Once a War Ends, Does It Really Ever End Within You?

My grandmother now has dementia and stays inside of her home everyday for safety reasons. My grandfather still had his combat uniform hanging up inside of his home when I was younger. My siblings and I were usually babysat by our paternal grandparents and sat watching television half the time. When my brother would put on a random video containing some sort of game involving violence and guns, my grandfather’s eyes would stay glued to the screen until my father would tell him to turn it off. I think I will always be too afraid to ask what happened to him, and he will always remember. What does it do to you, the violence? A certain loneliness is created out of it, I believe, the shell of you is left in the past but it still hangs next to you.

I think immigration is to live in a city where no one knows you, and you know no one with a feeling of impending doom always surrounding you but to also live in your childhood home where the air inside of your bedroom permeates your mind alongside the memory of cotton sheets where you used to cry. Does it make sense, to feel like you are two places at once? Two bodies simultaneously existing within one? I think my grandmother would understand, even underneath the layers of uncovered memory that she will never remember again. My maternal grandparents also emigrated from Vietnam, but my mother was born eight years after the fall of Saigon. Last year, they left New Orleans to go back to where their hearts really belonged, reuniting with my aunt and her child that I have never met in person but have seen on FaceTime. They left behind their house, their car that sits in the driveway of my home, and everything they ever owned for my family to rifle through. 

Underneath my dresser holds a box of my grandmother’s old things: purses, make-up, designer that is most likely fake, skincare, perfume, every other stereotypical thing you would think a Vietnamese grandmother would own. My paternal grandmother and my maternal one are very different. My maternal grandmother was never angry, always kind, and smelled of cherry blossom. My paternal grandmother smelled of Eagle Brand medicinal oil and yelled more than she talked. Both of my grandfathers were particularly quiet, and my memory of them is blurred, although my paternal grandfather has a form of lung issue where he has to breathe artificial oxygen through tubes now. I think my family tries to understand each other, but they do not understand what it is like to be on the other side of things. Emotional vulnerability is not popular within my family, or really any Vietnamese one. This is what war does. It causes a strange feeling of resentment but sadness. War separates us, but there are two different ones inside of us. I have to remind myself that when I start to think it is the end, it is really just another beginning. To be an immigrant is to be proud. To be an immigrant is to exist within a unique microcosm. To be an immigrant is to persevere. Being an immigrant is an inexplicable, indelible art.