Rust

During last Sunday's meeting in the park, Anh Hung had me take pictures of each and every family that attended, so when I met them later on I could recognize where they came from and who they were. Yesterday I had the opportunity to make a house call with my internship at Smiling Group. I visited the home of an older woman and her eleven-year-old granddaughter, Thanh Thy.

They live in a small house in the back of a church and school, pretty standard compared to the homes I've been in recently. The pale blue paint on the walls was peeling with rust. The other women of house were sleeping on the floor and retreated to the small loft upstairs as I came in. Thanh Thy's grandmother gathered two glasses of water and we sat together on the floor. Her 60-year-old grandmother calls me Anh Loc out of respect for Anh Hung (who she calls Thay), and Thanh Thy calls me by Chu Loc - I'll never get used to that.

Thanh Thy is only eleven, but she's so small I could've sworn she was six. She was resting from school that day because she was tired and didn't have the energy to study anymore. Her grandmother brought me water and we sat on the floor talking while she showed me pictures of her daughter and son-in-law, Thanh Thy's parents who passed away eight years ago from a combination of tuberculosis and HIV. Her mother was a tailor and her father was a driver. She also lost her newborn brother to tuberculosis during that period; she was only three at the time. I flipped through the family album, a handful of postcard sized pictures that I realized were Thanh Thy's only connection to her parents besides her grandmother. Thanh Thy is not yet old enough to understand that she also has HIV, she just knows that she has to take a lot of large orange pills three times a day.

Her grandmother was extremely welcoming and trusting of me. She told me all about her family, leaving each question thoroughly unanswered as I wrote gradually everything down. Looking through the album, I saw a picture of Thanh Thy's brother's funeral, a picture that both moved and disturbed me by the resolve at which her grandmother spoke about it. The picture was of Thanh Thy's mother, being held back and sobbing as the small red casket bearing a white cross was set down next to her son's body. The conversation was weighted by what they had all gone through as a family and that Thanh Thy's grandmother managed to raise her with the help of her uncles.

I sat and talked with them for about an hour. Her grandmother asked me questions about my life in the states. She asked me about my career plans and why I came to Vietnam, who my parents were and how we ended up in California. I got to learn more about the Vietnamese family structure as well, and I realize that my family is an anomaly in itself, especially by Vietnamese standards.

"You live so far away from your family. Don't you get sad?"
"Not really, I'm used to it. I can take care of myself. I know how to cook and clean."
"Oh, that's right, in America young people move out of the house when you are eighteen. Here, everybody lives together until someone gets married. Families here are much closer..."

I discovered that Thanh Thy has beautiful handwriting. Her grandmother proudly showed me the notebooks she brought home from school and we laughed because I couldn't understand most of the vocabulary words and after glancing at my notebook, they noticed that my handwriting is barely legible.

"Do you like to draw?"
"Yes...," she said, with a shy smile.
"What do you like to draw? Cats, dogs, elephants..."
"Elephants!"
"Do you want to draw one for me?"
"I can't! It's too hard!"

So I drew her an elephant standing next to some coconut trees and a happy little stick figure. She giggled and somewhere inside of me, a small child with a rough childhood came out of hiding. This is healing.

This Thursday, July 5th, should have been my father's 60th birthday.