Abnormally Normal

As I was driving home this past weekend from Atlantic City, I thought about the story I would write.  What was the next major event after coming to America?  I knew such little details about it, as I was only four years old at the time.  My snapshot memory provided little clues, and I hadn’t even developed the emotional maturity at the time to really understand what I saw. 

My mother circa 1988

Here is the scene as I remember it.  My mother was on the hospital bed, crying.  There was no blood or any visible injury, only tubes coming out of her body and nose.  I remember feeling a little confused.  That was it.  Later on, my mother would explain to me that she was shot that night by my father.  She was sad and lonely because they were fighting on Christmas day. So instead of picking me up from the babysitter’s, she went dancing with her friends.  His jealousy enraged him to go out searching for her.  Fortunately, he was a bad shot and she was only hit in the leg.  She recovered and he went to prison. 

I never saw or heard from him again, save the few hand-drawn pictures he sent from prison.  He was a good artist.  I wish my mother had kept them for me, since those are the few memories I have of him.  Those pictures and the smell of Polo cologne, the one in the green bottle with the gold round top.  I’m told he looks like me, but I wouldn’t know.   

That’s where my knowledge of the story ends, which pushed me to pursue it a bit more.  I started thinking of the questions to ask my mom, and suddenly I found myself realizing certain things about my life.  There was a lot I didn’t know, and I was hoping for my mom to have a moment of clarity to answer my questions. 

After my mom debriefed me about lottery numbers, I asked her for permission to talk about what happened.  It wasn’t something we ever really discussed.  She didn’t like talking about it, and I never had reason to ask.  I explained as best I could that I was writing a blog about overcoming hardships and finding happiness.  Although not quite understanding what I was doing, she agreed to answer my questions.

Here are my discoveries.  My father was a jealous and abusive man.  Ironically, he was also a womanizer.  Shortly after arriving to the US, my father found a job as a commercial artist, and my mother became a masseuse.  Their relationship deteriorated quickly and they fought often.   After he went to prison, my mother couldn’t take care of me alone, and we had no other family here, so she went through the classified section in Bao Thang Mo, a Vietnamese newspaper, to search for a family that would baby sit me.  Only, it wasn’t quite babysitting.  For $400 a month, I would live there full time, and my mother would pick me up once a week on Sundays.  At the age of four, I didn’t realize that this was a unique set up.  I thought it was normal.  It wasn’t until I was in the third grade, when my mother moved me to a different family that I realized it wasn’t quite the norm.  By then I had adjusted to it and was quite happy living with other families.  I was able to go to school and go out and play with kids my own age, and it resembled a real family enough that I actually enjoyed it.  The only hiccup was that we moved a lot, usually because of pricing disagreements.  Apparently, I was quite the malevolent child, often playing pranks on the adults who ran the house.  I don’t blame them for wanting to be paid more, but as a result, I attended four different schools by the fourth grade until my mom finally brought me home to live with her.

My first unrelated family

But why live with other families when plenty of single mothers take care of their kids from their own home, you might be wondering.  I surprisingly never wondered this until this last weekend, when I was thinking about what to write.  And to satisfy my readers, (which most likely is just you who's reading this) I had to find out the answers.

She explained to me that she was greedy for money.  As she unfolded the story of how she worked from 11 am until 2 am almost everyday, the revelation came to me.  My mother worked around the clock not because we were poor, but to support her lifestyle, one that included driving the latest model Honda Prelude and lavish shopping.  I remember going to the car dealership, and when she paid the down payment for her new car in cash, the salesman had a look of disbelief.  It wasn’t organized in a suitcase, with stacks of cash wrapped neatly in rubber bands.  She pulled the money from her purse, and they were mostly twenty dollar bills.  She, like many other immigrants, didn’t trust the bank.  There were things for me as well, like a Nintendo, Legos and birthday parties with lots of presents.  There was a piano she bought for me so I could learn how to play as well as a few lessons.  My mother was not a thrifty person, and to attain her lofty lifestyle she had to give me up to work all those hours. 

I turn six years old.  Two other foster kids behind me.

And there it was, my latest discovery.  The most surprising thing to me about all this was that I wasn’t all that surprised.  All the pieces were there, I just never bothered to put them together and say it.  Yes, my mother chose to pay unrelated people to take care of me, so that she could work really hard and make a lot of money to buy things we didn’t need.  But it all worked out for the best.  Those families had kids around my age and I credit them for giving me a normal childhood.  We learned how to play sports together.  We listened to Bel Biv Devoe and Boyz II Men and watched Jim Carrey and the whole Wayans family on In Living Color.  We hung out at the arcades, collected and traded cards of our favorite athletes and checked Beckett to see what they were worth.  At a neighbor’s house, I got pushed in a pool and learned to swim that same day.  I also got into my first fight (at Sunday school at church) with one of the kids I lived with.  I was a regular kid living in an irregular situation, but I still had a great time growing up. 

One of the foster kids from my first home.

In 1992, in the middle of fourth grade, my mother decided that I was old enough to come live with her.  She didn’t change her work hours.  She just figured I was old enough to take care of myself while she was away.  That's when I learned how to live on my own. 



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