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By Root 377 0

She once saw those in the thicket at the back of her kitchen garden blown sideways during the height of a storm, their skinny bodies parallel with the ground and the sky. Today they would surely break, she thought. As she watched over them, waiting for the tragedy to unfold, the storm picked itself up and went away. By then, the rainwater cistern had fallen on its belly, and a sheet of water gushing through a crack along its side was washing over red and orange chili peppers scattered all over the ground. Some still had their green stems attached, others had been ripped away too suddenly from the neighbor's garden and had to leave their stems behind. Regret spilled out of them in the form of small, pale seeds. As if in grief, the bamboos were pressed to the ground. But within a matter of minutes, they nodded and waved. They shook off the rain and reoriented themselves toward the sky. My mother was impressed, indeed. Now that, she thought, is strength. Perseverance and flexibility are not opposites. Survival requires certain compromises. Endurance is defined by the last one standing. These were the lessons, I imagine, that she must have learned.

My mother resolved to be the last one standing. Unlike her own mother, she would never let a man take away her life. She wanted to watch her husband grow old, decrepit. She thought of how his body would look floating down the Mekong, out into the South China Sea. She, unlike me, would never allow him to claim the land that she calls home. She wanted to be there to welcome her youngest son back to her kitchen and back to her house. But in order to proceed with her plan, my mother first had to reconfigure the confines of her faith. She needed something to believe in that would offer her some way to escape the wrath of her ancestors, some place to go when she died where they would not be waiting for her. She, like the truly desperate before her, turned to Catholicism for refuge. I will not call it a conversion because that implies an abrupt shift, a reversal from one side of the leaf to another, a change of heart. She still kept her family altar and the Buddha that sat there smiling back at her. She is Vietnamese, after all. She hedges her bets.

When I left home, my mother had been in theory but never in practice a Catholic for twenty-five years. The drops of holy water touched her head on her wedding day, after which she was told to open up her mouth and receive the Host, dry and flavorless on her tongue. These Catholics are terrible cooks, she remembered thinking. By the time I left home, my mother had lived if not with Him, then in proximity to Him for over two decades. She had taken in, absorbed through the tiny pinpricks of her pores, more than any of us had realized. In Catholicism, she recognized a familiar trinity: the guilt, the denial, and the delay in happiness that defined her adult life. She found a Father and a Mother, though these two were here not married to each other. She also found a Son to replace the one who went away. In Catholicism, my mother heard her voice lifted in prayers and in songs. The last time she sang out loud her boys were still her babies, and we had fallen asleep to the rise and fall of a young girl's voice, to the pleasing warmth of that girl's body enlivened by songs. In Catholicism, my mother found a place where she could one day go, ascend to in her gray áo dài, like smoke rising from the incense at her family altar. There was only a small part of her, only her earlobes, I imagine, that felt remorse, that regretted that her own mother and father would not be there to greet her. They would just leave me again anyway, she thought.

My mother never wavered, however, when it came to her vow never again to enter Father Vincente's church, the place where she was bought and sold. Every Sunday, after the Old Man washed his face, drank some strong tea to mask the sweetsharp smell of liquor on his breath, he left for Father Vincente's church to assume his post at the frontmost pew. My mother would then put on a clean blouse, tie on her straw hat, and