My father

Tomorow is America’s birthday. The day after is my father’s birthday. It is a special event, as he will be 70, a longevity landmark for elderly people in Vietnamese culture. On this event, I want to write something for my father. I want to try to write a minibiography, a quick glance into his life from his son’s perspectives, the life of a complex man with his strengths and weaknesses, who, in his own unique way, has always loved his family very much.

I go back in time to try to recall when was the first time that I was aware of my father. Fragments of memories cropped up in no obvious order. I remember sitting on his shoulder going up (or down) on the mountain steps. Many years later, when I asked my parents about that experience, they confirmed that the family went to Huong Temple. I remember sitting on the horizontal cross bar of his city bike going to my grandfather on my mother’s side during the weekend. I remember him sitting down to play chess with me in our tiny apartment one afternoon when he was home from work. I recall now the white tiles with blackish grout, slightly warm because of the summer. I don’t remember much about the game itself, only that I lost quickly and he headed out to his next shift. We were poor then. I remember getting a toy gun (probalby for my birthday), and he asked me to play with it for 5 minutes then put it back into the storage so that it would not get old. I remember our apartment full of odds and ends from the extra work that my parents brought home to get more income and him stepping around in a tub full of fresh arrowroot to make arrowroot powder. I remember him tried to teach me Russian. I know that Russia/the former Soviet Union always has a special place in his heart as that was where he met and fell in love with my mother. I remembered many songs but didn’t remember learning them, and I am fairly sure that it was him who sang to us while playing the guitar. In 1992, my family moved from Ha Noi to Saigon. Things got better, and my parents got a lot busier. My father was tasked with heading up a new construction company, and this resulted in him having to travel around a lot and come home later in the evening. My memories started to have more plentiful things, but his work also increased. I still remembered a trip to the seaside town, Vung Tau, where my mother and I went down to the beach while he went to work and only joined us for lunch then to head home.

My father didn’t talk much about his youth. We learned that he and his siblings evacuated and lived in poverty during the Vietnam War. The one story that he told was about how they counted and sized the roasted peanuts for dinner rations: four for big ones, five for smaller ones. The other story was about how his mother, our grandmother, fell sick and died due to exhaustion after bringing all her children from Ha Noi to Hai Phong, then rode a bicycle back and forth several times to bring them rations. We knew that he worked hard, went to one of the top highschool in Ha Noi (Chu Van An highschool) and then joined the military’s corps of engineers. Because of his exam scores, he won a scholarship to go study civil engineering in one of the universities in Russia (the Soviet Union at that time).

We can hear how he treasured his time in Russia through his stories. How big the country felt with the train ride from Ha Noi to Moscow. How he spent all his first stipend on a guitar and ate only breads (free) and yogurt (acquired by returning discarded glass bottles to the dining hall) for the rest of the month. How he developed a hatred for alcohol when a friend tricked him to gulp from a vodka bottle after a long soccer match. And how he boarded the train to the next town to visit a new student who just came from Vietnam, who he had a feeling would become his wife for more than twenty years until the day she passed. He talked about how he would go visit her during the weekend and ride the red-eye train back to go to class on Monday. He didn’t have a lot of pictures from back then, but there were two: one in which he was sitting and playing guitar and smiling, and (I think) my mother was in the picture too, and the other where he was rowing and showing off his six-packs. Many years later, me and my mother used to joke if he could ever get back into that shape!

My mom graduated and went back first. With many teary letters in between, my father went back on a two-week vacation after a year, they got married, he went back for his graduate study, and there I was nine months later. The tiny apartment where we lived had two small bedrooms, one for us and one for my grandfather. Down the hallway to the right was a small dining room which sectioned into a seating area, a kitchen area including a bonus chicken coop, and a tiny bathroom. I was fairly certain that we were raising a duck in there. My parents’ bedroom had a bookcase that was almost as wide as an entire wall. I was told that when my father graduated, instead of foreign merchandise, he brought home all these books. Many of them were technical, and there were some colored magazines and English books as well. The books followed us many years later until our house was sold and we could not bring them with us anymore. I regret to say that I was not aware of the final fate of these books.

My sister was born four years after me. My father put his and my mother’s name together to make her name. They asked me what should they call her, so I said Misa, the typical name of a beloved bear in Russian culture. That name stuck, and now except for offical documents and strangers, no one calls my sister by her real name anymore! I guessed all the extra work that my parents put in started to pay off, as I remembered now that we started to have more visits to relatives during the weekend. I didn’t recall any eating out thought. Things were progressing. One evening, for some reasons, a puppy showed up outside our apartment door, probably a neighbor’s. Later at dinner, my mother told us that having a dog visiting the house is a good sign, and that it matched exactly with her and my father’s reassignment to Saigon. My mom was to become the head of accounting for Vietnam Television’s first branch in Saigon, and my dad was tasked with leading a new construction company branched from the Corps of Engineers.

Sometimes, many times actually, I have complained about him. Perhaps I was channeling my mother, as they argued a lot. But in the end, she had always loved him, and all of us do as well. We will argue and we will disagree, but we know that he will be there in our corner.