Which One of Us Did You Fall in Love With?

I was an avid reader as a child. I especially adored fiction that was above my level, the more the better. I remember devouring Les Misérables (the Vietnamese translation) in the 6th grade, but of course it must’ve been a very abridged version because years later, when I rediscovered this tome in English, I found it laboriously difficult to finish, even though by that time my English had tremendously improved and my Vietnamese had in turn degraded to the point that it was no longer my preferred language.

One of my favorite Vietnamese authors was Bình-nguyên Lộc. His award-winning novel, ĐÒ DỌC, remained my all-time favorite after many readings and re-readings. It told the story of a young man from the city who, after being injured in an auto accident, remained in the Vietnam countryside to convalesce. His idyllic stay turned troublesome when all four girls in the host family fell for him, and the lucky guy found himself in purgatory for his wavering affections.

Of course, as someone who’s been described as “linear” and “black and white,” I had difficulty identifying with the novel’s protagonist and sympathizing with his quandary. I loved the book, but disliked the main character. Somehow the clever plot did manage a mostly convincing happy ending, but even young as I was, I knew that in real life, things could not be massaged that way.

Fast forward 7 years or so.... my family had successively moved and resettled in many different states after a temporary stay in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where we anxiously waited for sponsors upon immigrating to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. My sisters and I (the four girls in our family) were in our teens and early twenties then, and we’d seen enough suitors who did the switcheroo on us, just like I remembered in the novel of my childhood. In fact, this phenomenon happened with such alarming frequency that it became the subject of many sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious, discussions among us.  It almost convinced me to fall in love with the first man who showed interest in me and only me.  But I think my sister Peni had it worst.  Because she looked a lot like me, almost every guy who had a crush on me in college ended up wanting her as their second choice.

Once, a guy wrote Peni to confess his love for my other sister Midol, on graph paper as his stationery of choice. I did not make this up! He was an engineer and, true to his profession, had outlined the qualities he found most fascinating about Midol in bulleted fashion with a dry and thorough analysis. We had no idea whether he was too shy to say these things to Midol directly or hoped that Peni would be an ally in his quest to win her sister's heart. Anyway, after confirming he had zero chance with Midol, he began to pursue Peni as his new romantic interest!

The first time something like this occurred, we girls were of course confused and annoyed. But it’d happened often enough that we had developed a good sense of humor about the situation. Besides, the chap was a good friend of our family (we’re still friends, btw) and an overall sweetheart except for his misplaced sentiments. Unfortunately, this was not always the case. Midol revealed to me many years after the fact that one of my most ardent suitors had tried to molest her while waiting for me to come out of my room. Can you imagine a more perverse scenario?? Of course, at the time my youngest sister was a tiny shrimp who had not the vaguest idea what a pedophile was, only that she’d felt uncomfortable every time this guy insisted that she sat on his lap on our living room sofa. Thank God I never had any feelings for the creep! In fact, I hated him so much that I almost broke my toe once running to hide from him when I heard he was coming to see (stalk) me.

There were times when I wanted to tell these suitors the obvious (which they’d somehow missed) that switching between us girls would actually decrease their chances with every one of us, not the other way around! Love is not a numbers game. If we had any interest in you, you’d ruin your chance entirely. If we didn’t care for you to begin with, we liked you even less seeing you hit on one sister after failing with a different one. It’s a little creepy, if you ask me!

Everyone who knows me at all knows that I don’t watch TV, and regard reality shows as cultural blight. Nevertheless, even I know who the Kardashians were. Most importantly, I don't think they deserve more press. I even begrudge them a passing mention in my humble blog, not that my measly readership would make a difference in their fan base. But the reason I brought up the Kardashians is because just last week, while waiting in the supermarket checkout line, I happened to peruse celebrity rag headlines as was my habit, and there emblazoned on the In Touch Weekly magazine cover was this titillating caption over a photo of Scott Disick and Kim Kardashian:

SCOTT CONFESSES: “I’M IN LOVE WITH KIM”

Granted, In Touch Weekly was probably not the most reliable source of entertainment news out there, and there’s a better than 70% chance that their headlines mostly consisted of half-truths calculatedly worded to be as inciting as possible while circumspect enough not to provoke an instant lawsuit… but the familiarity of Disick's alleged dilemma did capture my interest. I could totally see him (in addition to over half of the unrelated male population in America) in lust with his almost-sister-in-law Kim Kardashian. Supposedly both of them just laughed it off, but I have my suspicions.

I knew a Vietnamese guy engaged to someone that died in an aircraft accident who ended up marrying his intended's younger sister after the requisite period of mourning. Rumor has it that his deceased fiancée was actually eloping with another man who perished with her when their plane went down, but he adamantly refused to believe it, and stuck to his version that she was kidnapped… and so did her family. Anyway, the point of the story was that this guy had no problem falling in love with his almost-sister-in-law. They’ve been married for more than 30 years now. We Vietnamese have a saying for this phenomenon, “Tình chị, duyên em.” I won’t even attempt to translate, as this very bad idea can only sound halfway acceptable in Vietnamese!

This past Christmas Audrey got serenaded by a former classmate who, for a time, was courting my younger daughter, Andrea. We did not imagine this, because everyone in our household had witnessed it firsthand. Nevertheless, this mutual friend seemed to be totally comfortable switching gears whereas Audrey was at a loss for words as she found him on the front steps of our home waiting for his private audience with her. I asked Audrey which song he’d serenaded her with and she confirmed it was “All I Want for Christmas is You!” Needless to say, Audrey was extremely embarrassed to find herself the subject of this romantic attention knowing it was already lavished upon her sister not too long ago. I’m sure Andrea felt relieved... not jealous, to be out of the loop; but it was still awkward! I couldn’t help telling my girls as unseemly as the situation appeared, it had happened to me and my sisters before, and not just once either.

I always thought it was a Vietnamese thing. I now realize it may be a universal thing. Ughh…!

----------------

Vietnamese Wikipedia entry on Bình-nguyên Lộc

http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%ACnh_Nguy%C3%AAn_L%E1%BB%99c

Other links on the author:

http://www.binhnguyenloc.de/pages/TieuSu/BNL_Dap%20Phong%20Van.pdf

http://www.binhnguyenloc.de/pages/BaiViet/baiviet.html

http://www.binhnguyenloc.de/pages/TruyenDai/DoDoc/DoDoc01.html

The O Word

I've just finished Nora Ephron's I Remember Nothing, a collection of the author's musings on various mundane, but otherwise quite relevant, subjects of modern life, and as always, I found her wry and honest reflections very readable and charming.  If you remember, Ephron is the witty and prolific writer who gave us When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood, and Sleepless in Seattle, who also directs (most recently Julie & Julia).  Among the short essays in her book, I liked best My Life as an Heiress, in which Ephron recounted how she almost inherited wealth and, in the process, came close to abandoning her then-unfinished script of When Harry Met Sally thinking she might not have to work again.  I also cherished The D Word, from which the following passages were excerpted:

"The most important thing about me, for quite a long chunk of my life, was that I was divorced. Even after I was no longer divorced but remarried, this was true.  I have now been married to my third husband for more than twenty years.  But when you've had children with someone you're divorced from, divorce defines everything; it's the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.

...

People always say that once it goes away, you forget the pain.  It's a cliché of childbirth:  you forget the pain.  I don't happen to agree.  I remember the pain.  What you really forget is love.

Divorce seems as if it will last forever, and then suddenly, one day, your children grow up, move out, and make lives for themselves, and except for an occasional flare, you have no contact at all with your ex-husband.  The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.

Enough about that.

The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.

And now it's not.

Now the most important thing about me is that I'm old."

The book

The author

----------------                                                                                                            

What I remembered thinking was, "My feelings exactly!"

You know how every time you see celebrities being interviewed about their most recent plastic surgeries, they always seem to give the same stock answer as to why they've decided to have more work done on their facies and bodies, "I'm tired of looking older than I feel."  Well, guess what?  I have the opposite problem.  I feel older than I look.  I always have.  And yes, it IS a problem when you're not quite 50 and have felt older than the moon most of your adult life.  On a good day I feel like I might be a thousand years old.

Hearing those celebrities brag about their natural vitality make me want to come up to them and try to shake the truth out of them and their sound bites, "Is it true that's how you feel or is it just a way to justify even more plastic surgery, and if so do you mind sharing the secret of how to feel younger than you look (not the other way around, thank you very much!)?  It suddenly dawned on me that if I were to go under the knife in order to match my outward appearance to my psychological age, it would be a pioneering sort of surgery – one that would turn the clock forward, not back!  That's certainly a depressing thought.

Anyhow, almost unconsciously my mind's started keeping a log of the things I've noticed about me that confirmed my ever-growing and pesky awareness that age is indeed advancing on me, and they are:

– Not being able to enjoy food or be wildly indiscriminate about it.  In college I used to wolf down 10 candy bars a night while cramming for exams and this unhealthy binging hardly affected me, either physically or psychologically.  But my stomach has evolved to become much more sensitive with age now that a case of bad Chinese food at lunch could make me feel out of sorts the rest of the day.

My standards have gotten lower over the years for everything except food.  I remembered loving junk food and relishing every bite when I was a hungry teen.  It would make my day if I got to enjoy a good piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken on a picnic or a frothy Orange Julius at the mall, but nothing tastes the same anymore now that I've gotten old and I can't will myself to feel suitably impressed even when dining at a solidly consistent, well-reviewed restaurant.  This has nothing to do with snobbishness, but an unfortunate diminished appreciation of life in general.

– I get cold!  I used to be a little famous around my college campus for the stupid fact that I refused to wear a coat in the soggy Seattle winter, but now I find myself turning on the heat in a much milder California climate.  I haven't deteriorated to the point of having to put on a coat every time I go to the supermarket like my mom, but I might be quickly approaching that.

– Dry skin.  Never thought it would happen to me since I was one of those people who's always had to blot the shine off my T-zone in my youth.

– Age spots, resulting in my not being able to let myself out in public without slathering on foundation for cover.

– Sleeplessness.  I miss the days when I was able to slip away to slumber within 5 minutes of lying down in bed, or even on any hard surface like a wooden sofa.

– Waking up during the night, at first in order to go to the bathroom, then because of the numbness in various parts of my body, then it degraded to my waking up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and not being able to coax myself back to sleep!

– Acquired dyslexia.  Words that used to effortlessly roll off my tongue now frequently get stuck somewhere between there and my brain.  When I try to think of the word for "not being able to sleep", which, of course, is "insomnia", "amnesia" invariably comes up, rather fittingly.  Numbers more often than not become transposed by the times they get to my fingers on the keyboard.  I can't remember the cell phone numbers of my own precious children, let alone friends'.

– Depressed intelligence.  The truly sad thing about aging is that you don't feel any wiser, just less capable mentally!

– Reduced excitement for life in general.  Have I already expressed a similar sentiment a few paragraphs ago?  Well, no matter... I need to reiterate it.  For a short while in my twenties, I might've felt excited about the end of my workday because I finally got to spend time doing what I like.  Now I just want the day to end so I could go to bed.

Someone I know once shared with me, when complaining about his young wife's lethargic habits, that her favorite part of the day was 9 o'clock, because then she got to go to sleep.  I would laugh about it, feeling a little superior that I was more energetic than someone a whole decade younger, but I have felt my mind reliably shutting down just around 9 o'clock for the longest while now.

For a seemingly interminably long time, the D word was the most pernicious description of me; now it's the O word.

I'm feeling especially OLD right now after writing this essay!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131161208

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/books/review/Kuczynski-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2010/11/07/nora_ephron_i_remember_nothing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/11/AR2010111107073.html?wprss=rss_print/bookworld