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THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467) VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 JUL 2005
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A Past not Forgotten: OCEAN
AND EXILE UYEN
NICOLE DUONG
Into dream I travel exploring journey of the self... 1990 When I
was twenty six years old, very incidentally I discovered the source of my
fascination with the ocean. All my
life I have held many fantasies about the ocean. When I doze off because of physical
exhaustion, I frequently dream of swimming very fast and effortlessly across
crystal clear and tranquil water. Even
in the state of dream, I can still feel the utmost happiness of floating and
conquering waves, when I shoot myself like an arrow parting the cool,
indivisible water in half. As an adult, I
am so much drawn to the ocean, yet still frightened by it. Even amidst the passion of my most favorite
water sport, at times I am still chilled by the fear that I will completely
be vulnerable in the insecurity and unforeseeable danger of the darkness and
coldness of the sea...that something will grab me from behind, detaching me
from the comfort of home...that the ocean will engulf me, into a vacuum of
weightless immensity, where I become nothing, nothing at all, yet still very
much aware of the pain and despair as my physical mass is diluted into
nothingness...My physical self has been completed broken, compressed,
defeated, and engulfed, but my psychic self is still floating, struggling,
fighting for peace, to return to a place called home... It was the year
of my judicial clerkship under Honorable Hugh Gibson of the Southern District
of Texas (now deceased) that I somehow began to rationalize my love for, and
fear of, the ocean. The court sits in
Galveston, a small port town on the coast of Texas overlooking the Gulf of
Mexico. Galveston is neither a
cosmopolitan place nor a classy resort. It is, in the words of Judge Gibson,
a sleepy old Texas port town. The beach
of Texas is no paradise, despite a few fancy hotels to whet the appetite of
showy Houstonians who consider Galveston their beach get-away or short-term
vacation. The waves can be very high, aggressive and threatening, but somehow
they just do not carry the powerful beauty of Hawaiian crests. The sand is frequently dirty and brown,
full of tar blobs and dirty oil residues spilled or discharged from ships and
oil tanks. One can smell and feel the
oil in all that muddy and sandy brown water... But Galveston
holds so much memory for me that once I was away from it, looking back, at
times I felt the remembrance was too painful to endure. It was through the coast of Galveston that my
mind first associated the image of the sea with velvet. Now, every time I think of the night and
the sea, I think of the mystery and richness of deep black velvet. One cannot touch the depth of black velvet,
just as the mystery of the sea and darkness can never be completely unveiled.
I recall every Friday night I would pack up to leave Galveston for Houston in
my old beatup Toyota...I hurriedly drove by the
sea, on Galveston's Seawall Boulevard, to reach the freeway en route to Houston. (Years ago, after the historical disastrous
hurricane that almost swept away the island of Galveston in the 1920s, the
U.S. Corps of Engineers built the Seawall Boulevard to save Galveston from
future hurricanes. The boulevard
bordered the ocean like a fortress.) But even in my rush and despite the routine
nature of the drive, I could not help but notice the sound and the sight of
the ocean beneath Seawall Boulevard, representing immense myth, power, and,
at the same time, loneliness. I
remember glancing at the ocean beneath and afar. I could no longer see the sparkling dark
blue water, since the horizon and the ocean had merged into immense
darkness...into a huge cloth of black velvet covering that part of the
earth. Such a deep black that chilled
my imagination. But along the
beach, the waves continued to hit the sandy land and protruding rocks,
splashing alongside the coastline, creating white strips of bubbling water
shining in contrast with the black darkness of the ocean. These white strips
danced under the silver moonlight and the yellow brightness of street lamps,
reminding me of lace embroideries at the outer edges of a huge velvet cloth,
as though the cloth was graciously moving in harmony with some mysterious
tune from outside this mundane universe. The blackness of the velvet was so
deep that I could no longer see the movement of the cloth. The only movements depicted were the
dancing waves, those lacy white strips bordering the edges of the black
velvet cloth. The coast of Galveston at night was the velvet dress of a
gigantic princess, hemmed with lace embroideries, dancing somewhere in the
universe. The awe-filled beauty of the
darkness of the velvet ocean and it animated white lace strips of dancing
waves, together with nature’s threatening sound, was so overwhelming that
while I was so much in love with the ocean, I also wanted to run away from
it. That same year,
I met through the court a woman from Spain, Isabelle. She was the court's
official Spanish interpreter for the federal criminal drug offense cases,
where federal agents caught shipments of controlled substances smuggled into
the country from South America through the port of Galveston. We did not know each other very well,
although in the few conversations that we might have had, we immediately
developed a rapport that promised friendship.
She might have invited me to a party once, but I never took the
opportunity to know Isabelle better. I
would have forgotten her name had it not been for what Isabelle told me about
the ocean. And that I remember forever. It was Isabelle who provided the
explanation for my fascination with the ocean. And I intuitively believed it. I did not
remember how the conversation began, but Isabelle told me, casually, that if
a person was born and raised near the ocean, automatically and subconsciously
for the rest of that person's life, he or she would seek to return to the
ocean. Isabelle concluded that she
always wanted to live her life near the ocean because she had been born near
the coast of Spain. I was born and
raised, until age two, in a port town right on the coast of central
Vietnam. The ocean was my first
friend. The ocean was home. There lies my source of fascination,
inspiration, and aspiration with the ocean.
I have embraced it in my childhood and carried it with me, endearing
it in my psyche, and longing for it as though it contained my garden of Eden.
That lost paradise. The ocean has become part of my cultural subconsciousness and followed me through life. Then there is
still the fear. If there is any
intellectual quest that fascinates me the most, it must have been the
psychology of fear. I have never
understood it .But
perhaps there is one common aspect of all human fears, and that is, we fear
pain or destruction. We all fear being
detached and separated from our territory, or what we consider to be our
possession of territory. Known territory becomes the extension of ourselves. We all fear the unknown, the unexplainable, and
the most obvious unknown facing mankind is death. My fear of drowning in the ocean is my fear
of pain, destruction, and extinction.
Simply put, the fear of death. Or more precisely, the fear of facing the
unknown after death. If one can be assured that being drowned is pleasant,
and that after death, one will be rejoiced and happy forever in a permanently
pleasurable state, then perhaps one no longer fears being drowned, or
death. And my fear of the ocean will
be vanished. Since my days
of living in Galveston, I have accepted that my attraction for the ocean
stems primarily from my longing for home and attachment to my place of birth.
I have also accepted that I fear the sea because it denotes pain, death,
extinction, and the unknown. There
lies the irreconcilable paradox. And if these paradoxical premises have long
colored my psyche, then would it be at all possible that, for someone like
me, the concept of "home," "roots," or "place of
birth," notwithstanding its familiarity, comfort, and warmth, will
always be intimately linked to the notions of pain, destruction, and
ultimately death or extinction? In my view of the Vietnamese immigrant
experience, I submit that the answer is a definite Yes. Perhaps it is only in the Vietnamese and other similar
immigrant experiences that the concept of home can be associated so closely
with pain, extinction, and death. All that pain,
extinction, and death was incidentally confirmed
when a old friend of mine from the old country, Vietnam, came to Galveston to
see me after two decades of absence. The last time I saw her was in Vietnam,
when we were 15 years old, before the fall of Saigon. To welcome her, I
planned for her to have a picnic with me on Galveston beach, with champagne
glasses, pate, French bread, brie, and fresh seedless grapes. I even bought
and presented to her a gift, a two-piece swimming suit, as I proudly announced
to her our picnic plan. That way, we could sunbathe together as two
fashionable young women wearing bikinis.
Instead of sharing my enthusiasm, my childhood friend looked at me
with awe and amazement, and said nothing in return. She simply wanted to take off. She wanted to leave me and Galveston
immediately. It was only
then that I realized how dumb, and hence insensitive, I had become toward a
past that should not have been forgotten. My friend was one of those boat
people escaping Vietnam in the 80s. In years of correspondence with me before
her actual visit to Galveston, she never once talked about the exodus at sea.
I saw her take
off with this unbearable feeling of loss, that awful feeling experienced when
one’s home sweet home and terror had become one. And that was how I
have since viewed the ocean and the fate of exile.
UYEN NICOLE DUONG The Writers Post &
literature-in-translation, founded
1999, based in the US. Editorial
note: Works
published in this issue are simultaneously published in the printed Wordbridge magazine (ISSN: 1540-1723). Copyright
© Uyen Nicole Duong & The Writers
Post 2005. Nothing in this magazine may be downloaded, distributed, or
reproduced without the permission of the author/ translator/ artist/ The Writers Post/
and Wordbridge magazine. Creating links to place
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