I can't give my mom the garden she deserves, but her flowers are as resilient as she is

This First Person column is written by Tony Ho, who lives in Vancouver. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

My four-year-old son eagerly picks vibrant green wine grapes from the vine. We're playing a game to find which ones are bursting with sweetness or will make him pucker his lips. The vines are several years old; their twisted, woody stems deeply embedded into the chain-link fence lining one side of my mom's container garden in the back alley of her east Vancouver apartment.

I love watching my son help water my mom's container garden and she proudly tells him how the peas and tomatoes will soon be ready to be picked.

But the frayed paint and growing cracks in the balcony of my childhood home make my heart sink. Renoviction looms over my mother, and it's likely I'll never be able to afford a home with a sun-drenched backyard for her in Vancouver on a social worker's salary.

Call it the curse of being the eldest child of a Vietnamese refugee, immigrant and single mother who worked in low-wage, high-intensity jobs to keep us alive. Mom worked long hours as a server in a Vietnamese restaurant, deftly balancing bowls of scalding pho to hungry and impatient customers. The thought I've failed to repay her — for my opportunities, for a better life — often tugs at my stomach.

Tội nghiệp quá! is a Vietnamese phrase often used to express feeling sorry for a person or animal's suffering. My mother uses it to describe the floppy, sad-looking plants she rescues from alleys and side streets or those at risk of being thrown out at the end of the season at the local home improvement store where she works.

Her garden started as a mish-mash of pots of herbs she uses for cooking. It steadily expanded to used tires filled with marigolds and pink water lilies nestled next to a plastic flamingo in a small, black plastic pond built for her by a neighbour.

In the peak of summer, the garden is so dense you wouldn't know there was a collection of found, gifted, and repurposed containers beneath all the foliage. You might wonder how so many colours could burst out of cold, gray concrete.

Growing up, I felt jealous of friends who lived in houses. Something about their homes felt more permanent than mine. My eight-year-old self wondered if we weren't lucky enough, didn't work hard enough or endured enough to have our own home.

My mom was the third child in her family to escape Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. My grandparents didn't let her go with her older sisters for fear that their boat would capsize or they would be captured or killed together.

Like dandelion seeds, it was a survival strategy: the odds of at least one landing safely increased if you scattered them into the wind, a little bit at a time, in different directions.

My mom left Vietnam in 1985. I have a photo from the mid-80s of my mother in a striking hibiscus-red dress, glowing with youth and looking hopeful. She had just settled in Alberta and given birth to me after spending months in an overcrowded refugee camp on Bidong Island, Malaysia.

There's no hint in her smile that she had survived a perilous journey across the South China Sea on a jam-packed boat with little food, water or sanitation. No sign of the human suffering she must have witnessed. I often look at the photo and wonder what her dreams were and what kept her going.

My mother remains a dandelion — bright, resilient and industrious. "Like your grandfather," she tells me, referring to her thriving plants. Her love of gardening echoes that of her father, who nurtured decades-old planters of delicate purple blossoms and rows of longan trees. She still refuses to use a sprinkler, opting to water each plant by hand and thoroughly with a hose.

Her stubbornness reminds me that no matter where she ends up, she will continue to grow. In the meantime, my son gets to enjoy the spoils of her garden. I hope his time with her teaches him, just as she shows me, that we can find beauty and freedom in gardening and life, no matter the size of our containers. 

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