Untitled 04
I’m five years old.
I’m in the kitchen with my parents.
Kneeling on the floor.
Wrists tied behind me.
I look up and see my mother.
Similarly bound and kneeling.
A white cloth stuffed in her mouth.
I don’t remember fear. I don’t remember crying. I don’t remember feeling anything.
It’s just image after image after image.
The film in my mind cuts.
My father wrestles a kitchen knife from the drawer with his clumsy, bound hands. He carefully cuts the cord around my mother’s wrists. She undoes the cloth tied across her mouth and helps my father and me.
Scene change.
The house is a mess. Things are missing.
All I feel is—
Nothing.
Was it real, or just a dream?
The details are vague and nobody ever mentioned it again—my parents, my siblings.
Maybe I’d dreamt it up. Like that reoccurring nightmare I’d had as a child of a giant spider chasing me around the house (I can’t count the number of times I’d had that dream throughout my elementary school years).
And yet, there were so many details that weren’t vague.
We’d gone to Santa Ana that day—a city over an hour and a half away, known within the Vietnamese community as “Little Saigon” for its large population of South Vietnamese immigrants and its resulting expanse of Vietnamese markets, restaurants and communities. A home away from home. We’d bought groceries and had lunch there.
My siblings had all gone to school. At that time, I hadn’t been old enough to enroll, which is why I guess I must have been 5 years old at that time. Maybe a little younger—4 years old perhaps. But surely not any younger than that.
I remember that when we came back home, it was still full sunlight outside.
And I remember that, in the kitchen, as we kneeled, there were two men standing in front of us.
I couldn’t have imagined all of this, right?
And yet I was never sure.
So for some 15 years, I never said anything.
For some 15 years, the images played in my mind.
The remnants of a vivid dream or a foggy memory?
The doubt lingered, gentle but also just a little bit, just a little bit annoying.
I stare out the car window. It’s another hot and dry day in the valley.
I’m visiting, on break from university.
My oldest sister is driving.
She’s 10 years my elder. In many ways, she acted as my mom growing up. I remember being bathed and dressed and fed by her in my early years. And then—gone. She moved away, went to college, worked and then went to graduate school elsewhere.
She would’ve been about 15 at the time of that event.
“Were we robbed once a long time ago?”
I watch the houses zoom across the window of my sister’s car.
It’s uncomfortable saying the words aloud.
As if, by saying it, it becomes real.
As if, by not saying it, I could continue to deny anything had ever happened.
Because normal people don’t get robbed at knifepoint in their own home.
And I want to be a normal people.
I could play this game with myself forever—real or not real? Imagination or life?
But here we were.
The moment when that memory would disappear in a puff of smoke or would manifest into reality as if life had been breathed into the hazy outlines of its being, giving it mass and form and truth and... what?
“Yeah, by some Vietnamese people.”
Well, fuck.
In a sentence, I am a Vietnamese-American female in my 20’s who graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Mathematics.
And in a second, you put me into a bucket, filling in every detail of my life.
What kind of details did you pour in, I wonder?
A secret: my parents were never that strict. I went to a fairly awful high school where only 2 out of 3 students graduated, so it wasn’t difficult to do well in comparison. I am decent at math, but fun fact: the majority of the Berkeley math department is white, not Asian (I was the token girl and the token Asian in class! Lucky me!). I don’t watch TV or movies; I’m not a foodie; I don’t know how to read music. Someone once tried to give me money because they thought I was homeless. Another person tried to give me money because they wanted to take me to a hotel.
Am I a model minority?
And what about the Vietnamese men who victimized us so many years ago?