“Mẹ, what date is today?”
“It’s the 20th of December, why are you asking?”
“No, I meant in positive dates!”
“Oh, then it’s January 11th.”
It’s always like that, I and Mẹ, ten days apart, our timelines. As I moved on the new year, she stayed back for a bit. There would be a few things left to do before she hits the last day of December. On the morning of the 23rd, she would wake up early and head straight to the wet market to fetch a river carp. She would then place the carp in a blue bucket with not too much water or he would jump off the rim, and not too few so that he stays alive until we đưa ông Táo về trời.
Ông Táo is the supreme god of all Vietnamese households, observant and full of intentions. During the ceremony, he would travel on the back of the carp which sublimates into a dragon halfway to heaven. I guess a dragon is ways cooler to ride on than a carp. He would then accordingly report the family’s good deeds, bad deeds, the secrets that they kept from each other throughout the year, based on which the heavenly judge will determine the outcomes and fortunes of the family for the years to come.
On the other hand, this ten-day difference is not without problems. There was one time when Mẹ forgot my birthday by hanging on the Lunar Calendar’s date-count for dear life. She thought she was waiting it out, but she wasn’t. Of course, as a ten-year-old, I got upset. I thought I’d hate the Lunar Calendar for the rest of my life for regressing my existence. I blame it for the unwarranted invisibility it befell me. I had yet understood the weight of trying to live both timelines at once.
Like history, the calendars are supposed make us more whole and less fragmented. Tabula rasa, as John Locke terms it, describes the child as a “blank slate.” Parenting involves putting the child in relations to time. In a particular timeline where the child inhabits, his or her tabula rasa is replenished with something else. The child is set towards a future and a certain correlation to the past as part of a homogenized orchestration. Like a machine with a built-in quantum clock, the child is set into motion.
Carla Shalaby talks about how a child can be perceived as problematic when the timelines are out of sync in her work Troublemakers (2017). For her, a timeline is linear and consistent. When a child acts and behaves at the wrong time, the timeline is disrupted. For the Solar calendar engulfs us in all the world, I chose to think that sometimes my angsty rebellion towards Mẹ is a form of resistance, because it is when we get the closest to a temporal reconciliation.
“During my time, we used to…” is her favorite way to start off a lecture; and I would yank up at her a “but in my time, people are…” It shall be like that – a perpetual feedback loop between the past and present tenses. But in the Vietnamese language, at least in speech, the distinction is almost impossible to tell.
“Thời của Mẹ, người ta nấu cháo bằng bùn cưa!”
(“During my time, we used to cook congee out of saw dust!”)
“Mà ngày nay làm gì còn chiến tranh nữa?”
(“But in my time, there is no war!”)
Except there has always been a war – our small battle against each other even though time itself is the lurking nemesis. Mẹ remembered by birthday this year. It was a warm sunny day in our hometown. The celebration was perhaps a point of reconciliation for bodies that exist both places at once. It does not provide clarity, but it’s a reminder that apart from the small battles we fought, we are also capable of benevolence.
To be a Vietnamese child is perhaps to always act at the wrong time and celebrate. To locate the fugitive Vietnamese body in time and language is to reclaim our tabula rasa. To speak in time and against time is a yellow gesture that decomposes what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “imagined waiting room of history,” where the colonial forefather shakes his forefinger at us and shh-es “not yet.”
