For my final assignment in my Asian-American creative writing class, I placed my full beating heart. I was heavily inspired by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ideas of Nothing in The Sympathizer. One piece of feedback I received for this work was the question, why does it exist? What is its purpose? I
tried to instill the feeling as hard as possible that it was purposeless. If this sounds snobbish,
proud, and haughty, it is. That is who I am. I cried when finishing this piece because it took all of me. This piece was submitted to the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. Thank you for your time.
This will be a dirty confession.
What is the first meaning you gather from my words? A select few of you will think I am speaking about a stain in my history, a blemish on my soul. A different, more lively, batch will assume I am speaking of deals with others regarding Eros. Sex. Do not feel ashamed, my lover will come in at some point in this confession, but she is not the centerpiece of my story.
Then do I mean to say it is a confession impure? A recount timid by narrative focus, lackluster on concreteness, or even malicious with omission? Certainly, that is to be expected when reading a confession one willingly gives up. Here is some reading advice that no other confessor will willingly give: this is not non-fiction. And yet, still, this is not what my intention is.
When people create confessions, they wish to impart (or, more accurately, depart) onto someone an idea of which they wish to relieve themselves. I am doing this, instead, in order to keep myself full.
Regardless of what I say, you will come up with your own conclusions about how the following journey I take you on fills one, some, none, or all of these criterias, therefore I will not deceive you by listing which ones I think are true in this story. You will deceive yourselves on your own.
So, once again, let me begin.
— 2a: morally unclean or corrupt: such as
I was eight years old when I first felt what having sex was like.
Sorry, I forget human horrors beyond comprehension are the first meanings to be expected today, though I’m quite out of the loop on the next generation: Do we yet live in a society where you’d understand what I meant to say from that phrase alone? I know the answer is likely no but, God, I hope so. Let me rephrase. I was eight years old when I felt my parents having sex.
Are you relieved? Mortified? Both? I’ll give you some more to work with.
Before I developed enough to dream about wanting more, I slept in a king-sized bed surrounded by ba má. Do not ask me about which parent I prefer. Although I have an answer prepared now, we are not close enough for me to reveal this information, and more importantly, I hadn’t yet understood love enough to know that there is a limited amount of it one can give. I would try to balance out my care every night; If I were sleeping on my side and facing my father, I would snuggle closely to my mother so that each of them had one part of me to cradle. My beholding or my body. I would then alternate sides so one wouldn’t feel unappreciated.
On a few nights, I would wake up in the arms of my father, who would lift me with a sway as gentle as a boat gliding over a still stream to the edge of the bed. There was never any danger, if you’re concerned, since we had our floor mattress pushed up against a wall. The worst that would happen to me was a bruise from slamming my head against it in my sleep. Ba má would then hover to the opposite side, before propping themselves up.
I apologize for this next scene I’m about to unfold. You can skip to the following line break if you desire, but it’s important for me to illustrate what happens in graphic detail. Half a lifetime of reading our human stories become brushed aside, or worse, mutilated so that we are objects, makes it so I can’t simply skim over what happens on these nights. In this way, the confessor has an easier job than the recipient. They are dispensing uncomfortableness diluted by spending years in their mind’s eye as concentrated matter.
My mother would unbutton her plain nightgown before tossing it into the basket of dirty clothes in the corner of the room. My father would pull out a condom from the drawer beside our bed and put it on before my mother finished undressing since he slept in only his underwear during this part of his life. Má was always on top, knees beside his waist as though it were a saddle, but I should specify that despite the dominant position she held over him, she was very much more concerned about his pleasure than hers.
I hear that sexual preferences are passed down from generation to generation. I’ve never mimicked this specific act myself, unless it was part of the quick foreplay after pushing my wife down, but I’ve always been more inclined to give than receive.
Soft, yearning desire would escalate into raggedy, streamed breaths as their hips bucked into each other. Má’s hands would place themselves over ba’s wrists, which were placed themselves over her hips. It would always start with him lying back and enjoying it first, but it would devolve into both of them instinctually rutting. The mattress would shudder and spasm at the motions; the air heating up as the build-up of passion was much too overwhelming for only the two people to bear.
It’s at this point I would wake up. Enough to get some action and to hear each of them let out one more dying heave before returning to tranquil murkiness.
Sleep always came quickly after, since I was in the sort of haze you enter when you wake up in the middle of the night, unsure why, only knowing that your throat is dry, you’re nauseous, and you’re frightened about whether you can go back to sleep or not. Sorry, remove those last two, that’s how the haze goes for me now. I don’t dream because I never dream. And, other than the brief, funny, conflicted feeling I will be taught more about in two years that wells up inside of me, I would think nothing more about it. They would clean up, and because they awoke much earlier than I to take care of me, they would return me to my spot in the center, still and unperturbed.
But I know.
I know what sex is before I know what sex means.
— (1): INDECENT, VULGAR
For how enamored my parents are over each other, it’s a wonder this only happened to me a few times. I’m sure there were many more instances in which I didn’t wake up.
For the audience I am directing my confession to, I know you won’t hold this against them. It is a movement of life, a parade of celebration, of completion, of wholeness. It is also not your place to judge them.
But I am concerned for the other half this will inevitably spread to, so I will placate you.
This is not the first time I’ve seen this. It is only the first time I’ve felt it.
Were you there at the refugee camps, where my parents and I fled? To be placed into a dizzy limbo where the only ending in sight is the end of our ropes? I am five when I find out scams, substandard living conditions, and soldiers (the worst of the bunch) were what AMERICA™ had waiting for us. I am skipping the reason why we arrived not because it is unimportant, but because it is the same as every other Vietnamese person on this island. We wanted to live.
Place the whole lot of us in tents with nothing to do, everything to yearn for, and what left is there to do than to do with who is left.
I have been called a backward savage for less. I think real backward savagery is to not expect that we would show off we were alive.
So hold nothing against them.
— (2): DISHONORABLE, BASE
How are you feeling about the confession so far? I would list some possible inklings you may have, but I have lied sunken in between these dreaming clouds of nothing-thoughts for so long that not only can I no longer hold any major feelings about it anymore, I have no memory of what those feelings could be. I only ask for one thing, and that is for you to not treat this as a tragedy.
My wife showed me some reading back when we were dating from her college class by author Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. You may be more familiar with his shortened alias, but I’d die before using a name Westernized for convenience. It reads as follows:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Disregard the ending for a moment. How can all happy families be alike to each other? Are you saying that I am alike a white family living in a mansion, living with no worry and no thought? They say you need a level of financial security. We spent some nights joyfully gazing at the stars, a pastime for families product of living without a roof. They say you need good health for all family members. I suppose since my mother is ash, there aren’t any ailments for us to worry about. They say you need mutual affection. Is reclusive distancing close enough?
My parents gave me everything when we came to America. I turned it into nothing. They dedicated all of their excess finance (is finance obtained from skimping on necessities considered “excess?”) into a bright career for me, stating they wished for only one thing in return.
“Không có gì quan trọng hơn sự hạnh phúc.”
Sorry. That’s my distortion of what they said. Even if you’re unsure of what is true and what is not in this confession, know that this is exactly what they said instead:
“Không có gì quan trọng hơn hạnh phúc của con.”
Không có gì, or khoong cos gif when typed using a United States keyboard layout, or it was nothing when used as a phrase on its own after you thank your parents for doing something for you, or nothing is more important when combined with two topics as the first half of a sentence, or the start of my parent’s rebuttal to me when I argued with them that it was time for me to pick up a shift at Lucky’s to contribute to our piling bills, is something I’ve fixated on my entire life.
On its own, it would never mean nothing is more important because we consider that phrase, even here in the States, to be incomplete.
Không có gì quan trọng hơn hạnh phúc của con.
The phrase I omitted the first time, của con, should not be mistaken with just con because, although they both cause the full sentence to mean nothing is more important than your happiness, của sits there with an arm wrapped around my chest dragging a crying me away from my parents and back into the sky because it signals it is happiness I own far away from them. My happiness, and no one else’s. This was always infuriating to me growing up. The sky was too clean, an endless expanse of nothing, compared to the ground, the dirt, the dirtiness, the dirty. I disobeyed. I took the job. Sometimes I wonder what would’ve been if I hadn’t. Not what would’ve been of me, but what would’ve been of us.
To deeply care for your parents is the greatest act of love and betrayal you can show them.
— (3): UNSPORTSMANLIKE
Do you need a breather? I think I remember being unable to get out of bed for the entire day after I had that argument with my parents. We had fought before (it always looks like a fight to an outsider, but it was really the only way we knew how to talk) but not like this. If the fights before were the cheap 25¢ firecrackers you buy in those small boxes filled with grain and wrapped in cheap paper, making noisy yet meaningless pops, the one on that day was the black and white videos of napalm falling on our country. Dampened sound, uncanny clarity, and no footage of a real aftermath. Only an imagined one.
Let’s go back to healing mundaneness then. I skipped higher education entirely to become an aisle cashier. In two years, I became store manager. In another five, district.
There were several reasons for my ramping ascent, but I’d like to touch on the one most relevant to the confession. My language.
The first time I came in for an interview, my former supervisor brazenly showed a look of astonishment. At the time, I was confused about the reasoning behind it. My physical appearance was plain, so it couldn’t have been that. My age was listed on the resume, and there were many others around my age applying part-time, so I wasn’t an oddity there either. Reader, are you coming to a conclusion yourself, feeling that crawling nudge implying to you something’s off here?
It was because I was a woman.
I’ve been told my writing is blunt. Someone once told me I “wrote like a man.” In the workplace, statistics (obtained from studies today, of course, no one cared enough about working women back then to research them, much less their language) show how much of a disadvantage we’re at just from our emails and applications alone. Even without an indication of gender, we live accustomed to writing with conciliation in mind.
“I think…”
“At your most opportune time…”
“Thank you in advance.”
My supervisor once sent me an email reading the following:
“Come in tmrw. thx.”
The “thx” is more than most men would give.
I’m trying to eradicate this part of myself still. If you’ve been paying attention you’d notice, despite my knowing it was pointless vanity, I included contriteness earlier in this confession, apologies and placations. I won’t do it again.
Did you know, when presented with an opportune professional position with a list of requirements, men are more likely to apply lacking one or more of these prerequisites compared to women? I wonder who we are appeasing because, when men get that position, it’s clear the ones who posted it do not care.
I am appeasing a dirty part of myself.
Even as my language grows to new heights, built continually upon with the visage of my interview being its foundation, I continue to write dirtily, because when you make a dirty rag more clean, if you can even know if in this situation we are making a dirty rag cleaner or a near-clean rag dirtier– I certainly hope I am doing the former, they are both still dirty regardless.
— 1a: not clean or pure
The Vietnamese word for dirty is dơ. It is near-identical to its counterpart in English, used in every instance you can imagine dirty being used. When I asked my parents what they thought of same-sex relationships, about a year before I started dating my wife but a lifetime after I knew I was gay, they said it was dơ.
I say the word dơ is near-identical because if I were to say my parents thought of same-sex relationships as dirty, it would imply they thought it was a not pure, standard love, and that they were not fond of it. When my parents said what they said, they also very much meant it as a not pure, standard love, but they knew it existed regardless.
Do you understand? I courted the side of false ambivalence.
When I introduced the topic of my girlfriend to my parents, I wasn’t anxious about whether they’d disown me or not. Recall.
Không có gì quan trọng hơn hạnh phúc của con.
I was worried about their happiness. Isn’t that a very filial daughter thing to do, be concerned with whether or not your parents will like the person you’re dating? I remember the exact moment I told my mother. We were washing dishes together as my dad snored on the couch in the living room. The entire time I scrubbed plates with eyes glazed over, I was building up confidence to out myself. I’m of the opinion that when you love someone, you’re able to spend hours in silence doing nothing with each other. Our love for each other, ironically, allowed me to speak, because if we began a conversation about idle chit-chat then and there, I think my mother would’ve died not knowing who I was.
I told her I was seeing someone. A girl.
À. Phải không? Con đó người Việt không?
No, she’s Filipino.
Hm… ok. Mời em ăn cơm tối đi!
If you were in person to hear me tell this story you’d find out the line gap between me telling my mother I was dating a girl and her response doesn’t nearly convey the smooth transition of her quick answer, and that three dots on a page aren’t nearly enough to convey the silence that occurred after I told her that she wasn’t Vietnamese.
Let me restate.
My mother cared more about whether or not my partner was Vietnamese than whether or not they were a man.
I’m very lucky. If I had answered with a non-Asian race, I think I would’ve really gotten disowned (though with the size of the pause before her acceptance, I think Asians not from the Southeast would’ve been a dangerous answer too). What would I have done if things had not turned out this way? Here’s the wonderful part about a written confession. You don’t get to know.
— 1b: likely to befoul or defile with a soiling substance (such as mud, dust, or grime)
Is it time I introduce my girlfriend, wife, lover? Well, what do you wish to know? We met at work– or, well, when I was at work. She was a college student who did most of her grocery shopping around the same time I was working (ignore her yelling it was a coincidence in the background, it was very much intentional). You have to remember we were horny adults who had never gotten any action in the 90s. Progression hindered by repression and suppression. We became friends, waded the muddy water between romantic and platonic for half a year, and sealed the deal with a charged exchange.
You don’t get to know the details. In fact, you don’t even get to know her name. How about our sex life instead? That’s much less personal.
It took us three days for us to have our first time together. Well, three days and however long since we’ve first known each other. Wouldn’t you celebrate leaving your socially-instituted shackles as soon as possible?
I was wracked with anxiety and excitement in equal parts. I remember even now it was equal because tipping in either direction would have rendered me paralyzed. I would’ve been left in loving stillness from seeing her naked figure. I would’ve forgotten all I’d practiced from that one absolutely awful lesbian porn VHS. I would’ve missed out on her neediness, her desire, her awkwardness, her laugh, her giggle, her gasp, her moan, her restraint, her physical sound, it’s indescribable really, you just have to press slick bodies up against each other, flailing around without knowing what you’re doing to recreate it, we’d kissed before today but never for this long, never this amount, look at her quivering eyes, they’re trying so hard to focus on me, to behold me as I am beholding her, I feel the sheets sticking to my back, I feel her trying to stick to my back, I feel sticky, I feel dirty, we feel dirty, together.
I can’t sleep in washed bedding. As a teenager, every time I cleaned my sheets, going out to the laundromat and tossing them in two loads (my blanket used to be an enormous mammoth’s skin. I needed something to replicate human weight once I had my own room and my parents no longer slept together), I wouldn’t be able to sleep in them the same night. It was, simply put, wrong. It was like the empty sky: nothing of substance. There was none of my residue as a human who was alive. No dead skin flakes, no stray hairs, no varying texture, just an artificial smell and feel. It was the empty sky. I hated being there.
Sleeping with my girlfriend, in sheets that we wouldn’t clean until the next morning, stacked reminders that I exist on top of each other. There was obviously her, taking up space and fulfilling my desire for touch, but there was also us nestled in invisibly, a conjoinment of our life’s evidence sown into the blankets and pillows.
But this was just a temporary solution. I could not avoid the vast air of nothing forever. Eventually, I’d have to clean my sheets and lie in them alone. Eventually, I’d be reminded of my parent’s sacrifice, guilt raising me up into the empty sky once again.
Eventually, late that night, after my lover and I were long asleep, I’d be awoken by the sound of the home landline ringing.
“Mẹ bị trúng gió.”
— 3b: highly regrettable
Vietnamese people believe in the idea of a “dirty wind.” Trúng gió. Dirty isn’t the correct word to describe it, but it is as close as you will get. It’s a superstition. It’s a way to cope. It’s nonsense. It goes as follows:
Essentially, sparse between the layers of wind, there are certain malignant bales which can descend upon anyone at any time to afflict them with an assortment of maladies or ailments.
The solution?
Cupping therapy and Eagle Brand Medicated Oil. Funnily, instead of being medicinal to me as a child, I always thought of them as sickly items. Going too far in one direction brings you back to the other. Giác hơi. By sucking on someone’s back using heated cups, you essentially drag the poisonous, cursed air out of them.
It was slightly difficult to convince the American doctors at the time to try this out while my mom was hospitalized. I had to wonder: Why do they care so much? Ba and I are the ones paying them the exorbitant amount of money, they should let us put hot cups on her back if we want.
I didn’t believe in either of these ideas before, but seeing your mother breathing from a clear, plastic mask shakes your beliefs.
It is a little bit funny in retrospect. Here I was, thinking about how my new relationship had solved my internalized issues with being brought away from my parents into an empty sky, only to find out that the sky I was in wasn’t so empty after all.
I had been drifting in substance this entire time.
— 3a: ABOMINABLE, HATEFUL
I am twenty-five years old when I am called a slur for the first time. It was a crazed customer looking for the manager of the manager.
“Dirty Invader! Chink!”
Isn’t that crazy? Sure, I’d been called names, gotten microaggressions, been discriminated against, and was the victim of a rather uncreative hate crime (why throw a brick with a note on it into the store window? I’m not even going to pay for it, while my car is right outside), but I’ve never been called a slur. Wait. Never been called one individually. Wait. Never been called one individually and in person.
If curse words are dirty words, what are slurs? Does it imply the existence of a degree word beyond dirty? Could we have that word please, I’d like to use it to describe the type of wind that fell on my mother. It was extraordinarily upsetting how easy my day-to-day life was after. Why did I not feel everything, all the time?
I did feel a little hurt by the jab. Not because it was an attack on me, God no, I’m much too hardened for something like that, but because of what my parents would think if they knew. They tried so hard to give me a life without difficulty or needless pain (there is such a thing as necessary pain for us), and despite their best efforts, I was still exposed to the worst word. The worst world.
I didn’t take the news of my mother’s hospitalization very well. I’ll have to thank my wife, who stayed with me throughout this entire dark period of my life. I’ll also have to, even though I said I wouldn’t anymore, apologize for this ending segment. My memories and feelings have distorted, then distorted the distortions, and I’m left unsure of the details.
Here’s a fact.
The infection rate of an open hand laceration is 5% - 32%. Although I am adamant on the idea of dirtiness, I do not wish for you to dirty your wounds. 70% isopropyl alcohol is enough to clean it up. Interestingly, moving up to 99% can cause you further harm, damaging the skin and tissue.
The reason why you become drunk when drinking alcohol is because the ethanol inside of it is so small, that it passes into your bloodstream and into the gaps between your brain cells. Your neurotransmitters, now moving through cloudiness, can’t keep up and ethanol ends up slowing your mental faculties down.
What a lovely instrument. Now I could make my outsides clean and my insides dirty.
— 1d: containing impurities
Do you remember when I said that this story would not be a tragedy? Or have you forgotten? It’s alright if you have, this has been a loose collection of blurriness, literally and metaphorically. I will conclude and you can draw your own conclusion.
My mother did end up passing away. We finished with plenty of time together as a family in her last moments, time of which I will forever be grateful for. I am writing this confession well past this point, spending that entire period healing and consolidating my thoughts. I only wish to share with you my journey in the latter, as the former is something for me to keep close.
Are you getting some idea of what I mean by a dirty confession at this point? It’s confusing. I’ve mentioned dirtiness as something comforting, but I’ve also written it down as a malediction.
It is the presence of someone who loves you, and the ill wind that falls on others you love.
It is the invitation to allow vulnerable honesty, and, at the same time, the devastating risks stemming from it.
Ultimately, I think that to be dirty is to hold onto something of substance. Purity is absence. Impurity is wholeness. You cannot be alive without being dirty. Without shedding biological products. Without holding someone holding you.
“Không có gì quan trọng hơn hạnh phúc.”
Nothing is more important than happiness.
Nothing is more important.
Nothing is more important.
Because when I begin my weekly visits to my parent’s house, as opposed to my parents’ house, I know if I tried to recall the last time we’ve eaten as three I wouldn’t be able to remember, and I wonder if I ever was able to remember, when I sleep in sheets, regardless of whether they’re clean, regardless of whether I’m sleeping alone or with her or with my parents, I can feel about the invisible intangible sediments of our bodies’ earth soiling into the cloth, dead reminders I am alive, when I fuck with absolute depravity and desperation my conservative mind screams at me about how wrong it is and I imagine how I’d use to sweep dust into a corner of the house thinking if I couldn’t see it it didn’t exist, thinking if two people fucked in a forest and no one was around to hear it, they clearly weren’t doing it right, when I walk the still streets of soft sunrise I can’t help but wonder if being on the ground and being in the sky are two sidewalks on the same road, I wonder if I jumped, my feet not even fully leaving the concrete, at what point I’d traverse from one into the other and if it’d even matter now knowing the richness both contain, because when I live my dirty life with nothing as the forerunning theme, no prospects, no dreams, and no chance of furthering my relationship with my parents, I am doing exactly what ba má ask of me, because it is impossible to live with complete purity, or blank absence, or infinite happiness, or whatever you want to call it. I live my life fully filled with nothing. And, for me and all of the other invaders of this country, that’s more than enough.
There are days when I come back to visit my dad. He’s always tending his garden in the back. Despite the years getting by, he’s as resilient as ever. When we look at each other, he greets me with the same expression he had when we were both decades younger, saying:
“Con có khỏe không?”
