Parallel // Structure

by C. T. Dinh

content warning: mention of death

//

It was July, and I ought to have been thinking about college. I knew that, and yet did not; instead, I rewrote my angry poems in an attempt to tame them into submission. 

I had too many tabs open, as always. One of them was a spreadsheet detailing every rejection I’d received in the past months. Another tab was a poem, and another was the website of a classmate I simultaneously admired and envied, publications page filled with hyperlinks to every journal that showcased her words.

“Are you working on your college essays?” My mother’s voice peered in from the doorway, sound waves curling towards me like spyware in the shape of a question mark. Though my mother’s eyes still resided on the other side of the room, her gaze obligated me to open the tab containing my college essay. A slim cursor blinked up at me against a blank white page.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Yeah, I am.”

“Good. Let me read them when you’re done.”

I curled my hands into fists above my overheated keyboard. My knuckles burned. My fingertips felt as if I’d just removed them from a hug against hot coals. Although I shipped my stories off to lit mags, stuffed them with confessions to put out before strangers, I didn’t know how I would share this 650-word statement with her.

“Sure,” I said anyways.

“Good.” My mother pushed my door open wider. “AP scores come out tomorrow, did you know?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Which tests did you take again, this year? Math, physics, and what else?”

“Spanish.”

“Ah. Spanish,” said my mother. I knew what she was thinking. She didn’t need to say it again.

//

The first time my mother caught me translating tales, she was confused. Then disappointed. She asked, “What’s the point?” She asked, “Can’t you just type it into Google Translate?” She asked, “Why are you translating these stories by strangers when you can’t even translate your mother tongue?”

“It’s an art,” I said.

“Doesn’t look like art to me.”

“Not all art is pretty pictures, Mom.”

“Not all art, maybe. But all good art.” She frowned over my shoulder. “What is so special about you translating words on the page? I do it every day in my head.”

Once, in 8th grade Spanish, my friend complained to me that her head was too full of Chinese and English to have room for another language. From then on, I wondered whether my proficiency in the class was only proof of my empty mind. 

“This is different,” I said. My mother left the room, defeated, as was I. We try, sometimes, to understand each other, but we’ve both given up long ago. As the lock clicked shut, the little inspiration I’d mustered before the intrusion escaped through the gap beneath the door.

I sighed and stacked the story I was working through into a neat packet, shoving it to the side of my desk. The manuscript shook hands with my abandoned project pile as it welcomed my work-in-progress to their ranks. Bienvenidos al club de proyectos olvidados, where translation projects go to die. I’m an unfinished novel by García Márquez. And that over there is a collection of poems by Lorca.

My manuscript nodded towards the marble-stained chapbook beneath the pile. And who’s that over there?

Who’s that? Oh. We don’t know her, the novel laughed. She’s not part of the club.

And she wasn’t, I don’t think, even though I’d shoved her into the same bin. Her hand-bound pages were inscribed in a completely different language, one that neither Márquez nor Lorca nor Quiroga nor I could understand, twisted diacritics flitting above the silhouettes of every Serif-printed verse. But I don’t think I can call it a given-up project if I’ve never even chiseled at its slate.

//

It surprised me a bit, to see how little my mother cared about poetry—even poetry written by a woman who still wandered into her dreams. But then again it didn’t surprise me much at all.

I don’t know if my mother believes in dreams-come-true but one time, I overheard a conversation with my father shortly after my grandfather passed away. “Did you see it coming?” she asked. “Did you dream about it?”

“Of course not,” my father replied. What else was there to say?

I watched them silently, realizing suddenly that maybe it was my fault—if I told them about the dream I’d had earlier that month, maybe then it could have been stopped.

A few months after the funeral, once we could bear to be in the house again, we started clearing out my grandfather’s rooms—my uncle carrying away books for donation, my aunt inventorying ceramic plates. Sticky notes on dusty lamps scrawled with my cousin’s name. I claimed for my own a Việt-Anh dictionary and a book on our history, both of which I’d eventually give up on reading. 

My aunt gave me a basket for my grabs. “There’s more stuff in Bà Nội’s bedroom upstairs,” she said. “Take whatever you would like.”

I followed her instructions and made my way to my grandmother’s bedroom to find my mother, homemade chapbooks spread around her. The writing was printed in Times New Roman on marble-stained cardstock, clipped together by plastic spiral binds. “What are those?” I asked, though I knew they were poems, just couldn’t decipher the words.

“Thơ của Bà,” my mother said. I wasn’t familiar with the first word, unsurprisingly. My parents were not privileged enough to become artists; there was never a need to mention the word poem in my house before.

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know Bà wrote poetry.” Maybe it ran in the family, but skipped a generation. I’d suspected that a lot of things ran in the family, like obsidian eyes and the urge to cut your hair.

As my mother flipped through the marble-stained pages, apparently searching for something, I picked up the title page, dismembered from one of the chapbooks. At the center was an abstract illustration, at the bottom was what I could only assume to be my grandmother’s name. I realized, then, that I never knew her full name, only knew her as Bà Nội. Paternal grandmother. Dad’s mom. I was surprised that I’d never asked.

Finally my mother found what she was looking for. She told me it was a poem that Bà had written for her nearly seventeen years ago, before my mother moved to California with Bà Nội’s only son. Somewhere in the second stanza, I caught my mother’s name.

She slipped the leaf out of the bindings and stood up.

“Is that all you’re taking?” I asked.

“Yes,” my mother said.

“What about the rest?”

“They’re all the same to me.”

Some of these poems were the same, duplicated on different patterns of paper. After we stacked the papers into a neat pile once more, after my mother left the room and I had it all to myself, I slipped one chapbook into my basket. Later that day I heard my aunt shuffling around the room, counting up the collections in her hand. “I could’ve sworn there was one more. I counted earlier today—I know there was one more.” There was one more. It had been taken by a selfish girl who didn’t even know how to read.

//

I tried my hand once at writing a poem in Spanish.

I tried my hand once, or rather, my voice, at freestyle rapping in Spanish. It turns out I could do that better than I could freestyle in my native tongue, though that wasn’t a high bar. Maybe that’s because rhymes come easily when so many conjugations end the same.

I used to dream of performing spoken word, of hurling my throat and my body into something I’d written. Speaking at an open mic, a coffeehouse, in between the boy with the ukulele and the girl with a voice like the sea. But my bones were not built to be rattled—instead, they were built to write. Arachnid fingers crawling over a keyboard or scrawling stories onto a looseleaf page.

Bà’s marble-stained chapbook still rested beside my hand. My fingers spidered through it mindlessly, yearning setting my brain to autopilot, my mother’s reprimands ricochetting against my memory. Can’t you just type it into Google Translate? 

I considered it, once. But that felt wrong. Like picking a lock when you were supposed to find the golden key. I was a translator, not a machine. If it wasn’t knowledge I could attain myself, it wasn’t knowledge that I deserved to have.

And maybe a small selfish part of me simply didn’t want to know. Where is the excitement in biting the apple when the temptation isn’t there?

I shut the chapbook and opened, instead, my computer. In my inbox, an unread message blinked. Your AP Scores are available. I read the subject line in my mother’s voice, disclosing nothing, and clicked.

//

“Hey, Mom. My AP results came in today.”

“Yes, I know.” A beat passed by as my mother stirred noodles over the stove. She doesn’t look at me. The fan roared, but it did nothing to quench the thick, crisp scent of nước mắm. The fish sauce hissed and sizzled in its odious cauldron. “Which ones did you take, again?”

“Physics 2, BC Calc, and Spanish.”

“And what did you get?”

“Two fours.” A breath. “On both physics and calc.”

“And on Spanish?”

My mother looked me over, and for a second I thought she was bracing herself for the worst. Then I realized that she already knew.

“A five,” I said.

She nodded. 

“Good.”

I wasn’t sure whether that flicker in her eyes was approval. But I could tell it was acceptance, of some sort, and that was better than nothing. She turned back to stirring her noodles, her expression a crisp paper envelope, her lips the immaculate seal.

//

That night, I went into the bathroom to wash my hands. My mother was in the shower. The glass panels were thick with steam but I averted my eyes anyway, though we’d been living together for too long now to care.

“You know,” my mother said through the showerhead’s murmur, “even if you aren’t taking Spanish next year, you should still keep practicing. It would be a waste to have learned it for so long only to forget.”

“Uh-huh,” I said apathetically.

“I remember I could speak Spanish very well in college. I could speak, read, and write. I was almost fluent.”

“Uh-huh,” I said again.

“And then I forgot it all.”

I was silent for a bit, so she continued. “It was such a shame. I hear my co-workers speaking Spanish all the time and I wish I could speak to them. I wish I didn’t forget.” She paused, voice heavy as rain. “I don’t want you to forget like I did.”

Her voice, distorted by the running water, streamed through my ears. A confession. When was the last time my mother confessed to me?

Something about her tone gave me déjà vu.

My hands, scrubbing and soap-soaked, froze in awe as I realized I’d recognized her shame. My mother, telling startled relatives that I couldn’t speak our language. My mother’s mother, switching in broken English for me as if she’d already given up. My mother’s cousin in Sài Gòn, firing question after question at me as I stumbled out sentence fragments in response, my words in the air underlined with neon green squiggles in Microsoft Word. At my hesitation he’d assumed that I did not understand; I’d understood perfectly, just couldn’t find the vocabulary to respond.

I always thought my mother, with her perfect bilingualism, her fluency in two, would never understand. But maybe, in her own way, she did.

I don’t want you to forget like I did. 

Perhaps a confession owed another confession. Perhaps I could have told her that I already had, once. But instead I rinsed the soap from my hands and shut off the faucet and said aloud, “I won’t.”

//

It is October and I am not taking Spanish this fall. Partly—rather, entirely—because of a scheduling conflict I could have fixed sophomore year if I had the hindsight. There are a lot of things I would have done if I had the hindsight. Wouldn’t have wasted so much time quenching the fires in my writing, for one. My quieter poems were rejected anyway, maybe because they tasted of lies.

Would’ve started my college essay sooner. I’m still in the brainstorming phase right now, and still at a loss for words.

Regardless, I’ve been productive this summer. I cleared my inventory of unfinished works the other day. Finally returned the library book I’d been hoarding for months, inscribed fin at the bottom of a work-in-progress, put the finishing touches on the poems I’ve neglected for so long. 

And as for the chapbook? I mailed it back to my aunt the other day.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have taken what wasn’t mine. Its beautiful, hand-bound, marble-stained pages weren’t written for me to read. And maybe that’s defeatist, or maybe it’s true, I can’t yet tell.

She should be receiving it around now, the clasp envelope with two stamps in the corner and no return address, only her own inscribed in ballpoint ink. She might not even open it. Our families taught us how to be suspicious, to shred unknown correspondence and ignore the phone on unrecognized numbers, but hopefully she’ll recognize the honorific I wrote before her name and realize that this package was from family. 

It’s still missing a page, though. Hopefully she won’t notice.

Tonight I add another leaf to my bin of unfinished projects, but can you call a project unfinished if you didn’t even start?

I found the poem beneath my mother’s wardrobe the other day, gathering dust, lint clinging to its corners. Forgotten. Page dyed light purple and faint cobalt blue, spiraling and blending and mixing like sea foam on a fantastical wave. Serif font thick with diacritics, binding holes lining the left-hand side. The poem that my mother had taken. Like mother, like daughter: taken and then lost and then, finally, found.

The only word I recognize is my mother’s name. That is all I need to understand.

//