End Of Innocence

I used to think that twenty-​one was the per­fect age. I wished that I could be twenty-​one for­ever. But now, I’m think­ing lower… six, to be exact. Calvin’s got the per­fect life. No respon­si­bil­i­ties, no wor­ries. I don’t even mind going to school for a cou­ple of hours every day. There’s no home­work or finals. Hope­fully I won’t be cor­rupted by cuss words and such like my eight-​year-​old cousin already seems to be.

This kinda stems from my trip to Min­nesota. While it was a lot of fun, I did notice a lot more going on among the adults. It’s amaz­ing the kind of stuff they dis­cuss as the kids are run­ning around, the kids are none the wiser.

First, there was all the drama about Ong Ba Ngoai’s move, because Ba Ngoai in par­tic­u­lar is a com­pul­sive pack-​rat, and she won’t let any­one throw any­thing out. Cau Dung was telling me about how they found five gro­cery bags each with four bags of sugar buried in her pantry the first day they were pack­ing stuff up. And she re-​uses every con­tainer that comes her way, even the sty­ro­foam ones. So some of the aunts will try to talk her into throw­ing some junk away, since the new place doesn’t have as much stor­age space as the old place, but she’ll refuse, and some­times the aunts and uncles will throw it away behind her back, and then she’ll just yell at every­one for days about it.

Then, there’s the really sad story. One of the rea­sons Cau Minh moved back to Min­nesota was to be close to his mom, who had Alzheimer’s, which lately devel­oped into demen­tia. She thinks that Cau Minh’s dad isn’t really her hus­band, but some­one who killed him and took his place. So she’ll hit him all the time. (I’m talk­ing seri­ously wail on him, leav­ing big bruises and stuff.) And she tries to run away from home all the time. Since Cau Minh was clos­est to her out of all his sib­lings, he’s the only one who can still calm her down. I remem­ber one day, we were at his house wait­ing for him to come home for din­ner, but he was so late, we had to eat with­out him so the kids could go to sleep on time. He came home later and told us that he had to stop at his par­ents’ place again, and that his mom wouldn’t eat unless he cooked it and ate it with her.

And then there’s my dad’s retire­ment plan. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about it until this trip, because it sounds like he’s put a lot of thought into it already. He said that when Gio Linh gets out of col­lege, and none of us need my par­ents to be around for us any­more, he’s going to take my mom back to Viet Nam. But not to set­tle down. He wants to get a big RV and travel the whole coun­try, spend­ing about a month in each province (more in the big­ger ones) , and write a book about the cul­tural geog­ra­phy of Viet Nam. This would take him about five or six years, and after that, they would decide whether to stay in Viet Nam or come back to the States. Crazy! It sounds like an awe­some project, because no one has ever done any­thing like that before, but I’m also really scared for him at the same time.

And like I said, all of these things… dis­cussed as the kids were run­ning around. How did I not notice before?

Tags: Gio Linh, Viet, Work