My Father

Today is America’s birthday. Tomorrow is my father’s 70th birthday. It is a special event, as that age is 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 create a memory-portrait of my father, a quick glance into his life from his son’s perspective, 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 (probably 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 he 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 Hanoi 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 Hanoi 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 high school in Hanoi (Chu Van An high school) 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 Hanoi 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 official 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.

The family moved to Saigon sometime in my second semester of fourth grade. I remember my father took me to visit and say goodbye to my homeroom teacher, and her kind offer to let me stay with her to finish my elementary school in Hanoi. Time seemed to fly quickly after that. I recalled moving across three different houses, one becoming slightly larger than the other. I recalled, though, at any house, we would always end up having a half house/half workplace set up for my parents’ various attempts to do more, to earn more. There was the smell of slightly damp packing straws and the dusty surfaces of the ceramic bowls, plates, and figurines, products of a Northern porcelain company that rented out our house’s front room to be their first shop in Saigon. There were various clothing articles, in mint condition, strewn out throughout the house. These items would later be packed into large polypropylene sacks to be sold to Russia. I had a great time hiding around those sacks imagining myself fighting against some horrible monsters similar to those I saw in my comics. My father was so very busy now. He would have to travel weeks at time, going all over the country to his company’s construction sites then flying back and forth to Russia to negotiate new business leads. Around this time, my brother was born, and my parents decided for my mother to take an early retirement package to stay home and lead the home business that my father initiated. With their busy schedule, it was inevitable that my own education and disciplinary routines got relaxed along the way and I turned into a little delinquent. Nothing too bad, mind you, just skipping school for a week here, getting some bad grades there. Of course there were consequences in the form of spanking, and I was very resentful at that time. My resentment did not last long, and I did not remember any particular instances. What I did remember though, was that I had an appendectomy when I was in sixth grade. When I woke up in the recovery room after, the first thing I saw was my father’s face outside the door. My mother later told me that he stayed up all night (the surgery began in the evening) until I woke up.

As I went to high school, my study and behavior became better. My father still showed his strictness, but it was in the form of why did you only get 9 instead of a perfect 10. I could sense the expectation that he had for me, the first born son of the first son in the family clan. He had gotten even larger, perhaps closer to 100kg in weight. I can still remember his routine: breakfast in the morning, then off to work, then home at 5 or 6PM, had dinner and then watched the news until 9:00-10:00PM then off to bed. While he never actively pursue any hobbies outside of work, I think it was because he wanted to focus on working. He still sang and played the guitar on special events. Occasionally, he would stay up late to watch a cowboy movie, his favorite genre. I remembered him yelling at me for wasting time reading comic but then I caught him reading and laughing himself later on. I never caught him reading the comics anymore, but he also never complained about me reading comics again.

My parents credited their abroad education for their successes. As such, I were prepared for studying abroad ever since I got into 10th grade (in Vietnam, high school starts at 10th grade). Interestingly, Russia was not their choice, but America. I studied English with our neighbor, a former English teacher for the old South Vietnam officers. My father did not want to just let me go though. He thought that I needed to prove that I can be successful once I am away from home. Despite the completion of all paperwork, I took the Vietnam university entrance exam and got a score high enough to get into one of the top three universities in Vietnam at that time, and only then I would leave for the US. I remembered my last few days of preparations, where he bought me a business suitcase and set the password to be my mother’s birthday. It is so that you have a safe and secure storage for your documents, he said. I also packed his and my mother’s winter clothes that they saved from their time in Russia. I remember hugging him before going through airport security, thinking that I was finally as tall as him.

Going to the United States had been a great opportunity for me, at the cost of less connection to home. In late 1990s - early 2000s, international calls were expensive, and my parents were not that great yet at using emails. Unlike other family, my parents didn’t encourage me to visit Vietnam too often due to the cost and also because they think I should spend time become more immersed in the language and culture. They also were even more busy working, overcoming various obstacles that I only learned about later on. My sister also joined me in the US immediately after high school. My mother was diagnosed with cancer about a year before my graduation. My parents and my brother flew over and attended the graduation ceremony. My father had to leave early to go on a work trip, and my mother stayed with us for another month or so. She fell sick after traveling back to Vietnam. My father asked us to write emails every day for him to print out and bring to her. My mother passed away two weeks after.

With my mother being gone, it felt like a layer of mediation was taken away from us. We all knew that we love and care for one another, but now we needed to become more proactive in staying connected and sharing with one another. He and I have talked a lot more often since. I learned more about my father and a glimpse into our family chronicle. Now, at 45, as I am making my own path for my family and facing my own challenges, I have learned to understand and appreciate what my father did. In our conversations, we are not agreeing on how things should have been done that often. Yet, I am always aware that in his own way, shaped through his lifetime experience, he is always loving and caring for us.

Happy 70th birthday, Dad. I understand you more now than I ever did, and I love you.