He had a headache now, centred over the right eye. And his stomach was queasy.
Driving through Corona Del Mar, he stayed below the speed limit, prepared to pull to the curb and stop if his vision blurred . . . or if anything strange began to happen again.
He glanced nervously at the radio. It remained silent. Block by block, fear drained out of him, but depression seeped in to take its place. He still had a headache and a queasy stomach, but now he also felt hollow inside, grey and cold and empty.
He knew that hollowness well. It was guilt.
He was driving his own Corvette, the car of cars, the ultimate American wheels, the fulfilment of a boyhood dream, and he should have been buoyant, jubilant, but he was slowly sinking into a sea of despondency. An emotional abyss lay under him. He felt guilty about the way he had treated his mother, which was ridiculous because he had been respectful. Unfailingly respectful. Admittedly, he had been impatient with her, and he was pained now to think that maybe she had heard that impatience in his voice. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Never. But sometimes she seemed so hopelessly stuck in the past, stubbornly and stupidly fixed in her ways, and Tommy was embarrassed by her inability to assimilate into the American culture as fully as he himself had done. When he was with American-born friends, his mother’s thick Vietnamese accent mortified him, as did her habit of walking one deferential step behind his father. Mom, this is the United States, he had told her. Everyone’s equal, no one better than anyone else, women the same as men. You don’t have to walk in anyone’s shadow here. She had smiled at him as though he was a much-loved but dim-witted son, and she’d said, I not walk in shadow because have to, Tuong. Walk in shadow because want to. Exasperated, Tommy had said, But that’s wrong. Still favouring him with that infuriating, gentle smile, she’d said, In this United States, is wrong to show respect? Is wrong to show love? Tommy was never able to win one of these debates, but he kept trying:
No, but there are better ways to show it. She gave him a sly look and ended the discussion with one line: How better – with Hallmark greeting card? Now, driving the long-desired Corvette with no more pleasure than if it had been a second-hand rattletrap pickup truck, Tommy was cold and grey inside even as his face flushed hot with shame at his ungrateful inability to accept his mother on her own terms.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child.
Tommy Phan, bad son. Slithering through the California night. Low and vile and unloving.
He glanced at the rear-view mirror, half expecting to see a pair of glittery snake eyes in his own face.
He knew, of course, that wallowing in guilt was irrational. Sometimes he had unrealistic expectations of his parents, but he was far more reasonable than his mother. When she wore an ao dais, one of those flowing silk tunic-and-pants ensembles that seemed as out of place in this country as a Scotsman’s kilts, she looked so diminutive, like a little girl in her mother’s clothes, but there was nothing vulnerable about her. Strong-minded, iron-willed, she could be a tiny tyrant when she wished, and she knew how to make a look of disapproval sting worse than the lash of a whip.
Those uncharitable thoughts appalled Tommy even as he indulged in them, and his face grew yet hotter with shame. Taking frightful risks, at tremendous cost, she and Tommy’s father had brought him – and his brothers and sister – out of the Land of Seagull and Fox, from under the fist of the communists, to this land of opportunity, and for that, he should honour and cherish them.
‘I am such a selfish creep,’ he said aloud. ‘A real piece of shit, that’s what I am.’
As he braked to a full stop at an intersection on the border of Corona Del Mar and Newport Beach, he settled deeper in a sea of gloom and remorse.