I struggle now with the idea that those days could’ve lasted much longer, perhaps even forever. That’s the naive and sometimes dangerous urge in all our memories. What might have been is a vast and depthless ocean that surrounds the tiny island of what actually happened, what was actually possible. You can either die of thirst on that island or wade out into all that endless water.
When I became pregnant with you, just a few months into this life with your father, it was as though I had uncovered a startling secret about myself. It should have felt natural, invigorating, as it would for any woman, but for me it was like a sudden and incurable affliction. I had only recently been given a brand-new version of myself to walk around in, and just when I started to feel comfortable inside it, I was forced into yet another version that seemed not only alien but unbearably permanent. Once you became a reality inside me, I knew I could never go back to being anything else.
Your father, however, immediately wrote his family and went about building a new crib and a bigger dining table, and three or four times a day he playfully caressed my flat belly as though the bump was already there. Before you ever actually existed, you were already the center of his life.
His joy was brief. When I was three months pregnant with you, we moved back to Cat Lai to await the Communists. He had already decided long ago, without telling me, that he would never flee the country, that as the oldest son he would stay and bear his responsibility to the family.
On the day Saigon fell, as your father’s family and I sat in the basement with the buried gold and listened to the radio and the screaming missiles overhead, your father put his ear to my belly and, to you or to me or perhaps to himself, murmured a lullaby in the darkness,
The lights in Saigon — some green, some red.
The lights in My Tho — some bright, some dim.
Go back now to your books and learn patience.
Nine moons I shall wait for you, ten autumns I shall wait for you.
By noon that day, he was nothing more than a farmer’s son.
But the Communists knew everything. He was immediately forced to attend their weekly meetings in the town square. He had to bring his own chair and mosquito net, as well as the reeducation booklet they provided. Not once did he look afraid. You would have thought he enjoyed studying the booklet. Each time he went, I refused to say good-bye, so he started leaving me with a kiss on the cheek and these grinning words in my ear: If anything happens, I’ll kill a hundred men to get back to you.
On the night of his fifth meeting, he never came home.
That was the first time your father died. For the first two years of your life, I did not know if I should miss him, mourn him, or hope for his return. He existed in some hazy region between death and life, where thinking of him was like choosing between a memory and a ghost. What made it worse was that I could not look at you, as you began teething and walking and settling into your own personality, without also thinking of his absence for all of it, and then hating him for believing any of this was avoidable. So I tried not to think of him at all, until gradually you became a marker for when my life changed from something solid and hopeful to something as unknowable as the sea at night. Perhaps that was when I started blaming you for making me erase him from my life.
Twenty months after his disappearance, the family received a letter. He was alive. It was his handwriting but not him completely. We could tell that they had inspected every single word he wrote, all 155 of them, informing us of what we had both hoped for and dreaded all along. He had been taken to the camps, but they would not let him tell us where or when he would ever come home. Only that he was working hard and honoring his reeducation, whatever that meant. Months passed without any more letters, from him or the authorities. We were left again to imagine the worst.
Finally, at the end of that year, a second letter arrived, this time from the government. He was to be released early for undisclosed reasons.
You were three years old when he returned. He was many shades darker now, his skin leathery and his eyes sallow and dry. He had lost so much weight that he seemed both smaller and taller. What struck me hardest was his smile. I had never seen him smile weakly as if he was uncertain of his happiness, embarrassed by it.
The first time he met you, he held you for a full minute. He wept quietly into your chest, the first time I had ever seen him cry. He was a complete stranger to you, and yet you did not struggle out of his arms as you did with everyone else. You stared at him wide-eyed and with understanding, as though his tearful smile was the first genuine thing you had ever encountered in your life. That night, you slept between us, cradled in his arms.
I asked him many times what had happened in the camps. He’d only say that they worked him hard and fed him next to nothing, and that they had little mercy for slow learners. It was clear from his reticence that he had rejected his reeducation and that that had cost him much more than he was willing to share.
One night, months after his return, I awoke to him crying in bed. The second and last time I saw him cry.
You two must leave, he whispered. Things will get worse.
But I refused to consider it. Not without you, I said.
And that was when he confessed that he was sick. They had diagnosed him in the camps and told him he had a year or less to live. That’s why they had released him early. He was not strong enough to make the trip with us. He’d be a burden. He could even get us killed.
I could barely get the words out. I told him anything could get us killed, and if I were ever to leave without him, it would only be after he was gone. I’d wait until then, no matter how long it took.
He shook his head and stared at the ceiling. He could not bear the thought of his daughter seeing him die.
You must go now for her, he said. I’ll never forgive you if you stay.
Your father died three weeks after we arrived at the refugee camp. He had held on a year longer than anyone expected. I was holding your hand when I read my mother’s telegram. I crumpled it and tossed it away, saying nothing to you, and started for the beach with you in tow, and once there we continued walking along the shore, through the sand and over the rocks, past the jetty and up the tree-lined cliffs as though we were actually headed somewhere, silent the entire time as you tugged at me and said you were tired and didn’t want to walk anymore. But moving was the only thing I could do. The words could not come to my lips, for you or for myself. We walked in an hour-long circle until we came back to our hut and I fell onto the pallet and went instantly to sleep.
I sometimes forget how young your father was. He had always seemed like a much older man, someone I had to catch up to. In the end we were only together a year before he disappeared, and for one more year after he returned. I have spent so much more time missing and remembering him than I ever spent knowing him. Though how long does it take to truly know anyone? Had your father lived, had he crossed the ocean and returned to us, to me, would I still love him now?