My mother stopped speaking to me when I was four years old.

She still did all the mother things. She made me kai palo for dinner with mango sticky rice for dessert, she helped me onto the school bus and tickled me to gasping when I got home, she let me fit myself into the curl of her body when I woke up in the middle of the night scared that the dark may have swallowed me away. In those early days when her silence was new, I would reach my fingers into her mouth and grope for words that would never come again. I would stamp my foot on her toes while she gentled her hands over my hair. Once, I slapped her face until we both wept. I could hear her late at night, murmuring with my father as I lost the timbre of her voice, as I alone was cast adrift in a great forgetting.

Eventually I stopped asking thamai, thamai, and started asking why, why. Eventually I stopped asking at all. I stopped showing her my little hurts, skinned knees and piercing slivers. I stopped drawing her pictures to hang on the fridge. I stopped taking her egg, scallion, and fish sauce omelet to school because I couldn't endure how the other kids staged dramatic death scenes when I opened my tupperware, how they fell on the floor and lay still, hands frozen in a shield before their delicately pointed white noses. I stopped looking to my mother; I stopped looking at my mother. I started looking through her. When I got my period for the first time, I waddled around in a makeshift toilet paper diaper until a box of pads appeared tucked under my pillow as if by some pii, some haunt, some echo.

Decades later, I was a speech-language pathologist and a mother who never stopped yammering at her kids. If they couldn't know Thai because I had none to impart, then we would learn Spanish together with Daddy's help. If they squirmed away when I tried to tell them stories, I would read them dinosaur facts from the backs of cereal boxes. If they tired of hearing my voice, too bad.

On parent-teacher night, Tomás handled second grade to talk about B—'s trouble with common core math, and I went to F—'s kindergarten classroom to lean on Mrs. O'Halloran about incorporating some Spanish lessons between all the fingerpainting and storytime. When I arrived, I stuck my hand out to shake hers and she called me Mrs. Dávila.

"It's Dr. Thawarnkhon, actually," I said. Mrs. O'Halloran's smile grew false and brittle in that way some white people have, where they decide on the spot they're going to fuck up your name, so I smiled with teeth and pulled out my placating voice. "But I'll answer to Lilac in a pinch."

She kept staring at me with that rictus grin and I kept pumping the limp fish of her hand. We were our own glitching video.

"You know," she said just as I resolved to fake my death for an escape, "I think I was your pre-K teacher, back when I was so green there were practically sprouts growing out my ears." She issued a strange, inverted laugh, sucking in air to scrape along her larynx. "Unless there's a real stampede of Lilac Towercorns out there."

"Miss Patton," my mouth supplied without the input of my brain. She had been big-haired and bright-lipped, instructing us to sit Indian-style on the floor while she sang us our ABCs, helping us trace the letters in our names, cutting out paper snowflakes for us to color. The former Miss Patton buzzed like the girl she once was and clasped my shoulders.

"Oh, what a treat," she said. "You know, you can be at it so long all your students run together, but there are some names you never forget. Guess it pays off sometimes!"

"Sorry, what pays off?"

"Having such a wild name! So interesting, you know? Something to spice things up between all the Johnsons and Smiths and Kowalcyks. Vietnamese, right?"

"Actually, I'm—"

"It was so funny," she said, rooting me in place by the clutch of papery hands, "you'd talk to me in Vietnamese, and I had no idea what you were saying! I had to call your house, but your mom would pick up and it was the same thing all over again." She sucked in more laughter. "Eventually I got with the program and called when I could talk to your dad. By the end of the year you were speaking perfect English! For a preschooler." A wink. "And look at you now! Not even an accent, can you believe it?"

She clucked her tongue and gazed into my face with eyes full of her heart. The way my father did when I got into NYU. The way my mother did when I told her I was leaving her.


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