October 1, 2024

“Dory?” my mom asks.

“No, mom. It’s Chloe, like C-H-L-O-E,” I reply.

“Chlorine?” she asks again. She laughs, and I can almost hear her smile over the phone.

I imagine my mom on the other end of the line, her brows furrowed, her index finger delicately tracing each letter onto the table in front of her as she sounds out my partner’s name.

“Oh, forget it,” she says in Vietnamese with a half-hearted laugh. “Is she kind to you?”

My mother’s English is like vines at the bottom of a forest, growing in the shadows where the canopy blocks out sunlight. It climbs steadily, always reaching for the sky where it can be seen. When she speaks in Vietnamese, her words roll off her tongue like a waltz, each syllable shimmering like sequins on a dancer’s dress. Her English, by contrast, is more staccato—short, fragmented beats. When she pronounces words in English, the inflections of her native tongue follow her, the tonal memories of Vietnamese sandwiching her English words.

When I was younger, my mom would bring me yellow sticky notes, each one hastily scribbled with English words in blue ink. She’d point to them, waiting for me to pronounce each syllable. Her lips would press into a thin line as she listened, her head tilting in concentration. Bravery, I think, looks like this—pushing forward even when the current pulls you back.

Some days, I wonder if she feels a quiet shame for the words she’ll never fully say. Can a heart break in a language it can’t completely speak?

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that my mother’s native tongue sounds like a soliloquy of love poems. Each word is traced and woven between generations before me. These are the mountains they’ve climbed for me, just so I can have a place in America, speaking a monotonic language. Every time I speak back to my mother in English, I swallow the guilt of the language I can no longer speak gracefully. It’s clunky and reaching, like re-learning to walk. It feels like a lonely march back to my roots.

Some days, my mom and I sit in silence on the phone together; she’s in the kitchen in our family home in Houston, and I’m typing away at my desk. Some days, we communicate in a silence where love is woven between the static. Here, on our FaceTime call, bridging two hearts separated by two thousand miles, we come to an understanding that we share a third language that speaks in silence. Her pixelated head occasionally pops into the frame, and she smiles, saying, “Oh, you’re still here? Good! I like having you on the phone.”

Halfway across the country from my mom, my partner and I are sitting side by side on a light rail, the grumblings and moanings of the train bouncing off the walls of the car. We talk excitedly about our plans to visit my mom in December. She pulls out her phone and shyly admits that she’s been trying to learn Vietnamese so she can greet my mom in a language she’s familiar with. The familiar green bird of the Duolingo app pops up on her screen, and we both laugh at the words we know we’ll never use in conversation. “This is how you say ‘Australia,’” the app shows. I point to a sign behind my partner, where safety and etiquette instructions for the train are written in Vietnamese. My fingers land on the accent marks of the words as I sound out the inflections. I watch her giggle as she struggles to follow. We stumble through syllables and laugh at our mistakes the rest of the ride home, finding comfort in the spaces that exist between understanding and speech.

When I’ve told my mom that I’ve been meaning to look into Vietnamese language courses, she jokes back that I could just call her more often. We walk parallel roads to understand each other better, each step a quiet effort to bridge the gap between us—where love, more than language, finds its way across.