Bà Nội

This essay was first written on February 6th, 2021 and posted to Facebook. It has been slightly edited and expanded.

My bà nội (paternal grandmother) was a notoriously private person, so in keeping with that, I haven’t spoken to many people about her quiet passing on Monday. Based on the stories that she shared with me about her life in Vietnam, I suspect she was a more outgoing person in another time and place. By the time I was born, she had survived the two mass migrations of modern Vietnamese history — a trek from North to South Vietnam in 1954, following the Geneva Agreement that split the country down the middle, and a subsequent journey as a Vietnam War refugee in 1975 — which likely played a role in her new persona, largely a homebody who lived vicariously through her son and her grandchildren. As my last living grandparent, her passing was important for its own sake, but also in terms of what it represented, the unspooling of one last, tangible thread linking me to a time before my parents. Her legacy — indeed, the legacy left my all my grandparents — was a historical vestige that I carry with me in embodied echoes: the pleasure of certain tastes, resonances with certain songs, affinities with certain ways of speaking, etc.

Whenever I was home, my grandparents’ reactions to the songs I played for them on đàn bầu (a single-string traditional instrument) always added personal context to the music I was studying. Whenever I played a song from the “chèo” northern Vietnamese theatre, bà nội would reminisce in vivid detail about going to see the traveling theatre troupes as a child. Due to the 1954 migration, neither of my parents had ever experienced a chèo performance and thus they never developed a taste for it. Consequently, these little “acts of transfer” were just between the two of us.

It wasn’t just music that elicited these memories. I would bring home sushi from the local Japanese restaurant and, after making her customary joke about “crocodile sushi” — I suspect it had something to do with the similarity between the words “cá sống” (raw fish) and “cá sấu” (crocodile) — she would describe both the well-behaved Japanese soldiers who had meals at her house and the ones who had razed farms and murdered innocents during Japan’s brief World War II occupation of Vietnam, often all in the same breath. She saw the complexities of politics, history, and social reality not as a scholar does but with the unique insights of someone who experienced them: there was good and there was evil, but people didn’t necessarily align with the categories given to us by powerful people. Thus, French colonialism too had its ups and downs, and though she had choice words for North Vietnamese communists, she also reserved some for ambitious South Vietnamese politicians. As with anyone who had experienced so much, she was living history.

Bà nội was both uneducated and astute, coarse and kind. She spoke in an acerbic tone that my mom always worried would rub off on us, her grandchildren, but her coarse language, like a loud and indiscriminate use of the terms of address “tao” and “mày” (first- and second-person pronouns considered rude by some), was tempered by nights she sat fanning her grandchildren to sleep or, when we got older and came home less often, the crisp $100 bill she would give us to buy her a shirt while insisting we keep the change. Eventually, even this pretense disappeared, because then she would just hand us a Benjamin and playfully whisper, “don’t tell your dad.” Bà was not a saint, and she was sometimes hard to get along with, but to me, her love and pride was always palpable.

I last spoke to Bà a few weeks ago on webcam. She was already not saying too much, so I had my đàn kìm (a traditional two-string “moon-shaped” lute) ready to play “Vọng Cổ” for her. Indeed, her affinity for this song, a standard of the southern Vietnamese “cải lương” opera repertoire, traced yet another aspect of her story. After settling in South Vietnam, my paternal grandparents had fully embraced the culture of the region, and thus despite their thick North Vietnamese accents, their favorite musical past-time was listening to southern opera. As I played, she brightened and seemed to be herself for the briefest of moments. She laughed and said to me, “hey, that’s pretty okay!”, which for grandma was the highest possible compliment. I had planned to ask her about those old days in northern Vietnam this week, to see if reminiscing might rouse her spirits, but as is so often the case for well-laid plans, she left before I got the chance. That’s okay though, because what she has given me already fills a lifetime of memories.

Bà Nội, though the pandemic has kept me from coming home, we’ve made you this meal to enjoy with ông. “Mướp đắng xào trứng” (bitter melon and eggs), because you always said “bitterness is medicine” (đắng là thuốc), a lesson which I always suspected was as much about life as it was culinary advice. A simple “canh” (soup), because even if it was just boiled vegetables and fish sauce, you always wanted something watery to wash down the rice. A bottle of Coca-Cola, which we shared every time I came home — each time you insisted that I get some for myself, I know you secretly wanted a glass too. And finally, a vegetarian stir-fry cooked by your grand-daughter-in-law, who you called “Pà zu” (Parul, as filtered through the thickest of Northern Vietnamese accents) from the first day she came home to meet you and who you always greeted with a smile despite the language barrier.

Thank you for all the love and memories.

“Cái thằng” (that boy) Vũ, Pà zu, & Anvi