What Happiness Looks Like

It is Wednesday night. We are at an outer southeast Portland grade school, after hours, holding the poetry group for refugees and immigrants. I’m wrestling with the days, each of them, this month, loss and sadness my clenched fists won’t release, and fear at the realization that hope seems closer to the horizon line than to me. I almost don’t go, I am too tired to teach, to figure out childcare for my two, to even go through my files and find lessons. And I don’t know if anyone is going to show up. Sometimes the chairs are filled, sometimes not. I’ve been leading writing groups like this one for years now, off and on and on my own time, because I believe in stories and in the telling of them. Some days I think that’s all I believe in.

Minh and Frank and Lena are there. I’ve never met Minh or Frank before. I write, what happiness looks like on the dry erase board because this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and because I don’t have any lessons prepared, and in hindsight, because perhaps I needed a little insight and didn’t know where else to look.

We write for about 20 minutes. Then I ask if anyone wants to share their poem. Frank is from Taiwan. He tells us happiness is only in moments of forgetting. He tells us that his wife died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He would wheel her chair to the park near their apartment and they would watch the children running, spinning on the merry go round, listen to them laughing, and they would forget she was dying, they would forget she was in a wheelchair, there was so much of the world at the park to absorb, in those moments it was bigger than them. In her final months when he couldn’t take her that far, he’d wheel her out on their balcony and they could still see parts of the park, still hear the laughing and shrieking floating across the treetops.

Minh says happiness is in our dreams and hopes, but not necessarily in reality. He says it took him 32 years to finally successfully leave Vietnam. He tells of how difficult life was in Vietnam, difficult enough to spend an entire lifetime trying to leave. He has been in the United States two years. He says he was happier 32 years ago than now, when he had the dream of leaving, something to fight for, to believe in, some kind of bigger truth to be within. With a dream the past is leave-able, forgettable. Without a dream, we are where we are.

Perhaps standing here, on this soil, in this moment, is happiness, just the kind that is hard fought, moored in a harbor of memory and regret and loss, hidden.

Minh’s daughter recently won an essay contest, and was flown to the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for an awards ceremony. This prompts me to ask how many children Minh has. He says four. Then repeats four, three living. I ask what happened. He says one of his children died of a brain tumor 13 years ago. She was 10 years old. My son has had a mysterious mass in his head since birth, it has been an 8 year, unresolved journey, and when I hear things like this my heart rattles about a bit in my chest.

He tells me of a doctor in St. Louis, an immigrant himself who at one time worked in the orchards in the German countryside, picking and carrying baskets full of fruit down swept dirt rows, until he became a doctor and landed in St. Louis. He is retired now, but throughout his medical practice he did what he could for third world children. Minh’s daughter was flown to the US, where this doctor performed multiple surgeries. After one of the surgeries the child slipped into a coma and never woke up.

Minh and his wife named their youngest child after this doctor. Minh chuckles a bit and says, my Vietnamese baby with an American name. Minh tells me, that this doctor has never recovered, has had an even more difficult time processing the loss than Minh himself.

This is not a happy story. None of these are happy stories. But for some reason on this night the continents and countries merge, Taiwan, Germany, Vietnam, America, and sitting in Portland on some plastic chair sized for a grade schooler, as the sky darkens outside on some random Wednesday night, our eyes are welled up, and for a moment it is quiet and still, and we’re all looking down at the words we just wrote, thinking about the words we just told and heard. Minh is concerned about my son, I tell him he is all right, it’s all okay, because in this moment, it sort of is.

And maybe this is what happiness looks like. Maybe it is all of this, in the forgetting, in the dreams, in the trying to save each other from tumors or tears, maybe happiness is sad, maybe we accept that, because we have to, because our stories, they are all the same, and maybe the comfort in that is bigger than us, as big as the horizon line leading to some distant land mass, and as small as a tire swing in a park with some kid hanging onto the chain, twirling, never to know the notes of her laughter reached an apartment balcony and wrote the kind of music that replays to memory in one man’s mind for the entire rest of his life.