The Real Writer in the Family

My wife just started her own open book blog:

In Vietnam I was too busy to care what I wore. In one photograph on the banks of a waterway, I am three and sit with my brother Chuong on a bench, my feet in the air. I am nearly falling off with laughter. In New Year’s pictures from each year of my toddler-hood I am posed in my Tet outfit, custom sewn to match those of one set of girl cousins or another – red polyester with blue polka-dotted patch pockets and sleeves one year, yellow pantsuit another year with large white daisy appliques. But I am turning my head this way or that, looking at something besides the camera, smiling or laughing.I run everywhere, oblivious to the care my mother had taken to stock my wardrobe with the most expensive dresses and shoes. As soon as school dismissed, I leap out of uniform and into loose and cottony house clothes, the cheap ones that we slept in. They are light on my limbs as I run. I run to my best friend Chau’s, house, down to the intersection and after a left turn. Without anything to alert her, Chau’s mother is waiting there in their foyer, cheerfully calling out my name and greeting me with a chair to sit in while she readies a basin and washes my feet, dusty and hot from the journey. I run across the road to the neighbor’s gate. They are richer and their house is set back much farther from the road. I climb the fence to reach the fruits growing in their yard and don’t get caught or yelled at every time. I run out our gate and in the opposite direction, away from the intersection, and the world grows gradually more exotic. The houses change to store fronts – convenience stores and lunch places where customers squat on small plastic chairs, palm readers, a pharmacy and an herbal shop, stores with unfamiliar meats hanging in the door frame – and the walkable street narrows and becomes dense with beggars – a blind man, a cripple, a leper with only one eye visible, and a man sitting with a long pipe and glazed eyes, old people with black teeth from the betel they chew and spit out. I smell steaming meat broth and incense and the faint stench of garbage, all marbled together. I run until I can’t hear the Vietnamese of my parents anymore, but only the syrupy, guttural drawl of Southern accents. The street people call to me, reaching out gingerly with gnarled fingers. There I would stop and wait for the moment when fascination just begins to turn to palpitations. And then I run home. My brothers are there waiting for me. Had they been watching? It would be a couple hours before my father came home, and more before my mother did.

This is a big deal for us, especially her of course. Some months after we fell in love, now almost a quarter-century ago, Mai needed to tell me something. She often daydreamed, except it was more serious than daydreaming. She had characters in her head about whom she wove elaborate scenarios. Only within the last five years did a psychologist label it: dissociation. It's a creative defense strategy against trauma, I kind of compartmentalization. One source of the trauma in her case was the challenge of growing up in an immigrant-refugee family.Mai began writing "chapterlets" a couple of years ago between jobs. Taking a cue from me, she's now posting them in draft online, with an eye toward a book. I lack all objectivity, but to me they are powerful, like poetic prose.

“What did your parents tell you about the war?” Blue asked.I looked at him blankly.“You saw a soldier in the alley. You broke curfew,” he nudged.“But then he took me home and everything was fine,” I said. I didn’t understand what he wanted.“What did you think the helicopters were doing overhead? Did you hear reports about the fighting on television?” he pressed.I shook my head. I was sure I had not. They did not teach about current events or history in first grade, and neither did my parents.

I helped her set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account linked to the blog.Tell her what you think.