Fraying (Final Memoir Essay)

Fraying

At the ages of 9 and 7 my brother and sister broke one of my mom’s rules. My mom never allowed her children to go beyond the backyard of Apartment 4, one of many in an urban neighborhood with houses tagged with yellow, red, and green graffiti. That meant that the woods, hidden a mile behind our apartment and located near a busy highway, could not be touched.

Dan had told me that a friend invited him and my sister An to go on an adventure. I didn’t receive the invite, but to appease me, my brother asked me to do one small, but important job: keep quiet and don’t let Mom know. As a little sister desperate to please her older brother, I took on this ultimate task, zipped my mouth shut and threw away the key.

Dan

Dan, Me, and An

Writing memoir essays can be similar to writing articles. In order to make a true account of my life, I have to do a lot of research. For my first essay, I talked about my spiritual experiences, and while I wrote the essay, I asked myself: What makes me move? What do I believe in? My second essay dealt with my mom and my dad's experiences during and after the Vietnam War, and to capture the political and social aspects of their lives, I sat down with my parents and asked a boatload of questions. I'm on my third essay now, and I need to write about a complex relationship that I have with a member of my family.

I've chosen to write about my brother Dan, because I cannot begin to describe how complex it is to be his little sister.

I'm walking down the same path that I went on  for my previous essays. My professor suggested that I take time to think about what feelings I have toward Dan. Exasperation, worry, and longing are just a few emotions that I associate with my big brother. Then, I've let myself remember things in my life that I've never really cared to think of before. I'm walking down memory lane, revisiting the good, the bad, and the confusing interactions and conversations I've held with Dan.

Since I'm home for Easter break, I've taken on the task to do more research, and I've been bombarding my parents with questions about my childhood, and the things that happened with Dan that I can't remember clearly. To help with this process, we decided to go through photos of our childhood. I discovered that my parents keep a safe in their bedroom that contains important documents and photos.

Mom pulled out an envelope that had Dan's birth certificate and passport in it. She also revealed three sheets of old, brown flimsy paper.

Dan's life is mapped out on those sheets.

When Dan was born, my grandmother - my father's mother - contacted some sort of astrologer/fortune teller/whatnot to write a description about Dan's projected life. For a small monetary fee, he mapped out Dan's life from his birth to the age of 74. Beyond that number, Mom says, the astrologer couldn't see.

You can imagine my shock to discover the existence of such a thing. My parents never told me about this. Now, let me tell you that my shock is not an indication of my close-mindedness. I'm kinda a believer in the supernatural. I love reading articles and fiction on things that may or may not exist. It's just...it seemed unimaginable to me that Dan's life could be so easily foretold.

I sat mesmerized by the neat but curvy penmanship that some unknown wrote in blue ink. My eyes traced the obscure boxes and arrows that appeared in random spots on the paper. It was in two different languages that I couldn't read: Vietnamese and astrology.

My incredulity heightened considerably when Mom began to translate the words into English.

In his adolescence, he will be a hot-tempered child. He will love and hate you (the letter is written to the parents). He will be a hard child to raise. He will be bright and will like numbers and will perhaps work in business. He will favor the mother over the father. He will be loved by everyone anywhere he goes. He will travel far. He will love but not be close to his sisters or brothers. When he is older, he will take care of his parents. By the time he is 30, he will be rich. He will marry a rich wife as well. His first child will be a son.

Ever feel like you hear something you can't understand but somehow know to be true? That's exactly how I felt when my mom told me these things.

Dan never liked school. When he was in elementary school, he never liked to do his homework. Some nights, I'd wake to find my brother's bed empty. After a little investigating, I'd find him downstairs and my parents awake. They used to make him do his homework during this time, forcing him to complete his assignments in order to get a good grade.

Despite his unwillingness to admit it, Dan has also inherited my mother's anger and stubbornness. He and her are too alike: one bit of friction and their anger comes alight.

Dan had a knack with business. The only thing that he really liked in school was business and business club. I thought he was going to major in it, but imagine my surprise when he decided to go for chemical engineering and then civil engineering! I never understood that change in his path.

Underneath his stoic attitude these days, I know that a thirteen-year-old wimpy kid still exists. Everyone still loves his innocence and they pamper him for being the firstborn son in my family. He can go anywhere he pleases and there will always be someone to help him out. When he went to Vietnam after my family just came back, he went with little regard for anyone there. But when he returned, he came back with gifts and fond letters from distant relatives. After he left training in Arizona, he went to visit a first cousin in Arkansas. He stayed there a few days, played with her dog, and hunted deer with the cousin's husband. He then went to Virginia to visit more cousins. They welcomed him with open arms.

Even though my love for Dan is indescribable, I still feel like there's a missing piece in our relationship. I started feeling it when he left for college, and I haven't thought about it until now, when I feel like I'm finally able to write about us.  My sister and him, on the other hand, will never get along. They've had too many problems, problems that trace back to childhood fights. They will be there for each other, but their bond will never be strong. It's sad to think about, because we've always been the triple Le's. I hope we'll always be that way.

As for the other things that I cannot see - his marriage and his children - well, I hope that can come true. My mom told me to remember that little prediction about his firstborn son. I hope that there's reality in that.

My sister has a letter too, but it's considerably shorter than Dan's. My parents probably lost some of it. My parents can't find mine, but I have one somewhere. Reading that letter is so surreal. So many truths that I cannot explain. There's nothing really wrong with what was written in the predictions. Discovering that letter has helped me reflect on my interpretation and perception of Dan. I still don't know how I'll begin with my essay, but I have the things that I need. I just have to put it all together.

This post has got to be the least coherent of all my posts. I didn't even realize I was typing this until I looked at the time. That's the dangers of being a writer: Your hands begin to move on their own!

Surviving: A political and social memoir

After writing the spiritual memoir, we had to write a political/social memoir. I had to talk to my parents to refresh my memory of their history, and it was quite nice. I don't think they expected me to write about such a thing, but I think they're glad that someone in the family is finally starting to write it all down. 

My piece will be part of a workshop on Tuesday, so this one is bound to have a lot of mistakes. I will post the rewrite when I get to do it. For now, enjoy!

Surviving

1975. Fall of Saigon. Agent Orange. Viet Cong. My Lai Massacre.

These facts flitter through my mind when I think of the Vietnam War. Sometimes I can’t conceive that parts of my family’s history and my very being lie beneath these stone cold, memorized facts that teachers used to throw at me in history classes. Today, I’ve already forgotten most of the names of politicians and military schemes within this war.  Truth be told, they’re just names that can be circled on multiple-choice tests.

I didn’t need teachers to tell me what happened because I considered my parents as sufficient proof that the war did happen - that years ago, constant terror, fear of the communists, and soul-splitting loss had my parents’ lives in their tight-clenched fists.

I look at my parents, and see how life is wonderful for them. All of their children are either undergraduates or graduates of a university. My parents can do what they please. My mom just started taking private swimming lessons. My dad is working on making his potbelly disappear by going on walks in the early morning.

I admit: The story about my family and parents is not simple. It’s an onion that always needs to be peeled. One layer contains the political history that my parents had lived through: the Vietnamese War. Underneath that layer might be one that captures the struggles that occurred after they relocated to America, a foreign country. Directly below, or perhaps a few more layers down, my own life and my siblings’ lives subsist in such an area, and it covers the hopes and dreams my parents came to grasp for not just their own reasons but for the children who are the carriers of their torch, their legacy. In the end, there might be a story outside of my parents’ stories, but it’d take years or my whole life to write such a thing. So, I’ll start with what I know.

I’ve realized that my dad never talks about his past unless he is asked about it. Which means, he only talked to me about his past when I approached him during spring break. That’s how my dad and I are similar. We would rather be moved than move on our own. My mom’s story had always been the story of the family, but I didn’t want to make it seem like my father’s story wasn’t just as important as my mother’s.

As a newborn in 1947, my father was born oblivious into a bloody, beaten world that had just crawled out from the battlefields of World War II, and he was caught in another war that would go on to cause more inconceivable damage to the world’s political relations. Lê Phung grew up in a poor village enclosed by old, rotting Catholic churches that stood as remnants of the French occupation in the late 19^th century. Even in 2012, when I visited my father’s home, the decrepit nature of the village could not be relieved. The main road to my dad’s home remained unpaved. The tunnels still only allowed people as its passersby, and cars were forced to turn around.

When my dad was young, he lived with his mother in a two-room cemented house. In this place, he felt perfectly content. My dad said he liked that he had his mother, because he only needed her.

As the Communists gained momentum, South Vietnam and the United States needed more men to enlist in armies. In my dad’s school, if a student couldn’t earn enough credits for school, he was forced into the army. My dad said that he never liked school, so he didn’t do well, but he wasn’t forced to go. My father wanted to enlist, because his friends did the same. To this day, he always reunites with his buddies when some anniversary of the naval academy comes up or when his friend invites him over for a chat.

And so, my dad left South Vietnam. At this time, he never knew that he’d leave his country at the age of 22, to join forces with the Vietnamese and American Navy. He couldn’t know that when he was able to receive sponsorship for entrance in the United States, he wouldn’t be able to contact or hear his mother’s voice for many years.

Now, I suppose after this, I can say that my dad happened to meet my mom over in the United States, got married, and fell in love. But I can’t. That’s just too simple.

In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson II to become the 34^th President of the United States. My mother, Pham Đông, came into the world around that time, born to Pham Duyên and Mai Thi Cat, a couple who ran a small, but marketable rice company in Nha Trang, Vietnam. At this time, Nha Trang had the cộng-sản, Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese communists, at the fringes of its boundaries.

 “It was during the time of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year,” she said, as she sat in front of the computer in the middle of a Youtube video about some obscure Vietnamese singer, “when I really noticed the world was ending. But I forgot what – oh wait—”

“Ba! Ba!” she said, using the Vietnamese word for my father who was actually sitting ten feet away from her, only he’s a bit hard of hearing. “What year was the –” and she went off talking in Vietnamese that I couldn’t understand.

“Ah,” my dad said back, his eyes thoughtful. He stood up, his hands slipping into his pockets. “It was 1968.”

“Really? But I thought –” My mom looked like she wanted to protest the date but stopped. Dates get fuzzy as one ages in years. “No, that’s right.”

On January 30 of 1968, the Viet Cong launched what is called Tết Offensive. Tết is the Vietnamese term for the New Lunar Year celebration. The communists and the South Vietnamese government had signed an agreement to put the Lunar New Year as a time of ‘cease fire.’

However, the Tết truce ended; the communists had broken their side of the agreement.  During this time, my uncle, Xon, returned from his position as part of a special force tasks in the Vietnamese army. When the Americans needed help landing on Vietnamese soil, they needed to make sure that the land was safe for their feet. The Viet Cong used to place boobytraps into the ground and if the Americans were dropped off in such areas, they’d lose more than just their feet.

My uncle’s job was to detect these bombs, in aid of the Americans. As the Vietnamese celebrated Tết, a time of color and loud, the air suddenly filled with cracks of what people thought were firecrackers.

But they weren’t firecrackers.

Xon knew this from his experience. Within minutes, he rushed his family, including my mom who was 12, into a tunnel located underneath the house’s kitchen. They stayed there for hours. When I went to Vietnam last summer, I stood in that same kitchen many times. We held family breakfast and dinners in such a tranquil space. I had no way of knowing that one of the safest places during 1968 existed underneath that kitchen. The numbers were never officially calculated, but in the aftermath of this offensive, the government estimated over 14, 000 dead victims due to the mass mortar attacks and ground assaults. Even underneath the tunnel, as she huddled with her family, my mom remembers bracing herself against the brisance of the mortar projectiles and hearing the rumbling of the aftershock, which sounded like the roar of a lion.

A few months later, Xon died.

In 1975, Saigon fell. Along with its government, its name also went away. The United States withdrew their forces. The war ended.

 Hồ Chí Minh City, named after the leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, stands today as one of the most populous cities in the country. This is the time that many people remember. Thousands of Vietnamese demanded for relief, frightened by the prospects of the communist state that would rise from their beloved Saigon.  The name Hồ Chí Minh roughly translates to “Bringer of Light.” But this light was not the benevolent light that one looks forward to in a summer’s day. The fall brought the scorch of the Communist forces that would leave the Vietnamese screaming.

The United States amassed the largest helicopter rescue mission in history.  My mom tells me that when the Operation Frequent Wind started, the sky was never silent and never still. Operation Frequent Wind saw helicopters arrive in Saigon, to rescue the Americans who were still stationed there and the Vietnamese whose family had been part of the South Vietnamese government. Desperate families pushed through to take that one step onto the helicopter in hopes of escaping an uncertain future.

My mother and her family ran against time. Her half-brother Con used to be a high ranked official in the Hậu Nghĩa province, but when the Communists took over, they sent him to a reeducation camp. The term reeducation was only a euphemism; instead, former South Vietnamese government members were forced into labor, a means seen as repression tactics.

Con did all sorts of manual labor, from cutting crops in the fields to the dangerously scouring the mines. My uncle, already pompous and cranky, before his time in camp, became more sullen and quiet after emerging from this, my mom said. His experience changed him. With him imprisoned, my family became more exposed. They, along with much of their neighborhood, stood as opposition to the government.

With the impending danger prowling in the rice fields and jungles of Vietnam and the dead bodies of North and South Vietnamese scattered across the grounds of the country like leaves during the Fall, my mother began to plan her escapes.

“Two nights a week, the government would shut down all of the electricity,” my mom told me. “So in our homes, let’s see, we didn’t have light. The streets were also dark.”

“Wait, so how did you escape, Mẹ?” I asked her. “If it was so dark out –”

“That’s right. It was really dark. But that’s why it was the perfect time for us to escape,” she said in a conspiratorial tone as she leaned forward.

Escapees had two means of escapes that had the greatest chances of succeeding: go by foot into Thailand or go by boat to another country. Two of my closest cousins took the former route, because when they went in 1988, they had less money.

My mom, however, became a boat person.

If I told a stranger that I need to leave Connecticut and wanted him to give me a ride, I doubt that the stranger would say yes. But this was what escapees had to do. To escape, they had to know or meet someone with a boat. Instead of paying them with đồng, paper money, they paid them in gold. Gold had more valuable than paper, whose value constantly changed.

“We had to trust our guts,” my mom said.  “And sometimes, we were wrong.”

She tried to escape seven times. One time, her “helper” carried her into the South China Sea by boat, but then took her money, jumped ship, and left her there. Other times, she paid her helpers beforehand, but they never showed up. At least one time, officials caught her in the act. When this happened, my mom had two choices: go to jail or bribe the officials and get away. Her choice was a no-brainer.

Her father, mother, and sister passed in a rapid span of time, which furthered her determination to leave in order to live. Live when others couldn’t.

Freedom. Freedom. The sweet taste of mango on a summer’s day. That jump down a waterfall. The open air of an abandoned flower field. My mom wanted all of this so badly.

My mom found that chance of escape, that chance founded by luck, and she escaped with her 11-year-old nephew. Her sister, the sister’s husband, and their 13-month-old child also went along.

For seven days, my mom shared a wooden fisherman’s boat with 39 people. They had no food. Sickness did not discriminate by age or gender. Other boats had capsized, and no one was saved – even the children. When I was little, my mom told me stories about cannibals. She heard from other Vietnamese refugees that on one boat, a man was so hungry that he couldn’t contain himself. He snatched the nearest person, a girl about the age of 5 and took a bite of her arm. Then her leg. Then the other leg. No one stopped him. As a child, I thought this couldn’t be true.

In reality, it was true. Other horrible and inconceivable crimes against humans occurred during this time. Thai pirates scooped the Vietnamese women from the boats, in guise of offering help, but then they ended up brutally raping and pilfering them. Women suffered – but for what? They had only their skin and bones.

My mom didn’t want to meet her end in a boat, a boat that likely led to freedom. She had to move on. If anything, my mom had learned how to press forward in times of struggles. In an article by Robert Funseth, senior deputy assistant Secretary of State in 1986, he wrote that the exodus of boat people had “resulted in so much needless human suffering and death.” But I can’t fathom why he would write “needless.” He makes it sound like the Vietnamese had escaped in hopes of encountering that suffering. But really they had to choose: either suffer at the hands of others or suffer in their own journey when they still controlled their lives.

In escaping, my mom came closer to touching freedom.

Before my mom left Vietnam, she went to see an old woman that used to buy rice from her parents. That woman had lost her son years before, and she couldn’t find him. She missed him dearly because he was her only relative that she cared about. My mom told her about her plan to escape, and said that if she made it, if she survived to step foot on American soil, she’d look for that missing son.

That woman was my grandmother. Her son was and is my father.

My mother kept her promise. She didn’t know anything about my father, and she wasn’t that close to my grandmother at first. Yet she did keep that promise for an old forlorn woman. After spending a few years in Palawan, Philippines, as a refugee and also as a volunteer French translator, she entered the United States. There, she met up with a brother in Washington who had left before Saigon fell. Soon after, she moved to Connecticut with her sister who escaped with her.

The Vietnamese have the uncanny ability to keep in touch, even after years of separation. My mom keeps a booklet that has all the names of refugees in the Philippines, friends in Vietnam and family all over the United States.

A friend of my father’s also kept such a phonebook. He lived in San Diego and saw that ad in the newspaper, so he told my father.

After a series of love letters that my dad refuses to admit to writing, in 1988, my father and my mother wed.

“So she won me over,” my father finished. The 63-year-old at the end of his tale gave me a nearly toothless smile. “And that was the end of my freedom.”

When I told my mother the first part (the second part just ruined the whole sentimental value), my mom burst into tears or anything like that. She just turned to my dad, who stood next to me. “You idiot,” she muttered in Vietnamese, a smile on her face. My dad started to laugh. I didn’t understand them, but I didn’t ask.

In college, I’m becoming more aware that I exist, and therefore my successes exist, because of my parents. One time, just like I am now as a young journalist uncertain of my paths in life, they were scared and uncertain about the future. But, I am the child of fighters.

Pham Thi Đông. Lê Phung.

I am Lê Đông Loan. My brother and sister also share the same middle name and last name.

In this way, I like to think that my parents imbrued their names in their children’s names, so that we too are marked as fighters, capable of taking on any task which we might have to encounter. Like my mother, my father, and other brave relatives, I know how to move forward. And I will, with the reminder of the past in mind.

I'm back. But instead of a post, I shall summarize through creative writing...

Yearning

Nonfiction (except for one part which had happened but not from this trip)

You will miss the days of wondering when you’d finally succumb to a permanent food coma. You'll yearn for the feel of the steam from a nice, big bowl of phở. The taste of the boiled chicken broth that spills pieces of bò and ga, instantly cooking them, will tantalize you. You will always feel the crunch of fresh bean sprouts, paired with soft noodles and lettuce and hoisin sauce; the symphony of textures only brings you closer to that nirvana your Buddhist parents always talk about. And you will believe it, even though you're Agnostic. And you'll always savor the moments where you sat back and held your stomach (Look, I’m pregnant) because you ate too much and wanted throw up. Funny—because you know that you would eat another bowl of phở within 20 minutes.

You will miss the sugary, cold slurps of sugar cane juice that was freshly squeezed in front of your eyes, and the coolness of coconut water from a young coconut that had just fallen off the tree in your backyard. You will miss, unbelievably, the bitter taste of Tiger beers, which you had the liberty to try since Vietnam holds no drinking age limit (but no more mango daiquiris).

You will miss the beach of Nha Trang, how the shoreline stretches miles and miles and how the ocean is so blue and clear that even as you swim deeper, you can still see your legs. You will miss the bamboo umbrellas which shielded you from the unforgiving sun. And yes, you will even miss the pesky but convincing women who roamed the sands (Hello, Madame, you like to buy?), carrying bamboo baskets filled with bracelets and trinkets that—let's face it—you'll never need in your life.

You will miss the boat rides which took you from one island to the next. You’ll remember the sunsets that led your dreams for most of the vacation. You’ll want to go back to that time when you stopped your boat in the middle of nothing but gorgeous scenery and purple and pink, and jumped right into the bay.

You will miss the mixture of fear and excitement that coursed through you when you rode on the back of your non-English speaking, but still endearing, cousin-in-law's motorcycle in the heart of Nha Trang (Slow down! Too fast! Sorry, no English, and he smirked). You'll remember the sweet, suffocating, and homely smell of gas, bún bò Huế, and fresh bread, each individual scent bombarding you at every corner you turn. You'll dream of the nights where everyone went out to have fun by the beach, where the lights of the night market stretched a mile down an already crowded street. The sights of eyesore and blinding glares of neon lights flashing "Fun Hear" (Oh look there’s fun—what?) and "Sailing Club" are now embedded in you.

You will remember the tears on your dad's face (you never saw him cry that way) as he stood in front of his mother's shrine, just one-year-old. You’ll remember the way your dad shuffled his feet like a 5-year-old instead of his 63 as he talked to his mother’s younger sister and the pain written on the face when he saw that his aunt looks almost like his mom.

You will remember that look on your mother's face when she visited the graves of her older brother and sister, both of whom died too early, both of whom she misses greatly. But her sister's death holds a greater burden, an inimical nightmare your mom has on occasion. You were there for her. You held her shoulders as she bowed down in front of her sister’s gravesite in respect, weeping. You offered your ears as she confessed that the night she and her sister were in the hospital, her sister had begged her to take her home, but the answer was "No, you need to stay and get better here until the next day.” Except...except, your mom had then said, while staring straight into your eyes, gulping her breath: She became lost. She went on (And it was my fault, my fault. If only I let her come home, your mom cried in English).

And you thought, in the back of your mind, at that very moment, that the Vietnamese also have their euphemisms, where the adjective for "lost, can't be found" is a verb for that thing you don't like to think about. You didn't know what else to do but light up three joss sticks to pay your respects. Then you lit 48 more for the other gravesites—all unkempt and strewn with weeds and questionable animal feces—and sent your prayers away.

You will remember the day you finally left home. Goodbyes weren’t given; you just told everyone you would meet them ‘later.’ Yet, ‘later’ could mean a year, two years—maybe even ten years. You took your final pictures, passing it off in playful gestures, but you secretly wanted to take photos with the people who you know will not live too long. Aunt Eight didn’t smile at the camera; instead, as you posed next to her, she whispered in Vietnamese, croaking at the age of 65, “What is that?” (Just smile, you said through your fixed smile).

And then, as you drove away in your taxi, you resisted the urge to climb over the piles of baggage to glance at the family house one last time. So, you sat in the front seat and closed your eyes, and before you could even comprehend it, you were at Nha Trang airport, ears full of English and Vietnamese.

And now?

Now, you’re ‘home’ in the suburbs (doesn’t feel like ‘home’ just yet), sitting on your bed, thinking that Vietnam shouldn’t have become a memory so soon.