NOOGIESBRAIN

In exactly two weeks from today, it will be my husband’s one year death anniversary. 

In my culture, we would acknowledge his passing by paying respects to him by cooking his favorite dishes, setting up an altar with his photograph, lighting candles and incense while we speak to him. Only after the incense has extinguished do we get to touch the food for ourselves. 

But here in middle America, no such thing will happen.

People will comment such trite things to me, such as, 

“I can’t believe it’s been a year, how are you doing?”

“He was such a great person.”

“I’m sure he’s looking down from heaven and smiling at you.”

Whatever.

It’s been a year fraught with grief, sorrow, loneliness, but mostly anger.

Anger illogically directed at him for dying. He had promised me at least twenty more years with him. Anger at cancer. Anger that there was no cure.

A lot of anger stemming from the weird relationship he had with his adult children, who he praised all the time as if they hung the moon. Angry at him for his delusional pride in them, thinking they were oh so smart and accomplished thinkers and trailblazers. 

Parenting does not come with any instruction manual. We are all winging it, some more successfully than others.

I’ve always parented based on my gut feeling. I feel I intuitively know my kids very well because they were attached to me in utero. Sometimes psychically even, for example, when I knew my oldest had pneumonia before he had even been seen by any medical professional.

What is the correct way to parent? Is it just as harmful to give your kids everything, as it is to withhold things from them? Does it do them harm when you praise them for something that doesn’t need to be praised?

In Costco a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but hear this mother talking to her little kids as if she were having an adult conversation with them but done in a sing-songey voice. She was explaining to them every damn little thing: “that is a banana, we don’t eat chips, we’re looking for only organic.” Yadda yadda yadda. I wanted to punch her lights out.

It’s not that big of a deal that your five-year-old knows what a damn banana is. It does not mean he has Mensa IQ.

Anger at my husband is accompanied with resentment. When we discussed his will and I asked to be removed from it to avoid any conflicts with his children, he said I didn’t have any faith in him. He said he was hurt that I would think he had raised anybody who would be spiteful and ugly.

For the last year, I have had to contend with his “faultless” kids in so many ways, that my anger at him has repeatedly fucked with my blood pressure, my stress level, my sleeplessness. These people have no respect for others or any social graces. I am so mad at him for thinking that they are exceptional people when they are actually loathsome. I’m so mad at him for being such a smart person but so dumb when it came to his kids.

I’m so mad that the harmful things done to me by his children has tainted my relationship with him. I know this is wrong and I am trying very hard to let go of this anger. I have officially erased them from my mind. I am not anticipating actually receiving anything from the estate.

I have  the car that he loved to drive. And I have some of his cremains, thanks to the funeral home. (His children forbade me to have them.) I have some photos and I saved all of the texts and emails and notes that we exchanged. And I have my memories. In exactly two weeks from today, I will look for him among the stars in the night sky that he used to name for me. I will celebrate him as my childless husband.

Ecole Française Colette on Ho Xuan Huong Avenue in Saigon is a massive two-story adobe structure. It is painted orange and has green wooden shutters. Beyond the green metal arched gates, the courtyard is covered in pea gravel. There is a bust of some unknown man’s head on a stone pillar in the middle of the courtyard.

When I was a student there, it was only a one-story building. And I don’t remember it being painted a cheerful orange but rather a faded and jaundiced horse manure color. The hallways between the classrooms were always dark and scary. On the occasional few times that I was allowed to use the bathroom, I would run quickly and squat over the latrine, hoping for fast release because noises echoing from the ceramic tile walls were surely from the dead, as legend had it.   

Colette, before it was a school, was a hospital. The lore was that so many soldiers died there at the hospital that their spirits still haunted the building. Some were benign yet others were to be feared because they had died violently and were seeking revenge.

The war in Vietnam precipitated that some schools be combined or shut down. Colette was not shuttered but they changed to a two-session school day. Some students attended the morning session and some, like me, went in the afternoons. 

Sometimes I got to school with our nanny, on a pedicab, or cyclo. My best days were when my favorite cousin would come pick me up and take me on the back of his motorcycle. I still can’t believe that my mother allowed that. But it was exhilarating for me as a kid to be on a real motorcycle, not one of those putt putt mopeds.

School went from two in the afternoon to six in the evening. I was usually picked up by my mother or my nanny. 

A week after my friend Suzanne, who had been kidnapped and had gotten part of her ear chopped off, their wires got crossed and neither my mother or my nanny came and got me. 

I waited in the schoolyard with all the other students. But no sign of them. The number of kids dwindled and the custodian came and ushered the few us left out of the yard so he could lock the gates.

Outside of the gate, I waited with some older girls remaining. As the group slowly thinned out and the sky darkened, the cold of fear started creeping up my limbs. I approached an older girl and begged. “Big sister, can you stay with me? I don’t know where my mother is.” She agreed and comforted me but eventually her ride came and she left too. 

I was alone in front of these huge metal gates in the dark. The same gates which kept the ghosts confined to the building. The same gates where some random criminal had dropped off my friend Suzanne with part of her ear missing. The same gates where Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk had self-immolated in protest of the government’s persecution of Buddhists.

I was paralyzed with fear that I would be kidnapped next. There were stories all over Saigon about what criminals were willing to do for the ransom. The general consensus was that it was a lucrative business for them and they were not moved by pleas of mercy from their victims.

I had heard talk of people losing fingers, hands, and toes, but seeing for myself Suzanne’s left over ear made it hard to breathe that evening, while I was alone in the dark. 

I started to walk away from the school towards the direction of one of my aunt’s house. The sidewalk was completely pitch black. I was sobbing with every step. I hugged my schoolbag to my chest to stop shaking. I concentrated all my senses to pick up any odd sounds or movement and prepared myself for escape should I need it. I prayed my legs would work. I remember being startled and then relieved when I walked into some overhanging limbs and the foliage brushed my face. 

I was desolate. I felt abandoned and unloved. How could they forget me? Fear was joined with bitterness and deep hurt. I had always felt that I was the least favored child of the four. Would they pay the ransom if someone took me? Would I be sold to some codger to be a child bride? Would I become a prostitute like my tutor was always implying?

When I finally entered my aunt’s house, still crying, I wasn’t met with hugs or relief. That’s not the way they did things. She did, however, put a large bowl of rice with meat and veggies in front of me and said, “Eat!” 

And I knew people DID care for me.

In Saigon, Vietnam, I attended a French kindergarten named Croix Rouge which literally translates to Red Cross. The teachers, both French and Vietnamese taught in French. But mainly we played. I don’t really remember much of my kindergarten year, I’m assuming because it was not memorable, neither positive or negative.

I do however, recall my first-grade experience in Vietnam as clear as day itself. Children had to take an entrance exam to enter elementary school. And apparently, I was as bright as an old penny. My mother was coerced into hiring a special tutor for me, and not incoincidentally, it turned out to be my first-grade teacher. Private lessons were held at her second-floor little apartment, to supplement her teaching salary.

When I said we played in the French kindergarten, I am saying I did little kid stuff. Perhaps I played tag or with dolls. Maybe I colored? Probably sang some silly songs. I don’t remember it being a stressful time.

That all changed significantly in the first grade. The reality of real school for me was frightening, abasing, and demoralizing. The very first day of class set the horrific tone for the upcoming term.

My illiterate nanny was to take me to my first day of school. All students were required to have identity cards, with their passport-sized photo attached to it. I remember we were running late that morning. And as we dashed out the door, she remembered the ID card. She found the card but the photos were not attached yet. She ran around the house in search for glue, but finally ran into the kitchen, with me following closely behind. She opened the rice pot and scooped out a fingerful of cold rice, which she smeared onto the back of the photo. Tada! Glue! She hammered on my face’s likeness with her fist to ensure a seal.   

My mother sent me to my first day of school, armed with the requisite cahiers notebooks, my yellow, zippered pencil pouch with pencils and quill pens, and my little plastic ink pot, which always leaked black ink over everything. My nanny and I caught a cyclo to the school. There she dropped me off, no hugs, no kisses, no waves, no pictures, just go.

In class, on the VERY first day, we were told to get out a textbook and take turns reading out loud. I DID NOT KNOW HOW TO READ. I guess playing tag and dolls does not automatically instill reading skills into your head at age 5. So when it was my turn, I stood at my desk, and stood. I kept standing silently, disgraced before the whole class. I couldn’t figure out how all the other girls knew how to read!

I also did not know how to write. Sure, I knew how to spell my name but these other girls in the class were writing whole essays in cursive with the quill pen and ink.

There were no recesses or bathroom breaks at my all-girl school. And of course, it was widely rumored that the school was haunted because it had once been a hospital where many people died. To go to the bathroom, you had to raise your hand and beg for permission. You would then tear some sheets of paper out of one of your notebooks and slink quietly out of the class. But my malevolent teacher denied me the opportunity to relieve myself. So I kept sitting at my desk until I quietly wet myself. And I stayed that way the rest of the day.

My nanny met me at the gate of the school that afternoon. She was already sitting on a cyclo. When she found I was wet, she scolded me loudly, so everyone around us could hear. She made me take my underwear off, right there on the footpad of the cyclo. And furiously hiked up my dress so everyone could see my bare bottom. I rode home, sitting on the plastic covers of my notebooks.

That was Day One.

On Tuesdays, we had Vietnamese lessons, since it was a French school. That teacher was a young Vietnamese man. He gave us all kinds of assignments, apparently, of which I was unaware of. One by one, we were called to stand to his right as he sat at the big wooden desk facing the class. The other girls were reciting from memory full chapters of SOMETHING. I didn’t know what the heck was going on. When I was called, I stood next to his desk, with my hands clasped behind my back, silent. And stood and stood until he cussed me out and screamed at me to go back to my seat after he rapped my knuckles with his green plastic ruler. The rulers we had in Vietnam had 4 sides to them, not flat as in America, so the edges really hurt on my knuckles.

That was Day Two.

So Day Three comes around, and guess what? I have my first tutoring session. I walk up the stairs to a well-lit little apartment that even has a balcony. I am told to sit at the small table. I sit and sit and finally my teacher comes out. She is barefoot. She has a silky short-sleeved pajama set on. She is no longer polite or nun-like. She barks at me to start reading from the textbook. I stumble as best as I can through the jumble of unfamiliar letters. I am doing a terrible job. She swoops her hands across the table and pushes all my books and notebooks crashing off the little table. She grabs one of my wrists and says, “How can you even read with hair like that? You can’t even see! No wonder you’re so dumb!” She drags me onto the balcony and magically produces a pair of scissors and goes to town on my bangs. My China Chop hairdo now looks more like Insane Jane’s style but hey, at least I’m no longer so dumb.

She looks at my fingernails and scolds me that they are filthy, like a whore’s nails. She rants about me being nothing but a slut. She takes out some nail clippers and starts whacking off my nails but cuts too close to my nail bed on some fingers so they start to bleed. 

When my mother comes to collect me that evening, the teacher is all sweet and pious. She even drapes her hands casually on my shoulders as she tells my mother how much I have improved. My mother hands her some money and thanks her.

I try not to stare but I can’t help myself. It’s like when my mother would say, don’t be rude, don’t look at that little boy’s harelip. Just because she said it, my eyes would automatically focus on the oddity. I tell myself to be a better person, to be more accepting.

But the reality is, I desperately need the money. Rent is due. Daddy’s will is stuck in probate and that bitch stepmother, with her Louis purses and Jimmy Choos, she had the nerve to kick me out of the house. Yes, I am well aware, it is very uncool for a 36-year-old to still be living in her father’s basement but who knew a degree in pet psychology was useless? And everything was hunky dory until he met HER at the Concrete Convention. Yawn. Yeah, like she knew ANYTHING about cement. Next thing I knew, I had a new stepmother. Loved Daddy but he really needed to use his brain instead of his dick when it came to life changing decisions, as in MY life changing.

So here I am, on a “date” with Roger, Samuel, whoever. He’s gotta be older than Daddy. Sheesh. And swear to God, he has a hump. Trying not to stare, but looks an awfully lot like Igor in Young Frankenstein. His jacket lays taut over his “back” and gaps at the neck. Oy!

Dinner was yummy! So glad it was not In n Out again. Humpman totally indulged me with surf and turf. And buff waiter dude, hey, keep the vino pouring, wouldcha? I’m feeling pretty good right now, got a little buzz going, my tummy is happy, and I can’t really see the hump where I’m sitting.

Oh no, where is Humpman taking me now? But what about dessert?