A Tribute to My Mom

I lost my mother recently to COVID-19. I’ve been trying to start this story and knew no better way than to start with the ugly truth. I lost my mom to something preventable, something that simple masks and social distancing could have taken care of. What is worse is that she actually qualified for the new vaccine a week after her infection. I’ve been in a haze, and at a loss…literally. Around the time of her death, I read somewhere that the number of coronavirus related deaths had reached 500,000 people and this statistic by itself is powerful but all it takes is the plus one to be your mom and then it is unbearable.

In grieving and processing her death I find myself thinking quite a bit about the life my mom led and wanting very desperately to tell our story. Healing is a topsy turvy roller coaster that’s brought me here to these pages. For all intents and purposes my mom did not have an easy life. To be honest, I’m not even sure I know the whole truth of her life as my mom didn’t really talk about the past and regrettably I didn’t ask. I’ve always felt, though, that some things were just for her and she would share in her own time, if ever. What I do know is what I have lived through with her. Those memories are etched in my mind, playing like a movie I have seen many times so I just fast forward through the sad parts and replay all the happy ones.

The story of my mom’s life is a hazy one, and I’m still not sure I have the details of her childhood correct. My mom was born June 20, 1949 but I remember her saying at different points of my life, “I don’t even remember my actual birthday. I just picked a ball park date for U.S immigration.”

I know that my mom was born in Ha Noi, a city in the Northern parts of Vietnam, to my grandfather who was a well-regarded tailor able to keep his family living a very comfortable life, and my grandmother a homemaker my mom loved more than anything. She had a happy childhood filled with a large family of siblings and close friends that she kept in touch with until her death.

My mother met my father in her 20’s through her family and shortly after they began a relationship, he became a prisoner during the Vietnam War. She would make the long journey to visit him often, bringing him food and treats for years until he was freed and they were married… seven years later. My mom had an enduring spirit and you could say resilience was her super power. Shortly after they got married, my mother gave birth to a son and then three years later me. She was 40 by the time I was born but having children was important to her despite the risks of being an older birther. My grandparents had died by then, and I don’t ever think my mom ever got over the loss of her own mom as she adjusted to life with her own family. I spent the first five years of my life in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City as it is called now and remember very happy times growing up there.

By this time, my father had already spent nearly 10 years as a POW from the Vietnam War before being released and this qualified him and our family to relocate to the United States in a program called Humanitarian Operation (what Vietnamese people know as H-O). My parents discussed the realities of what our future lives in Vietnam would be like. My father had fought the Communists in the war and they won so there were consequences to being their enemy. He would be barred from jobs, and his children blacklisted from universities and opportunities. The Communist network and their ability to track and punish people they viewed as threats made it difficult for my family to truly build our future in the country that was our home. People who were freed from the prisons like my father was were mysteriously taken back never to return. So in 1995, my mother made her first major sacrifice for her family by making the decision to leave all the comforts of her homeland, her family, and her life to fly into Beaumont, Texas where a family member was our immigration sponsor. Yes, Beaumont, Texas. My first vivd memory of this journey was her looking out into the Texan landscape and lights with a homesickness that I could sense even at the age of six. Texas was too foreign so after three months of being there my parents quickly relocated all of us to Southern California where there was the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam. If they could not be home at least they can have some semblance of it.

The first years in America were tough. We started living in my uncle’s house for a few months before renting out a two bedroom apartment in a small city called Stanton in Orange County. We quickly downgraded to a one bedroom because we didn’t have very much money but I remembered the safety of sharing a bed with my mom and looking across to see my dad and brother. Of course that couldn’t last long so we applied to Section 8 Housing and eventually moved to a different apartment with assistance. The first few years we had food stamps until the judgement at grocery stores got to my mom. People aren’t nice to you sometimes when they think you’re just another immigrant burdening society. My mom had a lot of pride and she foregoed the food stamps when she saw how she was being treated. For work, my mom who was a well-regarded accountant in a major company in Vietnam, ended up at a modern day sweatshop cutting thread off of clothes for 10 cents apiece. At the age of six I remember my brother and I coming with her as she couldn’t afford a baby-sitter and eventually helping her, my little hands working the thread and weirdly shaped scissors. These were in my eyes really happy times. I was always with my mom and I normally wanted to follow her everywhere.

We would take the bus our first couple of years here before she learned to drive and the story that is most seared in my mind during this time is the one night my mother and I left her work late. We missed our usual bus and ended up miles away in front of Disneyland waiting for the one that would lead us home. I remember having my head in her lap (six year olds get tired quickly!) hearing and seeing the fireworks that night thinking “how cool!” Two months before her death, my mom told me that she remembered that bus stop being in front of a Marie Callender’s and sitting and wondering if one day we could ever afford to eat there. We got home at 2 am that morning and she was back on the bus at 6 am the next day for work. We never did in our lives go to Marie Callender’s together. Now there will be no chance to even do that.

All my mom wanted was for me to do well in school because this was the key that would unlock my life to a better future. She worked hard everyday, and most of my childhood was spent watching her go to work and waiting for her to come back, never really making enough money. She always said to me “If you don’t want to have a life like mine go to school and study hard.” I never doubted her so I was a diligent student. At the age of 16 I got my first part-time job and a series of jobs after that led me to an opportunity at AT&T. The move to Silicon Valley came after and my life took on a different course that seemed to just get better with each year I was there. My move was hard on my mom. I left her in Orange County and I’m not sure it ever sat well with her. Where my mom came from, Vietnamese girls should stay close to home. But I knew that in order to make something of myself, I had to leave Orange County and leave her. The decision I made I feel was right for my career, but the ten years I spent living in Northern California while she was in Southern California now seems like much too high a price to pay for success.

This is not to say my career hasn’t been a struggle full of its own ups and downs. I feel like I’ve failed sometimes more than I’ve been successful. I’ve joined many companies where I didn’t fit in and like my mom did with food stamps, gave them up when it felt like I was standing there with my hands out, asking for help and feeling unimportant. What did a kid from the poor side of Orange County raised on welfare have in common with the technology wunderkinds who moved through the VC firms with ease and had millions of dollars thrown at them just because they were them? I remember going to an expensive executive dinner at one company in San Francisco when the CEO, who came from an extremely wealthy family, ordered eight items from the menu just to “try them out.” The items didn’t arrive on time and he left before it was all brought out. I packed all the meals in to-go boxes, gave half of them to a homeless man by the Bart station and kept the other half for myself. My mother would’ve seen that as incredibly wasteful on this CEO’s part and I would’ve said, “Mom, this is definitely not Marie Callender’s territory we are in but don’t worry, I didn’t waste it.” It is in these moments that I felt a low sense of belonging and I knew that they also sensed that I wasn’t like them. Not one leader back then ever asked me where I came from or who I was. I would have told them I was my mother’s daughter. I sometimes feel like I shoved my way to a few seats accidentally (sometimes to people’s dismay) and got to sit at the table only to explain my moxie by saying, “Hey, I got it from my mom.” The persistence has worked even in its failures and I found some success as a People leader. Now, all I think about is that everything I ever thought I earned myself, has really been bolstered by my mom and what she’s given up for me.

The plan was clear to me when I started making some money. I was going to give it all back to her. I started first by buying her a car, nothing fancy, a used Camry she loved that in my grief I wish was new, and when I learned her and my dad both got sick (yes dad too though he’s mostly healed), I quickly rushed to Orange County to buy them a big comfortable house they could live in for the rest of their days... with me. The biggest regret that I believe will haunt me forever is that I was too late. My mom died before the renovation was complete and the house now feels haunted with my sadness. I’m worried to keep fixing it because I feel her absence in the new place and I don’t want it to be a home my grief built.

But her death was horrible. There is no other way to put it. My mom spent two months in the ICU fighting hard. When she first arrived at the hospital, four weeks into the appearance of symptoms they found that she had pneumonia. She was incorrectly told by her doctor that unless she had trouble breathing she should just stay home. We found out later that it was bad advice. Given her underlying conditions, she should have gone to the hospital the minute she felt any symptoms. This is one of many regrets I tuck away in the corner of my mind, to be opened or not again depending on where the sadness takes me. She was immediately put on a bipap, and her oxygen fluctuated down to as low as 50 (when anything below 95 is considered dangerous). She got through the pneumonia and her breathing improved so that she could move to a nasal breathing tube. Then they found that she was anemic and losing a lot of blood, so they conducted a blood transfusion for her. She healed from that too. I thought she was going to go home until X-rays showed a second pneumonia, and this one put her in a coma from which she would never wake up. The virus did everything it could to kill her and it had to try pretty damn hard. My mom refused intubation in the case we had to go there and she spent two months on a bipap when most people stay on only for a couple of weeks. The doctors couldn’t believe the fight she had in her.

Her last day alive, I was able to receive special permission to see her. She was already comatose by then and I held her hand and told her “I really, really want you to stay, but I also understand if you are tired and want to go. But just know that I will miss you and I love you.” And that night she went. I was so very sad but happy the pain for her was over. I also wish I’d never given her the option to leave. Maybe I wasn’t all that understanding. I wanted my mom.

At the same time all this was happening, I was promoted to VP of People at my company, my first ever executive role working for the first time at a company where I truly felt like the people saw me. This should have been one of the best moments of my life but it was married to the worst part. I told my mom the news via FaceTime in our usual sessions where I would tell her about my day and she would listen. She couldn’t speak because of the bipap but she nodded her approval and used what little energy she had to text me “Congratulations.” Texting and Facetiming would’ve dipped her oxygen to a very dangerous 80 but she never missed a call. I knew something was wrong the day she missed my FaceTime request and I found it was the first day she slipped into her coma.

I always compared my life with my mom’s and felt like I was the lucky one while she suffered so much. My life was charmed and hers wasn’t. She spent so many years working hard and I reaped all the benefits knowing that I would never be able to repay her. She loved my brother and I so much she gave every last breath even when her lungs were being ravaged by a disease that wouldn’t let you breathe. My mom’s story has been entirely that — pushing through for us.

And why did I decide to tell this story? I’ve always shied away from exposing the most personal parts of my life. Would people really see you as a VP if they knew that once upon a time you were a kid living on food stamps and housing? I used to be ashamed of where I came from and tried to hide that aspect of myself, forcing myself to relate to people who had much more privileged upbringings than I did. But the truth is that I feel a very strong urge to honor my mother this way.

I know if she was alive she would read this, roll her eyes, and in her own way ask me, “Why are you sharing this? Who’s going to care about a mother doing what she’s supposed to anyway?” But she’s extraordinary to me and I wanted the people who knew her to remember her this way, and the people who didn’t to know someone wonderful existed. I also know this is a selfish endeavor on my part because in my hole of despair, I found that writing this was like tossing myself a flimsy rope with which to help myself climb out. No amount of writing or editing could ever convey who she really was to me.

She spent hours working, her hands gnarled so that her son could be a doctor and her daughter a tech executive and so that we could have beautiful lives. But everything is less beautiful now that she’s gone. I will never be able to repay her for that, and I hope in my life I can live up to that sacrifice.

My grief comes in waves but there are no breaks. My mom spent two months struggling to breathe and in her absence I find myself drowning in the same ocean, all the while looking for her. My days now are filled with memories of the life we lived together and trying very hard to heal. I’m aware that there is a piece of me missing that only she can complete. I binge watch Netflix, avoiding things that are too sad but finding myself unable to laugh at things that are funny. I think silly thoughts like if I live to 70, I would have been motherless longer than I had a mother. I scroll through texts she used to send me when I’m feeling masochistic. I regret all the ways I’ve been mean to her. I scroll through my own pictures on social media and categorize things in terms of “Time before Mom died” and “Time after Mom died.” I replay all the ways I could’ve prevented this from happening. Maybe a time machine will fix it. Maybe it’s okay she won’t be at my wedding but I know this will never be okay. The worst part is wanting to ask her something…anything to hear her voice again but there’s no way to contact her. I find myself hoping the afterlife exists just so I know she’s doing okay. I still think she’s going to call me. I read books about grief as if they could guide me step by step to happiness. I fumble through funeral arrangements and Buddhist rituals I’m not familiar with and should’ve asked my mom about when I had the chance. The best part of my day is the five seconds in the morning right after I wake up where I don’t realize what my new reality is.

But mostly, I just miss her terribly. And while they say time heals all wounds, some will always be just a little gaping.