Year of the Hare

TERESA CHUC DOWELL

A FETUS

It was 1975, the Year of the Hare, in Saigon, Vietnam. I was a fetus the size of a half-dollar in Mama’s womb, gulping down amniotic fluid, stretching my limbs out into liquid-filled spaces as my heart beat its first beats. An umbilical cord attached to my belly wound its way to Mama’s placenta where the food she ate entered my body the way air enters a diver’s body through a gas tank.

A few months later, I plumped out and she began to tilt forward with my weight as I turned and kicked the inside wall of her belly. She stroked the perimeter of her globe to feel my foot. The war was ending, the U.S. was retreating, and another war was beginning. Mama breathed in yellow as the sun made her dress stick to her skin and she tried not to notice the communist soldiers patrolling the streets. Military helicopters twirled in the sky. Her hand was holding my two-year-old brother’s hand as she walked and wondered about our “baba” (papa), “He was supposed to report to the new regime for ten days, but where is he now? Dead or alive?”

The following year, Mama’s body forced me out. For the next couple of months, she nourished me at her breasts and occasionally I drifted off to sleep while the warm milk flowed through my body. Soon Mama went to work selling soybean juice on the street in front of a hospital while “Por-por” (Maternal Grandma) watched my brother and me. Por-por carried me on her back in a cloth pouch tied around her shoulders and waist and I bounced up and down, knocking out some of her teeth.

An aunt said to Mama, “Why don’t you sell your baby? You don’t have food to eat.” My brother, not understanding that it was a sick joke, replied, “No, don’t sell my sister! Look, there are lots of cockroaches for us to eat!”

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