Opinion: Village Matters

Making History—a Garden Park for Keeps

There are so many important events in Laguna's history, seminal moments when the citizens saw an opportunity and a need, took the initiative and set the town in a direction that made Laguna the town we love today.

Did you miss the walk in the Canyon in 1989 that made it clear we wanted to preserve the Greenbelt? 

Or the initiative in 1971 when we established a 36-foot building height limit? Were you not a part of the citizen's ad hoc organization that prevented the Festival from moving to San Clemente or the group that stopped the takeover of our art museum? Were the efforts that pushed for creating Riddle Field, Main Beach Park, Bluebird Park or the Village Green before your time? Maybe those opportunities to make our town better come once in a lifetime, but how wonderful it must have been to share that vision, take action and be a part of making Laguna Beach exceptional.

Now, we all have an opportunity to be a part of this next important step in Laguna history–saving the South Laguna Community Garden Park—buying the land, making it a forever community garden and park. The purchase for $2 million is in escrow—30 days—and we have about two weeks to close an $800,000 funding gap. Your contribution can make all the difference. Go to SouthLagunaGarden.Org to donate. Once again, we as a community will take an innovative and assertive step toward a more humane and beautiful town.

Here we are 14 years after the community gained permission from generous property owner Paul Tran and gathered on that weedy vacant lot to transform it into a flourishing garden. It's now 10 years since Tran offered to sell the property for a garden, but the city turned down the opportunity on a 3-2 vote. In June 2022, the present property owner listed it for $5 million and nine months later, he rejected the gardeners' offer to purchase it for a lesser appraised value. As community leader Mark Christy said, "It has been like Peanuts' Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and Lucy taking it away at the last minute every time."

All that time, the community gardeners worked to make the garden the best they could with volunteers and donations. Building the garden, grading the terraces by hand, building the rock revetments, and moving the storage shed from north Laguna. (Even the shed has a story. It was originally a cabin for an orchard worker in the Anaheim groves where Disneyland is now. In 1917, it was hauled to the backyard of the house presently owned by Geoff and Julie Beckham with a team of horses. The Beckhams generously donated the shed, and Laguna Beach Towing inched it onto their flatbed, strapped it, drove the unlikely cargo through town and eased it down at the garden while local residents the late John Keith and Morrie Granger pushed and guided it into place.)

Transporting the garden shed from North Laguna. Photo courtesy of Ann Christoph

The Garden Band was organized, events and potlucks were enjoyed, classes inspired–in gardening, cooking, bees and more. Planting of the borders and slopes with native and drought-tolerant plants, weeding, and overall garden care were accomplished by the gardeners—part of their commitment in addition to working on their own plots. Visitors were welcomed, and they loved the opportunity to chat, walkthrough and lunch at the picnic tables. It is a garden park—providing the amenities of a park—benches, paths, tables and overlooks with garden planter beds in the middle instead of lawn.

On Aug. 7, a new realtor emailed he had a new lower-priced listing for the property. Really? We met. 

Mark Christy, serving as our realtor, said we'd have an offer the next day. The South Laguna Civic Association made the offer, and by Friday the 11, we had a signed acceptance. The Laguna Beach Community Foundation has agreed to manage the donations, pool the funds and deliver them to escrow. The Foundation will serve as the owner of the property until the Garden 501 (c) (3) is in place. Fundraisers and donations from the community over the years have produced $230,000. 

The city voted last week to contribute $500,000. Other pledges bring the committed total to over $1.2 million.   

Vision, sweat equity, persistence and your contribution and support will make the difference—our garden park for keeps, for Laguna's future. Donate now at SouthLagunaGarden.Org.

Ann is a landscape architect and former Laguna Beach mayor. She is also a long-time board member of Village Laguna, Inc. 

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SIDON, Lebanon

With a yellow pencil missing its eraser, the Palestinian educator draws from memory the layout of fortress-like schools in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon that have become the front line in a fight between Palestinian factions and Islamist militants.

Teacher Mahmoud, who asks that his full name not be used, knows every inch of Lebanon's oldest and largest camp for Palestinian refugees: He was born there, taught for 30 years there, and feels deeply how surges of violence raise the level of anguish inside the overcrowded camp.

He points to a school parking lot on his map. Here, says Mahmoud, is where a senior commander of the mainstream Palestinian Fatah faction, Abu Ashraf al-Armoushi, and four of his bodyguards were ambushed and killed by Islamist militants at the end of July. The attack deepened a blood feud and led to days of clashes that left 13 people dead and forced 4,000 from their homes.

Violence erupted again over this past weekend, wrecking a fragile four-week cease-fire with heavy gunfire and explosions that spread across much more of the camp. Another cease-fire agreed to Monday collapsed by Wednesday night, reportedly bringing the death toll of the newest fighting to 16.

Lebanese Army Forces began to deploy toward the camp, raising the prospect of a broader and more destructive battle. A hospital was evacuated after its walls were struck by bullets, and – with several schools occupied by fighters and damaged in the fighting – the United Nations is urgently looking for safer alternatives for 5,900 students to start the school year.

For Mahmoud, the lethal escalation signifies a deeper crisis for Palestinians in Lebanon, a further affront to their dignity after decades of dislocation and poverty.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

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A veteran Palestinian teacher who gave the name Mahmoud shows where, on his hand-drawn map of a school in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp, a Fatah leader and his four bodyguards were killed in late July, triggering days of violence, in Sidon, Lebanon, Aug. 30, 2023.

"The Palestinians here want to go back, but they can't go back home, and 75 years in we have an unresolved economic, social, and status issue, and it translates into these situations as we see in Ain al-Hilweh," says Dorothée Klaus, Lebanon director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA.

"We are proud people"

Ain al-Hilweh was created in 1948, when Palestinians uprooted by the war that accompanied the formation of the state of Israel fled north. More recently, residents of the camp include Syrian refugees and remnants of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, as well as known fugitives.

"We face a problem today as Palestinian people: The world takes a different view of us, after they see what happened in Ain al-Hilweh," says Mahmoud, speaking after the first round of clashes. He now lives outside the camp but provides services inside such as music, gym, and school support, which he says teach students to "see their future differently."

"We are proud people; we are well known for how well educated we are," he says. "Now the whole world is looking at us as a bunch of ignorant people in the camps, and this is something we are suffering from."

The escalating violence has brought into sharp focus the oft-forgotten plight of some 200,000 to 250,000 Palestinians in Lebanon, who for decades have lived out of a dozen crowded camps where unemployment and poverty are chronic, services are limited and shriveling, and paroxysms of violence by a multitude of factions vying for control are frequent and destructive.

Bilal Hussein/AP

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Smoke rises during clashes between members of the Palestinian Fatah group and Islamist militants in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh, near the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, Sept. 10, 2023.

The result has been widespread atrophy in this society of refugees. They say they are struggling to hold on to their history, and to pass from one generation to the next a hopeful ambition of "going home" to a Palestine that no longer exists as they remember it.

During the clashes Sunday night, rocket fire from inside the camp also struck two Lebanese Army Forces bases, prompting the army to warn of "consequences."

Those warnings raised concerns among residents of a repeat of the events of 2007, when the army destroyed the Nahr al-Bared camp during a 15-week campaign to rid it of Islamist groups. Lebanese authorities have no jurisdiction inside the Palestinian camps; under a decades-old agreement, a committee of Palestinian factions rules the camps.

The International Committee of the Red Cross "is extremely concerned by the alarming intensification of armed violence seen in Ain al-Hilweh camp, as the constant violence over the last days had a profound impact on people's lives, homes, essential services, and infrastructure," says Shady Ramadan, head of the south Lebanon subdelegation for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"We are continuing to provide critical assistance," he says, including supplying the hospital and treating wounded people.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

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A woman passes a mural of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as she exits the Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Aug. 31, 2023. Lebanon hosts 12 Palestinian camps with between 200,000 to 250,000 refugees and their descendants. Some families have been in the country since the 1948 founding of Israel.

For teacher Mahmoud, the fresh violence has multiple threads.

"What we are demanding now is to control these weapons all over the place," says Mahmoud, who describes how "shrinking" opportunities and poor education have led young men to find paid work with armed groups as a job only, instead of for "ideological reasons, for Palestine."

"These [Islamist] people in the camp, they belong to a master; they are tools in the hands of someone," says Mahmoud. "Some people take orders from others without thinking. Some people underestimate the impact of clashes, and what it means to grab a gun and open fire inside the camp ... Which shuts everything down.

"Our duty is to treat the problem, to make changes," he adds. "It's hard, but it's not impossible."

Resources in chronic short supply

Critical to making those changes is UNRWA, which has been charged since 1949 with the mammoth task of providing for all aspects of life for displaced Palestinians across the region, now an estimated 5.9 million refugees and their descendants.

At the end of August, UNRWA mounted an emergency appeal for $15.5 million to relieve the needs of those affected by the first round of clashes. The appeal noted that Ain al-Hilweh has become "a magnifier of different actors vying for control," with humanitarian needs "high and rising, driven largely by systematic discrimination over generations, failed governance structures [and] unprecedented" economic crises.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

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Dr. Dorothée Klaus, director of UNRWA Affairs in Lebanon, stands for a portrait in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency's offices in Beirut, Aug. 31, 2023.

Since taking her UNRWA post last February, Dr. Klaus meets every four weeks with all Palestinian faction leaders, including Islamic groups, to find better living solutions for refugees.

"What you have in Lebanon is a population that for 75 years has experienced recurrent hostilities, frequent displacement, and destruction through generations," says Dr. Klaus. She ticks them off to include, after 1948, the destruction of three Palestinian camps in 1976 and the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camp in 1982.

"This results in recurrent trauma, with no space for healing, and it translates often into severe depression [so] that people can no longer take care of themselves," says Dr. Klaus.

Limited resources have been a constant problem since UNRWA began, with Dr. Klaus noting that reports sent to U.N. Headquarters since 1949 have included requests for more funding.

The recent violence only compounds such problems, she says, with an estimated 30,000 textbooks stored in the occupied schools for the new school year likely destroyed, and reports of serious damage to buildings.

Opportunity for change

Still, as UNRWA searches for temporary solutions for students, Dr. Klaus says there may be a broader opportunity to build new school buildings that do not as easily lend themselves to becoming fortified positions for fighters.

"This is not a matter of reconstructing a school," says Dr. Klaus. "This is reconstruction through a participatory, reflective process, involving the stakeholders about what society you want your children to grow up in."

Such change is also the desire of Salah Salah, the octogenarian head of the refugees camps for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Beirut. He speaks of a young generation – including his son, Mohammed, a university student who sits beside him – doing better at easing the despair of Palestinian refugees.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

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Salah Salah, the octogenarian head of refugee camps for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, poses for a photo in his offices in Beirut, Aug. 31, 2023. "People are frustrated, people are depressed, but we have a new generation in the camps that are educated to say, 'No, no, no, we are Palestinians and we will defend our country and our rights,'" he says.

He says the presence of Islamists in Ain al-Hilweh is "the same time bomb" that "could explode at any moment" that led to the destruction of the Nahr al-Bared camp in 2007. "We are dealing with confusion in the camps. ... You have to ask the Lebanese army how [Islamist militants] got there, and with those weapons."

Mr. Salah asserts that there is a deliberate policy by Lebanon to keep Palestinians frustrated by barring them from certain professions and from owning property, and by the international community to pressure UNRWA to shrink services in camps, so that the Palestinians "will melt away."

"People are frustrated, people are depressed, but we have a new generation in the camps that are educated to say, 'No, no, no, we are Palestinians and we will defend our country and our rights,'" adds Mr. Salah. "They are rebelling against what is happening to them right now."

"Look at my generation: What kept us going? We still talk about liberation, and we pass this hope to the next generation by teaching them who they are, and their place," says Mr. Salah. "All talk is 'Palestine, Palestine.' ... Always 'Palestine' is in their mouth."

A Departure From Reality

In order to re member yourself and your mother, you examine the paper fragments of your past. Sometime before the fall of 1990, you visit your mother in what you remember as the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward. In a fitful, fragmentary journal you keep in college, you describe yourself as feeling

numb.

Your older brother, the medical student, calls your mother's affliction a

neurosis.

A dictionary calls a neurosis

a relatively mild mental illness

but not

a radical loss of touch with reality.

Really? You perceive this ward, its patients, and your mother as

insane.

None of the patients, your mother included, appears to be a member of your reality. Seven or eight months later, while you are a sophomore at Berkeley, you try to write about the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward in a seminar led by Maxine Hong Kingston. In your essay, you describe how a woman named Trinh rolls on the floor before a ward attendant, a Black woman, gently picks her up. Then

Trinh stands in the middle of the floor before us. Herlanguage is a mixture of Vietnamese and baby talk andmaybe something of her own thrown in. She gapes out thewindow. She begins clapping her hands and singing in adisjointed, breathless way, like a child singing too eagerly.

You put away the essay and do not look at it again for thirty years. When you finally dare to read it again, it might as well be fiction. You have no memory now of this scene or the fact that most of the patients are Asian and Vietnamese. But you possess a vague image of the ward, because Má returns in 2005 when she embarks on her final departure from your reality. What you mostly recall from 1990 is your discomfort among these patients, your shock and terror that your mother is here. She is not herself. Or perhaps she is herself. Herself as another. As your Other.

A white patient walks by, one of the fewwhite people in this ward. She says, "Tell your mother not toworry about dying. We all felt that way when we firstgot here. We all get over it." I nod at her torecognize that she exists.

The patients do not exist for much of the world outside the ward. This is perhaps especially true for the Asian patients, coming from people, such as your own, who rarely, if ever, discuss mental illness. Embarrassing. Shameful. You do not feel this way, but you can write about Má's voyage into surreality only now that she has died.

And what right have you to do even that?

But perhaps you tell this story so youcan recognize that your motherexisted, exists, in all her selves, andthat she was not and is not alone.

•

You do not recall what brought her to the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward until you read the words you wrote as a nineteen-year-old:

Someone out there—if not everyone—is trying to kill her.They crawl through the sewer and emerge through thetoilet. She was waiting for them, locked in the bathroom,when my father decided enough was enough andknocked a hole in the door to reach her.It was my bathroom.

If you cannot remember this, why do you remember the reverse, the night Má chases Ba into the other bathroom in the hallway? When Ba locks himself inside, Má smashes holes into the door with a chair, all the shouting in Vietnamese you don't understand.

Ba, so fastidious about everything, so protective of you, never letting you hang your arm through the open car window because, he says, you will lose it in a car accident—this Ba never bothers to fix or replace the door Má has smashed. Although you remember how the gaping holes in the bathroom door reveal its hollowness for the rest of your years in that brown house, you possess no image of sitting with your mother in the ward.

She recognized me, but I was no more important inher world than the rest of the ugly furniture. She lookedahead at the opposite wall. Her mouth remained slightlyopen, her eyes slightly glazed, but she didn't move.

Is this the same gaze you will see years later in the memory-care unit?

She wouldn't hug us or touch us, but instead shied awaylike a timid child. She stood on the middle of the floorand smiled vacantly as we said goodbye.

You believe that these things happened, even if you cannot re member them, including how Má ignores the grapes and orange juice Ba has brought, and, while Ba talks to a social worker,

the tears started to come from me and I got up before anybodysaw me crying, because nobody had seen me cry since thesixth grade. I walked into the bathroom without sayinganything to her, but I don't think she noticed anyway.I locked myself in the bathroom stall, andmy first sob made me gasp.

You do not remember fleeing from Ban Mê Thuột and Sài Gòn because you were only four, but why can you not re member these things from your late teen years? You do not remember your (adopted) sister, twelve years your senior, who stayed to look after the house when the rest of you fled, but why can you not re member yourself? You have been dis membered and disremembered, by Hollywood and colonialism and racism, yes, but also by no one other than you.

•

What you finally re member, provoked by these paper fragments, is this:

Throughout your childhood and adolescence, Ba Má want to shape you into a moral, hardworking, upstanding, one-hundred-per-cent Vietnamese Catholic. You disagree with their intention, but you respect them. They are not hypocrites. They never deviate from their moral beliefs, their grinding work schedules at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới of San Jose, California, their nightly ritual of the Rosary, their weekly attendance at Mass, which, on retirement, becomes daily.

But they verge on fanaticism. During your summer working in Santa Clara on the rides at Great America, when you are sixteen, you buy a pair of gray checkered pants with your own money from the teen fashion department at Macy's in Eastridge Mall. You roll up the hems and twist them tight around the ankle. You can never imagine wearing pants any other way, especially like those poor adults—your teachers—in their baggy chinos.

Má sees these checkered pants as the sort that delinquent Vietnamese refugee youth wear as they smoke, hang out with the opposite sex, do poorly in school, style their hair into outrageous heights, and go to night clubs and garage parties, all that is good and fun in your mind and wild and destructive in Má's imagination. She berates you, says you are not respectable and proper, that you are dooming your future. She orders you to return the pants. You do.

And seethe.

The lesson you learn is the need to keep a secret life. You are already adept at secrecy and silence. In Ba Má's house in San Jose, you are an American spying on them. Outside their house, you are a Vietnamese spying on Americans and their strange ways and customs, including the forbidden, fantastic world of dating, seen in John Hughes movies like "Pretty in Pink" and "Weird Science" and "Some Kind of Wonderful."

Then you meet J at Great America. She lives fifty-six miles away from San Jose. To see her, you take a bus and then BART, a trip of three hours each way. You sell your beloved comic-book collection to pay your long-distance phone bill. You maintain the secrecy for three years, until you run out of money and start calling J on Ba Má's phone bill. On January 4, 1990, Má says:

"Your father doesn't even buy himselften-dollar shirts. He wears your and your brother'shand-me-downs. Now, every time you call, he has topay ten or twenty or thirty dollars."And she cries.

By January 9th, your parents find your letters from J and your photos with her under your bed. You never see them again. You are outraged at this violation of your possessions, your memories, your affection for J, your chance to live your life like the white teen-agers in the movies. Ba Má are incensed because, all of a sudden, they discover that their quiet, sullen, usually obedient, vulnerable boy, not yet a man in their eyes, has been lying to them. And worse—is becoming someone they don't even know. You write:

Mom threatened to have a heart attack.

Ba Má demand that you end the relationship. You have no car, no money, no guts, and you owe your parents loyalty and love. So you tell Ba Má you will not see J again, although you keep seeing J. You have become used to living a secret life, with two faces and two selves, only one of which you reveal to Ba Má. What harm does it do them if they don't know of your other life? You avoid thinking about what harm it does to J, who tolerates the situation. Your mother and father compromise in their own way. They offer to set you up with nice Vietnamese Catholic girls. The last thing you want is a nice Vietnamese Catholic girl.

Eventually, though, you marry a nice Vietnamese Catholic girl—Lan,who is also so much more. But, like you, she knows howto wear the appropriate face for certain occasions.Not a false face. Just the right face.

Then, even though you will forget it, even though you have forgotten about it, on February 18, 1990, five weeks after learning about your secret romance with J, Má departs from reality and enters the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward, a fate arguably worse than a heart attack.

Correlation? Orcause and effect?

You don't know, but, in Kingston's seminar in the fall of 1990, you try to get to the center between your two selves, try to get to the crossing between reality and surreality, try to re member what you have already begun to disremember. One of your other writing teachers, Bharati Mukherjee, reads your work and says you need to

Cut to the bone.

No one can teach you how to do that. You will have to teach yourself.

As for your journal, you will not write another entry until October 6, 1991. It will be your final entry in this belated, fitful attempt to be a writer. Its last word?

Guilt.

•

Má recovers. Comes home. Returns to work at the SàiGòn Mới, open every day of the week, nearly every day of the year. Does not return to the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward for another fifteen years. You continue keeping secrets from her and Ba, a double life not atypical of immigrant and refugee children, or so you tell yourself.

Ba Má want to protect you from dangers you do not see; you want to protect them from knowledge they do not need. And they must own secrets you do not even know about. Isn't a true secret, by definition, something whose existence is not known? As for you, which secrets are worst? Being an atheist? Reading Marxist theory? Getting arrested? Seeing J for ten more years until the relationship ends?

i.E.,that is,in other words,she dumps your sorry ass.

J refuses to be your secret any longer. She doesn't need to be with a person too weak to stand up on her behalf, content to live a double life that she did not ask for. When does duality become duplicitousness? When does having two selves lead not to double vision but to self-deception? The last time you see her is at her wedding to a Vietnamese groom. At least you did not ruin all Vietnamese people for her.

You marry Lan. Although the most important thing about her to Ba Má is that she is a Vietnamese Catholic from a good family, the most important thing about Lan is that she is a poet, as well as beautiful. Your delighted parents pay for the very loud wedding, held in a Chinese banquet hall with the same elaborate ten-course Chinese meal served at every Vietnamese wedding, a bottle of Hennessy cognac on every table for the four hundred guests, most of whom you do not know. No one expects you to enjoy your own wedding. What a Western idea!

•

For seven months in 2003, from summer to winter, you and Lan stay in the Eleventh Arrondissement of Paris, where English is rarely heard and Americans are rarely seen, a few steps from Métro Voltaire. You are newly married, and you have just been tenured. You cannot be fired, short of committing a crime, and so you are here not to write another scholarly book—

your best friend from high school tellsyou he keeps your academic bookby his bedside to help himfall asleep

—but to write your book of short stories while living in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an unadorned building on the unfashionable Rue Richard Lenoir. No Haussmannian splendor and no elevator, but you and Lan are young and in love, with only one suitcase each.

If going to Paris, a city famous for its writers, is a literary pilgrimage for you, Ba Má visit you in Paris that fall intent on a religious pilgrimage. They have retired from the brutal schedule of the SàiGòn Mới, and this is their idea of a good time: visiting the major Catholic shrines of Western Europe. Over five days, you escort them to Lourdes in southwestern France and Fátima in Portugal, with a stop in London. You pack a bottle of whiskey to relieve the stress, but are proud of yourself for orchestrating this vacation of a lifetime for Ba Má.

This is their fourth international voyage. Their first was fleeing their homeland. If forced migrations make a person cosmopolitan, then refugees and migrants would be considered some of the world's best-travelled people. They are far worldlier than those who never leave their country of birth and yet look down on these voyagers whose odds of surviving their journey are as bad as or worse than those of astronauts.

Astronauts eventually return to Earth. But cosmonauts like Ba Má permanently escape the gravity of home.

Is this the root of your own willingness to leave home?San Jose too small for you?

Nostalgia is, literally, homesickness,with those afflicted yearning fortheir home. But what to callbeing sick of home?

For devout Catholics, the real home is not Earth but Heaven, their longing for it perpetual. How else to ascend and fulfill that desire but by becoming a one-way cosmonaut, voyager, risktaker? Nothing riskier than faith in what cannot be seen, heard, touched.

Your parents call their object of faith God.You call yours justice. All of you, inyour own ways, are true believers.

•

The bright colors of the architecture in Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl, remind you of Disneyland. Tourist shops sell crucifixes of every size, plates adorned with the Pope, Virgin Mary statues, snow globes, and lockets. You buy a cologne-size bottle of holy water for your father-in-law. Your parents bathe in this holy water while you wait outside the baths.

Fátima impresses you with its severity. Nestled in green mountains and supposedly named after a Moorish princess kidnapped by a Christian knight, Fátima commemorates other Virgin Mary sightings. Visitors approach a grand basilica with a towering spire by crossing an expansive square. Those desperate for the Virgin Mary's help shuffle across the square on their knees. In grimmer days, the knees of the faithful would be bloody and bruised. Now the pilgrims can wear kneepads. Ba Má pray at Fátima but do not crawl. They do not need a miracle. They have already saved themselves, with the aid of the U.S. Government and God.

You never tell Ba Má you are an atheist because you do not want to upset them. Protecting Ba Má is how you show you love them, even if they do not know it, even as you do not remember all the unspoken ways they love you. Being their tour guide is another way of showing love. Ba Má put themselves in your care as someone finally an adult. Getting married is the first real sign of your adulthood. Grandchildren are what they want next, but fatherhood terrifies you.

You buy yourself time with this pilgrimage. Surprisingly, you enjoy yourself, happy to see Ba Má delighted as you escort them to the Eiffel Tower and Versailles, Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. Ba Má prefer the cleanliness of London over the dirtiness of Paris. In the Paris Métro, Má laughs recalling how, as a girl, she rode the bus without a fare, hiding underneath a seat.

Years later, you will understand this memory whenyou take an oversold night train through centralViệt Nam, third class, kids sleeping under your woodenbench, a stranger dozing on a stool in the aisle,forehead against your chest.

Your terror of fatherhood comes partly from seeing what motherhood inflicts on Má. The mother of your childhood wields a beautiful smile. She loves to adorn herself. She is statuesque and elegant, authoritative and powerful. The SàiGòn Mới exhausts her, ages her, diminishes her.

But this pilgrimage signals the end ofsacrifice. The war years, long past.SàiGòn Mới, no more.

You will take them to all the Catholic shrines in the world. You might even go back with them to Việt Nam, to re member.

It is the fall of 2003. Má is healthy.Neither of you know that in two yearsnothing will be the same, ever again,for her. Or you. Or me.

•

You. And me. Such an odd couple.

The only way I have been able to write about myself is through writing about you. You are me, but seen from a slight distance, or the greatest distance, which is the space between one and one's self.

You are my excuse to write about me, because I find myself too boring to go on about and also too frightening to think about.

Only through writing about you can I attempt to re member not only you but also myself. And, perhaps, in writing and re membering, you and me, engaged in this delicate dialectic, can become something greater than the sum of our disjointed parts.

•

Ba no longer remembers Fátima and Lourdes, visits I now seize on as cherished memories of a time when Má inhabited this reality and I was a good son.

What he does remember: Paris and London. And what he remembers most:

Those curtains in that hotel room, he says wistfully.

The Marriott hotel where we stayed, near Big Ben, with its conjoining suites for Ba Má and for me, had floor-to-ceiling gold curtains.

I modelled the curtains in the living room on them.

A tailor in his youth, Ba cut and sewed the curtains himself upon his return from London. Now, every morning and afternoon, he sits and naps on the plush brown leather sofa, hands clasped on his chest, illuminated by the soft golden light filtering through the closed curtains.

Sitting on that sofa, one sees on the opposite white wall the photos of Ba Má's fiftieth wedding anniversary, in 2004, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the partition of Việt Nam, of the beginning of their refugee life together.

Even as a country is divided, a future of bloodforetold, marriage brings together two familiesand two lovers—a great detail for a novel!

During this anniversary, Ba wears a tan suit; Má, a golden áo dài. The presiding plump, pink-cheeked bishop of San Jose is ornately robed in his chasuble, bedecked with a mitre, and wielding a tall staff over his Vietnamese sheep.

A year later, in December, 2005, during the Christmas holiday, I sit on this sofa, stunned. Something in Má has suddenly broken.

There is no visible cause for this crack between our reality and her surreality. She was retired, enjoying her life: perfecting a handful of recipes, picking something different each day from her extensive wardrobe for the daily Mass she attended with Ba, taking pictures with her grandchildren. Now she is in a hospital, detained against her will and ours. I learn that doctors can put patients in a seventy-two-hour hold from which their loved ones cannot rescue them. This is one of the few facts I remember.

I do not keep a journal of this time.

And I call myself a writer?

In the absence of words, my memory is blank. A space as white as

bone.

Almost no memories, because you choose to forget and I am not willing to remember. Partly to protect you and me. Partly because remembering what I cannot remember would be an act of fiction rather than fact.

Fact: I am unable to recall what happened to Má, whether I was even there for her breakdown, what she looked like, how long she was in the hospital, or its name, or how she eventually returned to the same Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward from so long ago.

The fact is that I also refuse to re member. I do not call my brother to ask for his help in sharpening my memory and my prose, the better to saw against

bone.

I reject memory. I accept my amnesia. Because—fact—the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward is the most terrifying place I have ever been, and my mother's seventy-two-hour detention in that hospital is the most unsettling time of my life. I would trade parts of my body, even shorten my life, rather than be afflicted like the patients of that ward, like the people undergoing that detention.

Like Má.

Forgetting the painful things is necessary for someof us. As long as we eventually simmer thatbone that we cannot cut through. Have Isimmered that bone enough? CanI taste that marrow ofmemory?

After the doctors release my mother from detention, after she leaves the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward, after we gather the legal documents Ba needs to control Má's fate, we deliver my mother to a nursing facility.

My memory resumes at this halfway house between the surrealism of the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward and the realism of life with Má at home where she belongs. The nursing facility, neither luxurious nor cheap, resembles a hospital but is mostly a refrigerator to keep human beings alive until they are ready to die.

If a quiet library with towering walls of books and hushed patrons and my own leather armchair is my vision of eternal bliss, this refrigerator is, if not Hell, then a purgatory with tiled floors, brightly lit hallways, bland meals under plastic covers, incapacitated patients, the constant bustle of nurses, therapists, visitors, the buzz of televisions.

I have never seen anyonereading a book inthis purgatory.

Most of the staff, clad in nursing scrubs or polo shirts and chinos, are Filipinas. American colonization in the Philippines created this route for nurses to come to the United States, while draining the Philippines of its own medical professionals and depriving the children left behind of their mothers, exported to take care of others around the world.

Where is the televised dramatic comedy about thesewomen? Call it "Filipinas." Or "Feelings." All thoseFilipina actors and dancers who worked in"Miss Saigon" are waiting.

As I numbly watch the patients, they lie numbly in their beds or sit numbly in wheelchairs in the hallways. Old and ill, or old and dying. Occasionally, someone screams. I do not want to end up here.

My mother stays for days, or weeks, or months. I can't remember.

What I do re member is that this time is different from the other times.

While driving my brother and father away from one visit with Má, I realize that Má will not get better. As they discuss Má's condition, I understand that Má will never descend from her surreality to our reality, except for occasional, brief visits. I am ambushed by myself, sobs and tears rupturing the wall that separates you and me, me and myself. It has been fourteen years since I was so waylaid by myself, when Má was in the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward the first time.

Neither my father nor brother says a word as I grip the wheel and struggle to see through tears.

I recover. I get hold of myself. I put you back where you belong.My father and brother resume their conversation. Iresume driving.

We never speak of this moment.

After the nursing facility releases Má, Ba brings her body home. But not her mind. Not fully. Her thoughts travel most of the time through a different, parallel universe. Still, she sometimes returns to our reality, enough to notice how Ba, beginning at age seventy-two, when he should be circumnavigating the world via Boeing, remains earthbound. Homebound. He cares for Má without complaint for the next ten years, ignoring entreaties from my brother and me to hire the help that he can easily afford.

As a child, I watched Ba cook dinner, shop for groceries, vacuum the house. The typical Vietnamese man is allergic to these chores. This routine of mundane deeds, I understand later, is love.

In 2012, the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke,whose work I admire, makes "Amour," about aloving husband and wife in their eighties.A stroke disables the wife, leaving herhelpless and in her husband's care. Out ofdeep love, he suffocates her, and he isthen alone, perhaps even dead, in their Parisian apartment.

Haneke. Always a crowd-pleaser.

Not the right director to makea movie about Ba Má.

Their amour is about endurance. Both know how to suffer and sacrifice, without the reward of recognition from anyone but their sons, without the drama of a murder-suicide or a crucifixion.

Má's many medications, arrayed in a repurposed cookie tin, prevent such theatrics. The meds calm her. Reduce the chance of self-harm. Keep her from breaking fully free from our reality. So tightly is she leashed in orbit that Má is very quiet, moves slowly, does little. But she recognizes me and Ellison, my son, and her other grandchildren, even if the glow of recognition quickly fades.

Unlike Haneke's two-hour, seven-minute movie,this quiet play, as slow and puzzling as"Happy Days" by Samuel Beckett,goes on for a decade.

Beckett also wrote, in "The Unnamable,"You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

How appropriate for refugees, of whomBeckett was one. As for Ba Má,they have only ever gone onand on and on.

Má will not count as one of war's casualties, but what do you call someone who loses her country, much of her wealth, her family, her parents, her (adopted) daughter, and her peace of mind because of the war?

So many of war's casualties are never counted. Never commemorated, never named on walls, never written about in novels and plays, never featured in movies. The refugees, the suicides, the disabled, the unsheltered, the traumatized, the ones who have departed this reality. The ones never known.

Vietnamese people, how do you separate what is unique to you from the trauma of war, colonization, the division and reunification of the country?

from becoming a refugee or staying behind?From being the child of refugees, soldiers, survivors?From being the child of those who didn't survive?From being Vietnamese?

How do you separate yourself and your memories from History?

How do you separate your presence from so many absences?

Questions I can onlyask, never answer.

•

In 2015, after a decade of taking care of Má by himself, my then eighty-two-year-old father surrenders. Ba moves Má to the kind of benevolent nursing home seen in movies or soap operas, hushed and carpeted, a piano in the common room that my father plays for my mother when he visits. He taught himself to play the piano as an adult and the mandolin in his old age.

Sometimes I wonder what he could have become if he hadthe education my son has, with his private piano teacher.But then he would not be the father he became, andI would not be the person I am.

My mother stays in the nursing home's memory-care unit, again staffed almost wholly by Filipinas, where residents eat together in a sunlit dining room with silverware, plates, table service, and bland food with very little salt. She is as still as water in a plugged sink. Her pills don't always work. One day I learn that she has broken her arm by jumping on and then falling off her bed, or so the staff says. A doctor, whom I never see, adjusts her meds. Her arm, permanently injured, huddles against her body or floats by her side, useless.

I cannot now re member if it is her left or right arm.

In 2018, Má's condition worsens. She needs X-rays, MRIs. The memory-care unit can no longer attend to her. She returns to the nursing facility, the setting for a horror movie more frightening than anything Hollywood can dream up. A Hollywood drama is finished in a couple of hours, but finishing off a human being can take much longer than that. In Má's case, thirteen years of slow erosion, a death inflicted cell by cell on her body and mind.

Ba calls for a priest. A middle-aged one with graying hair soon arrives in his black uniform with its white collar. He stands over Má's bed to bestow last rites, delivers the words in Vietnamese. I don't understand the words. Má doesn't open her eyes.

The rites are done in a few seconds, the priest present for a few minutes. I expect solemnity from the Vietnamese holy man, a pat on the shoulder for Ba, but the man offers no words of care, not even pretending to share in the sorrow of my father. The priest could have been washing dishes for all the feeling he exhibits as he makes the sign of the cross.

Father. Son. Holy Ghost.

Ba. Me. And this—

memory, history, memorial—

this spectral thing I was already thinking of asMá lay dying, my art the closest I come to thespiritual. Or