To Meet Again

Kao Kalia Yang

 

The car is moving fast across the Minnesota prairie. The stretches of the soggy, wet fields on either side of the highway carry the thin stalks of green corn.  Where the fields are flooded by the heavy rains of the season, green sprouts rise from the pools of water like the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.  In the big expanses of flooded fields, one can see the reflection of the heavy sky with its gray clouds; the clouds are lying low, belly to belly, back to back, touching and tugging.  It is easy to imagine a world full of monsoons.

My mother’s voice is like the clouds above us, heavy with moisture as she speaks from the back seat of the car above the run of the tires against the pavement.

She says, “I still remember my brother as a little boy.  He loved chickens.  We used to keep them at the outskirts of the village because so many of them would die of disease in the village yards, so populated with so many different animals.  My brother used to plead with me, each evening, to go and visit the chickens with him.  I hated chickens then.  I often refused to go.

“I can still see him now walking away from me into the falling sun, a rice ball in one hand, the other holding an open banana.  His thin back, the rise of his pant legs, that frail ankle, the flip of his flip flops.

“It would make me feel bad.  Love would surge in my heart and overcome my hatred of the chickens, and I would run after him as fast as I could.

“I love him now at the memory of our time together.”

The last time my mother saw her brother was in 1978, shortly after she married my father, on a visit to her family’s camp in Xieng Khoung Province, Laos.

The Secret War with the Americans was over.  The communist Pathet Lao soldiers and their North Vietnamese allies had taken over the country and instilled a re-education policy that left the bodies of many Hmong villagers rotting among the fallen jungle leaves.  My mother and father’s families had both fled their villages; they had been scavenging for food in the jungle for three years.

My mother carries no memories of their parting. She had not known that she would not see him again for the next thirty years.  She had not known to run after him in the coming of night.

About two weeks ago, my mother received a phone call from her older sister, my Auntie Ma.  Auntie Ma told my mother that their brother was visiting; his visa had been approved; a Hmong mutual assistance organization was bringing him to America for a conference.

Two weeks ago, my mother started talking of a past that my siblings and I have never known, her past in Laos with a family that loved her, a family that many of us had never met beyond photographs sent from far across the sea.

The Vietnam War ended in 1975 for American politics and public consciousness.  It wages inside of my mother.  I can see it plain as the day before me.  Her heart has been in a long drought.  The washes of rain that we carry give it the fertility it needs to continue to beat.  But the dance of joy that allows a heart to sing has long been denied my mother.  She has spent most of her life missing her family, battling the remains of a war that has ravaged her first knowledge of love and devotion, of what it means to be born among people and then to live a life contemplating death far from them.

Tomorrow I get to meet my uncle for the first time, and my mother gets to meet her brother again.  From photographs, I conjure up a small man with a dark mustache.  I see the scar across his brow and his chin.  I hear my mother’s voice telling me that he was not born that way, that those scars came long after they were separated, on a search for bamboo shoots, the flicker of knife, the fall of a limb, the cracking of skin—on the falling bamboo and in the flesh of the man.  In my mind, I wipe away my uncle’s scar with the gentle wash of my mother’s hand.  Through imagination, we build new flesh, clean and unmarred by hunger or pain.  In the car, all I see is the encroaching storm in a day full of heat and humidity, calm waiting to collapse.

As I look out the window of the black SUV, listen to the sound of the wheel against the road, take in the greening fields on either side, marvel at how the pools of water reflect the foreboding sky, I can only wonder at how my mother continues to sit behind me, speak from the present, travel into the past, and hold to hope that the brother she loves remains—as she had for him:  captives of time and trust, youth and beauty, the little boy on his way to see his chickens, the little girl running to catch up—before the setting sun.