Viet Ham

This week, my older daughter goes on a sailing with her 6th grade class, leaving her younger sister to experience life as an only child for the first time. Already, I can see the compensation the younger one has made to counter the loneliness: moving to the middle of the back car seat, keeping herself busy with internal monologues, even volunteering to go on boring adult errands.

These are the little adjustments an only child makes to feel a reassuring connectedness to the world, a sibling sentiment to acceptance. To be able to connect is to feel accepted in some tangible way, no matter how small. Yet acceptance for an only child is a peculiar concept in that you are always graded on a curve. People underrate your accomplishments because success is expected when children have undiluted attention and resources. Conversely, they turn your failures into blameless, self-fulfilling parables of exceptional opportunity gone awry.

But the loneliness is the worst part. Growing up as an only child, I yearned for any moment where I didn’t feel like a musical instrument with nothing to tune to except myself. My parents’ reticence for social activities and devotion to Buddhist meditation only made matters worse. I scavenged for opportunities to connect with others, and finally found my salvation in elementary school.
 
“Talks too much, and doesn’t pay enough attention in class,” reported my 2nd grade teacher.

Fair enough, but if only my teacher knew how I lived in a mausoleum of joy, aka “living the way of the mindful Buddha in noble silence”, she might have been more sympathetic to the running of my noble mouth.

This may start to sound like a diatribe against Buddhism, but let me put that fear to rest by maintaining that the Buddhist ideal of moderation must surely extend to the enforcement of Noble Silence as well. Of all the religious ideas that I’ve heard so far, the Buddhist emphasis on the “Middle Way” resonates with my own belief that humanity must learn to find compromise to evolve. In many ways, I see the middle way as a natural resting position in the Hegelian dialectic between thesis and antithesis.

Alas this would be the adult version of me speaking of moderation and the synthesis of opposing ideas. The child version mostly saw the world in extremist tones of pleasure and pain. The pain of loneliness was especially acute when my dad refused to let me come along on one particular shopping trip. The ten year old me felt the pain of rejection to such a degree that I stormed into my dad’s room with a pair of scissors, pulled down his best pair of work pants, and cut them until they were short as capris. It was truly therapeutic as I felt the thickness of the fabric fall away under the crisp blade.

“So the plane that went down, in the movie, did they have to pull it up before the screen went black?” interrupted my younger daughter, as we discussed the new United 93 movie.

I turned my head back, and looked upon my ten year old. She was sitting on her knees, in the middle of the back seat, with her head tilted, desperate to catch some part of our front-seat conversation. I smiled inwardly to myself before answering.

I had just stepped away from the dining room when my dad blurted what had seemingly been lodged in his throat for the past hour.

“Tom, do you remember the feeling of being inside the woman? It feels so good you remember, so okay, the feeling that you have when you become one with the woman when you are inside. Do you know?”

His face was mixture of whimsical smirk and collective nostalgia. I would not respond. I feared the floodgates that would yield to this monstrous conversation.

“Tom? You know when you are one with her, it feels sooo good, not just physical, but it is wonderful for two people to become one; it is the best feeling in the world to become one with someone, did you know that when you meditate you not only become one with one person, but you become one with all the elements of the universe.”

So there it was. That was the reason why this 50 year old man-child insists to me that all thinking was toxic for the mind, and that one should spend as much time as possible in peaceful(?) meditation. If he had only told me from the start that meditation was akin to the toe curling, vascular squeezing, torrential gushing of the gonads, I would’ve been more obliged to give it a whirl.

The other night at SFO, we were a little late in sending my mom off to Vietnam. The check-in line was already packed with more people than Tinkle’s swollen arsehole. It was quite the sight. Boxes, suitcases, and hordes of Orcish, elderly Vietnamese spilled out of the S-shaped waiting area, while a knee-wilting odor of Eagle brand medicated oil wafted amongst the shawls and peeling permanent eyeliner. As more late arrivals thronged the third-world position grubbing, I ducked out of line and intentionally lingered near some Swedish girls looking somewhat curvy and lost. I made sure my time would not be in absolute agony.

I rejoined them 50 minutes later as my parents had just reached the service desk. Three EVA Air agents stood lazily about at the Evergreen Club section while the economy line tapered off near the exit doors of SFO. The next stop was the ticketed security checkpoint. It was a mess. There was that one old woman who was still picking her hairy nose, up to her second knuckle. To make matters worse, some overly bloated boxes collapsed and out came little combs, scissors, and thread spools. The wait was not helped when my mom was the winner of a random security check. They told her to take out her syringes (diabetes) and they investigated each of her little smelly ointment bottles. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. A hemorrhaging of short, squat, Vietnamese people grew behind her.

Just as my mind was about to go mad with impatience, I heard the sound of syncopated stepping. My head snapped to the origin of the noise, and saw a line of green approaching the checkpoint. There they were. Tall, beautiful flight attendants with amazingly tiny waists, splendored in fresh green, floated by, followed by their slim, compact travel cases. They had delicate almond shaped eyes that bejeweled their perfect cheekbones and small ruddy lips. The equally stunning Singapore Airlines flight crew followed closely. Goodness. A group of security guards rushed to the center security point to open the gates for this retinue of Elven beauties. And just like that, they were gone. My gaze returned to the struggling, restless crowd and my mom’s explicit interrogation scene.

“I tell you this for my diabetes,” my mom blubbered, apparently annoyed with the man’s groping of her mushrooms and tea leaves.

They finally let her (and us) go. On the way home, my dad spoke in the “now it is peaceful” voice and reminded me that I would have to work hard in life to expect anything good. He was in full super-martyr mode.

“My life, there is no more happiness, only suffering. My only happiness in life now is to reduce the suffering. Life is very tough.”

It certainly is, especially as a short, pushy Vietnamese man with glasses.