Owner of a Lonely Heart : A Memoir

CONTENTS Cover Title Page Chapter 1: Twenty-Four Hours Chapter 2: Apparent, Part I Chapter 3: Date of Birth Chapter 4: The Photograph Chapter 5: Apparent, Part II Chapter 6: Apparent, Part III Chapter 7: My Mothers Chapter 8: White Mothers Chapter 9: The Story of My Name Chapter 10: Apparent, Revisited Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright Guide Cover Start of Content Title Page Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright VI VII IX X XI XII 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 
 
 
 
 
 1 TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
 Over the course of my life I have known less than twenty-four hours with my mother. Here is how those hours came to be, and what happened in them.
 I grew up in Michigan, in a mostly white town in the 1980s, pretending not to be a refugee. Back then, the idea was to forget the past and move along. Stay out of trouble. Don’t talk about the war. Don’t react to racist taunts. Behave well enough not to get noticed. And that’s what I did. I did my homework and watched television and climbed the neighbor’s plum tree. But every spring I would think about how my family had left Saigon the day before the fall of the city and the end of the war—what is known in Vietnam as the American War. I was a baby, carried by my dad and uncles and grandmother, brought by motorcycle, boat, ship, and airplane to refugee camps and eventually to a home in the United States. I would try to imagine this: literally fleeing a country, not knowing what would happen next.
 It was my grandmother Noi who made the final call. She had done it before, leaving her birthplace of Hanoi for the south, when the country was divided in 1954. By the time we arrived in the United States, in the summer of 1975, she was fifty-five years old, a refugee twice over. I asked her once, years ago, How did you decide? She said, You just know. You just go. At the time, I thought it was an unsatisfying answer. That’s how far I was from understanding what she must have gone through.
 When we left, my mother stayed in Saigon, or was left behind in Saigon. For many years, I wouldn’t know which phrasing was more true. But I knew not to ask about it, because no one in my family wanted to talk about my mother and no one wanted to talk about the war. I grew up knowing these were silences that needed to be kept. And it wasn’t even hard, because I had no actual memories of war and leaving. I had the privilege, instead, of getting to imagine. Silence can look like submission, but for many of us it can be a form of self-preservation.
 
 I was ten years old when I learned that my mother had come to the United States as a refugee, too. I was nineteen when I finally met her.
 The known hours I have spent with my mother have been bounded by years and miles of absence. They have taken place over six visits and twenty-six years. Always in Boston, the city where she eventually landed. Toward the end of a visit she will look at me, sitting next to her on a sofa or at a table in her apartment, and she will give a small, tired smile as if to convey, What else is there? What else is there to say? I have never called her Mom. Our hours together have been defined by what we do not say. By now, silence is the language we have with each other, and the one we know best.
 The person I call Mom is my stepmom, whom my dad met and married when I was three. In real life, when I talk about my mom I’m talking about her. I use the word stepmom here, in my writing, only because the limits of language require such distinctions.
 What I’m saying is that I grew up with a mom and a grandmother and I was lucky to have so much. I had no right to ask for more.
 
 Refugees don’t fit the romantic immigrant narrative that’s so dominant in America. They are a more obvious, uncomfortable reminder of war and loss. And too often, as scholar Yến Lê Espiritu points out, the “history of US military, economic, and political intervention… is often included only as background information—as the events that precede the refugee flight rather than as the actions that produce