A Letter to My Young Self

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I see you again in a courtyard drenched in sunlight, the dogs asleep in the doorway, the red bougainvillea wavering above the iron gates, the shading blue sky. At your desk, you struggle for words to write to the brother overseas, and above that desk I see your treasures: stamp collection, French comic books, Chinese martial arts novels. I hear again the street vendor's lyrical and nostalgic voice and the faint but constant roar of motorcycle mufflers. I can almost feel the coolness of the tile floor under my bare feet and smell the wood smoke that emanates from the kitchen.

And the nights. Cool spring breezes that carried the sound of distant bombs in through the open windows from the countryside. Not loud. But the rhythmic explosion echoing like a childhood lullaby. And how, hearing Mother weeping in the next room, you struggled toward sleep.

I hold the letters and I have a glimpse of that past again: a sense of being insulated within a structure of family and clan, of being shrouded in my primal language that held me and everyone I knew within its Confucian familial embrace, a life within a walled garden.

It may surprise you then that you who lived so much in the present, who pretended history had nothing to do with you, would grow into an American writer with a Proustian obsession with the past, with what was robbed from you, from us. You may not know that history was alive and often unpredictable, but the man who writes these words has grown acutely aware of how the personal and the historical are but rivers to the sea. You had thought the borders were nearly impossible to cross, but I have discovered that the borders have always been porous, and that epic loss can loosen one's tongue.

So I write. The past is gone, but the past is ever-present.

All those letters tell me that it is so easy to forget all the sadness and joy and the love, forget who we used to be, and how we used to feel. But they also tell me impossible distances can be filled with love, with the written word.

Andrew Lam is an editor at New America Media, a national collaboration of ethnic news organizations; www.newamericamedia.org. He is also the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (Heyday, 2005). Reprinted from California, the University of California at Berkeley's alumni magazine. Subscriptions: $19.95/yr. (6 issues); www.alumni.berkeley.edu.

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