Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Once upon a time, in a faraway land... 

The thing that I miss most about Melbourne is talking with my grandma. Certainly, I miss my friends, but they've moved on to new circles and I can at least chat to them on MSN once in awhile. I miss my dad, but his attention is always devoted to more important things (and I say that without irony), and I can talk to him on yes-time. But my conversations with my grandma aren't suited to the phone or internet even if she knew how to use it. They take place on the tram, or when she comes and perches on the end of my bed to wake me up, or when we're sitting at the table after lunch or dinner. They can't be forced. There needs to be the right sense of quietness.

She tells me stories about our family and her childhood. Today, she told me how she didn't have proper toys as a kid. Their rural family wasn't poor, but there was always the threat of floods ruining the crops, so they didn't have money to spend on such frivolous things. She and her brother would cut cars out of cardboard and drag them along on a piece of string. One New Year's she remembers buying a tiny doll, the size of two fingers, for four cents. She'd sew clothes for it and dress it up, all the while looking enviously through shop windows at the extravagant French-imported dolls that her family could never afford. She says in Canada, she came across an old lady who bought herself dolls to compensate.

Nevertheless, they had simpler pleasures. Although the floods were a great worry to the adults, she said that the kids loved them. She'd sit on the bottom step of her house and dip her feet into the knee-deep water. Her brother would fish in the blocked-up drains, and with the other boys, would swim in the water, even though it was muddy with dirt and other filth. She thinks her brother went deaf because of an infection from the mud, although the adults believed it was a curse from the gods and only prayed.

It seems she was a bit of a tomboy, despite the dolls. Her only sister was ten years older than her, so her brother, only two years older than her, was her childhood playmate. When he went to play soccer, she'd be the goalie. She says that this meant that once she went to school, she wasn't at all nervous about being with boys, in fact she was almost one of them. She said that they'd swear at each other and curse each other's ancestors- and she gave as good as she got! One of the boys grew up to be an officer in Saigon, she said, and whenever they came across each other he'd still be embarassed.

I told her she should write a book about her experiences. She'd lived through two major wars after all, and several foreign regimes, and managed to raise a family of five kids. I'd interview her myself, but my Vietnamese is too crap. Evidently she's thought about it, because she said that other people had complimented her about her letters and in fact my grandpa had urged her to write when they were younger. Can you believe it, I - bookworm, nerd, former aspiring writer myself - have a writer for a grandmother and never knew it! I'd always thought my family was a bunch of technophiles on one side and uneducated bumpkins on the other. Unfortunately, grandma said now she's too weary to devote herself to a book. I've enlisted dad to help prod her, though, so we'll see. At least I think I'll get her to send me letters, under the pretext of improving my Vietnamese. It'd be a pity if these stories were lost forever.

# posted at 10:56 am

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