Song of the Ocean

Category C: Second Place (2024) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Cathy La

Before my grandmother stopped recognising me, she would tell me stories of Saigon. 

As we sat on the beach, she would pull her shoes off and massage her feet, complaining about her bunions.

‘You know, kid’, she would say, ‘you wouldn’t believe your eyes if you saw the beaches back home.’

She would describe them to me again and again. The fine, white sand that would glitter in the sunlight. The waters coloured a shade of turquoise unlike anything she had seen here. She would shake her head then, and say that I wouldn’t understand, that I couldn’t possibly comprehend such beauty. I would then sit there, peeved at how patronising she could be, but these were the things I eventually came to miss.

My grandmother liked to talk to the ocean as if it were a person – she would greet the water and ask it how it was doing. She would walk up to the water’s edge as the waves came in and kissed her feet. You could see her listening, truly listening, like she could hear the answer in the wind or the waves. Most of the time, I reduced this to the behaviour of a senile old woman. But sometimes, I believed her. In those moments, I believed that anything was possible - that something insentient could represent something as full as a life.  

I later learnt that my grandmother came to speak to Hai, who had been laid to rest decades ago on a foreign island.

Hai had come into the world screaming.

He had cried so loud that the nurses claimed that it must be a good omen, a sign of vitality and longevity. As he kicked and thrashed about, my mother was born fifteen minutes later, with a cry that was comparatively soft, the calm after the storm. She was named ‘Song’, meaning ‘river’ in our mother tongue, and her brother ‘Hai’, meaning ‘ocean’.

Being the oldest son of the family, Hai was always given the biggest piece of meat at dinner. He was expected to be strong, and he was. As his body stretched and grew, he was able to catch more fish, chop more firewood, carry more weight. Of course, Song was vividly aware that she lived in her brother’s shadow, but she adored him nonetheless, for she knew that his greatest strength was his soul. The people of their village respected Hai because he chose to share the fish he caught, to chop extra pieces of firewood for the elderly, and to befriend the children who had lost their brothers and fathers in the war.

The twins laughed and panted as they raced to the village well, the sides of their buckets slapping against their thighs. Hai got to the well first, filling his bucket with water. Song, reaching the well out of breath, did the same. She then took her bucket and raised it until it sat atop her head.

‘Race you back,’ she said, giving herself a head start. She heard Hai laugh and call her a cheater, but she didn’t take the time to look back at him.

The two of them walked briskly but steadily, focusing on anything but the weight of the water. Hai tried to strike up conversation, but Song gave little response, for she was determined to win.

At one point, the toe of her sandal dug into a tree root, breaking her stride. The water sloshed aggressively as she tried to readjust her stance, but the weight of the bucket proved too much. It fell to the ground, taking it with her.  

Song slowly stood up, brushing the dirt off her pants, and gave Hai a look of defeat as he turned around carefully. She picked up her empty bucket, eyeing the pool of water sinking into the earth.

Hai brought his own bucket down, then, and tipped half of its water into hers. Wordlessly, the two of them continued to walk home.

As expected, they came home to a scolding. They were both too tired to carry more, Hai said in their defense.

When Song thought of home, she thought of this.

As night fell, she would walk out with an oil lamp in hand, swatting moths and mosquitos away. Hai would bring his guitar, while people around the neighbourhood came out and started a fire, inviting others to sit. The light from the fire always gave their faces an extra dimension of warmth and joy as they followed the tune of the guitar and sang folk songs together.

But everything the light touched sat against a dark backdrop. Their country was in turmoil, and that reality always remained there, lurking.

It was April of 1975 when the war ended. North Vietnamese tanks rolled southward, flying the red and blue flag of the Communist party. In the months and years that came, Saigon saw an exodus of people fleeing the new regime.

For Song, everything seemed hazy then, as she tried to reconcile what this would all mean for her and everything she knew. What remained vivid was the memory of leaving home, and the way time seemed to still for a bit on that final day. She found herself staring at the doorways, memorising their height and arch. She wanted to remember all of it. The colour of the paint on the walls, and how they peeled in certain places. The dappled sunlight, and the way it fell on their yellowed tiles. Most importantly, she wanted to remember her brother. The way he held the neck of his guitar, a soft touch of longing, before leaving it to rest against the wall.

That was the last time she ever saw him smile.

Their boat was like the rest of them - dingy and packed like a can of sardines. As they crammed in with dozens of others, Song and her family made sure to huddle together throughout their journey. They spoke little, though, as if to conserve their energy.

On their second day at sea, Song found herself pushed against the hull, leaning over to dry heave, again and again. If it wasn’t the seasickness that overwhelmed her at any given moment, it was the hunger, or the very real possibility that they would be discovered and attacked by pirates.

So when the palm trees that lined the coast of Bidong Island came into view, she thought that she was hallucinating.

The family was allocated a makeshift hut crafted from sheets of timber and plastic - materials that had been salvaged from wrecked boats. Although the conditions on the island were almost as dismal as what they had experienced out at sea, my mother was simply grateful to rest on land.

But as days and weeks passed, the reality of their temporary life on the island appeared grim. Many people fell ill, as the unsanitary living conditions of the refugee camp tested their already malnourished bodies. Medication remained scarce while something called ‘hepatitis’ ran rampant. The name meant little to them then, but anyone could see that Hai had it. His face was gaunt and washed over in a yellow hue as he experienced bouts of diarrhea.

As Hai’s body became increasingly frail, he begged his family not to worry about him.

That's how he would always be remembered – as someone who remained strong, even in the face of death.

My mother tells me that coming to this country was the best and worst thing that ever happened to her.

A decade after Hai’s passing, she and her parents had learnt to call Melbourne home. To say that it was difficult would be an understatement. Everything seemed alien at first – the way food tasted, the smell of the air, the way people spoke – but these were all things they came to embrace. Well into her twenties, my mother was making a living from waiting tables and washing dishes, helping her family move out of their housing commission unit and into the peaceful outer suburbs. This was her Australian dream, and it was just important as any other. A part of that dream was missing though, and she could still sense him, from time to time. When chords on a guitar were being played, she felt him. When she found herself standing by the shore, looking out onto the horizon, she thought of him and what it meant to live.

‘I must have been a terrible person in my previous life,’ my mother would say, shaking her head. ‘There really is no way around paying off a karmic debt, you know? The universe will give you hardships, and you just have to take it.’

I would sometimes wonder how I fit into her Buddhist philosophy, if my existence was a blessing or just another hardship. Either way, I prayed that the rest of my mother’s life would be free of suffering.

I prayed and prayed, until dementia came knocking on my grandmother’s doorstep.

It began as a trickling, with the days of the week escaping her as soon as she had lived them. Then it became insidious, growing claws that dug out the softness of her spirit, leaving a hardened shell. I watched as words left her mind before her mouth could form them, her hair unkempt and her clothes unwashed. Hours and hours were spent sitting on the couch, watching soap operas I know she didn’t care about. I would cook her bún riêu, her favourite noodle soup, only to have her slam the table and push the bowl over, the red stock bleeding into our placemats.

Eventually, she forgot my name.

She had settled into the nursing home by then, for better or worse. The routine was always the same, with my mother taking the armchair by her bed, asking her how she was, and my grandmother complaining about something or other.

I had stood to open the window on an especially warm day, winding it open until we could hear the game of bowls being played on the lawn below. I looked down at them, watching their little figures shuffle and bend as they rolled their bowls to and fro. I turned around then, to see her looking at me warily.

‘Who are you?’

And there it was, that dreaded question.

I gave her my name and she took it, rolling it around in her mouth and spitting it out like a foreign object.

That’s how it was from then on, and I accepted it, begrudgingly. She would look at me, always with that blank expression, and I would look back at her. I would stare into her glazed eyes, as if to speak to her telepathically. I wanted her to remember my name. I wanted her to remember the way it sounded, the way she would yell it when she would tell me off, or when she needed a hand with something. I remember the way it rolled off her tongue, softly, as she shook the sand off a conch shell and showed it to me, with its pinks and oranges reflecting like a sunset in the palm of her hand.

‘Someone once told me that you can hear the ocean in one of these,’ she had said, with the innocence of a child. She then placed the opening of the shell against her ear and looked at me before she started to cackle.

The wind was unforgiving that day, as it is today. My mother’s hair is tangled and matted against the sides of her face, which are now wet with tears. She smiles gently, her mouth a wavering, thin line as she faces the water.

With the sand between my toes and my fingers gripping the urn, I think of my grandmother. I think of her resilience, her humour, and the sacrifices she made that led to my own being. I release her and watch as the wind carries her ashes into the ocean.

I release her, and I know that Hai will be there to embrace her with open arms.