My Mother

It will be 21 years this Friday since the day my mom passed away. I still remembered hearing the news from my Dad. I went to the family room, sat down and played Lettre a Ma Mere. She always loved these songs. And I cried.

My earliest memory of my mom perhaps around the time that I was four or five years old. I knew that because in the stories about that time, my mom mentioned that my sister was sitting up and I definitely did not recall my sister hanging around with us at the table. She had a work trip to Russia for a month. I didn’t remember much else, but I remembered dreaming about her coming home and hugging and kissing me. I still remember that the blanket that I used that night. It was a brown torn up sheet that no one wanted to use and I rolled it up into a tiny body pillow. When I woke up, I thought to myself, that must have been a dream. And then when I came into the kitchen, she was there preparing breakfast. That breakfast had black bread, butter, and a block of cheese. That was my first time eating butter and cheese, and I have fallen in love with cheese ever since. Currently Gouda has the closest taste to that morning breakfast. I remembered seeing a big toy truck that I was so excited to play with and so disappointed to learn later that someone else asked my mom to help bringing it back to their son. My gift was a puzzle block. I loved it, solved it, and turned the blocks into the walls for my toy army fortress!

When we were still in Hanoi, our days started with mom making breakfast. We did not have the concept of breakfast at that time, but it was more like lunch with a small portion used as breakfast. She packed lunch for my father and herself, then pack the remaining food into an old Soviet thermos, which was wrapped in a big blanket to ensure a hot lunch for my grandfather and I at home. We had two bicycles at home. Hers was a women one, and I could sit comfortably in the back seat. Once my sister arrived, that place was reserved for the baby, and I got to sit on a pillow wrapped around the crossbar of my father’s bike. During those years, both my parents did a lot of extra work to make ends meet. I remembered running around the small apartment playing with the small pieces of yarns and sparkling threads. I remembered hanging out around her and our neighbor, Mrs. Cao, and watching them shelling peanuts and gossiping.

I remembered her teaching me hand writing. There was no table. I sat and wrote on the flat top of a treadle sewing machine, with her sitting next to me and guiding my hand. I still remembered the feeling of pressing my chest to the flat lid, and tried reaching my feet down to press on the treadle for fun and getting scolded. When we moved to Saigon, she didn’t have time to teach me anymore, except for when I had to take the entrance exam to go from elementary to middle school (Yes, back then we had to do that!). I remembered sitting with her and making her frustrated by not being able to understand the concept of a constant (hằng số). She asked me what hằng means, and I kept answering the moon (as in Hằng Nga). And then it hit me: hằng means vĩnh hằng, which means never changing. Thus I understood the idea of a constant. I got a perfect 10 on math in that exam (and a 5 out of 10 in writing). As I got to my middle school and started to deal with more complex subjects, and I didn’t need to ask her to help me studying anymore. She only had to remind me to study, and while doing so, she had always emphasized the importance of mathematics and logical reasoning to me. She proudly told me many times about our great great grandmother who hand calculated all the materials to build their country house. When the house completed, there was only one joist beam left over. She taught me, the way her high school teacher, Mr. Vinh, taught her, how to divide up a scratch paper into four segments to help organize the problem solving process: one for known variables, one for unknown variable, one for the actual attempt, and the final one for hand calculation (there was no calculator back then). When I got older and when she had to scold me, one of her frequently used phrases was try to think logically!. She was not only a good teacher for me. Many of her subordinates, later on, talked to me about how they appreciated her mentorship. She was not a gentle and patient mentor, oh no. She instructed them on what to do, and yelled at them when they made mistake. But then she would work with them and guide them through how to correct the mistake. She never gave the kind of hand-waving instructions (like draw a circle for the head of the owl, then draw the rest of the owl) but a list of steps and explanations. She would explain the accounting reasoning behind these tasks so that they knew why they did the steps that they did.

During my sixth grade, I turned into somewhat of a delinquent. That made my mom very sad. Unlike my dad, with the corporal punishments, she didn’t punish me. When she got too mad, she would swat and scold me. One time though, I did something very bad. I stole some money out of her purse. She found out. I was preparing myself for some heavy scolding and punishment. Those never came. Instead, she sat me down, asked me why I did it, and then she just cried. That’s all it took for me to turn myself around. I never did anything that would make her cry again. I did not turn into a perfect child, of course, but she only had to scold me on very minor stuff!

A few years after we moved to Saigon, Vietnam began to lobby to join the WTO. One of the things that needed to be done was the migration of accounting standard to the modern methods accepted by US and other Western countries. As the chief accountant of Vietnam Television’s first branch in Saigon, my mom was responsible to handling this transition. She went to a night school to study the new accounting methods. English was new to her, so she sat in the front and recorded everything. I remembered her going to the night school after dinner, then got home around 10:00PM, immediately replayed the recording and started to update her notes. She did many other things for the family business as well. We were more well off now, and could afford to bring in relatives from the country sides to help, but she was always there working side by side with them during the weekend. If my father was the visionary that guided the family’s path, then my mom was the one that carried out all the detailed executions.

Life went by quickly and pleasantly until the time that I went to college. I still remembered her staying up and knitting a hat and a pair of gloves for me again. I picked a blue/black yarn and asked her to do a triple threads so that I could stay warm. It turned out to be a poor choice, as they shrunk and became not flexible enough to wear. I lost them around my second or third years between moves. Because international call was a luxury at that time and my mom was not very good at emails, we didn’t talk a lot except for when I went back and visited during the summer of my sophomore year. My mom came to the US to visit me at the end of my junior year, and I suspected that a big reason was to observe my first girlfriend at that time! I learned that she got diagnosed with breast cancer a few months after she got back from the US, but she and my father told me that she was following a well proven homeopathic treatment plan and that the mass seemed to be shrinking. Both my parents visited me for my Master’s graduation ceremony. My father had to go back early on a business trip, but she stayed for a month, helping me buying and settling in the first house after I got married. A week after going back to Vietnam, she was hospitalized. My father asked me to write her emails everyday, and that he would print them out for her to read. I wrote a lot for the first few days but then the stories ran out, and my later letters were short and mainly about wishing her well. She passed away a week later. Not writing her more will always remain my biggest regret.

After her funeral, I went back to the US to continue my PhD study. One day, as I was cleaning up my mailbox, I came upon the emails that she wrote to my father during her last time here with me. In front of us, they always call each other father and mother, but in her email, she used the endearing terms for him. She was reminding him to take his medicine and staying warm, and that she loved him and we all missed him. I have always considered my father a more romantic type, and my mom a more logical person in the family. I guess I was wrong. I miss her, so very much.

When I close my eyes, I can still see her sitting at our old house with her close friend, Auntie Thuy, to gossip about everyone, including my father. It was so funny, hearing her complain about how fussy my father was. I can still see myself sitting behind her on the motorcycle as she drove me to my English teacher’s house. I can still hear her asking me, Linh, play a song for me. And I will always remember her notes in the handbook that she gave me before I left for college: learn to always see the goodness in everyone.