Anam

I. MICHAELMAS

C

(If I think of my grandparents now, after all this writing and reading and imagining and remembering, two couples are thrown into relief, their outlines like clay figures in the mud where so many others are failing to resist the ebb and flow of forgetting. Both couples are elderly and Vietnamese and live in an apartment outside Paris with their eldest daughter. Both couples have been together sixty years, through two wars, and many separations. Both speak to me in a mix of Vietnamese, French, and a smattering of English. But one couple speak to me of suffering, loss, exile, forgiveness and redemption, and the other couple do not. Instead they are always laughing, with each other and at me, pinching, touching, feeding me, looking at me, shaking their heads and chastising me, praising my plumpness and my height and my grades. This second couple is harder to write but easier to remember. I think of them as saying to me over and over again, We want you to be. And also, Why don’t you marry that poor girl? And, When are you taking the bar exam? And always, Eat up, Why aren’t you eating, Finished already? I’ve been trying for a long time to bring the two couples together in my mind, or at least to avoid having to choose between them. And just now, thinking of them, I remember the visit that my grandmother and I paid to my grandfather one late afternoon when he was on his deathbed. He was in a clean, beige room in a public hospital a train and a bus away from their daughter’s apartment. He patted the side of the bed for my grandmother to come sit by him, and I asked them once again about the story, expecting them to tell me the usual things. Instead they chose to sing, something they had never done before, and would never do again, an old jazz standard: I remember you… But even as I was fumbling to record them on my phone, they were already finishing, lapsing into wrinkled smiles, so that the recording I have is nothing but silence.)

D

This will be the last time that I will have begun again – the last, because I will have learnt to see what I failed to see at the beginning. I will have learnt to see that a muddy swamp can be called a fen, that not knowing where you’re going can be a virtue, and that walking is a kind of perfection. I will have learnt to see that the dilapidated rental we left behind in Footscray will always be the house where we first bathed our daughter, washing off the blood and muck with which she arrived, and I will have learnt that after Cambridge we will return to that house in Footscray after all, and that, in time, it will also be where we first bathe our son, washing off the blood and muck with which he arrives. I will have learnt that the robes we matriculated in at Cambridge, hired from the college’s graduate student association, were actually cheap polyester, that most of the books in the many libraries in which I will have sat have never and will never be read, and that the past is no more a home than any of the string of place names with which my family is entangled could be a home: Hung-Xa, Hanoi, Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Laon, Paris, Boissy, Cambridge, Footscray. I will have learnt that we walk, as Paul said, by faith and not by sight. I will have learnt to stop stopping – that is, to stop waiting while stopped. I will have learnt, instead, to wait while walking, to walk without expectation of arriving and yet still be ready to arrive at any moment. In the end I will have learnt – or remembered, if there’s any difference – how to live. Or, at least, I will have learnt what we receive from our ancestors and what we pass on to our children – what we give them, even as we wash away the blood and muck with which they arrived.

1

We are walking in the meadows halfway between Cambridge and Grantchester. To our left, the river Cam, narrow and deep, winds its way towards town. It’s a fine autumn day, six months after I’d nearly lost them both, and the scene is dreamily bucolic: a canoe or two travelling upriver, a birdwatcher with binoculars trained on some bird of prey – a windhover, probably – beating at the gentle currents with its great wings, a silver-haired walker in Hunters and country coat, all bathed in weak English sunshine. Edith is asleep in the carrier on my back, which is so well designed that I can forget for lengthy stretches that she is even there, as if it is just the two of us again – Lauren and me.

As we walk through the meadows in silence, I remember the crowd of doctors in scrubs that suddenly appeared in the delivery room, the way they stood around Edith’s body – though she wasn’t Edith yet – on the table in the corner as I dumbly held Lauren’s hand; I remember the machine they wheeled in, a big plastic tube on wheels, the way the doctors spoke with quiet authority as they put not-yet-Edith inside and began to wheel her away; I remember the way the last doctor stopped at the door and looked back at me as if to say, Aren’t you coming? I let go of Lauren’s hand and followed, still mute.

I don’t know how much of this she remembers. But maybe it’s not so important to remember everything. Maybe there are reasons to forget.

As we enter the village of Grantchester, past a herd of grazing cows who pay us no mind, Lauren asks me if I’ve settled on a topic for my thesis.

At the beginning of term, Simons, my international law professor, told the class that in lieu of sitting the exam we could choose to submit a thesis. He meant a dissertation, an essay. A medium-length piece of writing duly researched and footnoted. He meant a very minor contribution to scholarship – a reappraisal of the doctrine of state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts as it appeared in the American–Mexican Claims Commission, or tracing the evolution of free-flow-of-data clauses in bilateral trade agreements. These are the kind of topics, I say to Lauren, that might tip the balance in my favour for a pupillage at one of the London chambers, or a traineeship at one of the international arbitration firms.

And that’s what you want, says Lauren, somewhere between a statement and a question.

It’s what everyone here wants, I say. The other students, they’re all Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Indians.

The best the Commonwealth has to offer.

Back to the imperial bosom for validation, says Lauren.

And a golden ticket to stay on in the City, I say. Or clerk for a judge in the Hague.

Just so long as you don’t return to whatever backwater you came from, right?

At a pub in Grantchester, as I eat my first ever Yorkshire pudding,

Lauren asks again about the thesis. I don’t respond right away, lost in a trailing thought about Wittgenstein – he’d completed this same walk many times to take tea with Bertrand Russell at the Orchard, a nearby tearoom. Beside us Edith sits in her high chair, squeezing a slice of
avocado into a pulp in her fist.

A thesis, I say, is also a theory, an idea. And I have one of those, even if it isn’t something that will get me a job:

Forgetting is complicity. Remembering is complicity. Making art is complicity. Living in the world, pursuing material gain, buying a house you can’t afford: complicity. Starting a family, putting down roots is complicity; migration, travel, too. Hope is complicity, but so is despair. Asking, What is to be done? is complicity. Not asking is complicity. Being a human rights lawyer is complicity. Loving my daughter.

I imagine I am already hearing Lauren’s response: Complicity in what? Complicit how? Why don’t you just say what you mean? And why can’t you say it without referencing someone else? But instead she says, Then what are we doing here?

Winner of the 2024 PM’s Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin, Anam can be found here.