CONG HUYEN TON NU NHA TRANG
ECHO OF SNOW ©
The sharp tiny beep-beep sounds tore me away from my dreams. I turned off the alarm. Closing my eyes again, I pulled the comforter over my head to shield them from the faint morning light. A long moment passed before it dawned upon me that I actually had a good reason to get up early on this icy cold morning. This was a winter of deep snows in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
Jumping out of bed and putting a heavy shawl around my shoulders, I went to the glass window that looked down to the back side of the hi-rise building where I lived. The cars parked along the back lane were blanketed with at least six inches of fluffy snow. Across the lane, the snow spread like thick layers of gauze over the newly dug square hole from which was to rise the new chapel of St. John's United Church. Further on, street lights cast a warm glow on pure white sidewalks, lawns, trees and shrubs, making the falling flakes glitter. It had been snowing steadily and the forecast last night had promised more of the same. I had wanted to be one of the early risers to watch the fresh layers undisturbed by people and traffic.
Dawn broke by the time I had finished the last sip of coffee. Traffic began to be heard, as were human voices. Sitting on a cushion with my back against a wall and my legs stretching out on the wooden floor, I looked through the balcony to the streets below. The light of day disclosed more snow-white trees and shrubs, roofs of tall and not so tall buildings. Perching on top of these common features, snow added to their charm, and where there was none, masked their crudity and banality. Even as I watched, tiny flakes were descending faster and faster, making the atmosphere almost dreamlike. It was beautiful. Yet, there seemed to be something unsettling about this snow-draped scenery I was contemplating. This could very well be because within my view the scarcity of trees and plants, the monotonous shapes of houses and the angularity of hi-rise buildings could not offer multiple and gentle formations to the snow. Or, it was possible that the thrill of seeing snow had decreased in adverse relation to my familiarity with it. Then, it could be a bit of both that was depriving me of the sweet emotional response to snow which I had once experienced and recorded.
I looked through a collection of old magazines and found what I searched for: a letter to my mother which I had written from Tokyo in 1963, almost two months after I had left Viet Nam. This letter had so touched my mother she suggested that it be published in Pho Thong, a popular magazine where many of my poems had appeared. I sat down and re-read the letter of eighteen years earlier. The distance in time allowed me to be more acutely aware than ever of the place my mother had in my heart. Even as I silently read the words addressed to her, I felt a tightness in my throat, and tears blurred my vision. The letter was in a flowery style, following the melodious rhythms found in a poem in prose. It had lived its own time. Nonetheless, some parts of the letter interested me in retrospect.
How can I express my feelings when seeing snow for the first time in my life, dear mother?
If you were at my side now, I am sure you would have sensed how I felt without my explaining it to you. During the years living with you, did I not always share your feelings and sentiments? But this afternoon, in a different part of the world, I am feeling very lonely in the crispy coldness, in the simple and unique color of heaven and earth. Mother, can you, in a tropical area of warm sunlight, appreciate fully my state of mind at this moment?
Snow flakes seem to be urging one another to fly softly in the air, faster and faster, more and more densely, until everything in nature is glitteringly dreamy. Trees and plants and shrubs are displaying soft white flowers of all shapes and forms, and houses in the distance appear to be hidden behind clouds. I am delighted with an unfamiliar sensation and suddenly I want to cry. Back home, my friends used to tease me for being easily moved to tears by beautiful things. However, I know I am now on the verge of tears not simply because nature is so sublime. Something else is being evoked by snow. The falling of snow does not have the melodious dripping sound of rain which kindles melancholy sentiments in one's heart. Rather, from its muteness comes a feeling of resignation and tolerance, in its quietness I am hearing a vague echo from the world of affection I have left behind. All these attributes of snow touch my heart, for I realize with a start that they represent well the noble character of yourself and your love.
I could see my desperate attempt to communicate with my mother, something I had done frequently in the years living with her. Had I actually hoped that my mother could, by her power of imagination, fully comprehend this experience of mine that she had never had? She could not have felt the freshness and heard the resigned silence of snow just by looking at the presentation of it in some movies. Neither could she have sensed my very real feeling that I heard “a vague echo from the world of affection” I had left behind. Perhaps I had not seen it then, but Tokyo's snow was falling like a curtain that marks the end of an act in a play. Whatever happens in the following act is related to what has gone on before the curtain comes down, without the characters' overview of it all. Only the audience can sit back, watch and digest the development. Time had made me an audience.
Seen from the distance of eighteen years, the inadequacy I had felt in communicating my experience of snow to my mother had marked my departure from the familiar, where some-thousand-years-old answers proved satisfactory most of the time, to deal with an outside world less gentle and more chaotic, in order to find a separate little corner of my own. And I had walked alone without the privilege of instantly turning to my mother's own experiences for guidance, armed only with the solid dreams I had built, values and attitudes I had selected and absorbed for twenty-one years at home. Like a small stream rushing to the deep sea, carrying along with it fragments of roots and duckweed that were saturated with the fresh scent of the mountains.
I had thus crossed the immense ocean in pursuit of my dreams. After two and a half years in Japan, more than seven years in America, two years in Thailand, and four years in Malaysia, at the beginning of 1979 I had come to Canada which I had hoped to be my last stop. At intervals there had been visits to my homeland, when I had felt disturbingly torn between an acute consciousness that my roots were there intertwined in the solid earth of central Viet Nam, and an equally strong desire for a larger horizon where there were dreams as yet to complete, experiences as yet to accumulate and thrive upon. In a modest way I had made myself recognized and remembered by a small circle of significant people. But the sweet taste of success or accomplishment did not come in an exalting fashion as I had long imagined. Rather, it was always shrouded in a sense of restlessness, of incompleteness.
While pain was most poignant since I by myself contained it all, happiness did not fill my heart with the colors of a rainbow because I could not see its reflection in the eyes of those to whom my dreams mattered. I had made some of those dreams come true in milieus alien to the soil that had witnessed their growth, amidst all tenderness and understanding.
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
1980
- Return to:
- •Top
- •Fragments from Memory
- • Home Page
Copyright © 1980 by Nha Trang Pensinger