Third World Appetite

“If I could do it again, I would never get married. I would work hard, travel, and know what it’s like to be alone.”

I am 26 years old. For at least all of my existence, my mom has phrased these words voluntarily during our lunches, dinners, car rides between stores, as if it had been the most unsettling idea of her life. Alone. She savors the word slowly as if tasting it without ingesting. There would never be any transition between the last topic to the thrown idea of solitude. The idea of living independently intrigues her and frightens her. While most women her age would desire to have better things, the thought of having better counter-tops, remodeled rooms, and fancy cars seemed excessive and inept compared to other things. Like most other middle aged women of her culture, she is bound by necessity and custom, as she spent the majority of her adulthood being a caretaker for someone else. It is a duty, not an option. The year her dad died in ’68, after being blown up to pieces in a gruesome accident by a grenade planted by a soldier in the communist party, my mom worked relentlessly to provide for her family, tasting the poor life for the first time with welted hands from carrying heavy wicker baskets transporting fish in open markets with her mother to feed 4 other hungry mouths. Her marriage shortly after would provide little relief. Being away from her family in a different part of Vietnam committed to a man who met her work ethic and spiritual beliefs, it seemed good. According to my mom, it was good because life was simple and in a country where hunger was the most feared form of death, being married to someone meant that your chances of being hungry would be less likely. Having enough to eat and being alive was good enough. It was good, she said. “We were healthy. We had enough rice to live on. God loved us.”

No one ever tells third world women that their appetite will change when they settle into the new world. Their children adapt quickly for a taste of their immediate culture and further away from their parents’. As a child of a first generation immigrant, I learned to eat my rice with chopsticks and inevitably with a fork and spoon, conscious of the correct way to hold a knife and fork in the appropriate hand in situations where chopsticks would not be available. I carry my parents’ hereditary culture with me; always in pocketful of respectable greetings and proper phrases to greet my elders, addressing them as “cô,” “chú”, “câu,” “bác” to signify the relativity of relationship to our family or the ranking of superiority. I bow to them with humility and know that stirring inside me, something is saying why should I feel inferior? Even though it gratifies my parents that we still abide by these customs, strangely over the years my parents have moved further away from the community which their Vietnamese friends find refuge in. When my parents saved enough money to move us out of our tiny downtown apartment to a house in suburbia, they were relieved to escape the confrontation of their own culture that dwindled as they gained better paying jobs and opportunities that would never come to them if they ever stayed in their home country. In a way, the Vietnamese community reminded them of the place that held them back. My parents like every first generation immigrant, marveled at their accomplishments, could not wait to throw parties and invite their friends from the city to their very small parcel of America which they would pay in mortgage payments well into their retirement.

When my dad seemed over-complacent, my mom in her 50s wonders if she will ever know the gratification of loneliness. She is happiest when she makes short trips to the store on her own, buying things for the family, without the family besieging her. For someone who is terrified of eating at a restaurant alone, she reveres that she can accomplish small tasks by herself, having an hour a day to reminisce who she was before she was someone’s wife or mother. One afternoon, over crispy noodles heavily sauced with seafood and vegetables at her favorite Chinese restaurant, she said, “Don’t marry a Vietnamese man. He’ll be oppressive.” To mock her, I told her I was going to marry a fine Black or Hispanic man. She always makes a face at me, laughs, and gives into the idea that no matter who I marry, somewhere down the road, the boundaries that confine our culture will be loosened with every generation. I realize as we gain the options to choose where our lives will go, we must also confront the question whether to choose to carry our culture with us. When I speak my hereditary language, I submit and become inferior or superior. Every Vietnamese word that comes out of my mouth will carry the essence of the order of things and someday, I too will have to ask myself if I want my children to inherit the caveats of their ancestors.

Stefani