(originally published Feb. 26, 2011)
For Christmas one year, my sister bought my mother a copy of Brigette Bardot’s biography, Initiales B.B. In French, no less. I sort of knew that my mother was a Bardot fan, the way I sort of know her birthday and sort of know about her life before we moved to the United States.
What I know for sure about my mother: she keeps all the books we gave her on the headboard of her waterbed; she likes Sidney Sheldon novels; she watches adaptations of Sidney Sheldon novels on the same television where, every evening, we watched the news and, on Wednesday nights, Dynasty, and, once a year, the Miss Universe pageant.
When I was young, I scoured the TV Guide, looking for her favorite movie. I found it once—the listing so small it was an inky smudge—showing in the wee hours, and I was so excited I wanted to stay up and watch it with her. But I fell asleep during a commercial, around the point where the heroine falls off a mountain during a ski race, breaks her back, and is paralyzed from the shoulders down.
Years later, of course, I realized the movie my mother liked was The Other Side of Midnight and not The Other Side of the Mountain. But she watched with me anyway.
I don’t know if my mother saw And God Created Women. She would have been about 24 when it was released. She still lived in Vietnam then—or she could have been at Southern Illinois University, I’m not sure which. What I know of Vietnamese history of that time includes: 1) the French being driven out of Vietnam; 2) the Geneva Accords splitting the country in half; and 3) the mass exodus of Northerners fleeing southward, bringing phở with them.
Had my mother already met my father by then? I don’t know. In the dining room back home (Aurora, Colorado, not Vietnam), there’s a black-and-white photograph of my mother. She wears a white áo dài, like a schoolgirl’s. Her face is tilted down towards the left, and the soft light picks out a luminous feature. Her nose. Her cheekbone. She’s possibly as young as Bardot herself when she starred in And God Created Women. Director and then-husband Roger Vadim writes of Bardot: “She comes from another dimension…. That’s down to her presence, which comes from outer space somewhere.”
My mother calls regularly, and I return them irregularly. She calls with news, with gossip, or just to talk. Her voice reverses time: here we are watching Alexis and Krystal getting into another catfight. Miss Venezuela wins again? But the conversation now veers towards different topics: her weakening knees, the regimen of capsules and multivitamins that she dutifully splits with a plastic pill-cutter. As she speaks, I imagine her sitting up in bed, phone extension in hand, leaning against all the books I’ve bought her: intergenerational Asian mother-daughter sagas, Vietnamese novels in translation, poetry—the unread stories in our lives.