Grandma's Tales

by Andrew Lam

The day after Mama and Papa took off to Las Vegas, Grandma died. Nancy and I, we didn't know what to do. Vietnamese traditional funerals with incense sticks and chanting Buddhist monks not being our thing. We have a big freezer, Nancy said. Why don't we freeze her. Really. Why bother Mama and Papa. What's another day or two for Grandma now anyway?

Nancy's older than me, and since I didn't have any better idea, we iced her.

Grandma was 94 years, 8 months, and 6 days old when she died. She lived through three wars, two famines, and a full hard life. America, besides, was not all that good to for her. She had been confined to the second floor of our big Victorian home, as her health was failing, and she did not speak English, only a little French, like Oui Monsieur, c'est evidemment un petit monstre, and Non, Madame, vous n'etes pas du tout enceinte, je vous assure. She was a head nurse in the maternity ward of the Hanoi hospital during the French colonial time. I used to love her stories about delivering all these strange two-headed babies and Siamese triplets connected at the hip whom she named Happy, Liberation, and Day.

Grandma's death came when she was spring rolls with me and Nancy. Nancy was wearing a nice black miniskirt and her lips were painted red, and Grandma said you look like a high-class whore. Nancy made a face and said she was preparing to go to one of her famous San Francisco artsy cocktail parties where waiters were better dressed than most upper-class Vietnamese men back home, and there were silver trays of duck pate and salmon mousse, and ice sculptures with wings and live musicians playing Vivaldi. So get off my case, Grandma, and I'm no whore.

It was a compliment, Grandma said, winking at me, but I guess it's wasted on you child. Then, as Nancy prepared to leave, Grandma laughed and said, Child, do the cha-cha-cha for me. I didn't get to do it when I was young, with my clubbed foot and the wars and everything else.

Sure, Grandma, Nancy said and rolled her pretty eyes.

That was when Grandma dropped her chopsticks on the hardwood floor -- clack, clack, clatter, clack clack -- closed her eyes, and stopped breathing. Just like that.

So we iced her. She was small enough that she fit right above the TV dinner trays and the frozen yogurt bars we were going to have for dessert. We wrapped all of grandma's five-foot-three, ninety-eight pounds lithe body in saran wrap and hoped Mama and Papa would get the Mama-Papa-come-home-quick-grandma's-dead letter that we sent to Circus-Circus, where they were staying.

Meanwhile Nancy had a party to go to, and I had to meet Eric.

Eric's so cool. Eric has eyes so blue you can swim in them. Eric has this laugh that makes you warm all over. And Eric is really beautiful and a year older than me, a senior. And he liked grandma a lot. Neither one knew the other's language, but there was this thing between them, mutual respect, like one cool old chic to a cool young dude. (Sometimes I would translate but not always 'cause my English is not all that good and my Vietnamese sucks.) What was so cool about Grandma was the only one who knew I'm bisexual. Even though she was Confucian bound and trained and a Buddhist and all, she was really cool about it.

One night, we were sitting together in the living room watching a John Wayne movie called The Green Berets. And Eric was there with me and Grandma. (Mama and Papa had just gone to bed and Nancy was at some weird black and white ball or something like that.) And Eric leaned over and kissed me on the lips and Grandma said, that's real nice, and I translated and we all laughed and John Wayne shot dead five guys. Just like that. But Grandma didn't mind, really. She's seen Americans like John Wayne shooting her people in the movies before. She always of him as a bad guy, uglier than the water buffalo's ass. And she'd seen us more passionate than a kiss on the lips and didn't mind though she used to tell us to be careful and not make any babies -- obviously a joke -- 'cause she's done delivering them. So you see, we liked Grandma a lot.

Anyway, we made out on the couch for a while then I said: Eric, I have to tell you something. Grandma's dead. You're kidding me, he said and smiled his beautiful smile like he didn't believe me. I kid you not, I said. She's dead, and Nancy and me, we iced her. Shit! Eric said, why? 'Cause if we didn't pack her in -12 Fahrenheit she would start to smell, duh, and we have to wait for my parents to perform a traditional Vietnamese funeral and everything.

Shit, Eric said again and then we both fell silent. After a while Eric said, can I take a peek at Grandma?

Sure, I said, sure you can, she was as much yours as she was mine, and we went to the freezer and looked in.

The weird thing was the freezer was on defrost and Grandma was nowhere in sight. But there was a trail of water and Seran wrap leading from the freezer to her bedroom. So we held on to each other and followed it. On the bed, all wet and everything, sat Grandma, counting her Buddhist rosary and chanting her diamond sutra. What's weirder is that she looked real young. I mean around 54 now, not 94, the high cheeks, the rosy lips. She smiled when she saw us and the she said: "What do you say we all go to one of those famous cocktail parties that Nancy's gone to, the three of us?" Now, I wasn't scared, she being my Grandma and all, but what really got me feeling all these goose bumps on my neck and arms was that she said it in English, I mean accentless, California English. I mean the way Mrs. Collier, our neighbor, the English teacher speaks English. Me, I have a slight accent still but Grandma's was really fine.

Wow, Grandma, said Eric, your English is excellent and you look like a babe.

I know, Grandma said, winking at him, that's just the side benefit of being reborn. But enough with the compliments, son, we got to party.

Cool, said Eric.

Cool, I said, though I was a bit jealous 'cause I had to go through junior high and high school and take all those damn ESL classes and everything to learn the same language and Grandma just got it down cold -- no pun intended. Grandma went to her closet and picked out a nice brocaded red blouse and a pair black silk pants and a pair of velvet shoes then she fixed her hair real nice, and then we drove off downtown.

Boy, you should've seen Nancy's face when we came in. I mean she nearly tripped over herself and had to put her face on the wing of this ice sculpture that looked like a big melting duck to calm herself. Then she walked straight up to us, all haughty like and said, It's invitation only, how'd y'all get in?

Calm yourself, child, said Grandma. I told them that I was a board member of the Cancer Society and flashed my here jade bracelet and diamond ring and gave the man a forty-dollar tip. And Nancy had the same reaction Eric and I had: Grandma, your English, it's flawless!

But Grandma was oblivious to compliments. She went straight to the punch bowl to scoop up some spirits. That's when I noticed that her clubbed foot was cured, and she had this new elegant grace about her. She drifted, you might say, across the room, her hair floating like gray-black clouds behind her, and every one stared, mesmerized.

Needless to say Grandma was the big hit of the artsy-fartsy party. She had so many interesting stories to tell. The feminists, it seemed, loved her the most. They crowded around her like hens around a barn yard rooster and made it hard for the rest of us to hear her. But Grandma told her stories all right. She told them how she'd been married early and had eight children while being the patriarch of the middle-class family during the Viet Minh uprising. She told them about my grandfather, a brilliant man who was well versed in Moliere and Shakespeare and who was an accomplished violinist but who drank himself to death 'cause he felt helpless against the colonial powers of the French. She told everyone how she single-handedly had raised her children after his death and they all became doctors and lawyers and pilots and famous composers. Then she started telling them how the twenty-four-year-old civil war divided her family up, and brothers fought brothers over some stupid ideological notions that proved terribly bloody yet pointless afterwards. Then she told them about our journey across the Pacific Ocean in this crowded fishing boat where thirst and starvation nearly did us all in until it was her idea to eat some of the dead and drink their blood so that the rest of us could survive to catch glimpses of this beautiful America and become Americans.

Grandma told them too about the fate of Vietnamese women who must marry and see their husbands and sons go to war and never to come back. Then she recited poems and told fairy tales with sad endings, fairy tales she herself had learned as a child, the kind she used to tell me and Nancy and my cousins when we were real young. There was this princess, you see, who fell in love with a fisherman, and he didn't know about her 'cause she only heard his beautiful voice singing from a distance. So when he drifted down river one day, she fell sick and died, her ear turned into this ruby with the image of his boat and his silhouette imprinted on it. There was also this faithful wife who held her baby waiting for her war-faring husband every night on a cliff and, out of pity, the Gods turned her and her child into stone. In Grandma's stories, the husbands and fishermen sometimes come home, but they come home always too late.

Grandma's voice was sad and seductive and words came pouring out of her like rain and the whole place turned quiet and Nancy sobbed 'cause she understood and Eric stood close to me and I cried a little, too.

"I lost four of my children," Grandma said, "twelve of my grandchildren, and countless relatives and friends to wars and famines and I lost everything I owned when I left my beautiful country behind. Mine is a story of suffering and sorrow, suffering and sorrow being the way of Vietnamese life. But now I have a second chance and I am not who I was, and yet I have all these memories, so wherever I go, I figure I'll keep telling my stories and songs."

Applause broke out then and afterwards this rich-looking man with gray hair and in a pin stripe suit came up to Grandma and they talked quietly for a while. When they were done Grandma came to me and Nancy and Eric to say good-bye. She said she was not going to wait for my parents to come home for a traditional funeral. She had a lot of living still to do since Buddha had given her the gift to live twice in one life and this man, some famous novelist from Colombia, was going to take her places. He might even help her write her book. So she was going to the Mediterranean to get a tan and to Venice to see the festivals and ride the gondolas and maybe afterward she'd go by Hanoi and see what they'd done to her childhood home and visit some long-forgotten ancestral graves and relative and then who knows where she'd go after that. She'd send postcards though and don't you wait up. Then before we knew it Grandma was already out of the door with the famous novelist from Colombia and the elevator music started up again and every one felt pretty good. They hugged each other and there was this feeling in the air, an enchantment, and if those ice sculptures of ducks and fat little angels with bows and arrows started to come alive and fly away or something, I swear, nobody would have been surprised. Eric and I ran out after Grandma after we got through the hugging frenzy but there was only this city under a velvety night sky, its high-rises shining like glass cages, with little diamonds and gold coins kept locked inside them.

Mama and Papa came home two days later. They brought incense sticks and ox-hide drums and wooden fish and copper gongs and jasmine wreaths and Oolong tea and paper offerings, all the things that we were supposed to have for a traditional funeral. A monk had even sent a fax for his chanting rate and schedule 'cause he was really busy, and the relatives started pouring in.

It was hard to explain then what had happened, what we had always expected as the tragic ending of things, human frailty the point of mourning and grief. And wasn't epic loss made us tell our stories? It was difficult for me to mourn now, though. Difficult 'cause while the incense smoke drifted all over the mansion and the crying and wailing resounded like cicadas humming on the tamarind tree in the summer back in Vietnam, Grandma wasn't around. Grandma had done away with the easy plot for tragedy and life after her wasn't going to be so simple anymore.