Viet Ham

There’s a strange nexus between my wife and my mom. They were born on the same day, even under the same Chinese zodiac sign. And though different in some ways, there are uncanny similarities.

To wit, they both:

- harbor a thinly veiled desire lead a cult
- delight in being the only woman among men
- pout and whine with no discrimination to the importance of the matter
- cannot contain their rescue fetish as it pertains to pets, animals, relatives, neighbors, the lonely, the garrulous, and the less fortunate
- coo at animals and inanimate objects
- share a wretched delight in heckling me

If I were smarter, I would have kept the two apart to prevent the fabric of the universe from being torn asunder. But instead, they met one another and swapped stories of how infantile I allegedly am.

Now it is too late. Even at 9,000 miles apart, they manage to gang up on me. This came about recently when I related to my wife the story of how my mom used to tease me in a very peculiar manner.

I was seven years old and such a sucker for her whining. Here’s how it would go:

Her: Oh my son….your mommy is soooo hungry, and I am longing for some ribs.

Me: No! Stay away!

Her: Look at me! I am so skinny and hungry, you should just let me have one of your ribs. Won’t you let mommy have just one rib? Mommy is sooo hungry!

Me: Just one? Do you promise?

Her: Of course just one! But I have to pick the very best one! Come here and let me find the best one.

At this point, she’d take me into her arms, flip me sideways and starting counting my ribs with her fingers. She knew I was ticklish beyond all reason and delighted in making me squeal as she identified and rated each rib bone. Finally, when she sensed I could take no more, she’d announce that she’d found the one to eat and bit me in my ribcage.

Of course I screeched in terror and ran off with tears streaming from being tickled.

Upon hearing this ridiculous childhood account, my wife immediately took on the mommy part and begged for a rib, pleading, “Tommy…I am soooo hungry….won’t you give me just one rib???”

My mom has never liked wiping errant pee off the toilet seat. Though blameless in her sentiment, this resulted in a ban on lifting the toilet seat. This unnatural sanction was established not long after her bony butt sank into the seat-less bowl like a dipping sauce one too many times. It’s like yesterday in my mind: her fiendish screech, followed by a wailing animal howl to make sure the entire house knew the egregious injury done to her.

It’s now been 7 years since my dad urinated standing up. He walks into the bathroom, pulls his drawstrings past his scrotum, and sits down facing the water tank, with his dainty thighs clamped around the bowl. His face hangs low while his two child-sized hands steer the hose from which half my genetic material was forcibly ejected some twenty-six years ago.

Twenty nine years ago, he was a long-haired, guitar playing, dance troupe mongering, Trotskyite dilettante who fell in love with a fiercely ignorant country girl two years his senior. It all started with a ridiculous proposal to go swimming, and ended with his well-heeled family’s cruelly logical disapproval of their marriage. While his older brothers quickly spent the family fortune on medical school, being the sixth child in a family of thirteen ensured him a cheaper, lightweight academic future as an agricultural engineer.

Four years ago, my mom shoved her grimy, uneducated finger into his forehead and judged him the loser of the family. They were doctors except for him, a lowly engineer. He staggered back, his love for her did not. His face swollen with shame, he apologized, and went to the bathroom.