What We Are Left With
Doua Thao
Our grandmother finally left us by not waking up in that pulled-shut privacy of her room. “I’m motherless now,” Mother said when she called from Wisconsin. “I’m now an orphan.”
It was early Saturday morning, and I was attending graduate school in North Carolina at the time. As I write this, I’m surprised I even picked up the call at all. “Oh,” I uttered, suddenly stumped for a reply. You’re 50 years old, I thought. We were not the type to say I’m sorry or offer condolences to our own. The appropriate response would have been for me to break down, become vulnerable, and acknowledge the finality of death with tears. Though what is left to say when you suddenly realize, if the world follows the pattern of fairness, you will one day be an orphan as well? “Oh” was the one consoling word I could offer.
Mother told me she’d get back to me when a date was set for the funeral. That was the entirety of the call.
Back then, I was struggling to discover what it would take to become a writer, trying to find a routine, mustering the discipline to work on the craft every day, striking a balance between the work of production, the actual writing, and the behind-the-scenes work of reading. I was a few pages into “My Antonia.” To put Grandmother off my mind, I read the day away. I was, however, ill-prepared for the emotional might of the book. By the end, I was left with an ambiguous, but oppressive, feeling, one that, though indescribable, could only be accurately defined by saying it was palpable. I could feel it. The unexpected feelings of helplessness? of loss? of mourning? completely leveled me. In this state, I was mired for the entire weekend, the shades to my apartment unpulled—never mind that one of the factors of my choosing to move to North Carolina was the number of sunny days—neglecting my absolutely necessary daily run, my weekly grocery trip during which I would gather provisions for the things that would sustain me for the upcoming week. Like the characters in the book who yearn for a past they could not return to—distance often affording us an idealized version of that past—I found myself yearning for a place that would allow me to recoup time lost with a normal grandmother. The best days are first to flee, the epigraph to the book says; it’s just as true and more despairing that those days could never be recaptured. What we are left with seems to be what shapes us. So even as I was consciously aware that these feelings were not for what I’d learned that day from Mother, I pretended they were, at least I could claim to have mourned for Grandmother on the day of her passing.
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Mother said Grandmother’s mother, Greatgram, came to a river with a wicker-basket full of chickens. Suppose Greatgram, like most Hmong women, was small of frame and slight from malnutrition, and suppose that the basket weighed twenty pounds. Add the fact that women, as the primary caretaker of children and doer of all things domestic, never frolicked in water long enough to learn how to swim, and you can imagine how Greatgram was confounded by the question of how to cross the river.
Along came two men to the same crossing. They offered their help, said they would take her basket of chickens first, with their own load, and be back for her on the second crossing. But while the men were halfway across the river—might it have been something in their voices or perhaps an over-the-shoulder glance by one of the men—Greatgram, an orphan whose marriage prospects were so low she willingly became someone’s Small Wife, leapt into the river after them, her feet searching for bottom, her light frame whisked away by the current, her body of hollow bird bones nothingness in that water. Grandmother was an orphan.
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Months after Grandmother’s funeral, I admitted to my siblings that I’d yet to mourn her death. There’s no welling of grief, I explained. And it wasn’t due to an emptiness of feeling. What I did not share was that I wanted to mourn Grandmother’s passing.
“Why”? asked my middle sister. “What happened?”
“Something I can’t forgive her for.”
“Oh that,” my brother said. I’d believed my comment was vague enough to be innocuous, that no one would catch my reference because I didn’t want to voice those exact words from the past. “You must forgive her.”
“You have to,” said the oldest of my sisters. “You know how she was.”
I understood, then, I was not the only one who had stored away this memory all these years. But how have they been able to move on, to mourn the loss of Grandmother, and I’m left wondering if the day might come when I could do so? Part of me knew that I didn’t know Grandmother’s history well. At one time, we were separated by physical distance, separated by age, then separated by the incident that, thereafter, shadowed my every interaction with her. And as my sister said, even if I didn’t quite know who Grandmother was, a part of me did indeed know how she was.
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Grandmother was born into a family of shamans, which significantly increased the odds she would be called to be a shaman herself someday. To be called, one would have to fall sick. To heal, that person would apprentice under an established shaman to learn the rituals—the incantations, the movements and laws of the spiritual world, the timing of the drums and gongs. The transition was a complete commitment, physically and spiritually. Eventually, the sickness did call for her, this fall her inheritance, and the believers buoyed her up because she was needed, shamans being the spiritual leaders of the community.
One way to ward off becoming a shaman and the attendant fall to sickness is a conversion to Christianity, or so my parents and other converts believe. The call to become a shaman was a spiritual one, so an exchange of beliefs would unbind you from that obligation. Grandmother, as a vassal to her only living son, underwent this conversion when Uncle converted to Christianity. How could Uncle refuse when his sisters and many of his male first cousins, his clan brothers, were already converts? While Uncle was slowly coaxed away from shamanism, Grandmother was dragged along by the shackles on her wrists; while the progression to Christianity for Uncle might’ve been a gradual process, Grandmother was a believer of the old religion one day and a Christian the next. If Grandmother’s life wasn’t already upended by becoming an orphan early in her life, or by becoming stigmatized by her divorce and unwillingness to accept being Big Wife to Grandfather, or by being displaced by the war, or by losing her youngest son, or by leaving her home country—if all of that had not upended her life, the arbitrary conversion to Christianity severed her completely from the spiritual and cultural community she had known. Of the new religion, she became a follower.
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I wonder about Greatgram’s death sometimes: was it a struggle as she drifted down the river, her tiny frame pushing off the bottom, her head breaking the surface for every last gasp? Her hands flailing for solid purchase on something as elusive as water, more illusory than air, there for the eye to see but really not there to grab hold of. Or did her arms reach out one quick time when she realized she was going under and then, taking a breath full of water, accepted her fate, nws txoj hmoo, swallowed by the seamless surface? At 38, part of me still naively clings to the worldview of justice prevailing, so the thought that she might have suffered troubles me. A quick and easy death meant mercy—that she’d tried to live a good life, that some higher power had witnessed her efforts and forgiven her shortcomings. A frightful death, full of terror, was this world’s way of leaving one last painful impression on her as she ventured into that next world, that fear a punishment for a life lived immorally, perhaps, or lived unaware of anyone else’s pain.
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Grandmother and Grandfather didn’t have a great marriage. They were verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive to one another. Mother said they both came to be addicted to opium because of aches in their bodies, those lingering hurt first got from working the rice fields and gardens with their parents when they were young that later calcified into pockets of arthritis, patiently waiting to become painful again with a change in weather. Occasionally, they fought over whose opium was left, who would get the last smoke. Mother scoffs when telling this memory of hers as a little girl, and laughs at the absurdity of it, to think, I assume, that now she is herself a grown woman with a family and could never imagine herself doing such a thing.
Life in the US had grown Grandmother round in the midsection, causing her to hold her shoulders back, one slightly lower than the other, to help balance the weight, a runway model’s pose. Or so I thought until I came across a picture of her in the refugee camp. I asked Mother why Grandmother always seems to pose for pictures this way. I demonstrated the way Grandmother forever stands in my memory, the model’s pose at the end of the runway.
“Does she?” Mother wondered.
I had thought Grandmother’s stance was due to the weight she’d gained, but this new photograph was telling me otherwise. Undernourished and thin, she had the same posture. “Did she suffer some shoulder or back injury?”
Mother said she didn’t know, but after a few moment’s thought, she told the story of when Grandmother and Grandfather were having one of their fights, and in Grandfather’s anger, because Grandmother was getting the better of him, he reached for a four-feet long stick, maybe 4 inches in diameter, and brought it crashing down on her shoulder. Mother said that day she, the youngest of the daughters, truly thought one of them was going to kill the other.
I harbor no belief my grandparents married because of love. But suppose they did, suppose in their intimate moments they ua niam txiv (become wife and husband), or sib hlub (to love), and suppose that over time their love regressed into the convenient realms of sib tsoob or sib txiag (to have sex), and then their touch thereafter was only in awkward moments of sib deev or sib aim (used to describe animals, particularly dogs), and suppose that their private interactions, later, came to consist only of those moments when Grandfather pulled trump, his male privilege card, and mos Grandmother. Supposing their love soured to the point where Grandfather brought a stick down upon Grandmother’s shoulder, and you’d have a complete perversion of the notion of romantic marriage.
In the photos I’ve revisited, there’s only one where Grandmother has anything remotely reminiscent of a smile on her face. In the picture, she is sitting down and seems to be talking, cooing at a new grandchild, caught completely off guard by the photographer. I wonder if the baby’s face has taken Grandmother to a time before, when her youngest child, the dead son, could still fit in her arms.
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To flee the earthquakes of Northern California, Uncle and Aunt X migrated to join my family in Wisconsin in the early 90s. The first tale I heard from my cousins, while we were moving their belongings into the flat above ours, involved Grandmother and a lady in their apartment complex. In the tight corridor of their building, convinced the lady was the devil, Grandmother had clawed the lady’s face in a scuffle. Blood was everywhere, my cousins gushed, a little too prideful. Grandmother’s nails were pointed and thick with age, gnarled. The oldest of my cousins, who was 16 at the time, said the lady had long been verbally abusive to the Asians living in the apartment. The law must’ve deemed it self-defense because there were no legal repercussions from the altercation. Until it happened, not one of the cousins thought this type of reaction was possible from Grandmother, but now, I am almost certain that while she was clawing the lady’s face, Grandmother’s tone changed. Niag tsov tom maum dev, I could imagine Grandmother saying. Ntsej muag khaus pim no mas, I know she was saying, her voice different, the words not her own.
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In her later years, Grandmother’s outings were restricted to infrequent medical appointments. Before that, though, our parents allowed her to walk around the neighborhood or two blocks over to the grocery store if at least one of us accompanied her.
“Where is the cough medicine?” she’d ask.
We’d lead her by the hand to the health and personal care section of the store.
“These are.” She’d look at the bottles, consider their prices, then return them to their shelves. At home, bottles of rubbing alcohol filled her trash. We were then forbidden to show her where the cough medicines were located the next time to the store, or if we were afraid of that voice of Grandmother’s that rose to chastise us, we stealthily shelved the alcohol bottles as we wandered the aisles.
Once, while we were crossing an intersection on our return from the store, Grandmother abruptly halted and broke free of my side to retrieve a stone in the middle of the road. “The stone was calling to me, ‘Pick me up, hold me, don’t leave me.’” She deposited the stone in her purse. The drivers didn’t honk their horns, but surely they grew impatient behind their windshields. I was ten and old enough to be ashamed of her. Then we were not allowed to take her out anymore, much to our relief.
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Until Uncle took her in permanently, Grandmother bounced between the homes of her children in Milwaukee—Uncle, Aunt X, and Mother. Not one of her children had the patience to live more than a year with her. Grandmother lived with her bags packed. Once, when she had gone out with Mother and Father, my brothers and I stole into her room and ransacked it, eyes peering into her bags, hands digging into the pockets of her clothes. In nooks and zippered sides, we found rocks, marbles, blackened silver coins that carried sickness. The marbles frightened us for they were not bought. Each was collected, found somewhere along the road of her life. They were an appealing array of colors when poured out onto her bed, reminded me of my own collection when my friends and I used to shoot marbles for keeps. But Grandmother’s were different: she addressed each in the language of lovers, a conspiratorial whisper, sharp and urgent, a new voice to us, before bed every night. There was nothing to be had between the mattresses, nor did we find much in the way of money; we pocketed some change, despite the memory of our own mother, when sick, taking a few dollars’ worth of coins, rubbing them against her body to curse them with her sickness, and casting them outside for some unlucky person to inherit.
We erroneously believed Grandmother would never sense anything amiss when she returned. But the contents of her bags were folded and settled like her memory, and we had ruffled it out of place, out of sequence. We didn’t fully understand then that the way things settled and fit together, the folding and crimping necessary to accommodate others were something only time could do. And there was no way for us to break into that fourth dimension to undo what we’d done or to quicken the settling of Grandmother’s things—her marriage suit, clan clothes, and gifts of garments from her children and grandchildren she never wore. Upon discovery of her misplaced things, her wrath frightened us, yet we persisted in denying it. I believe she would’ve killed us if my parents were not there to act as a buffer against her accusations. Her invectives were weighted with the same tone as the words she spat when she fought the lady in the apartment corridor. Her rage caused her to heave as if hurling her words at us were too strenuous a task. To put her mind at ease, Mother suggested the burning oil test to prove our honesty, to frighten us into admission; she gave us a deadline of noon the next day.
And what were we after, going through Grandmother’s possessions? Money, surely, but not so much that it would’ve raised suspicion. A few bucks for a couple of trips to the corner store, perhaps. Still, why go through her things? Other motives escape me now. But it probably isn’t a stretch to suggest what we were seeking was a peek into her mind, into her past, into those sacks she kept packed and took everywhere she went, to learn something of the forbidden and the treasured. What surprises me most, in hindsight, is how, under the pressure of sticking our hands in burning oil, we did not crack. I remember discussions of admission and of probable consequences, but somehow my brothers and I held firm, perhaps by the sure will of not wanting to disappoint the others. This was the lot we had entered—us against Grandmother.
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Live long enough and the world reveals fewer surprises. What we might think as unimaginable is the norm for others. Grandmother’s romantic overtures were not saved solely for the evening with her marbles. She often stood in front of the television, cursing at the images, and slammed her wrists together, the bangles she wore clashing as if blades of swords were striking each other. Ex-boyfriends, she explained, and she begged them to make love to her.
Once, in the thrall of another pitiful supplication, an eight-year-old of us confronted Grandmother. We had heard enough. The next minute, she had all eight-years-old of us pinned down on the floor, our legs bent over our heads to bear her weight, her fists pounding our faces because we’d dared to switch the channel on the television to quiet her. That a grandmother would assault her grandchildren in such a manner is not the unimaginable, at least not to us. When Grandmother stood up, satisfied she’d given us enough of her fists, we gave her some quick shots of upkicks, catching her stomach, her face, for all those times she chased us around the yard, a stick in hand, her tone a curse, saying: Ua cas koj pheej caum kuv mos? Tsovtom koj xav mos kuv lod? But she was old and slow. Why are you trying to rape me? An incantation that echoed in our ears. As we are chased, we are amused at first—not that it’s funny—then we grow ashamed, then mad, then spiteful. This spite torqued our upkicks.
Enraged, Grandmother redoubled pummeling us. To be clear, this happened only once, and it is not to protect this person that I’m withholding identification; it is the case, however, that when those upkicks caught Grandmother, everyone who witnessed this, who grew up with our grandmother, wanted these kicks to be our own, wanted those heels sinking into the flesh of her belly to be connected to our legs and from there to our heads, to relish the knowledge that it was indeed I who caused her pain, and then to our hearts to offer some sort of recompense for the slight that life had offered us such a grandmother. Had we done something wrong and Grandmother’s hands had occasion to land on us as discipline, we would’ve accepted that as just punishment. Later, when we recall the events to our parents, we tell them peb sib txeeb TV saib xwb, just a row over control of the television. We don’t mention how we’d grown weary of Grandmother’s behavior, nothing about the beating we took nor our kicks. Nothing about the burden of her great weight we could no longer bear. Ua cas koj pheej caum kuv mos? This was our norm.
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Lilac or yellow skies were signs directing Grandmother to return to Laos to search for her brother; a clean escape, however, eluded her. Grandmother apologized incessantly to him, her voice like a young girl’s—sorry sorry sorry—in a tone we didn’t recognize. The curses, she reserved for us: Cov ntsej muag dev no raws raws kuv li, xyov puas yuav caum tau koj mus os. We are dogfaces and watched as any attentive dog would because, instead of grabbing her bags and making a break for it, Grandmother would oftentimes be talked out of her clothes and lead outside by someone or something. Among us, whoever came upon Grandmother first would scream out another of our sibling’s name—T, koj thib lawm or Y thib—and it was that person’s duty to go coax her to come back inside the house, battling both Grandmother and the invisible speaker in her ear, oftentimes nothing prevailing except for a firm hold on the wrist and an insistent tug.
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To keep the evil spirits at bay, Grandmother started smudging a mixture of her bodily waste and chili pepper in a pot. The thought of an evil spirit possessing any part of her caused her great anxiety. She was already in the habit of collecting each strand of loose hair after brushing and burning them at the stove, the smell of which we overlooked. But the smudging of this new concoction left the house with an intolerably pungent stink that lingered for days—imagine breathing the sour exhaust of moldy ozone from an air conditioner, except the acridness is ten times sharper. Our parents confronted Grandmother with whys, what-fors, don’t you know you’ll burn the house down? Grandmother became more unpredictable, avoided us, and took to sneaking out of her room during the night to continue her burning, which was always followed by the slamming of her heels on the floor. Her stomps awakened us before the smell invaded our throats and noses like waves of hot ashes. Our parents screamed at us to open windows, the burned pot tossed through one of them outside, and by this time, Grandmother would have retreated to her room and locked her door, cursing and jumping at intervals to warn whoever had come for her to take note of how she was not going to submit willingly. We yearned for sleep standing watch at the opened windows. Sometimes this happened in winter.
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Will she cook her concoction tonight, we wondered as we prepared for sleep. Occasionally, instead of the slamming of her heels, we would hear Grandmother on her Jews harp twanging her lonesome desires into the night. The harp, a relic of the old country, is used by courting lovers to disguise their words by distorting the words’ sharp edges without changing their tones. On the other side of Grandmother’s door—which was our side—was a suitor. After an overture on the harp, she gathered by the door and spoke to her lover. Grandmother dispensed with art, had no need for innuendos. We were ashamed and embarrassed by her words, her thoughts, the most intimate stirrings of Grandmother’s heart—an honesty for which we were ill-prepared.
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If you think our eight-year-old actions earlier are reprehensible, what do you make of our fathers’? Grandmother had previously been caught squeezing dish soap into a pot of leftovers on the stove and now was caught in the act of smudging her mixture by our fathers. Words were exchanged. Grandmother scurried to her room, but our fathers were not finished speaking their piece. A foot is set against the door, blocked it from closing. In the next instant, Grandmother flung the door open, the space between them lessening, and our fathers’ foot finds Grandmother’s stomach, but she managed to catch it, hold on to it. The foot was worked loose, and the second thrust of the foot connected. Grandmother was thrown back into her full-length mirror, shattering it. What are our fathers supposed to do but intervene to banish any threat to their children? Again, this foot was all of our foot; we shared in its frustration. We gladly owned that foot the moment after the mirror shatters, the shards of ourselves revealed to us, our images thrown back at us as permanently cracked pieces.
Grandmother was led away by the cops. When we followed her to the psychiatric hospital, through the square window in the door, we saw the padded room and Grandmother in a straitjacket. That woman is our grandmother. Here was one of the few moments in which our hearts break: we know we cannot reach her.
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Grandmother said she was put into a huge tube. The nurses said she was very cooperative, such a gentle lady, though Grandmother didn’t know a word of English unless you count president and bush, and we wondered if the nurses were compensated for saying such pleasant things, or if Grandmother was an entirely different person with other people. The images showed a dark spot in her brain, a tumor, or scarring, a dead spot. Almond-sized, the doctor said, not big enough to risk removing it, nor did it look to be growing, which was just as well, because no one would’ve asked Grandmother what she would prefer to do. Her own mind, yet we believed we knew what was best, and under no condition was anyone cutting her open. No one would get to see what was inside her head. The doctor prescribed some medication Grandmother never willingly took before she was released to us.
At home, the decision was made to allow Grandmother to live by herself, an attempt to placate her into obedience. We sectioned off an area of our house for her. We sealed the door to the kitchen with plywood, drilled the floor for a drainpipe, and tapped the waterlines for the toilet. Only after the paint had dried would we wonder, What if she burns the house down? What if she lets the gas run on the stove? The smell of her concoction, nevertheless, seeped through the walls, the heating vents; her heel strikes continued to shake the house. The walls we had put up failed to shield us from our grandmother.
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We went from humoring Grandmother to accommodating her to apologizing for her. Our parents were quick to discourage guests from visiting, but occasionally these attempts failed—withheld invitations were impolite when the guests were out-of-towners or relatives. Introductions took on a routine: our mothers would precede Grandmother into the room, saying, “This is my mom,” and, before Grandmother could get a word in, telling the guests that Grandmother’s clock is off or her mind has gone. Puas xuab moom or xiam hlwb were the words they used. Don’t think anything of it, they’d say next, apologizing beforehand to preempt any imminent offense the guests might take. Hosting meant steeling ourselves and wondering if we’ll regret things later, or if our guests will regret visiting. We would rather discover Grandmother traipsing around in the yard naked, we were certain, and have to go retrieve her than have guests over and suffer the calamity that was sure to follow, a social humiliation such as—here, I offer a tame example—when Grandmother asked a middle-aged couple if they still slept together as husband and wife. In these moments, we hope our guests understood why our mothers had apologized to them beforehand. Beforehand, we prayed an apology was enough.
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Mother’s urgent voice followed the loud knocks on my door. Grandmother had blacked out and fallen down the stairs. She was being rushed to the emergency room, and I needed to follow to translate at the hospital. From my side of the door, I yelled that they should find their own translator. Obviously, if Grandmother had fallen down the stairs, someone allowed it to happen. Aunt X’s voice was next, her voice imploring in a way that I could see her genuflected in front of my door. I’m never good at denying others, but that pain that can’t be healed, those words, compelled me to say, “No.” I told her I can’t, matching her tone. I don’t elaborate, simply just that I can’t.
Grandmother’s condition had begun to strain the relationships of her children. Each had an idea of what was best for her, which of her conditions needed to be treated and how they should be treated, her mental health suddenly taking a backseat to the diabetes and hypertension brought on by her inactivity and affinity for fried pork chops. Aunt X and Uncle spoke only through Mother. I saw how it was stressing her, required now to be the in-between. Because she could never say to either sibling with confidence, “I believe we should do this”, whatever she confided to us, her children, I felt, was inconsequential, especially since she remained indecisive and neutral. This frustrated me. If only she would share her opinion regarding what she believed was best for Grandmother, maybe that might sway the entire situation and lead to a concerted effort to treat Grandmother’s ailments. Any decision was better than no decision. My reaction to Mother, then, was to shut her out. And as Mother and Aunt X headed to the hospital, I knew I was wrong to deny them, knowing their favorite items on the Burger King menu are Big Macs and McChickens.
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I asked a cousin who’s an interpreter for Hmong patients at local hospitals how she translates cancer. “Yog cancer xwb mas,” as though cancer itself was not only a universal disease but also known by a universal name. It’s just cancer.
Where, then, do we begin to explain to our parents the list of things Grandmother might be suffering from? In a landscape barren of direct translation, where no exact word exists for us to use and for them to understand, our strategies would involve breaking Grandmother’s ailments down into their most basic forms, identifying other analogous bodily processes, and relating them to recognizable patterns to facilitate our parents’ understanding, a conscious perversion of what exists to explain what is, which is to say only to effect more confusion.
Take cancer: a disease that occurs at the cellular level. The body is made up of cells. Cells are little tiny things that make up the body. Our flesh is made of cells. No, not little moving things like insects. But they’re moving, the body is constantly undergoing processes—at the cellular level. Anyway, cells replicate and replace news cells over time. When this happens without a hitch, all is fine with the body. Everything is “normal” and “healthy.” Without a hitch? But cells can sometimes “go bad.” It goes bad because the genes of the cells go bad. The gene tells the cell what to be, or how to behave. A gene is like the brain of the cell. A bad gene tells the cell to act differently from how it’s expected to behave. Draw it for you? Double helix? A circle? And where would I place the brain, this gene, at the head of the twisted helix or inside the circle? Nevermind. When many cells are piled together, they make up our flesh, Ma. Ugh. Anyway, different factors, I mean, different things, may cause the cell to change—radiation, smoking, or exposure to chemicals. And sometimes, it is inherited—what is it? the way a cell can go bad—which means, Mother, that you could’ve gotten it from your parents, and Grandmother could’ve have gotten it from her parents. Cells changing, or flesh changing—it’s like when a mosquito bites you and your skin welts up. Cancer bites you, changes you, and stays in your body until you cut it out or you kill it with chemicals. Cancer bites you? No, I am talking about how something can change from good to bad.
I remember days when Mother sat by the window, a sibling either in her lap or always close by. Her compact opened, she would express the blackheads on her forehead and cheeks, or she’d cross-stitch by the light of the sun. Mother was never going to win any awards for her needlework, nor would she ever find a paying customer. Her needlework was flat, lacked depth and dimension—a flower petal which might require 60 stitches to capture its full curvature and tip was completed with only four stitches, a diamond. Minus all the life-suggesting curves found in the needlework of others, hers seemed to suggest, in the case of the lengthier rise and rapid fall of her petal pattern, life was nothing but a laborious incline and a sharp decline. Her attention always seemed elsewhere on those days, her mind visiting a memory or perhaps imagining what more there could be to life other than being a wife and mother. If you’re quiet, she might speak of her past, her voice hovering at that distance where it doesn’t seem to be addressing you, as though you weren’t there, or not within earshot, or, even if you were being spoken to, there was nothing you could do to help her. Dreaming distance, where time melds and past, present, and future are alive. The same timeless place where Grandmother lived. She arrived in the US when the first President Bush was in office, and he remained forever her president. Every complaint and appeal was made to him until she passed away in 2013, the heels of her hands and bangles on her wrist banging against one another as she praised him, or cursed him, or called him her boyfriend whenever a likeness of him appeared on television.
Recently, my sister shared she believes Mother suffers from depression. Of course, I already knew. I was with her when—after an increasing list of ailments in her 40s, ailments I didn’t believe she had—she saw a specialist who prescribed for her antidepressants. Depression, I’d tried to explain, occurs when there’s a chemical imbalance in your brain. Chemical in your brain? An imbalance of those chemicals? And what about genes? I took a different tack, told her she was sometimes sad. It’s sometimes dark in your life, right? Not night darkness, more like hopeless darkness. I explained the moods associated with depression and brought up past moments when I thought she’d exhibited symptoms of depression.
Mother brushed aside all my explanations. She had been referred to the specialist after experiencing crawling sensations throughout her body, which kept her from getting any sleep. She was perpetually kho siab, ntxhov siab, and nyuaj siab about a lot of stuff, which also kept her from getting any sleep. She objected to every explanation I gave and every translation I relayed from the doctor because she could trace every feeling back to a source. Mother’s nephew and his family were finally allowed to immigrate to the US and she had agreed to take them in until they could get on their feet, so she was stressed about finances. The Great Recession had reduced the production level at my father’s factory to a trickle—he was the only one not laid off, allowed to stay on to keep the warehouse clean. Mother’s arthritic shoulder gave her no relief, to work, to do anything, to lie on to get some needed sleep. She even traced some of her stress and mood changes back to her mother, my grandmother.
The pills left Mother with a foggy mind, slowed her reaction. She could see herself moving, she said. The mind telling the body to move and, having already moved on to the next command, watching the body slowly catch up. It exhausted her, more so because she’d been going without normal rest. And when she did slide into sleep, a spirit was always upon her, smothering her. Dab los tsuam kuv os, she yelled when she came to; sleep paralysis, a doctor would’ve told her. After a week, she stopped taking the medicine, the bottle tossed into one of the two grocery-bags full of drugs that hung in her closet. Mother’s ailments, I shared with my siblings, seeing those grocery bags fill up, were entirely conjured as a way to get one of us to return home and accompany her to the doctors. Every bottle she added to the bags was the same weight she threw behind the power of prayer.
Our parents don’t believe in such a thing as mental health. They would sooner clear out the basement to make room for nonperishable foods and water for Y2K, poke around the attic for extra storage spaces for the Mayan end time of 2012, and speak in tongues than give the health of the mind a second thought. So long as you have the necessities—food, water, clothing, shelter—what’s left to worry about? Without the precise words to define our illnesses, it makes it easier to deny their existence and allows our parents, Mother, particularly, to say, always with finality, that there’s nothing to talk about. In this condition of want, then, there are no words to say I am hurting and I don’t know how to help myself.
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During Grandmother’s stay at the hospital, Grandfather’s brother from Minnesota visited and popped in on her. Her face lit up and then froze in recognition. “Koj tseem tuaj txog dabtsi ntawm koj thiab nas? Kuv twb xav tias koj tuag lawm ne,” she said. Translated literally, What are you doing here? I thought you were dead already. But that translation doesn’t quite capture her tone, her shock at seeing Grandfather’s supposedly dead brother; it doesn’t explain why everyone in the room, upon registering Grandmother’s words, exploded in rude laughter. Even Grandfather’s brother chuckled at her words, wondering if Grandmother had lost her mind by asking of him, put differently, “How have you shown up here? I thought you were dead!” But even that translation is lacking. A more accurate translation is this: What the fuck are you doing here? Aren’t you dead? That fuck contained so much. That fuck was in the tenor of Grandmother’s words—the surprise, the shock—even when it was not literally translated; it was the source of our laughter. And then sometimes fuck was in her words, as when she explained why my nine-year-old sister, who had just returned home from grocery shopping with my parents and whose bag of snacks was snatched away by my brother, was weeping inconsolably by the back door: Nkawv sib txeeb nws txiag. Xais nim qhuav txiag tas, es Nruas hais tias yog nws thib lawm.
Txiag kuv, Grandmother had said to her old boyfriends on television.
Cas koj pheej caum kuv mos? she’d asked while chasing us in the yard with a stick.
Los txiag kuv, she’d whispered against her door in the dark.
Deev kuv, she said to her marbles.
How long had Grandfather’s brother been dead to Grandmother? When and where had she heard of his death? Had Grandmother’s sickness left her temporally destitute? Were her present actions a reliving of experiences that occurred before her sickness? What, then, do I make of the adage that time heals all wounds? If time was all the same to Grandmother, if her mind was stuck there, if that was part of her sickness, then the passing of time was denied her, and memory was long, was forever on loop, frozen within her. Would it be correct to assume Grandmother was never given the chance to heal? In this light, if the reverse were true, had time been allowed to pass, had Grandmother been given the chance to look back and reflect, had some unfair perversion of the mind not afflicted her, she might’ve actually said, Rov los hlub kuv, to her marbles, keepsakes from someone special, her mother, say, or the items her youngest son most loved to play with.
Or Los hlub kuv, she might’ve said in the dark, words that hark back to a night when a favored suitor was courting her between bamboo-slatted walls.
Or Caum tau kuv no, txhob tso kuv, Grandmother said, running, her arms empty, as someone was playfully chasing her, as a child with a watchful mother is chased in the courtyard by a friend.
Or Koj puas tseem hlub kuv? Grandmother wondered, looking at a picture of someone from her past.
Or “They’re deciding who gets to love me,” she might’ve actually said, in explanation to her father, who has come upon his crying daughter and two potential suitors standing by her family door, “and Youa is saying it’s his rightful turn.”
You brood too damn much, my siblings say, but I’m a writer, I tell them. I can’t help it. And this is why I keep thinking about the two men who came upon Greatgram. How they chased her down the river to try to pull her out. How chicken dinner was the last thing on their minds when they made that first crossing. Tais, wb pab koj os, they would’ve said, using an honorific, being from the same village or even distantly related. If their motives were pure, then that day must’ve been a particularly cloudy day, with threats of rain, and humid, though the day was long out of monsoon season, and perhaps the weight of the day, of the weather not permitting the accomplishment of something—anything—productive again had drawn Greatgram to the water. Is this why Greatgram left Grandmother an orphan?
That is the rarest of discoveries, needing to know enough of someone else’s motive, Greatgram’s, to then, finally, start to understand your own.
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My sister had suggested I not judge Grandmother too harshly, considering the way she was. And how was she? Did she have schizophrenia, bipolar or dissociative identity disorder? Was her behavior symptomatic of dementia? Lately, I’ve read of post-traumatic onset schizophrenia. But which traumatic event might have brought it on? The loss of her mother? The tragedies of war and migration? The death of her youngest son? Could it have been her tumor? Brain tumors and lesions, I have since learned, can alter the personalities and behaviors of individuals to such a degree that they bear no resemblance to their former selves. If this were the case, when did Grandma’s tumor started growing, when did her behavior start to change? Mother can’t recall when Grandmother’s behavior was ever different. She didn’t have an easy childhood, Mother said. She’s always been temperamental. Gentle as any mother one minute and then full of ire for you the next. Mother guesses that’s how all mothers are. And what of Grandmother’s opium use? Mother said her earliest memories of Grandmother using opium was when Mother was five. If she was using before that, Mother can’t recall. It could’ve been not long after Grandmother became an orphan.
This is the last scene of Grandmother I leave you with. The snow started late Christmas Eve. Four inches became eight inches two hours later. On Christmas day, when someone checked in on Grandmother, the outside door to her blocked-off apartment was ajar. Footprints in the snow on the porch lead away from her door, down the stoop, and were quickly disappearing under at least ten inches of snow. As if those steps on the porch then the stoop were a reminder that someone had once been in our home and the heavy snow was making sure there would be no record of her passing. We called 911. Our parents got in their vehicles and circled the blocks. She couldn’t have gotten far, we were sure. We guarded against imagining the worst. An hour later, we received a call. She’d been picked up by a police officer. An old lady on snowy Christmas, the officer explained, he thought that was odd. She came right into the cruiser when he pulled up to her. Where was she? we asked. The officer gave us the intersection, and we realized that was no less than six miles away, and in this weather! Damn, Grandmother made good time, perhaps a vestigial skill from her days of fleeing the communists. After she was brought home, we started wondering where in this blizzard, into the cold, with little more than cloth shoes on her feet, was she running to? Any justification, any explanation, any answer as to where she was going would’ve been an opportunity for us to attempt to understand her before shrugging it off as Grandmother being Grandmother. In our excited chatter at her return, of the questions we asked of each other—Where do you think she was going? Why do you think she did it?—no one had considered what she was running from.
Doua Thao lives in Old Xiengkhouang, where he is currently working on a novel. His stories have appeared in Fiction and Crab Orchard Review.