My father is in Vietnam celebrating his mother's birthday. My grandmother is a steel-haired, tiny woman. I met her once, many years ago, but it was an awkward meeting. I knew no Vietnamese and the smoke from her cigarette stung my nose and made my eyes water. She did not appear interested in me; I, a young uncomfortable teenager, was a foreign stranger, maybe to be ignored like all other foreigners. So I was surprised when my father and my father's cousins told me that she was excited to see her grandchildren. She has a funny way of showing it, I thought.
He looks like her and I look like him--but I don't feel that I look like her. Perhaps the resemblance has been diluted through the generations as well as a hardy tenacity which she has and I don't. She has lived in Vietnam her whole life, a peasant Vietnamese girl who married a Chinese businessman and bore him children at an age that I still considered myself a child. And when war broke out and her two sons left the country in search of a better life, she still clung to her home village even when her only daughter ran away, attempting to escape, only to disappear into the South China Sea.
Even though I do not know her very well, I admire her. One does not have to be famous or heroic or be martyred to earn respect. She stuck to one place and managed to survive. That takes determination and guts--two qualities which I am ever in search of in my aimless journeys.
