Miss Saigon

My mother was Miss Saigon of 1973, two years before the fall and capture of the city by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Việt Cộng. There is a solid silver trophy, its height the length of my torso. The cup itself is the circumference of a basketball, and its S-shaped handles are molded into elegant leaf-covered vines. This trophy has been in our home for as long as I can remember. My mother has been Miss Saigon of 1973 for as long as I can remember.

The night before we evacuated for Hurricane Katrina, my father didn’t want to go. He said it was a waste of time to pack up and leave. My mother paced the house, her jade bangles and gem necklaces clinking as she packed up china and crystal. She filled the bathtub full of water but didn’t have a tub plug, so she covered the drain with a sauce bowl. I watched the water as it slowly but surely leaked into the drain. She continued to refill the tub. “In case we need water,” she said, as if this would be the difference between life or death, this leaking tub of tap water.

“You’re really pretty, for an Asian girl,” he said, with the characteristic lilt of a compliment. I said thank you, as I always did.

“How did you get the trophy to America?” I have asked my mother countless times. Sometimes she will say, “Someone brought it over,” but she has never told me who, or when, or how. Sometimes she will say something like, “The trophy is from Vietnam,” or “The trophy is because your mother is so beautiful,” answering a question I didn’t ask, replacing the real answer I seek with something that I know already. She is an expert at avoiding the concrete in a way I will never be able to replicate. Sometimes she even tricks me into thinking she has given an answer, until later, when I try to recall it on my own.

The answer is always vague. The answer is never an answer. I suspect this is because she doesn’t remember, or she started not to care about veracity; to create the answer in whatever way possible, regardless of its truth or ambiguity, is her only option because it is and was imperative to her survival. If she believes there will be danger when there is none, she can produce that convincing vague peril in words until you are too exhausted to convince her otherwise. If she believes something is ugly, you will believe it too. If she believes something is right or wrong, she will create the reason.

When I was ten, I went to summer camp for two weeks. By the end of camp, my skin was a deep brown, like loam.

The story of my mother’s escape from Saigon is as amazing as it is unbelievable. She has seven brothers and sisters. She is the second to last child. During the war, my aunt dated an American businessman. My mother said he was very secretive, that they didn’t really know who he was. The fall of Saigon was imminent. The end inevitable and looming, everyone watched the resistance slowly crumble with the same complacent expectancy of watching a cookie break away in a cup of milk. The American told my aunt he knew it would happen too, that he knew everything. He had maps and machines and contacts overseas. He could get her on an airplane to the United States before the fall of the South’s forces. Airplanes out of Vietnam were impossible to get, and when they could be secured, the cost was completely unrealistic for the average Vietnamese. She said she wouldn’t leave without her family, all seven siblings and her parents, and he said he couldn’t afford it.

When I was young, my mother would pinch the bridge of my nose, massage my jawline and chin, pull up the corners of my eyes. She said if we did this every day, we could reform my...