The Brooklyn Rail

1.

My father tongue, a loud Saigon dialect, has been memorialized in home videos.

I heard it from inside the womb, tracing its staccato peaks and swerves. I heard it in his quiet ladling 
of canh, steam moistening just behind the hem of mother’s bangs.

How did it shift us, the exchange of this tongue for English, this nest in which they spoke tiếng Việt
as refuge. “Dah-na! Phải nói tiếng Anh!”

“Listen to your parents,” is one definition of how to love. In exchange, I ate very well.

Together, my father and I learned to speak watching Steven Seagal and JCVD action flicks: my legs
dangling off the bed, milk straw in my mouth, my father just beside me, sandals shifting when he got
excited.

“Hasta la vista, baby,” he sometimes said, when I emerged from homework.

 

2.

 It’s not difficult to share that I left home.

But I don’t fully believe it when I tell my therapist I now know my father wasn’t a victim, that he was
an adult who should’ve protected us from our mother. 

Wouldn’t he have if he could’ve?

Change of perspective between learned helplessness and denied helpfulness initiates a chasm, where
the brink between belonging and harm is too sheer a cliff.

Some who suffer might align themselves with their aggressor to escape limelight.

I share this not to put him on the spot, but to take my mother out of it.

Growing up, we plucked kumquats from the garden, ate them skin and all.

 

3.

One foot and then the other, his arm predicting my stumbles, beside, alongside, abreast of, when a
pediatrician prescribed roller skates for my pigeon-toed gait.

Our eyes scanning the night for eyes on a road trip to Grand Canyon. “Dah-na, take over for me,
okay?” as he pulled the car off to the side.

My story of him has been a window screen dotted with moths, never been washed, dust keeping new
dust from coming in.

I inadvertently washed my own window screen while lifting homemade paper out of pulp, my
spouse and 17-month-old dancing in the autumn leaves, twin breakfast sammies in hand.

Whenever I watch them play, this father, our daughter, I map my father, his presence-absence, spoon
ready to feed me. The small bowl warm, his eyes elsewhere.

A dutiful father like a molted shell mistaken for the living thing.

It’s important I acknowledge he kept us alive—well, two out of three of us.

 

4.

My father at his most comfortable: behind the camera’s watchful eye, zooming in, panning left, life
safe inside a viewfinder.

When the scene became a ruckus, he’d stop the tape, run over to the crying child.

Once, after I read at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, a woman spotted me in the parking lot. “Is
that your mom and dad?” she cried, and my father jumped behind a hedge.

It seems I can only talk about my family to my family, if they are hidden in the unlit audience.

 

5.

“Did you get it?” I ask my father, peering out from behind the door.
“I got it,” he says, offering me the scrunched tissue.
“Are you sure? It moves really fast.”
“I’m sure.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m your father.”
“Daddy!”
“Well, we can check the tissue . . .”
“—No, don’t!”
“Good night, Dah-na,” his singsong voice trailing as he closes my bedroom door.

As I fall asleep, in the margins of the nightlight, a black spot darts out of sight.