I am five years old. Somehow I haven't even noticed that my father has been away. My mother packs up us three kids (or is it two now, has my oldest brother grown out of our house and headed to California for freedom and college already?) in our brand-new 1994 (or is it '92?) green Windstar. I'm excited. I don't know where we're going but I can see the fancy old Sofitel as we pull in. We've never been to such a fancy bakery before. Mom tells me to choose one of the shiny pastries behind the glass case. I pick a chocolate eclair; we've had those before from the grocery store. My brother chooses something with uncountably many layers of buttery crust. We don't get to eat our intimidatingly expensive treats though, "they're for your father" my mother says in don't-argue-with-me, no-nonsense Vietnamese.
We hop back on the freeway and take the exit toward the Southdale shopping center. Did you know that it's the oldest indoor mall in America? There's something ironic and maybe even sick about the fact that the largest mall in America, the veritable Mall Of America, is in the very same town as this respectable ode to mass consumerism. I've been to both countless times, and in the end, they're both just big ol' malls with elevators and fountains and cheese samples. Across the street from the mall, I can see Fairview Hospital, where I was born. My mother likes pointing out the hospital every time we drive past, remembering how my father took the boys fishing that day and she had to give birth to me, the baby girl, all by herself. My parents were in a rough patch back then, or maybe it was just rougher than usual. I finally wonder where my father is.
And here is where my memory fails me. I know we didn't drive past the hospital to the mall; instead we stopped at an annex of the hospital and took our pastries in. We must have signed in at a desk. Maybe Mom was blinking very quickly, trying to hold back her tears from her children. Maybe she was snapping at the nurses so she could see her ex-husband as soon as possible. I'm sure that as we entered the quiet room with floral curtains, they looked at each other over our rapidly-growing heads with some silent acknowledgement of their love for each other. I think I remember my father in the bed, wearing a hospital gown. But I'm not sure.
Sixteen years later, I can see her, my memory, perched eagerly on the edge of my coffee table and ready to gab on and on about this scene and others. But she's lying through her teeth. It wasn't until years after 1996 that I learned that my father had been committed to a mental hospital after an angry incident at work, and was deemed too mentally incompetent to work. I knew that now Daddy got to stay home and play with me, and he loved me more than anyone else in the whole world, and that when he and Mom fought it was probably because Mom was just being annoying. Not because Daddy literally could not handle his anger after twelve years in the South Vietnamese Air Force and twenty more as a refugee in a cold and isolating new country. His anger shaped my childhood, it bubbled and brewed around me and sloshed within me. In my veins ran his outrage at his former employer, his rage at his impotence to provide for his family, his hatred of everything holy in this world that let his first wife and son and daughter die in a meaningless war.
She looks me straight in the eye and lies through her teeth. He ate the Sofitel pastries and said they were delicious, and he eventually came home and stayed with me because he loved me so much.
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