It had been almost twelve months since I’d last seen her, and many years since we had lived in the same place. After I’d moved away for college, I hadn’t spent many long periods of time with Má. The summer I graduated, I’d gone to Plum Village in France for a summer retreat, then, with Má’s blessing, I decided to stay on and train with Thầy to become a nun in the Plum Village tradition. I ordained as a nun in France in 1993. In 1999, after being a nun for six years, I’d received the lamp transmission from Thầy to be a Dharma teacher, and my days were filled with our sangha’s daily activities and responsibilities. Returning to the US with all my monastic siblings and Thầy for the Deer Park Rains’ Retreat, I would be with Má for a full three months.
Má had always been there for me and my siblings when we were young. Having single-handedly raised us in Vietnam while the country was embroiled in war, she was a source of strength and confidence for me and our whole family. Despite not having a dad growing up, we knew we were loved, cared for, and protected by a strong, loving woman like Má.
She worked tirelessly to ensure we had all our basic needs met, and we never went a day without food. We children knew that as long as Má was there, everything would be okay. We felt immense gratitude toward her for choosing not to remarry, even though she was still young when our dad passed away. We were the center of each other’s lives.
When I was barely ten, Má had taken us on a boat to flee our country, suddenly oppressed by a new regime. We escaped with her younger brother’s family, aboard his fishing boat. Not knowing where we were headed on the endless open sea, most of us children suffered from severe motion sickness.
After seven days at sea, we arrived in Hong Kong. We were put in a crowded refugee camp with other Vietnamese “boat people” who had fled in search of safety and freedom. After several months in the refugee camp, my uncle, my dad’s younger brother, helped us settle in the US, where a church in Oregon sponsored us. After a month in Oregon, though, my maternal uncle and older sister brought us to live near them in Stockton, California, where I spent most of my teenage years surrounded by family and neighbors from many different immigrant communities. Needless to say, my youth was very different from Má’s.
After I moved away to Davis for university, Má moved to the traditional Vietnamese Buddhist temple in our hometown and began helping to look after the temple and cooking meals for the monks. Each morning and evening, she attended sitting meditation and chanted Buddhist scriptures with the monks and lay friends who came to practice with the monastics. She loved being at the temple, where she was surrounded by people who enjoyed her cooking and her company. Everyone who came to the temple became her friend. I visited her there often when I returned home from college on weekends, staying with Má in her small room above the dining hall. I would join her and the community for the morning and evening sitting meditations and chanting, and over time the temple came to feel like home to me, too. Má was joyful, peaceful, and contented, doing things that made her happy.
Má stayed at the temple for fifteen years. Toward the end, she no longer had the energy to cook for the monks. Eventually, she went to live with my older sister and her family, but she didn’t feel at home in the comfortable but isolating environment of suburban America. Now, everyone around her was either at work or in school, and she was alone most of the time. By this time, two of her children—my brother Pháp Đang and myself—had been living far away in Plum Village, France, as Buddhist monastics for some years. Má was lonely and bored, missing all her old friends who came to the temple to chant every evening and to listen to the Dharma every weekend.
Seeing that Má missed the spiritual and social aspects of Vietnamese Buddhist life, we children suggested she go to Deer Park Monastery in Southern California, which was a Plum Village practice center also founded by Thầy, to see if she liked living there. She did—in fact, she loved it there. She made new friends and began thriving again, surrounded by mountains and with space for her to grow a garden. She enjoyed meeting new people, and she got along with the practitioners who came to the monastery at the weekend as well as the residents. She could make a friend out of anyone, young or old. She quickly began to seem younger as she started laughing more, climbing the mountains like an expert, composing poetry, and singing and chanting songs she’d created.
That Rains’ Retreat brought so much joy to everyone, with the Plum Village monastics from the ten directions gathered in Deer Park Monastery.
We were a big family of monks and nuns living together in one place for the whole three months. For me, it was special because it wasn’t just a chance for my spiritual family to be together, but my blood family was at Deer Park Monastery as well. My mother was living there. I would be in my mother’s presence for the whole three months. It felt like a homecoming.
Every day for the next three months, Má walked all the way down from her living quarters on the other side of the monastery campus to the valley floor and then up a steep hill to the gatehouse where I was staying, just to see how I was doing. She brought healthy drinks and snacks for me, or sometimes just came to ask me to go with her to meals at the dining hall. Sometimes she asked if I needed her to do my laundry. As happy as I was to see her, I felt a bit uncomfortable and irritated by her daily efforts to care for me. I’d been living away from her in France for so many years, and I found it difficult to adjust to being her child again.
As time went on, I became alarmed at how annoyed with Má I felt. I loved Má and didn’t want her to feel my irritation and resistance. I thought I needed to look deeply into myself. On a lazy day (a day without a practice schedule), I decided to head into the mountains behind the gatehouse for some time alone to look into why I was finding her kind and loving acts so unbearable. I spent the whole day on a rock under the shade of a tree, meditating with the discomfort I had with Má. Slowly, I realized I knew these feelings—they were the same ones I had had as a teenager.
When I was growing up, Má was very hands-on with her care of me. I was the youngest in the family, which meant I stayed with her after everyone else had moved away or become busy with their own social life. Each morning before I went to school, she made breakfast for me and then sat in front of me to watch me eat. She washed my laundry. She told me to take a shower. Even then, I’d felt awkward about Má doing my laundry and reminding me to eat, to shower, and to study. Although we never had any open conflict, I often felt a bit rebellious and uncomfortable. I didn’t want to bother her; I wanted to be independent and free. The way she cared for me made me feel like a little child, and I had never really appreciated what she did for me. Although I had never communicated my discomfort to Má, I knew she felt my irritation.
It dawned on me as I sat alone on the mountain at Deer Park Monastery that her feeding me and doing my laundry even now, despite my being an adult, was her way of expressing her love. I was her youngest child, her baby, and she had brought me from our fishing village to a new world. In many Asian families, it’s not common for parents to say, “I love you” to their children. Love comes in so many different expressions and forms; I hadn’t recognized her acts of service as love because my idea of how love should be expressed was different. As a teenager, I’d needed love, yet my ideas about love had made me miss countless opportunities to feel and receive my mother’s love.
One of Thầy’s teachings came to mind: we have ideas of what happiness is, and these ideas can stand in the way of receiving the love and happiness that are already here. When conditions for happiness are here, ideas of happiness become obstacles to experiencing and receiving it. I decided that when I returned to the monastery, I would practice seeing things differently, I would try to welcome everything Má did with joy and appreciation. As I walked back to the gatehouse, a little awakening stretched my heart and opened my mind to the love that had always been there for me.
The next morning, Má walked to the gatehouse to see me as usual. She brought some fruit for me, and I received them with a genuine joy that made Má happily surprised. She returned my smile and I knew she was inwardly celebrating my reception of her love. My resistance to her was gone.
From Caregiving and the Art of Presence: A Zen Nun’s Journey of Love and Letting Go by Sister Tue Nghiem © 2026 by Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with Parallax Press.
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