A trip to fuRiwa
Brian Ma In 2003, with my cousin Duong, an ex-convict, I took my grandmother on a road trip. I was in my last year of college, where I was writing a thesis on postcolonial literatures in Vietnam, and I was visiting my grandmother in Chicago. My grandmother was entering her thirtieth year of dialysis and she felt she had little time left. She told us one summer morning that she wanted to visit old friends. Her friends turned out to be two women who used to manage her house and look after her children in Quy Nhon before the takeover of Vietnam. At that time, in the earlier part of the last century, my maternal grandmother oversaw a large estate as the second wife of a man who owned a tea farm that covered two mountains. The two women my grandmother called friends lived on the estate along with other workers during the week and returned to their families for the weekend. The aristocratic practice reminded me of the European nobility written about and glamorized by Nabokov. My grandmother spoke fondly of the two women she wanted to visit and when I asked my mother about them, she told me warmhearted stories about these older women who lightly scolded her when she would steal the freshly laid eggs of the chickens that roamed the courtyard and eat them raw after stabbing a little hole at the end of an egg and mixing the yolk in a glass with soda and too much condensed milk. When they all came to America through different means—another story for another time—my grandmother ended up in Chicago while the two women who used to manage her kitchen and look after