Beginnings: New York
BY OCEAN VUONG
Originally published in the Summer 2015 issue of The Adroit Journal.
It’s a rainy night in Brooklyn. Lightning silhouettes an oak tree outside my window, its twisted branches rinsed with rainwater. I’m lying in bed, waiting for her voice to break through the dark hallway and into my room, the way it has every stormy night since I’ve lived here. By the third thunderclap, a sharp wail shoots through the house and into my bedsprings. I bury my face into the blanket and curl into myself, hoping she will calm and return to sleep. Within minutes, my bedroom door bursts open and the shade of a small woman collapses onto the hardwood, screaming and writhing on a square of light fallen through the window. I leap from the mattress and gather her frail body into my arms. I stroke her back, my fingers frantically rubbing the length of her arm, trying to coax her back to the present, to herself. This isn’t a nightmare. The woman is eighty-four-years old and suffers from severe dementia. Her name is Lina and she is my landlady—sort of.
I take care of Lina in lieu of paying rent. It’s the only way I manage to live and write in New York City on my own. Like most young writers before me, I came to the city hoping to better inform my art. But, more practically, I came to the city to go to school. My single mother, being an immigrant from Vietnam and living in a housing project in Hartford, Connecticut, cannot afford to pay for my education let alone support my vague ambition to become a writer. As the oldest son in a Vietnamese household, it’s my “filial duty” to obtain an education and provide a house, a home for my mother to grow old in. It’s a responsibility I accept and embrace with pride.
****
I am able to attend university only because of a generous scholarship from Brooklyn College. Unfortunately, the scholarship doesn’t come with an apartment to accommodate living in one of the most expensive cites in the world. When I first arrived in New York City in the fall of 2008, I had exactly $564.00 in my checking account and a backpack jammed-full of handwritten poems. Other than a few distant acquaintances in the city, I knew no one. Through the generosity of a few kind folks I did know, however, I was able to set up an intricate couch-surfing map that stretched across three boroughs, with the occasional night in Hoboken, New Jersey. I ended up sleeping on three different couches in addition to the titled corner of a kitchen each week. I showered wherever and whenever I could. Of course, there were nights when my host could not accommodate me: relatives were visiting, landlord checking in, vacations, illness, etc. But I was usually quite crafty and found last minute accommodations from other friends, sometimes even strangers I met at various poetry readings or open-mics.
****
One day after classes, I was making my way into the Starbucks outside of campus to charge my phone when I saw I had a missed call. It was from a friend who lived on Long Island. I met him at a few literary events I’d been to throughout the city. I had told him a week earlier about my nomadic navigations throughout the city. Shocked, he suggested I just return to Hartford, or at least call my mother. But neither was a plausible option. Calling my mother and telling her I was semi-homeless would only cause her to worry. She would frantically wire me the little money she had in her tip jar at the nail salon she worked at and spend days preparing my favorite dishes to welcome me home. And although I was often tempted to do so, the semester was already in its fourth week and I figured I could just “tough it out” and at least get twelve credits closer to my degree. Besides, my mother was so proud of having a son attend college. I couldn’t stomach disappointing her. She taped a postcard above her table at work depicting the gold-plated bell tower on top of the Brooklyn College library and, not being able to pronounce the name of the school, would gleefully point to the card when customers and co-workers inquired about her oldest son. “My son in the college! He go here! New York City.”
I called my friend back. “I have a deal for you,” he said, “take care of my grandmother in Brooklyn and you get a room for free…” The words “room” and “free” were all I remembered hearing. “Can I come now? Okay. I’ll be there in an hour. Wait, wait—what train do I take?”
The building was an old Brooklyn brownstone: two floors and three rooms, only one of which was occupied. The children had long moved out and the husband long passed away. When my friend opened the door, a little puff of white hair hovered behind his shoulder. An old woman timidly peered out from behind him. Slowly, she stepped out from behind my friend and started to smile, apparently relieved at my small stature. “Oh, he’s just a small one! That’s good! That’s good. Come in, we have tea.” She turned in and I followed them inside the house. “Labas!” (Lithuanian for Hello), “I’m Lina.” Her bright eyes were magnified by her thick glasses. She looked like a grandmother from a Japanese anime cartoon. I liked her immediately.
“Labas! I’m Ocean!” This one word would play a major role in our exchanges with one another. To make her feel at ease, I would always use her native tongue and say “Labas” instead of “Hello.” For some reason, she never trusted herself calling me Ocean, perhaps because my name is more unique than what she’s used to. And, being self-conscious about her dementia, she would say “Ocean” and quickly look down at the floor, thinking she had said something terribly idiotic. Eventually, she just called me Labas and to keep it simple, I called her Labas as well. From then on, we would greet each other by saying “Hi, Labas!”
She reached out and held my hand with both of hers. I almost pulled back at how cold they were. She led me through the dark hallway, which opened to a stuffy living room furnished with what seemed to be everything made before 1965. The walls were plastered with some sort of faux woodgrain. There was an assortment of odd, Victorian style chairs that faced no particular direction. Everything, save for the rug and our bodies was coated in a thin or thick layer of dust. What was most bizarre, however, was the glass armoire in the dining room housing a fleet of sad-looking owl figurines also filmed with dust. In fact, there were owls everywhere. Apparently, Lina was an avid collector of all things owl: owl clocks, owl paintings, owl lamps, towels imprinted with owls, even owl slippers. Everywhere I went, I was watched by hundreds of mournful yellow eyes.
She had me and my friend sit down in the old kitchen while she made tea. Fumbling through the drawers and opening and closing random cupboards, she tried, with great difficulty, to find the proper cups. Her breaths grew heavy and her poof of white hair trembled in the effort. “I know they’re here. Don’t—don’t worry. I know…. I know. Please…” Growing uneasy, I looked to my friend who looked equally confused. Finally, she turned to us; a wooden spoon and a sponge in her hand, her forehead jeweled with sweat. She had the look of a child who’d just been caught drawing on the wall, waiting for either an affirmation or scolding. She was clearly lost. I suddenly realized how serious her dementia really was. Still, I was too excited about the promise of a room of my own that I quickly brushed it aside.
My friend took me to my room on the second floor. When I opened the door, I was immediately plunged into a thick musty odor. It was the scent of air trapped for too long. My friend walked over and opened the window, which had a picturesque view of the red brickwork on the side of the next building. Of course, I didn’t mind any of this. After all—I wasn’t exactly living in luxury at my previous residences, which, for two and a half weeks, included a stint in Penn Station (but we’ll save that for another essay). Then, I saw it: an old wooden thing in the corner with only three and a half legs. A desk, lit with a small square of evening light falling through the window: a blank sheet of paper burning on its surface. “Can I keep that?” I asked, pointing at the sad-looking yet invaluable artifact. “If you want,” my friend shrugged, “I don’t see why not. It’d be a pain to move it anyways.” I walked over and touched it, ran my fingers across the surface, the dust, the bolts, the cracks and seams and knots in the wood, I opened the drawers, sat down, and placed my hands and elbows on the table, testing the height for writing. It was fake oak, laminated to look natural—but it was perfect. Perfect not because of its quality (or lack thereof) but because it was mine. My first desk. It didn’t occur to me until then that having a desk of my own, something I did not have even in Connecticut, somehow legitimized my identity as a writer. It was a badge, a label, a dedication. And, having no publication and barely any respectable poems, the desk was also an anchor, the promise of possibilities, that good work would be done, and it would be done right here.
****
A thunderclap erupts through the night, and in a small room in Brooklyn, Lina’s mind is firing a memory from 1944—in Dresden, where, as a teenaged girl, she and her family were caught in one of the most devastating bombings of World War II. Lina’s family had been fleeing the Red Army and was heading west when Allied bombs started to fall on Germany. The genesis of my own family began in the very nucleus of bombs. As a product of the war in Vietnam, my mother is a “con lai” or “mixed child” whose father was an American vet. Without the war, I wouldn’t even exist. It’s a hard pill to swallow and I’m not sure I’ve got it down. When heavy fighting tore through her small farming village, my grandmother took my mother, only a toddler then, and fled to Saigon. The city was supposed to be the most heavily fortified city south of the seventy-sixth parallel, the line that divided North from South Vietnam. Saigon was a merciless place in time of war, especially for a young woman with no education and an extra mouth to feed. Like many other young women from the countryside, my grandmother took to the streets where many American G.I.’s were desperate for affection and had plenty of money to pay for it. When my mother was born in 1968 and the family grew to four people, her father was already long gone—nameless and faceless.
I remember the first few years after immigrating to the U.S. We had no TV, no radio, and no one knew how to read or write in Vietnamese or English. The war disrupted everyone’s education and all the adults in my family rushed into nail salons to earn quick, un-taxable cash making other people beautiful. But even without books, we were filled with stories, and after dinner, we would all gather around my grandmother for “talk story.” She would close her eyes, the words coming slow at first, but soon they sputtered and surged, always growing into some sort of song—a fractured folk ballad. It was as if pain could not be told in any other way, that only through singing, could the memory exit the burden of a body and flourish as something abstract and, therefore, tolerable. Within minutes, every wall in the room would melt into fantastical landscapes of terror and wonder. My grandmother would be in tears before the second verse, but always finishing the song between gasps for air. Her daughters would pick up the verse where they could. I hummed what I knew of the melody as fresh snow started to crackle against the windows and wind rattled the beams of our tiny Hartford apartment. We would sit deep into the night this way; surrounded by bright buckets of KFC chicken, the tea pot emptied and filled a dozen times over.
****
Living with Lina has its clear advantages. Other than having a roof over my head, there is one particularly surprising bonus that comes with living in her house. Lina’s husband, Peter, who died in 2006 from a stroke, was a chronic hoarder, which might explain the phantasmagoria of owls, among other things, throughout the house (although Lina insists the birds are a strict representation of her own aesthetics). One evening at dinner, over my steaming bowl of ramen noodles and Lina’s Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, she told me of how her husband would go on these long walks and come home with armfuls of odd items. He too suffered from dementia as he aged, and once, he came home carrying an entire front door to an unidentified house, having no recollection of how or where he procured it. Baffled, Lina suggested he toss it out but he replied, as he always did, by valiantly raising his right hand to the sky, as re-enacted by Lina, and saying “Don’t you remember the war? You never know! You never know!” before proceeding to drag the door down to the basement where, it seems, everything was stored. Out of curiosity, I took a flashlight and went down to look for myself. I reached the bottom of the stairs and was immediately confronted by a life’s worth of items: pots and pans, black garbage bags filled with myriad clothes, dozens of shoes, filing cabinets partly obscured by old and broken furniture, sewing machines (yes, as in plural, as in three!), a wooden rocking horse with one of its eyes gouged out, a box full of vitamins from the ’70s nestled between rolls of condoms just as old. There was, however, a single winding path slightly wider than my waist that led to a back room. I headed through and pulled a string that lit a single brownish lightbulb. As the bulb swayed above me, casting my shadow back and forth across the room, I saw what appeared to be a huge library. There were shelves, stacked three books deep, that covered entire walls from floor to ceiling. The books were mostly pulp fiction ranging from the ’50s to the ’80s. There was also a back wall covered by a large black sheet. I worked through the dust, one arm over my mouth, peeling the fabric back and shining my flashlight on the shelf. As drifts of dust swirled through the beam of light, I saw the hidden books. They were paper gold. Rows and rows of western history’s most timeless classics: Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, Faulkner, even Nabokov, Salinger and Atwood. Most of the books were paperbacks, cheaply made from the ’50s and were printed for vast distribution. But that didn’t change what was written inside them. There was also the entire collected library of Steinbeck and Hemingway in hardback. My mouth agape, my blood pressure rising, dust in my lungs, I dove into the books. The years had glued the covers together, and, as I attempted to dislodge them from the shelves, some books came out attached in twos, even threes. Others were eaten, almost entirely, by rats. I lifted a trio of Camus’s books and peered into a golf ball-sized hole burrowing right through three existentialist masterpieces—cover to cover. Luckily, there were often duplicate copies and I managed to salvage both The Stranger and The Rebel, among other modern classics despite the decades of rodent feasting. And since I had no TV and certainly no Internet connection, the secret library became my new pleasure. I would finish a book, return it, and grab another from the shelf, making my way through centuries of great literature. I would stay up deep into the night, often holding vigil over Lina’s volatile dementia attacks, the pages of Crime and Punishment ringed with mold and falling apart in my hands. I would turn a page and it would break off, the book literally disintegrating as I read it. When I finished, there was only a single back cover between my fingers.
****
With Lina, most of my duties are manageable. I am in charge of her pills, which means I have to know what they look like and remember their names—all fourteen of them. She needs pills for everything from cholesterol, to arthritis, to nerves, to dementia, and even one for “general pain.” I have to allocate the pills into a giant plastic organizer labeled with the time and days of the week, making certain she takes them at the scheduled hour. Missing one dose risks the possibilities of a severe dementia attack. But I’ve gotten better at reading her body language and emotions. If she starts to talk to herself while watching TV, or if she just starts wandering around the house, putting owl figurines into her pockets, I know we are heading towards catastrophic possibilities. I can usually see an attack coming hours ahead of time and try to talk to her or put her to bed for a nap. But sometimes, it’s a lot trickier.
One morning she was watching The Price is Right as I was leaving for school, and, as I passed her to leave the house, she leapt up from the couch and grabbed my arm. “Tomas!” (the name of her forty-eight year-old son), “you can’t leave me like this! What did I do to you?” Large veins erupted across her forehead, her eyes widening behind the heavy glasses. “I raise you! I come to this country for you and now you run away from your mother!” This was followed by a slew of what I assume to be very harsh and desperate Lithuanian. She was so deeply stricken by the attack that there was nothing I could do to convince her that I was, in fact, her twenty-two year old Vietnamese caretaker poet. With Lina still clinging to my arm, I called her daughter on Long Island who promised Lina that Tomas was visiting her and currently sitting in the living room (which wasn’t true. Tomas lives in Boston and hasn’t seen her in over 8 years) and that he would be coming home soon. “Are you sure, honey? Oh. Okay. I see my son later then.” She smiled and hung up before turning to me, wrenching her hands, “I’m so sorry, Labas.” “It’s ok, Labas. But I have to go to school now. Remember, here’s the OFF button on the remote control.”
Other times, it’s flat-out eerie: I came home one evening after a late night at the library and found Lina sitting in the kitchen having a casual conversation with an empty chair. When she saw me, she pointed to the chair and said “Labas, why don’t you make some tea for this nice little girl here?” This was followed by me silently freaking out and ushering her into bed. Sometimes, to make sure her mind is working the way it should be, I check on her by asking her who the president is. Other responsibilities include showing her how to use the microwave and cooking for her, shoveling the sidewalk and driveway, getting groceries, fixing the cable when it goes out, teaching her how to use the TV remote, for the fourth time that day. Sometimes, while working on a poem, and, in the midst of wrestling a stubborn metaphor, I walk to the staircase and yell, “Lina! Who is the president?!” “My God!” she would shout from the living room, clearly annoyed, “It’s ughbama!” “Okay….Thank you.”
Some of my favorite moments are at breakfast when she would read old Lithuanian magazines, sometimes stretching back to the ’80s, while sipping her coffee. “You see this?” she’d ask, pointing to a picture of a young girl wearing a sweater with the neck buttons opened, “Who the hell is going to marry her? My god!” Or, I’d be reading poems or working on one of my own and she’d always ask me to read one to her: “Labas, read me a love poem, please.” I’d read and she’d sit there, staring out the window, her eyes searching for some distant year in her long life, or perhaps simply blanking out. Whatever it was, I was always glad to see her pleased. When I finished, she’d look at me from beneath her glasses and smile, saying, “Very well then. Very well then, Labas.” It’s in these moments that I thought: this isn’t so bad, she’s actually getting better.
But then, here I am, the thunder growing louder, the rain relentless. Lina is clinging to my shirt and, between gasping breaths, begs me to save her brother whose charred limb she sees poking out beneath a pile of rubble. She points into the darkness and her hand is swallowed by it. I can hear her wet eyelids blinking rapidly as the memory flashes behind them, so clearly that she reaches out for it, insisting that I too should help her. I try to calm her with words: “It’s okay. It’s just a dream. Please. I’m here. I’m here. It’s Labas.” But her terror is shocking in its vigor and determination. In my panic, I forget that she barely understands English. So I do what I know best, what my grandmother did for me on those hot summer nights when I was a child, lying awake wheezing and sweating with nightmares, I start to sing. My voice unsteady and crackling, I guide the dirge of my grandmother’s lost country into Lina’s ears and through her buckling body. I sing, the long sad notes of ancient Vietnamese poets. And, after about thirty seconds of this, Lina begins to wilt from her body’s long and tarnished history and returns to the present. I keep up the song and can feel her breathing slowing, her clutch easing. My singing softens into a whisper and I stop to ask the crucial question: “Lina,” I say, willing her eyes to stay with my own, “who is the president?” She looks up, her face exhausted, nearly pleading for something to stop or begin. “I am,” she says, “I am the president of this God-damned country. Ave Maria.” She chuckles and asks politely to be brought to bed, and we shuffle down the hall and I assist her in, pulling the covers to her neck and tucking the sheets beneath her legs. I sit by her and sing softly the same song until I can hear her breathing evening out, lulling into sleep.
Despite the obvious confusion and difficulties of living with Lina, not once have I considered it impossible. In fact, I see myself to be quite fortunate, blessed even. Here I am, an immigrant whose family, or what’s left of it, has been living below the poverty line for over twenty years; I shouldn’t be living the life of a writer in New York City while having practically zero income. I shouldn’t be going to a great college and studying with some of the smartest and most passionate thinkers in their fields. I shouldn’t have the luxury of making the art I love and feel so strongly about. And yet, here I am.
Before I sit down to write, I always hum my grandmother’s song, the one I sang and keep singing to Lina. The simple ritual helps me focus my attention towards the page, like a call to prayer. I write because, at the risk of sounding naive, I believe in the unquestionable power of words, that poetry can change a life, perhaps not in that one sweeping moment of profound epiphany, but like the words we chisel into the page, our world, and the experiences we make from it, is changed through time, through that steady erosion and resurfacing of meaning. I close the door to Lina’s room save for a crack just in case she panics again. I close the door thankful I have a door to close, a room of my own, and a life that allows me the privilege to chisel away something other than myself.
“Labas?”
“Yes?… I’m here.”
“Will you have a new poem for me at breakfast time?”
“Of course.”
“A love poem, okay?”
“A love poem.”
“Good…Good. That’s nice.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Goodnight, Labas.”
“Goodnight, Labas.”
