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The Writers Post VOLUME
6 NUMBER 2 JULY 2004
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UYEN NICOLE DUONG ___________________________ THE
THREE CHILDREN OF
A VIETNAMESE SCHOOLTEACHER Saigon, The Republic of Vietnam April 25, 1975 -Room
Service? -Excusez
moi, Monsieur... -I am
dictating. Leave the tray on the table. -Je ne
voudrais pas vous deranger, mais... Je vous en prie. Monsieur... Mr. Christopher Sutherland? -Oh, you
are...not Room Service. Qui etes vous, Mademoiselle? Vous parlez Anglais? Oui? -Yes I
speak English. I was just too nervous. I stood hours in the sun before I
entered the hotel. For a moment I couldn’t read the room number, two hundred
and ten, engraved on the door. I stared at it for a long time outside your
room. -How did
you get in here? So Vincent didn’t follow instructions. I told him no
visitor. -The hotel
manager? Please do not blame him. It’s chaos out there in the lobby. -Are you
sent by the American Embassy? -No. I came
here on my own will. -Then,
would you mind leaving? I’m busy, and I am in my bathrobe. Let me guess. You
want a magical way out of Vietnam.
Sorry, I don’t work magic. You got the wrong guy. -I don’t
think so. You are Christopher Sutherland. I’ve seen your pictures. Here is
one. Taken at a Christmas party. For the past five years, my father has
talked about you occasionally, at dinner table. -Who are
you? -I am
Hope’s oldest daughter. -Oh, I am
sorry, Miss... -Simone. You
can call me Simone. -Oh, yes,
Simone. Your father is very proud of you. Everybody at the Cercle Sportiff
Saigonnais talked about you, the most beautiful girl of Lycee Marie Curie --Now
we’ve met. --Under
different circumstances I would have been much more hospitable. Or even
charming. But under the circumstances.. Allow me to put on a shirt. -There is
no need. May I sit down, Monsieur? -Actually
no, I am afraid you will have to leave soon.. .OK, OK, sit down, but only for
just a minute. Darn it, I have a weakness for the feminine sort of thing. If
you are looking for your father, he was here earlier, but he left already. -I know
where he is. My father is at home sleeping in exhaustion. For days he had been running around town
looking for a way out. From the
Defense Attache’s Office to various embassies. He went home defeated. Finally
my mother said, sleep, my dear, take a nap.
She got him a hot towel. Made him a lemon soda. I watched them. I saw
despair and panic written on their face. So I said, mother, stay with him,
let me try, leave everything to me. After all I am the oldest daughter and
speak fluent English. -Your
English is perfect. -So I put
on my best ao dai, made specially for ceremonial occasions, and decided to
come here. You see, this dignified ao dai, high collar, black satin with an
embroidered golden dragon... -It is
lovely, but why this visit? -Because
there is nowhere else to go, no other route to take. --Miss, I
can sympathize, but... --My
father is your friend. --Yes, he
is. -For years
he has consistently supplied you with news, tips, and interpretations. You
call him by his pen name Hope. It’s kind of a code name to denote how helpful
he has been to you. Until last week, he was still supplying you with news
about the Convoy of Tears, who in the National Assembly has connections to
the North, the lobbying the Catholics are doing with Vatican, and all this
talk about the possibility of a Third Force, neither communist nor
pro-American, who can save Saigon from a bloodshed... --All such
news tips were greatly appreciated Your father is a fine man, and I am
grateful for his help through the years. --But you
will leave him when the time comes. --I told
him to go home and wait. --He is
waiting, Mr. Sutherland. We are all waiting. --Perhaps
you should go home and wait with him. --I am
bringing you something. --Oh
please, there is nothing I want. --I offer
you my family heirlooms. You must have heard of my family. --Not in
great detail. But I know Hope’s wife came from the former capital city of
Hue. That royal or mandarin background or whatever. Look, Miss, now is not the time to talk about history. -It is
exactly the time to talk history, Mr. Sutherland. I’ve brought you history. I
came all prepared. Look, here are two ivory plaques, made out of elephant
tusks thousands of years old, one belong to nhat pham trieu dinh, hong lo tu
khanh, a mandarin of the first rank of the royal court, and the other one
belonging to an admiral of the royal fleet. Here is a luscious green jade
phoenix, once held by a royal concubine of the Nguyen Dynasty. -They are
beautiful, Miss. --Mr.
Sutherland, these belong to my extended family. Once a French collector
offered my family tons of money for these items, and the answer was no. To
give them away means to entrust our lives. Now, these items are yours. --I am
deeply moved but I dare not accept, Mademoiselle. Wait, wait, don’t frown.
Let’s see. Perhaps there is another way for you and your family to get out of
Vietnam. Come here, by the window, I’ll show you. You see, out there at
Saigon harbor, sea merchants are selling spaces on their boats. At ten gold
taels or so per head. --You know
we don’t have that kind of money. My father is a writer. He teaches at a
starving wage. A local stringer who works for you on the basis of friendship,
not an employment contract. --Perhaps
you can sell the ivory plaques, the green jade. --They
mean life and death for us, but no one would pay ten gold taels for them at
this time. --Neither
do I. I have no use for them. But don’t give me that sad look. -How can
the city seem so peaceful? I can see
La Rue Catinat with all those fashionable kiosks. The big circle in front of
the Opera House, animated, full of traffic -- those mopeds, and cyclos, and
those yellow and navy blue Renauld taxis. Everything seems so normal. You see
that ancient clock over the Ben Thanh Market? It has been there since the French time, before I was born. My
grandmother said troops came. Troops left. People revolted. Jailed.
Escaped. Returned. Died. And the clock has been watching. --Are you
all right, Miss? You are turning pale. You seem lost in a trance. -The clock
has remained intact, as though people can do much havoc to themselves, to the
city, but they can’t do anything to time.
Or perhaps the clock is laughing at history, at all our anxiety and
panic and all the things one must do in a time like this. You’re part of
what’s happening here. You know what the American Congress is going to do.
What city will fall next. When the Viet Cong troops are moving in. -I don’t
know as much as you think. But I know this, and I will tell you right now. In
any moment, with a signal from Washington, Voice of America will play White
Christmas, and all U.S. personnel are to report immediately to the Embassy.
And I’m supposed to be here 24 hours a day, around the clock, waiting for the
tune of White Christmas over the radio, to cover the end of the war. My
nerves are raw. If you would, Mademoiselle, please... -So I am
right. You know the end is near. That means you can make things happen. - ...leave.
Just leave, please. Don’t force me to be rude. Take your heirlooms and go
home to your father, and if I have good news, I will come to the house. -Mr.
Sutherland, in the hotel lobby, there are women... --I know. --Bar
girls, I guess, looking desperate, waiting for their American boyfriends or
husbands. Their ticket to the last flight out. --Miss,
you are shaking and your eyes are all red. Are you all right? Would you like a sandwich? I’ve ordered
Room Service. Aren’t they working around here any more? Maybe a hot towel would help. --Out
there in the lobby, no one wears an ao dai with a gold dragon and silk
trousers over escapin shoes. They are all in bell bottoms and mini-skirts and
platform shoes, with their fake eyelashes, foam enhancers inside their bras,
and all that heavy makeup and broken English. I don’t belong. Yet I have
walked through there. Just like the girls, I am ready to beg and kneel. And
the hotel manager, Vincent, he had such a hard time keeping the girls under
control. He tried so hard to keep up
that French elegance. He was nice to me, yet his eyes had that same question,
why was I looking for a room number like the girls? Finally, he screamed at
the girls, putains, putains, and I had lowered my head in shame. --I am
sorry, Miss, you should not have come here...Oh, my goodness, the tape
recorder, still running.... Oh no, what are you doing? --Help me,
Mr. Sutherland. Help us. --Hey,
lady, stop. What are you doing? --I won’t
watch my father sent to a communist jail. I have teenage siblings who need a
future elsewhere. My mother is a fragile woman who loves to plant flowers and
cries in times of crisis. --Oh,
Mademoiselle, please stop. You are not being yourself. -Those
people from the North who will be coming out of the Cu Chi tunnel, Mr.
Sutherland, they don’t like us. French-educated professor. Informer for the
Americans. Bourgeois. Annamese aristocrat. We stand for what the people from
the North have been trying to destroy.
--Miss, I
am asking you to leave. Or, I think I will leave. --They say
I am beautiful, Mr. Sutherland. --You are,
but this is ridiculous. --My
family heirlooms are not enough. --That’s
not the point, Mademoiselle. You are indeed lovely. --I am
eighteen years old. Everyone says I am mature beyond my years. I feel a hundred years old at times. It came from being the oldest girl in a
family like us. They all thought the Lycee girls were wild Vietnamese
congai’s who spoke French and acted like French movie stars, but not me. I
always dream of loving someone and he is beautiful. But he is not here and you are here and... --Oh gosh. --All you
need to do is to put us on the plane.
--It isn’t
that simple. --Tell
your boss in America I am your wife. Tell them anything, anything. Take us to
America and I’ll be your maid. I’ll sweep your floor. I’ll do anything. --Oh what
have I done? You are gorgeous. --Mr.
Sutherland, it is simple. I have figured it all out. I’ll stay here with you.
You can do whatever you want with me. And together we will be waiting for the
VOA to play... what is it? --White
Christmas. --All
right, White Christmas. And only then will we leave together. We’ll pick up my family on the way. And
you will see to it that all of us board the plane. --Miss, I
should throw you the bed sheet. --Either I
stay here with you, or I will go into another room. Any room. I’ll find
myself another American man and leech myself to him. A GI, perhaps. --Oh no,
please you can’t do that. --I am not
looking at you, Mr. Sutherland. I am looking down at the floor. It’s gray
marble. -I should
be turning away. I should leave this God-damned hotel room. --I can
hear the air-conditioning. I am so cold. The grey marble. I’ll remember it.
Cold as it is. --Oh,
please don’t cry! -Everything
may collapse, but perhaps this gray marble floor will sustain. It will
remember me, this day...What is today? --April
25th, 1975. --This day
in April, and the gray marble floor. When this is all over, perhaps I won’t
remember. --You make
it so difficult for me, Mademoiselle. You are exquisite. Just exquisite. --I am
feeling this gray marble floor with my bare feet, and then I am lying down. *** --Mr. Sutherland, have they played White
Christmas yet? Houston, Texas
the present The day is
long in March and the hot and humid climate of
Texas reinforces my self-indulgent illusion that sunshine will last forever.
At six o’clock in the evening, the bright day has not died out, and the
traffic of Westheimer street is gradually turning into a slow-moving bee-like
stream. The patrons of La Griglia parade in,
all beaming with their bright eyes, the women lifting the corner of their
mini-skirts, the men glancing at their gold watches underneath their grey
coat sleeves. I am sitting at the bar, facing the front door, hiding my
roving eyes behind the dark sunglasses so I can be free to become the people
watcher of Houston. I rest my eyes on the mannequin face of some Texas
beauty, who reminds me of an unkempt peacock, with her turquoise frilly dress
and beehive of purplish red hair. I cast my eyes to the beer belly of some
Texas oilman, well covered under his navy blue coat jacket glamorized with a
row of bright gold buttons that match his bright gold cufflinks. The Houston yuppies move leisurely to the
front door from their shiny BMW convertibles and luxury Lexus’s, the alloy
tire rims, leather seats, and customized license plates making the statement
of success for their owners. The primitive colors of LaGriglia’s
southwestern artwork take me to Mexico’s green grass, brown earth, red sun,
and the deep yellow grains of its corn tortillas. Gorgeous twenty-year-old waiters and waitresses sing the exotic
menu with twenty different kinds of salads while holding in their rosy hands
baskets of hot bread wrapped in crisp white cloth, gliding them toward the
tilting cups of glistening butter. Delicious oiled garlic and melted cheese fill
the air, mixed with the slight intoxicating ferment of red and white wine,
the tanginess of fresh tomato and tamarind sauces, and the rich floury smell
of home-made pasta and corn tortilla. I sniff into my lungs the smell of
food and drinks yet my pallet remains immune to the seduction of the culinary
art. People turn robots through the
lens of my sunglasses until the familiar gait of an Asian male appears at the
door in his khaki pants and denim shirt.
I raise a finger and he sees me immediately, the familiar broad grin
pulls his full lips upward and puts wrinkles on the bridge of his elegant
nose, harmonizing with the unconscious raising of his dark brows. I recognize
the trademark boyish grin of my brother. That part of him has not changed and
perhaps will never change. In my mind the boyish grin becomes the link
between the man and his childhood.
Now perhaps he has gained a little weight around his waistline. Perhaps his thick shining black hair has
thinned out a little. Perhaps his
grin is only boyish in my mind. Pi
is a man now and he acts like a man.
I slip down from the bar stool and he places one arm around me, a head
taller than the top of my teased hair. His embrace is that of a grownup, more
of an influence from his Americanism than the French elementary school Aurore
of his Vietnamese childhood. There is nothing traditional
Vietnamese about Pi’s embrace. In the
old days, Vietnamese boys did not embrace their big sisters. Then, big sisters were treated like
mothers, revered and bowed to, from whom sacrifice was given and directions
taken for the sake of the family. Now in stylish La Griglia, Pi can be
mistaken for my boyfriend showing up for our early evening date. And he is embracing me. “Hello, Mimi,” he calls me by my
American name, “looking good, sis,” he says. He is speaking English without an accent and we are meeting in
LaGriglia, where we act like Texas yuppies, instead of some Pho noodle shop
in the Vietnamese neighborhood of midtown Houston, where we suck in those
long, flat, tasty noodles while our bamboo chopsticks dip and stir in the
meaty broth sprinkled with chopped green chives and coriander. Simone will be arriving late, Pi
tells me as we sit down at a table for four. Immediately he starts giving me
a full account of the rat race of Friday afternoon --he has had to fight the
four o’clock traffic to take my mother to his new home across town in an
affluent suburb of Houston, the Woodlands.
Regardless of when Simone arrives, he will have to leave before
eight. Only I, the unmarried and
unattached, can stay past eight and sit idly at LaGriglia to catch the
attention of these young men wearing white shirts and designer ties, arriving
in the restaurant after they have valeted their BMW convertibles. Once upon a time, we were three
children inseparable in our daily routines, sharing a bowl of rice and
splitting a piece of fruity American chewing gum into three parts. Simone used to put Pi up front and I
tagged on the back of her bike, and together we toured the streets of
District Eight, Saigon, laughing at the dirt particles that flew against our
young faces, in the heat emanating from the dusty tires of those military
trucks -- the camions that graced Saigon’s busy streets and spoke of a
country at war financed by foreign aids. But in those days I had no awareness
of danger, whether the source of which were the camions that could crush our
bike, or the threat of war. Now we live in America, are afraid of
high cholesterol and the health risks of overeating, and we see each other
twice a year, once at Christmas and the second time only for special meetings
like this. There
will not be too many meetings like this, I hope. I tell Pi and he shrugs his shoulders. Someone calls, Peter,
and Pi turns around to shake hands with a blond young man in a starched white
shirt. “Meet my sister MiMi,” Pi says to the
starched shirt, and I take off my sunglasses at last. “So this is the Harvard
trained lawyer, the White House Fellow, your superwoman sister you always
brag about,” the starched shirt says in his distinctive Texas drawl. They
work together for Hewlett Packard, Pi says.
“Peter?” I repeat, and my brother
explains that he has officially changed his name from Pierre to Peter. While the starched shirt is busy
digging his fork into the grilled chicken breast topping his Cesear salad, I
ask Pi why he prefers being called Peter.
“Convenience,” he says, “as I am tired of being called Peer instead of
Pierre. If I had ended up in France I
would have been Pierre. But I am in Texas
now. Pierre is too French and it makes me unpopular among my colleagues at
Hewlett Packard. *** Peter
Giang-Son. My brother’s new name
brings back my bittersweet memory
of the day we, as a family, were processed for naturalization. It was an important event. Even Simone had flown down to Houston from
New York City for the special occasion, so we could all be naturalized
together as a family. Things were supposed to go smoothly
on that historic day, until my father, in his stubborn way, decided to create
a problem for all of us. My father’s
full name, the correct Vietnamese way, was Tran Giang-Son. The family name Tran came first. His given
name, Giang-Son, came last. Giang-Son
meant river and mountain, a metaphor derived from the literary phrase
Giang-son gam voc. Rivers and
mountains, beautiful like silk and satin.
The literary phrase was used metaphorically to describe a beautiful
country. So my father’s full name was
Tran the Beautiful Country. If my
father were to follow the American way, the family name would come last, and
he would be Giang-Son Tran, instead of Tran Giang-Son. No big deal, but that day at the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, my father acted up. Ten minutes before our interview, my
father announced solemnly and adamantly that he would not reverse his name to
conform it to the American way. The reversal destroyed the melody, he
said. It destroyed everything about
him, he added, and I could not understand why, but he kept repeating the word
“destroy” in Vietnamese and his eyes were red. He sat in a corner, reciting a Vietnamese poem over and over
again, while his three children stared at one another, worried and confused,
knowing he had, again, slipped into his madness. It started with the day when my
father stopped his car along Interstate 45, on the way from Houston to
Galveston beach, in order to rescue a turtle who was crawling aimlessly
across the freeway -- the beginning of what we considered our father’s
non-violent and harmless episodes of temporary insanity. Those days, my
father had given up all hopes of finding a teaching job. He had given up
writing or researching. Instead, with
cash from Simone and a loan from his friends, he had bought an old shrimp
boat and rented it out to the Vietnamese shrimpers in the Gulf of
Mexico. Every week, he drove to
Galveston to check on the boat and to collect his weekly rent. That
night, my father declared to us at dinner that he had adopted the poor little
turtle as his fourth child to replace his first born Simone, who had married
his American friend and boss at the news service in Saigon, the AP journalist
Christopher Sutherland. Mr. Sutherland was twice Simone’s age and the
marriage was entered into hurriedly a few days before the fall of Saigon to
secure our departure for America. For years Mr. Sutherland had never once
contacted my father, and my parents never once talked about Simone’s
marriage. Oblivious to our wide-opened eyes and
gaped, rice-filled mouths, my father even declared he had given the turtle a
name. He called it Ali Baba, after a
character from The Arabian Nights -- Ali Baba and the forty bandits. We were all shocked that night by my
father’s solemn declaration about the turtle. I, in particular, was not sure whether he was just joking, or
whether he was truly bitter about Simone’s marriage. Bitter to the point he
was going to replace her with a turtle.
That summer, I had graduated from
college, was living at home with my parents and Pi, prepared to enter Harvard
Law School in the fall on a combination of scholarship and Simone’s help in
cash. My father had refused to talk to me about Harvard, never once
congratulating me. He handled my
Harvard admission with the same silence he had treated Simone’s
marriage. It was as though he was ashamed,
instead of being proud of my Harvard admission, unable to bear the thought
that I had come to Simone for financial help, rather than asking him for a
share of his modest income deriving from the old shrimp boat. But the shrimp boat, too, was partly
the result of Simone’s cash -- something my father never wanted to
admit. I was puzzled, of course. Nonetheless, we the children exhibited
little reaction or objection to my father’s idiosyncrasy about the
turtle. After the fall of Saigon, in
our own quiet way, we had denied ourselves the luxury of outward reaction to
shock. Further, even among the professor of the old University of Saigon, my
father had always had the reputation as a frustrated, impoverished, dissident
intellectual. So, we quietly watched while our father put Alibaba into a
portable plastic sink and took it to the bedroom. From then on, my father spent hours
each day taking care of his turtle.
My mother, the classic subservient wife, went along and even helped
him feed the little animal with bread crumbs, occasionally expressing her
concern that the turtle might be toxic. We would have taken my father’s
turtle for granted, until one night, when my mother slipped out of their
bedroom and told us in tears. “Your father has gone insane. He has been speaking to the turtle every
night. Tonight, he calls the animal
Simone,” she said. Pi
and I quietly tiptoed through the hallway and placed our ears onto the door
to my father’s bedroom. We even pushed the door open a little, seeing my father
kneeling on the floor, next to the plastic sink where he kept his Ali Baba.
He was indeed talking to the turtle, calling it Simone, his precious,
beautiful first-born child. Pi could
not understand the monologue, but I did. My father was reciting Vietnamese
classical poetry, passionately and intensely, as though Ali Baba could
understand every word. It had been
years since I heard my father reciting those verses. It used to be a habit of his, in the old
country. In fact, I still have vivid memory of
those nights in Hue, when Simone and I were not yet ten years old, bored and
upset because our absent-minded, clumsy father had decided to take over our
grandmother’s roles in our young lives by putting us to bed. Awkwardly, the young father first exhausted
passages from Alphonse Daudet’s Le Chevre de Monsieur Seguin, the little goat
of Mr. Seguin, running around somewhere in the countryside of France. He then progressed onto a reading of
Vietnamese poetry. I never forgot my
father’s favorite Vietnamese poem, which he read to us that night and many
times thereafter: Toi dung ben nay song, ben kia vung dich dong, lang toi do xam den mau tiet dong ... I stood on this side of the river on the other side, the enemy’s
zone, in between lies my village, the haze of its horizon bearing
the color of frozen blood … That night in Hue, Simone had pouted,
asking my father to please go away.
She wanted our grandmother to sing the melodious folk tunes of Nam
Binh. She wanted neither the little
goat of Mr. Seguin the Frenchman, nor the frozen-blood haze of my father’s
North Vietnamese village. My father, losing his patience, had spanked her,
and she had cried. It was the first and only time he had
laid hands on her. *** The year
was 1979, in Houston, Texas, when my father recited again the same Vietnamese poem, this
time to his turtle Alibaba swimming in a portable plastic sink. *** “What is he
saying, sis, what does it mean?” Pi
roundened his innocent eyes into
a question. Pi had had no literature classes in the old country. He was too young when we left. Naturally I did not expect my youngest
brother to possess the linguistic ability to understand the words my father
was reciting to his Ali Baba. Perhaps
my father had realized this. Perhaps
that was one more reason why he had adopted Ali Baba into his family, the
poor abandoned, misplaced turtle from a Texas highway. *** “Doi nguoc
ho ten cha me dat, tap lam con tre noi ngu ngo.” At the Immigration
and Naturalization Office in downtown Houston, my father went on to sing
another poem written by a friend of his -- a Vietnamese writer living in
exile. The writer could no longer write or publish. He could not speak
English, and he had reversed his name.
So subtly he complained about all these things in a poem, printed in
some crummy-looking newsletter distributed at Vietnamese grocery markets, all
located in the less than desirable part of town. My father was murmuring his friend’s
poem to himself, the same way he had spoken to his turtle at home. I
understood the meaning of those words.
I should not complain,
the poet admitted. I am among the fortunate ones who should
celebrate freedom. Just a little
inconvenience here and there, the poet went on. For
example, I reverse the name my parents have given me, and I become a child
again, talking with my hands, babbling in a language I cannot speak. Stunned, I watched my father close
his eyes as though he were meditating, travelling alone into his private world,
saying his favorite exile verses over and over again like a chant, as though
we no longer existed around him. In
that moment, my father became the lonely immigrant who slipped away from
reality, shutting out his wife and children, such that only Ali Baba the
turtle could become the lonely man’s trusted friend. *** Before the
immigration authority that day, my father officially remained Tran Giang-Son, the new
middle-aged citizen of the United States of America. No longer Dr. Tran Giang-Son the schoolteacher,
but the small-time entrepreneur Tran Giang-Son who owned a shrimp boat that
broke down all the time because it was so old, used by no other shrimpers in
the Gulf but the newcomer, penniless Vietnamese who couldn’t speak a word of
English. There
was a problem, still. Without the name reversal, my father would be called
Mr. Son, while Pi and I would be Pierre Tran and Mimi Tran. (The married Simone wanted to keep her
Vietnamese last name as her middle name, so she would be Simone Tran
Sutherland.) People in America would
be asking why our father and his children did not have the same last
name. We the children kept discussing back
and forth. Meanwhile, the immigration interviewer occasionally stuck her head
out, calling the name of the next interviewee. We argued and argued so urgently and earnestly and the room was
filled with our staccato Vietnamese clipping, tonal sounds, and the rest of
the people who were also waiting for their interviews -- Mexicans, Indians,
Peruvians, Pakistanis, Iranians, whatever places they were from -- were all
staring at us. We must have looked
like noisy clowns to them. Amid all of this heated discussion,
my mother had retreated to a corner, looking at a Cosmopolitan magazine,
although her English was not good enough to understand Cosmopolitan. When I looked at her to seek her opinion,
she smiled feebly and said whatever name the immigrant officer would like to
call her, that would be just fine with her.
And then she told me out of the blue, ”The sky is blue and I love
America. It is my country.” For a moment, I was lost. Then, I
caught on. She had practiced the sentence at home so that she could say it
perfectly to the immigrant officer.
My father had worked with her diligently the night before our scheduled
interview to lessen her Vietnamese accent and to make sure she would not say
the sentence the way she would be speaking French. The sentence had to be spoken in perfect American English, my
father had stressed. At the Immigration and Naturalization
Office, my mother was practicing still, apparently in her head. I understood
the emergency situation. My father
had slipped into the mood of poetry recitation and my mother had taken refuge
in the practice of her English. I had to become the take-charge daughter, a
literary designer of a last name to solve the dilemma of the day. I turned to Simone and Pi and
announced I would be making the final decision about our last name. We would be taking my father’s given
name, Giang-Son, as our last name.
That way, in the American way, we would all have the same last name, and as a
family, we would be the Giang-Son’s. I turned to Dr. Tran the Beautiful
Country for his approval, but he was still closing his eyes. I
reasoned to my siblings that after all, Giang-Son did sound prettier than
Tran. Giang-Son also sounded more Vietnamese, as the Chinese had Tran as a
last name as well, so we would be maintaining our Vietnamese cultural
identity better by being called Giang-Son, rather than being called Tran. Further, if the Americans misspelled Tran,
we would all become Train, and that was no good. At least with Giang-Son, we would not run into that risk. My logic must have sounded fine, and everybody,
including my mother, seemed happy with my literary design of a name. The
three children would become Mimi Giang-Son, Pierre Giang-Son, and Simone
Giang-Son. Not bad. That was how we were prepared and
ready to throw away our old names, Tran Thanh Mi Uyen, Tran Thanh Phi-Long,
and Tran Thanh Mi-Chau, those beautiful lyrical Vietnamese names with special
meanings that nobody here understood, names that consisted of foreign words
too complicated and long-winding to be remembered. Finally the matter of name
was solved satisfactorily, and we all sat down, contented and peaceful,
waiting to be called for the interviews. *** Unfortunately, the problems of the
day did not end there. Pi had come in
first for the interview. When he got
out, he had officially become Pierre Giang-Son. My mother came in second.
When she exited the room, she told us what happened. There emerged the next
complication. During the interview, stressed out by
my father’s sudden episode of temporary insanity, my mother had broken out
crying. The kind-hearted immigration officer, a woman in her twenties, had
gently asked my mother why. My
mother’s broken, self-conscious English was inadequate for her to explain the
complex turmoil of the soul, so all my mother could offer was a timid,
short-handed explanation of the last name business. She managed to explain that in the old country of Vietnam, a
married woman could retain her maiden name.
My mother had had the same name all her life, vestige of her heritage.
Yet that day she was all ready and prepared that day to change her full name
from the long-winding Cong Tang Ton Nu Mi Suong to Suong Giang-Son, to
conform herself to the American way and to be properly identified as Mr. Tran
Giang-Son’s wife. Apparently, the immigration officer
thought the name change had made my mother cry. So, she zealously pursued a
mission to help my mother maintain her long-winding Vietnamese name. She told
my mother that in America, no citizen could be forced to change or reverse
their name against her wish, and women, in particular, could make their own
decisions, especially on such a personal matter like a last name. My mother
was indeed threatened by the interviewer’s long and forceful explanation of
what America was about on the issue of names, but in the end, my mother got
the message. The bottom line was, my
mother did not have to be called Mrs. Son instead of Mrs. Suong, simply to
please her husband or to become American.
She could be whatever she wanted to be. The officer (not knowing she had
unintentionally added to our family’s identity crisis) also pointed out to my
mother, conveniently and casually, the terrible disadvantage of adopting my
father’s last name Giang-Son. In English, “son” meant a male child. In the worst case, someone in America
might even call my mother MaMa San, instead of Mrs. Giang-Son. Mama San, that
stereotypical and derogatory way of referring to an old Asian woman! My
mother would not like that. Facing the uncomplimentary possibility, in a
split of a second and without further ado, my timid mother triumphantly said
yes to the officer’s question whether she wanted to keep her old name. So, thanks to the feminist officer,
when my mother emerged from the interview room, the new citizen of America
the beautiful, timid and disoriented still, had remained proudly as Mrs. Cong
Tang Ton Nu Mi Suong -- a testament of my mother’s freedom of choice in her
new country. The new citizen of
America who emerged from behind the door of the interview room that day was
Mrs. Cong Suong, wife of Mr. Tran Giang-Son, and mother of Pierre Giang-Son. By then, the whole system of consistency I
had devised for the last name business had collapsed, because our father was
Mr. Son, Pi was Mr. Son, and my mother was Mrs. Suong. Where would that leave
the two daughters? After all this
work and discussion, we still ended up with different last names. Back to square one. And the
discussion started all over. All eyes
in the room were on us again and we became the quarrelling bunch that
unavoidably received all the perceivably hostile attention and curiosity of
our fellow aliens, all sitting around that day in the waiting room, perhaps
equally anxious and nervous as we were, waiting to embark upon their new
American identity. It was then that Pi exploded. He said he had become Pierre Giang-Son and
that was the end of it. All of this
embarrassing discussion was the result of my father’s nonsensical approach to
the legalization of his own name on the piece of paper called the
naturalization court order. After
all, Pi did not care if he was called Mr. Son or Mr. Daughter. Amid that heated and loud argument,
the immigration supervisor stepped out, his six-foot-five body seemed
gigantic next to us. “What is the
problem here?” The giant cleared his throat, and we all quickly became silent. I caught my mother’s worried eyes. I could
tell she was panicking as though the copy of Cosmopolitan was withering in
her hand, and her fragile frame would wither with it. Once again, I became split-second
creative and fixed the problem. The
men in our family would be Giang-Son, and the women would be Giang-Suong,
taking on my mother’s beautiful first name, Suong, which could sound like
Swan, or Sean. In Vietnamese, Suong
meant Dew. Giang-Suong meant River
and Dew. So, the men would be River
and Mountain, the beautiful country, and the women would be River and Dew --
misty dew over a river, still the poetic image of a beautiful country. I was being my romantic and creative self,
proud that I had managed to hold on to this thing called our heritage. Giang-Son for boys, and Giang-Suong for
girls. The rule made perfect
sense. I pushed Simone inside the room and
the six-foot-five supervisor followed her and the door was shut. When she
walked out she told us she had become Simone Giang-Suong Sutherland, and she
liked it. The immigrant supervisor had asked her why the spelling of her
Vietnamese last name was different from that of the men in the family, and
she had simply smiled. “It is a
complicated family, and a complicated place where we came from,” she told
him, urging him to move on with the paperwork and simply honor her wish. I was the last one to walk through
the door for my interview with the feminist immigration officer. I found out
she was a graduate of Smith College, where all the feminist students in
America congregated (she proudly claimed).
She congratulated me on my new name and identity, Mimi Giang
Suong. “Sounds like Mimi Sean Young,
how beautiful. Welcome to America,” she said. We
were then sent home to await the court date, where we would be sworn in as
new citizens, pledging our allegiance to America before a federal judge. On the way back home, we had no more
discussion on the matter of name. My
mother was happy that the immigrant officer had warmly praised my mother for
making up her own mind and speaking beautiful English. “The sky is blue and I love America,” my
mother had delivered the sentence perfectly.
My father seemed most pleased, and I
understood why. Things had gone well.
On the historic day, no disaster had occurred and he had got his
way. He did not have to reverse his
name like that poor poet. After all, Vietnamese or American, he was still Dr.
Tran Giang-Son, the identity of the schoolteacher, and not Giang-Son Tran,
the shrimp boat owner he had become. Perhaps
in his mind, his children would still bear the beautiful Vietnamese names he
had carefully chosen and constructed the day we were born. At home, we would
always be Si, Pi, and Mi, the three children of the schoolteacher. But it was important to us, how we
were called when we sat in a classroom, were interviewed for a job, or went
out on a date. I felt terrible. I
should have persuaded my father to reverse his name. That way, we could all remain the Tran
family. Instead I had let my wild
mind run and my literary creativity had led to the splitting of the family in
the domain of name. On the day we
officially took our American identity, we had taken on different last
names. Giang-Son. Giang-Suong. One of
these days people would be asking us why the spelling of our last names was
different, among brother and sisters, father and daughters, husband and wife.
It would be a far too complicated, boring, and ridiculous story to tell. And
nobody would understand anyway.
Perhaps we would just lie and blame it all on the towering tall
immigrant supervisor in charge of processing our paperwork, or the
overzealous feminist officer who encouraged my mother’s freedom of choice.
Perhaps we would just claim the giant man had misspelled our name so no more
questions would be asked. Or, we
might as well have become John Doe and Mary Smith. The sadness in me grew as I looked back at the federal building
office where our papers would be processed.
What I saw behind me was
impersonal. All I could see was the
facade of a building. Just a building. *** “OK, Peter, but to me, you are
Phi-Long,” I call him by his first name given at birth, the masculine name
meaning a traversing horse that turns into a flying dragon because of his
unbeatable, magical speed. “OK, I got it, sis,” he blinks. “My
sister, the writer, the romantic. You
don’t want me to forget my roots.
Okay okay okay. I am Phi-Long.” He says, too, that I am too romantic
to hold a Harvard law degree, too romantic for the dreadful routines of corporate
law, too romantic to play the stake of Wall Street and get rich. Silently I acknowledge the truth he has
laid out. In those places he just mentioned, I have disguised my romantic
self for a while, floating above water just enough so I would not be discarded
and stepped on by the unromantic. I add to his statement the fact that
I am too romantic to get married and love an ordinary man. I want someone who
calls me his First Lady and one day I will be dying still waiting for him.
Our statements summarize all the failures and dissatisfaction of my life. I
have hung on to my romanticism as though it were the only treasure left after
an earthquake. And because I am
romantic, I prefer calling him Phi-Long now and then. My brother tolerates my choice. Someone is calling my name. “Mimi, over here.” I see Simone
approaching in the New Yorker’s signature little black dress that accented
her slenderness. I have not seen her
since last Christmas and in the light of the early evening, despite the high
fashion model look, her face appears drawn and her eyes slightly red. Her
sleek, straight black hair has been layered and highlighted into a light
brown, wavy shag. The furrows on both sides of her mouth are the only obvious
sign of her forty-something era. The fine baby hair on the side of her cheeks
contrast against her translucently smooth skin. The tiny blood veins under the small, porcelain skin gives it
the reddish pink shade of a young Chinese apple. My sister is the sweet
child-woman, ageless in her way. Finally we are together, the three
children of Ong Giao, the Vietnamese schoolteacher who refused to reverse his
name. The restaurant is getting crowded and
I order foie gras mousse as an appetizer, in commemoration, I say, of
Simone’s and Pi’s French elementary school, that period of time, so long ago,
when Pi still wore his navy blue shorts and carried a bidon of water on a
shoulder strap. Ecole, ecole, ecole,
je deteste l’ecole, I hate school, he used to say. I have no time to indulge myself in
the nostalgia of childhood since Pi makes a hand gesture and anxiously gets
right into a discussion of family affairs. “We can all spare childhood
remembrance for now,” he says. In his
toastmaster public speaking style, he expertly summarizes the living
arrangement for our mother. I can see
him making a presentation at work for Hewlett Packard. He deserves every
promotion Hewlett Packard has given him. He acts like an American male and
there is little Vietnameseness, if any, left in him -- that sullen, shy,
non-communicative and scrupulous look from eyes that are lowered and glancing
sideway, and the perpetual smile that beams up a flat face -- the signature
of the Vietnamese spirit. Praise a
Vietnamese, he smiles. Beat him up,
he smiles. Shoot him finally, he dies smiling, a Vietnamese writer has
written. But Pi is not smiling scrupulously
like a Vietnamese. Instead, he is
professionally eloquent like a serious presenter, a straight shooter a la
American style. He readily justifies
why my mother is better off living with him as the Grandma-nanny for his baby
girl. My mother cannot adapt to my
single life or Simone’s Manhattan existence. The problem, however, is Pi’s
dark-haired Iris American wife, who may find the concept of a live-in
Vietnamese mother in law a culture shock. One does not expect the host
country to understand our Vietnamese way. So, my mother’s living conditions
under Pi’s household can only be a tryout, to be revisited in the future. And then Pi mentions the Hy Vong
Viet. The Vietnamese Hope. Simone brushes her hair backward and
pulls a scarf out of her tote bag.
She wraps it around her head to cover up the dark brown shag. I know
it is her nervous gesture. Like our
late grandmother, Simone has adopted the habit of doing things to her hair to
hide her emotions. Sometimes, with
the use of a scarf; other times, with a hair clip. Since her husband died, she has reestablished her ties with the
family, travelling to Texas once a year to see our parents. I have learned my big sister’s nervous
habit by observing her at these yearly Christmas get-togethers’s. The mentioning of the Vietnamese Hope
must have hit her raw nerves. In Vietnam, my father wrote newspaper articles
under the pen-name “Hope,” and the teenager Simone was known at the Saigonese
national press club as Hope’s beautiful daughter. For more than two decades of his life
in America, my father never mentioned his former pen-name, until he founded
the magazine. He called it the Hy
Vong Viet, Vietnamese Hope. “Dad has been asking me for five
hundred dollars a month to support the Hy-Vong Viet,” Pi takes a gulp of his
iced water. “Five hundred dollars a month, you hear me? It’s totally ridiculous. And guess what,” Pi chews on his ice, and
soon the glass is empty. “Dad does not want to ask the girls because he
thinks the Hy-Vong Viet should be the responsibility of the boy in the
family. C’est Moi, that’s me,” he
points to the middle button of his denim shirt. I detect resentment in his
voice. The waiter is serving our foie gras
and a French baguette. I see past
Pi’s anxious face to envision the profile of my father’s face at sixty-five
years of age, with his facial muscles sagging and drooping, and those age
spots that fill his cheekbones. He has lost the elegance of the facial bone
now distinctive in Pi’s handsome Asian face.
On my aging father, somehow the elegant bone structure must have been
buried deep under sagging skin and loose muscles. Only when the elegance was gone, and the retirement paper properly
signed, did my father establish the Hy-Vong Viet, his one-man publishing
house and one-man magazine dedicated to the “revitalization of Vietnamese
literature” and “advocacy of liberal democracy in the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam.” He has distributed two issues of the
Hy-Vong Viet to Vietnamese grocery stores, unwelcomed by shoppers who
preferred reading the community gossip.
The magazine has consumed a good junk of my father’s modest retirement
income from the school district. He
had taught there for years, taking care of under-privileged black, Hispanic
and Asian bi-lingual children from the urban ghettos of Houston, after his
shrimp boat had gone up in flame in the conflict between the Vietnamese Gulf
Coast shrimpers and the hooded men of the Klu Klux Clan, which attracted
national press in the eighties. Finally, his retirement came as a
joyful escape from the routines of his life. My father could not wait to take
off to California where his old buddies, the left-over literati of the
defunct South Vietnam, would jump in and help Hy-Vong Viet survive. These retired old men have all rid
themselves of their jobs and are now into the survival of the Vietnamese Hope
full time. Somewhere else, in LaGriglia for
example, that spirit is dying, and my brother has no sympathy for it, and I
have no energy to argue, explain, or plead for my father’s case. It
is ridiculous, Pi continues, that for two decades we have become the
supporters of unemployed relatives in Vietnam. We the new Vietnamese Americans, with one foot in the old
Vietnamese culture and one foot elsewhere, have been made into the unwilling
rescuers of a failing communist economy transitioning into the market model
of the West. We have had to expend the kind of expenses we cannot deduct on
our income tax returns, and now we are being asked to support the revival of
this Vietnamese Hope, whatever that means to Dad. Pi’s liberal wife, a former local
administrator of the Houston chapter of the ACLU, has indicated she would not
mind putting the money into a mutual fund for my father, instead of
supporting this ethnic press of his. It is either a tranquilizer or an
old-age hobby for these old men, Pi says. Like playing bingo, he adds. |