Kiêu by Khuê Pham – Words Without Borders

Let me begin this story with a confession: I don’t know how to pronounce my own name.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt uncomfortable introducing myself to anyone. The German people I grew up with tripped over my name’s melodic sounds, while my parents’ Vietnamese friends had trouble understanding my heavy accent. The Germans got around the problem by not addressing me by name at all. The Vietnamese would ask: “How do you spell that?”

Once someone said: “Are you sure about that?”

As a child, when we would go to the department store, I’d head straight for the toy section to try to find my name on the personalized pencils. At the hardware store, I would pin my hopes on the long, colorful keychains. If I could only find my name, it would prove that nothing was wrong with me, I would say to myself as I combed through hundreds of pencils and key chains. I would find “Katrin,” “Kristina,” and once—my heart skipped a beat—“Kira.”

I never found “Kiều.”

“Kiều” existed only in my family’s world and in the title of a book on my father’s basement shelves: Truyện Kiều (The Tale of Kiều). A work as important to the Vietnamese canon as The Catcher in the Rye is to English-language literature.

Of course, I was unable to read it.

Whenever my father was tidying up, he would pull out the book and say, “Did you know that you’re named after a famous young woman? Every schoolchild has read this novel! You’re famous all across Vietnam!”

I believed everything my father told me when I was a child, so why should this be any different? I imagined walking through Vietnam and being approached by all kinds of people. I would constantly have to keep introducing myself, and each time I would have to pronounce my name. Followed by endless questions.

When I turned sixteen, I changed my name because I expected, falsely, it would give me a better chance at being accepted into Jeanette’s circle of friends. When I was twenty, I had my passport changed as well, because I finally felt that I had some sort of power over my life.

For the last ten years, I’ve been a different person. Germans call me “Kim”; the Vietnamese say “Kihm.” It isn’t perfect, but it is easier. Shedding my past never really bothered me. It really didn’t.

Until I got that message.

*

The message, written in English, pops up on Facebook. Someone calling himself “Sơn Saigon” has contacted me.

Is this you, Kiều? There’s something I need to tell you and your father!

There is only one group of people who know my true name; it’s insider information limited to members of my large, nebulous family. My mother’s side, who still live in Vietnam, is loud and includes many children. Whenever my relatives send photos, I’m amazed to find all sorts of new cousins whose names I can’t remember even though, or perhaps because, they consist of only two letters. I don’t really know my father’s side of the family; I just remember a deaf aunt. All I know is that his siblings fled Vietnam after the war and ended up in California, maybe as boat people, maybe not.

Then there’s also a great-aunt in England who got rich working as a lawyer for the cannabis mafia, and a cousin-in-law who was a poet and was flown out of Vietnam after the war to Canada by the PEN writers’ club. And finally, my young cousin in France who appeared in that cheesy musical variety show my parents love to sing karaoke to: Paris by Night.

I only know these relatives from stories. They are just as unreal to me as the ghosts of dead ancestors for whom I light a couple of incense sticks on Vietnamese New Year’s while going through the motions of praying. Once a year, they drift into my life only to vanish again after a brief greeting, like smoke.

So, who is this Sơn?

His Facebook profile photo shows a man with bushy eyebrows and a straight nose that reminds me of my father’s. I have often heard Vietnamese acquaintances talk admiringly about its high, elegant form, which is why it’s the first thing I notice about Sơn. His eyes are unusually round, making his face, despite his wrinkled brow, look rather boyish. He apparently lives in Westminster, California, where he runs an import-export business called Made in America. He must be my father’s younger brother, the one who, according to family stories, was really bad at school but really good at playing cards.

I try to remember my father’s family in the same way you might try to recall passages from a history book. I met them once, fifteen years ago—we took a trip to Vietnam and learned, by chance, that they also happened to be there. I have no idea why we never flew to California to visit them there. One time, when I asked my mother if there had been some kind of falling out, she thought for a second and then shook her head.

“Actually,” she said, dragging the word out in an odd way, “everything’s fine. But Dad’s family is difficult. It’s better if we just get on with our lives and let them get on with theirs. We send money, we don’t have to visit them in California as well.”

Nothing more was said, and I didn’t dare ask any further questions, sensing that I wouldn’t get an answer even if I did.

There’s something I need to tell you!

What does he want from me?

I snap my laptop shut, ready to plunge back into my everyday life in Berlin, a life that is German, orderly, and free of intercontinental family issues. My uncle hasn’t spoken to me in fifteen years. It will hardly matter if I don’t reply immediately, or indeed at all.

*

Two and a half weeks later, I make my way to the light blue house where my two siblings and I grew up. It’s Christmas and, like every year, it puts me in a strange mood. Going back home means returning to the displacement of my childhood. My parents learned Christmas the same way they learned German grammar—as something you observed to be a part of this country. They’ve decorated the tree in the living room with a stuffed Santa Claus, wooden figurines they painted themselves, gaudily glittering baubles, and two strings of multicolored lights. Only the fake snow is missing.

I sit down at my old piano and play Bach’s “Prelude in C Minor” from The Well-Tempered Clavier. The hammering of the notes blends with the clattering from the kitchen, where my mother is constantly messing about with her pots. How often did I fight with her over my piano lessons as I sat crying on this black stool? How often had I wished that I was growing up in a family that didn’t have to become German because it already was?

The ski equipment in the basement, the BMWs in the garage, the framed family photos from Ibiza, Paris, and Halong Bay illustrate a history I heard people recount innumerable times during my youth: Look at this family! They might be immigrants, but they’ve made it anyway! It always bothered me when “the Germans”—that’s what we call them, as if they are a foreign, faraway people—congratulated us on my father’s career, my mother’s diligence, or the “astonishingly good German” spoken by me and my siblings. Even as pride spread across the faces of my parents, I suddenly felt hurt. I was born in this country, why should I not speak its language perfectly? Over time, I have even come to speak it with my parents.

I miss my chord and my hands remain sitting there on the wrong notes. When the sounds from the kitchen die down, I close the fallboard. There is a black-and-white photo hanging on the wall above the piano, a picture my father took of my grandmother several decades ago. Slender and dainty, she is sitting in a taxi. Her curled hair is carefully pinned to one side, her Vietnamese silk dress, the áo dài, is embroidered with golden flowers. He took the photo long ago in Saigon, shortly before he left for Germany to pursue his university studies. Even though my grandmother is looking into the camera with a broad smile, her eyes wide open, there is something wistful in her expression.

My father once told me that my face reminds him of hers. I can see the resemblance mainly in my high forehead, which I conceal with bangs that I style in a variety of ways. I’m not quite as slim as her, a bit taller perhaps, and of course I never wear an áo dài, instead opting for black pants with monochrome tops. I think Asians in glasses look too nerdy, so I only ever wear contact lenses, despite my terrible vision. During my last visit to Vietnam, a lot of people thought I was a foreigner, not Vietnamese at all. Which, I have to admit, didn’t bother me in the least.

*

As darkness falls outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, my siblings and I sit down at the table my mother has set with the heavy Rosenthal porcelain she normally reserves for German guests. She has even splurged on a white silk tablecloth from the famous KaDeWe department store, though she rarely spends large amounts of money, buying only marked-down products on principle. She’s been living in Germany for half a century now, but having grown up extremely poor, she has never broken the Vietnamese habit of saving money wherever possible. Neither the BMW nor the large house has changed this habit of hers.

“A hundred euros! I thought about it for quite a while,” she says, gently stroking the lustrous material. “I figured one of you could inherit it someday.”

We had spent the last several weeks discussing the menu for this evening’s feast, and had ultimately settled on lobster, just as we had the previous three years. None of us is particularly fond of seafood, but lobster is quite festive, and it doesn’t taste all that fishy, so we indulge once a year. Five of the creatures are lined up on a platter, glimmering orange-red. My father grabs a pair of garden clippers that he bought the Christmas before last because he didn’t have any lobster pincers, finding the garden tools so handy that he’s been using them ever since.

The phone rings in the bedroom.

“Don’t answer,” my mother orders, standing up to serve the salad. An anger I recognize from countless arguments back when I was in school flashes in her eyes: anger that anybody would dare disturb our sacred family gathering.

The ringing stops and then resumes after a short pause.

“How rude,” my mother grumbles as she stabs her fork into the salad. My father, showing solidarity as always, clips a claw from his lobster.

Silence, then it rings again.

I jump up from my chair. Maybe it’s an emergency. Or it could be my old schoolfriend Thomas, who is oblivious to the concepts of family rituals and holiday repose. I dash to the phone, just as I so often did as a schoolgirl to keep my mother from getting there first and launching into a tirade.

“Yes?” I say in an impolite tone. I want to sound impolite.

An unfamiliar male voice replies, asking in Vietnamese who this is.

“Kim, here,” I answer in long-unpracticed Vietnamese. I haven’t uttered a single word of the language since our last trip there five years ago and am not at all interested in speaking it now with this stranger.

“Who?”

He’s clearly unfamiliar with my German name. I try again. “It’s Kiều!” I say, louder this time, drawing out the syllable. “Who? I still haven’t caught your name.”

“Kiều!” I repeat. “Minh’s daughter!”

“Oh, Kiều! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

The conversation is hardly thirty seconds old, and I’ve already been thrust back into the dark chamber that holds my most embarrassing memories. Suddenly, I can see a younger version of me desperately trying to make herself understood during my last visit to Saigon. I had suppressed that memory; you can see why.

Maybe I should hang up.

“This is your Uncle Sơn from California,” the man at the other end of the line says. “I tried to reach you on Facebook, but you probably didn’t see my message.”

He pauses, apparently having trouble expressing what he wants to say. Not knowing whether or how to apologize, I say nothing. There’s static on the line. The connection is extremely bad.

“It’s about your grandmother,” he says, eventually. “She’s on her deathbed. I really need to speak to your father.”

In another situation, another language, I would have said something at this point. Something like: I wish I had gotten to know her better. Now it’s too late. But because I’m apparently not even capable of conveying my own name, I just mumble, “Okay,” and, with my hand over the receiver, call for my father.

Your grandmother is on her deathbed. So that’s what Uncle Sơn had wanted to say. Suddenly, I am overcome with guilt for not having responded to his Facebook message. I grab my phone, sink back into my chair, and start tapping around on it, even though I’m usually the first to reprimand others for doing so at the table.

The photos he has posted on his Facebook page over the last few months tell the story of a slow decline. He had taken dozens of pictures of my grandmother, with her body seeming to shrink from one album to the next. I had never realized just how severely people can shrivel up, and now I’m seeing it before my very eyes. Dark spots spread across her skin like tide pools. Her hair grows wirier, her eyes cloudier. The faces of the others also change: the early photos show my grandmother surrounded by relatives bravely smiling. Toward the end, though, their expressions start looking empty as well, as if the illness weren’t just sapping the life out of my grandmother, but also hope from the rest of the family.

I scroll through the images with the distance of someone watching a silent film in black and white. Her suffering feels so distant to me. As sad as the photos are, they seem unreal. California is nine time zones and a world away. What happens there touches neither my day-to-day life nor—to be completely honest—my heart.