Who you gonna call? Mr. Knife.

Vietnamese are superstitious people, especially about the hereafter, and although I think superstition (like religion) derives from lack of awareness, I’ll admit I once believed in some of it. My mom used to tell me that if I left my hair down outside at night, ghosts would hide in it and follow me into my house. I don’t know if she was just trying scare me – like the story about scraping and eating food from sidewalk cracks in the afterlife if I threw any away now – but until middle school it pushed me so far as to hold up my hair by hand when I didn’t have a hair-tie.

I hadn’t thought about those stories much until recently, when I visited my grandmothers in Hue. One afternoon, while some men were preparing a cung, one of my grandmothers yelled across the yard that they better not stand too close to the trees. I’d forgotten that ghosts are plentiful in trees – the greener the tree, the more abundant the ghosts. To humor her, one of the men assured my grandmother that they were safe in the daytime.

Though amusing, the warning didn’t really surprise me. What did surprise me the next day was when my other grandmother invited me to spend the night with her. I wasn’t planning to take her up on the offer, but was even more deterred when I noticed the knife on her bed. She apparently slept with it as protection from ghosts.

Homecoming

Like most people, my nostalgia constantly pushes me to return to old haunts, I guess out of hope that part of the past can be frozen in amber, that if the places still exist, then the memories live. Though I left Hue too young to remember anything about it, returning there last week still felt like stepping into the past. For three days, I lived with my mother's brother and his family in the village where I was born, where my mother was born, and where her mother was born. The village, nestled in the countryside in central Vietnam, is a five-minute walk away from the beach, where the kids used to sleep under the stars when the nights were too hot at home.

The relatives I met knew almost as little about me as I knew of them, but they remembered me as the baby carried out of there two decades ago. “She was just months old!” they would explain to each other, calculating when I must have been born and when my family must have left. They understood that I wouldn’t remember names or faces, and excused my poor Vietnamese.

Seeing their faces, though, was enough. In them I saw time preserved, I saw lives that carried on as if nothing had changed since that fateful day. I saw what my life would have been if in fact things hadn’t changed. My brother would occasionally tell me, “You know, you were almost left behind. You’re lucky our uncle was there to carry you to the boat.” I don’t actually think my mother would have left me in Vietnam, but it’s true that others weren’t so lucky. Her sister came the same way we did a couple years later, trying several times to get to America through Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea, only to be sent back. They closed the door; that was how she described it to me when I met her.

The uncle I stayed with has a son who also nearly emigrated from Vietnam. He would have left with my family, but his mother was afraid he’d fight too much with my brother. He and I sat by a window as he reminisced about the days of wrestling with my brother right in that sandy yard in front of us, of walking together to the now closed-down school a few blocks away, of arguing over the goodies they would occasionally sneak from my mother.

Even from his limited anecdotes I could start to imagine that forgotten life. And from the stories of my grandmothers, I could start to appreciate how complicated my family tree really is (for one thing, The Story of Pao comes to mind). The context made it easy to ask for and tell such histories, of course, but the sad truth is that I could have learned all of it and more at home in California. From the scores of young Viet Kieu I’ve known or interviewed, I know I’m not atypical for having seldom thought to ask my parents about this world and for having parents who seldom thought it comfortable or necessary to tell me on their own. But if this summer will change anything, it’s that.

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.