Tell My Sister Where I Am

Grandmother summons me. I tiptoe to her and stand straight but small, stare at my ten toes lined up taut in the sand. Her lecture on disobedience rains down on me. Her voice is stern, her face severe, and in her grip is steel. She squats, wielding a kitchen cleaver in a chopping motion over my feet, touching my toes. She raises the blade. It hovers, about to… 

“I will chop off your feet so you cannot run off again.” 

Wide-eyed, fear holds my breath. She swings. UUGH! The knife-edge bites into the earth far from my quaking feet. I am flabbergasted by Grandmother’s abysmal aim. 

“You didn’t do a very good job,” my cheeky self thinks and as the tension snaps, I am overtaken by fits of laughter. 

Grandmother cannot contain herself at the sight of hysterical me. She doubles over. Till tears drip from our chins, we laugh and laugh together. 

Never, in our wildest dreams, could we have imagined where those feet would take me. 

• Excerpt from Tell My Sister Where I Am and Other Stories 

“Hanhtiet weaves a vivid, chilling, descriptive tale of her childhood life in rural Vietnam and her perilous journey to freedom, of her three years living in different overcrowded refugee camps and prisons, of her struggle with the integration process in Canada and finally, of her successful chosen long-term-care nursing career. A must-read memoir!”
– Thành Quý Nguyen, awarded Edmontonian of The Century in 2004 at the Celebration of 100 years of the City of Edmonton.

“Beautifully told… this is an important story, showing up front the lives of those fleeing what was so dear to them.”
– Rebecca Walker, Refugee Manager, World Renew