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The night we returned to Saigon, my mother, Linh, exacted the last promise I would ever make to her, my vow, never to call her "Mother" again. We'd just arrived in the city before dusk, Grandmother Thanh, Linh and I, hiding until twilight sank the last of the hot sun, then emerged with the others, all the ghosts from the countryside. Like them, we were homeless, carrying our kerosene stoves and torn mats on our backs, shadows looking for work and shelter in the city. We found a space on the bottom landing of a cracked stairwell, and made our beds there, on the concrete, still splintered with old shrapnel. I was almost asleep when Linh whispered to me and made me the accomplice in her crime.
“Every name is its own world, every word a journey,” Linh began. “Promise me, Mai, swear it,” she said, taking hold of my hands. “Give me your word you won’t call me mother, only Linh from now on.”
I waited for my eyes to accustom to the dark and looked at her closely. Before the takeover, she’d been a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Saigon. She was a teacher of etymology, skilled at exhuming the origins of words, finding their buried secrets, and a name was an entire history for her, a universe, not to be disturbed, never to be erased or forgotten.
I hesitated to answer, but she pressed me.
“Mai, please.”
“I promise.”
It was then I made my own oath — I would let her rob me of this intimacy, but I wouldn’t let her take anything else from me again.
“Say it now,” she demanded, emboldened. “Say my name.”
“Yes, Linh,” I said, watching her, then looking away.
She was reckless with her own promises, a charlatan. She’d stolen the word from me, done exactly what she professed to despise, and made “Mother” extinct, lost to me; but I knew I couldn’t do otherwise. I’d seen her eyes find a fleck of light in the black coal of the stairwell when I said her name. I knew Saigon was the place of her fall, her surrender, and now that we’d returned, she needed to have her name said aloud, and repeated. I understood then that every time her name was uttered, it gave her strength somehow, reminded her that her spirit existed.
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