I even came down with the hot fever of homesickness, and so it was that when I returned to the base camp, I sought comfort in the hamlet that Harry had created. The dusty lanes, the thatched roofs, the earthen floors of the cottages and their simple bamboo furniture, the piggeries with real pigs already snorting softly in the night, the warble of the innocent chickens, the soupy air, the bite of the mosquitoes, the plop of my unsuspecting foot into a mushy cake of buffalo dung - all of it left me dizzy with the vertigo of sadness and longing. Only one thing was missing from the hamlet and that was the people, the most important of which was my mother. She had died during my junior year in college, when she was just thirty-four. For the first and only time, my father wrote me a letter, brief and to the point: Your mother has passed away of tuberculosis, poor thing. She is buried in the cemetery under a real headstone. A real headstone! He had noted it to say in his own way that he had paid for it, since my mother did not have the savings to afford any such thing. I read his letter twice in numb disbelief before the pain struck, the hot lead of sorrow pouring into the mold of my body.
[...]
What I would give to have those useless things with me now, kneeling by my mother's tomb and resting my forehead against its rough surface. Not the tomb in the hamlet where she had died, but here, in Luzon, in the cemetery built by Harry just for authenticity's sake. When I had seen his field of stones, I had asked to have the biggest tomb for my own use. On the tombstone I had pasted a reproduction of my mother's black-and-white picture that I carried in my wallet, the only extant image of her besides the rapidly fading ones in my min, which had taken on the quality of a poorly preserved silent movie, its frames cracked by hairline fractures. On the gray face of the tombstone I painted her name and her dates in read, the mathematics of her life absurdly short for anyone but a grade schooler to whom thirty-four years seemed an eternity. Tombstone and tomb were cast from adobe rather than carved from marble, but I took comfort in knowing no one would be aboe to tell on film. At least in this cinematic life she would have a resting place fit for a mandarin's wife, an ersatz but perhaps fitting grave for a woman who was never more than an extra to anyone but me.
[...]
I love that cemetery. It's the greatest thing you built.
You got thirty minutes to take a picture before boom-boom time.
It was only a fake cemetery with its fake tomb for my mother but the eradication of this creation, in its wantonness and its whimsy, hurt me with unexpected severity. I had to pay my last respects to my mother and the cemetery, but I was alone in such sentiments. The cemetery was abandoned, the crew still having breakfast. Among the tombs now ran a maze of shallow trenches gleaming with gasoline, while bundled to the backs of the headstones were sticks to the ground, hidden from camera view by headstones and the knee-high grass that tickled my bare ankles and shins. With my camera slung around my neck I passed by the names of the dead that Harry had written on the tombstones, copied from the Los Angeles phonebook and attached to people presumably still alive. Among these names of the living in this little plaza of the passed, my mother's name was the only one that genuinely belonged. It was at her headstone I knelt down to say good-bye. The desecration by weather over the past seven months had eroded much of her face in the photographic reproduction, while the red paint with which her name was written had faded to the hue of dried blood on a sidewalk. Melancoly slipped her dry, papery hand into mine as she always did when I thought about my mother, whose life was so short, whose opportunities were so few, whose sacrifices were so great, and who was duet to suffer one last indignity for the sake of entertainment.
Mama, I said, my forehead on her headstone. Mama, I miss you so much
The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen
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