1997: Shania Twain, Come On Over

By Hieu Minh Nguyen

When things got bad, auntie Kim would pile us all into her van, and we’d leave the city. We knew better than to ask where. All my life it seemed like the only destination was distance. This was the summer I turned nine, or ten, or sometime before our family was scattered across the country, when we all lived in that two-bedroom apartment on the Eastside of Saint Paul.

Roll call: there were eight of us (six kids: Me, Emily, Amy, Stacy, Samantha, and Alexandria), so to make room, we took out the back seats and sat on the floor of the van. Kim was the driver and my mother rode shotgun. Return to them if you get overwhelmed with the kids in the back. Even if it confuses you, I needed to name everyone. I needed to remember, we were there, at one point, together.

For as long as I can remember, the only CD in Kim’s deck was Shania Twain’s Come On Over. As soon as she’d start the engine, there was Twain, clicking on to say, “Let’s go girls,” the rallied cry blessing the road before us. 

I can’t always remember what it was like to be a child, but I remember staring at the sky. The sun strobing between buildings and branches until we reached the edge of the city. We held our breath as we sped through tunnels. From the back, we’d watch as each passing mile-marker reanimated our mothers. The pending divorce, the pile of bills, the cohort of deadbeats and their incendiary tempers grew small in the rearview as the wide sky filled our periphery, the color returning to our voices as we sang, “the best thing about being a woman.”

Twain is, and will always be, the least important part of these memories.

Somewhere inside “Man! I feel Like a Woman!” a tube of lipstick would get passed around the van. We studied how our mothers applied it in a single stroke. Their eyes still glued to the road. I was the only boy—the only not-daughter, so when Emily turned to me, lipstick unsheathed, I feigned a brief protest before pursing my lips in surrender. Emily would tilt my head back as if performing a surgery or baptism. It’s true, the only heaven I’m permitted is through the sliding doors of a Chrysler Town and Country.

There’s something to be said, though I’m not sure how, about “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” being inspired by Twain’s time watching drag queens. Something to be said about this song, in the background of this memory, becoming a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting the same shade of red on all of our lips; Twain on the album cover; my face, which is my mother’s face, casted back in the hard plastic. Let me say it messy, I learned to be a son by wanting to be a daughter.

I wanted to be a beauty queen. Specifically, I wanted to be Princess Kay of the Milkyway 1999. I wanted to compete in the Minnesota Diary Princess Program, to have my face carved into a block of butter. I wanted to be soft—to be made of soft things. I wanted to be nothing like the men we were running away from.

For me, when Twain sang about, capital L, Love, it was never about a man. It was about a feeling. Something similar to hope. Not the hope you’d find in the back of a prayer, but like an X on a map—a map you can only recall from memory or myth. Some porch light left on to say, I am waiting for you to get here.

Come On Over is front loaded by songs we would, broadly, categorize as love songs: “I’m Holdin’ On to Love (To Save My Life),” “Love Gets Me Every Time,” and “Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You).” And though we sang them as such, I would say now, I see them more as songs about love’s imposters, the mirage city we drive towards until everything is made of sand.

Listening now, I hear it clearly: “You hang over my shoulder when I read my mail…You even get suspicious when I paint my nails…Don’t be ridiculous, you know I need you,” “Don’t you know that love gets me every time,” “Save me, save me, save me. Save my life.”

Listening now, I think of the men who brought flowers to our door, who took us to the car show, who took us to the fair, who took the keys so we couldn’t leave and ripped the phone out the wall.

On those drives we’d never know how long we’d be gone. Sometimes it was a day or a week or however long it took for some man to pack his shit and leave. We, and I include myself, were women crossing state lines, crossing the borders men placed on us, just to piss them off, just to prove that we didn’t need them.

One thing I’ve been trying, but can’t seem, to get down adequately is how we were nowhere, but had everything. Our mothers arrived in America, country girls in a new country—a different brand of country in the western country. We stood in the rain and used bar soap to wash the clothes on our backs. We fished under the flooded overpass. We threw rocks at the drunkards who catcalled our mothers. And depending on the day of the week, we’d go to Denny’s or Applebee’s or Hooters or wherever kids ate for free. Using a five-toe discount, we’d walk barefoot into K-Mart and leave with new shoes.

Once, when we all got lice, Kim sat us in a motel parking lot and doused our heads with the olive oil she swiped from a salad bar. That night, when everyone was asleep, Emily, Amy, and I, the oldest of the kids, snuck out to the van to scavenge the console ashtray for half-smoked cigarettes. We’d sat where our mothers sat and listened to “You’re Still the One” on repeat. Our glossy faces lit by the dashboard lights. I don’t remember what we talked about. Emily probably interrogated me about another one of my friends she had developed a crush on. What was his favorite color? His favorite band? Did he have a girlfriend? And of course I probably knew, because, like Emily, I probably loved him too.

What did we know, is a question I keep trying to answer. When we sang, “black eyes, all behind me,” did we know? Or did we simply just want to mean it the way our mothers did. Did we cast a spell? Did we sing a curse? Does a curse break once it comes true?

When I listen to “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” I think of my mother—my mother who was forced to leave her first love behind—saying, “It was Minnesota and cold. Your father bought me a blanket, and so I thought, good enough.”

When I ask her if she regrets it, marrying my father, she says no, says something generic about turning every stone, taking every path. But its foolish to think our mothers didn’t imagine things, yes, even us, different. I can admit to the versions of myself that would have made her life better. And though vague and pointless, sometimes I wish I could just, one day, wake up different for her. In some daydream, different and gone are the same scenario.

I want to put a small emphasis on returning. When we discovered that he took everything, even the lightbulbs, we adapted. Prepared. Already adjusted to nowhere, to nothing, but everything we needed. I always make the mistake of hearing away, instead of a way, in “You’ve Got a Way.” It’s still true, I think, my only destination being distance.

There is so much left I want to say, but I don’t want to ruin it. Is it important to mention all the things haven’t happened yet?

Is it important to mention that Twain, in an interview with the Guardian, said she would have voted for Trump if she wasn’t Canadian? Or how Amy told me she would have voted for Trump if she wasn’t on parole? How Twain apologized? How Amy watched her mother get detained by immigration? Is it important to mention all the things that curl the corners of the photograph? All the reasons we don’t call or come back for holidays?

Two decades sit between us and that nowhere summer. When I’m afraid of messing up the memory by remembering too much, when I traveled too far and the room gets too empty, I circle back. I do roll call. I stare at the sky. I hold my breath until we exit the tunnel.

 Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of two poetry collections, Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), and This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Hieu is from Saint Paul, Minnesota, but currently lives in Oakland, California where he serves as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.