Bonjour, Comment ça va?
“Good Morning. How do you do?”
Ca va bien, et vous?
” Very well, and you?
I sat next to my grandfather at breakfast time, at lunch time and dinner time. He came from another time and another place. It was a place that I connected to so deeply in the gut of my heart. As he held his bowl of rice in one hand and the delicate chopsticks in the other, he ate and spoke. His descriptions of the world that he had left behind and the man that he used to be.
To me there was no past, there was only the present. I think all children think of life in that one way. There is no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow but only today. That may be the difference between the young and old.
The really young live like there is no tomorrow.
The old live like there was only yesterday.
My grandfather spoke phrases in French. To my ears it was like music. What were those unfamiliar sounds of foreign influence that hit so close to home? He even carried himself a different way. He is tall, broad and proud.
There is no question why I’ve always connected to French culture, art and fashion. I have always been fascinated at how close but yet so far the french world was from me and my own Vietnamese culture.
When you have no knowledge of a subject, it is so easy to romanticize what it may mean.
I left one Summer day and lived in Paris.
I have yet to see Vietnam, again.
And so we sat,
and I listened.
I imagined the beauty he was speaking of.
They were words that described the gritty beauty of our homeland where his love lived.
His words rested in a hammock and swayed in the breeze.
In his voice were the notes of a homesick child.
In the evening he would bring out his guitar and vietnamese music sheets and pluck at the strings.
Each note came out desperately.
He begins to sing and the songs became inbedded in my heart.
The songs of out motherland.
The songs of where my grandfather came from.
The songs where he came from.
Songs of happiness and birds who have flown too far to return.
Only in memory can they be reached.
Songs of losing a home, a love and a life that will never return.
We sang together, my grandfather and I.
My heart hurts when I think of his voice.
I learned to harmonize.
I soon became the voice to his strings.
“I used to carry your grandmother to bed every night.”
In his eyes were the tears of a hundred years yearning to come out.
We are in a new life now.
Those were so many years ago.
I’ve thought of why I’ve become the person I am and love the things I love.
The person I think of is my grandfather.
The songs never fade.
They play in my mind and I will sing my grandfather songs,
Forever.
I cannot wait to see my homeland.
