What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

could say that their parents had ever fully declared them second-rate to their lost child. Cam and Tuan were parents in the way they knew—dutiful, authoritarian, good providers. And certainly Ai and Lam, who were the only other witnesses to that loss, did not think in those terms ever. They were born in the old country and understood their positions before Quy’s loss, understood as a matter of culture; and surely if they had harboured any hopes of changing that, of living out their fantasies of the North American teenaged rebellion, with Rolling Stones concerts and independence and free sex, Quy’s loss squelched those hopes.

It was Binh and Tuyen who were in a position to feel second-ratedness as a visceral marker. Their culture was North American despite their parents’ admittedly ambivalent efforts to enforce Vietnamese rules, and in North American culture they knew it was de rigueur to love children equally and for children to claim that kind of love as a right. Binh picked up on that lost right and made all efforts to collect it. Tuyen, on the other hand, was made merely curious by its absence. She preferred to explore other aspects of North American birthright, such as independence, free love, and artistic irrelevance.

Tuyen had never felt the need to keep an eye on Binh’s dealings, but as she left her father and walked along College Street toward her apartment, she felt a deeper stirring of uneasy interest. About her family she had taken a superior view. She considered them somewhat childlike since her power over them in the form of language had given her the privilege of viewing them in this way. And her distance from them, as the distance of all translators from their subjects, allowed her to see that so much of the raison d’être of their lives was taken up negotiating their way around the small objects of foreignness placed in their way. Either they could not see the larger space of commonality or it was denied them.

But superiority aside, she was still broke. Watching her mother, she’d had second thoughts about breaking into her sleep to have her mother force money on her. She had become so preoccupied with having hurt her father and wanting to apologize to him, and her sister had put her off with the threat, despite her cool response. She had, as usual, become confused and tangled up in their presences. Some day she wants to mount an installation of the characteristics of her family, if only she could imagine the science with which to do it. It would be a hundred boxes of varying sizes made of a transparent translucent material floating in a room, suspended by no known element. The floor of the room would be water, and she would walk through the room bumping into the boxes, which would not be discernible to the naked eye. As she collided with the boxes, things would fall out, spikes and keys and mouths and voices.

She would have to go to the restaurant later and borrow some money from her father; though she hated giving him another opportunity to scold her and lecture her about dropping out of school, about living downtown, she was desperate and would have to endure it. Or she might take Binh up on the offer of money for keeping the store, which would also give her a chance to scope him out; to see what he was up to. She had told him she wanted nothing to do with his idea of digging things up, but she had no illusions that that would stop him. Admittedly, she had abdicated to him her role as arbiter between the outside world and the family, but she might have to intervene if his scheme—she was sure there was a larger scheme behind it all—placed them in jeopardy.

But her father was shrewd, she assured herself as she neared the apartment. She and Binh might have been the translators, but her father ran things. He determined from which version to abstract the family’s course. Still, her parents had a vulnerability that she had known for as long as she could remember, and it made her feel protective of them; it had sometimes motivated her interpretations of the exchanges between officialdom and her family more than self interest.

Stopped at the light, she laughed at this partially disingenuous assessment of herself. She remembered her child self, her teenaged self, impatient with her mother’s repeated attempts to get accreditation, tired of making phone calls for her, writing letters of explanation and not mailing them as she was instructed, knowing that her mother’s letters were so convoluted that they likely would only prove her unqualified for consideration. Bureaucrats, Tuyen knew, were not impressed by long letters containing life stories. There were forms that had to be filled out with no addendums, no laminations. Anyway, she had been a petulant child, thinking her parents incompetent and wishing they were different, similar to some perfect parent she had in mind who was not Vietnamese and for whom she did not have to translate the world.

“Hey, what’re you laughing at?” Carla had come up to her on the street, caught her laughing to herself.

“Oh, Carla!” Tuyen snapped around. “I was so worried about you last night—and this morning. Where’d you go?”

“Walking. What’s funny? People will think you’re mad or something.”

“You didn’t talk to me this morning, what do you care?”

“I’m sorry …” was all Carla offered.

Seeing her about to dive back into the morning’s mood, Tuyen said, “I forgive you. See how easy I am?” She brushed a hand over Carla’s left cheek. “Jackie was over this morning and Oku. They came for coffee. They might check by later.”

Tuyen chatted the rest of the way to the apartment, trying to keep the mood light. She was happy simply to be in Carla’s company again. She didn’t mind caring for people who were not her family—it was so much easier; they actually did not expect it and