After my mom tells me Ngoại is dying from cancer, I swim into the Atlantic and meet a coral reef.
I’m in a country on a coast, not unlike the one where Ngoại was born—where she lived, and loved, and raised a family through 7.5 million tons of bombs. I’m in an ocean, not unlike the one she boarded a boat in, with her eight children, in the dead of night. It’s not the dead of night here—it’s a perfect evening.
My friends and I are wading in the warm salt water, laughing at the way each other swims, planning our next trip together, reminiscing on the past several perfect days. Only the day before, we’d patched up a house that had been damaged by a hurricane together, with a mixture of clay, sand, water, and coconut husk. I try to imagine a mixture, just as simple, that could be applied to Ngoại’s cancer.
When I swim on my back to the coral reef—eyes facing a clear blue sky, my friends watching out for my head so I don’t hit it on the coral—and I reach it, and feel it near me, and see the green mossy grain of its surface up close, I think of time. Like Ngoại, this reef only has so much of it left. I know that climate change, pollution, and tourism—the results of persisting capitalism and colonialism—will kill it. It’ll be poisoned, the way that bad blood cells will circulate through Ngoại’s body and destroy her spleen, her stomach, her bones, her entire body.
The environment can be tricky here in paradise. You think nothing’s dead, but the coral is. You can’t see death the way you can in New England, where I’ll return soon to be greeted by the peak of fall, where I’ll fall ill and have to watch a beautiful death from my window. Election day will arrive, and I’ll call my mom to hear her cry that Ngoại is back in the hospital and she’s going to fly back and stay with her for a couple months after Ngoại is discharged. I’ll walk in the warm dark to the polls and wonder and rage at the motions that brought us here, at the reality that I vote to maintain the so-called democracy of the very empire that tore Ngoại’s nation apart, then held out a hand to her, still stained with the blood of her countrymen—and I swear I’ll live and die un-American, and I pray the same for Ngoại. Then winter will come, and Christmas is Ngoại’s birthday, so I’ll return with my cat and my partner—who became a fast favorite of hers the first time they met—to California. There the air is heavy, and the grass is dry, and the ocean slams its ragged head against cliffs, and forty-five years ago a family of Vietnamese refugees made a home there, and six years ago I fled from there—and now I’ll have to watch her landscape burn up and grow barren, and Ngoại shrivel up and blow away, the way everything in California does.
What’s it like to be killed on a land, in a language, by a disease, not your own? In Vietnamese, “cancer” is “ung thư,” which translates literally to “spoiled letters.” That’s what the name of her cancer, chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, looked like to me when I first read it—words that were corrupted, and corroded, and rotting. I wonder desperately: Does Ngoại have regrets? Does she miss her mom or sisters right now? Or her grandchildren, including me, living on the other side of the country from her? Does she have more to gossip or complain about? Does she have lies to confess and secrets to tell? Does she have apologies to make? Does she wish she could die in Vietnam, have her ashes scattered there? Is she afraid, angry, relieved? I can’t ask. The letters are spoiled between us.
I’m thinking of that period of time when I was in middle school and Ngoại lived with us for a short while, and because both my parents were working, our neighbor had to pick me up from school every day. I’d come home to only Ngoại—and the smell of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice—in the kitchen, happy to see me and eager to feed me after having just cooked me an after-school meal. She’d stand there—with her black-dyed perm, tattooed eyebrows in perfect arches, red-painted lips, and always wearing a pastel cardigan and silky pants—smiling and speaking words I couldn’t understand. I, awkward and embarrassed, not used to lacking a translator between us and with nothing of my own to say or offer her in return, would simply grin back and say, “Cảm ơn, Ngoại,” then eat her food, always perfect, while I did my homework. And it’d be her and me in that house, quiet and alone, until my parents came home.
It killed me to not be able to talk to her. I didn’t have enough words in Vietnamese to express myself. What I had was “thưa,” “ẳm,” “cảm ơn,” “phá quá,” “chúc mừng năm mới,” and “Ngoại”—the basic vocabulary of a toddler who only needed greetings, niceties, how to ask to be picked up, and to know when they were misbehaving. How many sentences could I possibly make with those? I’ve had so many perfect words, and can give none of them to her. So what’s the point of them?
When I went to sleep with Ngoại down the hall from me, a necklace of red coral beads hung from my bed post, placed there by my mom to bring me luck and keep me safe. It’s said that red coral can get rid of nightmares, end wars. But I’ve always had nightmares, and wars keep happening. Red coral is also supposed to help your blood—if I’d known this, perhaps I’d have crept from my bed, out my door, and down the hallway to my dad’s office, and finding Ngoại sleeping peacefully and safely there on the futon, slipped it under her pillow.
Maybe now, by being near this coral reef, I can absorb its essence and bring it back to California and give life back to Ngoại, give her back good blood, make months into years and years into decades. She’d be eternal, and I’d never have to imagine life without her, and everything would be perfect. This first Christmas that my partner will spend with her won’t have to be the last. Family get-togethers wouldn’t have to be spent with her ghost. America wouldn’t have killed her. And I’ll have time to learn enough Vietnamese to translate this for her, time enough to think of what I’d say to her—because without the language to do it, I never even thought that hard about it.
Ngoại has always been more than a grandmother to me. She’s been our matriarch, the boat that brought us here, the anchor to where we come from, the barrier against life’s tides, the lighthouse to find home by, the reef we made a home in. Sometimes it was easy to forget she was a human—not a deity, not a god. Just a person. And she could get sick. I’ve known before what it’s like to lose family. But how can I lose this? What am I without her here? Who do we become without our history? What’s left of the earth when the reefs die?
I once went to a talk by Ken Liu, and he spoke of history beyond Western standards, as something different than just a thing that must remain. History can die, and disassemble, and decompose, and regrow, and rebuild, and rebecome. History exists simply because it once was—even without proof, without memory, without ruins. Ngoại will be gone, and our family will be gone, and Vietnam will be gone, and language and words will be gone, and the reefs will be gone, and it’s enough that at one time, they were here, and they were perfect.
I carry Ngoại’s family name as my middle name, and I imagine that even after she dies, I’ll hold her somewhere safe, nestled in my soul. I’ll find that coral necklace again, and wear it all my days, and protect her blood with my own. I’ll take her to a coral reef, in Vietnam, and it’ll be alive. She’ll lean her body against my sternum, put her feet up on my ribs, warm her hands against my blood vessels like a fire. She’ll rest her head on my heart like a pillow, and hear in its beats the rhythm of words I didn’t know I had to tell her.
I want to spend the entire night by the reef’s side, but as the sky drops, I swim back to shallower water. I have a flight back home tomorrow, and there are no reefs there, but they’re still somewhere. I’ll see them again another day, I swear. There’s still time. There’s still Ngoại.
