The First Trip Home
Of course we had phở for breakfast, it was the breakfast food of Ha Noi. There was a good shop at the corner of the alley. I ordered a medium rare bowl for me and a well done one for Adam. The bowls came in about half the size they would in the U.S, without a plate of vegetables. I squeezed a lot of lime and added a dash of chilli sauce into my bowl as usual. Then I spooned a sip of broth and drank. It startled me. Flavors danced on my taste buds, yet the broth looked innocently clear as if there was nothing in it. I had gotten used to phở in Missouri. I had forgotten how it was supposed to taste.
Adam wanted to see the Citadel. I approved, I had biked past the long yellow wall surrounding this palace on my way to school for years but had never been inside. We took the bus to the middle of the city, where it was quiet like the eye of a hurricane. The Citadel was the size of a small park, and about a dozen people were there. Some of them were working in the excavation site. Several ancient bricks that lined a garden walkway in the 11th century were exposed, lying humbly between heaps of dirt and tools. Ha Noi was a thousand year old, counting from the year 1010, when a king decided to move the capital out of the mountains. The war was over, there wasn’t a need to hide in a craggy place anymore. Ha Noi was open, flat, a river ran straight through its land (the name Hà Nội means “inside past the river”). Agriculture would flourish. Trade would prosper. He drafted an edict and the move happened. This citadel, his new home at the time, now had a museum that kept the printing block of the edict.
I suddenly realized I had a vintage hometown, the same way we realize our parents are old and what ignorant kids we have been and what can we do now to make up for it before time runs out. Ha Noi used to have only five districts. In my childhood memory, my uncle lived in the Old Quarter at the center, and we lived in the suburb at the farthest end of the radius. I could keep my eyes shut during the 15-minute ride and guess what streets we were on. Our house was a tower in the middle of an empty field, a new road, and several small lakes. The lakes now disappeared. The road was jammed with traffic all day and night. The empty field became banks, coffee shops, restaurants, and houses of all shapes and sizes. There was no downtown, everywhere was equally busy and modern and important. One of my cousins lived on the west side of town, on a street whose name I didn’t know. It didn’t exist two years ago when I left. Outside its original circumference, Ha Noi had grown several new rings, filling up space with buildings, scooters, and people as it went. Nothing was the same.
I wanted to excavate my memory lane and walk down with Adam. I took him to my regular coffee shop. We found the sign hanging in front of a dark alley that fit one person at a time. At the end, it opened up to a sky well: a yard, a staircase, open sky, walls on all sides. We ordered downstairs (“Two egg blacks and water, please.”) then headed up to the yard and sat down on low, wooden stools. They made coffee with a dripper, letting water slowly extract as much caffeine as possible from the powerful Robusta ground. They whipped a raw egg and poured it on top of the coffee. Adam sipped cautiously, then lifted his eyebrows with approval, “It’s good.”
We hailed a cab and went to my cousin’s house. There was a gathering with all of my cousins on my mother’s side in the event that I came home with my fiancé. This house was in the old center of the city, in an area where estate value had skyrocketed. A piece of land could be covered by the amount of gold it took to buy it. My cousin bought a tiny piece and built a house that went up like a pencil. Each floor was about the size of a large booth. The other cousins brought their significant others and kids. We sent the kids to one floor and tried to fit in another, sitting on the floor in a circle, everyone had to fold one leg up. One or two people ended up in the stairway and had to ask for food every so often.
The food occupied most of the floor. Half a dozen kinds of vegetable filled up several colanders. Assorted meat, tofu, and noodles piled on plates. Two large pots of broth bubbled on portable gas stoves. This was a hotpot: everything would be dipped in broth, brought to a boil, then eaten immediately. Chopsticks skipped around, bowls passed from the stairway in and out. When we waited for the pots to boil again, we talked. Vietnamese filled my ears, its words flow, its tones played like a musical, its jokes natural and instantly hilarious. We ate and laughed. Adam laughed, too, the way I laughed at American pop culture jokes that I didn’t get, “I don’t understand but I want to be a part of this.”
We got home late. The heat of the city puffed into the cab when the door opened. Everyone went straight to their respective bedrooms, exhausted from so much traffic and family catching-up. I gave Adam a couple of hand towels and told him we used these as bath towels, that shower time was in the evening and not in the morning, that he should go take a shower now or my father would find it gross. Being the local host felt strange. Adam had always assumed this role — we met in his country and had been there the whole time. I remembered the first time we went to visit his parents, he had to tell me to put the bath mat on the floor, not on the side of the bathtub, so that it wouldn’t get soaking wet after I showered.
My bedroom was on the top floor. I glided up the stairs without turning on the light, my muscle memory lit up as I went: 12 steps in the first flight, 11 in the second, 12 with a slight turn in the third, 12 in the fourth. The room wasn't changed much. Covering one wall was a bookshelf filled with titles that clearly grew up with their reader, Ten Thousand Questions Kids Ask capped one end and The Old Man And The Sea held the other. A large portrait of my mother was on another wall. She wore her hair long and her eyes were soft. She wasn’t smiling, but a tender look glimmered on her face. My pillow that I had used for twenty something years was on the bed, its case used to be pastel pink. The mattress was pure latex, very firm and bouncy. In place of a fitted sheet was a bamboo mat. I laid down, felt the watery cool smoothness of aged bamboo, my face against the pillow that smelled like me. Maybe I had never left.
The cemetery where my mother rested was on the southern edge of the city. She was buried the traditional way, in her father’s home village, next to his grave. Their tombstones and the thirty or so of other late relatives faced different directions, depending on the signs of the birthdays. Grass had covered the ground, and at some spots was as high as my waist. I walked down the little footpath, Adam followed, carrying assorted plastic bags with flowers, incense sticks, fruits, and joss paper.
We found the rose marble mound in a small jungle of grass. It looked like someone had left a stone twin bed out there, and nature had claimed it. The headboard had her years of birth and death in both Gregorian calendar numbers and sexagenary terms. Her name, carved in larger, capitalized font, meant “beautiful virgin.” There was a small pot in the front for incense sticks, a cake stand for fruits, and two vases for flowers. We arranged the offerings in their places, then I showed Adam how to pray: “You stand on the side or at the footboard, join your palms together, close your eyes, and think about what you want to say to her.”
The incense sticks slowly burned, sending out faint strands of smoke with a warm scent of wood and herbs. We stood quietly. Every now and then, a breeze drifted down the sunny meadow, gently brushing on still grass. My mind went on a float trip.
Mom, would I have argued with you when I hit puberty?
Mom, would you have cried when I got the scholarship?
Mom, would we have skyped everyday?
Mom, I finally found a nice guy.
Mom, you would like him.
Adam went over to my side — the incense sticks had burned off. We gathered the joss paper and set a small fire. It wiped through the paper offerings, collecting their shapes and colors, leaving a trace of gray ash. This was our postal service to the sky, how we kept in touch with loved ones in the next world. When the fire faded away, we put the fruits back into plastic bags and headed out. I wanted to know what Adam had said to my mother.
“I said, ‘I wish you were here.’”
Mom, I wish you were here.
