Nhà Home

A collective poem (Doan Bui, Thi Bui, Anna Moï, Hoai Huong Aubert-
Nguyen, Vaan Nguyen, Bao Phi, Paul Tran, and Vu Tran)

Nhà is in my lost name. The name I relinquished.
I am the snake, I change my skin.
I put my white skin on, my name vanished.
I dug into the earth, covered my nhà with soil.
It is a dark cave with all things lost.
My mother tongue and lullabies
Bà ngoai’s voice chanting kinh.

My mom asked me what I want and I said
I just want a safe place to raise my child.
My mom scoffed and said, in Vietnamese, no place is safe.
She says it like I am the idiot for believing such a thing,
That I forgot how many times I, she, we were nearly killed.
The stores burned down, the extinguishers still spouting water,
Running in rivulets out the broken glass door and into the parking lot.
Different time, different place.
A few days ago, she told me I wasn’t welcome in her home anymore.
I wondered if she would take down the pictures of me with her
grandchild
At different stages of life, the pictures she put up but forgets to dust.

The nhà was in our red lands, má said, the lands that we lost.
The earth was red as ruby, má said, red as blood.
I don’t have any nhà not anymore, she says.
My only nhà is you, my children with no skin.
I tried to give má the lost nhà. But I could not.
I am the snake, I change my skin.
I searched the nhà in blank pages. Could only find the void.

Home—as a place or as a feeling—has always been elusive to me.
I arrived in the new homeland as a refugee at the age of five,
and of course, growing up there as a displaced immigrant
in a homogeneous environment, diminished and distorted my sense
of home,
Which started more, I must say, with us: the isolated, protective, and
restrictive
ways my parents raised me and my two siblings, the fractured nature
of so many relationships
in my life growing up, often modeled for me by the people who had
the most power
in my immediate and extended family.

Come closer. The Vietnamese word for “house,” at a distance,
not unlike the Pacific separating
my mother from hers, looks
to be the Vietnamese word for “memory.”

Memory is a house where nothing can be
touched, even the mind covered in plastic. Memory contains “me”
in it. As a child, I pronounced
the English word for “oneself” as the Vietnamese word for “mother.”
Let’s go home. Such a simple thing to say.
“Go” + “home.”
Many oldies in Orange County have been heard claiming:

I yearn for a dying spot where the Blue Dragon reigns.
I want to go home and lie my bones in the motherland soil
Under a mound of earth, away from a hilltop—where my body
might slide to the bottom
Away from a stream that might sweep me to the ocean—
Home to some of us, those who have fled on dinghies or larger ships,
Ocean, their last home.

And then the oldies never went home. Forever disorientated.
Not knowing whether home is a city or a country

Or a place of memory.
“There is no music in your writing,” she says. “Where is your skin? “
My words are too plain, she’s right, I am the snake without a skin.
I dream to give her the red lands, red as ruby, red as blood.
But my hands are bare. I have no skin.
The nhà is hidden in my words. Words are black spiders.
I am a nhà van, not a nhà khoa, I broke her dreams.
Spiderwebs heal the wounds they say.
Home is where the spider is.
Remembrance of things past.
Where is my Nhà, where is my skin.

In these 3 letters
n
h
à
echoing in silence,
Dream of a boat, a leaf, a feather,
Sliding on water.
For our home is a floating world
The stream is made of scent and blood like Sông Huong,
Of ink and wine as the Seine.
It leads–who knows where,

But in its depth,
I can see colours which are burning to be seen,
hear voices which are yelling to be heard
and unknown faces—radiant seeds which will grow in sparkling
waves
gushing to the sky.

Again, it can begin there. (How can it not?)
But for me—and perhaps more for me than most people—
it can’t only be that. For me, home can only be sustained from within.
From within and, only then, from without.

From the platonic, professional, and romantic bonds I choose to
make and keep.
From the house I choose to live in and share with others.
From the places I choose to work in and frequent.
From the art and the culture and the ideas and the sounds
and the colors and the weather I surround myself with.

From everything and (most importantly) everyone who gives me
stability
but can also challenge and expand me for the better,
whatever that might mean.

A bird
Still needs to sleep.
Cut through sky,
Razor wire and free,
Where does it hide
From the too wide open?

How does it calm
The beating of its fierce and tiny chest
Unbound
Except sheltered
Unfettered
At least
Sometimes
At peace.

I wonder if someone who grew up an orphan or adoptee,
born into little that was naturally theirs, would say this.
I wonder if they’d think I was asking for too much.

“Home” requires some stable level of familiarity,
knowability, affirmation, hope, and possibility.
Without any of that, even the aspects of a life that feel like home
can only feel that way at a distance, with conditions.
But perhaps I’m asking for too much.

Neighbor,
I gave up this house
Everyone left.
Later I will ask my mom if she
Remembers your name,
But she’ll only say:
I wish I could remember
Everyone,
The wave deleted
Everything
(She only remembers they
Were left with no water to
drink).
A home,
Is where my mom starts all
Over a

More and more, I believe what most affected me
was the absence of community and openness within
and around my own family.

In such an environment, one’s family can still provide love,
protection, intimacy, and familiarity, but again
only at a distance, conditionally and partially.
That might be why the larger world beyond my family life
—like the neighborhood I grew up in, my hometown, my home state,
in some ways America itself—
has never quite given me that enduring sense of home I need.
But again, maybe I ask for too much.

I’ve come to think of “home”
as something that begins but cannot end with family
—that is, anything that we were born into.

I live with my mother in that house called Memory.
We trapped ourselves inside
trying to keep ourselves
safe from the future pounding the front door

like a father whose name I no longer say, hiding
what was left of ourselves
from the present hiding from us in the shadows of shadows.
Was that the purpose for being alive, to go on

for as long as we can? Only now
do I see the “or” in memory and not the Latin for “death.” Perhaps
It’s possible to let distance, like the Pacific, shrink.
If memory were a house, we built it. With these hands.

Tell me we can tear it down to make room
for ourselves, the present and the future: twin buds that bloom
only in mud, pines rising as if swords,

striking the sunless sky, blades made by an ancient fire.