Who Will Light Incense When Mother’s Gone? by Andrew Lam

Who Will Light Incense When Mother’s Gone?

My mother turned 70 recently, and though she remains a vivacious woman - Her hair is still mostly black, and there is still a girlish twang in her laughter - mortality is nevertheless heavy on her soul. After the gifts were opened and the cake eaten, mother nevertheless whispered this confidence to her younger sister: “Who will light incense to the dead when I’m gone?” My aunt shook her head and said. “Honestly, I don't know. None of my children will do it, and we can forget the grandchildren. They don't even understand what we are doing when we pray to the dead. I guess when we’re gone, the ritual ends.”
Such, alas, is the price for living in America. I myself can't remember the last time I lit incense sticks and talked to my dead ancestors. Having fled so far from Vietnam, I can no longer imagine what to say, or how I should address my prayers, or for that matter what promises I could possibly make to the long departed.
My mother, on the other hand, lives in America the way she would in Vietnam. Every morning in my parents’ suburban home north of San Jose, with a pool shimmering in the backyard, my mother climbs a chair and piously lights a few joss sticks for the ancestral altar which sits on top of the living room's bookcase. Every morning she talks to ghosts.
She mumbles solemn prayers to the spirits of our dead ancestors, and to the all-compassionate Buddha. By contrast, on the shelves below stand my older siblings' engineering and business degrees, my own degree in biochemistry from Berkeley, our combined sports trophies, and, last but not least, the latest installments of my own unending quest for self-reinvention — plaques and obelisk-shaped crystals — my journalism awards. What mother's altar and the shelves beneath it seek to tell is the narrative of many an Asian immigrant family's journey to America.