SAOMAI
My first school assignment was in kindergarten. My task was to go home and ask my parents about the meaning of my name. They filled out a form and the next day everyone shared with the class.
Sao Mai. Sao means star in Vietnamese, Mai means morning. Morning star.
I remember sharing that in class and the teacher telling me that I had a beautiful name. I would have to disagree, though.
Rather than beautiful, I found the name burdensome. To this day, I hate the first day of classes or having to re-introduce myself. No one ever seems to be able to get my name the first time. Instead, their tongues toss it around, distorting the letters, hoping to find the correct pronunciation. When I learned that it was possible to change one’s name, I made a list of names I would give myself. I wanted something that sounded pretty like Lily, Evelyn, Jasmine, or Skye. Something that would not be mispronounced.
When I was in Vietnam, all the other children would introduce themselves with names they were given in English class. “Hello, my name is Thomas.” “Annie.” “Mickey.” I would tell them my name, and their faces scrunched in confusion. “English name?” “Không có. Don’t have one,” I would reply. I remember my 6-year-old niece asking her mother why an American like me did not have an English name. My cousin looked at me and told the little girl, “Because she’s Vietnamese. It is only right that she has a Vietnamese name.” The answer was evidently unsatisfactory, but I was not pestered anymore about my name.
Back at the hotel, I asked my father, “Why did you name me Sao Mai? It’s not even a common name.” My father, mother, and brother all had common Vietnamese names. Yet, mine was the anomaly. “How did you even think of it?”
He told me my mother’s name, Minh Nguyet, means Clear Moon. He wanted to continue with the celestial theme. Also, he wanted to name me something easy. “Easy?” I asked. “Easy for Americans to pronounce,” he clarified. He was not wrong on the last point; the syllables of my name contain phonics commonly used in the English language. But people still struggle with its exotic spelling. They stare at the letters, perplexed.
One night, I was walking with a friend. I looked up. The sky was especially clear that night. I began pointing out the constellations I still remembered. I finally found the Orion’s belt. “See those three stars in a vertical line? There, behind the pine tree. That’s his belt. And the stars around that are his hands and feet. Do you see? I think that curve of stars is his bow. I think, his arrow is supposed to point towards what Orion’s hunting.”
“You know, it’s fitting that you know so much about the stars,” my friend said. I replied with a blank stare, slightly confused. “Your name.”
My favorite field trips in elementary school were the ones to the planetarium. I loved watching the universe spin around me, the stories of how each constellation was placed by Greek gods, the collective ooh’s and ah’s of the room.
Or maybe it is true that our names are our destinies.
In high school, I learned that “Morning Star” was a nickname for the planet Venus. If everything is aligned correctly, you can see the planet among the stars. It is bright, and rather than twinkle, it radiates a steady, silvery light. However, I am not confident whether I have correctly identified it yet.
Nights when I cannot fall asleep, I watch as the dawn sky warms up into a violet haze. I look out my window and see how peaceful everything is. I can hear the birds rustling in the trees and the beginnings of early morning commuters on the streets. I look at the pale-yellow moon and wonder if I can see Morning Star. Sao Mai. It is pretty.
PHUONG
I did not know I had a middle name until I was in fifth grade. I finally learned how to spell it the next year. All I knew was that it was that it is also my father’s middle name. My mom does not like our middle names. When she named my little brother, she did not give him a middle name because it was “too much of a hassle.”
When we arrived in Quang Ngai, my father’s hometown, we visited my late grandfather’s and aunt’s tombstones.
My paternal grandparents used to live with us when I was much younger. They moved back to Vietnam before I really got to know them. When my grandfather passed away, my father was silent when he received the news on Lunar New Year. He did not attend the funeral. “He was not a good man. It was probably better that he died.”
I never met my aunt. She died before I was born. Her existence was hidden from my brother and me. We were too young, too naïve, too innocent to understand the turmoil of depression and suicide. We did not need to know such things. It was only recently, when I was diagnosed with depression, that my father began to tell us about her. “My older sister, she was very pretty. I remember at school all the older boys would follow her around.”
My cousin-in-law, the husband of my late aunt’s daughter, drove us to the site. On the way, we stopped by a street vendor. The store was the front room of their home. Hanging on the walls and an opening that resembled a doorway was candy, chips, drinks, unrecognizable trinkets, and flowers. She held a basket of incense. Back home, I had only seen ones with red sticks. But she had blues, greens, yellows. I wondered if the colors had any meaning, if they made any difference. My father reached out the window and exchanged a bill for a bundle of incense.
We drove on, down a narrow path that was less of a road and more of patches of grass and dirt packed down by motorbikes and livestock. We were the only car I could see amongst the traffic of people, chicken, dogs, and cattle.
Soon we were outside of civilization. The huts disappeared, and we were surrounded by rice fields. I could no longer hear the chickens and the desolation was hauntingly alluring. The car slowed down. I looked forward and saw hills of gravestones. They were large blocks of stone above ground, almost like at a fortress. Rather than just a gravestone, each one was a plot, sometimes gated. It looked as if there once was an order to the mayhem, but now it was all scattered and random. Some grave plots jutted out into the road and you could see where people had tried to create a new path to navigate to their family’s grave.
We got out of the car and my cousin-in-law guided us to the graves. We zigzagged between plots, trying to respectively walk over the corners of others’ plots. My grandfather’s tomb only filled up half of the lot. The other half was empty, overgrown with weeds. The space was for my grandmother, so they could be buried next to each other. On the other side was my aunt’s. It was more orderly. Unlike my grandparents’ lot, this part of the graveyard was owned and regulated by the government, rather than by a private company. My aunt’s tombstone rested beside her husband’s, despite having died decades before him. Their children had bribed the officials so they could be together.
At each tombstone, we lit incense and bowed our heads. I remember how hot and humid it was that day. You could hear the rustling of the tall grasses, the gravel shifting underneath our feet, and the cicadas chirping all around. The smoke mixed in with the sweat streaming down my forehead, and I felt my eyes water. Tears streamed down my face for people who were no more than strangers.
When I looked back up, I read their names.
“Ba, they have the same middle name as me. As us.”
He explained to me that in Vietnamese culture, as most last names were so common, the middle name functioned as the family name. Some families carried on their legacies through that name. My cousin on his side inherited a middle and last name held by a family of scholars. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side came from a long lineage of poets and artists.
“What was your family’s legacy?”
“Nothing. We were just peasants, manual laborers.”
Later, I looked up the meaning of the middle name. Phương. Direction. Way. Path. For whatever reason we ended up with this middle name, and I would carry it with pride. It carries not only my identity, but the all those that have come before me. It is not nothing.
NGUYEN
Nguyen means first or original, but it is in no way unique. It is estimated that forty percent of the Vietnamese population has the last name Nguyen. The last ruling family of Vietnam was the Nguyen dynasty. As a show of respect and loyalty, most Vietnamese took on their last name.
My last name is by far the hardest part of my name to pronounce and the part of I have the least commitment towards. It has no special meaning nor significance. It is merely the most obvious indicator that I am Vietnamese.
“Where are you from?” As soon as I started school in Connecticut, I began hearing it every day. I hated it. “Here,” I would answer but they were never satisfied. “No, where are you from from.” At first, I did not understand. I was born here. I was raised here.
Then I realized, I did not belong here.
I wanted to belong. I needed to belong.
For my family, the preservation of our heritage is synonymous to the preservation of our language among the younger generation. My first language was Vietnamese—my English vocabulary consisted of “hello” and “yellow” (I’m not sure if the latter was really my favorite color, or if it simply sounded similar to the former). I would memorize the folk songs my mother sang to me and sing them back to my grandmother on her birthday. I was excited to wear my áo dài on Lunar New Year and show off the floral designs of the silk. I felt a surge of pride when I got to help prepare by wrapping bánh bột lọc in banana leaves.
But I wanted no more to do with my Vietnamese identity. In school we spoke English, so I felt it only right that I speak English at home. My mother scolded me, told me I was disrespectful, that I was hỗn. When my parents called for me in Vietnamese, I responded in English. Eventually, my mother would stop listening to me when I spoke back to her in English. I did the same, ignoring her when she spoke in Vietnamese.
By the time I entered middle school, I lost the muscle memory to properly pronounce my own name. I stopped wearing traditional clothing. I started criticizing my mother’s cooking for its smell and unnecessary spices and herbs.
I am American, so I should act American.
Despite all my parents’ efforts to combat my repudiation of our language, they barely spoke of the motherland and all prospects of bringing my brother and I to visit were immediately shut down. “You don’t need to know,” they would say. “It was a long time ago,” they would say. “I do not remember much,” they would say. “The country is too dusty, corrupt,” they would say. “You would not like it,” they would say. “We will go when you are adults.”
It was only as my father’s body began to fail him that they decided it was time.
On the first day of my last year in high school, my father was re-admitted into the hospital. We had known for a while that the tumors eating away at him were relentless. If the last six years had taught us anything, it was that “It gets better” was a lie, a promise everyone is willing to make but unable to uphold.
It had ravaged his intestines, flared in his lungs, and crawled through his bones.
The original plan was to visit Vietnam when my brother graduated from high school, but my father’s clock was ticking faster each year. We began preparations to go that summer.
My father was lost when we landed in Quảng Ngãi. He tried to maneuver by landmarks, by the hospital, by the main street, by the river. But the roads were all new. The shops were new. The small homes and yards he once biked by were paved and covered with new block style homes. He could not find the fields he would play in. The marsh he and his friends wasted away days and nights playing in. The old man who was his father’s best friend. The shop where he bought candy. The school he attended.
The rapid industrialization of Vietnam had seeped its way into the sleepy and untraveled town.
My brother and I stood behind him, sweating under the merciless sun and scraping at our mosquito bites. We watched as he paced up and down the streets, stopping at each house, each street peddler, each construction worker. We waited as he spoke to them and eventually, he would turn back to us and wave for us to follow him.
We walked in circles, down allies, up narrow stairs, by empty storefronts, between overgrown grasses.
We entered a seamstress’s house where kids were watching cartoons. A café where men were playing cards and drinking coffee. A garden where a woman was hanging laundry. A porch where a 100-year-old man lies on his hammock. A hardware store where two huskies are panting in front of the fans. My brother and I greeted them and bowed. We sat and drank water. And my father began to tell stories. We did not understand it all. But I quietly sat, entertained. I forgot about the heat and my grumbling stomach. I watched as my father sat back and laughed for the first time in a while.
With each encounter, we heard the same phrase, “Lâm là ốm quá ngày này. Lam is so scrawny nowadays.” I had known that my father lost a substantial amount of body mass. I had felt how his once bristly hair was as soft as my baby cousin’s head. I had seen how his hands were now cracked and nails brittle. But I never said it out loud myself. There was no need to state the obvious. To make it more real than it already was.
My father wanted to be cremated. He had no specifications for his funeral ceremony. He did not want to take up any space nor time. Rather than a tombstone or urn, he wanted his ashes to be released back into nature. He was not one for sentimental memorabilia.
If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.
I would not appreciate any physical tokens, either. I wanted to believe that when I lost him, I could keep him close spiritually. That I can still remember him. But memories are corrupt and unreliable. And how am I to honor someone I knew since I was born, and yet still know so little about? I realized that more than anything when we were in Vietnam. It is not just the country that is foreign. It was also my parents. Entire lives that I could never understand. And both were crumbling, disappearing into an abyss of another time.
When we visited my grandfather and aunt, I had imagined my father’s name engraved into the marble. Nguyễn Phương Lâm. I guess, more than anything, I could never lose that. His name. And the name he gifted me.
Nguyễn Phương Sao Mai
Description
This a personal essay reflecting on the meaning of my name and follows along as I explore family memories and stories and my Vietnamese American identity.
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