Mum was a mumbler.  She mumbled all the time,  an unending stream of Vietnamese.  She was talking to nobody, but she was talking to everybody.  It didn’t matter.  Whoever was in earshot was her audience.  Whether she was cooking, folding laundry, dusting, or any of the other thousand domestic chores that made the day, her sweet, but hardly audible voice was always at work.  Mostly she complained.  About the weather, about aches and pains, about her in-laws, about no one listening to what she had to say.

Mum would mumble and Cha would roll his eyes with feigned exasperation.

They had been married for over forty years and had settled into the comfortable equilibrium that old couples usually do.  Habits and routines, played out day after day with the same script.   It hadn’t always been like that.  They had been through more than most couples can dream of.  Perhaps that’s why they so enjoyed driving each other crazy.

Cha had started modestly.  He had picked himself up by his bootstraps and rose out of a French Jesuit orphanage in Saigon to become one of the most prominent lawyers in South Vietnam.  He was paid as often in gold bars as with favors from high ranking politicos.  Cha was a tough man, fiercely driven and supremely ambitious.  He had fought and killed French imperialists in the 1940s when the Vietnamese reclaimed their native soil.  He was barely a teenager.  During the war with the Viet Cong, he traveled across the United States learning military strategy.  He was shortlisted to become a general.  God help the NVA had the war continued long enough for him to get his stars.

Mum was the 12th born to an old aristocratic family in the Mekong Delta.  They were rich and had been rich for centuries.  So rich in fact that they owned an entire island out in the middle of the delta with tenant farmers surrounding their sprawling grounds crowned with a French country estate.  Statues of her ancestors graced their private cemetery.  Mum was well bred, highly educated, and completely devoted to her parents as a good Vietnamese daughter should be.  She was a jewel, a beauty to any beholder.

Mum’s parents had immediately fallen for the self-made millionaire, ambitious but respectful, hardworking but family-oriented.  The tea ceremony was arranged and vows were exchanged.  Four children arrived in quick succession.

Mum was always a frail little creature, perhaps 4′ 10″ in good shoes and never an ounce over eighty pounds.  Her child labors were hard, so hard that they took a toll on her body that she never fully recovered from.  Medicine in those days, particularly in a developing country like Vietnam, made more mistakes than now and Mum carried that mistake the rest of her life, in and out of hospitals.

When the war was lost, the South Vietnamese listened to the promises of fairness and peace from the arriving northerners – some listened with desperate hope, others listened with well-earned doubt.  Cha’s law practice had accumulated a lot of gold, gold that he had hidden to avoid seizure.  That made him a target.  Perhaps more importantly he had accumulated a lot of favors as well.  That saved his life.  It was one of these favors that tipped him off – his name had been placed on a list.

The List.

In those days, in newly reunited Vietnam, that meant only one thing.  Re-education camp and all the horrors that came with it.  Poverty, torture, brainwashing, and often death.  Cha had a wife, raised to be a fine lady, unaccustomed to manual labor.  Cha had four young children, the youngest of which was barely two.   He had to leave the country or lose everything.  He had to leave at once.

Cha gathered stacks of gold bars and offered to bribe the fishermen for passage for as many of Mum’s family that was willing to go.  Few were interested, wishing to face the Communists rather than the South China Sea.  Mum was torn.  She was so dedicated to her mother and father that leaving them would destroy her, yet how could she abandon her children?  Ultimately, she chose her children.  The four children were split between two groups, each taking different routes to the fishing boat.  If one group was caught, then the other two might still have a chance at escape.  At life.

The weeks on the small boat, low in the water with dozens and dozens of desperate refugees, drifted through the torrid waters and suffocating weather, avoiding pirates and slavers looking for easy prey.  A rice kettle was cooking onboard and it tipped over onto two of the children, scalding them with severe burns, of which they still bear the scars thirty years later.  One was hit directly on the face and the burns nearly took her life.

Mum was traumatized.  She had left behind her life in Vietnam, her soul fused to the ancient rhythms of her ancestral lands.  She had left behind her parents, to whom she had devoted her very existence.  And now her children were suffering, burnt and crying, with no land in sight.  Maybe she would have given up, maybe she would not have been strong enough.  But Cha was strong.  He was strong enough for everyone.

When they arrived at Kuala Lampur, he demanded, he bargained, he cajoled to see the best doctors for his children.  He worked tirelessly to help build the refugee camp that would serve the thousands more to come in the following years.  Cha was a man possessed – he would escape the Communists and he would rebuild the life he had before, the life he had promised to Mum.

They arrived in Australia and he worked four jobs at the same time, anything he could do to make money.  He took night classes to learn English, to transfer his legal degree to the Aussie law codes.  And he looked after the children in every other spare moment.  Mum’s heart had been broken.  Both of her parents died before she could return to Vietnam.  Her last memories of them were the final, terror-filled farewells before their escape.  Part of her was lost on the dangerous seas, part of her that would not heal for many years.  She struggled in the new existence that awaited for them in their new home.  Mum did what she could to earn money for the family and put all of it into the hands of Cha, trusting that he knew best.

The children learned English.  They excelled at school under the high expectations and relentless drilling from Cha.  He put them in martial arts to teach them courage and discipline.  He settled in a white neighborhood rather than the comfort of an Asian one so that they would learn to integrate, so they would be forced to become Australians.  He saved every penny he ever earned, plotting and planning for the future.

Eventually, they scrimped and saved enough to buy a house.  Then another.  And another.  The children graduated from school to become lawyers and doctors.  Slowly, all that was lost was returning.  Perhaps too slowly at times.  Sometimes Cha became frustrated that he had lost so much in leaving Vietnam.  Starting over at 40 takes its toll … regret is a heavy burden to carry.  But that was okay … because Mum was there.

As Cha worried and fussed and planned, Mum was the figure in the background, mumbling as always, putting a cup of warm tea in his hand, laying out freshly cut fruit for him, or placing a fuzzy cap on his head in the chill night air.  She toiled behind the scenes, doing everything she could to allow Cha to focus on the money, on the future.  And at every meal, she prayed at the altar to the spirits of the ancestors, to the spirits of her parents.  Help Cha find the answer.

And thus their routine developed over long, anxious years.  She’d be fixing clothes pins to her garments, preferring the clothes line to the fancy dryer.  She hadn’t even bothered to take off any of the stickers.  As she did, she’d mumble at dad in the same tit for tat they’d been doing for decades:

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“You should eat something or you’ll get sick.”

“No.”

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

“You should put on a scarf or you’ll get sick.”

“No.”

“You are no longer young.  You are an old man.  Put on your scarf.”

“Muuuum” (rolling his eyes)

“When you get sick, don’t expect me to take care of you.”

And so on and so forth each day.  Eventually Mum would relent and force Cha to wear his hat, take his medicine, and more.  All in the hopes of keeping him happy and healthy.  But eventually Cha did get sick.

Cancer.

In 2004, he was diagnosed with aggressive colon cancer.  He would have to have it removed surgically followed by a rigorous program of chemotherapy.  Staring his own mortality in the face for the first time, Cha was crushed.  There was still so much that he had to do to set up not only his children for the future, but the next generation and the generation after that.  The weight of the world that he had carried on his shoulders seemed heavier than ever.  He feared the worst.

That’s okay.  Because Mum was there.

Everyday he was in the hospital, the small, slight Vietnamese woman of 70 years would walk from her Carlton flat to the hospital blocks away, carrying a bundle of small grocery bags.  In them, she carried small treats for Cha, fresh clothes, little things from home to make him more comfortable.  She would even bring small gifts for the white nurses and doctors, hoping that they would give her husband extra, special treatment.  Everyday from sunrise to sundown she stood at his bedside, waiting on his every need, trying her best to calm his fears, and asking a thousand questions on what he needed or how he felt.

And at night?

She prayed.  With her small, delicate hands laced into a tight ball at the center of her chest, she prayed.  She prayed to her ancestors at the family altar.  She prayed to Buddha.  She even prayed to Jesus.  Anyone that would listen.  She prayed that Cha would recover.  The family needed him so much.  He was the planner, the plotter.  He had eyes for the future.  She prayed that the sickness would leave him and go into her instead.  Mum asked that she be sick instead of him.  She prayed and she prayed.

Cha recovered.

Mum’s prayers had been answered.  His journey through the cancer was the hardest battle he had fought.  Tougher than the French, tougher than the Communists.  He came out the other side changed.  His hair had turned from a snowy grey to a stark white.  The lines around his eyes and face had deepened.  The chemo weakened his gums and his teeth shifted.  His shoulders sagged ever so slightly.  But he survived.  He had been given another chance.

Mum’s prayers had indeed been answered, but at what price.  A price that she offered to pay willingly, eagerly.  Two years later, that price was due and she fell ill.

Cancer.

She was diagnosed with liver cancer, aggressive and in a bad location, hard to treat because of its proximity to other organs and an artery.  Mum was small and frail.  The doctors were not optimistic that should be strong enough.  The family tried everything they could, no matter the cost.  Operations could not stop it.  Radiation treatment did not stall it.  Last chance experimental drugs had no effect.  Slowly, her suffering increased beyond breaking.  It was all that she could manage to just lay in bed, curled into a ball, occasionally reaching out for a comforting hand from one of her children or Cha.

She was dying.

Her silent suffering, unable to eat because of her medication and dwindling down to a skeletal frame, proved the mettle that the small woman always possessed.  She still asked her visitors if they needed anything.  She apologized with tears in her eyes that she could not do their laundry or make them a meal.  What does a family do when the hands that have wiped every mouth and nose and bottom, the lips that kiss every forehead,  disappears?  How does a man cope when the wife that has dutifully and lovingly stood by him for forty years passes on?

When the moment came, in a small hospice, wracked by terrible pain, Mum had only one request.  Turn me to face Cha so that I can look at him.  She smiled at him despite her pain.  He held her in his arms as her life slipped away, sent off with a soft kiss to her forehead.

Cha is a tough man, as tough as any man before him.  And yet when Mum passed he wept openly and freely, trying to force the words past the tightness in his throat that would capture his love of this woman.  There were no words.  He looked to the heavens disbelieving that she was gone.  It is the Buddhist tradition that the relatives of a family visit the temple where the ashes are kept in a holy place for seven weeks.  This shows devotion and also blesses the spirit for the afterlife.  Even though Cha is a Catholic, he went every week for a full year, before finally bringing the ashes home to the family altar.

Now Cha sits by himself.  His head is low and his hands lax.  When he holds his new grandchildren, there is a small tender spot of sorrow at the corners of his eyes.  He knew the fuss Mum would make over them if she were still here.  Sometimes the silence around him is too loud.  Sometimes he leaves the house without his hat and scarf until one of his frantic daughters chases him down the street.  Sometimes he forgets to eat breakfast.  Sometimes he has the wide eyes of someone who has lost … or is lost.

Cha has trouble sleeping.  There are times when he wakes in the night, dark and still, and reaches over to feel the bed next to him, but finds it empty.  And yet somewhere in his ear, perhaps ringing from the memories playing in his dreams, a small, delicate voice mumbles in a familiar, loving cadence:

“Are you hungry?  Are you cold?  Put on your coat or you’ll get sick.”

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