the start of something new

When was the last time you saw your mother?

I just learned very recently that my mother never got to say good bye to her mother. My grandmother. My ba ngoai. 

When she was about 26, my mom’s oldest sister Quyen started sneaking all her siblings onto boats. Pair by pair. Week by week. From camp to camp. My mother’s voyage was accompanied by her little nephew Eric, of 11 years old. Her father and mother were against all of this because they had once fled from China before, so they understood the dangers and grief of such life-threatening flights. They even lost a few babies (who would’ve been my aunt and uncle) along the way. Thus, my mother and her siblings all started to escape one by one without saying good bye to their mother and father. My grandparents. 

I was shocked to learn this. I always knew that my mother fled vietnam because it was too  hard for her to live there post war and with the viet cong and what not. But i never knew she escaped from her parents. 

Then, today we were talking about her mother. When I was just a baby, about 1 year old, my grandmother started to get sick. At this point, my mom was 34 years old living in San Jose with my father. About half of her sibling were scattered in the east coast and in LA. So 3 of her siblings had to go to the Vietnamese embassy to plead to go back to vietnam, due to family emergency. My mother wanted so badly to go back to VN to see her dying mother, for one last time. However, my dad worked all the time and I was a newborn. My mother had no friends or family in the area… she had no choice. It killed both of them to be stuck in America while her mother’s body was leaving this earth. 

A month later, my grandma died and all of the sibling in America didn’t have the resources to go home to her funeral in vn. During this time period, it was hard to make international calls. It was hard to contact family, send pictures, send money, etc…etc… 

It’s crazy when you hear a story over and over again…and after year and years you realize there were parts that weren’t told. This puts such a new perspective into my life. 

Was life so bad, she was willing not only to leave her country, but her parents as well? 

My throat closed up as I listened to this expansion of this story and I couldn’t bring myself to ask her: When was the last time you saw your mother?