Mother’s Voice
We moved to Sài Gòn in The Year of The Snake 1965. I was two years old.
In the beginning we lived in a rented house. Then my parents bought a wooden two-storey house which had a well in the front yard. My mother wanted to buy this one because it stood on the main road. Before we made it a home, my parents hired a carpenter and a painter to work on it. They changed the small front door to a large door that opened full length across the front, with a board hanging above it. Whist the painter painted and the carpenter made a new door, my parents went shopping, buying a table, a desk, some chairs, a glass cabinet and two Singer sewing machines.
On the left side of the long and large board the painter painted a picture of a young woman holding a little girl’s hand in one hand, and in the other, a boy’s hand. The woman was in áo dài, a long traditional dress; the little girl wore a long skirt and the boy a pair of shorts and a light-coloured shirt. The girl carried some flowers and the boy carried a balloon. In the centre, across the board, the painter painted two big words: Mỹ Nữ, Pretty Women. Along the edge above, in small letters was: Tiệm May Phụ Nữ và Trẻ Em, Making Clothes for Women and Children. Underneath was our home’s address, 205 Lê Vǎn Dụyêt, Sài Gòn.
Our address would change many times over the years as our street name was changed many times to reflect the political movements of the time. Our home number was also changed many times because whenever a stream of villagers rushed to Sài Gòn as their villages were bombed, some parts of the park or some strips of an empty lot would be occupied by the refugees.
From the opening day, our front door was open six days a week, from Monday to Saturday, from dawn until curfew time, except for siesta time, when Mama closed for about two hours. My mother was a Buddhist, but most people in our district were Catholics. She closed her shop on Sundays, but she rarely took rest and was often working behind the closed door. When the door was open, she sat either behind her long table cutting or stitching, or behind her sewing machine, sewing or instructing her assistants, or behind her desk talking with her customers or neighbours.
While making clothes, Mama often sang. Sometimes she sang folk songs, sometimes verses from the Vietnamese Classics, and sometimes verses from the Opera Show. Most of her favourite songs were very sad. I did not know why but those sad melodies had moved me since I was a child. Perhaps, because I loved to hear my mother’s voice. When she told a story, the tone of her voice changed with the stories and I always felt as if she were singing the play. She had a beautiful voice, indeed. Her accent was a mixture of Quảng Trị and the Royal City Huế; when she recounted stories, read poetry or sang, her tones were peaceful, yet they often brought tears of nostalgia and a yearning for peace to her listeners.
Whilst Mama was working, I played in the front yard sometimes and sometimes I sat beside her. When I was little, Mama said some years later, I often could not sit still. One day Papa brought me a table, a chair, a pencil and some coloured papers and Mama brought me scissors and made a little space for me within her sight. Then every day as I watched her cutting material to make clothes, I cut paper dresses. I would pick up my scissors with my left hand and a piece of paper in my right hand and cut them into all sort of shapes and sizes. This was the beginning of my in-house learning; at home my parents never forced us to conform to any strict order but at school I would be forced to write with my right hand. To this day I cannot hold a pen properly, but I can cut very well.
About two hundred metres from our home, towards the city, was Thánh Tâm Primary school. As I sat on the threshold of our home, I saw hundreds of children walking past, many times a day, attending morning or afternoon classes. The younger group started late and finished earlier; in Việt Nam students only go to school for some four to five hours a day.
In the 1960s our street was like a country road. Every day horse-carts carried fresh flowers, herbs and vegetables to the market near our home. The fragrance of fresh herbs and flowers floated in the morning air, sweet and refreshing. The sounds of horses’ hooves, rolling wheels and the click-clack sound of the horse-driver’s bell in the early hours of mornings, the bells of bicycles and the ice-cream men, the voices of passers-by and food vendors throughout the day into the evening were music to my ears. Some food vendors stopped to ask for water from the well to wash their dishes; some horsemen asked water for their horses to drink. I liked watching them all. But I never missed the chance to watch the school children going past our home. Each child carried a colourful school bag. The young ones had bags painted with beautiful pictures and they wore clothes that made them look very special to me.
Then one day I did not see any of them. I asked Mama, ‘Where are the students?’
‘Like your brothers, Trí Tri and Trí Tuệ, they do not go to school for three months,’ Mama replied.
‘Three months!’ I cried, even though I did not understand what three months meant.
Then one day I saw a group of children. ‘Mama!’ I cried. ‘I want to go to school, Mama.’
‘Not yet, my daughter! You are too small to go to school.’
Then I saw a little boy walk past, not much bigger than I was. ‘Look, Mama! He’s small, and he goes to school,’ I pointed to the boy. ‘He carries a BIG bag that has NICE pictures,’ I cried excitedly.
Mama smiled. ‘When I go to the market, I’ll buy you a bag like his.’
My face beamed and I clapped my hands. ‘And will you make me clothes like his?’ I ran towards Mama’s sewing machine.
‘I’ll make you a beautiful dress, but not like his. You are a girl.’
‘Like hers,’ I cried, pointing to a girl walking past.
‘Yes, like hers.’ Mama leaned over and kissed me on my forehead. ‘I’ll buy you a new colouring book and a bag.’
‘Buy me a BIG bag, Mama. I want to put my alphabetical book, my red-and-blue pencil, my coloured papers and my scissors inside.’ (I had had my elder brother Trí Tuệ’s old alphabetical book for some weeks.)
That day, before the little boy and the little girl went home from school, Mama bought me a new bag from the market and a new colouring book from our neighbour, Mrs Sáu.
Mama was like that; she would do everything for her children and would keep her word, from a little thing like buying me a bag, to the bigger things. She sacrificed everything for her loved ones. She did not only look after her own six children - since she was a girl she had been looking after her siblings and many others. Throughout her life I saw her helping her widowed mother, her two brothers, her two sisters, her half-sister, two adopted daughters and many other homeless and hungry children. She gave gold leaves to her siblings and nephews to pay for their study, or to go abroad, set up businesses or buy houses. She hid her sister’s husband so that he did not have to go to a re-education camp, bought a house for an adopted daughter, and nursed another adopted daughter back to life from madness and a suicide attempt.
That mid-day in September of The Year of The Goat 1967, I skipped my siesta to watch my mother make me a new dress. By afternoon, I was ready to go to school. That night, I went to sleep with my school bag in my arms. The following morning I woke up to my mother’s voice while she was saying something to my two elder brothers. I sat up and had a fright: I did not see my school bag! I was about to cry when I caught sight of it lying outside the mosquito net.
‘Wait for me!’ I screamed as I picked up my bag and ran.
At the foot of the stairs, Mama pulled me over; she sat me on her lap, and combed my hair in silence. Making me the new dress and buying me the school bag, she had thought I would play with them, that I would pretend to go to school, as I pretended to make clothes for my imaginary customers or serve them tea. For some months, every morning I had been pouring imaginary tea from my teapot, which was the size of a duck’s egg, into my teacups, the size of a quail’s egg. But that morning I wanted to follow my elder brothers and join those students in their classroom. I was four years old.
Mama did not know how to refuse to dress me up, how to explain to me that I was under age. She did not want me to think that adults would lie. Then, as always, whenever she found herself in a difficult situation, she turned to Papa. ‘What should I do? Our daughter wants to go to school.’
Papa was pushing his motor scooter towards the door, getting ready to go to work. He turned to her and smiled. ‘Take her!’ he said in a booming voice, continuing to push his scooter. Everything was simple to my father. When he was in the front yard, he stood his scooter on the ground, walked slowly towards Mama, bent down and whispered into her ear, ‘Then take her back!’ (Papa told me this, years later.) Then he left for work.
My two brothers left, walking to school by themselves.
Mama washed my face and gave me my favourite breakfast, xôi gấc, the glutinous rice cooked with the seed of a fruit gấc that gives the rice a beautiful orange colour and sweet fragrance. She often said, ‘Xôi gấc has plenty of vitamin A, good for your eyes.’ After eating, she dressed me up, then walked with me to Thánh Tâm Primary.
At the school gate we stopped and stood outside the gate. I watched students go inside. Some small children walked past and some waved their hands to say goodbye to their mothers when they walked through the gate. I pulled Mama’s hand to take her inside but she resisted. I pulled her hand again and again.
After a little while, she said, ‘I’ll teach you at home.’
‘No, Mama!’ I said. ‘I want to go in there!’
‘I’ll be your teacher,’ she said softly.
‘No!’ I cried. ‘No!’ I cried louder.
A teacher, one of Mama’s regular customers, walked past, stopped, turned and looked at us. She smiled to greet Mama. ‘I’ll take her into a kindergarten class, if you want to wait here for a little while.’
Perhaps the teacher thought that my excitement would be over when I saw that my mother could not come inside the gate, and I would cry like most children do on their first day at school. Then my mother could take me home with her. But I stopped crying the moment the teacher took my hand. I pulled her towards the gate and when I walked through it, I turned around and waved. The teacher looked at me, then at Mama. Mama looked at me and smiled. She stood, waving while I walked away with my first teacher.
‘Study well, my daughter!’ Mama called after me.
* * * * * * *
Thirteen-and-a-half years later, as I was walking past my first school on my way out of Sài Gòn, for a brief moment I remembered that four-year-old girl and her mother.
I saw her mother’s lovely smile. I saw the girl pulling her mother’s hand. I saw her free herself from her mother’s hand and walk hurriedly towards the school gate. ‘Study well, my daughter!’ I heard her mother call after her. The four-year-old girl smiled as she waved; she walked away with firm steps. She was not afraid. As she grew up she was always ready to move on, to face any challenge and to learn new things.
‘I will study well to make you proud, Mama!’ I said in my mind as I walked away from my old school, carrying my mother’s voice in my head.