She Is a Haunting

by Trang Thanh Tran

I am a tourist in the country where my parents were born. Even my clothes have been here before me. All made in Vietnam by Vietnamese hands, then sent overseas where a Vietnamese American girl (that’s me) picks it off the rack and one day brings it to a place she can’t call home but the clothes can,

The air cools against my face, smelling sharply of pine and flowers rather than Saigon’s smoke-tinged lungs. Green and gray, soft hints of yellow, and a pink sunrise unfurl to my right.

The use of scent to place you there

Ba spent years building the perfect houses that aren’t ours, all time lost in a black hole where a thirteen-year-old girl had to become a father for her siblings.

like braided fingers urging us back to the earth.

luring

Crown molding weighs the walls with such fancy, sharp edges that I expect Michelangelo’s angels to be among them.

It’s made starker by walls as pale as soup bones.

Not just "white"

Then, remembering she didn’t know any English, I ramble through a poor Viet version.

Ancestors understand

My little sister’s sweet, until she’s not.

We know how that is

I feel inadequate in ways I can’t put in words, confused in others,

A common feeling at that age

She probably doesn’t even remember that time we came home to Lily building castles out of his empty beer cans while tiny Bren sat beside her.

Oldest kids always remembers

I know this is a dream because I am not afraid of my father.

You don’t want to do this, Mom said after, exhausted, when all I had wanted was to be like her. Soft. Likable.

The potted hydrangeas seem to suck up all the sunlight in this house, leaving these rooms dim.

This woman has her PhD in colonization, and I’m supposed to mindlessly defer to her?

“Just because you feel lucky to be alive and fed doesn’t mean you can’t be angry.”

The woman has her PhD in colonization, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy she knows more than me

I’ve been going about it wrong; I don’t need to know what Marion wants. Racists don’t need reasons to be racist.