Dad, do you remember the last time we spoke? I’m having trouble remembering myself — it’s been so long now. I must’ve been seven or eight-years-old the last time I saw you. I have to confess, you keep me up at night. I lie awake in bed, trying to treat the blurs of black in holes in my mind — the rot from wounds running deep, left untreated for 20 years. My scars, they’re no different from the ones you picked up during the war — no different from the ones our people have been carrying around for the last 50 years.
This April, will mark 50 years since North Vietnamese tanks — soldiers riding atop, a victory parade in a coalition between North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units and Viet Cong rebel fighters—infamously rolled over the presidential palace gates in Saigon. 50 years since the war’s most defining photo: the rooftop evacuation above 22 Gia Long Street photo snapped by Dutch photojournalist Hugh Van Es, depicting a CIA agent’s outstretched hand to men, women, and children climbing over one another toward a departing American Bell 205d helicopter. That day, thousands — believed to be up to 10,000 — of South Vietnamese civilians crowded around the gates of the American Embassy, begging American marines holding the gates down, for a way out.
On the morning after, April 30th, 1975, President Dương Văn Minh — who’d been in office for only three days after the resignation of his predecessor a week before (a story of its own)—declared a formal surrender to the north, “We are here to hand over to you the power in order to avoid bloodshed.”
Dad, you never spoke about the war. When I was a kid, I used to lose sleep over you — mainly out of fear for our safety under your addiction to alcohol and later harder and harder drugs. When I became a teenager, I used to lose sleep out of anger for all the problems in our life — I blamed you for everything. In my early twenties, lost and bent to the point of near-breaking, I lost sleep at the idea that I was becoming you in my own mistakes and shortcomings. Now, freshly minted 25 this past March — the magical quarter-century mark of adulthood — I lose sleep at what I lost when you left: your story.
Is it true that grandpa died a hero? A forgotten commander fighting to the very end for your freedom? And that, when his body arrived draped in an American flag, grandma had to burn all traces of his memory out of fear of the Viet Cong? That had she not burned all memory of him, we would’ve had a direct flight out then? Mom told me you were scared of the communists; she told me her brother tried to escape Vietnam some time after the war ended. He was beaten bloody into the ground, losing a few teeth, by state police the first time he tried to leave. Mom said you thought about leaving when the first wave of refugees took out to sea — becoming the international phenomenon that you’d later become a part of in the late eighties: The Boat People. I heard you almost died when it was your turn — like the hundreds of thousands that lost their life out at sea those years.
I think it’s worth saying that mom thinks you had it easy compared to her brothers. They got shot at, you didn’t — at least not that we know of. They had to take the long route around out of fear of capsizing at sea with two young children on board, you didn’t. They didn’t come across any rescue by American naval or commercial ships, and you — well, you also didn’t, so I think you get points for that. Mom told me my uncles were around my age now when they left. She doesn’t remember how old you were — or off the top of her head how old you would’ve been today if you were still alive — but she does remember you almost screwed up our ticket to America when you came back.
She told me you left her pregnant with my sister when you made your escape towards Hong Kong. You spent five years there; I’m sure, causing all sorts of headaches there as they gave you asylum status. Mom told me, like the lucky — including her brothers who’d gone years before you — you were given an opportunity to return to Vietnam, with an offer to resettle in America. You begged mom to come with her in return, as if the last 5 years she’d been raising my sister by herself meant nothing.
“Whined” is how mom describes your pleas to get her to go. She was to give up her life? Leave behind her family? Break apart from the only home she’d ever known, for a country that had abandoned her country in its time of greatest need? I’m told you didn’t handle this well, but to your credit, you were persistent — having another kid, my brother, while disappearing, and reappearing to beg mom again in the late nineties. She only gave you what you wanted for us — something she’s done her entire life.
You know, she still has that scar on her left arm. The one from when you threw a cleaver at your own baby daughter, forcing mom to jump in front of the blade, almost killing her from the pool of blood laid out across the floor. If it wasn’t for family friends and neighbors, she wouldn’t have survived the night.
When she agreed, coaxed by family to do it for the kids — to give them the utopia life that so many Vietnamese heard during the war; education, the best hospitals, freedom to say and believe in anything, including their dreams — you traveled together to Saigon in 1999, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. While there, you passed your visa screenings. Mom doesn’t fully remember what the questions the American man and woman pair asked her then — in part because what you did later that night, on one that should have been a celebration, almost cost us our lives in America.
You tore up all of the paperwork for citizenship after demanding, of all things, a whole chicken and a box of beer. Again, you got what you wanted; entering that drunken rage that took you from hopes of a father into the monster at the bottom of the bottle. You tore document after document up. Once again, if not for a family friend — and to your credit, not tearing things into confetti shreds — driving around Saigon at midnight looking for tape to patch it up, the journey would’ve ended there. But that wasn’t the end was it?
Sponsored by a Vietnamese-American Christian organization, you rode on a plane full of resettling Vietnamese bound for Arizona. Mom told me it didn’t take long for you to get wasted, this time, trying to kill her, my sister, my brother, and now, in mom’s belly: me. Our sponsor family, gracious and generous, put us in our own apartment building not long after touching down. You broke the furniture, the windows, and the door we were hiding from you behind.
Mom sent my sister down first — jumping from the second floor balcony onto the gravel beneath, badly scrapping her knees to the point they bled all night. Then she jumped with my brother — and by some miracle, I also survived, months later at birth at a hospital in Seattle, perfectly healthy. I was always told to stay quiet about you at school, but I always wondered, every night you tried to kill us, why didn’t mom call the police on you? It turns out, she did you a mercy every time somebody did; neighbor, family friend, whoever. Our sponsor family called the police on you the morning after they learned mom walked for hours in the middle of the night, stumbling upon another recently resettled Vietnamese family — whose grandparents, boiled water and wrapped bandages around my sister’s legs. Mom says they, and the police, wanted to deport you back to Vietnam, but as she always has, she spared you — once again, in hopes that we’d still have a father.
You never did change, or appreciate her, especially after we moved from Arizona to Seattle to join up with Mom’s sister.
I find it so cruel, so unfair in how fitting it is, that it’s me, and not you, that will see the world that came from our people’s defining silence. In my restless turns in bed, I think about what I’d tell you if we sat face-to-face once again. I’d tell you I forgive you above all else; then I’d tell you what they never told you.
They never told you millions of our people died and were displaced as a result of the war — you were too busy surviving. They told me, briefly in school— in what felt like a 15 minute cover- up of our struggle — how many thousands of American soldiers were killed, maimed, and scarred. But never our people.
I was eight years old when I started asking about the war. Mom had a book with her; a photo collection of the Vietnam War. I remember seeing stills of abandoned and rusted tanks in the countryside; craters from land mines and munition shells scattered across the ground where children would gather; and most disturbingly, the deformed limbs and skulls of men, women, children above all realms of abhorrent crimes, left from America’s use of Agent Orange — the deadly herbicide, 2o times stronger than commercially recommended chemical levels to kill plants, that 11 millions of gallons of use. A scourge on the conscience of humanity — poisoning our land, and, at least, 150,000 0f our children — forgotten like all the rest.
Whenever I’d ask mom about the war then, she never wanted to talk about it—as if to spare me her pain. Whenever mom goes to the doctor, she never talks about the war — I tell her to, but she’s afraid.
Dad, I’ve spent much of my life in conflict with who we are. I once started a fight in middle school with another Vietnamese boy, because he believed grandpa killed his grandfather. (Despite both of our families being from the South.) I’ve been asked here and there, very frequently during the years of the pandemic, if I can speak English. I’ve been mistaken, casually, without any idea of how it might make me feel, to be Chinese. And I’ve been questioned, on if I’m American — or if I’m American enough for feeling as if the scars were never closed.
Mom says you both had it rough. You grew up shortly after the end of the French Occupation in Vietnam—our people have spent the vast majority of our existence under occupation, or fighting those who have sought to occupy us. The yellow and red flags of the South Vietnam Republic that fly in our Little Saigon here in Seattle — thousands of miles from the real Saigon — tell me that our people are still occupied. But our record in history, fragmented, warped, and forged to be repeated from being forgotten, is a reflection of you and I.
You suffered a fate no human being should be subject to. You grew up in severe poverty, a child of war and the silent death that follows its survivors. Mom can’t tell me exactly how hard you had it, but I grew up on stories from her family about a pre-war Vietnam where half the kids in her family went to bed hungry every night because there wasn’t enough to eat. Her family could only send half the kids, the boys, to school — a big reason why mom can’t read or write her own tongue. I suffered your fate, one no American, no model country, our people dreamt about during the bombings of Hue, could fathom. I suffered your flaws, drowned in my own encounters with the human tendency to hurt others, because we never had a chance to talk about our pain.
This past February, your daughter got married in Vietnam. I couldn’t make it, held down by school and a column I pen this letter in. But I’m told, my brother, your eldest son, broke down in tears opening up. Bringing the entire gathering of family and friends gathered for their celebration of love, to tears. I’ve rarely seen him cry myself; he brought it on himself talking about the single mother, who endured so much for us. She hid her scars all these years to raise three young children into the people we are today. Mom was even brought to tears — the first time she’s been given her flowers for showing our people’s strength. The first time she’s acknowledged, and allowed for celebration, of her pain.
When I think about our people, I think about how absent our experiences, our stories, are from the healing process of other cultures. Perhaps it’s a reflection of how Little Saigon is treated as an outcast of the wider Chinatown International District, but the Vietnamese experience often runs parallel with our tendency to endure in silence.
I wandered the halls of school, the morning after you’d pressed a knife to my sister’s face, strangled my brother, or beat mom downstairs as we laid in bed upstairs crying wondering if you’d spared her, holding onto the pain. I hit the books, picking up novels no eight year old should be trying to read, the summer after you left us for dead — a habit that was born out of desperation to lift us up out of our situation in subsidized housing. (You might say, this made me the writer I am today.) I held onto the pain, believing that the only measure of being a man was to not be you.
I heard grandpa wasn’t the best he could’ve been for you. I remember your uncle, the man who became your father-figure, took his own life—when I was a kid. You did the same as I did when faced with the pain… and look where it got us? You’re dead and I almost came close myself, at the height of my own regrets.
I was always taught by mom, anytime anybody gave me trouble — a teacher, a bully, and later, bosses, anybody with power over me — to “stay quiet and put my head down and go to work.” It created a vacuum of complacency with the more raw, burning strips of flesh that are the wounds you carried over, inflicted, and asked of me to bear.
At the core of who we are, as family, as Vietnamese, as sinners with a future, as humans, the pain in our hearts as part of the human experience, is permanent. But, as you’ve made of me, the struggles to live this life, as hard as we’ve had it—as our people have—the strength we deny when we refuse to open up about our feelings, our insecurities, our regrets, our hopes, is wasted on holding onto the past. Our story across three generations of Vietnamese, 50 years on since Saigon’s Fall, cannot afford to die in silence.
At a remembrance event I attended back in February at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) on South Lake Union, a question was asked between the speaker and members of the Vietnamese community, “Is it shame or pain that prevents us from talking about the war?” I see this question as existential, but consequential to the world you and mom gave us, dad. It’s neither shame nor pain, it’s nature.
When I made my feelings, my pain, my story open to others, 20 years of wounds began to close. When I listened to my mistakes, the pain I’ve handed others, sharing my regrets, that’s when the back of three generations of abuse began to heal.
If you were alive today, perhaps you’d be appalled to have seen the same frantic scenes of people in Afghanistan racing towards American planes — just like the helicopters of Saigon — to escape the Taliban. If you were alive today, perhaps you’d be angry at the threat of cutting out Ukraine, the same way South Vietnam was. If you were alive today, perhaps you’d be broken by the children being bombed in Gaza. Our people’s healing, our stories, our pain, has power more than ever.
In your death, I was able to open up about who you were to me. Our family has never been closer. I learned to be the man you never were, when I decided to see you as human.
Dad, I can’t remember the last time we had a conversation, but I recall the mornings and afternoons spent watching cartoons with you. I think if there was ever a time mom had power over you, it was for the hour I got to watch PBS those years before I started kindergarten. Those were the only times you ever felt like a father to me. Although, I get the feeling that you only sat there with me, waiting for Elmo to wrap things up, just so you could put on tapes of half-naked women dancing. I remember you’d look at me those years, hair short, but layering over like blades of black grass from our homeland — a horrific contrast to what I saw in your ghost in Little Saigon — and ask me, with your broken English, yellowed smile, and that silly thumbs up you always did, “Who’s number one?”
“Me!” I’d tell you, laughing together.
