Serpentine Alley

The summer of my 8th grade, I took up Hapkido. Had to keep up with my classmates, who, one by one, held Tae Kwon Do and Judo titles; who, when horsing around, often used my face for target-practice

It took some arm-twisting for my mom to sign the Release Form and open her purse my Martial Arts uniforms – white belt- to start. We warmed up then practiced moves and kicks. A few weeks into it, a red-belt Master visited our class. He had us line up to kick a piece of wood he was holding.

When he shouted “next”, it’s my turn to build up momentum, then in slow motion. jumping up high in the air, right leg in full stretch and locked knee. Having held it for a while, the Master twitched and jittered to re-brace himself and the board. That split second, with a moving target, I missed. Punching through thin air, I landed sideways and heard my left arm breaking on impact.

That whole summer, 15 year-old, home-bound and restless, I was bored to tears. Tous les garçon de mon age….went out dancing, chasing after chics etc…while I nursed a broken arm i.e. no guitar, no singing, no washing and no scratching. In short, a lot of Don’ts and no one could tell me the Do’s. People stopped by and signed my cast, as they would on a guest log-in book at funerals.

I flipped the pages of Essential Idioms in English by Dixon:” Get on- Get off; Put on – Take off, ” but couldn’t help experiencing sudden sadness. In between lessons, I gazed beyond the confine of my house, located half-way in an alley with two imposing long tombs (perhaps of a high-ranking mandarin’s and his wife’s).

I rarely reflected on life, certainly not that early in life.

But that summer, being “sheltered in place”, I wrote for our class white-paper ( posters on the school wall near those ping-pong tables) about coming-of-age, about the road ahead and my existential loneliness ( other classes often illustrated similar theme wirh simple sketches of young girls whose stoic faces half-covered in Cher-like hair).

I knew then and now, that people were joined together for a while, biologically or what not before parting ways, sometimes amiably, other times with slam doors. Either way, life is fleeting (even when people’s tombs were huge) and the sum of all choices, sometimes with no choice e.g. came home in a casket from the war-front as in the case of my next-door neighbor.

I knew each was with different options and orientation. Many from well-to-do families (great zip codes), or influential ones (Army brats). As a TK (teacher’s kid), I grew up humbly and possessed few material things.

Even the bike I rode to school was salvaged from a rusty broken frame, garbage haul from my aunt’s balcony. The life I lived was a part-time one: I had to “Airbnb” my Dad with his other family.

I knew we were of different breed, despite our (martial arts and school) uniform and universal language of math and science, subjects that many already showed signs of mastery.

I had my own inarticulate demons to wrestle with, so poorly that I turned my grief inward while screaming my lungs out – with guitar as my shield, performing at imaginary concerts after-school to quench hunger.

Somehow I got through that summer. Four years later, we faced the inevitable : the war could not go on forever: friends found themselves socially distancing for fear of sabotaging their family escape plan.

We knew that life as we had known it, would never be the same.

Post-war rebuilding e.g. major and mate (mates, in my case) required us to drift further apart. When we saw each other , South Vietnam or Southern California, something were missing. I couldn’t for the life of me put a finger on it.

All happenstance in a new social order i.e. Maslow scale ( survival, security and self-esteem…). We can’t find our way home. Never again, even with a fast walk through the once-familiar serpentine alley.

As with that broken bike and arm, time heals.

That summer, I used quarantine for reflection. I conjectured that my life would zigzag like the serpentine alley “Around the bend, we will take a different path at those forks on the road”.

” I hope when we meet again, further down the trail, there won’t be too much of a gap between us..” (Khuc Quanh – Bich bao Uoc Vong B3- 71).

It was my first writing about love and friendship outside my immediate family.

Without that incident, I would have played guitar summer long, not given a thought about that far-flung future and the only thing that broke would have been those poor guitar strings. ___________________________________________________________________

For my class of 68-75 who had to face with so much coming at us while coming of age.