A rumble of thunder awakens me in the middle of the night. Because it is not so loud and not accompanied by lightning, it must be coming from the faraway Đầu Mâu Mountain or from the sea signaling a storm is brewing. Suddenly a saying (I do not remember when and where I first heard it, but it was very popular when I lived here) comes to mind: “Chớp bể mưa nguồn” ‘Lightning at the sea means torrential rain in the mountain.’ The little phrase, packed with endearing connotations of a past long gone, releases a spawn of familiar images and sounds, sending a sudden spasm of melancholy through my body. I came across this quote of folk weather forecast in my childhood reading about rains and floods in the north in the fiction of Tự Lực Văn Đoàn writers. In my unconscious mind words become sounds and evoke memories. The sounds I hear in the present are the same sounds I heard in my childhood reading and in the past, they render my nostalgia acute and immense. I had heard this thunder before both at night in my sleep and during the day when I lived in the country with my father. Its frequent reverberation would fill me with fear and anxiety as I looked at the gray sky and knew that heavy rains and sometimes floods would occur afterward. (My father said his older brother had drowned in a major flood a century earlier and he never got it over.) But there were times when coddling in my warm bed at night I found the distant rumbling pleasurable because I knew my father was beside me and he would protect me from danger. After a while the rumble became a magic sound. I have carried it within me as a metaphor for my father, my childhood, and my country since I went into exile.
Tonight I relive my short happy childhood in Quảng Bình when hearing that magic sound again after half a century of being uprooted from my father’s land. As I drift into sleep, the painful spasm vanishes and I become a happy child I was in the distant past. In my half-awake state when consciousness is not totally suspended but not strong enough to drag me back to the present, the magic sound releases its formidable power: it draws me to the dreamland of my childhood, frees me from the sorrow and burden of old age. Early in the morning I am awakened again by other magic sounds of years past—the gentle patting of raindrops on the windowpanes. In the absolute stillness and serenity of the wee hours in the country the regular, clear, rhythmical taps accompanied with the soft cry of insects outside reverberate in the depths of my soul like the notes of a folksong. I lie still, body and mind afloat the stream of sounds feeling like returning to a period so distant in time but so near, so cozy, so delightful.
In the States when I got lonely and homesick, I occasionally heard sounds connected with my past but I would not characterize them as magic. They stirred more sorrow and regret than joy and happiness because I, the subject, was not rooted in the native land and because the brief felicitous state I was in was not nurtured and sustained by the American soil. The echoes of the past triggered my memories of it, making me remember it more intensely, but at the same time they caused me sorrow. Here is what I put in my journal about my impressions of a shower in the Texas Hill Country:
It [the shower]comes crashing down from the sky. Its cascade catches me off guard, plunging me into a stream of familiar sensations of exhilaration and joy I have not experienced for a very long time, perhaps since my arrival in the States. The sounds of the downpour transform the place where I have lived for almost thirty years and yet still feel a stranger into instant home. Home! This is exactly how it rained in Saigon thirty years ago: It came all of a sudden, without warning, it drowned out the city in its cascading noise, then it stopped as quickly as it came, without warning. Unlike Huế where it would drizzle for days on end, in Saigon a downpour would last no more than ten minutes, just long enough to cool you down a bit on a hot summer day, but not too long to make you feel depressed. This is exactly how I feel today about the rain thirty years later also on a summer day in Texas. It arouses in me the pleasure of experiencing something dear and familiar connected with home. It brings out at the same time an unrelenting longing for something unattainable, a profound sadness upon realizing that this precious thing that I catch a glimpse of today will not stay. The rain will end and with its passing my sorrow of exile will return, perhaps it will get more intense. Memory plays an important role in recreating the past, but cannot sustain it long. The search for Paradise is not simply a mechanical-like remembering process. Because it is an extremely exhaustive endeavor, it should be conducted in the exile’s native land where his past resides and will be found, and where he can get replenished and strengthened when he runs out of energy.
Tonight I relive my short happy childhood in Quảng Bình when hearing that magic sound again after half a century of being uprooted from my father’s land. As I drift into sleep, the painful spasm vanishes and I become a happy child I was in the distant past. In my half-awake state when consciousness is not totally suspended but not strong enough to drag me back to the present, the magic sound releases its formidable power: it draws me to the dreamland of my childhood, frees me from the sorrow and burden of old age. Early in the morning I am awakened again by other magic sounds of years past—the gentle patting of raindrops on the windowpanes. In the absolute stillness and serenity of the wee hours in the country the regular, clear, rhythmical taps accompanied with the soft cry of insects outside reverberate in the depths of my soul like the notes of a folksong. I lie still, body and mind afloat the stream of sounds feeling like returning to a period so distant in time but so near, so cozy, so delightful.
In the States when I got lonely and homesick, I occasionally heard sounds connected with my past but I would not characterize them as magic. They stirred more sorrow and regret than joy and happiness because I, the subject, was not rooted in the native land and because the brief felicitous state I was in was not nurtured and sustained by the American soil. The echoes of the past triggered my memories of it, making me remember it more intensely, but at the same time they caused me sorrow. Here is what I put in my journal about my impressions of a shower in the Texas Hill Country:
It [the shower]comes crashing down from the sky. Its cascade catches me off guard, plunging me into a stream of familiar sensations of exhilaration and joy I have not experienced for a very long time, perhaps since my arrival in the States. The sounds of the downpour transform the place where I have lived for almost thirty years and yet still feel a stranger into instant home. Home! This is exactly how it rained in Saigon thirty years ago: It came all of a sudden, without warning, it drowned out the city in its cascading noise, then it stopped as quickly as it came, without warning. Unlike Huế where it would drizzle for days on end, in Saigon a downpour would last no more than ten minutes, just long enough to cool you down a bit on a hot summer day, but not too long to make you feel depressed. This is exactly how I feel today about the rain thirty years later also on a summer day in Texas. It arouses in me the pleasure of experiencing something dear and familiar connected with home. It brings out at the same time an unrelenting longing for something unattainable, a profound sadness upon realizing that this precious thing that I catch a glimpse of today will not stay. The rain will end and with its passing my sorrow of exile will return, perhaps it will get more intense. Memory plays an important role in recreating the past, but cannot sustain it long. The search for Paradise is not simply a mechanical-like remembering process. Because it is an extremely exhaustive endeavor, it should be conducted in the exile’s native land where his past resides and will be found, and where he can get replenished and strengthened when he runs out of energy.
