LUA
Everyone in my family forgets. The Jade Emperor blessed us with the freedom to give our memories to whatever and whoever we wanted. One time, Grandma forgot that she left Grandpa Dragon Brows at some karaoke bar in Vegas an hour away, and he came home the next morning with no money and no voice and no pants. Grandma keeled over and dispersed the flies raiding our stockpile of apricots with the force of her laughter, which lasted a whole forty-nine seconds. Flocks of flies traveled to his crotch, frenzied by the sweet rancid scent rising from his legs, and my sisters held up their phones.
First Sister had a husband just like Grandma, always faking what he forgot so he could stay at Sam’s as long as possible, that blonde woman he met on our flight from the Tan Son Nhat Airport, who called him cute with an accent and made him Lindström burgers. Sam, who my sister had thought for years was a wholesale club until Grandma found locks of the woman’s hair in the backseat of our Toyota, and chased the husband out while brandishing her tongue and a lint roller. Though later, when Grandma’s sleep apnea vibrated our bones, I saw him smuggle into my sister’s room and tap her out of sleep and patty himself on the carpet, his palms winging open in supplication. I saw how my sister’s desire to give him what he wanted was defeated by her desire to see him suffer. So when she didn’t yell at him, didn’t know his name, his face foreign with slaughtered history, it felt more like punishment than forgetfulness. And that’s when I wondered if amnesia could injure, if you could take back what you killed, if all murders began as mercies. But when I asked Ma, she didn’t answer, just told me we all had something that forced us into forgetting, that some memories were birthed inside a fist. I thought about that one summer when Ma and my sisters tried to forget everything after war, the one that left a chunk of Ba’s leg missing in action and gave Grandma a bad lung, thickened it with smoke, which showed on her X-rays every month like a wildfire, like wind carrying the cartilage of the dead into a blaze. Fire is a memory of memory, she once whispered to me: Smoke is what survives after loss, what is ingested by the body and expelled into night. But this was before she sold all her secrets to the land, one by one, like teeth, so it would cough up the tares of gold she buried in some backyard when the war ended, that she forgot so the communists wouldn’t suspect disloyalty, wouldn’t accuse her of escaping the country they were creating. We used half the money to pay for our plane tickets, some for Ba’s funeral fees, and gave the rest to a Lucky Charms cereal box that Ma duct-taped to the bottom of our bed for our debts.
That summer, Ma and my sisters decided to feed all their memories to Mean Brother’s 13-year-old Shih Tzu, Lua, the dog so meatless it was a toothpick, doing nothing else but skewer us in our sleep and play dead when rabid squirrels chased her. She’d just fall over. Like pines. Every night, before she died of exhaustion from the day, we’d serve her scraps from dinner, let her eat the lace of burnt rice out of the cooker, lap up the leftover bathwater Grandma used to make chicken congee for Grandpa Dragon Brows. Second Sister thought the memories would accumulate inside Lua like layers of fat, beefing her into Cerberus or a horse or something. Except what ended up happening was a seismic shift that quaked the pavement for miles, that buckled neighbors to the ground, sprinkled our ceiling down like seed, sowing wide. Ma rushed to open every window for the mold to migrate out and waft back into wind, returning to the genealogy of the sky, while Grandma stood far from any glass, gripping a figurine of the Virgin Mary with both hands while crying CHET ME! CHET ME! (as freaked as when she discovered the lotus tattoo on First Sister’s back, the bud resting at her nape and its stem ending somewhere below her hips. Lotuses, First Sister calmly explained to her, are like us, swimming on the surface of water, free of the mud that makes them. And Mean Brother said, And the mud is what, your shit? And Grandma whacked him and said, That mud is your family, the ones killed by war, your cousins by starvation and your father by depression, and now they are with you every time you open your eyes, now they are walking on wind, now you can never be free of them. Then she proceeded to forget the tattoo immediately).
Once the knots in my gut routed back into the correct cavities, I ran outside. There was no damage, no deaths, though I swore all the homes on our street had rearranged, swore they were now facing ours, the horizon of their blame. Ma and my aunts lost all the silver on their heads after that one. Or lost it until Lua died two mornings later under mysterious causes, her head shoved in the ass-cleft of our couch, which nested a new strain of fungus that Second Sister believed had come from our shrimp chips, a special breed with better odds at surviving the apocalypse than any riverine race (This sister would know; she had to give up a life of biology and now does pedicures in a nail salon in the Chinatown Vegas strip mall, where men often came in with some kind of fungus under their toes, dyeing their nails all kinds of fluvial colors). When Mean Brother found Lua, he shamed them for their memories. Something about “blood pressure” curse curse “history’s weight” blah blah “the danger of too many stories” and other ugly words between phrases of spit. The rage that came out of him scattered far as fortune so even our future could hear some piece of it, the delay of his shouts arriving later that night in the frequency of thunder, which jolted everyone awake again and again. In the morning, there were bright new threads in Ma’s hair, milk-white strands that fell fine as silk and Second Sister said we could pluck and pawn.
Story goes, from the moment she was born, Lua always looked at water like a lost love, a missing mate, waiting for something to leap out made with the marrow of a dog’s heart. So we held her wake at the community pool, where Mean Brother laid her out on a floatie and shrouded her in Saran Wrap so that light adhered to the grooves of her corpse, glittered her snout, crowned her with kisses; she looked almost pretty. He slid the cigarette off his ear and smoked it and then put it out on a dish, sticking the butt upright like a stick of incense. Standing vigil at the edge of the pool, my head hunched over the water in prayer, salting it with my sweat, Mean Brother told us to forget about how far she would’ve gone still, the life she was meant to be living on behalf of her memories. He told us to forget everything but the love and the dog, unkilled, chasing cars, lunging at the moon, the pigeons, her tongue pink and floppy as school-lunch baloney, living that good dog life. The water rippled beneath our breath.
This was the same summer Grandma had another stroke, the one that made her forget our names and turned her tongue to steam, and we could no longer get it to hold anything. One of my sisters, I forget which one, told me her stomach had sprouted its own mouth because of this, that ate only organ meat and memory, orchestrating digestion. By the time Grandma died, she still bore the aura of a very large water buffalo but was boned like an empress, so small the crematorium told us it took only seconds to burn her body, that it generated no ash or smoke, no evidence at all except for a pile of red acrylic nails. While Mean Brother went to pick up the remains, Ma found an assortment cookie tin hidden behind a gallon ice cream tub that contained our immigration documents and her WIC papers, both of them in a pantry where we kept other unconsumable things: towels, roach spray, retired lightbulbs, a broom bearded with black hair. There was a Danish farmhouse embossed on the lid of the tin, and the blue paint had chafed off.
Ma placed Grandma’s remains inside, along with her rosary, an updated selfie-portrait, and a family photo taken on my last day in kindergarten, when everyone took a field trip to the elementary school and strode into my classroom like Power Rangers, proud that my English had gotten so good I could read prescription labels, active shooter alerts, eviction notices, and other warnings no one else could read. Ma told us to forget Grandma’s name into it and sealed everything in with tape, saying she’ll ship it to our relatives in Vietnam so she can be buried where she was born. When I asked Ma why we needed to give up her name, what’s it worth when you’re dead, she told me names exist nowhere in nature, how they’re manufactured in human mouths, animated by memory. According to Ma, in the next life, which is always sooner than we think, her name will tendril up and out of the land like spirits, like history, seeking a new mouth to metabolize it, the family that’d grown it a future worth staying for. And I thought of what Grandma said at the clinic when Dr. Mo (whose name I forgot out of spite, for pronouncing Bich like bitch, who was named for what I first tasted when our family came to America, grease) asked her if our family had a history of heart disease, of lung disease, brain disease, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases named after a man. I translated and Grandma turned to me and said no in triples, that our family doesn’t have history, that our forebears gave up on the idea of inscription, of setting anything to stone—haunt is so much more practical, she said. Her ancient eyes flickered with foreign light; its only lineage was flame.
On nights when the moon is the curve of a sickle blade or a beautiful rib that reverts the world into some kind of womb and I can’t sleep, I’d drive to a lookout spot over the Pacific where I can hear the dead. I’d roll down the windows and listen. My grandparents once came to this spot and my siblings used to come here and on her last nights on earth, we came here together with Ma. My daughter, my youngest, once asked me if a cloud only cries when it’s sad, if a house ever hurts when we hurt, if the ocean makes a sound when it remembers and whether we could even hear it, and I laughed and said how do you know you haven’t already. Back then I wanted to tell my daughter, You might not believe the sound. I wanted to tell her, You might not recognize it now. In my head I can still hear it, what happens when you attempt to forget a memory for good, when you give it to the wind, the water, the powerful exhale in the waves as something returns.
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Uyen Phuong Dang is a Vietnamese American writer based between Saigon and New Haven. Her recent stories and poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Passages North, Booth, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships and grants from Tin House, Fulbright, and Dartmouth, she is currently working on a story collection centered on reclaiming the myths and memories of daughters in Vietnamese land and history. Find her at uyenpdang.com