A NO NAME

Kathy Nguyen

Two years after your passing, our family friend, whom I’ve always called Bác Hai, passed away. I positioned myself in the dark concerning your and Má’s history, and this wasn’t any different. Stories you once told marked your history with Bác Hai: he was a former lính bộ binh, which transliterally means an infantry soldier, and became a lifelong friend at one point. Your last reunion with him was during Four’s wedding banquet and even then, you were distant to him and his family. A few words were exchanged but we could hear subtle overtures that audibly pointed out how far removed you were from the world outside of your home. Since your first stroke, you had acted more aloof, isolating yourself from your friends and the people you once were intimately familiar with as you retreated elsewhere, into your own space. Years before your stroke, you frequently hosted your friends from the Vietnamese community. You shared a long history with Bác Hai; as Má later shared, your family escaped with Bác Hai’s family. Perhaps the disease symptomatically prompted a lonely unfamiliarity only you understood, allowing you to feel secure in seclusion while also breaking away from any hostile impositions expected of you.

Bác Hai’s funeral was a long all-day event with Buddhist monks, one dressed like Đường Tam Tạng from Tây Du Ký—Journey to the West—all hired to recite and chant Buddhist scriptures that only Má was familiar with. Má and I were there for two days. I sat away from Má as she sat next to and comforted his wife, Bác Gái. I observed her family waiting and lining up in perfect formation to take photographs as a way to commemorate Bác Hai’s funeral into a framed memory.

It’s been said before and I’m merely one of the many shadowy echoes at this point, but funerals are more about living amidst death than any tragedies surrounding the departed. Funerals provide a mark, a timestamp, for the dead but continue moving onward to celebrate the living. I’m never going to understand it nor will I attempt to. But it’s comparable to how we insist that grief has no limit, is indeterminate, and there’s no expiration date; funeral arrangements are likely the same way. The existing afterward, or what I see as the aftermath of a person’s death, is when the days and times bleed into each other. Times that are difficult to control and beyond our comprehension as we attempt to move forward while feeling the—your—absence.

We left after the funeral procession when Bác Hai’s body was taken to the retort to be cremated.

You were also cremated but we didn’t want to witness it either. After saying our last farewells to you, with Four, Five, and me kissing your forehead for the last time, we watched your body be zipped in a thick, black post-mortem bag, and taken away to a funeral home. It was a terrible sight to exit the hospital to see the bag that held your body be placed in a van, knowing that you’ll be cremated in a few days. It remains difficult for me—the living—to see your body—your physical existence—reduced to granular ashed bones.

The ride home after Bác Hai’s funeral was quiet, almost too silent. Má always talked, every waking moment and everywhere. That day, she remained quiet, perhaps out of respect for the departed; only the melodic notes and singing from that one Vietnamese CD I burned years before served as background noise for the somber ride home back to Fayetteville.

Breaking the silence, I asked Má, “Do monks often sound like they’re singing folk-like operatic cải lương when they’re reciting Buddhist scriptures or do I not possess the ears to closely listen to Vietnamese Buddhist texts and am not listening to them correctly?” I didn’t know what I meant when I inquired about how to correctly listen to Buddhist scriptures. The only time I heard scriptures being chanted was in films and movies dubbed in Vietnamese and ironically, cải lương, which I preferred not to watch. Listening to Vietnamese felt like a linguistic detachment, all of the words and sounds escaping my ears as comprehension can be difficult when colloquial and cultural references felt more like an elusive encounter than something that riveted together. But what was I listening for when all I heard was a medley of reverbs being displaced in a room when I felt linguistically displaced myself? 

Some nights that bleed into the early mornings, I wake up to Má loudly whispering Buddhist scriptures, her head lowered to the point her chin might be in contact with her chest as her palms are pressed together. I haven’t heard her reciting scriptures since you recovered from your second stroke and returned home.

I expected Má, in her warning tone, to reprimand me for being disrespectful but instead, she laughed. “They’re not supposed to sound like that,” she informed me. “I can’t understand what they were saying half of the time.” We went silent after. We didn’t voice anything about possible dialects that might produce opposing pronunciations to what Má was used to hearing. Some things are just known and unspoken. Maybe your absence was too palpable at this point, after attending another funeral, because there are times when I imagine your reactions in a present without you. I can only imagine your response, spoken in your soft but steady register, your face thoughtful as you considered, “There’s no incorrect way to read scriptures.” 

Three or four tracks later, with the CD continuing to play on a loop to what felt like an undeviating linear drive, I initiated a conversation as Má stared blankly ahead due to my curiosity. “Má, why was there another name printed below Bác Hai’s birth name on his funeral poster? I noticed the word pháp danh. Does it mean that everyone is given a Buddhist name after death?” What I left unverbalized was if Buddhist names symbolized the material body leaving the physical realm and entering the state of nothingness, leaving everything behind. Maybe for reincarnation. Or maybe names, like the body itself, disappear and post-death is just that: death, decay, and then nothingness. Only that nothingness becomes fragments of our memory.

Má’s sighed as she explained that a person’s pháp danh is their given Buddhist name. She was unsure about the process or legalities for Vietnamese diasporic citizens living in the United States, but she recalled from the memories she holds about Việt Nam that a person has to visit a Buddhist temple. A monk, likely the abbot, would give the person a Buddhist name and print their name onto a document, stamped with a Buddhist seal to officiate it. A Buddhist person can inhabit two separate names in a body, their pháp danh and their nhũ danh—their birth name.

Sealed or not, names aren’t arbitrary.  

You probably don’t remember, but I wheeled you out late one night, a recurrence when sleep evaded you, so you could sit at the dining table to watch an episode of Animaniacs on my laptop while eating a bag of Halloween candy. Ollie, our family’s plumped, territorial bunny hopped around your wheelchair, never straying far from your moist feet. You were still smiling then. Your smile stretching out a little bit more whenever I placed Ollie on the table.

The day you were discharged from rehab, you sat on the reclining chair, the faux leather fabric torn with tape strewn over to cover the wears and tears because of Ollie’s tremendous bunny teeth. As you reached down to the carpet to pet Ollie, he lay beside the chair and his nose moved up and down at an unknowing accelerated speed.

You never knew Ollie’s plumped body gradually became thinner as he rapidly lost weight and his two black eyes were damaged by visible cataracts that created a white gloss over the entirety of his eyes; these were symptoms triggered by an unknown prognosis of E. Cuniculi. His energetic jumps and rapid binkies became consciously careful and much slower as his eyesight faded. What was left was his sense of smell and ability to navigate the house and his indoor enclosure by sheer memory. He passed away a year after you did; a large tumor was growing behind one of his eyes and there was a chance he would die on the operating table; a year ago, he took longer than usual to wake up from the anesthesia. Má believed he slowly died from a broken heart as he felt your absence. When we returned home from the hospital after your body was transported to the funeral home, I let Ollie out, and he hopped in front of your room, the door closed, and laid there for hours.

That night, your eyes looked focused, intent on watching the episode of Animaniacs, featuring Slappy Squirrel speaking with her discernible apathetic New York accent. I sat next to you, reading xxxHOLiC, a manga series by CLAMP, while forcing my eyes to remain open and ignoring the subtle but sensed cluster headaches creating invisible dents and lesions in my head. Reading wasn’t the best nightly activity to induce insomnia but for me, reading kept my mind concentrated and conscious. As you once remembered, reading is one of the few activities that make me stay up all night and into the early mornings because I have a habit of not sleeping until I finish a novel, regardless of length. One of my favorite manga characters, Ichihara Yūko, from xxxHOLic, philosophically expressed: “Names have power. With living things or inanimate, depending on the names we give them, a thing can have the same power as that for which it is named.” Má doesn’t share this sentiment. For her, without a Buddhist seal, a person’s Buddhist name felt arbitrary. But do names have to be official for a person to formally exist?

“So, would a person pass on as their Buddhist name or birth name?” I asked; I’m unsure why names were significant to me, especially once a person passed away. I wasn’t sure if I asked that question correctly.

“Does it even matter? It’s the same person. Both names are printed. They know,” Má answered.

“Do you and did Ba have one?”

You two don’t; Má said there was neither a need nor urgent obligation to do so. I don’t remember Bác Hai’s pháp danh. Sometimes his full name also escapes me because I’ve only ever referred to him with a reverential title since I knew him. You and Má would respectfully refer to him and Bác Gái as anh hai and chị hai. Names weren’t used to identify but were a hierarchical familial branching that felt reverential yet enforced and distant.

Your name sounded complete, full. All those years after your resettlement, your name was still written as it was on your birth certificate; it was official and as you remembered. 

There was a time you liked to retell stories: a day at lunch when we were eating soft tacos and enchiladas that I ordered, which you drenched in salsa, you shared the history of your and your brother’s names. You always mentioned that your brother’s name was Kiếm while yours was Khách. Two separate people coalesced in names to become Kiếm Khách—Swordsman. I giggled and thought of the only reference I could connect to your name: Trung Nguyên Kiếm Khách—The Righteous Guards—a wuxia series with a discernible cheap budget that was made to remember and relive the peak of the Shaw Brothers’ nostalgic film period, when agile and ridiculous but amazing wire stunts and fighting sequences were a thrill to watch on screen. Many young, noisy summers were spent rewatching that series. Six and I listened to how fake metal, somehow flexuous swords clashed against each other, creating friction followed by a tenor of desperation to win and survive. Those times when you placed those tapes in the VHS and replayed it for us, Six and I watched it repeatedly, in awe of both the sword fighting and the garish, floaty costumes that only heightened the stylized wuxia worldbuilding that you once loved.

You also laughed fondly every time you repeated your family bit, about how a sword couldn’t exist without a wielder. You couldn’t exist without your brother and he couldn’t exist without you since your names were entwined. I still don’t know anything about your brother nor had I ever asked about him when you were still alive. I only have his name to distantly identify with, never a face. Your name identified you and your face, for several of us.

You made your name into a running gag in the family. Whenever “Con Đường Xưa Em Đi,” one of the many romantic pre-1975 war songs you listened to in high frequency, was playing in the house and regardless of the rendition, you still listened to this particular, unchanging lyric, searching for that exact lyric in the song’s intro:

Anh làm thơ vu quy,

Khách qua đường lắng nghe chuyện tình ta đã ghi

and you would point at yourself, clearly and proudly enunciating the word Khách, even though the lyrical context signified not your name, but an unknown guest or a fleeting visitor passing by.

When I came to visit from Denton, you repeated the same action when we rewatched TVB’s 1989 serial adaptation of one of Kim Dung’s wuxia novels, Hiệp Khách Hành. When the character Tạ Yên Khách appeared on-screen or whenever a character references his name, you would point at yourself. It never got old then; now, it’s a passing memory, like a guest, fittingly remembered because of their initial impact.

That one night, that unexpected night a few months after you recovered from your second stroke, where nothing was supposed to happen, your body went into respiratory failure and the night extended itself even further than possible. Má called out to you, pronouncing your name in a shaky monosyllable. That was the first and final time I heard Má calling you by your first name, repeating it out of panic.

Later, she would tell me calling your name out repeatedly called you back from the dead. That was the night she thought you were gone only to painfully return. There are times when I see and hear the word khách and I can no longer hear your voice nor can I remember the facetious inflections your voice carried when you said your name. But I can still hear Má’s trembling elocution. 

With Má, names were different. I’ve never heard you referring to Má by her name before. But I distantly remembered a time when you called Má out by her maiden name, middle name, followed by an exaggerated emphasis of the ahh sound in jest. For years, I thought her birth name was an unremarkable A letter with an assumed pronunciation of that aah sound you made, forever mulling over how to pronounce it correctly since we would tell everyone that her name was just the letter A. Sometimes people used a long intonation that devolved into a hyperbolic enunciation of the ahh sound or whatever derivatives their tongues felt comfortable rolling with. Sometimes you can also hear disbelief in their tones each time they repeated Má’s non-name, questioning its origins or their accuracy in pronunciation. In America, I only knew to call Má as A, as her A no name. 

Americans pronounced your name as catch with an intent to phonate a caw sound, making it sound more like Caw-tch; Mr. and Mrs. Webb, one of the many sponsors you and Má used to keep in touch with, often pronounced it like that. I’ve also heard people simply calling you Cat. That never failed to elicit an unimpressed chortle from you.

I didn’t know her real name was An, a common Vietnamese name that was unknown to me. To me, A was a distinct Vietnamese name; here, in the English language, it’s the second most commonly used vowel. Something as simple as alphabetical letters, like words, can mean a lot until they lose meaning.

Although Má believes her ears have gotten used to people referring to her A no name, her family in Việt Nam continue to call her An; that’s what they know her as. For Má, her two names do not fracture her identity. She allows two names, including that one letter that she used to repel from, to reside in contention within her identity.

So used to Má being identified as A by her coworkers and whenever translating and interpreting for her, I asked Má if she occasionally gets confused with the two names.

“Why would I be?” she questioned back, more confused than I was upon learning about her dual names.

“I guess I’m asking if you would ever be confused if someone called you An here. Has anyone referred to you by your real name here? Wouldn’t you at least be a bit confused or startled if you heard someone calling you by your actual name since you’ve been called the unfortunate A no name for decades now?”

With what felt like residual resentment emitting from her body from something related to the history of her A no name, Má must have considered the question, allowing it to hang in the air all the while glaring at me when I implored her with that last question. As is customary when conversing with Má, she again counters with a story, revealing the brief history of her name and the origins of her A no name, a narrative retelling you’ve likely heard multiple times before.

A moment back in time, in South Việt Nam, she relayed how every citizen was legally required to procure a government-issued ID once they turned eighteen. She traveled with her Bà Ngoại to Long Xuyên, which you and Má reminded me is the capital of An Giang, the province where Má was born, to apply for her government ID. They waited at one of the capital’s government offices to submit the required paperwork.

Sadly, as you once recalled, living and surviving in an unstable country fragmented and divided by war, unpredictable violent attacks occurred in tragic quotidian. A combination of being misprinted and misspelled, her A no name carries an unexpected violent legacy.

Waiting became the only inert activity to pass the time as Má and her Bà Ngoại prolonged their stay during those three days when it was mandatory to retrieve Má’s government ID. Mailboxes weren’t installed in rural villages so they traveled for days and remained in near proximity to the office by staying at a family friend’s house.

Returning to the government office to fill out paperwork, an explosion occurred, inciting chaotic disruption to what felt like a ubiquitous day. Enveloped in smoke-induced clouds and clamor, people ran and screamed about an attack. One of the government employees rushed to Má and handed her stamped government documents to file at another office branch; she was expected to travel to the next office to fulfill the final criteria for obtaining her government ID. He then frantically told her to run before she got killed.

The sight of blood splattering everywhere she was running away from was deeply ingrained in her memory. Those years, Má reminisced, were peaceful compared to the previous years when she survived incessant bombings and gunfire aimed at her village and family house. To hear explosions and see the presence of blood drenching the ground’s soil at the capital felt like she was reliving the same nightmare again, forcing her heartbeat to become erratic as her body was once more driven into survival mode. She left that area behind, scared and haunted for days.

With the ringing aftermath of the days before still pulsating in the ears, Má and her Bà Ngoại sat outside the other office branch they were directed to, still waiting but disturbed. They waited for Má’s name to be called by someone so she could finally retrieve her government ID. Hours went by until they both heard someone calling an unusual name that didn’t sound Vietnamese. Whoever was pronouncing that name, Má described, sounded as if a bird was cawing at something.

Calls for an Ahh continued until an office employee noticed that Má and her Bà Ngoại were the only ones left waiting outside. That was the moment they both knew that the significant letter N that completed Má’s name was lost, her real name officially changed to the designated singular A.

Má’s Bà Ngoại was enraged because they had to witness horrific violence while waiting only for her name to be misprinted. Má’s Bà Ngoại wanted the office to rectify the error but the employee informed them that the copies and the paperwork were already mailed to the main office in Sài Gòn; rectification would take several additional days to months for any amendments to occur. Waiting was a laborious process; they wanted to return home and forget the violence. Má was forced to live with being An to her family, neighbors, and friends while being recognized and identified as A by the South Vietnamese government.

Fragments of the truth were revealed days after the explosion. An unnamed family of six, whose names Má didn’t know, who lived in a spacious two-storied house, was targeted. Everyone in the family but a child perished from the explosion; the child sustained major injuries but was expected to survive.

Everyone instantly blamed the Việt Cộng for the explosion and murders; it wasn’t days later until someone disclosed the perpetrator was a South Vietnamese soldier. No one wanted to believe that a soldier protecting their country would murder their own, but war changed that perception.

A conflict existed between the unnamed soldier and the unnamed family patriarch. The unnamed soldier demanded the family to give him their chickens but the unnamed patriarch refused to allow his chickens to become entertainment commodities for brutal chicken fights. In an act of senseless retaliation and contempt that intersects with an abuse of power and authority, the unnamed soldier planted two grenades at the patriarch’s house.

Hot anger permeated throughout her body for a time after that infraction. For three days, they remained in Long Xuyên and waited for Má’s printed ID. All that waiting only for that letter N to disappear from a part of her identity and be left unprinted in her official South Vietnamese documents, leaving her, in a sense, substantially undocumented.

Her name was forcefully truncated into her A no name and now akin to a foreign word in the Vietnamese language, pronounced without any legitimate dialectical Vietnamese intonation. But that initial anger quelled the moment she realized violence and chaos caused an employee to leave the letter N off out of fright and the right to survive.

Was An Giang, her birthplace, the reason behind her real name? Names are a mesh of geographical origins and history, all of which serve as references to a person’s life. For Má and a common contention of life: a point of geographical origin is remembered more than a person born with the same common name. A person with an incorrect no name will become a footnote or an obscure marginal annotation only if their existence is allowed to be remembered and memorialized.

Má was born as An but it was violence and multiple deaths that led to her A no name’s birth as a weighted scarlet letter.

Hearing and listening to mispronunciations are forever recurring, something you witnessed in your lifetime. During another failed interview for a postdoc position, one of the faculty members on the hiring committee asked if our surname was pronounced Nu-Guy-In, a common mispronunciation we’ve heard since grade school. I corrected them and said a simple Win would work. They still insisted on pronouncing it as Nu-Guy-In and for thirty minutes, I was Dr. Nu-Guy-In. Somehow, a confident polysyllabic butchering of what should be a simple monosyllabic Win became common here. Was it my corrective tone that made them repeat it in the same manner without considering my preferred pronunciation of a family surname? Or did their tongue not assimilate to the Viet-lish sounds quickly enough?

We have a long history with Nu-Guy-In. It’s likely a relationship at this stage since we’ve been living here forever. 

Unfortunately, Má has to live with more aliases than her A no name allows. When you were both working for Campbell Soup Company, later renamed to Vlasic, only be to be renamed to Pinnacle, your coworkers and Má’s would call Má Nugie—pronounced as Nu-Gee—or Nugin—pronounced Nu-Gin—which is consistent with their non-phonetic perception of our surname.

When a beautiful Christmas card addressed to Má from her former coworker arrived at our house, Five and I went hysterical when we saw how Nugie was spelled for the first time. All these years we’ve heard the cacophonous mispronunciations but seeing it spelled phonetically was different. It was jarring to see how letters were randomly thrown together to further misspell a person’s name.  

Employees elect how they refer to each other. Má explained that her coworkers often called each other by their surnames, which didn’t seem consistent to me because I heard Má referring to people by what seemed to be common first names. Since becoming an employee at the factory, her coworkers called her Nugin or Nugie because they thought Nguyen was too difficult to attempt—a very fair admission. For weeks, she couldn’t get used to Nugin or Nugie and would unintentionally ignore anyone calling for her. Very few people called Má by her A no name anyway; years of assimilating to the dissonant sounds of the Nu-names gradually became more familiar and they became acceptable forms of identification for her.

When coworkers pressed about her A no name, a story she shared during lunch, and demanded to know what happened to the letter N, Má would shrug and not reveal anything else, knowing they wouldn’t understand the politics or grasp the complications that tightly structure and frame them. Instead, she attempted a joke, “It’s lost somewhere. I don’t know, I lost my letter N in my pocket somewhere and got too lazy to find it.”

Má has a difficult gendered history with no names. Family friends would refer to you as Anh Khách or Chú Khách while Má is still referred to as Chị Khách or Thím Khách as if her identity doesn’t exist beyond family life and that marriage solely defines her as a wife, your wife. Her existence outside of that is flattened by the many names that categorize and fragment her. Justifications about how it’s an unchanging part of Vietnamese culture will be expressed, but Má deserves more than to be called various no names and rightfully identified as an individual—an individual name that proves her existence. Doesn’t a name become an impermanent marker for someone’s existence? Was this why Bác Hai has a Buddhist name? Did Buddhist names mark a closure or a conclusive break from his previous life as his Buddhist name follows him in death?  Even then, whose names do we remember after death?

When you were still alive, I was compelled to finally open my MSW diploma which I hadn’t opened for years. Like Má’s A no name, my middle name was misspelled and misprinted on my diploma; I went from being born as a Ngọc—being born as one of the many Ngọcs in the family like my sisters—meaning Jade—to a Nguc—meaning chest. You and Má were livid and demanded that I request a reprint.

I still haven’t requested a reprint yet. I can live with being a Nguc for now. And unlike Má, very few people know my middle name. Those who do pronounce it as Knock, a mispronunciation you used to laugh at.

At another recent failed interview for an assistant professor position as a recent PhD graduate in a perpetual job limbo, a faculty asserted that names are important when I thanked them for asking how our surname was pronounced. Names are important but we’re prone to hear anything but what and how we prefer our names to be pronounced.

It won’t be the last time our family name will be mispronounced as Nugin, Nuguyin, or Noog-man. Does perception complicate the pronunciation? Does seeing Nguyen printed on paper inwardly compel someone to hear Noog-man? We’re going to continually hear it in those variations, like an indoctrinated mantra that refuses to be challenged or corrected. An old common surname dissected into newer pronunciations. How unfortunate it is that we’re all no names at this point.