Quotable Quotes from Marrying Sis

ON A GENUINE LACK OF EMPATHY:

“Sometimes, stupidity can be more harmful than downright meanness. And when it is, there’s no Band-Aid that can fix the damage.”

“My sister’s learning curve, ex ante, was very steep. Her ex post learning curve was equivalently horizontal.”

ON CLANSMEN:

“Absolute loyalty is what distinguishes a clan from a big family.”

“On that day, our clan died. And thank fucking god.”

“For the ones who helped me: I will always remember. To the ones who held me back: I do not forget.”

ON GOSSIP AND BUSYBODINESS:

“Discretion is not an acquired taste.”

“Just because I wallowed in the mud, does not mean that I have to stay there.”

Chapter 2: Part Two: Christmas at the House of Behinds (Ten Years Ago)

The family Christmas party was held each year at the home of one branch of the family, that is, at one of my aunts’ or uncles’ homes. Newer, more spacious homes were favored over cramped houses because there was a lot of family to accommodate. Definitely over fifty, possibly over a hundred easy. That meant that some uncles and aunts had not held the Clan Christmas party at their house for a long time. It had been ten years for my mother. This was a long time, considering my parents’ house was big enough and she was the second oldest of twelve (the eldest daughter). Her only bigger brother still lived in Vietnam. That’s how my mother became the decision maker in our family. Her older brother was still in Vietnam, and he was a priest, which meant, he belonged to the priesthood. So, even were he in the States, he could not have a hand in the daily decision-making of our clan. And with a clan, daily decision making, especially during the first years in America, required a daily presence in the affairs of your family. That constant presence in every aspect of her family was natural for my mother. (My mother’s immediate younger brother had passed away in Vietnam during the war and incidentally, was also a priest.)

The Clan Christmas party at my parents’ house ten years ago was a hectic affair, as family affairs tend to be. It was hectic because my parents had just moved into their new home. It had not yet been decorated. My mother was still sewing the curtains the night before the party while the rest of us were busy cleaning the house. For some reason, our house could never achieve that immaculate look of other houses, not even when we were giving a party, and the house was brand spanking new! There was always something out of place, off kilter, or that needed to be picked up off the floor. For instance, my father had a set of tools, black and yellow striped screwdrivers. The Philips head was on the dining room table. The large flathead was on my father’s desk in the den. The small flathead was on a shelf in either the family room or the bedroom adjoining it via a shared bathroom. It migrated from room to room depending on (I assume) usage, but I never saw my father or anyone else using the small flathead. I just noticed that the screwdriver moved from room to room as a wealthy Bostonite chose a winter or summer vacation destination. My mother was happy that Christmas day. She was excited, energetic, invigorated. She finally got to show off the two-story house she always wanted but didn’t get until all four of us left home.

That was ten years ago. My parents never held the family Christmas party at their house again. Neither did my mother attend any of her clansmen’s Christmas parties. And Christmas is a very important time for Catholic Vietnamese. Shortly after this Christmas party, which was attended by all eleven surviving siblings, and was the high point of our family, my parents and my Uncle the Priest returned to Vietnam. My parents returned for a visit. My uncle returned to continue helping the poor. My uncle, who had the opportunity to flee the Communists before the fall of Saigon, who joined the seminary at twelve against my grandparents’ wishes because he was the oldest male, remained in Vietnam even after the fall of Saigon. By choice. To take care of the poorest of the poor. Of course my grandparents could not be prouder of him. He was the family sweetheart. If there is one consistent thing about a clan, it is that they cannot agree on anything. We only stand as a united front against the world. That is what elevates a very large family to the status of a clan. My Uncle the Priest, after over two decades, had finally been allowed to come to the States to see his parents, ten siblings and at that time, thirty-something nieces and nephews. Like many great empires, the downslide of our clan came on the heels of its zenith.

After that great Christmas celebrated at my parents’ new house, the next spring, my parents went with my sister Mai and my Uncle the Priest back to Vietnam. Mai went with them. Thuy was too busy with her residency. She did not have kids yet so could not have that excuse. I had already went to Vietnam  several years earlier when my father’s oldest sister was faring poorly and she wanted to see one of her nieces or nephew. If I had known that I could have used school or my postdoc as an excuse, then I would have had a lifetime of excuses. But I didn’t want an excuse. I love traveling and use any excuse to travel! But some people, they have to travel to the well-trodden places, you know, Rome, Paris, and God forbid they travel to out-of-the-way places like Da Lat, as Lonely Planet suggests.  Better to go with a travel group for protection against the foreigners in case you ever get homesick. And Vietnam, Vietnam is too poor a place to go when you’re a physician, but somehow Thuy made it to Rome all right. It’s more glamorous with the pope. In Vietnam, it would’ve only been my uncle the priest. I made it to both Vietnam and Italy years before because I don’t discriminate. To this day, my brother the priest and Thuy have yet to visit Vietnam once. They make it to Rome enough. Too busy with his parish. Too busy with her kids. It is often the case that uber religious people do not have enough time for their family. Maybe their own kids, but that’s in their direct line of self interest.

My uncle died suddenly during that trip to Vietnam with my parents and Mai. One morning he wasn’t feeling well. The doctor was called in. The doctor, such as he was able, couldn’t find anything specifically wrong with my uncle, beyond needing bed rest. No tests were run. Blood tests were, and still are, a rarity in Vietnam, save at a hospital. While my parents, my uncle, Mai, and the doctor were thusly hanging out, my uncle said to the doctor, “Doctor, I don’t feel well,” leaned over on my mother’s shoulder, and died.

This was the shock of my mother’s life. There she was: in her country where she grew up, fled as a refugee with a large family, struggling in a new land where she did not speak the language with only the clothes on her back, praying and dreaming that some day she could return to Vietnam, and when she is finally able, so ecstatic to see old friends and relatives, touring the places where she grew up and lived with her beloved older brother, her only older sibling and one of the few people to whom she gave deference to in this world,, and he dies quietly on her shoulder. My mother screamed for the doctor to come help when she could not wake my Uncle. He had lain on her shoulder so still. The doctor performed CPR. No use. My mother was in shock. Disbelief. She kept shaking her head, “No, no, no no, keep going, keep trying doctor, don’t stop!” but all the denials in the world would change nothing. My Uncle was dead. My beloved uncle, the family’s heart. Dead on my mother’s shoulder. So it must have been my mother’s fault.

That’s what my grandfather thought. He asked my mother over the phone twelve time zones away, “Why did you not take care of my son?” What could my mother say to that? 

Chapter 2: Part One: Mai Announces Her Engagement

It is not possible to have a thorough understanding of my sister unless you observe many more examples than is possible without turning you away from the happy part of this story, for indeed there is a happy part, but similar to all of Tolstoy's unhappy families, the happy part is drowned by our family's unique and miserable details.

Replete in all these examples was an underlying pattern, irregular and even inconsistent at times, or perhaps constantly changing, so that it was near impossible to model my sister's behavior. But effectively helping her was based on understanding her behavior, and that could only be done if one could systematically characterize her behavior, motivation, and rationalizations. No different than anyone else, correct? Not exactly. It was always this "not exactly" that threw you. The difficulty in modeling Mai's behavior was exactly the difficult in helping her. It took a mind capable of observing, digesting, categorizing all her actions from the past, remembering them, and trying to adapt them to the future, when future actions would almost necessarily be inconsistent, or invariably unpredictable, in one small yet invariably significant direction. For the value of any scientific model is in its predictability, but even if you had the whole information set, that is, witnessed my sister’s life like St. Joseph did George Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” thereby being able to in theory recreate a perfect model of my sister’s behavior, you would still have a model that only more likely than not predicted her actions. And that was on a clear, sunny day when you could see so far behind you that the future seemed almost nearer.

I was sitting in the family room up in my parents' house. I did not live there. It only seemed as if I did since I had recently spent so much time there in the past year. My mother had been ill and my father needed help so I flew home to help.

My parent's home sat on a corner lot. Red crimson, grayish bricks. Some siding on the back sides for cost efficiency. My mother had wanted a house fronting one of the man-made pondlets. I'm glad my father insisted on the corner lot because the ducks quacked a lot, and the duck droppings generously decorated the walkway round the pond. Those decorations found their way to the bottom of your shoes as you walked round the pond.

I slept in the family room because I could work on the computer at night and crash on the couch two feet away. That's how I usually worked those days, until exhaustion. It was at the end of my mother's long illness. The family room was on the second floor. My mother had always wanted a two-story house. We had been poor growing up so could afford only a one-story. By the time my parents could afford a two-story house, their four children had left. It was a very large, empty nest. My room faced east so the morning sun could heat my head at the foot of the couch almost as soon as I hit it.

Our old house was a model of disorganization. Something was always not quite right. Our house did not look like the Walton’s, or Little House on the Prairie. It was not neat. Our dish sponges smelled. There was always something on the table that should not be there. Something was always not put away in its place. Things spilled out if you opened shelves too abruptly, for all the clutter was delicately balanced so that only a pro in stashing untidy items could open a shelf door, add a say, binder or picture frame, and close it before the pile inside would come tumbling out. It was a skill that was learned from childhood and should not be attempted by non-professionals, even if on a closed circuit course.

It was a new development in the suburbs, the house my parents moved to after all their children left home. My parents moved to the fastest growing city in the region, if not the state, and one of the most noteworthy growing cities in the country. Unfortunately, with the fast development, came speedy building during which developers would shave corners a little too perfectly. Like most houses, my parents' house had a ten-year warranty, and in the eleventh year, virtually every house in the development started sinking. The lack of foundation sunk my parents' house so that the doors started not to close, cracks emanated from at least one corner of every room (usually the northeast). And the foyer had a nice crack running from the front door halfway to the carpeting, at the time I last noted. Each time I visited, it was harder to close the front door, the back door, until all the bedroom doors on the second floor could no longer completely shut unless you slammed it, as if in anger. That year of my sister's engagement, the bedroom doors were often completely closed. Simultaneously.

My mother decorated in light cream to keep the house open and airy. Thing is, we were not the neatest of families, and buttercream coffee shows stains vividly. The kitchen cupboards were done in maple pink. The counters were touched with similar pale pink. The cupboards were coated with hardened grease that somehow permeated from the stove to every cupboard door in the kitchen, above and below, nearest and farthest from the stove. On the cupboard doors nearest the stove, rusty orange grease drops permanently stuck mid-drip on the cupboard doors. That is what happens when you do not wipe cupboard doors once a year. But why should you, if you were brilliant like my parents, romantic, and had so many lofty ideas that stuffed your days so that even one day a year cleaning the cupboard doors would be taking away a valuable day of thought and ideal.

The pink maple kitchen matched the Hunter Douglass shades over the fireplace in the living room, which also showed dust amazingly well. The pinks cut the monotony of mono- to duochromatic ivory buttercream throughout the house. To this day, I am not sure if the double shades have been cleaned. They certainly have not been raised or lowered. The Hunter Douglas shades were made of two sheer fabrics that diffused a pale pink light in the living room. It was my parents' only homage to conspicuous consumption, as the altar was above the fireplace. The rest of the windows that were too high for my Dad to reach with a stepstool still had the temporary paper blinds collecting their eleventh year of dust. Actually, they looked pretty good for their paperiness, for anything less than high-end shades would have looked worse than nothing. And that is why some of the ceiling windows in the living room were left untreated. Either way, my mother achieved her desired light and airy look of openness, with a dense spattering of stains between the coffee table and the couch, and also on the carpet edging the kitchen. And a medium density of stains on the kitchen counter facing the living room interrupted the façade of cleanliness my mother attempted. As did the stains in the front room by the front door opposite the dining room. This room, the official den, held the piano we banged on in childhood with the metronome transported from our old house as well (probably sitting on top during transport so that we would be able to find it in the new house).

The walls were left white save the upper story bathroom adjoining my family room to the next room, which were wallpapered in lustrous blurry beige-brown pattern. These took on dye stains that appeared during the process of marrying sis. Across the second-floor walkway were two more bedrooms, one my father used as a work space, and one my dad slept in when he fell asleep watching television. On one side, the walkway overlooked the living room with a good glimpse of the kitchen. On the other side, where the stairs led up, the walkway overlooked the front door, with a fair glimpse into the dining room on the west and the official den, which along with our piano from youth, held another computer desk facing the front window, on which my father spent far too much time, the way I spent far too much on the computer upstairs in my room.

The master bedroom on the first floor did not have a television, for it kept my mother's sewing machine. She was a master designer and tailor. The curtains were all mom-made. They did not have the uniform crisp quality of department store drapes yet when we replaced a few with store-bought, I realized the mix and design of the fabrics my mother chose was something that heavier textiles could not achieve.

The back lawn was busily coaxed to a thriving garden of hard to find herbs, some of which I am totally in the dark regarding their arrival and habitation in this country, that my parents enjoyed regularly. My father built a tin room for the patio that was a bit too high and shanty-town for the homeowner's association. The front yard at the time housed a fish pondlet that froze every other winter unless covered with a tarp. Trees with rare fruits spotted the lawn, although most of them never bore fruit the first summer, only the second and perhaps every other henceforth. A shallow bower framed the red-black brick front entrance. Vines grew on a trellis my father built to frame the entrance as well as the front window, to offer shade from the summer sun when he was surfing the net on the computer desk in the den. My mother grew flowers, of which her prized roses were so coveted, some neighbors asked for a few. We said sure, how many? They said a dozen.

It was in the family room, my makeshift bedroom, where I was working when my sister came in to talk to me. I slept on the ivory couch; the cushions would never stay in place and would slide off onto the floor while I was sleeping. The mini two-seater couch sat at a right angle to the big couch-bed, its back to the center of three windows facing mostly south and a bit east, which meant that the curtains on the center window had to be shorter than the curtains than on the side windows, no furniture being placed next to those windows. The mini couch I used to throw my clothes, the clean clothes on the right cushion, the worn clothes that could still be worn again on the left. For years, the mini couch was covered with a bright red and black striped Mexican blanket, with a few slivers of white and green. The colors were garishly unappetizing but it stayed because I do not have a nesting instinct. Of late, a course ivory throw with soft fringe blended the mini couch into the carpet.

It was the end of Mai's trip home and she was leaving the next day. My mother had fallen ill in February; it was now November and Mai had come to help take care of our father. My oldest sister, Thuy, who was a physician and lived on the East Coast same town as Mai, did not as yet have time to visit my mother. Busy with the kids.

Mai had been in town for over a week and she was exhausted. From day one. It was difficult for her to do the things an invalid needs even with my father and me helping. Remember when you were young and very ill and your mother would bring you chicken soup, and it might have been too hot and you weakly said, "it's too hot, mom," your mom would blow on each spoonful until it was just exactly right even if one spoonful required four blows and the next spoonful required six, a mother always knows how much--not too hot, not too cold--that, dear friends, is quintessential motherhood.

Well, motherhood is composed of a million to some N-th power of details that only a mother would know and notice about her children for their comfort and happiness. For elderly parents who need care, it's not much different except children have no parental instinct for their own parents. Well, some do and most don't and a few fall in varying degrees in between, most toward the shove them off to a nursing home and visit when they aren't so busy with the kids.

My mother was not able to eat much and her meals consisted mainly of liquids. She liked her water a certain way. First, tap water filtered through Brita, then boiled through a coffee maker that never was used for coffee, only water, the coffee taste never went away. Then when the filtered then boiled water was cooled, it was poured into a pitcher or bottle, ready for my mother. Since my mother was not eating much, she would ask for a drink now and again. When she was cold, she would ask for a blanket, and when she was hot thirty minutes later, she would ask for the blanket to be taken off. This was a lot of trouble for Mai, even with my father and me helping her, and after a day of this (I had picked her up at the airport around midnight the day before last), Mai said she was tired. She was impressed that I could have helped care for our mother for several weeks, and I mentioned our father had been doing this for nine months now. He had lost almost twenty pounds.

It wasn't that it was hard, said Mai, only that getting up and getting down when she was all settled with the laptop on the couch was you know, kind of a lot of trouble to get up and interrupt what she was doing. It's a vicious cycle. If you're not active, you gain weight and your body feels sluggish. When you gain weight, you feel even more sluggish. No one in my immediate family was fat, or even overweight, yet after a few decades in cornucopia America, some of us were not as trim as the gaunt figure of an Asian immigrant that comes to mind. Which meant that getting up to get my mother some water was a hassle for some.

During Mai's visit, she helped me bring my mother to the doctor. My father was so relieved to get a break, for he and I both had to take my mother to the doctor before Mai came home, so now he got a break. It was difficult for my mother to get out of bed and walk. You had to help her up slowly, let her adjust to sitting, then when she was ready, help her stand up, wait until she was steady on her feet, and walk. Someone had to hold her up while she leaned her weight against them. There was a bag of meds, a sweater, water, munchies in case my mother needed something waiting in the doctor's office since she could barely swallow five hundred calories a day. So if my mother said she wanted a bite, literally one bite, I made sure a bite of food was available so she would not feel faint. An ice pack in case my mother had a hotflash, not the menopausal kind but the waves of heat that would burn her up so that she could not sleep and the bed underneath her burned so that she could get no rest.

Anyway, it was the first time that Mai had been involved in getting my mother out of bed to the doctor's, since that was the only place she was going these days. This particular doctor's office was less than ten minutes' drive away. It took well more than that to move my mother from the bed to the car and load up the three small bags for her. When we parked in the lot, I shouldered one tote, my purse, and my mother's sweater and was helping her out of the car. Mai was in the back; she was in charge of two bags and asked, "do we need to bring in the thermos? It's heavy." My mother looked hurt. I glared at my sister; she knew the look and shouldered the great weight of the two bags, which weighed en toto five pounds. As we approached the front entrance of the medical building, which was fifty feet away and would take us another couple of minutes to reach, I called out to my sister who was ahead inside the entrance, "Mai, hold open the door for us," as I guided my mother the last few feet to the office building. We shuffled, moving like time-lapse photography. I had so much time in between steps my mind wandered to a video of two starfish that was captured using time-lapse technology. They were battling each other for something I forget what, a female starfish? Territorial combat? I do not think it was over a scallop. But each starfish's arm took a day or more or half to lash out at its enemy, and I thought if it took that long, could one starfish, seeing its opponent begin a punch that would take twenty-eight hours to execute, stop its own punch midway, change directions, duck and throw a sucker punch, or once begun, a starfish attack was delivered without possibility of change? I wondered if the thinking process took long as well.

"Mai, open the door." My mother and I reached the entrance and Mai had wondered off somewhere she had gotten tired of holding the door open.

So it was that Mai's trip home to help our mother ended tomorrow. She had spent most of her time on the phone with her boyfriend when she was not working. She had talked so much that she used my phone since I had unlimited minutes. We knew not to interrupt when she was talking to her boyfriend, my dad and I. Mai was now sitting on the floor by the desk where I was working on the computer. I listened while I worked.

"Well, Anh, I wanted you to be the first to know, since you've always helped me, ever since we were little. And you helped me, you know, taught me how to fix myself up and dress a little nicer and showed me how to put on makeup, and it you know, boosted my confidence, and that was how Steve first noticed me, he said that I was nice looking and had an air of, you know, kind of assurance that made him notice me. So, I wanted you to be the first to know that Steve and I have been talking about getting married, and he's coming home with me Christmas to meet the family and announce our engagement then." My sister was so happy I listened to her chirp for another few hours, minimized the window that I was working on and looked at engagement rings while she was telling me all about Steve and their plans.

Later, when Mai was fast asleep, I picked up my work again, staying up late to finish it. I had to get up early to take her to the airport. She dozed on the way there.

Chapter I: Part Six: Driving Faster to Keep Up In The Same Place

This lack of consideration could take a single-mindedness all of its own. People like my sister often went about their routine or urgent matters with blinders on, stopping only to glance side to side when there was a shadow or tangential movement that might inhibit their own forward progress.

Suppose that I was driving my sister to a doctor's appointment. It was usually that case and never the other way around, for I normally could get to the doctor myself, and Mai was uncomfortable driving a car until she was around thirty years old. I was the one who finally taught her how to drive on the freeway. (Remind me to tell you that story.) Our father taught her how to drive, as he taught all his children, but after passing her driver's exam, my sister drove almost exclusively on city streets because she was afeared of switching lanes, and anyone sitting in the passenger seat was usually terrified.

We would be in the car and I would be backing out of the driveway and ask where to turn to get to my sister's doctor's office. Nine times out of ten, she would say, "Oh, I don't know, I'm figuring that out right now," while she scanned the  paper map and when cell phones finally had Google Maps she would quickly get directions. The tenth time was when I prodded Mai ahead of time to print out directions or map them out on her phone. Otherwise, it would be left to me, not my doctor's appointment but somehow I had to get us there on time. Unfortunately, it was faster if I both read the map and drove instead of waiting for my sister to read the map or get directions online while I drove. Knowing that I was that competent often made people like Mai depend on me more. So when I would drive her somewhere in the early morning when we both had little sleep, she would, unless I prompted her, kick back and relax, maybe take a snooze, while I struggled to stay alert with hot Jasmine tea.

Giving me directions would consist of something similar to this. Before we got on the nearby freeway, which was two miles away and I obviously knew the way there having driven our neighborhood streets hundreds of times, Mai would say, "Turn left out of the driveway,..." We would often get lost before we hit the freeway if followed Mai's direction giving, by the way.

Mai would often read the directions all at once, without looking at the map, without thinking it through, "take a right on Bradford, a left on Burlingame, enter the freeway headed north, drive 7 miles, exit on Monterey street headed east for 0.8 miles, then take the third left. Next, drive four blocks--"

"Mai, we're not yet on the freeway, I can't memorize the directions when you read them at me while I'm driving. Wait until we get to the next step, then tell me." I would remind her for the twenty-seventh time. That year.

Besides not really considering that a person could not memorize all the steps at once while driving to the nearby freeway and without being able to look at the map, my sister also read the directions so quickly all at once so that she could get it over with. Kick back, relax, read a Harlequin romance while I chauffeured her around town, catch up on her sleep because she had read romance novels all night long.

And then when we finally got to the segment of the drive where I really needed help, my sister would be huddled over a Silhouette romance novel, poke her nose out when I sternly told her to stop reading and give me directions, flash a look of anger for being interrupted in the middle of her romance novel, and flusteredly try to figure out where we were and where I needed to turn next (about three blocks ago). Where we grew up it rained a lot and getting lost was not a big deal, and I am not the type of person who drives from point A to point B taking one route her entire life. However, when you have played chauffeur long enough, having to take U-turns because someone did not bother to give you prompt and accurate directions because she was busy reading a romance novel gets aggravating. Especially when you are losing sleep over it or could be doing something else far more interesting than drive your older sister to a physician's appointment because she is too afraid to change lanes on a freeway.

You might think these are little things but little things add up and the repetition of a little thing cumulates until all these identical little things summed from zero to infinity drown you even as the function approaches zero over time. That means, although today, my sister has improved a lot in helping the person that is driving by giving timely and understandable directions, when she does not, it's the straw that breaks the camel's back. For a chauffeur who could have gone on to do bigger and better things, the marginal times Mai got us lost was enough for the wave of exasperation to submerge me in its howling undercurrent. For there are some people, who when drowning, can be saved only by a professional lifeguard, otherwise the rescuer might drown himself. So it was with Mai.

I long ago stopped counting the ways in which I had to stop up the pin holes that were poked in a balloon that was then filled with water. The water would eventually leak out and if the goal was to keep the balloon inflated, then either water had to constantly be poured in or the holes had to be stopped. Or both, which was doubly tricky because pouring water into a balloon that you knew would eventually leak out all its water was frustrating because you were the one filling the balloon and and tending it, trying to stop all the water leaking out so how was it that there were new pinholes as soon as you patched up an existing pinhole when you were so careful?

Sometimes, I thought that the faster I poured in water, the faster it would leak out. Was it the pressure or a predetermined equilibrium that made it impossible to keep the balloon filled at a critical minimal level so that it could stay inflated and float away from its own? So, sometimes I would let my sister fend for herself, always waiting in the emotional wings to stabilize her when necessary. Lo and behold of wonders, sometimes Mai was able to swim, not only the dog paddle but the butterfly, as gracefully as if she had never been in a cocoon. Most of the time, I had to continue refilling the balloon with water. Determining the difference when to let go and when to stabilize her was one of the greatest puzzles I had been given to solve. It was a multistep process in which we all played a part.

Chapter 1: Part 5: Still Counting

And thus it was that my sister faced life, excelling at a few things such as art and not at others. What was perhaps most notable about my sister was her lack of assertiveness. This played a huge part in family interactions as well as with friends, coworkers, and just about anybody when there was a disagreement, no matter how agreeable or combative. It came down to a few types of situations.

The first was when my sister wanted something different than another person, say, my brother, but there had to be agreement. For instance, our parents said that we could buy some ice cream and Mai wanted drumsticks and my brother, Tien, wanted ice cream sandwiches. My brother could persuade my sister Mai into getting ice cream sandwiches because related to her impressionable mind was a lack of assertiveness so marked that most people could persuade my sister Mai to do well, a lot of things. Save things that were drilled into her not to do out of fear, the fear of God or Satan, to many, both fears are indistinguishable. But if fear did not play a role in it, then Mai could be persuaded to do and also think many things that she would not have done or thought on her own.

Which leads to perhaps the most notable aspect of my sister's "specialness", as my mother put it many years later, when her English skills caught the nuances of political correctness as used in dry humour, yes with an "our". My sister Mai, very often, too often not perhaps, did not think of do things that would occur to an ordinary person. Ordinary is defined as the average considerate person who takes into account other people's feelings. Mai definitely could feel empathy, but it was in situations that were closely related to her world. Where things did not affect her micro world, which was identical to her macro world until someone shook her into following the teachings of empathicalism, my sister did not think about other people.

When she made herself lunch, you could be sitting there and chime in, "I'm thirsty," My sister, in her youth, would say, "me too" and make herself a glass of lemonade (Asians made it with limes) and sit there and drink it in front of you. She is better today, a lot of reminding and scripting. Today, if you enter the room, all sweaty from a five mile jog in the noonday summer's heat, and Mai sees you throwing yourself, panting and exhausted in a chair, she might, "You look tired. Is it hot?" And you answer, "Yeah, I just got in, couldn't take the heat," Mai will make herself some lemon-, I mean limeade, and sit there across the table from you, and commiserate about the heat, "It's been hotter this summer, must be climate change," and sip her limeade without offering you any, until you ask, "Can I have some limeade to drink?" wherein she will loop at her glass of limeade and say, "Oh, sure. I pour some in a cup for you."

My middle sister was unable to take into account other people's feelings unless told to do so or unless it directly impinged upon her own sphere of goals, wants, (getting married) and requirements (working to pay the bills so that in the meantime, she could get married).

Chapter 1: Part Four: How My Sister Was Different: Let Me Count the Ways

My sister's awkwardness expressed itself in a variety of ways. One was her distance from reality. She was the classic young girl who dreamed of her Mr. Right, who came in the form of Cinderella's prince charming to Harlequin's Fabio. She wanted the perfect white wedding and nothing else would do. Some women want children, and marriage is a way to. They think they want a wedding but it's really children. Now with out of wedlock parenting, weddings for wedding's sake were still important to the conservative, religious, and romantics. My sister fell into all of these categories, which made wedding planning all the more difficult. Wedding planners should take into account such considerations before estimating the cost of planning. The more factors to these three that are present, also including mixed-race marriage, differing religions of the betrothed, immigrant parents who are way more open minded than Americans because they were brave enough to move halfway around the world, all of these should go into estimating the cost of wedding planning. For when too many of these factors mix,...kablooey.

My sister of course, wanted to wear white, have the whole get-down-on-his-knees-to-propose groom, the perfect dress with either lace or beads or embroidery or all three plus ruffles, and everyone to be happy on her happiest of days. Because she believed in happily ever after. To the exclusion of not much else. Sure, she worked hard, but there was a majority part of her that could not be fulfilled as a wedding could. And I mean wedding every bit as much as marriage.

Another distinctive characteristic was my sister's way of communicating. She had funny thoughts that were not so funny. I mean that they weren't silly that you could laugh at them. They were just...odd. You had to think about it before you responded and that usually meant that you decided to ignore the odd part. But even I will admit that it was hard.

For instance, after reading so many Silhouette romance novels, my sister had the idea that women should have an hourglass figure without the corset. That waistlines naturally curved inward to an extent that would be possible if a woman had her unattached rib removed. Since full figures did not run in our branch of the family, my sister was intent that her waistline look small. So, when she would try on dresses in the fitting room and the saleslady would ask if she needed a different dress, my sister would say yes and explain that the dress she tried on made her look "straight" and trace out with her two hands two parallel lines. Straight. Well, she did look straight because she is not big busted. So, like all women, including big busted women, she wore a  padded bra, but didn't like to super size it. so she still looked straight and asked the saleslady for a dress that would make her look curvier. Then my sister would trace out with her hands, two sideways V's. In other words, her hands came together where a waist tapered in and then her hands spread out where a waist blossomed into hips. She pointed out to the saleslady that the dress was not sewn that way and that was the reason it made my sister look straight. Even though she knew she looked straight, she thought a different dress, if sewn differently, you know, with a bust of thirty-two and waist of twenty inches and hips of thirty three inches, would shape her body into those measurements. If you asked her, at another place and time, if a dress could conform a body to a more hourglass shape without being made of whalebone corset, she would say, of course not, don't be ridiculous. But there she stood, asking another bemused saleswoman that it was the dress's fault my sister did not look as if her waist were smaller and her figure not curvier.

Sure, some clothes make you look fatter and some even make you look slimmer. But when a dress looked as good as it could given its styling and it was evident that the dress was not what made my sister look straight, she would still insist that there was another off-the-rack dress made of silk that could be sewn a little tighter at the waist to make it smaller. Even when the dress she had on was pulling at the seams and the waist could not be sewn smaller, this did not stop my sister from insisting that the dress made look straight because the waist was not small enough.

Any smaller dress on my sister and the seams would bust. Pointing out that the seams were taut made her look at the mirror, her hands on her waist, a disconsolate look on her face, and shake her head and say, "but the dress makes me look so straight! If the dress were sewn in at the waist and out at the hips, then I wouldn't look so straight. Some dresses make you look better, don't they?"

"Yes, but this dress is as tight on you as it can be without tearing at the seams." I must have explained this a dozen times since my sister went through puberty. When the sales associate suggest she try a corset or waist cincher, my sister would reply it "looked fake". No...you mean Barbie looks fake? Well, since she doesn't have to wear a waist cincher, I guess Barbie's fifteen inch waist is natural!

I do not know that we should blame the media for young girls' self image and expectations. For if it is not big breasts and an unnaturally small waist that is the object of unobtainable obsession, it will be something else, for some people are impressionable, the same way they are stubbornly insistent that the clothes they wear can be made in such a way to make them look like an ideal that does not physiologically exist without cosmetic enhancements.

That might seem contradictory, to be so impressionable from one's external environment and yet be so stubborn. Since human nature is far from consistent and rationalization makes perfect sense and truth to the rationalizer, there is nothing inconsistent in such a nature. It is in all of us. In one out of two hundred, the inconsistency is expressed in the particular as to make one say "whu-ut..." Don't forget the chronology. Media suggests something. Then impressionable adolescent without question takes it as life's most important and worthy goal to be achieved. Happens all the time. Only the way that it expresses itself in individuals can peg one as a typical adolescent or as a person that isn't the most well liked because people who cause discomfort, much like ideas, are rarely welcome in our circle of friends.


Chapter Three: Growing Up Immigrants American Style

Chapter Two: That Was Not Me

Marrying Sis: Chapter 1: Something That Would Never Happen

Chapter 1: Part Three: Growing Up Immigrants American Style

Add to the institution of family vested with family values the institution of religion and the result was a sticky mess out of which a black widow could not extricate herself without losing a limb or two. I always confused arachnids with insects anyway. To me, arachnids were deft runners and insects were plain bothersome. Unfortunately, they overran everything from sacred, household, and garden variety obscene until the best way to fight them was to lay back and let them drown every bit of your skin in their pincers and biters until the welts on your skin ran into each other and became one big swollen bite. The wounds of a clan are like that. Symbiotic. Together the sum of their potency is greater than the parts. That is a clan's strength. That is how they confront the world, and that is how they make sure each member of the clan stays in line. For the solid face presented to the world is turned inward on its own just as quickly and noncompliance is dealt with as swiftly as a bite of a black widow even if she be partially amputated.

It wasn't always so bad. Clannishness had its benefits that outweighed its cost in the beginning. Being in a new country, closeness ensured survival.

We started life in an immigration camp where the Midwestern townsfolk truly did have family values and set us and other immigrant families up in low income housing, found us used cars that still had a thousand miles on them, found our parents blue collar jobs cleaning, paining, hauling, things that did not need English. We, meaning the extended family of a dozen aunts and uncles (luckily most were unmarried, which means no children at the time) lived in a tiny cramped apartment with barely enough warmth in the winter but being a happy child I remember the drifts of snow crunching underfoot and always wanted to run out and play with my older siblings, two older sisters and one older brother, but was too young sometimes for the subfreezing temperatures.

I remember a general feeling of strife that shaped my father's posture as he spoke to native countrymen, the gratitude when he spoke in broken English with the locals, and the stress of work that I did not specifically understand but certainly felt every time he came home late from work. It was no less for my mom. She would sometimes walk through the front door and barely greet us as she went to the bedroom to lay down. I knew it was bad, even at four years old. It was a type of spiritual stress that comes from people with great talent and potential who cannot express it, for the land of opportunity meant food, and safe shelter for the first generation adults. The first generation children did not have the spiritual stress of having society look down on them for not being able to speak English and having to clean other people's toilets when they were capable of so much more than the people for whom they cleaned toilets.

My siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles did not learn about culture from our parents, for they were busy working for our happiness. We learned it in school. And if you have heard about how loners, homosexuals, and anyone different are persecuted, immigrants are no different. Try fighting back when you can't speak the language. Luckily for some of us, learning to speak English was easy since we were young. But small nuances in language persist to this day.

For instance, anything with a flat surface was a shelf. If my sister told me to put something on the shelf, she often pointed to the coffee table or the living room table or the dresser drawer. We actually did not have a coffee table or a table made specially for the living room. Those concepts were not known to our young minds. We just sort of placed a table of a certain size in our house as was convenient.

This did not make much of a difference until I went away to college and my roommates laughed when I pronounced cupboard phonetically. Is it my fault Americans don't enunciate and slur their syllables?

Being poor and wearing second hands from your classmates didn't help either. I remember an off-the-shoulder dress in green floral print that I thought was so sexy. I was always happy to get new hand-me-downs. I never felt any sense of inferiority from my classmates and even thanked them for their old faux fur coat that felt more luxurious than anything I had ever had. I was lucky that way, the things that people would be ashamed of, such as wearing your neighbor's clothes, I saw as wow, what a sexy little dress and faux fur coat, I can't wait to wear it to church this week!

My pink colored glasses sometimes got cracked. Not everything could be viewed with a smile, so it's a good thing my family was tough. We fought back against the bullies. Not all of us could, however. When you are an immigrant all battles are uphill, steep and rugged. For my sister, the battle uphill approached vertical. She was a bit different. In a way that was hard to explain. It wasn't anything obvious in one faux pas. It was more like a series of odd things she might say. The first time you kind of thought whatever, people explain things in a confusing way all the time. The next time you kind of blinked. Maybe she didn't really say it the way it sounded. The third time, okay, that was a little weird. After hanging out with her for a while, you realized the out-of-kilter things my sister said was a real reflection of the way her mind worked. A little more than two standard deviations from the mean. And for this, kids and adults alike were mean to her.

It was something we all noticed but wasn't big enough to do something about. What could be done anyway. There was no word for it when we were growing up. Hey, I'm not saying there wasn't anything wrong with the rest of us. However, most people are different within acceptable boundaries. And being different in a not good way is usually balanced by talents, strengths, such as excelling in school, being pretty, or running faster. My sister had none of these except art. But who values art these days unless there's a big price tag attached to it. Things might have been tolerable but my sister got it on all sides, at school and at home. It wasn't a purposeful thing, not at home anyway. But you have to be around to see how difficult it was to not take advantage of my sister. It took the patience of Saint Job to hang around my sister without losing one's temper. So at the most one could take her in doses. Continuous exposure was not like inoculating yourself to cyanide by taking little doses over a period of time. There was no dose sufficiently small that would not be harmful in the long run. Immunity did not exist. A cure was as hopeful as a cure to breast cancer. Exposure meant certain debilitation, if not permanent, long lasting with a taste for no further contact or a dose large enough to end one's misery. The nature of this beast however, was its skill in prolonging misery. At least with the bull, the picadero would be replaced with the bullfighter and his long sword. In the real world, the picadero kept on pricking you until you finally bled to death, but how was that possible when pinpricks close up faster than you can prick them.

Chapter 1: Part Two: That Was Not Me

That was not me. That bitter monologue spitting out my--well, bitterness. I am not an angry person. Proud definitely, so my wrath at that time came from another source. For me, the two vices that run least in my blood are anger and envy. That’s why it would have been sad that a person, who was born happy, had a happy childhood, and remained happy through her adult years, could sink into such anger and depression. Over a wedding no less, but it happened. I will not say that it was mostly others. Perhaps I should have been stronger. I know I was not strong enough. I don’t think anyone could have been.

The only other choice was to step away. But if any of you recall the question in tenth grade lit class, on whether you thought your life was guided by choice or by fatalistic events, marrying my sis made me believe in fate that could not be evaded. As much as I chose to avoid it, fate came at me from all sides tackling me down like a tiny squirming bait on a fishhook. And yet as fatalistic as my life seemed then, I could not help but recall Dante and his refusal to repent because he thought that he was past redemption, for I chose a path that for its entire expanse was irreversible, including the decision to take it, the way love is irreversible, for nothing could have made me do what I did except love, and when there is only one decision you can make that is driven by love, I say that is pretty fatalistic. Or call it choice. Because no one can make you love something, not even god.

Whatever it was, it kicked my butt and recuperating was a struggle up the peaks of Denali. I would like to say the way down was easier with the help of gravity, but the rocks I tumbled upon came at me with the faces of my clan, vices and virtue on the same face, the same vices on different faces, and the same faces of different clansmen commingled together like a happy and very warped soup, for I had never known until then that weddings brought out a person’s true nature. I did know that the only real important things in life were: births, baptisms, marriages, divorces, and death. I had read that somewhere when young. But I had no idea that the full extent of a person’s misery could be brought out during the preparation for what was to be the best day of a couple’s new life together. And I don’t mean mine either. Not my life together, I wasn’t getting married, my misery I mean. I had no idea the misery of others would be an obstacle I had to overcome in marrying sis. And oh, there were many obstacles. If misery likes company, then I became great company for my clansman.

But let me step back a moment. You need to be introduced to my clansman. Basically, two brothers married two sisters. The older brother had twelve children because it was cheaper by the dozen and the younger brother had only eleven. That’s why he was the younger one. The oldest of the twelve (of the older brother) went to the seminary when he was fourteen. Of his own volition. His parents were at first not for it. Because he was the firstborn son. Let me remind you of a saying in our traditional native country, that “to have a son is to have, to have a daughter is to have not.”

That left the second of twelve in charge. Albeit female, she was the only one old enough during the war to manage and the only one with the steely will to march her siblings along the treacherous road to the South. Her father had already gone down to Saigon to work at the U.S. embassy, and her mother wondered when he would be coming back. When it became evident that any capitalist lover living in the North would be killed, the second oldest of twelve children, my mother, gathered up her ten younger siblings with packs and suitcases of ao dai, her mother and grandmother, and started the journey south.

It was a road of bombings and battles. Who could sleep when the nighttime air raids came like whistling messengers of death that ended in a crash boom on your neighbors hut. My aunt, child number three and my mother’s immediate younger sister, could. Evidently, she could sleep through anything, that’s why she was a big beautiful woman. My mother, she worried, and planned and improvised a new plan day to day to maneuver her family down South. She was maybe thirteen-years old at the time. Sharp as a tack and deadly with intent. The enemy soldiers were everywhere, the friendlies less so. And my mother had to find a way across river, bridge, road, field, forest, jungle, machine gun fire, missiles, bombs, and her crying siblings that were too young to even remember. But this she did because this is what she had to do. And that kind of gumption worked its way into me, vested me with the power to get my sis married and if you think that is a poor comparison and more appropriately contrasted, I agree. Navigating one’s family through a war zone should not be compared to planning a wedding. Yet planning my sisters wedding almost did kill a few of us; if not permanently, disabled us for life. Don’t laugh. I didn’t, if I did at times, it was with a rueful consciousness that recognized its impending death. For if the enemy in us is the greatest of all enemies, then the wounds it can inflict all the more grievous. But sadly, death from friendly fire comprised the majority of near casualties. Sometimes, I wished they would just end it. The friendlies, they believed in slow death. The torture, it was like a picadero jabbing you with a knife, maiming you only enough to leech your strength but leaving enough for you to nurse back to almost health. Over and over again, until you wished for a quick stab through the heart, or better yet, through the mind, so that you would not need to think about all the absurdities the world could throw at you through the guise of institution called family, a clan no less, that professed its closeness, which made it all the more needlessly absurd.