There's No Love on the Mekong Delta

My mom always liked Steph.  I’m not sure why since they never exchanged more than a handful of formalities during our relationship.  “What happen to your girlfriend?” she asked during the most random moments: while watching TV, or during dinner, or when I was on the phone with a friend, or at family gatherings. 

“Ex, and fuck if I care.”

“Don’t say ‘fuck’ it bad word.  I like that girl she pretty.  You should talk and say sorry.”  My mom thinks I’m at fault for the breakup.  I explained to her that it was Steph’s choice, but she doesn’t believe me.  “Yes, she pretty girl for an An-do.”

“She’s Italian,” I corrected her. 

“Oh, but she look like an Indian.  Very dark skin.  If you want, I send you back to Viet Nam de di choi, and you can find pretty Vietnamese girl.  She will be very nice.  Good for you I think.”

“Mom, for the last time I’m not dating a fuckin’ FOB.”  Fresh off boat—I don’t think she knows what that means.

“I told you not say ‘F’ word,” she said, and smacked me across the face and advised me to learn some respect.  Then my dad chimed in—drunk—also in broken English, “You be nice.  Your Mom not a Fuck.” 

My dad didn’t care much for Steph.  “She white and not go to college.  I not approve,” he said and shook his head.  I don’t care much for his opinion though; he’s a loudmouth and an abusive alcoholic that smokes incessantly.  I hate that about him.

My parents met under the reigning power of Christ, ten years after, in the same church where they received communion and became confirmed Catholics.  It’s one of those worn out love stories.  A hackneyed interpretation where city boy falls in love with country girl, but instead of overalls and wheat and cornhusks its rice patties and muck and conical-shaped hats, along the Mekong Delta.  My love story is much different.  I met her in America at a job with air-conditioning.  I knew her for eight-months before we got together, we were friends first and lovers later. 

“She’s this astonishing Italian chick,” I described to my friends, most of them women, but they didn’t seem to care.  I thought Steph was the most beautiful girl in the world.  The way the strands of her wavy brunette hair fell on her face as she impounded litters of frantically meowing kittens just before they were injected with euthasol.  “I don’t understand why people won’t fix their fucking animals,” she said after each intake.  She was so cool in her reprimand it never got old.  Her sympathy and use of the word fuck—to emphasize her distaste of animals engaging in their natural breeding cycles—turned me on. 

I was awed by her olive complexion and how it seemed to persevere through the dankest conditions, radiating under the animal shelter’s dim lighting.  I remember getting hard-ons when I got a whiff of her scent as she walked past; she smelled of freshly laundered clothing, even after walking out of a freezer of decaying animals—dogs, cats, rabbits, and classroom pets subtly brought in by teachers that didn’t want to care for them over their summer break—ready to be rendered into lipstick and foundation and eyeliner for women to put unknowingly on their faces. 

“I know its tough but you’ll see Bruno again,” I said.

“Yeah, on your face,” she said under her breath.  I tried not to laugh.  I’m sure the owner would have found it funny if it weren’t their beloved pet we joked about. 

We laughed because we no longer gave a shit about Donner or Dora or Lucky or Sophie and how they were so one-of-a-kind it was heartbreaking to let them go.  We laughed to hide the fact that we wanted to see each other naked—but neither of us had the balls to make the first move.   

My dad is a horse-mouthed smart aleck.  If he wants something, he does everything in his given power to get it.  He’s astutely persuasive, and what God forgot to give him in looks he made up for in tact.  He’s so convincing that at twenty-one he won my mom’s attention.  He wooed her with tamarind candy and promises of a life away from rice farming.  My mom believed everything he said, and two months later they were married.  She was graceful, nineteen, and naïve.  They’re each other’s first and only relationship. 

When I still romanticized my parent’s marriage, I asked my dad how much he loved her.  He responded by saying it’s complicated, and that I wouldn’t understand.  He was right; I was only five.  I asked my mom the same question but unlike my dad, she didn’t give me the same generic excuse.  It was a single word but nonetheless spoken with absolute conviction: “Mistake.”  Her body convulsed wildly and her lips curled, showing her teeth when she said it.  I didn’t quite understand, but my mom quickly realized her wrong in telling me.  She chided me for asking and shooed me away.  “Go play,” she said, and I did as I was told because I was too young to enquire any further. 

It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I understood what had happened.  She had no intention in revealing her true feelings that day.  What good would come from it?  My older siblings didn’t know and there was no reason that her five year-old should either.  She told me because I was the only one to ask, and that though it was mutually understood between my parents, and their siblings, and my grandparents, it was never to be openly admitted.  My parent’s marriage is like a business transaction, enacted too hastily and gone sour, without the option of a buyout to recoup losses.  Divorce, for them, is an inconceivable option.  And until one of them dies, they’ll remain tenaciously committed.

When I asked Steph out I didn’t give gifts or promise anything.  I didn’t even have the nerve to tell her in person.  While most guys prefer to court women with charm, grace, love notes and flowers, I lack suavity and write her a two-page confessional that reads like a third grade pen-pal letter.  We shared a locker and before the end of work, I slipped my revelation of infatuation into one of her books.  It’s like in school when boy likes girl, but boy is too scared to tell her face-to-face so he hides it in one of her things, calling her later and asking her to check her possessions for his exclamation of affection.  I went through all these cliché motions because even at twenty girls still scared me. 

I wrote to her a stream of words compiled from the stomach churning emotions that I felt each time she was around.  I used words like awesome and rare and statuesque and magical.  Then I apologized, twice, for liking her, making myself appear meek and undeserved of love in hopes that my humility and self-deprecation would clench the deal and convince her to date me out of pity. 

Around the same time Steph wrote me something, too.  It wasn’t a letter, but a stock Christmas card she personalized with her own version of endearments. 

Sorry I didn’t pick out individual cards for people, she said.  Oh wait, no I’m not.  I was too busy having a life.  Your Christmas card scared the shit out of me, she continued, I think you threatened me in it which is not very Christmasy, but I’ll forgive you and chalk it all up to sexual frustration.  She knew.  Well, Merry Christmas and I hope that next year will bring you many bitchy girls for you to bang.  See you in customer service, virgin. 

         “This is the girl you like?  She sounds like a bitch,” my friend said.

         “No, that’s just her style.  Strong and flirty.” 

         “Yeah sure.”

         “Trust me,” I said. 

She knew just what to say, I was smitten.  I read the card over and over.  I just couldn’t get enough.  While most guys might be turned off by her approach, I was reeling in her wit. 

“Man, her candidness and independence.  Isn’t it hot?” I said. 

“Eh.”

“And to sweeten the deal she loves indie music.  A chick with a strong attitude and fresh musical taste, she’s totally my dream girl.”   

         I was working nightshift when she called.  Nervousness, anxiety and tension all overcoming me as I answered the phone, my body shaking and face flushed as I belted out a quick unstable hello. 

         “I got your letter,” she said. 

“Oh,” I said, followed by a flow of incoherent mumbles and stutters.  “I’m sorry, I’m just really nervous right now.” 

“That’s cute,” she said giggling.  “And don’t worry. I feel the same way too.”

On our first date, we ate pancakes at a local mini-café.  Sharing stories about our friends and joking at their misfortunes with drugs, sympathizing for their love-life woes, and laughing about how I told our work I was vegan as I splattered a mountainous heap of whip cream over my pancakes.  “I thought it’d give me a better chance at getting hired,” I told her.  She thought I was the funniest guy in the world. 

When we finished eating, I drove her home and we hugged.  She came in for a kiss, but I was shy and turned my head presenting my cheek.  Later, I felt like a fool, embarrassed of my action I called to apologize.  I told her that I had never kissed anyone before and I wanted the first time to be special.  Steph comforted me and said she’d wait. 

I’ve only seen my parents kiss once, and even then it wasn’t done very affectionately.  We were coming back from a wedding in Oakland, and my mom quickly pushed him away before their lips caressed.  She called him a sloven drunk and he slapped her.  He went in again, forcefully pressing his mouth up against hers, this time she submitted.  Her body languid and her mind seemingly detached, I saw at that moment the dissonance between them, and I realized then that they were never lovers but man and wife trapped in marital hell. 

When Steph and I kissed for the first time, I asked her if she had any hard liquor to calm my nerves.  “I do but we should just do this.  It’ll be okay,” she said stroking my jaw.

“I don’t even know where to start,” I replied.

“Just close your eyes and I’ll take care of the rest.” 

She moved herself closer to me, our bodies contorting and molding into the single-seat, cream-colored, La-Z-Boy armchair, legs crisscrossing into a braid, with her back exposed and adhered to the leather surface.  As our lips touched, she slipped me her tongue.  It flailed frenziedly in my mouth, writhing and swimming through pools of our exchanging saliva, manically thrusting as if trying to escape hers and establish a new habitat within mine.  I opened my eyes to look at her face, my lips and tongue moving haphazardly as I tried to discover the rhythm behind kissing.  Her eyes were still closed, her eyebrows furrowed and concentrative, telling an obvious tale of her frustration as she attempted to find the natural order in our mouth dance.  I wondered what she was thinking as I stared at her eyelids, pondered if she knew that her face from this proximity was bulbously distorted, as if I were looking at her through a fishbowl.  Even then she was gorgeous. 

When we finished she leaned back and smiled. “See, that wasn’t so bad,” she said, her face flushed sanguine. 

“Yeah, can we do it again?” 

“I have a better idea,” she said, and Steph pulled me so close her tits were pressing against my chest.     

Sex to my parents is an act of necessity—nothing else.  Babies turned to infants, to talking children, to snide teens, to working adults, to a walking 401(k) plan with living benefits.  Children are their way of securing a comfortable retirement.  Doctors, lawyers, engineers and pharmacists make for the best pension plans.  My B.A. in Art History from State, “Not even a U.C. at least,” my parents often reminded me, is useless.   

When Steph and I had sex for the first time, I used condoms a friend gave me.  It was expiring the following month and to my ecstatic relief, I didn’t have to put one on and pleasure myself, again, so it wouldn’t feel like another prophylactic gone to waste.  I remember feeling the warmth of her inside while thinking to myself: Holy crap!  I’m finally having sex!  On the night she took my virginity, we listened to Cowboy Junkies.  The riff on the guitar of the opening song, liberating my twenty years of chastity, strung out a deep and heavy: DUUUUNNN!

A year later, I gave her herpes. 

“God, what’s going on down there?  It freakin’ burns,” Steph said. 

“Really?  That’s weird.” 

“Yeah, really,” she said, her eyes bulging as if it were about to jump out from its sockets.  “Here, do me a favor and take a look.”  She quickly rubbed her crotch to soothe the discomfort and proceeded to undress.   

As she stood bent over, hands propped on the bed frame for stability, underwear pulled midway and resting on her thighs, we speculated: A rash?  No.  Razor burn?  Unlikely. Yeast infection?  No discharge.  It resembled the infection I had around my mouth: three raw sores, gray in color, accompanied by an intense itching sensation.

“Any clue?” she asked me.  I knew the truth but couldn’t face the fact that I had given my girlfriend an S.T.D. 

“No, but get that checked.  It looks pretty bad,” I told her, and pulled up her underwear to conceal my shame.

###

At thirty-three, two years after giving birth to me, my mom had to get an emergency hysterectomy.  After four pregnancies, her body had had enough and her fertility was on the wane, disappearing with it her sense of respect and womanhood. 

“Why am I bleeding so much?” she asked my dad on that cold October morning, when she awoke to their bed sheets soaked luridly with her blood. 

“I don’t know, but you better clean that up.”  He didn’t turn his head or open his eyes when he responded.

“Your useless,” she said, “lying there on your stomach, in your underwear while I’m bleeding to death.”  My mom told me the story when I was older.  About her frustration and hatred and disgust for the man she called her husband—and my father. 

“Your father didn’t give a shit,” she told me in Vietnamese. “He didn’t care that his wife bled straight through her pants.  No, he didn’t care.  Your grandparents had to take me to the hospital, and you know where he was,” she paused and stared at me, her face surprisingly stolid when she continued, “playing cards and drinking with his damn friends.” 

She told me about how she waited for his visits that never came.  How she cried herself to sleep at night in her hospital bed at St. Alexis, how the pain was so excruciating it felt like she was being ripped out from the inside, and how she didn’t eat and didn’t understand the Filipina nurses when they asked her how she was doing.  My mom hated every hour she was there, her feeling of worthlessness heightened by her seclusion, she made the choice to try and kill herself by stopping her intake of fluids.  The IV drip line dangling, and her heart and pride destroyed, she ripped out the needle with the tube attached and waited for a death that never came.  She didn’t know that it wasn’t enough, and that her attempt was futile.  She didn’t realize that it takes more than loneliness to correct a dysfunctional marriage.   

Your father didn’t give a shit. It plays repeatedly in my head, the power of her voice not broken as she spoke derisively about her disdain towards my dad.  She was right.  He’d reaped his bounty and gotten his full use out of her, four kids, the uterus and the woman that contained it no longer had any value to him. 

This was one of the few times my Mom spoke to me in Vietnamese.  She prefers to converse with me in broken English because she thinks that’s the only language I understand, reserving Vietnamese for when she feels it necessary that her story be told with an accurate perspective.     

###



I cried vehemently, choking and gasping on my words like a child with scraped knees when Steph told me the news after her Planned Parenthood appointment.  It took me several attempts before I was able to say I’m sorry.  My words over the phone’s receiver sounded more like an unharmonious gargled bray of sound rather than a coherently articulated apology.  When she came over we sat in her ’87 blue Volvo, staring down my empty street as I smoked cigarettes and apologized again.  We made a pact that day to stay together, sparing her the embarrassment of having to tell a new boyfriend she’s infected with strain-one vaginal herpes.

A year and a half after that she dumped me.  This time, I didn’t cry.  I just held her in my arms and told her, “We’ll always be friends,” giving her a kiss on the forehead as I gazed at her face while snot ran down her sharp nose, and tears flushed out of her sullen eyes. 

“Best friends?” she asked.

“I promise,” I replied, sitting on the den floor of my parent’s house, surrounded by unused exercise equipment and housewares we bought at IKEA for our future apartment.

###

When my parents arrived in California, they rented a two-bedroom shanty in Livermore.  Located approximately forty miles east of San Francisco, twenty-miles west of Tracy, and fifty miles from the central valley farming life my mom tried so desperately to escape from in Viet Nam.  My grandparents arrived three months prior and when my Mom asked where all the Vietnamese people were, my grandpa told her, “None here, we’ll just have to make do.” 

This was a problem.  While my dad was privileged enough to grow up in the city and learn English in Saigon and befriend American GIs, my mom was confined to a country shack with twelve other family members.  “There was no time to learn the white language if that meant letting the fruitful fields of rice go fallow,” she told me.  My mom was dependant on my dad and his parents for support.  Cooking and cleaning and fucking my dad was the only life she’d know. 

###

Two years have passed and I’m still single.  I haven’t dated, considered, thought, or had any desire to be in another relationship.  This concerns my mom and she’ll deny it if confronted, but I can see the disappointment in her eyes each time she asks if I have a girlfriend, her face marked with a hopeful expression, only to be denied when she hears no. 

When she gossips with friends, she candidly expresses her resentment about the loss of her job during the dotcom bust, about her annoyance with being married to my dad, and about how she hates worms, but when it comes to me she lies. 

“Yes, he very happy in relationship.  He have many many girlfriend.  So many, I can’t count.”  She smiles and chuckles the way Asian girls are taught when they’re young, with their hands over their mouth to look innocent and demure.  When I catch her, she quickly changes her expression, but still sly in her maneuver so that her friends remain unsuspecting throughout her display. 

It’s an act that has always intimidated me as a kid.  Her eyes quickly widen, no longer small and squinty but predatorily preemptive and grimacing as if she were an animal ready to pounce on her prey.  She then waves her hand at me—it’s her final strike—tested, perfected and proven effective, her silent gesture putting me into submissive respect.  It’s her way of saying: Don’t worry, I’m doing this for you, so shut-up and play along.

I try putting her at ease, reminding her that I’m only twenty-six and finding a new girl will happen when the time is right, but it probably scares her that her son doesn’t show any present interest.  It probably worries her that she might not get a set of grandkids from my loins. That she might not be able to feed them, for lunch, rice with fish sauce and Chinese sausages.  To pinch their little purebred Vietnamese cheeks and give them snorting kisses before she puts them down for naptime, telling them stories of the old country and how communism is no good.  I tell her she just has to wait.  She scowls at me and dismisses my comment.  I tell my mom that my brother and sisters will have kids, but she’s greedy and wants mine.  I try letting her know that everything will work out and how not being in a relationship is very freeing, “It’s like those reeducation camp stories you always tell me about.  How when people escaped they would say, It good to be free.  Vietcong very bad.”  She doesn’t find my method of correlation amusing. 

         “Many people die.  Don’t joke because you don’t want to find girl,” she says, hitting me on the back of my hands to correct my disrespect. 

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry,” I tell her.  She disagrees.

“When I your age, I already have three kid.  I married, have home and take care of both grandparent.  You know what problem is?  I spoil you too much,” she says as she puts her hands over her face, sighing dramatically to make sure I’m aware of her stress.  I proceed to walk away when she pulls me back.  “Where you going?  I not done talking.  All I ask is you find a nice and pretty girl for Mommy.  Why it so hard?”

“Enough,” I said, slamming my fist on the glass tabletop.  “Stop pressuring me because you married a fuck-up and think that I can redeem you.  I’m not getting a fuckin’ girlfriend so get off it.”  I readied myself to feel the justice of her hand, but the impact never came.  The conversation was over, and she bowed her head gracefully in tempered resignation—never speaking to me about girls again.                   

###

I was nineteen when my mom left him.  It wasn’t the alcoholism or laziness or cops or attempted stabbings that caused attrition.  These acts were daily life.  A routine of automated action.  She learned to deal with him in this respect a long time ago, while their relationship was still straddling the horizon of love and obligation.  It was my dad’s inconsistency that made her leave him.  The unpredictability of whether or not my mom forgetting to dry the dishes, or salt the fish, or sweep the floors would incite rage.  It was the game she resented that made her trash the dice.  The constant wondering of whether she would have a chance to brace herself before the thud of my dad’s clammy hands made contact with her face.  She had gambled her life away.  For thirty-three years she rolled the dies of marriage, each time hoping for jackpot double six, cupped tightly in her hand she blew soft whispers for deliverance, and was fucked over again with the snake eyes’ stare.  She was done playing. 

Steph and I tried the friend thing too when we broke up.  Our phone conversations were brief, always ending in me asking if we could have sex.  Her response was always the same: “Absolutely not.”  But I figured it was worth a try.  It was difficult for me to accept that it was really over and she knew this.  What she didn’t know was that in my free time I stalked her MySpace page and read her emails and checked her phone calls in our couples call plan, rationalizing in my head that it was acceptable since we once planned to get married.

Four weeks after our breakup, as I was looking through her call logs, I found a phone number with unusually extensive talk times:

09/12/06 8:23PM  Incoming Call  [phone]  78MIN

09/13/06 2:47PM    Outgoing Call  [phone]  106MIN

09/13/06 9:06PM    Outgoing Call  [phone]  42MIN

09/15/06 7:13PM    Incoming Call  [phone]  92MIN

09/16/06 12:01AM  Outgoing Call  [phone]  23MIN

09/16/06 8:16PM  Outgoing Call  [phone]  113MIN

09/17/06 10:27PM  Outgoing Call  [phone]  44MIN

I went home and reverse searched the number.  It was this guy name Mark—his parent’s house to be exact.  I heard of him before, a long time friend with an obtuse nose and facial features ten years his actual age.  I called her immediately to find out if they were dating.  She didn’t answer.  I called ten times after that before leaving messages. 

8:42 PM

Can you give me a call when you get a chance?  I want to ask you about a song and I can’t remember the artist.  Hope you’re doing well. 

9:10 PM

Uh, I haven’t heard from you yet, not sure where you are or if you busy but give me a call.  I’ll be up all night. 

9:44 PM

I text: Where are you?  Are you fucking someone else?  Call me.  Please. 

When she finally returned my calls, I tried to contain my anger.  I asked her where she was, “Marks,” she said.  I screamed, calling her a cheating slut.  She reminded me that we’re broken up, and that she’d a right to see whomever she wanted. 

“How can you go off and already be fucking another guy?  It hasn’t even been a month.”

“Calm down, I’m not.  Stop acting crazy,” Steph said.   

“How can I fuckin’ calm down when you’re talking to this guy every goddamn night,” I said, my voice and hands shaking with spit flying uncontrollably out of my mouth.   

“We’re not doing anything, so don’t go getting all pissy on me.”

I knew she was lying.  I could tell by her long pauses, the hesitation in her voice before each sentence, and how she stumbled as she tried to calculate her words wisely.

“Then tell me Steph, what the hell are you doing at his house?  You know, besides spreading your fucking legs to him.”

“There you go again, thinking you’re so goddamn right about everything, Tien.  I just told you nothing’s going on, and it’s not my problem that you’re fuckin’ fool and don’t believe me,” she said in a pitchy voice.  “If you’re gonna act like a little bitch than do it alone.  I don’t wanna see, or talk, or deal with your face ever again.  You are absolute bullshit.”

The phone went silent, only broken by the sporadic bursts of static let off by the cordless headset searching for a clear channel.  I heard the dial tone.  Followed by the rapid beeping.  Then silence again.  The phone line was dead—and I was alone.

###

My dad couldn’t accept life without her.  He found out from his sister where we were staying and everyday, for a year, he’d drive through our neighborhood in his beat up ’88 Corolla and try to catch glimpses of my mom.  We could hear him coming from down the street, the cacophonous clanking of his car’s front axel as he made ueys for another cycle.  Like clockwork, eleven-fifteen p.m. every night, he’d hastily shuffle through on his way home from work.  It was the only time in his life he was consistent and dependable.  He was never man enough to knock on the door; he was waiting for my mom to make the move, to tell him everything’s resolved and we’re coming home. 

“Dad’s a pussy,” I said.

“Respect your father.” 

“He’s an asshole.”

A year after my mom left him she received a letter in the mail. 

“I thought it was divorce papers,” she said, “but he wrote to apologize.” 

That smooth bastard charmed his way back into her life, I thought.  My dad seduced her with the same tactics he used before they were married, but this time instead of tamarind candy, he gifted ginseng vitality tea and the promise of a life without abuse.  Just like the first time she believed him, and a week later, we were packed and ready to go back.  She was fifty-two, impressionable, and lonely. 

###

When Steph came by to pick up her things, she was with a fat guy wearing a yellow shirt and baseball cap.  It wasn’t Mark.  I’m not sure who he was.  I watched through the peephole as they loaded tables and chairs and books and art posters.  I watched through the tiny perspective of one closed eye as the girl that I once loved, and wanted to marry, and wanted to mother my children walk away—never to be seen again—with all the things that we had treasured, for the life and future we once wanted together.

Two days later when I checked her emails, I found out that she was calling me names like drama queen, bitch d’jour, and creepy.  I wanted to set things proper, but I knew it was already too late.  Unlike my dad, there was no second chance.  Three-and-a-half years after declaring my love I was writing again, only this time—I was saying goodbye. 

I'm sorry that things ended up this way, I said.  I know my words mean nothing but I hope you have a good life.  I'm genuine when I tell you this because I don't wish bad things upon anyone in a world already completely fucked up.  You were a fun girl and definitely worth the wait.  It’s unfortunate we hate each other now, but I’ll always look back and think about how lucky I was to score with a fairly cute Italian that I met while working at the animal shelter. 

You took my virginity and I gave you herpes, we definitely live in a cruel and ironic world.  You gave me head before every act of intercourse and hell, even let me shoot a load in your mouth once in a while.  Thanks. 

I gave you—what I hope to be—some of the best orgasms you'll ever experience in your life.  I showed you that oral sex can be great, and gave you your first—and possibly last—ass-lick job.

If you're still reading, you're probably creeped out, confused, and even disgusted.  What the hell was the point of all this?  Honestly, I don't know, I guess since we'll never speak again, I no longer give a shit and thought I'd leave you doing what I know best—making people uncomfortable, but don't mistake this for love sweetheart—we're beyond that. 

What I'm trying to say is fuck all this bullshit.  Fuck me and my 'why do you hate me?' attitude.  Fuck my insecurities, fears and eventual failures.  Fuck the fact that I think too goddamn much, worry about everything, overanalyze the unnecessary, and care to the point where it turns me into a douchebag.  Fuck you and your pussy.  Fuck your manipulation, fuck your height in heels, your sex moans that use to turn me on, your baked goods that I’ll never again get to enjoy (and that no girl will ever be able to make as good as you), fuck the fact that you're Italian, your olive skin in the summer, your beautiful yet gummy smile, sunken eyes, and the fact that you're probably still prettier than you'll ever realize, but remain your same humble self you stubborn bitch.

You know, when we're older we'll look back at all this and laugh at how seriously stupid we were because this was our first serious relationship and we both acted like idiots.  Eventually, we’ll put aside our ideals, settle for someone that’ll make us happier than we could ever make each other, and think about the practical rather than the trivial.  We'll laugh about how much we used to hate each other, and feel bad for making our friends listen to all this bullshit that they've already been through.  We'll realize that we were both to blame, but will brush it off since it no longer matters. 

Then when we're thirty and married, you'll be glad you left me because you found that guy who will buy you the house you've always wanted—the one with the balcony-like open stairway, providing an aerial view of the foyer.  And of course, I'll be happy since I married a girl that finally understands me and wants the same things in life as me.  My wife and I will drink ourselves blurry in our home overlooking the city lights.  We’ll smile at the good life, with our two kids fast asleep with the family dogs in their beds.  In the distant future, on some slim circumstance, we may even speak to each other again.  I doubt it though, one of us has too much pride and the other lacks dignity—it’ll never work.

I guess the point of all this is to say I'm an idiot, but you're not far behind.  We’re stupid, stubborn, calculative and idealistic, and that’ll never change.  If anything, I've learned that I don't have to take everything so seriously.  I don't have to push for everything, and competing to have my word be the final say only causes trouble.  I hope for your sake, you’ve learned how to compromise, apologize, and try things that you may have been hesitant about before.  I know you can do it, I've seen you act this way toward your friends many times.  I guess the problem is that in our relationship we acted completely different.  Around my friends, I'm a chill guy that goes with the flow and rarely gets riled up over small things.  Around your friends, you are actually a really funny, not-so-boring, and somewhat adventurous girl.  If we can just translate that behavior to our future relationships, we'll be good. 

I'm positive you'll be discussing this with your friends.  You’ll talk about how I need help, why I can't leave you alone, and even speculate how I stalk you.  The only favor I ask is that when you tell your side of the tale, remember—we're both assholes. 

###

Seven years have passed and things haven’t changed between them.  My dad tries to be a good husband but old habits are hard to quell.  They still don’t love each other, and he still drinks and treats my mom like shit.  I asked her why she took him back and my mom just shakes her head and gives me the same excuse: “There’s no love on the Mekong Delta.”  She tells it like a song in a ceaseless repeat, I just stand there listening not knowing what to say.  The repetition of her words rewind and replay in my head: There’s no love on the Mekong Delta.  It sounds like a bad musical chorus sung with only one verse, each time the lyricism of the line becomes increasingly exaggerated to accentuate the narrative.  There’s no love on the Mekong Delta: It’s my mom’s eulogy for love, her version of loss, and the story reverberates through—again and again.