What’s in a Name?

Chim Lac is an ancient mythological Vietnamese bird that resembles a crane. It is purported to help guide the children of the land to harmony with earth and heaven. To follow brings clarity amongst the cacophony of loud mouths and small hearts. What we create in rhythm with the ultimate metronome of time is eternal. I am now that woman my mother once was, daughters by my side, and a reckoning at my door. These words and works I offer to this journey. To the reunion of heaven and earth.

— Rebecca

But now, almost thirty five years later, a ruminating mind breaks open. I owe the process of living greater reflection and iteration, as lessons of transatlantic resettlement and familial reformation inform my loyalty and love of country and people. Here in Georgia, as much of a motherland as Saigon, I explore being through the spiritual scrutiny, skepticism, and hope of the devoted. Graced with language and the acquisition of definition and meaning in this finite mortal timeline, I am reminded of my moral compass and the cultivation of hope necessary to face villainous purveyors of spectacle and greed.

My given name was Bích Trâm or fancy jade comb. I like to think my birth mother thought of me as something that precious. Her first child, in country that assumed her inferiority and sexual immorality genetic, a particularly well trod piece of ideological baggage, and here now, an Afro-Asian baby girl. I wondered, did she know what we would lose when we left Vietnam? Did she know what we would gain? She died before I would get a chance to ask her any of these questions.