drowning

My first memory of the waters of Vietnam is drowning.

I am six, the first time we visit Vietnam after my family left it years earlier to move to America. Like fragments of sea glass and shell on the beachfront, I collect what I recall from the time. My leopard print bathing suit, new. The minivan my cousins rent to drive us to Vũng Tàu from Sài Gòn, when it is more common to have motorcycles. My parents with a giant black buoy – do I really remember that? Or is that a false memory I’ve invented after seeing the photograph of the three of us, mẹ holding the buoy against her thigh, ba laughing as I run up ahead along the sand?

As a writer, my job is to make things up. I invent stories about fictional characters in my spare time, and I make up stories about the people I pass on the street, too. So I can write about the feeling of the waves crashing over me as I am pulled underwater, the aching hollow burning sensation of my throat as I scream for help, the relief at finally being noticed and rescued. Yet I don’t know if I remember that, or if it is simply the way that I write the story in my head, after.

What is memory, if not the act of rewriting? Psychology suggests that every time we remember something, we are rewriting that memory, and so the memory changes: water against stone, sand to glass. Smoothing and reshaping every time. I begin to wonder how we can even trust ourselves. Or if it is better not to remember things at all, so that the memory can be conjured as pure as possible, in a moment when it is truly needed. And when would that moment be? On the verge of death?

I am too little to have my life flash before my eyes, that moment in the water when the tide nearly takes me. I don’t know if I remember drowning – but my body certainly remembers the fear of it. Two years later, I am enrolled in summer swim lessons with my cousin at the YMCA, and get nothing out of it except for a healthy dislike of chlorine. My cousin swims easily after the lessons, and I learn to dread the pool. Freshman year of high school, when my P.E. class has a swim unit, I pretend to be on my period so I can get out of it. Yes, I am on my period… for three weeks. So what? Summers by the community pool, I stay on the side where the water can only get to my shoulders. Or better yet, out of the pool with a book. I do not go anywhere near the deep end, much less open ocean. Unfortunately, I grow up in California, so I am not spared the beach, though I go layered with healthy doses of sunscreen and dislike. Over many summers, I muddle along, somewhat learning to kick back and forth but never really a strong swimmer. I can do without, I think.

Then I learn that a requirement of graduating my university is passing a swim test.

How cruel. Maybe I just will never graduate. Could they possibly make us do that? But it is true: the week before freshman orientation, everyone has to take the swim test – or opt out and take the swim P.E. It is a way for MIT to make sure that all their students graduate with an important survival ability, and yet for me, it feels like the worst thing on earth. I will take my chances when the time comes, so long as I don’t have to face my fear now. Unfortunately for me, this isn’t something I can slip out of. Two choices, two evils. On one hand, I have an entire term of a dreadful, mandatory swim P.E. class in lieu of more fun classes such as fencing or salsa dancing. On the other, I have a few minutes to try my hands and legs at a dreadful, mandatory test. I choose the second as the lesser of the evils. Fear and avoidance stand no chance against my commitment to efficiency. So that summer, I practice. It is literally sink or swim.

The swim test consists of jumping into the pool and swimming a hundred yards continuously. It is the most difficult test of my life. My lungs ache, and so do my arms and legs. And yet I finish it. I pass.

I still am not a strong swimmer. But I know how to swim, and I try not to let my fear and aversion stop me from enjoying life. My second trip to Vietnam, after my college graduation, we go out on a boat past the island of Phú Quốc. Out in the open water, our tour group is encouraged to jump out and swim to explore the reefs. So I do.

We have life vests, but this is still the open ocean, so the guide advises us that we only go if we know how to swim. Mẹ stays on the boat; ba and my brother follow me into the water. I have a great time, at first. I float. I splash. I swim around, relishing in the sea. For the first time in a long time, I feel like a true daughter of Vietnam. Then, my foot brushes against something sharp: a rock on the ocean floor, or a part of the reef. I don’t feel the pain, at first, disguised by the salted sea, but when I come back to the boat, I bleed all over the deck. Only a flesh wound, not deep, yet there is a lot of blood. A dizzying amount, diluted red flowing over the white of the boat.

And so: my second memory of the waters of Vietnam is bleeding.

The boat does not have a real first aid kit. I wash the cut with water, and we use toilet paper to bandage it until we get back to shore. I still have a raised, jagged line across my toe from that day.

Yet I’m still drawn to water, especially to that beautiful jade green water of the land of my parents’ birth, and mine. I have a complicated relationship with that land, and that water. I love it, and I don’t. I know it, and I don’t. It is home, and it is foreign.

What is memory, if not the act of retelling? I come from a nation of lush rivers and beautiful oceans. Almost everything I know of that nation is stories. Ba tells me that in the village, he isn’t taught to swim. As a kid, he is thrown off a bridge in a rushing river by a cousin or an uncle, and expected to figure it out or else. He grows up to be a strong swimmer. Mẹ isn’t taught to swim either: she is a market girl and has never been subjected to this brutish but terribly effective method. She never learns to swim and still, to this day, she’s quite wary of water. In this (and in many things, to both of our chagrin), I take after the latter, more.

Almost everything I know of my history is memory. My people come from a nation of water, and when civil war tears the land apart and the side that they support falls, they have to flee. Across the ocean, on boats, to unknown lands. They leave everything behind but their memories. Sometimes, they leave behind the memories, too. Many perish at sea. Some drown. Some are shot, by the government finding them or by pirates, their blood washing the boat floor. And some, against impossible odds, make it to shore, and find what they are looking for: a new life, a new family, a new chance.

What is memory, if not the act of rebirth? They say that trauma is carried in our veins, coursing through our blood. Past and present. Trauma of our ancestors, and of our childhood. It gets refreshed and renewed with each pump of the heart. I am here. I exist. I survive. Perhaps this fear of water is an inheritance: just as a love for it is. Perhaps this fear and this love, this memory, lives within me for the people who could not.

Whenever I move to a new city, I seek water. A river, an ocean, a lake; whatever I can take. I grow up to dread the beach, and yet, whenever I see water, I am happier. I am even drawn to the visage of water in paintings, rendered in oil, its enemy. Over and over, in different mediums and forms, I build up my collection of water memories, and hope that the good washes out the bad.

What is memory, if not the act of repetition?

Every time I jump into the water, my body flinches, like it remembers drowning. Every time I kick in the water, my foot curls, like it remembers bleeding. Yet within the water, I feel alive. Perhaps I am simply destined to have this love-hate relationship with it. To cherish my trauma. To relive the memory of the past. Over time, the water has shaped me like it shapes all things.

I hope my third memory of the waters of Vietnam will be a more positive one. I hope I, too, will make it to shore and find what I’m looking for – no matter what that is.