I Finally Asked My Mother the Truth About Her Life

When Vietnamese parents don’t talk about their private lives, it’s not because they don’t love their children but because they believe love means shielding them from the weight of the past. Silence becomes a form of devotion. But silence also becomes a wall, one that grows thicker every year.

I didn’t realize how thick that wall had become until my own daughter, 10 years old at the time, looked at me one day and asked, “Dad, why don’t you ever talk about your feelings?”

I didn’t have an answer. I only felt the echo, the familiar, inherited quiet, and recognized it for the first time as something I had absorbed without noticing. My mother’s silence had become my own.

Her stories explained everything I had never understood about her: the way she worked without rest, the way she never believed she was enough, the way she held her faith like a lifeline. She prayed every morning, went to Mass, kept her rosary close — but she never spoke about what that faith was carrying. I saw the ritual. I never saw the burden.

One evening, I asked her what she played with as a child. She looked at me as if the question didn’t make sense. Má không chơi gì cả. I didn’t play with anything. I didn’t have time and I didn’t have money.

Then she described something with her hands — a spinning top. She had watched other children play with one. She had wanted to try. But she’d never had one, never had anyone to teach her.

That night, I ordered one online.

When I placed it in her hands, her eyes lit up. Má già rồi. I’m too old. I don’t know how.

I told her I didn’t know either. We could learn together. 

She learned. She made it spin. She laughed — a bright, unguarded laugh I had never heard from her in my entire life.

Then pain shot down her spine, so she took her medicine.

And I sat there thinking about all the years I had not asked. All the questions I had decided were not mine to ask. All the silences I had respected out of love, deference and habit.

I was wrong. The stories were meant for me. She just needed someone to ask.

I am not writing this to assign blame — not to my mother, not to the culture that shaped her, not to myself for the years of not asking. I am writing this because I know there are children of immigrants living inside the same quiet I lived in. Children waiting for their parents to open the door themselves.

The door does not open on its own. And asking is not easy. It requires sitting with answers you don’t know how to hold, and with pain you cannot fix. It requires being willing to hear what they survived before they became your parent. 

Ask the gentle question. Say: “Tell me something about your life that I don’t know.”

You might get khổ lắm. You might get a changed subject and a bowl of soup. 

But ask again. And again. Keep the door open.

Because what they are carrying belongs to you, too. Their story is the foundation of everything you are — the reason you work the way you work, love the way you love, protect the way you protect. The reason you are here at all.

My mother survived a war, an ocean crossing, an abusive marriage, decades of poverty and humiliation in a country that wasn’t sure it wanted her — and survived it all with her faith intact. She almost took that story to her grave without telling me.

I almost let her.

Ask before it’s too late.

The spinning top is still on her table.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.