Who knows my grandmother?
Who remembers her?
asks the girl who doesn’t
have memories
to remember her for.
All that is left of her is
that she is the grandmother
of the girl.
Of course there have been
words too
narrative attempts
to tell the separation
the dreams
the unknown death
in an unknown place.
Of course the girl boarded a plane
some thirty years later
looked at the checkered tiles
of the house where
she was raised
for three short years
without understanding
what she was supposed
to see in them.
Of course the girl visited
the grandmother’s grave
and wrote again and again
about that afternoon
the motorbike ride in the jungle
the gravestone hugged by creepers
the red incense sticks in the bamboo vase
the tears that would not come
to soften the hard mud
the spider in the white helmet
the burning bite on the girl’s forehead—
how many times did she try
to write on the implication of that scene
while the swelling grew to become
as large as a quail egg
and stayed so for weeks in a row.
Did the girl’s grandmother ever eat
boiled bird embryos
a popular dish
in Southeast Asian countries?
Who knows
what she enjoyed
eating
drinking
watching
reading?
What world
did she live in?
What world did she offer
her grandaughter?
The girl likes to tell
that the grandmother
listened the whole day long
to the American Forces Vietnam Network
because if she didn’t
how come the girl
knows so many American songs
from the sixties
as if they were lullabies?
The girl cherishes that image
of her grandmother
sewing at night
her face both lit up and erased
by the light of the desk lamp
the girl doesn’t know
where this image comes from
a dream or a photograph
reduced to nothingness since
nobody remembers anything.
The grandmother of
the girl died
nobody knows
when.
Telling will always be telling stories
of the loss, that creature
as indomitable as she is
indescribable.
Telling won’t tell
anything to anyone
about the loss itself.
There’s nothing else
the girl can do
but write
a story nobody knows
there’s nothing else
she can be
but be
the granddaughter of
a woman nobody
remembers
a woman nothing
is left of
not even a memory—
Who is she
the grandmother of?,
asks the girl who remembers
the painful bite.
(Sabine Huynh, unpublished)