Even knowing that it's a work of fiction and both mother and son are fictitious, the interchange between them haunts me. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer, is narrated by the Eurasian protagonist. His father is a European priest and his mother a poor, Vietnamese peasant girl. Based on merit he is awarded a scholarship to an American university. Terms of the scholarship allow one annual trip back to Vietnam for a visit. His mother dies when she is 34, poor and alone, rejected by family for her son out of wedlock. Sometime after his mother's death he is reflecting on his last visit with his mother. He writes:
"She smiled bravely and called me her petit `ecolier, after the chocolate-covered biscuits I loved so much as a child and which my father blessed me with once per year at Christmas. Her parting gift to me were a box of imported biscuits--a fortune for a woman who only nibbled on the corner of one once and saved the rest for me each Christmas--as well as a notebook and a pen. She was barely literate and read out loud, and she wrote with a cramped, shy hand. By the time I was ten, I wrote everything for her. To my mother, a notebook and pen symbolized everything she could not achieve and everything that I, through the grace of God or the accidental combination of my genes I seemed destined for." p.154
"A notebook and a pen" this gift of a loving, impoverished, mother to her university student son, while in a work of fiction, struck something deep with in me. The poignancy, the pathos, reflects the experience of multitudes of real life mothers aching to provide for their children; think of the desperate mothers at our southern borders risking everything to find safety and sustenance for their children. "A notebook and a pen" given to a student at a foreign university. There is something about that image that reaches deep into a tender place in me. Yes, that gift haunts me.
Takk for alt,
Al
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