notion that since it was only a private project, done out of my own volition, unbound by expectation from neither author, employer, nor the public, then I should indulge in private passions and let other considerations fall on the way side. But when one has spent decades on something, it becomes harder and harder to change course. I must admit - when I look at the thing I’ve made, I could not see the original in it. I suspect I’ve failed, and I am not of sound enough mind to judge. At this point, I could only finish what I’ve started, and I’ll leave the rest to someone less partial, someone that I trust. Jesus has taught us that once we know the truth, it will set us free. Every night, I have confessed, but speaking the truth alone is not enough. I must also live it. I have not been a very good translator. Now, it is your turn to judge and to put that judgment into your own attempt. You know this would one day happen. [[We are not alone, Vivian->Meeting Mai]]. Billions dream, and they lie beside us while we sleep. But I am very tired. It is high time you add your voice to that choir. Mine - I should save it for my nightly confessions. More than once, you have shown your interest for the pile which you now possess, not only as a linguistic challenge (the way many of us translators tend to view their assignments as puzzles), but rather what those words whisper to you, with your own voice. You know what that voice says. You have seen it also. This should be our bond beyond mere words. Thus, it is the trouble that I bring you. I know you might be upset when reading this, especially when I have jealously guarded this work from you, only to produce little while asking much from you. I apologize. I regret that I have been stubborn. I regret that this is the fifth year since we last met. I want you to know that during all of that time, I have always thought about you. Every line I wrote, I wrote in the hopes that one day, you might read them. Though we are now distant, I have always considered you my peer. And most of all, I love you, always. [[//Continue reading the letter...//->To Be a Translator]]

(set: _thisChapter to "To Be a Translator")\ (if: not($unlockedChapters contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedChapters to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">Letter to Vivian</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ The rest of this letter should help you better situate the work before you. Vivian, do you remember when you were young, you asked me what it was like to be a translator, and I told you that it was “like being a bat”? I know I should feel bad for not being all that helpful in helping you with your career choices. But it amused me to see you [[furrow your brows and pout->Vivian’s School Troubles]], and why live if not for the amusement? Why “bat”? Was it because we were nocturnal animals? Or that we made echoes to locate, to infer the shape of things? Or was it because we glided from one space to… No, I didn’t mean anything so deep. Metaphors are the stuff that writers trade in, and I wasn’t one. I said “like being a bat” because if I were a bat, I would not be able to tell you what it was like. Come to think of it, I might have taken things too literally. I might have told you what the job was, but you already knew the dictionary definition of “translate”, “translation”, and “translator”, didn’t you? You knew that a “translator” was sometimes the same as an “interpreter” (only slower), but “translation” meant something different from “interpretation” (which I would disagree), and that “translation” also meant to move a thing across space, just as it was, without shrinking, stretching, skewing, rotating, or morphing it in anyway (which the job entailed precisely those very violations). Oh, you knew everything. What was left for me to tell you? Perhaps I should have told you one of two things. The first approach would be to describe the dry aspect - that is [[translator as a job->New Year’s Eve]] - the daily humdrum of coming into an office, attending meetings (surprise, we are downsizing!), answering emails, mashing keyboards until you either feel good enough or tired enough. True as these things turned out to be (and they have indeed dominated most of our talks since you followed in my footsteps), I wasn’t going to tell a young you about any of that if I wanted you to go into the profession at all. You would have bounced right off! Then, the second thing to tell you would be… well, to tell you that it was like being a bat. But [[bats didn’t talk->The Bat on My Balcony]], so I didn’t explain much further. As obtuse as my answer was, it seems I’ve made the correct choice. Look where you are now! I had my laugh, enough to see me through another decade. [[//Continue reading the letter...//->Translation Challenges]]

(set: _thisChapter to "Translation Challenges")\ (if: not($unlockedChapters contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedChapters to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">Letter to Vivian</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ On a more serious note, translating the pile has been quite difficult - not simply because the kind of Vietnamese spoken in the mainland [[has diverged->Speaking Vietnamese with Mai]] somewhat from what we’ve learned at home and in school. And you and I are not the most recent diaspora either. We’ve been away from home for a long, long time. But the other, more salient challenge is the very subject matter of the pile - it touches too closely on [[things that have plagued me all my life->Bedside Worries]], things which I have promised not to discuss in this letter. As such, I’m afraid you’ll not be immune from these challenges either. Normally, having empathy with the work is the basis to effective translation. The translator should apprehend what the author intends (and how readers in her native language would receive the text) and present likewise to a different linguistic community, producing a like effect that the work would have had on the original readership. However, mere empathy would have sufficed for a disciplined professional. The trouble started when that [[empathy became sympathy->Business in the Bayou]] - a queer, presumptuous sort that fully took hold before I could even finish a close reading of the text. I could not properly read without my mind wandering to how I would have told these same truths in the manner and sequence that are the most familiar to me, in words that are not so much translations as they are echoes of this invisible thing we share, simply because I knew, without evidence, that I understood what the author wanted to say better than they could. I wonder if, in my sympathetic bouts, I had disrespected the text and its author. Or had these bouts really been closer to an animal hunger? Perhaps I had thought her a small prey - naive and unknown, and in my selfish exploitation, I would uplift her out of anonymity as well. Conqueror and savior all in one. But how powerful was I, really? I have never written anything properly on my own, and what I did… well, your encouragement was my sole comfort, and that stopped when we halted our correspondence. I was not a viable contender to even begin with. A better woman would not have taken a whole decade to realize this fact. [[//Continue reading the letter...//->Interpreting the Pile]]

(set: _thisChapter to "Interpreting the Pile")\ (if: not($unlockedChapters contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedChapters to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">Letter to Vivian</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ The [[urge to violate this work->A Dream]] did not come from nowhere. Quite the opposite, I have exercised much restraint in the face of my desire, but to make anything at all was to transgress against the raw material with which I start (perhaps this here is the implicit truth behind the veneer of neutrality and faithfulness with which us translators cloak ourselves). Again, the state of the original was such that to behold it was to have transgressed. The loose-leaf format of the original Vietnamese came with neither annotation nor any additional guidance from the author or the sender. Once I realized this challenge, I indexed all of them in the order that they had come to me. It wasn’t a perfect system, as my initial, confused shuffling must have mixed up the pages in several places, although this was minimal. (Outside tampering notwithstanding, though I do hope that the indexing will help once the manuscript crosses [[the southern border->Business in the Bayou]] to you, and you will realize if anything is out of order or missing). I then tried my best to match passages by [[chronology->Birthday Cards from Mom]] and [[theme->Thoughts About Faith as I Age]] (you will see a diagram of my proposed organization in my English manuscript). This involved a lot of guesswork. The first-person narrator remained consistent, but she occasionally disappeared into omnipresence, and the story then followed a point-of-view character whose name had appeared elsewhere in the story, but it was unclear whether this is the same person. Some characters seem to appear in different stories. Sometimes, a name would stay the same, but their life details may contradict. At other times, characters with different names are very obviously taken from the same inspirational stock. For your convenience, I have indicated the potential connections or recycling of characters and events in my English manuscript. Again, we must revisit my theory. One way to interpret the pile, which is not my way, is that there is a “mainline” story, which is usually when the narrator is present within the story as “I”, and the rest are tangential vignettes or flights of remembrance. This makes the pile a collection of discrete works - at best a novel sequence. However, the iterative nature of the stories are plain to see, and it is far more likely that this is a single narrative being experimented on over the years, and what we are looking at is its multiple drafts. This may present a challenge to my notion that the pile is a gospel, for if it is indeed an account of a direct encounter with the divine, then it should remain consistent. However, as we all know, the nature of mystical experiences is that they do not obey mundane logic, and the expression of which relies on the reporter’s ability to abstract and allegorize so that the underlying truth is more apparent. Take for example, Paul has never met face-to-face with Jesus, but his account of the heavenly palace - which maps onto the contemporary understanding of mystical experiences - lends credence to his reportage of Jesus’s teachings. I suspect our author has encountered an essential truth - a revelation - and the swapping in and out of identities represents an attempt at reportage - of translation. [[//Continue reading the letter...//->Various Grammatical and Stylistic Considerations]]

(set: _thisChapter to "Various Grammatical and Stylistic Considerations")\ (if: not($unlockedChapters contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedChapters to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">Letter to Vivian</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ No matter how much we would like to insist on the transparency and neutrality of a translator, we must inevitably leave [[our interpretive mark->Fainting at a Conference]]. One of those places is on the matter of tenses, or the lack thereof. I feel a bit funny having to talk about it at all, as this has been one of the most pervasive misunderstandings about the Vietnamese language that people like us have to fend off - that there is “no way to tell” if an action has happened, is happening, or will happen. It is a silly prejudice of Anglo-monolinguals. However, with this particular manuscript, the silliness crops up in some practical ways. Throughout the pile, the narrator changes mode from first- to third-person, and the narrative itself can change as well, there is no obvious way to tell if the intent was to have everything happen in a kind of [[convoluted present->A Dream]], or if there are discrete time frames to each of the stories. Because of my belief that this is all a single story, albeit multiple tellings of which, I have chosen the present tense as primary. If you take a look at the terse, concrete, and minute descriptions in the original text, you will see that the effect is that of immediacy, of looking around, of breathing in a certain air that seems to have remained the same for time immemorial. As for memories, there are things that the narrator recalls from her own past. You will have to infer from context where the past tense ought to be used, although it is sometimes hard to tell if a passage is a recollection or a switching to a different present, a different story, a different life. Then, there’s the matter of tone and diction. On the surface, the tone can appear casual, befitting a contemporaneous setting. Yet, there is extensive use of floral, anachronistic Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and ways of address. I do not want to be dismissive of the author, and yet, we cannot rule out altogether that such inconsistent word choices are a product of a lack of mastery over the literary form. It certainly does not match the candidness of the mid-century novelistic style, which would have been contemporaneous to the time of drafting the pile. Or, perhaps [[the Vietnamese which you and I are familiar with have been orphaned by the fatherland->Translating an Idiom with Mai]]. It saddens me to think so. Regardless, to preserve this tone in English, the most obvious reference may be Jane Austin, but it may be more appropriate to look at Chambers or Poe for the more [[gothic elements->The Bat on My Balcony]]. However, I still believe that this is an anachronism, as the subject matter of this collection is undoubtedly modern in a metropolitan sense. Once again, there is a crossroad, and whichever way we choose, we cannot help but leave our marks. As you can see, even if we have direct access to the author, [[which we do not->Talking to Mai at the Caravelle]], we cannot help but impose a certain idea that we know the author’s intent best. The (dis)order of the loose-leaf pile itself requires that we exercise editorial intervention. Even if you choose to keep the entire thing in its current order, you will still have to make decisions about what is here-and-now, and what is already passed. For us, to reorder may be to better honor the author’s intent - which we must do so using our… unique sympathies, as unpleasant as that is - since to make a seemingly innocuous grammatical decision like tenses is in fact to editorialize. If that is the case, then to translate at all is already to violate. [[//Continue reading the letter...//->On the Author]]

(set: _thisChapter to "On the Author")\ (if: not($unlockedChapters contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedChapters to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">Letter to Vivian</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I understand that you disagree with my notion that translation is an act of authorship. Perhaps it was not worth it to let this be part of the reason why we have not spoken in nearly five years. I think your ethical reasoning is right, and I blame myself and wounded pride for not being more active in contacting you. So do not think that I seek to persuade you to my methods. The more I write about them to you, the more I realize that my manuscript [[should rightly be called an English-language adaptation rather than a translation->Scandal]]. To attempt to compile this into a book is to have transplanted the content from one medium - a Vietnamese “pile” - to another - and English-language book. However, I do hope that when you put your mind to the task, you will see all the crossroads that I had passed, all of which will demand concessions heavier than what we are used to. You will also feel that uncanny and aggressive sympathy - that urge to say those things that you understand so well, in the manner which you deem good. From the content and the form, everything invites you to cut into it with a knife of your own. More than anything, this work contains what I believe to be a genuine mystical account, and so we must muster too the God-given conscience and sensitivity which He has bestowed upon His few. As such, our translation is that of the Will, and not simply a textual concern. [[You have always been more creative than I am->Falling Out With Vivian]], and so these urges may be stronger for you. Or is it the uncreative who hungers to see herself within everyone else’s work? Had I been a writer like I’ve sometimes dreamed but, would I have been content with translations being unmolested by ambitions of authorship? Perhaps you will find some other way that I, with my age and my limited imagination, have not even considered. You will find that I have attached a note about how you might contact the [[author’s family in Hà Nội->Talking to Mai at the Caravelle]], though this information is a decade old, and even if the information checks out, you may find that they are not very open to talking after what happened. Other than this, I cannot give you anything beyond what you have already gleaned from your years of looking over my shoulders, as well as our past correspondence. It is worth it, however, to remind you that she would have been your age. Your birthdays are even the same - year, month, day, and hour. Since you two are from the same generation, you may understand her better than I can, but seeing sympathy’s effects on me, I hesitate to say if this is a good thing. On second thought, given how messy this issue of authorship is, it might be prudent to not have it published at all and keep the translation as purely a sentimental exercise, something you would do for my sake. Ah, but whatever your decision is, you will do the right thing, and even if you don’t, then I won’t be there to reprimand you (if your mother hasn’t already). You are your own woman. [[//Continue reading the letter...//->Coda]]

(set: _thisChapter to "Coda")\ (if: not($unlockedChapters contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedChapters to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">Letter to Vivian</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I suppose this is it, Vivian. What is mine is yours, and some things have never been mine to give in the first place, but still, you have them now. I will not wax poetic about [[my career->Scandal]], for I have not accomplished anything of note. Those great dreams about the grass being greener anywhere had stopped, but it was because my grapes were sour, and so everything else turned bitter. I had but one hope to turn things around. That, too, turned tart when the bad news came, and then came the pills. Letters like these are best written in a desperate hurry. They always have some raw verisimilitude to them. But the haze that has fallen over me (even on New York’s prettiest days) has prevented my focus. It is a professional habit to always say things well, even if it takes me an hour to write a single sentence. I have been writing this letter for over a month, Vivian, but my mind has not changed. Receiving this package should be enough evidence for you of this fact. I have wanted this for so long. Perhaps it was the reason why I went to Vietnam all those years ago. Your uncle had just gone missing a few years before I went away. I did not plan on returning, but I met someone who bought me some time. When I landed back American soil, you were born. That was thirty years ago. Now, everyone is gone, and once again, I find it harder and harder to not think of it anymore. It calls to me, Vivian. I can feel it. You feel it, too, and that was why I never blamed you for moving back to Houston to be with your mother. She will keep your head straight. <div style="text-align:center;">—</div> After sending this package (and who knows how long it will take to cross the border; I will leave a photocopy of everything, even this letter, at my Brooklyn apartment, just in case you suspect your package has been tampered with), I will promptly leave for the old family home in Syracuse to visit Oneida Lake. This is the best time of the year for canoeing. I still have a faded photo of you as an infant by the Oneida shore, your brows furrowed and your arms clutching your plastic shovel, as if afraid that your mother would take it away if you were not vigilant. Next to it is a picture of you, your dad, and me, squinting under the Dallas sun; I smiled the brightest, so glad to be granted a visa. After that is a picture of you holding a framed certificate; you had just won a spelling bee at the seminary one block over from where you lived. Then, you were already a grown woman, holding a microphone at some dingy college bar, months away from flying to New York. After that, there is one photo of you and your mother on Ellis Island, with the Statue of Liberty in the blurry distance. I think that was the last photo of your mother outside of Texas. And finally, I have a photo you took of you and me at this very apartment. It was snowing outside, and you had colored my plaster-casted leg with festive green and red markers. I miss you so much, Vivian. There isn’t a single day that I haven’t thought about what would happen if I would put everything aside and be with you and your mother. But these dreams of mine, they started long before I knew how to love. Whenever I wake up, I long for sleep. Even my love for you feels like just another dream, one which I will sorely be disappointed with if I were not to continue sleeping. And when I wake, just as when I dream, I see her out there across the streets from my apartment, walking about - to where, I don’t know. She hasn’t aged a day since I first saw her. Soon, I will have the courage to come up to her, but how soon is “soon”, when everything hurts, and I can no longer recall being well anymore. I had my good neighbor help me rearrange the furniture to how it was [[when you were here->Vivian’s Visit]]. The sofa and the long ottoman would be arranged so that together, they would be wide enough across to pass for a twin bed. They asked me if I was expecting someone to stay over, and those words filled me with tears. I have not cried for so long! I cried warm tears, Vivian, and it meant that I was still human, that I was still alive, still able to make something of myself. I was convinced that you had forgotten all about me, but after that cry, I decided to write this letter, against all hope. This long sentence had her punctuation, after all! Please, take up my work. There is no other side. There is just this life, forever more. It does not have to be a sad affair. I should celebrate that it does not end with me. I know it is hypocritical of me to have kept you out with harsh words and now coax you with sentimentality back into this burden. But I know that you feel it too. You feel in the depths of night, when you are alone with your mirror. You feel it in daylight, when you are bare for the world to see. You feel it even if you do not tell me, thinking that you will outgrow and outrun the gnawing gnats at your heels before you have to put them into words, into action. I had hoped that you will be different, that you will forget everything, so long as I kept you from it. But if I had the ability to keep anyone from it at all, then I would have kept myself from this state. Whichever way we think about it, we all have the worm of words inside our heads, and they warp us so terribly. It would be another cruelty to deny its grasp over our souls. I had to choose. I believe it is best to leave you with an ellipsis rather than a question mark - the former is open-ended, whereas the latter is disguised determinacy. The antecedent remains true, but things do not have to be this way. <div style="text-align:center;">—</div> Take good care of [[your mother->Growing Apart]]. I have not. Pot remains Schedule I in Texas, so remember to buy scented candles. I should write to her, too, but it has been decades, and I can scarcely bring myself to think about it. Maybe I will, after writing this letter. Either way, do be proactive about bringing things up to her. She won’t take it well, but she will remember if you have neglected to act accordingly, even if in your heart, you know that you are different. She is the type of woman who needs to see things to believe them. Your grandma left a portion of her savings for me; I will be entrusting it to your mother. What little I have made- ah, someone will see you about it. The sale of my old Volkswagen and furniture should cover the ensuing expenses, which you and your mother should keep to a minimum. Knowing you has been my greatest pleasure in life. You have grown so much, and I am so proud of the woman you have become. The path ahead will be very long, and it is your job to keep it long, no matter what strange dream may visit you. Do as I say, not as I do. And do remember to have fun with the manuscript I sent you; we often forget to enjoy ourselves. It’s all just words at the end of the day. Just some momentary thrashing of the pen. I have loved you so dearly, my small Vivian with her tiny plastic shovel. Your grandma loved you, too, though you might not remember it. God loves you, even if sometimes, it doesn’t feel like it. I might visit you someday. But you ought to put those dreams aside should they appear. They bring nothing but bad portents. It is quite enough to know that you are loved. Enough words. My life has been full of them, and few have been true. I’m just clinging at this point. I’ve never been one to cling, and I’m not going to start now. No more excuses; time to do what I should have done all along. [[The lake calls to me->I Met Her!]]. I must get my swimsuit ready. My Greyhound leaves early tomorrow morning. They say that there will be a red moon. Oh, the majesty! What a time to be alive. <div style="text-align:right;">Yours, Aunt Emily</div>

(set: _thisChapter to "Family Road Trip")\ (if: not($unlockedSpring contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSpring to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Spring</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ It was probably somewhere along the I-10 on our way back to Houston that I first heard the expression, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” I was about to enter primary school, but which? My parents had wanted to shop around for schools in the New Orleans area, preferably one in a decent zip code, so we all went on a little road trip to Louisiana. Obviously, we never got around to moving there. Decent schools meant expensive real estate. The trip was more aspirational than anything, which makes me think that the “green” in the expression is less about the freshness of the grass and more like the green of sour grapes. Maybe my parents sensed that things back home would soon get difficult, so this was all the fresh air I would get for a while. I still remember the exact occasion that the phrase, “The grass is always greener on the other side” was spoken. Dad said it, antsy at the wheel, waiting for traffic to inch us by five-minute intervals closer and closer to the newly set up border crossing. Mom was hanging her right arm out of the car windows, as if to feel like she was not really here in the car and stuck with us, and all that awaited her was still out there, palpable on the skin. Of course, I must embellish because I didn’t know what mom was thinking. I was only five. All that I could remember was how unbearable the backseat faux letter had become after hours of driving. There was nothing to keep my mind occupied. None of us had uttered a single word since passing Beaumont. I had already read all the books that mother packed for me. We had rolled down the windows, but nothing could dissipate the heavy disappointment that wafted inside the car. Fate had ripped a fat one all over us. Then, as the big sign that said, in stark and unceremonious font, “Approaching The Republic of Texas. Ready your ID,”, I noticed dad looking at me through the rearview mirror. Perhaps he was not looking at me at all but rather something further away - perhaps the bayou that we had just left this morning, shrouded in early fog. Or Florida. Or even somewhere across the ocean, across continents, where his (and our) countenance was not such a matter of contention or at least did not result in surreptitiously increased and punishing rent. I think he missed some truer home. It was then that he bellowed, out from the driver’s windows, as if for the whole column to hear, [[“The grass is always greener on the other side.”->Passing Borders]]

(set: _thisChapter to "Passing Borders")\ (if: not($unlockedSpring contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSpring to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Spring</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ That road trip was close to fifty years ago, and on this side of the century, the grass is only mildly greener. Border crossings seem today to be a relic of the past. These days, it is no longer as inconvenient for me to visit my family in Houston (if I’m able and willing). I still get searched and questioned, especially if I’m flying from JFK, but it’s a far cry from how things were in my childhood. Back then, it seemed as though the label of “defector” would go from mere rhetoric to law. That had, fortunately, passed like a bad dream. But it is equally likely that more trouble would come, and when they do, they will pass like kidney stones. My mother has given birth to me twice - once in Texas and another time when she cashed out dad’s life insurance and took my sister ([[Thy->Going to the Theater with Thy]]), my infant brother (Kỳ), and I to New York. We would first land at Newark and take a shuttle way upstate to [[Syracuse->Catholic School Girl]]. There, at a small rental unit close to the Oneida, my second life in the Union began in earnest. I had barely had time to bury the life before this. Looking back, this move had seemed fatefully symmetrical. My matrilineal great grandparents have made a similar trip, albeit across the ocean instead of mere borders, when French Tonkin fell. Great grandfather had wanted to join a mission in his youth, and great grandmother was a teacher. They gave birth to my grandmother in the Kingdom of Hawai’i, who then traveled to California, and finally settled in Houston, where she gave birth to my mother. That was half a globe. It was all the more fateful that I eventually got a degree in Vietnamese Studies at nearby Rochester, moved to New York City to intern as a UN aide, and [[traveled to Republican Vietnam->Working in Southern Vietnam]] at the age of twenty-seven. I took off at JFK, stopped at Hong Kong, and landed in Sài Gòn. And so, we’ve made a complete trip around the globe.

(set: _thisChapter to "Working in Southern Vietnam")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ It is unavoidable that humans see patterns, and in that instinct for symmetry, we often invent all manners of conveniences in order to close off the loop. Strictly speaking, I have never stepped foot in Tonkin proper, nor have I ever visited Hà Nội, which was where my great grandparents last left Vietnamese soil. I only worked at the UN embassy in Republican Vietnam for six months. This was nowhere near to a “homecoming” to Vietnam, and it was certainly very controversial at the time to speak of a general and unified Vietnam that is distinct from the Republican project. (Curiously, despite this general sensitivity to language, antiquated terms such as “Tonkin”, “Annam”, and “Cochinchina” were generally accepted among the diplomatic cadres in which I was embedded). However, it was the south (with which I have no blood relation) that most stirred in me this sense that [[a circle has been completed->Family Road Trip]]. Perhaps it was not my great grandparents’ circle, but it would be my own. The myriad Viet Minh raids from across the Cambodian borders were of mixed success, but once in every while, a village too close for comfort would temporarily fall into insurgent control, and the delegation of which I was a part of would have to flee to a [[military base in Sóc Trăng->Jason]]. There, I saw bayous as great and terrible as any other in Louisiana. The Mekong mangrove forests were generally less imposing than those fog-shrouded swamps that our family had driven past so many years ago, but that didn’t mean that these waters were any more habitable. For our safety and sanity, we generally kept to the (relatively) dry land. Did my father have in mind this sort of environment when he spoke of “greener grass”? Like its American counterpart, the mangrove forests of former Basse-Cochinchine had little to no grassland to speak of. Everything was steeped in murky water and ensnaring roots. The floating boat nomads were wary of us, and the sedentary Hoa hamlets were more of a headache, for they were genuinely friendly. But the American advisors would always corral us away from the locals before we would accidentally say something that compromised their friends in Sài Gòn. In Sóc Trăng (and to a lesser extent Tiền Giang), I found that the sort of academic Vietnamese that I have prepared (which was laced with French and Mandarin flavors) was only fitting to deal with diplomats from the North, and I was faring little better than my Anglophone colleagues, who like me was not well versed in Cantonese turns of phrases or Cham location names. How strange it was that I found myself using words like “sanity” as an umbrella to describe the sort of temperate chaos that has festered within my own home in North America, and stranger still - for it necessarily elicited an awful admittance - that I was not home. Indeed, I was half a globe away from my Main Street, U.S.A. It was then that I began to think that what my father called “the other side” would have to be something [[wholly different->Meeting Mai]], not quite comfortable to behold, and very difficult to find.

(set: _thisChapter to "Meeting Mai")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I met Mai in Sài Gòn. She was part of the Northern delegate. They have traveled past the DMZ for yet another round of negotiations. It was a strange position that she and I found ourselves in. We were helping with what seemed awfully important but, as history has proven, also pointless. There was not a lot that either delegations could negotiate, for the broad strokes have been hashed out in Paris a decade ago. There were rumors of U.S. manipulations at Paris, which we at Rochester protested; news of Kent State sent the leadership of our group reeling, and my mother told me that I should focus on my study instead, lest I eat lead. I wanted so much to tell Mai that I sympathized with her. But we were only interpreters, here to help the lower-rung people sort out the details that followed from Paris. The American (that is to say, “Union”) delegate forbade fraternization between their staffers and the Tonkinnese. The UN people, however, were in theory free to talk to whomever they pleased, probably because we all knew that the UN was only there to “oversee” negotiations - troops retreating here, materiel being withdrawn there, etc. At that time, the reports were already being drafted in D.C. prior to our witnessing, as my future and late [[husband->Jason]] would attest. We all suspected as much. I was assigned to a particularly drunk Swiss bureaucrat (or rather, his aide), so I found myself with a lot of free time in Sài Gòn, free to wander off from the Caravelle complex. I was sitting with the Swiss aide (who was my handler) in a local evening cafe when we spotted Mai entering. He remarked that her French was awful - she had a strong accent, a colonial one at that. I told him that all the good French speakers have already fled before either he or I was born. He said that the Tonkinese should have used English instead, which was quickly becoming the default medium of these legalistic exchanges. I told him that his own English was not very good. He asked me if my Vietnamese was any better. I told him that I would go over there and talk to the Tonkinese girl just to prove a point. He pointed out that plainclothes Union and Republican Vietnam agents were all around. I told him that I was already being followed since Rochester. This was a lie. I was more tired of his company than I was curious, somewhat self-destructively, of [[that Tonkinese girl->Speaking Vietnamese with Mai]] who looked so much like my mother in her youth.

(set: _thisChapter to "Jason")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ My late husband, Jason, was stationed in Bà Nà Hills as a military attaché. In other words, he got his living as a tour guide and a pointman for troops on R&R. He knew how to get Javanese zaza and, and he knew what time of the month the Russian girls would arrive. Prior to this stint (which he called his “retirement”), he was a photojournalist that freelanced for the AP. He even saw Hà Nội before I ever could. He described the capital in the north as, “not that bad, if a little banged-up.” After the carpet bombing, the flattened hospitals and shrapnel-marked houses didn’t look all that different from the Dearborn he was raised in or the Detroit that he had left, he would joke. He was thirty-three when I met him. Nothing was ever more than “a little banged up” for Jason because most of the major fighting was already over before he ever set foot here, and rebuilding had already started. He arrived after Paris decided on a co-government system, and I got there five years after that. When I returned to the U.S., he reached out to me, saying that he was looking to get away from the Union, which “promised nothing and took away even more”. I told him that I had rescinded my Texan citizenship, and I would not return to Texas, nor could or would I help him in doing so. After some heated phone calls and a chance meeting near the Canadian border, he finally relented and said that Texas couldn’t have been all that good if I wasn’t there, and (according to him) New York was its own country anyways, albeit “a little banged up”. Either this was his way of describing the selling of New York to the banks, or he was flirting with me. This conversation took place in a log cabin only a mile from Niagara Falls. I laid on that bed, listening to Jason while staring at the wood carving of a moose’s head on the wall. People have given more out of pity; [[I only married him->New Year’s Eve]]. Though I may sound brief and somewhat callous when writing about Jason, it is because the one decade that we had together were the most blissful days of my life, and I should reserve some sense of sacred privacy. He and I were not perfectly happy all the time. I was subject to bouts of dissatisfaction, and he held his own idiosyncratic views of the “Vietnamese Question” (which he expressed with such fervency that I sometimes had an impression that he had forgotten that I myself was Viet). Perhaps I was not altogether Viet, which might explain how I could put up with him and remained in a mood of soft contentment until the day so-called “cancer” took him away from me. Vietnam didn’t bother me. Like my parents, what troubled me far more was the tension between D.C. and Austin. By comparison, Hà Nội and Sài Gòn (and even Phnom Penh) were cordial. Jason and I were cordial. [[We were, for the most part, happy->Goodbye, Jason]].

(set: _thisChapter to "Goodbye, Jason")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I do not like to write about Jason all that much because, as happy as I was, I do not like thinking about those times. I far prefer recalling his smile, his presence in our tiny Brooklyn apartment, or how nonchalant he was when I told him that I would not, after all, like to have a child. He said, “In this economy? I get it.” [[Jason was the only one who made me feel like myself->New Year’s Eve]]. He did so by making me forget that I was anyone else but me. Back then, when I returned to the U.S., I had refused a full-time post in the UN, knowing that they would have me permanently posted in Sài Gòn. Perhaps it was cowardly to not want to go back. I was tired, tired of narrating my life through the geopolitics of the day, tired of playing the part just to pay the bill, tired. So I freelanced for a while, translating this and that. I felt like a failure, a traitor twice-over. But to my husband, I was only his bespectacled and hunched-over wife, typing away at the dinner table. He did not know that I was pursued by a ghost, a ghost of my father saying, “The grass is always greener on the other side,” a ghost that had chased us across the Pacific and then the continental U.S. And behind this ghost was [[another far more ancient->Talking to Mai at the Caravelle]]. Jason must have had his own ghosts, too, for he had kept his life with me away from his past. Most of his siblings were spread around Appalachia. In their eyes, a Viet city girl like me was as much of a foreigner to them as my grandparents were to Hawai’ans (who assumed they were Japanese) or Californians (who assumed they were Chinese). But I couldn’t hold it against them, as I myself did not know much about Jason prior to his passing. We buried him in a church plot not far from Dearborn (not in Michigan). That evening, I stayed and listened to his sister singing. A cousin pointed out that I wasn’t crying, and I told him that I did not cry either when my own father passed away. During dad’s funeral, there were only the rites and the songs that I have heard so many times in church gatherings before. I struggle to this day to think of what a Vietnamese, non-Catholic funeral music would be. I suppose I could look it up, but I feel like it would be taboo to know. Perhaps in God’s Grace, one’s joys and sorrows should best be private, and [[one only knows the ghosts which fate has revealed to them->A Dream]].

(set: _thisChapter to "Speaking Vietnamese with Mai")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Mai said that she was impressed with my spoken Vietnamese. This meant that I was not all that good at it. When one’s fluency matched one’s face (and I had my father’s dark and gaunt look), one should pass quite invisibly, without praise or critique. I admitted to Mai that my family primarily spoke English in the house, and Vietnamese was reserved for… heated moments. As one might imagine, this made for a rather narrow familiarity with my mother tongue. “Really?” Mai would arch an eyebrow. Yes, to make up for it, I spent [[six years in Rochester->Going to the Theater with Thy]] writing a comparative thesis between Vietnamese and English literature. By the end, I knew my Hán words, my quasi-French, my (admittedly anachronistic) pronouns, but I still had barely spoken a word of Vietnamese past, “Mẹ ăn chưa?” As far as my responsibilities in Sài Gòn were concerned, I didn’t actually need to say a single word of Vietnamese. I was only taking notes in English on what the Tonkinese were saying, which my Swiss handler would double-check before he handed it to his boss. Most of it was about the appointments of minor bureaucrats in the DMZ provinces. Meanwhile, in the next room, a second-generation professor from Berkeley was interpreting for the generals. The terms of retreat were already agreed on in Paris. Still, it took a PhD to reiterate, “Johnny is going to pack up and move back home to his mama and papa.” Mai was one of the interpreters. She translated “peace” as “bình thường hóa” (“normalization”), which made it clear that to the North, the war was already over a decade before, and everything that happened in the years after was a matter of formality, even Paris. It was all an act. Mai’s performance was the only one that stayed with me. At twenty-seven, I was young and was lonely. And Mai was patient and curious. Things did not seem as high-stakes as they did when I was in my first year of college, watching the news with my mother, my sister, and my brother in that dingy living room in Syracuse while mom bit the nail of her thumb short, waiting for Paris to end with peace. Or rather, normalization. The work in Sài Gòn was boring, and we all felt like we should have been celebrating instead. So, Mai and I celebrated privately in my hotel room. The next morning, before I saw Mai off, I asked her how she would translate to Vietnamese the phrase, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” She thought about it, twiddling with the ring on her finger, and said, [[“Đứng núi này trông núi nọ.”->Translating an Idiom with Mai]] A day later, Mai was replaced by someone else. Two days later, I was invited to the top floor of the Caravelle for [[a little chat with my fellow Americans->Prelude to Isolation]].

(set: _thisChapter to "Prelude to Isolation")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I refused a full-time post in the UN because it was made very obvious to me that my continued presence in the New York office would soon be a great burden to my colleagues. In my mind’s eye, black cars were following me everywhere, and whoever that was associated with me would be watched as well. Jason told me that I was imagining things, but whatever I chose, he would be right there with me. I wanted to tell him that the reason why he was posted on Bà Nà Hills was because he couldn’t see enough to watch anyone’s back. I was not very good to him. When I joined the publishing industry, things weren’t looking great for print media in general. The banks refused to buy government bonds, and grants were drying up. All the greats had passed away. The New York scene had long retreated back into itself. The idealists of my parents’ generations have migrated west, where they would construct new worlds not on Earth but on a wholly different plane of existence. By the time I had settled for the private sector, this new plane of existence was a reality. More and more people were migrating online, but it was only the moneyed youths who had access. The rest was left behind. Once, twice, or thrice every century, there would be a [[literacy crisis->Fainting at a Conference]]. “No-one wanted to or knew how to read anymore”, so went the headlines. I couldn’t be too sure whether it was the case or a special one at that, but when I hit thirty, it seemed all too real. The mayor of New York chose education as one of his platforms (the other being a cooperation with Republican Texas to crack down on organized crime). I voted for him. Back then, my answer was simple - the publishing executives needed incentives to court the attention of students. Now, three decades later, it seems more convincing (which isn’t saying much) to think that I have brought my burdens, my dark clouds upon the industry. Sure, this is melodramatic. When one feels beset on all sides, one knows only the one side. It is narcissistic to think that the paranoia of one individual could bring down a venerated institution, and it was equally deluded to think that the self-serving ambitions of a few could uplift it. In hindsight, this period seemed to be my original (a translation) of the Pledge of Allegiance, which through my vote and (adopted) convictions would prove loud and clear to those…watchful compatriots of mine that I was more Unionist than Texan, more American than Vietnamese. “The wicked flee when no one pursues,” only if she believes that she is indeed pursued. What then, when one voluntarily subjects one’s self to monitoring? Must one become a life-marathon runner? When I joined print publishing, it was as though I had showed up after the starting pistol had fired, and [[everyone around me was running->New Year’s Eve]].

(set: _thisChapter to "Catholic School Girl")\ (if: not($unlockedSpring contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSpring to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Spring</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ As a faithful Catholic and eager to [[ingratiate our family->At the Salvation Army]] with the diocese, my mother enrolled me in Bishop Chimes. There, I learned three things: my letters, my numbers, and chastity. In the last two years of high school, I focused all my energy on my letters - taking the Latin and Greek electives - and neglected the other two things. My first time was with a boy named Alex, who sat behind me in AP English Literature. Alex and I had made purity pledged to our mothers (because neither fathers were with us). I think we bonded over that. We broke things off after graduation. Alex told me I was frigid, and I told Alex that I felt guilty. It was the least hurtful thing I could say. Don’t get me wrong. I was guilty, but I simply didn’t feel that guilt; and not feeling guilty made it so much worse. Later, when pursuing a major in Vietnamese Studies at Rochester, I had first chosen the dead script of Nôm to be my area of focus. There was something quaint and innocent about Nôm. The Tonkinese studied it so that they could maintain some marginal, scholarly legitimacy from the feudal hand-over. The Cochinchinese used it as evidence of the superiority of the God-given National alphabet, which was invented by a Portuguese. The Annamese… there was no longer any real Annamese, according to my mother. She told me that not even the imperial heir-apparent, exiled to France, knew how to write Nôm anymore. At Bishop Chimes, my Latin teacher taught us that Latin has never been a “dead language”. The common people in places like Gaul, Italia, and Iberia went on speaking and writing their own Latin regardless of matters of church and state. He concluded that to learn Spanish was to find that holiness within us (I saw him kissing the Spanish teacher in the gym room). One of the kids asked him if it followed that to speak English was to stray from God’s light (I paraphrase). Another kid asked if we should not rightfully learn Hebrew or Greek instead, to which our Latin teacher said that Bishop Grimes already offered a Greek elective, and all the kids who should know Hebrew, rare as they might be in Bishop Chimes, had already been taught Hebrew at their respective synagogues. After my college freshman year, I spoke to my advisor about [[switching departments from Anthropology to Literature->Going to the Theater with Thy]]. She tried to ask me if she had been inadequate in accommodating me. No, but why would you ask that? “Because you’re an international student, and-” I was from Texas, and I had a Union citizenship. “Oh no, my mistake. I must have mixed you up with the other Nguyễn.” Alright, now could we discuss the course catalog? “But Vietnamese culture is facing erasure by communist forces. If we here in the West can preserve it, then we all have a duty.” I would still be studying Vietnamese literature in the other department; it was a joint program anyways; plus, Chữ Nôm wasn’t all that was to Vietnamese. “Now why would you say such a thing?” Because there wasn’t any way that I would win an argument with her about what was and was not Vietnamese. She knew the difference between Chữ Nôm and Vietnamese. However, her department was being funded on a per-student basis.

(set: _thisChapter to "A Mid-Life Surprise")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Whenever people say that life is full of surprises, they are either speaking with a mouthful of hypocrisy, or they are really muttering a prayer of submission. That life is full of surprises is always a platitude, for by definition, it can never be an authentic observation. True surprises cannot be known. Either one shrugs and says that, “Life is full of surprises,” barely hiding a smugness that suggests that such surprises were already behind them, which cannot be the case; or, one is so beaten down by the caprices of fate that one can do little more than to prostrate and chant this mantra, “Life (God), thy will cannot be known.” I had never thought about not wanting children before Jason asked me if adoption was on the table. I hesitated and finally blurted out what seemed to be a culmination of all I’ve ever been - if given a choice, outside of God’s blueprint, I would prefer not to have children at all. A few weeks before Jason asked me to consider adoption, the doctors had told me that I was practically infertile. [[If conception, unlikely as it was, were to happen, both the child and I would likely die->Tailbone]]. I wasn’t going to bet on a pleasant surprise. Forgive my dry language. I had met women in my position who cried for weeks and mourned for years. I empathized with them greatly, but I had doubts that my empathy, my sorrow was great enough to warrant writing about, because this empathy was also tainted with relief. I was and am undeserving to speak for grieving mothers. When I went to confess (which I hadn’t for many years, even after Sài Gòn), I told the priest my situation, and that I felt as though through this decision to foreclose birth, I had killed a hundred souls instead of just mine and my hypothetical child’s, and it was not within my rights to cry. On the other side of the wood screen, he said, “Every soul is loved by God, and no soul can be counted, weighted, and compared like we do with stones.” Instead of being enlightened, I left the booth feeling quite silly. It was not like me then to consult priests or scripture. And really, was I truly responsible for hundreds of souls? I would never be able to give birth to a hundred lives, even if my body was beyond robust and my procreation beyond diligent. (This thought, this mood led me to imagine that were my flesh limitless in its endurance, it would still take a veritable platoon of dutiful men to have me produce that many children, considering that men’s strength was usually a fraction as their oaths and boasts; and when the image took shape, it throbbed greatly within me). That night, I was all over Jason. [[The Holy Spirit must have possessed me->Bed-Bound Christmas]], because I had no other way to explain my behavior. Jason tried to stop me, to have me calm down and talk, but I was without words. By the time my husband was snoring, I was restless with a strange vitality, so I went out to the living room, retrieved a pile of manuscript paper, dug up my old typewriter, and started click-clacking away. I had no idea how long those sentences would eventually become.

(set: _thisChapter to "Going to the Theater with Thy")\ (if: not($unlockedSpring contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSpring to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Spring</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ During freshman spring break, I went to a community production of Carmen at SALT while visiting my family in Syracuse. Mom told me to take Thy with me to, in her words, “Give your little sister some culture.” Thy and I were five years apart, and we weren’t very close. She had been skipping out on church to go wander the Oneida shores with her group of friends. Mom didn’t know what to do about it because raising me was so trouble-free that she never really learned to be strict with her children. I saw that Thy was trying her best to pay attention, but she couldn’t contain her yawns. I couldn’t blame her. The singer who played Carmen (or perhaps the composer, in an attempt to be original or to accommodate his singer’s limited range) had replaced most of the high notes with lower ones, and with it followed some odd reharmonization. However, it made for an anticlimactic listen. “L'amour est un oiseau rebelle?” Non, “L'amour est un oiseau fatigué”. When art fails to capture the senses of the audience (or when the audience’s senses fail to meet art halfway), then dry intellect floods those cavities where experience should have been. This strange rendition of Carmen allowed me a lot of time to think. [[My first year studying Chữ Nôm->Catholic School Girl]] wasn’t as interesting as imagining myself to be some enlightened lorekeeper. If one was driven by dreams of grandeur (such were those in my high school Latin class), one would be quite lethargic with something less grand. In all fairness, my teachers were passionate and knowledgeable. It wasn’t their fault that during the entire two semesters, I had only liked the classes on Truyện Kiều, which allowed close readings. Our edition of Truyện Kiều had Chữ Nôm, Chữ Quốc ngữ, and English translations printed side-by-side. When read aloud, the Vietnamese words were practically identical (there must have been some editorial liberties going from Chữ Nôm to Latin-Vietnamese, but I could not spot them). It was music. It reminded me of when our teachers at Bishop Chimes took us to SALT (I was sitting just over there), and I first heard The Iliad performed, albeit an English rendition. I giggled a lot and had to be shushed. How strange it was that while sitting here next to my sister, trying to suppress my own yawns so that she would not see, I started to sense that Carmen was tied by some sympathetic thread to Truyện Kiều. In both, there were desired women bonded in unfortunate love lives, but the superficial similarity ended there. No, if they shared anything at all, it would have to be an occult substance, something that could easily be felt but far harder to articulate. I had little to go on, only that initial flash that had left me stunned. I decided then that my Vietnamese Studies major should have a different focus. After the curtains fell, I drove Thy to Oneida Lake. She told me not to tell mom that she smoked. I wonder if I had pulled out my own cigarettes then, [[would we have been closer?->A Family Emergency]]

(set: _thisChapter to "Translating an Idiom with Mai")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Mai was thinking carefully about my question. Perhaps there was a Vietnamese analog to “the grass is always greener on the other side” that was closer and more in keeping with the pastoral spirit, but what came to her was “đứng núi này trông núi nọ”. It occurred to me that the way Mai translated compared to mine was far more intuitive (and I do not mean this euphemistically). There was little time for granular selection of words. Besides, had there been more time - to be disciplined in the standards of the ivory tower - Mai would not have cared much about preserving the pastoral image of the original English expression. Preservation was not simply a matter of preference. When an [[agent of the West->Prelude to Isolation]], such as me, came to Vietnam, she brought with her the eyes of an expert, by which the natives may be measured and cataloged. It mattered to those like us whether the natives referenced pastures or alpine landscapes; the manners in which each feature would be enclosed and exploited were markedly different. However, when a Vietnamese encountered someone like me, she needed only to be understood, to the extent that her humanity was obvious, comparable, and worthy of kindness. Even explaining Mai’s choice of translation in the way that I'm doing right now (referencing geopolitical dynamics) was also an act of insidious expertise. The text remained bare. The only thing that could be said was that Mai deliberated and said, “Đứng núi này trông núi nọ”. “I see,” I said. “You seem disappointed.” “No. It makes sense. I guess [[it is what it is->Our Role]].” “Which disappoints you.” “My parents told me the same thing, but it just sounded like something altogether different. I couldn’t help but think that the image of green grass would be universal.” “Well, there’s ‘cỏ bên kia đồi luôn xanh’, but then we’re back again at the hills, mounds, and mountains. Plus, that’s just a translation from English. No-one really uses it.” “Right. It’s just that ‘núi’ feels different - grander, less down-to-earth.” “But mountains are the Earth,” Mai chuckled. “You’re right that there are universal things. Maybe there is a bit of my mountain in your grass and your fences. Universal things cannot be the grass or the mountain. [[We can’t easily recognize things of the universe.->Talking to Mai at the Caravelle]]” “And I suppose you can’t name them either.” “No, I cannot.”

(set: _thisChapter to "New Year’s Eve")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Once, at a company New Year party, a man told me that translators were failed writers. I raised him Baudelaire, but he did not know who that was; in a solipsistic way, he proved his point. Then, I raised him Nabokov, which sent him into a tirade about the moral destitution of aristocratic Russia. Finally, I raised myself, to which he stammered, said that he did not know that I was a translator, and politely conceded that perhaps it would only be a stepping stone for my future literary career. This, I was irked. There was no way for him to know whether I had potential because we had only met twenty minutes ago, and I had not produced anything significant. He was right that up to that point I had been a failed writer, but it was his eagerness to betray his own position in order to please me that made him seem so small, and by association, I was also pitifully tiny for having spent twenty minutes defending [[my chosen profession->Our Role]]. I told him that I would have to look for [[my husband->Jason]]. He told me that he also had to find his wife. It was my sixth year at Voices, an imprint of Random House specializing in introducing foreign literature to the American market. That was overstating it. The only truly addressable market was in Union public school libraries, which desperately needed to set themselves apart as worldly and metropolitan compared to what was being offered in the Republic of Texas. I never lacked for work anyways. A consequence of [[Vietnamese peaceful co-governance->Meeting Mai]] was that there was finally a proper Vietnamese embassy in D.C., with diplomats who could spend more time on cultural matters rather than military. Last year, Voices Imprint received a grant to translate Vietnam’s classics. I wanted Truyện Kiều but didn’t get it. It went to my old advisor at Rochester, who had since been promoted to Chair of Vietnamese Studies. Close to midnight, Jason and I had found each other and were smoking on the balcony. I asked him if I should get a doctorate. He asked what the stipend would be, and I told him that it would be less than what I was getting at Voices, and I would not be able to help around the house. Jason sucked his teeth, and his leg started jiggling, as it would when my husband was in thought. For two years, we have been trying for a baby. We told ourselves that it would come any day now. Pursuing a PhD, however, was practically a resignation from the effort. Jason then started talking about how he could take more shifts to cover for the income drop, but then neither of us would be home at all. Of course, we couldn’t conceive if neither of us could see each other, let alone [[care for the child->Bedside Worries]]. When the party inside started chanting, “Twenty, nineteen, eighteen...” I said that I should see a doctor first. Jason nodded. I said that after that, everything would follow. He smiled. I looked at his eyes and waited. He kissed me on my forehead.

(set: _thisChapter to "A Family Emergency")\ (if: not($unlockedSpring contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSpring to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Spring</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ When it looked like Thy wasn’t doing well in high school, mom called me on the phone, and out of frustration, she told me that it was my duty to tutor my sister. I asked her, “How?” Rochester - where I was studying - was an hour and a half away, and I could barely pay for gas or the phone bill; there was also the matter of my recent transition to comparative literature, which meant that I had a lot to catch up on. I didn’t say these things so succinctly, though. Like mom, I was worried, overstressed, and wishing that Jesus would, indeed, take the wheel. There were many conversations like this. When it wasn’t an angry call, mom would tell stories about how Thy was doing (smelling like pot) as an indirect way of saying that I should be doing something about my sister. At other times, mom just cried. Through the phone, I heard my little brother Kỳ, in his tiny voice, saying, “There, there. It’ll be OK, mom.” Kỳ went missing when I was in my senior year at Rochester. Whatever I wrote in my thesis draft, it felt as if every sentence was, “Please come back. Please come back.” I imagined my father in Heaven and how he was probably worried sick also. In my mind, he was darting from cloud to cloud in his white tunic looking for little Kỳ. One day, Social Services called me on my dorm’s phone, asking me all sorts of things about our family life. They even asked me about whether my mother had any animosity with the Republic of Texas. Holding back my confusion, I dutifully answered, “No.” Later, I realized that there had been a series of kidnappings targeting defecting families. So far, I have not written about Kỳ all that much. Part of it is because I have very little memory of him, even though I and Thy have filled in as co-parents when the family arrived in Syracuse, and mom was busy looking for work. The other part is simply because there are things that one cannot speak about, cannot write about, so one passes over in silence. I had a brother whose name was “Nguyễn Cao Kỳ”, and I could no longer meet him. These were the facts. I wanted to cry myself to sleep, but no tears came, so I simply didn’t sleep. This, too, was another fact. I took a gap year to be with mom and Thy. This was the cusp of the Internet boom, but schools have not quite figured out that most of the coursework could be completed online, so my studies halted almost completely, save for some readings. I had no more excuse to shirk my duties. On the other hand, my sister had turned into a completely different person - involved, intense, and melancholic. Thy and I would split time between her schoolwork, the police station inquiring about [[the search for our little brother->Growing Apart]], and walking the Oneida piers at sunset when there seemed like nothing more could be done for the day. During our walks along the shores, we never talked about mom or Kỳ. Mostly, we talked about Thy’s friend troubles and whatever that was on the TV. In this state of denial, removed of burden and context, we had come to each other serendipitously like friends would. Thy still smelled like pot, though.

(set: _thisChapter to "At the Salvation Army")\ (if: not($unlockedSpring contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSpring to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Spring</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ My first job out of college was volunteering as an interpreter for the Salvation Army, Syracuse chapter. There had been an influx of Vietnamese migrants at that time who preemptively left when news got around that there were secret talks in Paris years prior. My mother half-jokingly warned me that I might get odd looks because I was a Catholic working for an ostensibly protestant organization. That wasn’t a real worry because most of my coworkers were of other faiths or non-believing, and the people that were coming in were invariably Catholic. Of course, mom didn’t know that what worried me more was people at the center finding out that I had participated in protests against Union sabotages at Paris. Such meddling turned out to be unsuccessful, as Republican Vietnam felt that walking out of the negotiation would be foolish. After all, the Union was increasingly incapable of delivering upon their closed-door promises, what would the situation down in Texas and all. So, people would rather run. At the Salvation Army Center, I helped people handle New York’s ballooning paperwork, which was worsening since the banks bought up NYC, and the state governor transformed the entire Greater NY bureaucracy to match the city’s. The expectation was that everyone would eventually move to the city to work. To my surprise (partly out of ignorance of how things were done over there in Republican Vietnam), most of the migrants were readier than our own family was when we moved from Texas. More than half of their papers, especially financial ones, were already translated prior to their flight, and the rest was a matter of finding a matching template in the NY database. Even then, half of those already had U.S. records, which I needed only to look up. Only later did I find out a decade prior, [[Sài Gòn->Working in Southern Vietnam]] had tackled its own debt crisis by subjecting themselves to the same U.S. bank-mandated reforms. The Republic on the other side of the Pacific had been the banks’ testing grounds. I heard that the Saigonese fire department would ignore neighborhoods that weren’t paying their dues. Myths like this was a significant motivation for why I joined the Salvation Army in the first place. My Vietnamese Studies professors had related the same stories. One or two of them were third generation Hawai’ian-Californian-Vietnamese, like my parents. One of them had been to Vietnam, and he died before I could take his class. That year, I had to do Advanced Composition instead. The families that I worked with needed little help in finding houses, jobs, and a Catholic church. They were somewhat lightened when they knew that I belonged to the same congregations that they had joined (they would strike up conversations with me after Sunday service), and that I was a Vietnamese girl at the right age (after greeting me at church, they would turn to my mother and tell her - in my presence - about their sons, who were eligible for any chaste and kind Catholic girl). These suitors would invariably be in middle school. Their older brothers had either stayed in California or perished in the Philippines seas.

(set: _thisChapter to "Bedside Worries")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I heard somewhere that traumatic experiences made one hypervigilant long after the initial danger had subsided. There would always be some profound change in the way one approached the world. The soldiers coming back from the trenches of World War I would forever continue their watch, listening for the screech of incoming shells, waiting for the dirt next to them to explode (if it were the dirt they stood on, they would not have known it at all). The same went for those who recognize their fathers’ footsteps on the floorboard, the quality and tempo of which indicated whether their sleep that night would be undisturbed. However, at the boundaries of such experience, it was far harder to tell whether one is only mildly perturbed, or one had quietly gone insane. Once, in our bed, when sleep had failed to honor its appointment, I turned to Jason and asked what he would do if one day, our future-child would go missing. He turned to me. His eyes gleamed in the night, moist from the failed attempt to pass over to more peaceful realms. Otherwise, he was only a large shadow. “Why all of a sudden?” “It’s not sudden if it’s always there. There’s always a risk, isn’t there?” “Yeah, but you could get hit by a truck tomorrow. Something might fall on me at the worksite. Why haven’t you worried about those things?” “I do. But I would be such a bother to ask.” “Then why are you asking me about it now?” “I’m bothering you?” “No…, not at all.” Jason slid a hand between my head and the pillow. I moved myself closer to him, and his arm wrapped around me. With my face buried in his chest, I dreamed that I had spoken something quite moving - the exact thing that had been troubling me all these years, the reason why I was sometimes distant or anxious. But in dreams, nothing came out as words, and everything was transmitted as pure meaning. Only when one groggily woke up and found her husband long departed for work did one put it all together and assign the sort of speech that could represent whatever that was exchanged in those other realms. Twelve could be a product of four times three, or two times six, or tragically, twelve times one. Had I gone to a psychiatrist, would they have me settle for one explanation over others on why I had these thoughts? It would be too obvious to say Kỳ’s disappearance was the sole cause of it and ignore everything else that loomed over [[frail, frail life->A Mid-Life Surprise]].

(set: _thisChapter to "Growing Apart")\ (if: not($unlockedSpring contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSpring to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Spring</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Growing up, I was not very close to Thy. I think it was partly a deliberate attempt to not invite any more strife into our lives, because anytime she and I got too close, too warm, we would inevitably irritate one another. It wasn’t the usual sibling bickering. Something deep inside us was missing, as if we were never meant to love one another. That didn’t stop me from trying. When I was studying at Rochester, I thought that it was enough distance for us to start talking amicably. However, when Kỳ went missing, I took a year off and spent all of my time in Syracuse with Thy and mom. Being this close to me, Thy began to see that I had not cried at all, nor was I scouring the Earth looking for our brother like she did. I simply existed, impotently. Once, at the precinct office, the detective working our case quipped that Thy - the sixteen year-old - was the “real adult” in the house. Mom was hardly interacting with anyone, let alone the police, since she could not leave her room at all. And I was…me. This had poked an anthill in Thy, and during our bus ride home, she smoldered with cold fury. At the front door, she snapped at me. I told her that this was no way to talk to her sister, and she returned the favor by saying that I was hardly a sister to anyone. She said I was only interested in my little world of letters. She said I was “emotionless” and “feckless”. I called her a brat. It seemed to be the appropriate thing to say at that point. Only years later, when both of us were deep into our adulthood did we broach that incident at a family gathering. We both apologized quickly as if to sweep away any unpleasantness. The cell phone bill from New York City to Houston was forbiddingly high at the time. I knew Thy was right, but she didn’t know why she was right. It would have been too easy to admit to the plain facts that it was my nature to be a feckless mouse, skittering out of sight and freezing when cornered. I didn’t cry at all when they held my dad’s wake. I locked myself in my room and only left when little Thy knocked and told me that the family had finished packing everything and was [[ready to catch the last Greyhound out of Texas->Passing Borders]]. Mom was carrying Kỳ on one arm and an overstuffed duffle bag on the other. Sometimes, there are things that one cannot talk about, especially things that happen on the inside. If I could show my inside, then they would already be my outside, like guts strewn in the sun and shriveling till they are leather. What I could show, I’ve already shown, and they were the dry and dead silences of bus rides either a mile or a hundred. To say that I was a “feckless mouse” would be to lay bare what was true in dry, shriveled words.

(set: _thisChapter to "Vivian’s Visit")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Vivian is coming later this evening to cook for me. She will be sleeping over in the living room because her campus is closing tomorrow on account of the oncoming blizzard. Gray and brown masses of snow are already piling up along the sidewalks. By day, the snow melts into the microscopic spaces within the asphalt and concrete, and by night, it quietly refreezes until everywhere that is not salted becomes an invisible sheet of ice. I slipped and twisted my ankle last week. They gave me pills for it, which somewhat leavened my sorrows and made the New York December more enjoyable in all of its cozy drabness. [[I told Vivian to be careful->Bed-Bound Christmas]], as this was nothing like Houston. “Don’t you worry about me,” she said, suppressing a giggle. “I’m not the one who twisted her ankle.” “You’re just like your mom. Always talking back.” “No, my mom would have given me a glare if I was sly. You’re the only one who put up with it.” Vivian has [[her mother’s face->Going to the Theater with Thy]], only more tempered, somewhat melancholic. Looking at her is a glimpse into the past, when I catch Thy alone, when she thought that there was no one to be tense at, and she could at last let all that worry give way to sadness. That tenderness was rare, and they are still rare, especially when I am in the same room, a looming reminder of all that was lost. Not Vivian, though. Vivian is tender even when she is at her cheekiest. “How are your classes?” “Why, are you going to tell my mom?” Vivian pulls off her oven mitts and tosses them onto the table. “In that case, then classes are going great!” “If there’s enough space left in the Christmas card, I’ll be sure to write a full report.” “In that case, I think I’m screwing it up, aunty. Not everything. I’m doing alright with the reading, and I can say one or two reasonably smart things about Anaïs Nin or whatever. But there’s this one class - “literature and the brain”, I think - which just makes my own brain shut down even if I just say the name.” “Why? Are you the only one in the class who can’t read when they put electrodes on your head?” “No, my friends aren’t doing any better. They all thought it would be a cakewalk when they signed up for a creative writing major. The lab chimps are doing fine though, but not us.” [[“Seriously though, what’s the trouble?”->Vivian’s School Troubles]]

(set: _thisChapter to "Vivian’s School Troubles")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Furrowing her brows and pouting, Vivian says, “It’s questions like, ‘What do we see when we read?’ or, ‘Does language affect the way we think?’. What do you mean? [[Of course it does->Thoughts on Species-History]]! I’m sorry to sound so dismissive, and sure, I know that it’s really a matter of ‘whether’ instead of ‘how’, but questions like that just don’t click for me. It’s like wasting a year to learn how a pen or a computer works before learning how to write.” “If you hate it so much, then why did you take the course?” “I said I was struggling, not dumb. I was going to take a course on Darkbloom, but the professor went and died over the summer, so we were all shuffled elsewhere in August, and honestly, it wasn’t so bad at first. I understood the concepts just fine by themselves. I had AP Psychology before. But as it went on, I just sort of dragged my feet. I felt angry all the time, and I didn’t know why. Maybe it felt wrong, personally, like the longer I spent looking at brain scans, the less I wanted to write.” “And I’m guessing it’s not because you’re contemplating a career in neurology.” “No, it just makes me want to stop doing anything at all. Or be anything at all. It’s probably the weather talking.” “And the weather is only going to get worse.” “Helpful as always, aunty,” she shakes her head, smiling, looking just like her mother. “Alright, since I can’t really help out with your brain troubles, let’s talk about something more your speed. How is your thesis manuscript going?” “Very good! Which is to say that I have no idea where I’m going - just the way I like it. My professor says that we shouldn’t get too deep in it this early on because it will make things harder towards the end. But I find it easier to write when I might throw it all away.” “I’ve seen worse approaches. What are you writing right now?” I ask, rummaging for pills. “It’s just some ridiculous thing that I took too far. Each week, we had a writing prompt, and I guess one of them just stuck with me. I turned in something like four thousand words, which was marked down because I had exceeded the limit by two thousand. But I wasn’t sad or angry; if anything, I wanted to write even more, to keep doing it until it made them feel silly to give any grade at all. In all likelihood, I might not even finish it in three years’ time. Knowing that I might flunk because of it means that I’m probably onto something.” “That’s one hell of a writing prompt,” I say, washing down my painkiller with soda. “Not at all. Just something generic, [[something about a girl and a lake->Sights at a Lake]].”

(set: _thisChapter to "Thoughts on Species-History")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Saying [[“the grass is always greener on the other side”->Translating an Idiom with Mai]] presupposes this side and the other, a binary symmetry which betrays out upright bipedalism. We acquired our capacity to apprehend that which was not immediate once we were no longer so close to the here-and-now. We lose whiskers and secondary eyelids, and in exchange, we stand closer to the divine. Once standing above ground, what was far became near, and what was near became far. It was then that we conceived the world in generalities - that a rule bound here as much as there, now and then. We made sounds, which carried better across the tall grass. Our lips, our tongues, our larynxes, which had been the writhing, grasping, shuddering worms of darker ages, began to make sounds that were symbols, standing for that which was neither here nor there. “I”, “you”, “that”, “this”, “tomorrow”, “shall”, “come”. From our heightened vantage point, we begin to survey the land around us. Foresight begets visions of dominion, and so it was inevitable that we would equate whatever occupying the absolute highest point to be a total and final dominator. As we strode our legs across the savannah, new and lusher sights appeared over the horizons, which we were drawn towards like plants towards the Sun. And everywhere we went, Creation made itself available to our hands and mouths, so long as we could grasp them. From our erectness, we extrapolated God; from our footsteps, we anticipated Kingdom Come, though it was a thousand or a million years away. But what of the animal, that initial memory which made the upright feel tall? When the first primate spoke, did others swarm upon her and beat her into a pool of red, red gristle? They must have, as that initial utterance must have been - to use a modern perspective - a puppet whose biological strings had become taut and started dancing to some alien rhythm, to [[birth and propagate things that were not of the Earth->Tailbone]]. Standing upright meant abstract cognition, but it also meant back pains and, equally bad, the original sin of subject-object distinction (the notion whose originary distinction must have been between the “here” and “there”). From there, it was a short trip towards mind-body dualism, which allowed one to hate her body for its stirrings and agonies, as though such dark necessities were very separate from what it meant to be. All humans long to be of pure, un-extensive intellects. Our eyes should be invisible, and our hands should be manifestations of will alone. How disappointing that our bodies - which have endured against gravity and brought us closer to the sky - must tend towards the soil, towards disassembly and a sort of silent, idiotic radial symmetry, that of a liquefying corpse staining the ground around and beneath. The grass is only greener because [[there are bones in those fields->A Dream]].

(set: _thisChapter to "Fainting at a Conference")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Once, I was invited to sit on a panel about something nebulous like “the uniquely human touch in literature”. The exact title of the event didn’t matter, as the same words get shuffled around once every five years or so. Once every five years, the arts would come under attack, usually from the scientific and engineering world, and there would be a race between universities, galleries, and publishing houses to host these kinds of non-events. They weren’t so much defenses as they were a scramble to call attention back upon the decrepit old guards, those priesthoods of the sacred letters who now begged with a bowl where their eulogies were preemptively inscribed. “Pour your libations into our open mouths, for this may be the last time these wonderful lips would open.” As I remember it, there was some advancement in Markov chain text generators, really good for spam mails and little else, but the opinion pieces had been published. Our parent company could not help but respond. Thus, the panel. My specific imprint, Voices, had a seat for being a “world literature specialist”, and I was a senior member of their translation team. As [[my editor->Scandal]] put it, “a minor literature was the only resistance against the encroachment of the hegemony.” She went to NYU to study Deleuze and never left the state of New York since. What she said sounded vaguely agreeable to me, enough to paraphrase at the panel, so I didn’t inquire further. I was recovering from my first stroke. There wasn’t much room in my head for that sort of discussion. Plus, I had an up-and-coming mainlander to promote, so that was enough reason. Perhaps it was the sweatering room, the burning lights, or the urge to remove [[the oxygen tube->Tailbone]] and scratch my nose raw, but when the panel was wrapping up, my sole wish was to get out of there. There wasn’t anyone there worth hanging back and shaking hands. I knew most of them from various industry functions over the years. Here was a professor famous for his crusade to re-politicize potboilers. There was a duo known for their so-called “literary experiments”, which amounted to a poor study of typography. Over yonder was an open plagiarist who, as the New Californian once put it, “challenged the bourgeois notion of authorship”. All very tedious people; they wrote much but created little. While privately wallowing in these cynical thoughts, with mood a New York gray, I suddenly felt a pang of pain, which I momentarily mistaken for death, but as my heart continued to beat, I knew that it was really regret. I was approaching fifty then, and under my belt was not much more than a barren basin, strewn with a pale English hinting at a yet paler Vietnamese. How rare it was for anyone to truly create. And yet, children did it all the time, without glory or illusions. But then again, the children I knew were illusions of mine, gone when I was in my youth. It was then that I conceived of this image - the exit at the conference hall peeked open, and light fell on the shadow entering the room, and a girl entered. [[My daughter->Talking to Mai at the Caravelle]].

(set: _thisChapter to "Talking to Mai at the Caravelle")\ (if: not($unlockedSummer contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedSummer to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Summer</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Mai’s great-grandmother was the daughter of a court mandarin. When the old man passed away, so too did the imperial seal and sword passed onto the revolutionary government. Great-grandmother’s only inheritance was the old expectations, the old ways. This had been the case for Mai’s grandmother, mother, and then her. When she spoke, Mai was never in any hurry to say anything that she did not mean, and when she listened, she did so with her eyes as much as her ears, and one had the impression that she could see one’s lips betraying one’s intentions. [[In that room at the Caravelle->Speaking Vietnamese with Mai]], I trembled before Mai. I should have guarded my tongue more closely or even scurry away like a mouse catching sight of a cat. However, I was beside myself. I must have believed that while my words may fail me, she would see what I mean to convey nonetheless, so I spoke of what I dared not with colleagues, friends (the few that I did have), and even family. It would have been idle talk for anyone else, but for me, it would open the gates of suspicion, suspicion over whether I should best be shunned or confined. I asked Mai if she believed in the divine. She said yes. Spirits, ghosts? Yes, also. Visions, revelations? She had many. The truth of the cosmos? Wrong question. Why? It is not for us to know, only to glimpse. What manner of truth was hinted at when I met my brother after his disappearance, when I saw my unborn daughter, when I momentarily lived as a young girl swimming in Tây Hồ - a place I had never been to? She shook her head, gazed at me, and it was a lifetime till she finally asked, “Why are you saying all of this?” Because I did see, did meet, did live it all. I had seen Kỳ - my little brother - several times during those years [[while we looked for him->Growing Apart]]. He told me that I should advise my sister and my mother to stop looking. And then, he walked back into the Oneida. I did not relay this message to my family. It would have been a great cruelty. Then, at JFK, before setting out for Vietnam, I saw a young girl loitering near the cabs, smoking a cigarette. At first, I took her for my sister, Thy, because they were splitting images. But then, I realized that this girl was [[my daughter->A Mid-Life Surprise]]. I didn’t know how I knew. By the time I snapped out of it, the girl had finished her cigarette, entered one of the cabs, and disappeared. She would appear here and there during my layover in Berlin, and again in the streets of Sài Gòn. I would see her at midday and at midnight. I wondered what sort of person she was, underneath that tall frame and head of long black hair. I walked towards her but then, my feet were slow, and I was underwater. I recall swimming in [[West Lake of Hà Nội->I Met Her!]]. What it was “west” of, I could not say. Memories were things one simply had, not know. I was only a child, and only fragments of sensations remained - that the smell of lake water was that of dead things. I told Mai all of this, about how I’ve never been to Hà Nội. Mai did not comment on the contradiction. She only smiled.

(set: _thisChapter to "Business in the Bayou")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Before things normalized with Texas, I avoided traveling near the border of the Union and the Republic. The only time I did so was when I traveled to Lafayette to see a creole woman who advertised online that she could speak to the other world. She was not special. Her wording simply appealed to me. After that strange vision at the conference some year ago, I had been browsing the web for some explanation. Most of what I saw were daughters of people from my generation, inheritors of an enchantment long lost to this world. It was in a mood of cynical hereticism that I judged all of these technicolor websites that touted herbal remedies to malaises that could only come from the end of history. And it was the same cynicism which haunted me during my trip across West Virginia (which I took a detour up smaller roads to visit my late husband’s grave), then through the south (where I spent a difficult night in a dilapidated motel in Tuscaloosa), then finally to the wet boondock where my father once drove our family through, seeking better lands. I recognized the woman’s quasi-French. It reminded me of my grandmother’s verbal habits, who was fond of those quick expressions and biting curses from her own grandmother. But given time, everything eroded back into an alien core, awash with English. That was also how I considered my Vietnamese. I recognized the names of the saints from whom her powers were purportedly derived. They were Haitian names, and I gave her the Vietnamese names of those same saints, and she laughed. We laughed so hard that she invited me to stay for supper. We said our prayers together and ate her red soup. We spoke sparingly about my purpose, neither did she about herself. Instead, we spoke of romances and marriages - what they were before, what they were now, what each of us were given, and what each of us regretted. Her husband had overseen a construction site but could not see the metal beam that would fall on him. They had one son who was slated to join the Jesuits but was thinking of quitting. I told her [[I had a husband, once->Goodbye, Jason]], but no children. That was we were talking about right before my taxi arrived. My next few days were spent going around Lafayette, trying to track down a Viet author who had escaped in ‘75. He was my other purpose for being in the bayou. His son received me in place of his father, who I found out then had passed away. We met at some local chain diner, and to my surprise, Junior's wife did most of the talking. Apparently, the old coot was not very happy when his only begotten son married a white protestant woman. She didn’t read any of her father-in-law’s work, and the son had little to add. I began to wonder how his work had ended up on my table at all. In a last-ditch effort, I asked if either of the pair was familiar with the Sino-Vietnamese funeral rites that their father had written so much about, but I was disappointed. They barely knew what to do with his corpse. The old man was still lying in the parish’s morgue. Before I returned north, I stopped by the creole woman’s place, but she was not home. In the shuttered garage where she received clients was a sign that said, “You will find what you seek.”

(set: _thisChapter to "Birthday Cards from Mom")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ The older I got, the more my birthday became just another number to be remembered (and forgotten), like any other number on one’s identification. Soon, the only person to remind me of my birthday was my mother. Everytime I visited her in Syracuse, she would ask me what age I was that year, and when I answered, she would immediately put it out of her mind and start mumbling to herself that my birthday was… and I would be… and I was still childless… She would do this while her hands shook, trying to make me coffee with the glass pot that she bought when we first moved here. It had stained so much that it started to look like a tiger’s coat. After her first stroke, mom started calling me [[“Thy”->A Family Emergency]]. I suppose it was an easy mistake to make. I sounded like my sister, especially when one didn’t look very carefully. Mom’s eyes were not clear enough to tell that the freckles I had grown up with were becoming liver spots. I stayed in Syracuse for a year to take care of her while Vivian looked after my Brooklyn apartment. She needed the space to finish her master’s thesis. And my mom - Mom could not cook her own food anymore. Thy would occasionally fly from Houston to visit mom, but I think the house and the lake brought back too many memories, and we could not stand to see each other for long times without bickering. Mom would sometimes break out of her stupor and yell out, “Kỳ, my baby boy, where are you? Get your mom a glass of water. I’m parched!” Thy found some time to visit New York City - something she had never done while she was a teen living in Upstate New York. I have a photo of her and Vivian on Ellis Island. That was the last time she came. After [[mom’s third stroke->Sights at a Lake]], Thy took her back to Houston and placed her in hospice care, since I didn’t have the money to afford something like that in New York. Things had become far laxer for us so-called “defectors”. I was to rent out mom’s old house in Syracuse. The money helped somewhat when I eventually lost my job and went on treatment. When I came to clean out the place, I found old pictures of our family before we [[crossed the Union border->Passing Borders]]. Dad was there. I realized that I had become far older than he was. Kỳ was there, too, forever a small child. When I was this young, my parents were still thinking about settling in New Orleans, and it was the first time I heard of the phrase “the grass is always greener on the other side”. Kỳ was not me, though. He had a soft heart, a rare clarity of affect. Me - I was always in a haze, busy looking back while others lived in my stead. Lost in those old photos were birthday cards - most of them for me. Before the age of six, there were so many from aunts and uncles whom I can only vaguely remember. After that, there were only cards from mom. Mom has given me fifty cards in total. The last few cards - must have been five or six of them - all said, [[“Forty-five and alive!”->Thoughts About Faith as I Age]]

(set: _thisChapter to "Thoughts About Faith as I Age")\ (if: not($unlockedWinter contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedWinter to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Winter</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ It seems the utmost taboo to admit that at this old age, wisdom has failed its appointment with me, or I of it. I still fear death, more than anything. I had hoped that a long life would teach me to age with grace, and yet, I feel like a cornered rat, half frozen in fear of the looming predator, half ready to pounce at it, screaming, squirming, then silent, forever quieted in this final embarrassment. When I look at my [[sixty-one years of God’s blue Earth->Birthday Cards from Mom]], I cannot help but feel dizzy. It is not a mountain of experience that I stand on. There is only a tightrope over a chasm where lessons and contentment should have been. If I slip and fumble from this precarious place, then I am quite free to fall. Who will help me? Everyone is gone, and I have nothing to give. Life has lost its stickiness. It slips by me like air. All that loose skin under my arms - will they let me glide down to the depths? Or will they flap pathetically, a final reminder of meat and bones? I have thought that as time goes on, I would change for the better. Perhaps in my seventies, or eighties, or nineties, all of this will finally make sense. But the longer I live, [[the less I am capable of making sense of things->Bed-Bound Christmas]]. I had always felt one step behind others - slower to read the room, more prone to tangents, and plagued by bouts of unworldly ambitions. Now, with my body breaking down, I am increasingly dependent on medicine that will occlude my already sloth-like thoughts, confining me to a bed while bankruptcy approaches. If there is any shred of rationality in me, then I have no reason to believe that I will be better in my seventies or later. I have no reason for faith. But faith needs no reason. It is true that I have turned away from His halls, and yet, the Almighty needs neither stone nor lectern to demonstrate the evidentness of His work. I sometimes wonder if I am clear-minded enough to tell His work from that of the Devil’s. Here is the heretical thought: Is the Devil not part of His plan, His doing? Evil, then, is as sacred as the blossom in spring or the terrible rays of the Sun, which casts long and warped shadows. It is He who blesses me with the veil over my mind. Whether I lie down in submission and gratitude, or whether I rage against the twilight of my mind - all is holy for one who is Almighty. Perhaps there is no hope for any other world but this one. But this one is precisely enough. After all, [[God does not make mistakes->The Bat on My Balcony]]. If He intends for me to hold ambitions above my ability and suffer for it, then I should also rest assured that such a plan is far greater than I can see the end of, and it is not for me to perform alone. Let me be a roadside flower, for wayward travelers to know that someone has been here. I will not live long enough to see the end. Perhaps this ignorance will be my sole wisdom, and my choice is made in bliss.

(set: _thisChapter to "Falling Out With Vivian")\ (if: not($unlockedWinter contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedWinter to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Winter</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I had denied to myself the possibility that Vivian might not be all that interested in the work of a translator. She performed it dutifully and excellently, and it was in this great diligence that I had come to believe that my decision to nudge her in this path was right, after all. Yes, she had struggled to secure a job in some literary magazines like she always wanted, and I helped her get a foot in the door with Voices as my assistant. I told her that a life’s path can be winding. Behind this self-assuredness was the desire to see Vivian excel where I could not, and I had forgotten all about a time when I had wanted more than to perform a job well done. I told her that translation was the same as authorship, and I told her so often that I had constructed a veritable edifice to explain this momentary assertion. Today, the sentiment feels true, but I cannot remember if it had been true before like wisdom rising from the depths of ignorance, or has it been a mere convenience. I told her this once again when it became clear that Vivian had, all the while, maintained an eye for what she could call her own. She had been nominated for some young writer’s award in the horror category. Really, it was nothing to be envious about, but I had felt somewhat betrayed all the same, betrayed that she had told me nothing about what she was writing on the side while she did photocopies for me at Voices. Of course, it has occurred to me that clerical and light editorial work was really a tangent for someone like her. The realization was so great that I immediately told myself that all writers began by copying - thus cheapening both my profession and her ambition. But this was not what happened. Our exchanges did not touch upon these truths. Instead, I had let her know that her Vietnamese still needed work, that for a person so far removed from our homelands, it was expected. This proved to be a far more effective way to say what I wanted to say, far more than I had hoped for, and Vivian heard it clearly. We bickered for several days until she finally said that [[my daughter was lucky that she was never born->A Mid-Life Surprise]], because that would mean having to live in my suffocating shadow. That gave me the final reason to banish her from my apartment, from my life. She was sick of that job anyways. I thought I was freeing her to do what she wanted. At least, I won’t have to be there to see her do it. If I had truly believed that translation was in some way akin to authorship, then I would not have put so much effort into writing something of my own. Maybe I really believed it, because when she left, I stopped writing [[all those little stories that I had so privately treasured->Scandal]]. Vivian was the only one encouraging me forward, and I deemed both the effort and her silly. It was all silly, a waste of time, a delusion. I have made too many mistakes. She was gone. There was only one thing I was decent at. So I went back to it.

(set: _thisChapter to "The Bat on My Balcony")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Once, I saw a bat stranded on the balcony next to my apartment unit. It was the end of summer. Bug larvaes were just leaving the soil on still wet wings, and it was a feast for birds and bats. I heard their wings when streetlights came on, and they sometimes slammed against my windows. One morning, I saw one stranded on the balcony to the left of mine. At first impression, I thought it was a rat, but the skeletal wings told me that it was a bat. Shriveled into itself, the animal must have been as small as my palm. It lied still during the entire time I smoked my cigarette, which told me that it must have been dead. I was slightly bemused at the thought of what it would become when the ants - those diligent hearse bearers - came for it. Sights like those were never very rare in this city, no matter how big the animal. In the evening, when I came back from work, I saw that the bat was lying in a different spot. There was a streak of brown liquid across the balcony tiles, starting from where the little bat was in the morning to where it was now, which was closer to the metal railings. I knew that if it did not have the strength to escape its plight in the morning, it wouldn’t open its wings had it tumbled off the ledge. I went over to the neighbors and knocked. There was a stack of yellow bills stuffed underneath the door. My neighbors had been gone for months, it seemed, and I hadn’t realized this. I resolved to throwing pieces of bread and salad over to the other balcony. The next morning, I was elated to find that the little bat had dragged itself over to where the food bits were. At least, I imagined that that was the case based on the new streak bat liquid. It might have regained some strength and flown away. I couldn’t see it anymore. When I came back that day, I was saddened to see that it was still there, now in a faraway corner, lying quite still with wings kept very close to its tiny body. I imagined that it was breathing. Sleep would not come that night. I was beset by many sights and sound - the siren of ambulances, the blue red-then-blue hues which their roof lights casted, and the fluttering of wings. Finally, I took a flashlight out to the balcony and located the little bat. Readying a paper bag, I started climbing the railings, hoping that there was still something to be done. The other balcony was coated in grimy dust. I approached the creature bat, paper bag open. It screeched. Startled, [[I reeled backwards->Tailbone]]. Shrunken in my corner, I listened to the bat’s screams, and though my eyes and mouth were torn open, I was blind and mute. A few days later, the ants were swarming its white bones.

(set: _thisChapter to "Tailbone")\ (if: not($unlockedWinter contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedWinter to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Winter</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ An officer came by the hospital to talk to me, but I had no desire to speak. I had no other desire to speak of. The medicine was like a warm blanket, under which one could imagine herself slumbering forever and ever, free at last from the burden of having to say anything at all. The officer asked me what I remembered [[before I fell->The Bat on My Balcony]]. I could not recall. More to the point, she asked if I had intentionally jumped. I shook my head because it seemed the right thing to do. I would not have told her if jumping was indeed my intent. I was trying to save a stranded bat. I must have slipped while climbing back from the balcony next to mine. My guess was as good as hers. I did not want to die. But would I have told her that living, by itself, has been turning into a pain? It was only a passing thought, one which I needed not explaining, especially when it felt somewhat untrue when wrapped in this blanket, warm and absolutely safe, like my own mother - she who had given birth to me twice - was singing me back into non-existence. After the officer had left, the doctor came to check on my cast. She had on her hands several x-ray printouts. The good news was that I had only broken my two legs, an arm, and a few ribs. The bad news… I told her that I suspected as much. Long ago, I had set aside some money for the baby. Furniture with rounded corners, washable diapers, a kindergarten with an emphasis on physical activity, a dress for the first prom, something to help with college tuition, a house to get started. The money was meager for those ambitions, but when all those things disappeared, suddenly, what remained was a giant, untouchable reminder of a life never lived. It stayed that way for several decades. And now that I had come to that mountain with a chisel in hand, I found it to be a molehill after all. [[I never had enough for what I might want->A Mid-Life Surprise]]. To create is to know and love God. To deny ourselves of our creative capacities is to sequester some sacredness behind moral cowardice. How could one worship if one did not worship all of Him? Tracing His hands in a pale act of imitation reveals in one’s flesh and bones one’s very inadequacies, and the knowledge will fill one with ecstasy. I was not so barren after all. From my own flesh, I would have made enough for a daughter. Put it all together, she would have been [[such a lovely girl->Talking to Mai at the Caravelle]] - black hair like mine, white teeth that never knew food, skin unblemished by the sun, and a soft body that would never know pain. And like many women, she would be given form by a knife. It was such a shame that she was killing me. My precious daughter, my Little Monkey, you should have stayed a tailbone, a vestige of my animal past. But you wanted to be a real girl against all odds, and so you borrowed my flesh and willed yourself into existence.

(set: _thisChapter to "Sights at a Lake")\ (if: not($unlockedWinter contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedWinter to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Winter</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ After my mother’s third stroke, Thy and I walked along the Oneida shore as we have when we were younger. She asked me to move back to Houston with her. After the doctors placed the stents inside our mom, Thy would take mom across the border, and when that happened, I would be alone in New York. She told me that these days, it was normal to work far away, given that I already had a computer. I stayed silent and waited. Looking back, there was no need for her to say that she wanted to be close to me; she had implied as much. But had she actually said those words, then I would know that all of my absences, my distance, my silence, my lack of tears during all those years, would have been forgiven. I waited, gazing at the forests on the other side of the lake, which had receded into a thin black line that cut across the sparkling water and the reddening sky. I asked her if Vivian would move back to Houston as well. She was staying at my place, finishing up her master’s thesis, and looking for a job at the same time. Thy sucked her teeth. In that twilight, her face looked so much like our mother’s - the face of someone who had someone else to worry about. She asked me how the job search was going with Vivian, and I told her something optimistic-sounding. I really believed it, too. I knew I would end up getting her [[a spot at Voices->Falling Out With Vivian]]. Then, I wouldn’t be very alone. We walked back to her car, and as she searched for her keys, I mentioned the dreams she used to have about this lake. She told me to not mention them anymore, as she has put those things far behind her when she started going to church again. Yeah, but did she still dream? No, she didn’t want to talk about it. The last rays of the sun were crimson in her eyes. She asked me if I still dreamed. No, I didn’t anymore - so I told her. Told her that I went to church, too. Good. She said that I shouldn’t mention the dreams around Vivian either. I didn’t like sleeping pills. They gave me dreamless sleep. Some nights, I stayed up late and stared into the ceiling until I was so tired that the shadows began dancing. I would imagine that a host of angels had appeared before me. My eyes were peeled, and my mind was ablaze, I could see them, burning into my vision like pulsating darkness, a black neon fire in geometric shapes, first principles of God’s universe, from the cosmic to the atomic. And slitting across the bruised space is a red horizon, flanked by a red star on one side and its sister on the other. In the middle, the horizon parts, and where it is agape, there is an island in the middle of that mirror-like lake. Then, my toes, my ankles, then my knees become cold and wet, and I wade into the water, [[towards that far thing in the distance->I Met Her!]]. The red water tastes like metal.

(set: _thisChapter to "Bed-Bound Christmas")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ A brown van parked across from my apartment building. It has been there for three weeks now - the same plate number, the same shaded windows. I knew that it was not abandoned because its roof was strangely free of snow. I thought about looking up its plate number, but I didn’t want anyone to know that I knew that it was there. Plus, there could have been an entire squad of identical vehicles rotating shifts. My conditions did not allow for investigation. I was bed-bound, stuck staring out of my windows, then at my ceiling, then at the wall at the foot of my bed, then my windows again. The pills helped me while away my idleness, and idleness was all that I had. A year before this, I received news that [[Mai->Meeting Mai]] had passed away in her Hà Nội home. It was not really news. It happened about four years before. I only accidentally found out through an old colleague in the UN. I was surprised that he would tell me this at all, but less surprised that he remembered Mai. Everyone knew that I had left the UN because of Mai anyways. Against my better judgment, I sent letters and made phone calls to Mai’s family. I stayed in contact with her children, especially her youngest, who wrote in English. That was a brief moment of merriment. I could tell that the letters and packages were being tampered. Don’t ask me how - I’ve learned to tell when I was still working at Voices, where we dealt daily with international mails crossing Union borders. I stopped my correspondence after slipping and twisting my ankle and [[being hospitalized->Tailbone]]. When I was discharged, the brown van was already there. Still, the letters from Hà Nội came, but I left them unanswered until one day, they stopped. Vivian would come over [[every other evening->Vivian’s Visit]] to check up on me. I told her not to speak to strangers. She laughed, saying that she was not a child anymore, and she wasn’t going to be kidnapped like her uncle was. I didn’t tell her about the van, though. I was afraid that she would think that all the medicine had made me lose my mind, but worse than that, in explaining things to her, I would have to reveal that I might have left my mind somewhere in the jungles of Basse-Cochichine (or more precisely somewhere on the Caravel rooftop). I certainly would not tell her that her uncle, Kỳ, was not kidnapped. I would miss those days more had my mind not been on the damn van that was watching me from across the street. It was a very cozy December otherwise. Vivian played a Christmas record and made us eggnog. She showed me what she was working on. I nodded and asked perfunctory questions. So you’re writing about your dreams? No, it wouldn’t be right to call them mine. Something autobiographical, then? No, I’m not that miserable. Then why write it? Why write anything - because it might be true, to someone, somewhere, silly. But why? Why do anything at all? I looked, but the van was gone.

(set: _thisChapter to "Scandal")\ (if: not($unlockedWinter contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedWinter to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Winter</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Must it be? Let it be known that I left Voices completely of my own free will. I was not fired. That was the most that I could negotiate with the editor-in-chief, the hag. There was an on-going strike, and I bumped my way through the line of colleagues that had formed in front of the main entrance just to make it past my fifty-fifth birthday, when I would retire - again, out of my own volition! I was invited to my editor’s office to chat about my seeming liberal exercise of editorial privileges on the N. X. Hoàng collection. It was for the one-year anniversary of his passing, published at the insistence of a German colleague of ours, who had spent some time at [[the Old City->Talking to Mai at the Caravelle]] as a missionary prior to Reunification. Herr Weber was an exceptionally brave man. He came to Central Vietnam after history had been made abundantly clear that his kind was not welcome there. He lived in the Old City for eighteen years, perusing the old graveyards in order to retrieve the bones of his old colleagues so that they may have their rest in the consecrated soil of their homes. There, Herr Weber befriended the writer Hoàng - a kindred soul who shared a love for Huda beer. After one of their nightly outings, Hoàng collapsed under mysterious circumstances. Herr Weber was determined that though he could not take Hoàng back to Germany as he did with all the men he loved, he would have the late writer’s voice echo throughout the world. And so, it reverberated to my desk. I told my editor that I was willing to offer - for free - an alternative translation that was closer to the original, and I warned her that it would make for a poorer read. She was red-faced. I knew she could not read Vietnamese, and all she had to go on was a complaint posted by the author’s daughter. She had no idea [[the extent to which I had changed Hoàng’s prose->Our Role]] in order to preserve the original cadence when transposed to English. Had I been younger, I would have fought till the end over these minute decisions, but all those fighting times had garnered me a reputation of being difficult to work with, and I felt that I had fallen too far behind to be fighting about the small things. Of course, my offer was only a moot courtesy. Voices had already rushed the collection out to print. The editor asked me if I had kept up with things on the web. I told her no. She said that Hoàng’s daughter had made a hubbub online, which caught the attention of a very active section of the diaspora. Apparently, they had dug up some past publications of Voices and found evidence of American interference - something they were all too wary of. Fortunately for Voices, it all traced back to one senior translator, one bad apple, one spoiled career, nevermind that what I did was part of the profession. The public did not know or care. My editor wondered aloud if, for their public statement, the phrase “part ways” was too amicable. How about [[“excise”->Tailbone]]? After the meeting, I went and talked to the strike organizers, hoping they would back me up. No dice. They were already using my name as an example of the excesses at Voices. Ah. Es muß sein!

(set: _thisChapter to "A Dream")\ (if: not($unlockedAutumn contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Autumn</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Beads of sweat are crawling across my forehead. I am shivering. I have been shivering for so long that I have lost track of time. My hands are shaking, but I cannot move them. I call out for my mother. My lips are not moving either. I try to turn my head, and for a moment, I think I am facing the bedroom door, but no, only my shadow has shifted, not me. I remember that mom had given me a few pills so that I might sleep easily. My body has fallen asleep. Not me. If it is not the bedroom door I am looking at, then what is that red line that I see? Ah yes. It is the sunset, which has spilled through the door, while everything else is shuttered. It is just the Sun. What stubborn Sun! I have stared at this crimson horizon for what feels like hours. I have closed my eyes and fallen asleep. In my sleep, I dream that I have grown up, have married, and have grown quite old. Old and sick and tired. Where has that man gone? His name is Jason, yes, a schoolmate, and I married him. I must have. Oh, Alex will be so upset if he knew of my unfaithful dreams. Poor Alex. Don’t you know? Jason is dead. When I open my eyes, the red slit is still there. The door is slightly open. I can see a dark figure moving behind it. Is it mom? Or has Thy come home from school? I sit up. My joints are grinding against each other, and my muscle slides wetly across my bones. I am catching shallow breaths. Each inhalation is fire, and each exhalation is a flood of phlegm. I am coughing. My entire face has gone numb. Still, I find my footing and stumble towards the door. The entire living room is basked in a [[red glow->Sights at a Lake]]. The windows are black. It is still night. I search for the TV remote and realize that this is not my mother’s living room. I must have…In the far corner, right where my shoes are, there is a shadow on the wall. Is it the shadow that I cast? I watch it glide across the wall, and though I want to run, my legs were paralyzed. As it passes me, I call out its name. It does not know that I am there. It looms over the couch, gazing at the mass of the blanket. There is movement, soft and first, then firm. The blanket is pulled apart. Underneath, a woman lies resplendent, squirming in drowsy pleasure. Her hair is long, black, and wild. Her flesh is supple and moist, like some pupa mid-transformation. She lifts her slender white arms, and the shadow descends upon her. There is a whimper, then a sigh, as though life had left her body with that one, long breath. Everything is the color of blood. When my moans finally became screams, the door swung wide open, and there in the dawning light was [[Vivian->Vivian’s Visit]] - disheveled and beautiful. And I was old and rotting in my bed.

(set: _thisChapter to "I Met Her!")\ (if: not($unlockedWinter contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedWinter to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Winter</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ I met her! I thought this day would never come, but it has! By God’s miracle, it has. I had thought that to do so would be to risk everything that I had, but now I realized that everything I had was the sole binding that kept me from her. Now that all of that was gone - Jason and mom were buried, what remained of my family had forgotten all about me, and my colleagues had finally dropped me like the stone that I was - there was nothing more to lose. She was the loveliest thing that I ever beheld - [[a true angel->Tailbone]]. Though she did not speak a single word while I was next to her, it was abundantly clear that she was intelligent, sensitive, and had a soft heart for all the frail things in the world. There were things that one felt with one’s heart. She only smiled, and that much was enough. I was beside myself. I showered her with kisses and embraces, and every touch was electric. In return, she showed me such beautiful places, her interesting friends, and the wonderful things they did while the world slept. I was awestruck. I’ve always known that she was special. I asked her if the grass was indeed greener on the other side, and she revealed to me that only on this side did grass grow, for there could be nowhere else to go but Eden. We rowed out to the middle of a lake. Upon our heads hung a red star, and beneath the water was its sister. Everything I had was weighing me down, so I stripped off my clothes, and threw them into the water, laughing all the while. I was as naked as she was. Still, she held her smile, expectant. I was confused. I asked her what more she could want from me. She did not answer. I became angry. She touched me, and I started crying. I cried as though it was the day I was born. She guided my hands and showed me what she wanted. There, underneath the fold of her right breast, I found an opening where the flesh parted. She pressed my fingers into it, and I could first feel the slick warmth of her body, and then the firmness of her rib bones, which flanked above and below my digits, telling me how deep I had gone. I was mesmerized and horrified. I withdrew my hands, afraid that to go any further, I would not be able to stop. She smiled and stood up straight. The rowboat rocked. She walked towards the middle so we would not lose balance altogether. Her hips were right in my face. I gazed up at her. Having had my attention, she began demonstrating where my commitment lacked. She slipped a hand through the opening beneath her breast and started to part her skin. A red line ran down her navel. I immediately covered my vision, but my palms were open holes, and my eyelids would not fully seal. I saw her slink out of her white-and-yellow skin, which dripped hotly onto me. She tossed it into the water. It floated away.

(set: _thisChapter to "Our Role")\ (if: not($unlockedWinter contains _thisChapter))[\ (set: $unlockedWinter to it + (a: _thisChapter))]\ <div class="sub">A Memory of Winter</div>\ <h1>_thisChapter</h1>\ Dương Tường, whom I’ve never met but respects immensely, has written that, “The translator is the co-author.” I keep wondering how things would have been if our health was in better states, and if I did not exit the industry so soon, would he have answered my mails? Sometimes, we feel as though an originary piece of us has been shattered and flung across the ocean or over mere fences. I am a stranger to him, and he is a stranger to me, as well. We owe each other nothing. We answer only to our mother tongue, and even so, he will balk if he knows of my blasphemies, those things said in haste, those feelings borne of envy, fleeting, quick, and wounding. I hated him for saying it before I did, but there must be others before him still. Indeed, “the translator is the co-author”. Dương Tường has taken this conviction far enough into infamy, when he translated Lolita with self-assured liberality and received, in kind, liberal criticisms bordering on a public dismissal. To wit, he correctly assessed that “Chữ tài chữ mệnh khéo là ghét nhau” implied, by way of common readings, that the latter - mệnh - imposed upon and victimized the former - tài. It was appropriate that readers of English understood this phrase in the same manner as readers of Vietnamese would. But would is not should. To do away with the original’s symmetry, that antagonistic reciprocity, was to decide in the reader’s stead (and even the author’s stead) that the alternative reading was not to be, that talent (or rather, will) could not impose upon the firmament. Would that not deprive the original of its richness? Is the firmament not the invention of the will, be it multiple or One? A few years before that kerfuffle, I was also [[dismissed->Scandal]] from (or rather rescinded my involvement with) public, commercial translation. Oh, poor old Dương Tường, in infamy, we are kin. My incident at Voices did not stop me from professing, at least in private, my literary principles. But when it happened to him, I stopped. What better balm for my ailing body and sick mind than to see my betters fall? It was the final medicine that eased my thrashing. Indeed, the grass is green nowhere. Maybe we were both wrongheaded. Still, nights did not admit us quietly. From my sick bed, I heard news of Dương Tường’s illness, but even then, he was esteemed. Ires pass, and they leave little wounds. The medicine was sweet but not sweet enough. One night, when the police siren kept me up late, I hauled myself to my work table and found that everything - that accursed pile - was still there. She was still there, waiting for me, that stranger, that piece of mine flung so far across my imagination, my moor from which I have drifted so far away. The author is a translator of an inexorable will - the will to be, to say, “Let there be…”, rather than nothing. We are often wrong and blind, but this much, we are sure to owe.

(set: $unlockedChapters to (a:))\ (set: $unlockedSpring to (a:))\ (set: $unlockedSummer to (a:))\ (set: $unlockedAutumn to (a:))\ (set: $unlockedWinter to (a:))

{(append: ?SideBar)[ <div style="font-family: Garamond;"> <p class="sub">Hypertext Novella, 2024</p> <h2>Translator's Note</h2> (if: $unlockedChapters's length is 0)[] (else:)[<h4>Letter to Vivian</h4>] (for: each _chapterName, ...$unlockedChapters)[ [[_chapterName]] (if: _chapterName is _thisChapter)[ ☙ ]  (unless: $unlockedChapters's last is _chapterName)[<br>] ] (if: $unlockedSpring's length is 0)[] (else:)[<h4><span style="font-weight:normal;">Memories:</span> Spring</h4>] (for: each _springName, ...$unlockedSpring)[ [[_springName]] (if: _springName is _thisChapter)[ ☙ ]  (unless: $unlockedSpring's last is _springName)[<br>] ] (if: $unlockedSummer's length is 0)[] (else:)[<h4><span style="font-weight:normal;">Memories:</span> Summer</h4>] (for: each _summerName, ...$unlockedSummer)[ [[_summerName]] (if: _summerName is _thisChapter)[ ☙ ]  (unless: $unlockedSummer's last is _summerName)[<br>] ] (if: $unlockedAutumn's length is 0)[] (else:)[<h4><span style="font-weight:normal;">Memories:</span> Autumn</h4>] (for: each _autumnName, ...$unlockedAutumn)[ [[_autumnName]] (if: _autumnName is _thisChapter)[ ☙ ]  (unless: $unlockedAutumn's last is _autumnName)[<br>] ] (if: $unlockedWinter's length is 0)[] (else:)[<h4><span style="font-weight:normal;">Memories:</span> Winter</h4>] (for: each _winterName, ...$unlockedWinter)[ [[_winterName]] (if: _winterName is _thisChapter)[ ☙ ]  (unless: $unlockedWinter's last is _winterName)[<br>] ] <br><br><br> { (if: (passage:)'s name is "Begin")[] (else:)[ Sometimes, I want to forget everything.<br><span style="opacity:50%; font-size:80%;">(click to reset reading progress)</span> ] (if: (passage:)'s name is "Begin")[] (else:)[ (click-replace: "Sometimes, I want to forget everything.")[ (set: $unlockedChapters to (a:)) (set: $unlockedSpring to (a:)) (set: $unlockedSummer to (a:)) (set: $unlockedAutumn to (a:)) (set: $unlockedWinter to (a:)) (set: $visited to (a:)) (reload:) ] </div> ]} ]}

<h1>About</h1> <em>Translator’s Note</em> is a hypertext novella. In this story, a life was lived, and the choices have already been made - i.e. it is not a choose-your-own-adventure book. The links do not change the outcome of events. You will, however, get to choose your own path through the text - which thread to read further on, and which to ignore. {<ul> <li>There is no definitive ending. You’re “done” when you feel you’re done.</li> <li>Each person will have a different order of reading, leading to some details being “spoiled” earlier than others. This is intended.</li> <li>Some pieces of the text may be missed altogether. This is also intended.</li> <li>When feeling stuck, use the navigation bar on the left to go back to a topic you have unlocked - there will be other paths to pursue.</li> <li>Also on the same bar, there is a link to reset your reading progress.</li> </ul>} <h1 style="text-align:center;">[[BEGIN READING->Dearest Vivian...]]</h1>