When the time came to write my mother’s letter in 2004, five Vietnamese words came to mind: Lễ, Nghĩa, Nhân, Tín, and Chí.
They were my attempt to name what my parents had taught me over thirty-one years.
I did not choose Vietnamese because I was more fluent in it. Ironically, I was more fluent in English. I looked for an English word first.
I could not find one.
English words such as duty, loyalty, honor, gratitude, devotion, and moral obligation each carry part of what I meant. None, by itself, carried the whole. I was not trying to describe a single action or feeling. I was trying to describe a relationship that continued to make a claim on how I should live.
Nghĩa was the closest word I could find.
I am not a Vietnamese linguist. I may not understand every history, shade, or formal definition carried by the word. I can only say what I was trying to express through it.
To me, Nghĩa meant honoring my mother, her life, her teachings, her values, and her memory. It meant more than remembering what she taught. It meant trying to embody those teachings and passing them to my children.
Memory was not enough.
The memory had to become conduct.
That is why Nghĩa felt as though it held the other four words inside it. Respect, compassion, trustworthiness, and perseverance mattered because they shaped how we fulfilled our obligations to one another. Nghĩa was not merely what I felt toward my mother. It was what her love and sacrifice now asked of me.
At the time, I was not thinking about language as a teacher. I was thinking about loss.
Only much later did I recognize what had happened. The language I knew best had failed to give me one word for the idea I needed most. The inherited language I knew less well had preserved it for me.