My Other Heart

Prologue

Mimi

Mimi Truang did not yet know that her baby was gone. She sat back and closed her eyes, coffee in hand. It was still some time before they could board the connecting flight to Newark for their journey home to Saigon. Packing up last night had been difficult; Ngan had refused to sleep.

She’d finally succumbed as they’d approached the airport on the bus, closing her eyes and dropping like a heavy sack of rice on Mimi’s lap at eight minutes past six that morning, exactly one hundred and four minutes after they had boarded the bus.

Mimi’s arm had lost all feeling as she held on to her child, trying not to drop her as a wave of fatigue dragged her along.

It had taken a lot of energy to divert her daughter while she was awake.

A one-year-old who had only just learned to walk wanted to explore everything.

The old ladies seated across the aisle began the trip cooing over the cute, chubby baby.

But after an hour, they started to tut at the crying.

When Mimi’s things fell from her bag into the aisle as she tried to find something to distract Ngan, she was met with a curt Ma’am, we need to keep the aisle clear, people might trip, okay?

DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M SAYING? Strangers always seemed to speak slower and louder when they got annoyed with her.

Check-in was equally hard. Ma’am, please watch your child, the man behind the counter had said, examining their passport photographs as Ngan slipped off the ledge of the conveyor belt that weighed her bags.

Mimi tried to distract her, encouraged her to wave the bags goodbye, but the baby wanted to follow.

The man behind the desk had the uncomfortable look young people got around an infant or an old person: embarrassment at the lack of self-consciousness.

It was the thing that parents loved most in their children in infancy and loathed most in their elderly parents.

···

Mimi wrapped her arms around herself; muscle memory had taught her to make herself small and inconspicuous.

The smell of weak American coffee floated up from the Styrofoam cup in her hand.

She would never get used to this. When she first joined her sister, Cam, in Philadelphia two years before, they walked along Arch Street, outside Reading Terminal Market, sipping coffee in the brisk autumn air.

Dirt water , they called the coffee. They guffawed and hooted at their joke.

Two cups of dirt water, please. But when they became too loud, enjoying themselves too much, the sneers and looks would begin.

So their jokes were kept private, spoken within their own four walls.

Soon she’d be back home. Café Sua Da would be waiting.

No more need for hushed voices. She sipped her dirt water and winced.

As if in agreement, her daughter giggled from her “hiding place” beneath her seat, and Mimi felt small sticky fingers squeeze her ankles.

The hot liquid ran down her throat. There was still a day’s traveling left before they would land on Vietnamese soil.

Ngan’s whining interrupted her thoughts, and she shuffled through her handbag and pulled out a cracker.

Mimi leaned down and offered it into the space beneath her seat.

Her daughter’s plump hand took it quickly, and there was silence from her again.

Now only the ambient noise of the airport and the muffled announcements interrupted her every thought.

She patted her pocket to check for their passports and her remaining money and mentally subtracted the dollar fifty she’d spent on the coffee and milk.

The oily smell of fast food lingered in the air.

Next time she would remember to sit farther away from the restaurants.

She looked at the grime and dirt on the floor and thought about Ngan’s hands touching everything then going into her mouth.

Mimi pulled a tissue from her pocket, already soiled, and grabbed at Ngan’s hands to wipe them. But Ngan pulled away quickly.

Mimi could never get used to the air in America: its taste, its smell, the way it felt on her skin.

The cold was in her bones all the time, and the food gave her constipation or the opposite.

America had been a storm in her stomach from the moment she arrived.

She had never found peace. The shouting and the cursing she could tolerate; she rarely understood what was being said anyway.

People said fuck a lot. And she couldn’t understand why the fucking had to involve mothers.

But the food offended her most. Bread like she’d never known.

She missed the perfect crispness of a banh mi and the soft clouds of white dough inside it, the heady fragrance of the mint and coriander and chili in the air—the sweet saltiness of pork and rich paté.

Instead, there was only dirty oil and flaccid bread, noodles that were, in fact, not at all what they claimed to be.

She wanted to take her child and get out of this place where she could not be understood, or considered, but always discarded instead.

Her invisibility was a noose around her neck that tightened every day.

Even now, as the time to leave edged closer, and Mimi’s heart flipped at the thought of putting this fetid land behind her, people would look at her for only a millisecond before dismissal. She didn’t count.

···

Mimi reached down to place her cup on the floor but changed her mind as she remembered that Ngan’s little hands would seek out the hot liquid.

Instead, she got up and put the cup on the table two seats away.

She sat down again and reached between her feet, her arms stretching under her.

She didn’t want to get on her knees, the floors were filthy, but she had accepted when they traveled that Ngan wouldn’t understand this.

She would wipe her down later in the bathroom, and rinse her arms. Americans and their poor hygiene, she thought.

The stench of bleach was everywhere, but there was always an underlayer of filth.

Nobody mopped their floors properly here.

Cam’s landlord used to walk through their apartment with his shoes on, traipsing the dirt from the filthy streets across her clean floors.

Mimi waved her arms side to side, windshield wipers searching for her daughter’s fleshy arm or leg. Mimi’s armpits hurt from the awkward motion, so she got down onto her knees to pull Ngan out from under the seat.

Her child was gone.