The 'There You Stay Lady'
[Note to the reader: This is a short fictional story that I have written to commemorate International Women’s Day 2021.]
To my mom, my two grandmothers
and all the ‘real’ women in my family.
Have you ever regretted addressing a stranger on the street? I have, many times!
Perhaps because I am a writer, I see strangers with curiosity rather than fear. I feel remorse when I miss the chance to talk to interesting people. So I have made a rule for myself to never avoid a stranger. I came up with this rule after meeting Anthony, in London. Before that, he was yet another stranger I was ignoring, thinking that it was good to apply some self-restraint to my outgoing personality. I had been told too many times that London was a city full of crazy people. That this was not my native Hanoi, in Vietnam. And that it was best that I stayed away from people I don’t know. If Anthony had ever received such advice of self-restraint, he had clearly chosen to ignore it.
“What are you reading?” he asked me this morning when we spoke for the first time.
“Something that I wrote.” I cautiously replied.
That sounded interesting to him. He did not even ask me why I had written something. Clearly, he was not curious about it. Maybe he didn’t even care. He got a bit closer and sat down by my side.
“Read it to me, please”, he said.
This was much more than just some casual conversation. Reading to a stranger is something I would not even do in Hanoi! I thought to myself.
Anthony and I had been enjoying the sunset from the same spot at Regent’s canal, in east London, for weeks. I was curious about him, but my self-restraint prevented me from talking to him. As I ignored my inner calling, I left it all to my imagination, wondering who that African man was and why he was there by himself as often as I was. When the weather is nice and there is the promise of a good sunset, I rush to this spot to perform one of my favourite rituals: reading the last story I have written. For some reason, being there in the open, before the night falls, gives me a clarity I can’t find indoors, during the day.
Regent’s canal, London, 2021.
I started reading the title out loud to him, “‘The ‘There You Stay Lady’.” This was as far as I got. Anthony interrupted me immediately.
“Who is this lady?”, he asked.
I thought he was a bit impatient, to be honest. How can he ask me to read a story and then interrupt me before I can even get to the first sentence?
I explained to him that the lady in question was my grandma. This is how my grandad used to refer to her after she passed away. My grandad was a big storyteller, and he knew a lot better than I did how to build momentum. He had a gift for this. Perhaps this was the reason why he waited until I was 16 years old, after my grandma had passed away, to tell me how he fell in love with her.
The mountains in Northern Vietnam, 2007.
They had met at my ancestral village during a festival to worship the forebears of the big clan living in the village. My grandad never explained to me what happened on that day. Because to him, the only thing that mattered - and what he wanted me to know - was that moment in which he knew he had no way to escape her.
“There you stay!” were the last few words my grandma threw at my grandad when they had a fight a few weeks before getting married. She was pissed at him, apparently, over a dispute on the logistics of leaving the village after their wedding and moving to Hanoi to seek better opportunities. My grandma was true to her words. She walked away from that conversation in the middle of the street, and she refused to see my grandad for quite a few days. An attitude that required a lot of courage for a woman in rural Vietnam in the early 40s. All that was expected from my grandma at the time was to perform her duties as a wife and a mother.
My grandma resisted the pressure from her mom and everyone around her to go back to my grandad. She was convinced it was he who had to apologise. My grandad’s family obviously thought otherwise. They were worried about his reputation if he bowed down to my grandma’s behaviour, which he did. He knew he couldn’t lose someone like her. She mattered too much to him! By trying to get her back, he also earned the respect of my grandma, as well as her heart. Even if that cost him the support of his family.
Hanoi, Vietnam, 2007.
When my grandad shared this story with me, I realised that my grandma’s words “there you stay” embodied all she was as a woman; beyond everyone else’s expectations. And that included her dreams for herself and the type of man she wanted to marry. When she passed away, all that my grandad wanted to remember about her was the woman that she was before they married; before she became a mother and a grandmother. He remembered the independent, free woman only he had the chance to know. After that, she became just a mother and a grandmother. And all that was left of that free spirit stayed within the privacy of my grandma and the moments she shared only with my grandad, as a woman and as a lover.
When my granddad missed her, which happened very often, he would say to me: “‘The ‘there you stay lady’… wait for me in heaven until I am ready to come and join you. In the meantime, I’ll be staying with our family. They still need me here.”
Since the day he shared that story with me, my granddad stopped calling her grandma in front of me. Only to him and me, she was ‘The ‘there you stay lady’. A nickname that he refused to share with anyone else.
A couple of years after my grandma’s passing, when I turned 18 years old, I came to London to study and I never went back to Vietnam. My last visit to Hanoi was just a few months ago, and that was the last time I had the chance to see my grandad smiling and saying to me: “‘The ‘there you stay lady’, keep waiting for me. They still need me here.”
And she did wait for him, until he passed away yesterday, on the same day my boyfriend broke up with me. Anthony interrupted me and asked, “So you feel you did not honour the legacy that your grandad passed onto you from ‘The ‘there you stay lady’… This is why you wrote this story. You are blaming yourself for not showing the woman you are to this boyfriend who ran away on the day you lost your grandad.”
I nodded. He had figured it out. I had nothing else to say.
Anthony quickly broke the silence as he tried to explain that this was not the reason my ex left. Apparently, Anthony’s mom shared some good storytelling talents with my grandad. However, Anthony’s memory was not as good as mine. He tried to excuse himself by raising the fact that he wasn’t a writer, as he shared the moral of a fable his mom told him when he met his wife. Anthony’s mom had chosen to move back to Lagos, in Nigeria, when his dad passed away. As an immigrant, she preferred to live closer to her roots when she became a widow. Consequently, when Anthony was thinking of getting married, his mom wasn’t there for him, in person.
He had forgotten the full story that his mom had told him when he thought he had made a mistake that would take his future wife away from him forever. This is the only thing that stayed with him: “If you love each other, love will never be lost. Whatever happens, you will always find a way back to each other.”
Anthony believed I had misunderstood my grandma’s legacy. And that I had made no mistake. Love wasn’t about my proving myself to anyone, playing games or being persuasive. Love meant finding someone who was able to fall in love with the woman I was.
“Real love is never lost”, he concluded.
“Are you alone? What happened with that woman that was supposed to become your wife?” I asked him.
“We got married, but I have just lost my real love”, he answered.
“What? Why? You have just told me real love is never lost!”, I exclaimed.
“Well, there is an exception”, Anthony said. “When you close your eyes to the real person you have in front of you. And you don’t want to see how lucky you are to have real love in front of you… then real love is lost.”
He took a little pause, before he continued, “I did not want to see the real woman I had in front of me, even though she was there to see me. Eventually she slowly faded away, until I lost her.”
I interrupted him quickly, “Wait a second Anthony, your sunset ritual… you are coming here to see your mom! Did she pass away recently and now that she is gone, do you think you owe her?”
He nodded as he shared, “I wonder if my dad ever saw her as the real woman she was. We, her children, failed at doing that. To us she was just our mom. So I am determined to come here every day when there is a beautiful sunset, to honour her as the woman she was and I never met.”