Chapter Three
Chapter Three
Mimi
There was little that Mimi could remember clearly in the time after she lost Ngan: the days morphed into weeks, months even.
First, she was swept into a pitch-black hole of terror, and then she was thrust into the depths of ice-cold water, a ghoulish riptide taking her further and further away from her Ngan.
There were no tears, instead she felt a choking in her whole body, a persistent ache that held back the tears that would fill the ocean between her Vietnam and America.
She was flooded with images of Ngan: a newborn, her paw-like hand clutching the fabric of Mimi’s T-shirt.
Sometimes Mimi had wanted to shake it away.
But she loved her, how she loved her. Sure, during that journey to the airport, Mimi had lost her patience when Ngan tried to wander out into the aisle of the bus.
But Ngan knew her mother loved her. A child knows how much a mother loves them.
Even in that moment just before she was gone, Mimi told Ngan how much she loved her. “Good girl, smart girl,” Mimi had said as she smiled and gently tried to reach below. And then she had searched beneath her seat, and the cavernous emptiness of that space swallowed her up.
“Ngan!” she had shouted.
Mimi felt herself being sucked into a well. She kept shouting into the crowd, into the space between the ceiling and the heads of people walking past her. She screamed at the blank faces that stared at her as they pushed their luggage slowly in front of her.
But Ngan did not come.
The things a person is self-conscious about disappear when desperation takes over.
The rolls on your stomach you were so worried about against the waistline of your trousers, an ill-fitting shirt, the bags under your eyes.
When the anguish comes, you just don’t care.
You don’t care about the sound of your voice that’s decibels above everything, and the people who stare wide-eyed at you like you are a wild animal.
You don’t care about the guttural savage cry that emerges from the depths of your breaking heart as you try to grasp for something that is gone, that has disappeared.
“Ma’am, you need to control yourself.” A man, who looked like a pink pig with sprouting orange hair, mouthed slowly.
A sound came from Mimi, from deep inside the well of her being.
She didn’t recognize it as her own. The realization that she couldn’t find the words, that the language she had a shaky grasp of got her nowhere.
She couldn’t communicate her despair to anyone—it only pierced her insides and brought forth the animal from her depths.
“Ma’am,” he continued, but his silhouette blurred around the edges.
She couldn’t make out the things in front of her.
Someone was holding her arms behind her, thick sweaty hands squeezing her until she felt her arms might snap.
Mimi’s mind raced through thick matter, she couldn’t see clearly nor could any word in any language other than her own form on her lips.
She was pushed into a room with harsh fluorescent lighting; she needed to squint to focus.
The strength left her body, and she felt herself become limp.
She whimpered and felt tears and mucus running down her face.
Her shirt had opened, her faded bra exposed for everyone to see, but her arms were pinned behind her, and she was helpless.
The conversations that took place around her sounded muffled.
She couldn’t catch the words, though she tried so hard to concentrate.
“Documentation.” “Boarding.” “Police.” That was all she heard.
Nobody came for Mimi that day. Nobody helped.
Too much time was passing. She wanted them to search the terminal sooner, every plane earlier, every parked vehicle and every suitcase should have been searched.
But nobody came in time. She saw no search party.
And nobody was brought to the room with the blinding lights to speak to Mimi in her native tongue.
Instead, she sat and waited. As the minutes passed and she could feel Ngan getting further away, Mimi’s whimpers turned into wails again. It was all too late.
When her sobbing finally became too loud, she felt a sting against her arm, the painful piercing of a needle through her flesh, and soon her eyes drooped. She fought it, fought with everything left inside of her. Then the world went black.
After Mimi was sent home to Vietnam, after she woke up on a plane with her arms tied to the chair, after she sat in transit beside security guards in countries she didn’t know, who would not look at her.
She begged the officials in Tan Son Nhat to let her board another plane, but she was treated like a criminal.
Finally she returned to Cam, who’d gone back to Saigon six months before her, and she laid in the bed her sister had made for her on the floor.
In her fits of sleeplessness and swirling grief, she heard her sister talking to her husband through the thin walls of the next room.
“What if she’s wanted by the authorities?”
“What are you talking about? If anything they are the ones who need to be held accountable. A child is missing and they did nothing.” Cam’s voice was rising.
“You are naive if you think that will ever happen. We have nothing.”
···
We have nothing . Mimi knew it was true, there was nothing she could do, but she would not accept it. Every waking moment held the deep fog of her loss, and when the air cleared briefly, the darkness returned, like a night that would never end.
Mimi would never get over that day. And it wasn’t because she was sedated and found herself flying over the Pacific back to Saigon without her child.
No, she would never get over that day because she had been powerless, which forever altered how she saw herself.
And because she had, ever since, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the pink smiling pig man with sprouting orange hair who told her to control herself as she wept for her baby and begged for help.
She lay in the darkened corner of Cam and Duong’s rooms in District 9 of Saigon for days.
She woke up each morning with her head throbbing, her thoughts slowed by desperation, frightened to open her eyes and face reality.
Her Ngan was gone. Sometimes her sister would draw open the curtains and Mimi would squint her eyes shut: too bright .
When Cam would spoon food into her mouth, she felt the suffocating urge to cry.
She would lie back down, replaying the moments in the airport, every day an emphasis on a different detail, how the men in uniform spoke to her, how the empty space beneath her seat had felt as she waved her arms around, how the fast-food shop in front of her smelled.
Everything had closed in on her. She was drowning, lost in this savage fog of pain. Drawn between her and what had happened was a sliver, a thin red line of what she should feel and do. But she could not move. Her heart had been crushed inside of her chest.