Three Grandmothers: Mykha

I have three grandmothers. Both my parents' parents got divorced, and my mother's parents both remarried. I am extremely close to both my biological grandmother and my step-grandmother on my mom's side. My father's father remarried (I have met the man and his wife only twice), but his mother did not. I wanted to dedicate this blog post to writing about these three remarkable women.

Mykha - My dad's mom is Mykha. She is a 4'5" Vietnamese woman, but what she lacks in height is MORE than made up for in spunk. She wears wedges (at least three inches tall) everyday, and whenever she goes out she wears a fur coat and hat. She has a Vietnamese restaurant outside of Chicago, called Mykha's, and it is her entire life. The five love languages are quality time, acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation, and gift-giving, but Mykha has invented a whole new one - food. I grew up spending my days in that restaurant; my parents managed it for Mykha while she managed the food. My mom says when I was a baby Mykha refused to talk to her for a week because she found out about my mom giving me baby-food bought from Whole Foods. One morning Mykha showed up at our house unannounced with a cooler that was more than twice her size filled with fresh mango and sweet sticky rice. "My công (grandchild) will not eat that American crap! No good! You tell me you need food I bring! My công deserve better!" She has lived in America for more than 30 years and still has no idea how to conjugate verbs. She was born in Da Lat, Vietnam, during the last of the French occupation. Her father had died when she was a toddler, leaving her mother and her five siblings on their own. When Mykha was ten, the French general in their village was killed, but no one knew by whom. As a punishment, the French army chose five people at random and shot them. That day Mykha was pulled out of her math class by the Principal who brought her to the local police station; her mother had been one of the five, and she needed to legally identify the body. She and her five siblings went to live with her great-aunt, who owned a restaurant, and that's how Mykha learned how to cook. Cooking is how my grandma tells you she loves you (literally, her English still isn't great). If she loves you, she makes you a feast. If she doesn't like you, she makes you a little less food. Since her 4'5" frame poses several problems, her entire kitchen is custom made; she isn't tall enough for standard stove and countertop sizes. On her answering machine at her restaurant, after the very professional greeting and stating of the restaurant hours by one of her waiters, you can hear a scuffling, a couple of Vietnamese words, and then Mykha comes on the phone and says, "and remember, Mykha love you." I am not joking.

This, my dear friends, is Mykha.