Wired Earphones for Má's Cải Lương, and the Evenings the House Went Too Quiet

My mother listens to cải lương, the old southern folk opera, on a phone my son Tín set up for her two Tết holidays ago. Every night since then it has gone the same way. Once dinner is cleared, Má sits on the low stool beside the family altar, props the phone against the foot of the flower vase, and turns the volume all the way up.

Má is eighty-one and hard of hearing. The phone is small, and its speaker crackles whenever the lead singer climbs into the high notes. Put those two things together and you get a voice that carries from the mouth of the alley to the back of our house.

Ours is a narrow tube house, one floor and a loft, sharing a wall with Bà Sáu next door. I paint houses for a living, and I come home with white flecks of paint still lodged under my nails, wanting nothing more after a shower than to lie down. My wife runs a small grocery counter at the front of the house and only gets free in the evening to watch her TV serials. Tín, our son, is nineteen and studying to be an electrician. In the evenings he wears headphones the size of a pot lid and sits up in the loft watching the lessons his teacher sends.

Nobody in the house dislikes cải lương. Nobody wants to hear it at the same moment as whatever they happen to be doing.

Everyone complained about the noise, and nobody said it to Má

There was plenty of complaining, all of it behind her back.

My wife complained to me while we washed the dishes. Tín complained to me by text message, though he was right upstairs. I complained to a man on my painting crew while we ate bánh mì at the foot of the scaffolding. The one person who never heard a complaint was Má.

I didn't tell her because I knew she would switch it off at once, then sit in silence the whole evening, then go to bed early. That is how she is. When I was small, my father once said her soup was too salty, and she carried the whole pot out and tipped it away and cooked another one without a word. I was more afraid of that silence than of any noise.

One Thursday night my wife's serial reached the part where the two leads have a fight, at the exact moment the opera on the other side of the room reached its most heartbreaking passage, the male lead drawing out a line so long he nearly ran out of breath. My wife pushed the TV volume up three notches. Má couldn't hear it, but she could see the set getting louder, so she turned her phone up too. When it would go no higher, she put an upturned plastic bowl over the phone so the sound would bounce out.

Tín came down the stairs and stood on the bottom step.

"Bà nội, could you turn it down a bit?"

"Huh?"

"I said could you turn it down a bit."

"Oh, this part is so good, sit down and listen."

"I'm studying, Bà."

"Studying what, this late. Want a tangerine? Bà Sáu gave us some."

Tín took the tangerine back upstairs. The phone stayed exactly as loud.

The next morning he told me he was thinking of buying his grandmother some earphones. I nodded straight away. So did my wife. Three people in the house agreed on something about Má, nodding at each other, while she was out the back sweeping up almond leaves. Thinking about that now still makes me wince. At the time it didn't.

Tín bought her wired earphones, and once she put them in, the house went silent

Tín bought them at the accessories stall at the top of the market. Wired, white, two tiny earbuds. He said with the wireless kind she wouldn't know how to charge them, and even charged she wouldn't know how to pair them, so better something that plugged straight into the phone.

That night he squatted in front of her stool and showed her.

Má held the two buds up and turned them this way and that under the light. Each had a letter printed on it, the size of an ant: L and R. She couldn't read them. Tín went and got his mother's red nail polish and dabbed a dot on the right one.

"The one with the red dot goes in this ear, Bà. The right one."

"Either side, it's still an ear, son."

"Yes, but it sounds the right way round."

"It's cải lương. It doesn't have a way round."

She put them in. The bud sat loose and kept slipping, so she had to hold it in place with her index finger. Tín pressed play. I was standing in the kitchen doorway, and I watched her face change, her eyes going wide like someone who has just heard their name called from far away. Then she smiled, a gummy smile, because she had already taken her dentures out and put them in a glass of water.

"Heavens. It's singing inside my head."

That night the whole house was quiet. My wife watched her serial at a normal volume. Tín put his pot-lid headphones away and did his homework downstairs. I lay in the hammock on the porch and watched videos of people painting houses on my phone, sound off, pictures only. That is my habit. Every night I scroll through those clips of someone rolling paint onto a wall until it's flat. I already know how. There's nothing to learn from them. My thumb keeps swiping anyway.

I listened to the quiet in the house and it felt good. I thought: well, that's one thing sorted.

Two days later came the business with the hairpin. Holding the earbud in with one finger for an entire opera made her hand ache, so Má pulled a black hairpin from her bun and clipped the cord to the collar of her blouse so it wouldn't tug. The left bud she gave up on and let dangle against her chest. She wore only the red dot. One side was enough, she said. With both in, the sound echoed around her skull and made her dizzy.

My wife brought it up while we were hanging laundry on the roof.

"Funny nobody thought of earphones before."

"Mm."

"And she actually wears them. I thought she'd refuse."

"She doesn't mind."

I heard that inside as a compliment to myself. The noise in the house had been cleared up with a length of wire, everyone back in their own corner. I believed that for about a week.

I called Má to dinner three times and she didn't hear me

The next Tuesday my wife put dinner out early because a late delivery was coming. I stood in the kitchen doorway and called.

"Má, dinner."

She sat with her back to me, head tilted toward the red dot. I called again, louder. She stayed as she was, one finger tapping on her knee, a beat as steady as the wooden clapper that keeps time in the opera band. The third time I walked over and touched her shoulder.

She jumped and clutched her chest. The phone slid off the vase onto the tiles, and the cord yanked the bud right out of her ear.

"Heavens, you frightened the life out of me."

"I called you three times, Má."

"When did you call."

She ate very little at that meal. She wasn't angry with me. She was angry with the earphones. Wearing them, she said, was like sitting inside a water jar. Anyone could walk behind her and she wouldn't know, anyone could call and she wouldn't know. She said it in the voice of someone telling a story, not complaining, and then she put a piece of fish in Tín's bowl.

That night I paid attention, and I saw things I hadn't. Má sat on the stool facing the wall, the phone close to her face. Back when it played out loud, she used to sit facing the door, and every so often she'd turn and say something to my wife about the story. "This poor girl has it so hard." Or, "What a wicked man, this one." My wife couldn't have named the opera if you paid her, she just said mm-hm, and Má kept talking anyway. Now Má had stopped talking. She sat alone with her right ear.

Then there was Bà Sáu. On Wednesday morning she was at the top of the lane buying rice cakes when I wheeled my motorbike out for work.

"Is Bà Năm all right, son? I haven't heard her singing these past nights."

"She's fine, Bà. Tín bought her some earphones."

"Oh. I see." Bà Sáu stood there a moment holding her bag of cakes. "And there I was thinking she was ill. I used to lie in bed and listen in from my side. Every time a good part came she'd sing along a line or two. Her voice is still sweet, you know."

I stood there with my bike key in my hand. I had not known that Má sang along. My whole life under the same roof as her, and I hadn't known she still sang. The phone speaker was too loud and her voice got lost in it, or I was out on the porch scrolling and never noticed. Someone on the other side of a wall had heard it. I, under the same roof, had not.

At work that day I was painting a house in the upper neighborhood, a west-facing wall in hard sun, where the paint dries fast and you have to roll quickly or you get streaks. I rolled, and the whole time I was turning over that line, her voice is still sweet. I thought of when I was little and Má rowed our sampan to the floating market with a load of bananas, me sitting in the bow, and she sang something very long, on and on without ending. I remember the muddy brown river. I remember a yellow ant walking from the bananas onto my hand. I don't remember what she sang. Only that she sang.

Má handed me one of the earbuds

On Wednesday night after my shower I didn't go out to the hammock. I pulled a plastic chair up beside Má's stool. I left my phone on the coffee table in the front room, far enough that I would have to get up and walk a few steps to reach it.

Má saw me sitting there and looked at me a moment, thinking I had something to tell her. I didn't. She unhooked the left bud dangling against her chest, the one without the red dot, and held it out.

"Here, try. This one's good."

I put it in. The cord was short, so the two of us had to sit close, my knee touching hers. The earbud was still warm and smelled of the medicated oil she rubs on the back of her neck.

The first difficulty was that I couldn't follow it. I didn't know who was who, where the story was up to, why this person was crying. I asked, and she explained, but she explained her way, jumping all over: this one is the son of that woman, who years ago did something to that man. I nodded along. Before long my hand drifted down to my trouser pocket and patted it. Empty. The phone wasn't there. Twice more during that opera I patted the empty pocket, and each time my hand went back to my knee.

The second difficulty was that I got sleepy. A full day of painting, then sitting still with one ear full of strings, and my eyes started closing. My head dropped, I jerked awake, and found Má watching me.

"If you're tired, go to bed."

"No, I'm listening."

"Listening to what, you're snoring."

That night I went to bed before the opera finished. Lying in my room I heard a small voice drifting through, thin and a little hoarse, not the phone. Má's voice. She was singing along, a line, then stopping, then after a while another line. Bà Sáu was right that it was still sweet. At the end of a phrase she would let it fall and then lift it, like someone carrying something full to the brim.

I sat with her a few more nights. Not once did I make it through a whole opera. Some nights my back ached from the low plastic chair. Some nights my wife called me out to help shift crates of soft drinks. One night I got up to check the time on my phone and ended up holding it, swiping through painting videos, until I heard Má ask, "Where are we up to?" and realized I had wandered off from the story a while back. She didn't scold me. She just told me the part I'd missed, at greater length than the part itself.

I noticed something I did over and over. When the opera reached a long sung passage where I couldn't make out the words, my hands started looking for somewhere to go. My pocket, the edge of the chair, the cap of the oil bottle on the table. When there was spoken dialogue, when something was happening, I sat still. So I tried this: whenever a long sung stretch came, I stopped trying to hear the words and listened to Má's finger tapping her knee instead. She hit every beat, one after another, never off. I followed that tapping and got through to the end of the passage. Some nights it worked. Some nights I still got up and fetched my phone.

One night she took out her own earbud and handed me the red dot as well.

"You need both sides to hear the zither, son. I'm used to one. I know where it all goes."

I wore both. Má sat with nothing in her ears, finger still tapping, lips moving along with the words. She was listening from memory. I was listening through the earphones Tín had bought. We sat like that for a whole opera. That is the only time, so far, that I have heard one all the way through without getting up once.

These days the speaker goes out on the porch, and the white cord hangs on the nail above her bed

Tín was the one who worked it out. He heard me tell the story about Bà Sáu, scratched his head for a while, then dug through his box of electrical odds and ends and came up with an old speaker about the size of two fists, the one he'd used back in high school. He charged it full and showed his grandmother which button to press.

Now our house runs like this. Nobody wrote it down, it was said out loud once over dinner. After the meal, Má goes and sits on the porch and plays one opera on the speaker. Bà Sáu carries her plastic chair over and the two of them sit together, and sometimes Bà Sáu brings a bag of roasted peanuts. One opera. When it ends Má comes inside and, if she wants more, puts the earphones in, while in the front room my wife watches her serial and Tín does his lessons.

It doesn't always go smoothly. Some nights the two old women get to a second opera and forget, and the speaker keeps going. My wife goes out and says something, and Má laughs and apologizes and switches it off. Some nights Má forgets to charge the speaker and turns her phone all the way up indoors again, and everyone complains again, this time to her face, and she just says "yes, yes" and goes looking for the earphones. One night I came home worn out, my head pounding from a day of oil-based paint fumes, heard the speaker on the porch, and snapped at her. Loudly. Má switched it off and sat still. Bà Sáu got up and carried her chair home. That night I lay in my room and couldn't sleep, listening to Má sitting alone out on the porch, not singing, not talking.

In the morning I made her a black coffee and took it out to the porch. She took it and said nothing about the night before, just pointed out a few buds on the potted apricot blossom. I still don't know whether she was angry that night, or sad, or only tired. I didn't ask. That evening she played the speaker again, and Bà Sáu came over again.

I still scroll through the painting videos every night. I haven't stopped, and I'm not really trying to. It's just that on nights when there's a good opera and Má calls me out, I leave the phone on the coffee table before I go out to the porch. I sit on the step, a bit lower than the two of them, my back against the post. Leaving the phone on the table first is something I manage some nights and not others. On the nights I leave it, I sit longer. On the nights I bring it, before long I'm back inside.

Once Tín came out and sat with them too. Halfway through, he asked his grandmother what the lead singer's name was. She told him, and he looked it up on his phone and showed her a picture of the man when he was young. Má held Tín's phone out at arm's length and squinted at it for a long time.

"He was that handsome back then. He must be older than me now."

"I think he's passed away, Bà."

"Well, who doesn't." She handed the phone back. "But his voice is still right here."

Tín didn't look up anything else. He sat till the end of the opera.

Má still uses the wired earphones. She uses them late at night, when everyone else has gone to bed and she can't sleep yet. The red dot of nail polish has nearly all chipped off, just a faint smudge left, but she doesn't need to look anymore. The white cord has gone the color of old ivory, and where the plastic coating cracked, Tín wrapped it in black electrical tape.

Last night I passed her room close to midnight. The light was off, the phone lay on her pillow with its screen dark, the red-dot earbud was still in her ear and the cord lay across her neck. I eased it out for her, wound the cord around two fingers, and hung it on the nail above the head of her bed, where she keeps her conical hat.