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An Asian American’s Language of Mental Health: Empowerment and Understanding through Conversation

I never learned the word ‘mental health’ in English (my language of primary expression) until my 20’s. It took nearly another decade until I actually began to understand what that even meant. I am still learning this word in Vietnamese (my language of communication with my parents).

However, language is more than the sum of vocabulary words. Language is context, subtle unspoken gestures, symbolic actions and its mis/interpretations. Language is when my mom made me canh khổ qua (bittermelon soup, my favorite) after I mumbled through tears that I needed to get mental health support.

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Introducing “Mẹ [Mom], Translated”

Dear friends,

I am sharing with you meaningful news of my project “Mẹ [Mom], Translated,” because you have helped to contribute to its fruition in some way shape or form–from teaching me about Vietnamese history, language, and Asian American identity to empowering my artistic voice to write, express, and share my work.

“Mẹ [Mom], Translated” is a mixed-media art project on love, language, memory and everything lost in translation. Inspired by the work of Viet Thanh Nguyen, I made this project intentionally not for the dominant audience. Rather, I sought to dwell on the act of translation — that universal human yearning to understand and be understood. Vietnamese words in the pieces are not always translated to English because I wanted to convey the complexity of comprehension/miscomprehension between different languages, generations, and also through the nostalgic and bittersweet filters of memory.However, I explain the concepts through poetic voice and through visual symbols, actions, and subtle gestures.

[Read more…] about Introducing “Mẹ [Mom], Translated”

Ba / Father 23:03

We hover around the curved glass of the monitor, its blue light washes over my brother and sister’s faces–innocent and focused. I squeeze between my siblings and shove from my face the static strands of my hair. With a few soft clicks and precise movement, my brother maneuvers the mouse to bring up the surveillance footage named “02-04-1999-23_00.mov”

My fingers mechanically twist the worn metal clasp of my red Tết purse —a nervous twitch that returned around the months of January to February when Lunar New Year’s invited family gatherings, gambling, and lucky money gifts. This year’s bounty was a proud 8 dollars and 32 cents.

I squint at the black and white thumbnail image. My round unsure eyes discern what appears to be the laundromat–a quiet thief in the night it snatched my parents away every Sunday before mass, early mornings before we prepared for school, and late nights after we went to bed. For the past three months I had begged them to let me come along to help. But unlike the garment factory, the restaurant, the daycare, I was not allowed to follow my parents on their second-third-fourth-job at the laundromat because they said the neighborhood was too dangerous.

Instead, I imagined with a childlike wonder that place my parents referred to in broken English as ‘con-lon-di’. The sounds of the ringed master keys formed a familiar jingle, entering my half dream half awake state each night that signaled my father returning home. On lucky weekends I sat on a wooden stool and observed my father tinker with a broken coin operated mechanical horse. One day, the worn out horse came back to life! Giggling I climbed up and down its repainted blue back, greedily shoving my coins into the slot knowing that my father would open up the coin bank with his keys to retrieve my coins. It was the ultimate game of no risk, only reward. Over and over and over.

My father brought home for me the fragmented personal affects of laundromat life: an abandoned earring missing its pair, a tangled necklace possibly 14 karat, a foreign coin maybe from France. I cherished each of these trinkets pried from the machine’s lint catch—each imbued with my father’s quiet affection but also with a mystique of stolen stories from strange faraway places.

23:01 Một

My brother clicks the triangle play button. That mysterious magical place stretches across the thirteen inch monitor rendered in blurry black and white silent stills. A pixelated tranquil landscape: the mechanical horse sits in a corner, aisles of laundry machines, an empty metal basket on its side. A figure appears in a stilted stop motion of five frames per second. It’s my father.

23:02 Hai
My father’s voice pulls us back into the reality of our task at hand. On the computer desk sits a chewed #2 pencil and a free notepad that reads “David Pham Real Estate. We find your home and make it home.”

“Xem kỹ đi con. Có gì thì viết xuống cho ba bằng tiếng anh để cho cảnh sát biết. Watch closely children. See if there is anything important to write down in English so dad can give information to the police.”

I inch closer to the screen, intrigued by the image of my father rendered in choppy black and white movements. He bends over to clean the machines I think, or maybe he found something in the lint catch for me?

23:03 Ba
I blink and the scene transforms. My father stands stiff and upright, hands in the air still clutching a cloth. No longer alone, he is surrounded by a darkness I do not comprehend.

23:03 Ba / Take 1
My brother pauses the scene and replays it again and again. My well-trained brain quiets my pounding heart with a categorical logic of explanation: three masked figures, armed robbery, Thursday night.

23:03 Ba / Take 2
My mind floats faraway, falling into a fantastical rendition of sounds, colors, abstractions of the surveillance scene. From an aerial distance I hear my father humming sweetly while cleaning the machines. A sudden crescendo and abrupt silence. Hurried steps, a gasp, muffled commands to hand over the money.

23:03 Ba / Take 3
I imagine his first sounds to be that familiar “Nooo! Đừng! Nooo! Không!”—an exasperated croak that escaped whenever my father was flustered and slipped between Vietnamese and English.

23:03 Ba / Take 4
Cut scene to the black shiny gun. Cut to his eyes tearing up, his hands shaking. Cut to a cloth sack that appears out of nowhere marked with a green $. Action background music and the expectation of a heroic climax of justice delivered in technicolor.

23:04 Bốn
I blink and the dark figures are gone, but the darkness remains. In the silent black and white shadows my father stands alone again, shoulders slumped and hands empty. He bends over, picks up the fallen cloth, and resumes his cleaning.

23:05 Năm
My brother right clicks the video file and renames it “Ba.”

Confessions of a Vietnamese Refugee

October 10, 2008
UCLA

Yesterday, my history professor ordered me to stay after class and then apologized to me.

“We are sorry for everything that we did. Vietnam was such a beautiful place with beautiful people.”

I shifted awkwardly, unsure if this was the beginning or the end of the conversation. I adjusted my backpack bringing it up to my tense shoulders. Not sure of what else to do with my hands, I touched the split ends of my hair. I folded the corner of my final exam booklet back and forth, creasing the edge between my sweaty fingers until it ripped off.

I nodded slowly and mouthed goodbye to the last student filing out of the classroom. “You know, Vietnam was my home. I knew immediately on the first day my boots touched that red earth. I was just a little over 20, but I knew that Vietnam would change me forever.”

I glanced around the now empty room, my eyes tracing the peeling pale blue paint around the door. All of a sudden I felt eyes directed downwards at me and I became acutely aware of my small stature under his gaze. “I was just about your age probably. Where did you say your family was from?”

I never said anything, I thought to myself. Instead, I politely told him everything he wanted to hear.

My family is from Biên Hoà.
“Oh of course! I flew out of ‘Bin Wa’ airbase there many times.” Looks at me for some confirmation or…was it affirmation (?) of his Vietnamese pronunciation.

I came to America on a boat.
“It was horrible, horrible what we did. How could we abandon so many good, honest, hard working people? It was the American government, they lied to everyone, especially the troops.” Proceeds to sing that worn down American tale, a familiar tune that goes something like,

doo da corruption, liberal press, threat of Communism…
dee dee Now what they want you to believe is…
doo da We learned our lesson there in Nam…

(Silence)
Actually, I do not remember saying much at all come to think of it. I nodded silently while he spoke. Sometimes I submitted those signals that said we were in a conversation by sprinkling in ‘hmm’ and ‘oh really?’ When he looked at me and paused to take a breath or to let the heaviness of his words sink in—I hurriedly wrinkled my lips to convey empathy and understanding as a substitute for looking him in the eye.

I was not sure which social cues and staged behavior a situation like this required. What did he want me to say? Did he want me to say anything? Did it matter what I said? Did it have to be me or any other representative of Nam would do?

I wondered how and when and why he strategized his approach. Was it my last name that gave it away? Was it because of how I looked? Was it something about my homework assignments that gave away that ‘vibe’ to invite him to a reconciliation session of his wartorn past? Did he want to approach me sooner, but waited until the last possible minute when the class had finished because…because he no longer owed me anything as my teacher? or maybe because he might never see me again?

Then suddenly he interrupted my looped performance of hmms and frowned lip wrinkling with another “We are sorry for everything we did in Nam.”

Before I could even take a breath and stop the words from escaping, spilling out from my lips, I mechanically muttered.

“It’s okay.”

The undeniable force of Khó Khăn

Gia đình phải hy sinh cho nhau.
Mẹ đã trải qua nhiều khó khăn.
Con phải chịu khó thì sẽ thành công.

My mother’s words play back like a scratchy recording. Quiet, muffled, persistent.

Đừng làm
cho mẹ
thất vọng.

Faded notes in the soundtrack of my childhood memories, the words are scrambled.

Do not
make mother
disappointed / lose hope / hopeless?

Meanings associate with memory, hastily connected synapses between Vietnamese and English, past and present.

Maybe she used to always say “Cố gắng lên!” “Try hard! Work hard!” but my memory fails to catalog her precise words. Instead, I hold on to her stories.

Childhood, khi còn nhỏ

Worried wide eyes search for her words. Hands flail through the Vietnamese words, grasp clumsily for meaning. Yet catch only her tone, her tears, her distant stare.

Throughout my youth, her life served as a tấm gương— a mirror, a model of work, struggle, and triumph. I listened attentively to stories of
her lost childhood in post-war Communist Vietnam,
her young motherhood escaping into the night with her children,
her unforgettable boat journey,
and my miracle birth in the Malaysian refugee camp.

Stories shared in the darkest of nights between only my mother and me as we lay under the patchwork blanket of my Vietnamese comprehension ability.

She used a certain vocabulary to tell her stories.

Hy sinh
Khó khăn
Chịu khó

I did not understand their precise meaning, but became familiar with their sounds. Whispers of the past professed through stories of struggle and sacrifice.

Hy sinh
Khó khăn
Chịu khó

The words were fragmented totems—heavy with a metaphysics of meaning and untranslatable into the American English of my suburban childhood realities. I held the totems in my hands, ran my fingers along their textures, and carefully placed them in my treasure chest.

The words represented my mother’s life. Each word embodied tales of worlds past, dreams lost, the impossible overcome.
But every so often, the words forcibly made their way into bouts of resentment and mistranslated arguments.

Your parents Hy Sinh for your life in America.
You do not know what Khó Khăn is.
We have to Chịu Khó every day to provide for you.

Over the years, the totemic words became increasingly distant and indistinguishable—their universe of meanings collapse into each other, a nebulous cloud of hazy interpretation.

Adulthood, bây giờ

Chớp mắt tỉnh dậy, một tay nắm chặt không buông ra, một tay thêu một hình ảnh mới trên chăn. Phải giữ lại mỗi từ, mỗi câu, mỗi ý không hiểu rõ. Tự học, tự biết, tự hiểu.

I reopen the chest, lift out the lexical totems lightly covered with a dusty sheet of forced forgetting.

Sacrifice
Suffering
Perseverance

I think.

I fumble with the words, utter their sounds between my untrained lips, and feel the soft sonic warmth hover around my ears.

Heroic nostalgia seep past the temporal and linguistic distance of miscomprehension.

I try out the words in context, the way she used to—or at least the way I remember she used to.

Family must Hy Sinh for each other.
Mother has experienced so much Khó Khăn.
You must Chịu Khó in order to be successful.

Through the looking glass, khó khi nhìn lại

Tra từ điển, tìm lại những từ mất đi quên rồi. Có phải là đây không? Hay là cái này? Mình cất đi hay để quên ở đâu rồi?

An examination glass of logic, dictionaries, distance peer into blurry memories.

Khó Khăn, I think I know you now.

As an adjectival specter, Khó you haunted all things ‘difficult.’ School was Khó, work was Khó. Sometimes combined with other words you transformed into a new meaning.

Khó + ăn meant something difficult to eat, digest, complicated, easy to get sick of.
Khó + nói chuyện implied someone difficult to communicate with or how we operated our daily family communication.
Khó + chịu was a state of being that was uncomfortable, unhealthy. Or in most cases it could mean a difficult person who makes us feel uncomfortable.

By itself or together with another word, something that was Khó was never good.

But as a noun Khó Khăn, you are an undeniable force.

On the surface it means ‘difficulty’, but in context implies the crushing weight of suffering. Khó Khăn was how my mother operated. Khó Khăn was a relentless heavy fog cast on her past, her present, her future. Khó Khăn, the only constant in life. Meanwhile ‘Chịu Khó,’ the only antidote.

Chịu Khó, you were both everywhere and nowhere, hiding in context and unspoken subtleties. I regretfully have come to know you.

As a verb of action with inaction, Chịu commanded quiet strength and patience. Somewhere between ‘endure, concede, and tolerate’ I found its meaning intolerable.
Chịu conjured immediate obedience. “Thôi ráng chịu đi con” was a regular command for the kids to no longer be kids. Translated it meant something along the lines of: “Exasperated sigh, my child you must understand and accept our current circumstances because there is no other choice.”

Chịu + đựng was a temporal state of extended, persistent suffering and pain.
Chịu + đói was to endure the feeing of hunger when there just was not enough for all of us.
Chịu + đòn was to withstand and accept a disciplinary spanking. Often but not always used as a threat.

Chịu khó you were both everywhere and nowhere.

Together, Chịu + Khó literally carried the heavy meaning:
Endure suffering
withstand difficulty
accept hard times.

Yet in practice, Chịu khó was deployed daily.

Chịu khó, translates into American English to characterize industriousness, hard work, diligence. But for us Chịu Khó became a pithy expression, a parental reminder to us children to work hard and struggle. Always.

But for what?

A state of becoming: The realization of thành công

Tay mẹ cầm gì vậy? Cho con xem đi! Mother what are you holding in your hands? Let me see please!

Đây là một đời công lao của mẹ: 1 nắm hy sinh, 2 nắm khó khăn, 3 nắm chịu khó. Con đếm lại đi. Như vậy có đủ để mua thành công cho con chưa? This is a lifetime of my labor: 1 handful of sacrifice, 2 handfuls of suffering, 3 handfuls of perseverance. My child can you count this for me again? Is this enough to purchase ‘success’ for you?

‘Thành’ is a state of becoming, a transformation, a realization of something we all seek.
‘Công’ means work. It is a lifetime of your labor, your hands, your sacrifices.
Thành + Công means the realization of your labor, or in other words ‘success’.

I hold the totems one by one in my hands–hy sinh, khó khăn, chịu khó. Their edges are worn, their spirits tired. My hands automatically reach for all of them at once, but the words refuse to stay in my grasp. I close my eyes and echo that exasperated sigh I heard so often. “Thôi

con đừng lo, mẹ lo cho.” Her resounding voice slips between the totemic words in a blanket embrace, cradling my hands delicately shielding each word, meaning, memory.

DISRUPT NORMALCY

Could we just for a second, disrupt this bizarre normalcy
Of hatred, massacres, injustice, disillusionment disguised into a muffled calm?

Could those who have been talking take a moment to listen
to pause, to look, to touch and feel
the fabric of our shared humanity?

A second turns to minutes turns to movements.

Turn off the channels of fearfeeds and misunderstanding.
Turn to a stranger, a neighbor, yourself.
Ask why and be uncomfortable by the answer.

Stop repeating start creating.
Think, write, speak for yourself and the collective we.
Because it is time for a radical change of the everyday me.