Save Her to Define Me

Their speech and the movement of their mouths do not align. The weak woman character in the dubbed-in-Vietnamese Chinese kung-fu series cries in distress as she is getting raped by a villainous male character with hands that aggressively caresses her face traveling down to her waist and onto her.... Her voice is drowned by the dubbers inaccurately capturing the emotions displayed, skewing the tone of the scene. She screams. I wish I could had done something. Though I made sense of my world through these depictions on screen, it was not real, but it soon became real for me.

My 8 year old eyes, with pupils of dark brown, mirror the horrendous scene on the tv. I slowly form my perception of good and evil, man and woman.

I can see my little self growing angry, frustrated, confused of why women had to be weak, why women had to be dependent on a male hero to save her. I was a boy who wished he could be a hero to all those women under the evil of certain men. As a boy, I felt it was my duty to protect women, as a boy becoming a man.

I remember back then, I told my mother not to wear such revealing outfits out of fear she might attract other men. I wanted her to stay with me all the time, to smell her hair, to say she is my mother. "Please do not go to the doctor's, ma. I don't want him to touch you in those ways." I cried to my mother. I would use a plastic stool we would buy from Dai Thanh Supermarket on Story Road to hold onto her while she makes rice porridge. The familiar scent of her black, curly hair comforts me that I am home with my mother and that she is safe and that we are safe.

Manhood, I believed, was defined through these lines set by movies and television. I believed that one day I could be those heroic men in these stories. That was what represented good to me. I should have realized that women have the agency, that I should not be protective all the time of them, that I should not try to define myself through rescuing them to reinforce their fragility and weakness. Though I am conscious of this, I still have a tendency to be protective, but I am slowly letting it go little by little.

I want to let go of what I felt was right to me then
and move on what I think is right to me now.
The first step is to accept that "Women are not Roses".
They are who they are. Who they want to be. What they want to do.
I am who I am and I can't define them because I am not them.
I am not my mother. I am not you..

Friday Night(s)

I don't want to let the drink talk for me. I ask it where it was made. It answers Europe, perhaps Germany, perhaps Russia, perhaps here wherever here is, it answers through my reading of its name and labels of the bottle. I twist its cap. I smell the scent of nail polish. I imagine my multiple Vietnamese barbers from multiple beauty salons. I imagine them cutting my hair, calculating which angle to snip at, wondering if I wanted it that way. I smell that scent, yet I still consume it, a piece of myself, my make-up. My mother appears out of that imagery evoked by my scent. My mother appears when I hear you speak of whatever issues you have being a woman.

Tears drip down an unfamiliar face. I've never seen this side of me before. Thank you for witnessing it so I can witness it for myself. Thank you.

Home She Said To Me

Mẹ,
cho con đời sống.
Mother,
you give me life.
You,
gave me life.

Mẹ,
How
can I put my hands on
you.

Mẹ,
When
you,
give life.
When
you,
make my home, make me home, make me.

Em,
your brown-nâu eyes,
mirror
my own,
mirror,
Mẹ.

Mẹ,
your tối-đen, black hair
imbued
by
the aroma
of
the
Perfume River.. is

The essence of my adolescence.
The essence of my manhood.

My running reflection.

Mẹ,
the wrinkles, the cracks, the marks on
your
hands
mirror
the beauty
I mirror the world to you, Em.

Viet-Nam-Mẹ-------------------
America-Em--------------------

I am you. I am you both. Viet Nam. America. My Em, my lover. My mother, my creator.