When I was young, my mun was my world. She was supposed to live for her children, to be with us, to be our spirit. But the conventional moral was broken down in my mind. She became a normal woman since I once was so disappointed that I annouced "My mum is dead"- not as a slip of my tongue but as a matter of fact, mental thought. Actually, she has died since I discovered she considered me as a pawn in her scheme of revenge on my irresponsible father.
It is good to have a normal family, isn't it? I wish I had been born in a simply good family. It doesn't matter to me how good I become, how well I would learn and work but how happy I feel. When a family breaks down, there comes a time when each family member's heart is broken, so was mine. I was badly influenced by our parents' divorce. Later, graduately, it ruined my young brother's life and my ideal love for my mother.
No one would compare what he did for his mother's love with what I did. No boy in the world could do the things I did to serve, to protect, to raise the love of our mothers. Our lives are about our desires to love and to be loved differently, aren't they. My childhood was completely taken away from me. There were no birthdays, no Chirstmas, no normal pleasure of childhood. I was told my dad became irresponsible since I was very small. Instead of taking care of me, his first son, he played cards, drank, went out and had a second wife. He did what he should not have . My mum was so upset that once, she was about to commit a suicide by swallowing a poison with me when I was about 10 months old. As time went by, it was reasonable for my Mom to ask for a separation and he did. Actually his supervisor forced him to do so. He was transfered to work in a town of Quy Nhon where he got such a fortune while struggling for his second family's new life.
Natuarally enough, my mum sought a job right after being left and she succeeded in working as a cleaner for an American military base, so did my sister at the age of 17. My brother and I were left home wondering what was happening around us. We both lived in a home but grew up with an unparalleled intentions. He did what people expected a member of a broken family to do. He dropped school at the age of 10, going out with friends, staying out over night, drinking, smoking, fighting, robbing and commiting crimes. I did the total different, staying at home, cooking, taking care of the home and my studying and as parents have wished, becoming a good boy. Noone in my neighborhood could ever believe I could pass the entrance exam for the state secondary high school while other boys having their fathers’ support failed.
As a left- father boy did, I didn't read much especially about family care, happiness, but I wrote an essay in Vietnamese literature class at grade 7 so well that my teacher praised evaluating my ability of writing as he said it would be a good story with some help of a writer. What made me do that? What the hell did I write about? The topic was: “What is the most memorable event in your life?”. Well, I did challenge myself to write down such a difficult thing: My broken down family. How and why? The willing of warming, complaining people about the plainest realism on Earth, divorce or separation made me write rather well. My typical utterance was high piched and highly rhetorical and consisted of a wild out burst of naked emotion and simplicity.
When thinking of staying away from 3 of my classmates having motorbikes and often playing hooky, I wanted to be good and the love for my Mom helped me do it. Going to Agricultural high school was another proof to prove my progress of being independent. We tried to farm to earn and save money for our trip. While doing farming, we had poor lunch. Since no one in our families realized what we were doing, we all felt lonely as the run away did. We decided not to stay home at night. We rode to school sleeping in the beds of students’tables, reading with an oil-lamp, eating bread for lunch, having very poor dinner. But we all felt happy living as the dust children. That was why we were named “Bui Gia Trang”. I always thought of my Mom as I was doing such a strange thing hoping one day she would call me back or asking me why I could do what I had been doing. Then I could tell her what I needed.
No one could ever think of the reason of my smoking and when I first smoked at the age of 11. But after 4 years, I did the opposite thing that the youth couldn’t. I stopped smoking as soon as I left home for Bao Loc School. Besides, I just asked her to offer me the least amout of money for my rent and board. During 3 years there, I was given exactly what I actually needed meaning I had no cents all the time there. Knowing that we were so hungry, one of our classmates asked us to pick up fruits and sweet potatoes in his uncle’s garden. After we stuffed into bags all we needed and ready to be back, he shouted out loud: “Let’s run”. We learned that stealing was what the others there did for food. We kept doing it as our unique way to have supper and breakfast. When I was home on summer vacation, I refused to my mom’s home-made breakfast. To her surprise, I calmly told her that I used to have nothing for that.
During grade 11th, I had a chance to live with 2 brothers of a dismissed classmate whose parents supported us the cost of rice so the money was just for food. I did the cooking so well so I had enough food that whole school year. I didn’t tell her that I was offered help to keep her from being offensive which I had never wanted to happen.
What I did in the last year of high school was so special that it would be considered a way to show my loyalty to my Mom, the love for her. As Tai Bot and I shared a small inside-room of a house, we had to be quiet. As I realized he was an unchangable guy, I managed to be on my own way of learning, and at a special time. What he did was normal- studying from 8 P.M to mid-night. What I did was quite opposite- studying from 1 to 6 AM and I kept doing it continously in my last school year. How could I do that?
The second thing I did was that I kept letters from my girl friend in Can Tho unread since their arrival at 10 AM till my break time 3 AM the next day. My life was manifestly determined by my passion for my mother, love and it emphasized the supreme importance of this natural impulse. I made or tried to make my love for her absolutely perfect. There was nothing false or unmoral I had done. My treatment and behavior were evidence of a through natural humanity in it. I was great souled in my way and attained a certain primitive nobility because of my huge strength of character I loved as fiercely as I hated, and my passions were so humanly powerful that I became admirable in some ways.
As a matter of fact, I passed the college entrance exam. Things went unsmoothly. It was a hard time to study especially for those in the first year of college. The first room I rent was large enough but too noisy and dirty tobe in. Then I found the second one which it cost me nearly half of the money I was given- 5,000d out of 12,000d. After 2 weeks, a classmate asked me to share it. It was about time we had to study some natural scientific subjects at Phu Tho University. I had a chance to cut down the number of meals by having dinner at my sister’s or my grand ma’s having bananas and bread for lunch 2 days a week. As I had to travel 20 km to Phu Tho Polytechnique University from Thu Duc, I left the room at 3:30 AM. Even though I felt pitiful of myself, deeply I considered that part of endurance I should try to prove my love for her.
One day, I happened to be told her coming the following day. I prepared to meet her. I borrowed a good bicycle and after class I rode as fast as could to see her. It was a 20-kilometer trip and it took me over 2 hours. At my grand ma’s, we met, sadly she asked me a few questions and as noone could imagine she let me go back by showing me less willing to keep me there. On the way back, I cried more than I had ever done. How could she treat me that way? I started to doubt if she had truly loved me. I recalled an unforgetable event, my leaving home May, 1975. All seemed to me she paid less attention to me to how I lived my life, who I was what I thought how I felt than anyone could do. What she did was to send me a certain amount of money monthly. I had assumed to ask her as least care as possible so I never tended to tell her what I did how much I suffered.
My very existence is grounded upon the impulse to love and to be loved. If we are disppointed in a certain desire, time and circumstances eventually combine to make us forget, and then our attention focuses on something new. We are changeable but my love for my Mom remained the same for a long time. I made my love an absolute thing. We are based on instinct, the fundamental urges or an external system of values.
Did my Mom have a deep natural love for me? Was she led to reject it or did she hide it? I always want to know the truth. Each of women is attracted by something non- essential, and the attraction represents a perversion of true love, doesn’t it? Each finally chooses a man who is really worth her affection, doesn’t she. After my Dad left, there came a man. If he had not interfered with my Mom’s emotional world, then what gap would have been between us? The human mind is so well-constructed that we understand something best if we can visualize. She had not seen what I did for her so she didn’t love me as I had wished she would.
Life itself has a lot of understandable things, doesn’t it. I would feel easier if it was true of our relation ship. I would believe in anything that could make me understand this.
Rach Gia Apr 16- 2007
Luong Ngoc Thanh
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