It has been six years since my grandmother passed away.  I do not believe that a day goes by that I do not think of her.  I see her in my children actions and expressions.  Although I mainly think of her when I find a penny.  Why a penny?  Well my grandmother always saved her pennies.  She would use them to gamble with, playing bingo or games with her friends every week.  Now that she passed away I seem to find pennies everywhere.  Every time I see a penny I think of her and obsessively I pick them up and keep them.  I say that my grandmother is going to make me rich, one penny at a time.  To ignore a penny is to disrespect the memory of my grandmother.  Is this silly?  Maybe but to see a penny on the ground when walking into a store tells me that my grandmother is with me and saying hello. 

     In reading Andrew Lam's collection of essays East Eats West Writing In Two Hemispheres I seem to see this trend of honoring the spirits of his ancestors. Especially when reading his essay Can Ghosts Cross The Ocean?   This essay talks of his grandmother and her fear that her husbands spirit was not able to find her here in America.  His grandfather had passed away during the Vietnam War and his grandmother believed that he would visit her in her dreams.  He would help her with problems like finding a lost bracelet or just give her comfort in the feeling that he was still with her.  The problem came when they were forced to flee with the fall of Saigon.  After being here in America she realized that he never visited her in her dreams.  It would be many years before she would realized that his spirit was always with her.  She would tell Andrew that while sitting in the garden of her convalescent home shewas visited by a butterfly that kept flying about her.  Suddenly, I just blurted out and asked, "Husband, if it is you then come land on my shoulder."  And it did, on both sides, and it stayed for a long, long time." (p137)  I can only imagine the joy and comfort this gave his grandmother.  I wonder if today when Andrew sees a butterfly, do you feel the spirit of your grandparents?

     I was born and raised here in Chico, California and have not seen the tragedy that Andrew had to live through.  In reading his essay Letters From A Younger Brother I felt that I could still relate to what he was saying.  He has come across letters that he wrote as a child while still in Vietnam.  At first he does not even recognize that he is the one who wrote them.  This takes him back to a time of innocence and he is shocked.  He realizes that when he came to America he suffered a kind of self-imposed amnesia (p163). This was obviously a way for him to cope with the trauma that he had witnessed.  I can relate to this because I feel that many of us as humans deal with some forms of self-imposed amnesia in order to deal with the traumas in our childhoods.

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