By Andrew Lam

My mother turned 70 recently and mortality weighs heavily on her soul. After the gifts were opened and the cake eaten, she whispered this confidence to her sister: “Who will light incense to the dead when we’re gone?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” my aunt replied. “None of my children will do it, and forget the grandchildren. I guess when we’re gone, the ritual ends.”

My mother lives in America the way she would in Vietnam. Every night in my parents’ home in San Jose, she climbs a chair and piously lights a few joss sticks for the ancestral altar that sits on top of the living room bookcase. Every morning she talks to ghosts. She mumbles solemn prayers to the spirits of our dead ancestors, asks them for guidance and protection.

By contrast, on the shelves below stand my and my older siblings’ college degrees, our sports trophies and, last but not least, the latest installments of my own unending quest for self-reinvention—plaques and obelisk-shaped crystals—my journalism awards.

At that far end of the Asian immigrant trajectory, however, I cannot help but feel a certain twinge of guilt and regret upon hearing my mother’s remark on her birthday.

Once when I was still a rebellious teenager and living at home, my mother asked me to speak more Vietnamese. “No thanks,” I answered in English, “I’m not going to use it much after I move out.”

My mother winced and called me the worst thing she could muster. “You’ve become a cowboy.” Vietnamese appropriated the word “cowboy” from the movies to imply selfishness. A cowboy in Vietnamese estimation is a rebel who, as in the spaghetti westerns, leaves town—the communal life—to ride alone into the sunset.

America, it seemed, had stolen her once obedient son. America seduced him with its individualism, twisted his thinking, bent his tongue and dulled his tropic memories. America gave him freeways and fast food and sitcoms, imbuing him with sappy, happy-ending incitements.

I’m older now, and though I still speak Vietnamese I no longer light incense for the dead. Having fled so far I no longer know what to say or who among the many dead to pray to. For me and my generation the collective, agrarian-based ethos in which ancestor worship is central slowly gives way to the glories of individual ambitions.

Yet my mother is my bridge to the past. And I fear that her generation and their memories of the Old World will fade away like the incense smoke they light nightly. I fear that when she’s gone she’ll leave me stranded in America, becoming more American than I expected, a lonely cowboy cursed with amnesia.

June 2006 © Andrew Lam
alam@newamericamedia.org