Michelle Nhung Le

Posted on: 20/3/2022

It was all dark around, silent and still. The air was calm and only the electric fan busied itself steadying its wings’ motion, with a humming sound that bounced among the dimly lit walls. Fortunately I came and graced the fan’s solitary business with my lively society: my bags rubbing against one another, my heavy tramp that tinged my footfall with an aspect of laggardness, zip teeth snapping as they clenched in or broke out of the line, and my lungs as they drew in the air upon pulses that counted toward sleep. Soon everything was settled and silent again; I didn’t sleep through but thought it fit to meditate (a.k.a eschewing my unfinished homework) under the tranquil shadow. Meanwhile, my aunt and uncle were still lying sound in their slumber in another room, troubled though they would be with the daily litany of babysitting and housekeeping once they were removed from these salving early hours.

Mom had always made weekly visits to my aunt a tradition she wanted me to follow, even when she herself wasn’t the most passionate adherent of this unspoken rule. She fancied the idea of compensating me for the family atmosphere she and my dad couldn’t provide due to their busy work, and the most viable option was regularly sending me over to my aunt’s place whose extended family is thanked for its busting energy. And I mean “busting” quite literally, as the home was always filled with ear-splitting cries of the babies, muttered complaints, frustrated drawls and unceasing calls for help.

“You should help with the chores here” - Auntie would always remind me of her expectation for my presence at Auntie’s place.

I always couldn’t pinpoint where the stringency, the slight tinge of condescendence I sometimes found coloring Auntie’s voice, when she arches her brows at me, originated from. I reckoned, from a very young age, that Aunt directed quite an irrational, incessant strictness, with nothing to embellish, to me and me only. Her nitpicky glances, her command-like enunciating tone miraculously vanished the second her sons came approaching: Aunt’s voice was two drastical pitches higher, an impossible smile materialized at her drooping mouth frown. She would be the first one to police my mistakes, be it dropping a cup or forgetting a grocery item. The displeasure deepening the trenches around her eyes stung my tender conscience, unstoppable, until shame burned into the reddened skin of my ears, cheeks, and nape. Oftentimes when I was little, I teared up at the mere thought of Aunt’s berating. Fortunately (or not), I got desensitized further down the road, yet the perplexing reason why such treatment befell me was never left dormant.

Mom often said I greatly resembled Aunt, perhaps the most in the family, which made Aunt’s distaste toward me increasingly conflicting. What kind of bond would Mom want to be fostered between Auntie and her only niece, at whom Auntie’s piercing stares are thrown, out of what I deemed impossible to be camaraderie?

The dawn broke and the morning came. Light filtered through the dilating spheres of gleaming dew and toiled out its passage among the skylight’s several translucent glass panes before spreading out like waves; on whose welling crests rode my high morning spirit. Soon enough, however, the morning revolted me: the oppressive morning life had crowded vermin upon the ruin of last night’s dying happiness. A morning, I’d imagine, like any other that plague Aunt’s life with monotony.

Auntie and Uncle issued from their receding hermitage, the former hurrying towards the kitchen then out, scurrying off to the wet market like a blind mole restlessly striving for a living. The latter struggled to poise his gait while steering the mop upon the floor, his tenuous legs aching at every swiveling of the joints and his pale face touched with age and sickness. Baby-A’s shrilling cry startled uncle out of his regular occupation, just to enter into another of a noisier nature. He hastened over the task of calming the baby, humming a clumsy, supposedly soothing “Sh, sh” while awaiting the better-knowing aunt, whose arrival at home was just in time for her to attend to baby-B’s low, fitful whimpers. Sometimes on her errands in vassalage to the tyrannical babies, auntie blurted out some half-muffled expletives. She couldn’t have helped it, considering she was thinking about these toilsome hours of unpaid yet unflagging dedication, and about her past mistakes: the biggest being her marrying the man she now calls husband.

“Devotion”, she would say, whenever asked by Mom why she never bailed out on her marriage. “And for the boys. I’m a Grandma now, who would take care of my grandchildren if not me?”

I dare think it was a euphemism Auntie chose for “responsibility”, a burden so heavy it forever shackled Auntie to the role of a housewife, before squashing her flat with motherhood, caregiver’s duties, and thousands of nameless chores maintaining a family.

My elder cousins, aunt’s two sons, and their wives came downstairs to look at their children before heading for work. Auntie greeted them fondly despite her weariness and fret:
“Khue, there are bread and eggs in the kitchen if you’re up for breakfast”;
“Hung, don’t forget your umbrella today. They said it’s going to rain”
As they departed in mute indifference and ingratitude, her eyes lingered at their trailing shadows. She spared her sons no love and no praise. She often spoke proudly of them when she saw it proper to educate my tender mind. As role models that best embody the worldly wisdom of her strictures and catechisms, the two sons were compared to the “inferior” me, and auntie thought her sons shall lead the way, while I should retract from my erroneous path and follow theirs.

But then they were her loyal expectants and more than willing contradictors: barnacles wilfully cleaving to and dragging down the tattered ship that is their mother, yet complaining her wasting frame is not supportive enough.

All that, and Auntie loved them still. They departed; she returned to her chores, occasionally roused to some bitter invocations and vain imputations, as they were, that ultimately translated into sad self-condolences. With happy memories of the woeful past constantly invading her mind, she would, at ill-concealed pleasure, recount the things she used to have as a young girl. Had she done what she should have, her life would have altered: high-breeding and properly educated, a guaranteed entrance to a prestigious all-girls school, and an opportunity to study abroad. Mom told me my enterprising aunt had fared exceedingly well in school and had everything ready for a promising academic career. A premature marriage took her partway, to grandma’s objection. When grandma died, and grandpa lost his establishments to the authoritarians, aunt’s dreams were lost behind the skylight’s blurry glass panes. Now that aunt sometimes revels in the reminiscence over the old days, they were all long gone.

I wondered what Aunt saw when she looked at me. Did she see the niece who frantically sought for a parsimonious bite of her approval for ten odd years? Did she see a teenage girl who tried relentlessly, to no avail, to understand her aunt’s hidden resentment? Or was our resemblance in appearance so huge it transcended generational individuality, and she saw the girl, once herself, doomed to fall into the trap of motherhood society set out, impossible to be renounced and forever holding her at its mercy?

Perhaps watching her niece growing up provided Aunt a chance to grieve a life she never had.
Perhaps the dictating, governess-like manner reserved for me was her attempt to compensate, to salvage the remnants of a younger Aunt who didn’t know better.
Perhaps she, who committed follies, couldn’t bear to let “a miniature version of herself” loose, just to suffer from the same mistakes. Stripped of choices, dreams, and fulfillment. Yielded to the rigged game of societal norms that rendered her obsolete.

It did rain today. I wondered what Aunt saw when she looked up at the brightening skylight’s glass panes that sparkled like a kaleidoscope after the drizzle. But she was too occupied with retrieving the hanging laundry for the vibrant colors to even land in her eyesight. “Oh” - she uttered at the sudden wail that emerged, panicked as if it was blaring sirens she heard:
“Baby-A woke up. Can you take down the rest of the clothes for auntie?”
I nodded. The creaking floorboard followed aunt’s footsteps back in, accompanied by her lullaby rhymes that mimicked the rise and fall of a lake surface hit by the rain.

Gone as they were – days of a woman’s bloom and hopes. A myriad of plans harbored only to end up crossed out, crumpled, and shriveled into themselves like withered leaves. A small woman whose fate was sealed dead, whose life was contained in the smothering glasshouse of a family. Aunt’s freedom was lost to sacrifices for the love of others; all, so bittersweet, arrested me in a stately reflection of life.

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