Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao (©1997 by Lan Cao). The story is set in the late 1970s in Virginia, where the narrator and her mother have moved from Vietnam after he fall of Saigon.

I discovered soon after my arrival in Virginia that everything, even the simple business of shopping the American way, unsettled my mother’s nerves. From the outside, it had been an ordinary building that held no promises or threats. But inside, the A & P brimmed with unexpected abundance. Metal stands overflowed with giant oranges and meticulously arranged grapefruits. Columns of canned vegetables and fruits stood among multiple shelves as people well rehearsed to the demands of modern shopping meandered though florescent aisles. I remembered the sharp chilled air against may face, the way the hydraulic door made a sucking sound as it closed behind.

My mother did not appreciate the exacting orderliness of the A & P. She could not five in to the precision of previously weighed and packaged food, the bloodlessness of beef slabs in translucent wrappers, the absence of carcasses and pigs’ heads. When we were in Saigon, there were only outdoor markets. “Sky markets,” they were called, vast, prosperous expanses in the middle of the city where barrels of live crabs and yellow craps and booths of ducks and geese would be stacked side by side with cardboard stands of expensive silk fabric. It was always noisy there—a voluptuous of animal and human sounds. The sharp acrid smell of gutters choked by the monsoon rain. The odor of horses, partially camouflaged by the scent of guavas and bananas.

My mother knew the vendors and the shoppers byname and would take me from stall to stall to expose me to her skills. They were all addicted to each other’s oddities. My mother would feign indifference and they would inevitably call out to her. She would heed their all and they would immediately retreat into sudden apathy. They knew my mother’s slick bargaining skills, and she, in turn, knew how to navigate with grace though their extravagant prices and rehearsed huffiness. Theirs had been a mating dance, a match of wills.

Every morning, we drifted from vendor to vendor. Tables full of shampoo and toothpaste were pocketed among vegetable stands one day and jars of herbs the nest. The market was randomly organized, and only the might and experienced like my mother could navigate its patternless paths.

But with a sense of neither drama nor calamity, my mother’s ability to navigate and decipher simply became undone in our new life. She preferred the improvisation of haggling to the conventional certainty of discount coupons, the primordial messiness and fishmongers' stink of the open-air market to the aroma-free order of individually wrapped fillets.

Now, a mere three and a half years or so after her last call to the sky market, the dreadful truth was simply this: we were going through life in reverse, and I was the one who would help my mother through the hard scrutiny of ordinary suburban life. I would have to forgo the luxury of adolescent experiments and temper tantrums, so that I could scoop my mother out of harm’s way and give her sanctuary. Now, when we stepped into the exterior world, I was the one who told my mother what was acceptable or unacceptable behavior.

All children of immigrant parents have experienced these moments. When it first occurs, when the parent first reveals the behavior of a child, is a defining moment. Of course all children eventually watch their parents’ astonishing return to the vulnerability of childhood, but for us the process begins much earlier than expected.

“We don’t have to pay the moment we decide to buy the pork. We can put as much as we want in the cart and pay only once, at the checkout counter.” It took a few moments’ hesitation for my mother to succumb to the peculiarity of my explanation.

“I can take you in this aisle,” a store clerk offered as she unlocked a new register to accommodate the long line of customers. She gestured us to “come over here” with an upturned index finger, a disdainful hook we Vietnamese use to summon dogs. My mother did not understand the ambiguity of American hand gestures. In Vietnam, we said “Come here” to humans differently, with our palm up and all four fingers waved in unison—the way people over here waved goodbye.

“Even the store clerks look down on us,” my mother grumbled. This was a truth I was only beginning to realize: it was not the enormous or momentous event, but the gradual suggestion of irrevocable and protracted change that threw us off balance and made us know in no uncertain terms that we would not be returning to the familiarity of our former lives.