To grandma's house

To make my mom happy, I had simply planned to visit my grandma in nearby Dong Nai Province as another checklist item, so I didn’t know what to think when my aunt (who lives with my grandma) told us to arrive by 8 a.m., in time to go to the cemetery. Long past the stage of surprises, I wasn’t jarred by the request, just curious. Things are seldom what I’d expect.

After an hour-long ride, my two cousins and I reached Dong Nai early and walked through a narrow alley of puddles and cracked pavement to get to the house. As we approached, the street widened and the buildings shortened, letting in the brilliant, peach-colored daylight. Before I knew it, my cousin was walking through an open door as if he’d done it every day of his life. I didn’t follow him far because my grandma was sitting on the ceramic-tiled floor next to the entrance. I joined her, as instructed.

Although it took some time to explain which one of us – me or my cousin – was her granddaughter, this actually wasn’t my first time seeing her. I’d almost forgotten that my grandma had visited us in America several years ago. Then again, maybe I had forgotten because all I ever remembered was how lonely she’d been and how much she looked forward to returning to Vietnam. Seeing her face now seemed right, not in the way that you recognize a face from your past, but in the way that a piece fits a jigsaw puzzle you didn’t realize existed.

She’s ninety-two, I learned at some point. Then, as if she were discussing a noodle recipe, my grandma started telling me about her funeral arrangements.

It wasn’t until 9 a.m. that fourteen of us – cousins, aunts, and uncles I’d never heard of, plus my two cousins and I – piled into a rented van with fruit, rice, chicken, and flowers. The ride to the cemetery lasted almost as long as the one to Dong Nai, but with a better view. Along the countryside, leafy plants formed their own roof-like layer a foot above the ground, and beyond them lay forests, some natural, some, upon closer inspection, comprised of neatly planted rows of shadowy deciduous. Something like a mix between a bus stop and a gazebo, structures of wooden posts and thatched roofs dotted the highway and enclosed several hammocks. I couldn’t imagine how people could live there, but then why else would there be hammocks? My camera batteries had died of course.

Concealed behind a small rambutan grove, the cemetery could only be reached by a muddy path barely wide enough for our van. Among the things you don’t think about until they happen: I’d never really visited a cemetery before. But based on those I passed by or saw in films, it wasn’t hard to notice the differences. Here the graves were packed tightly together in geometric rows, with just enough room for pedestrians. While most graves I’d seen in America were hidden below ground except for their headstones (therefore creating the illusion of space), these tombs included visible, coffin-like boxes I would expect to find in a sepulcher. Standing next to one of them, I thought with dread, could there be nothing but the edge of the small concrete block separating me from a corpse? The anxiety later dissipated when I looked through an opening on top of one of the “boxes” only to find it empty but for dirt. The bodies, then, must have been six feet under.

Except for that lapse, the trip was so absurdly detached as to be worthy of Meursault. My aunts prepared for the ceremony, arranging the food and incense on top of my grandpa’s “box,” while the men pulled weeds from another tomb that had no covering. Weeds and dead grass were commonplace. The grave turned out to be that of an uncle who died fighting for the South. I hadn’t known about him, not because I believed I had no uncles, but because my parents told me little about my relatives. Out of sight, out of mind.

The ceremony, I realized, was just like any cung I’ve had at home. Walk into almost any Vietnamese house in America, and you’ll find a ban tho, a sort of bureau on which families place photos, flowers, and incense to remember the dead. During a cung, families make food and sometimes burn paper clothes and (valueless) money. Just as at home, where the cung is performed out of respect, not mourning, our trip to the cemetery wasn’t meant to be morbid. So while the adults went through the motions, I joined the kids, who had run off to pick rambutan.