You know, I think these days we would call it a mild stroke . . . yes, I think your dad had a mild stroke.
Could that happen from drinking?
Well, I don’t know, but he was very drunk. And then his mouth froze over on one side, and your great uncle said shove something in his mouth so it doesn’t stay that way, and so he doesn’t bite down on his tongue. I think we used a towel. Haha! You know your father, he would never eat enough before he drank. I would always tell him, eat something first to absorb the alcohol.
But this didn’t just happen when I was little, it happened in the refugee camp too, right?
No, not in the refugee camp. We didn’t have any money to buy alcohol; how could he have gotten drunk?
Oh. Okay, that night I was little, do you remember his one friend, who was a doctor in Vietnam?
He was so kind. His wife was too.
He had to piggyback Dad from that house to the car, and then from the car to our house.
Oh, were you with them that night?
Yes!
How do you remember these things?
How could I forget these things?
_____
I call my mom every other day when I’m cooking dinner. We typically do not speak for long—under five minutes. We live across the country from each other and these calls serve more as mutual health and safety checks. I say, “How are you, what did you do today?” She says, “I’m fine, I went swimming,” or she says, “I’m fine, I didn’t go swimming, it was too cold.” She’ll ask, “What are you cooking for dinner?” I’ll ask, “What did you eat for dinner?” And then she says, “Okay, go eat, I’m fine and I’m watching a movie.”
Every once in a while, for a song, a film, a written piece, or just sentimental urgency, I will call her in the daytime and spring many far-reaching questions on her, regarding her life before war, becoming a refugee, her life now, how wildly different my brother and I are, or what she remembers about my father and our time with him. At my behest, we will go on family history forays like the one excerpted above from our most recent extended conversation, collaborating to flesh out a sequence of events, or to re-ground in truth what has become lore in my mind. She’s always game and acts as though she has had advance warning.
In the early seventies, my mom was just building a career in diplomacy with the South Vietnamese government. She was very much looking forward to marrying the man she loved (not my father) and living and working all over the world. As Saigon fell, the man she loved fled to France, and she had to make her way to America. She met my father in May or June of 1975, in a refugee camp on the island of Guam. They were both en route to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. At Fort Chaffee, my mom and dad decided to get married. They settled first in North Carolina, where they had my brother, and then they moved to Northern Virginia so my dad could work for Metro, the D.C. public transit system, and they had me.
My dad became increasingly maddening to live with, often gone and worrying us, or home and destroying us. He left when I was around twelve. I wonder if he had the foresight to disintegrate, to know that he was a slow-burning net negative capable of flashes of brilliant pain, disinterested in change, and that he should spare us. He quit his job at Metro and disappeared, materializing a couple years later, meeting me every now and then at one McDonald’s or another, handing me an envelope of cash to give to my mom. As he offered it through his car window, he would laugh like we’ d been joking and say, “Girl, you are a pain in the butt!”
A man in diaspora self-divides. Divides himself from his decency, again from his family, again from his home. No one can know much of him anymore; they just report to each other regarding his most essential welfare. They put only the most extreme fears to rest—he is alive, he is not sick. They do so with a curious lightness. What has become of him or what he has become are not mysteries to solve, just realities to accept.
_____
My mom laughs on a recent voicemail she’s left me. “Hey, don’t worry. I just asked Co Ba. Your dad is fine, she just talked to him the other day.” She sounds genuinely amused. “Seems like he’s okay. The old man is just not calling you back!”
My mom is now remarkably warm and good-natured toward him, or, I should say, the idea of him. These days she remembers how much he cared for her mother, my bà ngoại, after she came to live with us in 1990. She recounts all the wooden frames he constructed in our backyard, so bà ngoại’s bitter melon and bottle gourd squash vines could climb.
When my grandmother was alive she would bring him up from time to time and say to me, “Your dad loved you like gold. Remember how he would call home from work every day just to talk to you?” I did remember.
My mom always doesn’t need anything. I have taken to just taking her at her word and aspiring to be more like her. If she says she’s not lonely in Florida in her one-bedroom condo, what can I do besides believe her? Even when I press her for candor, when I use persistent questioning to show her she can tell me the truth, she says no really, I’m fine. And when I was just there visiting her, due to my partner’s Covid contraction and the subsequent ten-day isolation period, we had twelve days of us together in her condo for her to tell me how she truly felt about anything and everything, and she just said: “I’ve had a good life.”
In 2015 I was invited to visit and perform in Vietnam for the first time. I thought it a perfect opportunity and nearly heroic act to take my mom to Vietnam for her first trip back in forty-three years. Unfortunately she was very reluctant to go and is so cloyingly stubborn when she is reluctant that I had to try multiple times to convince her. I had to call her and promise things I actually didn’t know much about. I screamed things over the phone like “OF COURSE YOU ARE NOT STILL ON A LIST FOR WORKING FOR THE REPUBLIC! OF COURSE THE COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU COMING BACK!”
We went there. I say “there” and she says “back.”
After my concerts and two weeks into our visit, we embarked on a road trip with a small cavalry of relatives. We stayed on the beach in Đà Lạt, and then drove into the countryside to see Dí Sáu, one of my mom’s first cousins. (I refer to her as aunt; all parents’ cousins are aunts and uncles.) Dí Sáu was my mom’s best friend growing up. They hadn’t seen each other since 1973. A few miles out, my mom said, “She doesn’t know I’m coming.”
While my mom was newly resettling in the United States, Dí Sáu’s immediate family were plotting to get out of Vietnam. Dí Sáu was pregnant at the time, and her father forbade her to attempt such a dangerous escape with them. She stayed in Vietnam and they proceeded; months later she was notified that all her siblings and her father had died at sea.
We walked into her front yard and Dí Sáu came out of the house and picked my mom out of the bunch and looked incredulously at her. She could not believe what she was seeing. She embraced my mom and then pulled back to look at her through tears.
She said to her, “I didn’t think I’ d see you again in this life.”
We stayed long enough for my aunt to serve us drinks and recover from her shock. She recounted the trouble they would get into and gave examples of practical jokes my mom would play when they were teenagers. Dí Sáu told us how often the government had tried to take her house from her over the years, and how she’ d just recently shouted down an official hovering at the edge of her property. Everyone laughed the uproarious laughter of survival and I snuck in there too.
After about half an hour my mom said, “Well, we have to get going.”
Dí Sáu said, “Really, so soon?” And then she said, “Wait, let me get you mangoes from the backyard.” She took a long while picking the mangoes, talking the whole time, asking us to stay for more drinks, for dinner, to come back again before we left. My mom kept declining and demurring with uncharacteristically few words.
We piled back in the van and I waved emphatically and watched my aunt watch us as we pulled away. My mom did not look up.
Back at the hotel I asked her, “Why didn’t we stay longer?”
She said, “I don’t like to be sad.”
I asked, “Will you keep in touch with her?”
She said, “I don’t know; I don’t think I will.”
On the call with my mom, I tentatively brought up that visit. I had not mentioned it since it happened seven years ago. I myself don’t like to remember that evening much; it doesn’t sit well with me that we ambushed my aunt with such brief joy and such sharp pain.
When I asked my mom again why we’ d left Dí Sáu so quickly, and why she hadn’t stayed in touch with her, she said, “There’s something about time passing that makes everything and everyone distant and strange.”
I have spent years thinking my dad was suffering. I have, in the endless interim, imagined him torn asunder by guilt, silent and paralyzed with remorse. Most recently, I have worried that he was so ill he could not return my calls. After hearing my mom speak so matter-of-factly of time and its power to cast an alienating patina over everything and everyone we were once certain we would always love and need, it occurred to me that I am not so special, nor exempt. Time could have easily made me distant and strange and ultimately unnecessary to my father. I wonder if I’ve assigned a great deal to him to explain what is perhaps simply him at peace.
On that same call I asked her again about Vietnam. She said, “There’s nothing there for me anymore. It’s all completely gone. If it is inconvenient to live there, why would I live there? My family, my kids and grandkids are here. There’s nothing left there, nothing to even remind me of my good memories. What would I do there? I can retire here, I can rest here.”
But almost immediately she added: “If the war hadn’t happened, my life would have been unmatched. Diplomatic life is amazing. A new country every four years. My next assignment would have been Paris. You know, the man I was supposed to marry, he and all his family were there.”
Still oddly defensive of my dad, I said: “Yes, but could this man dance?!”
_____
My mom always loved how my dad danced. She said: “Your dad, he was the king. All the women loved to dance with him, the rumba, the cha cha cha, tango, waltz. He was better than all their husbands.”
The dance halls. I’ll call them dance halls because they were so much more than a temporary sheet-vinyl dance floor in the Harvest Moon Bar and Grill or someone’s cleared basement. However I can remember the dancing, I will. Sweet memories are not about accuracy, they are about safe harbor. You keep them well maintained and embellished as needed so you can steal away from time to time.
I remember being eye level with waists and torsos. Thin leather belts, fabric swishing. Curves. Panty-hosed legs and low heels; hips; graceful, manicured fingers resting lightly on strong, stately hands. Strobe lights from Party City and disco ball refractions swinging through the room, catching sequins from dresses bought at Macy’s or Nordstrom’s or Filene’s Basement. Smiling, cackling, levity. Forlorn yet soaring notes, bright, resonant snares.
I was transfixed and delighted in the music and movement, happy to be unnoticed. Stateless men and women with varying degrees of fight still left in them, whom I knew personally, were free and joyful, out from under memory and worry for the evening.
My favorite, of course, was when my dad would dance with my mom. When he danced with other women, I would fret and monitor his hands gently guiding their turns, wonder what he was saying that was so funny.
My parents loved Randy Travis and Reba McEntire. They loved dramatic American country music more than anything else in the western world. It’s not surprising, as they and their friends coveted Vietnamese songs and tales of war-torn lost love, where the soldier goes off to fight and then his wife takes their newborn to the top of a mountain to wait for him and they turn to stone. They turn to stone. It’s never about regular heartbreak, where both parties are still alive and just not functioning well together.
My dad also loved cowboy movies and songs. You’ve not known equal parts disorientation and enchantment until you hear a drunk Vietnamese man sing Marty Robbins’s “El Paso.” “Down in the west Texas town of El Paso / I fell in love with a Mexican girl.” When my dad put on “El Paso” and let loose his clear, lonesome tenor, we were both transplanted to another life, one where we were fluent and strong and dashing and in charge. All I wanted then was for him to be happy and at peace. He was neither, generally speaking. But there were rare moments and I filed them away. As long as my brain works I will have my vivid versions of such moments: we are in the backyard lying on a blanket, looking at the sky. My mom in one crook of his arm, me in the other. He says to me, “You know, I won’t always be alive, so you have to learn how to take care of yourself.”
The last time we spoke, I’ d called him. His voice sounded more like sinew and finely ground pebbles than the pure chime I remembered. I don’t mind seeking him out now. My brother has vanquished him from his consciousness, to best wrap up long-flailing loose ends. Once, several years ago, I asked my brother if he was still haunted by life with our father and he said, “When I was nineteen, I decided I would forget everything that had happened in our family and that I would be happy.”
Not me, apparently; decades on, I am still dipping in, checking the temperature, meandering to and fro. I don’t ever involve my brother. It doesn’t seem right or fair to drag him back.
I haven’t ever succumbed to the temptations I have considered to help me escape my experiences of neglect and trespass, violence and violation at my father’s hands. I am generally at peace now. My pride in these accomplishments makes me generous and forgiving and over-confident and foolishly delusional. Sometimes I actually believe I’m not out for emotional recompense or closure or justice or to make someone be what they have clearly demonstrated they are not. Sometimes I believe that what I want from my dad is only pedestrian information about himself. Sometimes my eyes do not burn and well at just the prospect of seeing him again. Sometimes I think I only want to present him with a questionnaire and that I would mean it when I said, “I just want to know more about you before you die, and I just want to know if you remember the same things I do.”
I would ask:
What have you been up to?
Do you still like to read?
Do you still watch cowboy movies?
Do you still smoke Winstons?
What is the last song you listened to?
Do you have other children besides my brother and me?
Do you remember making me ham sandwiches before we would go fishing at Burke Lake?
Do you remember drinking aloe vera from little jugs?
Do you remember meditating side by side on cushions my mom made us?
My mom said your mom was mean and didn’t care about you, is this true?
Do you remember anything about your father?
Do you still remember any French?
How come no one ever taught me any French?
What is your favorite meal now?
Do you think you are an alcoholic?
_____
It is evening in 1990, in Falls Church, Virginia; the same evening I will ask my mom about over thirty years later. We all pour through the door and it is mayhem. My dad on the back of his doctor friend. My mom and aunt and grandmother stunned and then immediately clearing a path so the doctor friend could deposit my dad on the couch. Me trailing behind, crying, having been driven home in my dad’s car by Bac Nga, one of my dad’s friends who had served in the South Vietnamese air force with him. My great uncle, who had also been at the little gathering where the kids were playing upstairs while the adults played poker on the first floor and where no one expected my dad to drink till he collapsed, has come back with us to help. He is screaming for something to shove in my dad’s mouth.
Now it is very quiet and I am disappointed. All the very helpful men have left together. I’ d quickly recovered from the shock of seeing my dad barely conscious and had started to relish all the commotion. My mom and aunt and grandmother are in the kitchen, gathering things to help him and quietly denigrating him while he’s still too drunk to register.
My dad needs to vomit. The towel is out of his mouth. He has just struggled to sit up. He is hovering over a large powder blue plastic tub, the one that my mom uses to marinate large quantities of meat. The plastic is probably irrevocably infused with raw onions and garlic. He’s winding and bobbing his head round and round. He’s moaning for relief, but it can’t happen. No one around is going to stick a finger down his throat, and he is too drunk to do it himself. He is on the sofa, with the tub in front of him on our coffee table/dining table/only table. I am on the floor of our living room.
I stare earnestly at him, keenly interested, emboldened by his stupor. Typically I would never look at him, never risk making eye contact with him. But now I am staring and staring. He accidentally focuses on me and we lock eyes.
He is lost. He does not belong to anyone here. He is to be found at a later date, in another home. Or maybe not in another home, just in the vast wilderness of decisions made by deciding and decisions made by refusing to decide.
He looks at me. I look right back. The next day at school I tell my kindergarten teacher about our night. I love Mrs. Gibson so much and always want to entertain her. I detail some exploits, the giant thud I heard that was him falling, the grown-man piggyback rides, the marinating tub. I am confused by her perplexed responses. The next day after school I tell my parents what I told Mrs. Gibson and they are very angry with me.
____
On an evening two years later, my dad summons my brother and me to our secondhand stereo system for a song from Elvis Phuong. Elvis Phuong is, as you might imagine, a Vietnamese crooner. After the war, he resettled in France, and then moved to the United States, putting out records for all those who are scattered and bereft but still like to be debonair, like my father.
We quickly assemble and my dad presses play. Somehow he is already impatient and frustrated with us. He demands gruffly that we listen, listen. He sings along to Elvis Phuong covering Paul Anka’s song “Papa.” First a verse in English, then that same verse in Vietnamese. My dad is very somber, and then emotional. Eyes glistening, he says, “Listen to these lyrics, this is like me singing to you, this is like our life.” The lyrics are in the first person, the narrator reminiscing about how devoted and self-sacrificing his father was, and how he is continuing the cycle of hard work and devotion on behalf of his own children, so that they might grow and prosper, and how sadly, yet beautifully, and as a generational matter of course, they will one day leave their father’s home to have their own families and be virtuous parents as well. My brother is fifteen or sixteen by now, neither moved nor impressed and most likely disgusted by the irony. I am seven or eight, fully onboard, rapt and nodding earnestly.
There is a well-worn Vietnamese phrase to describe wayward souls who drink a lot and do objectively nefarious, directionless things: Bụi Đời, the dust of life. It has deeper, more nuanced implications from war, but has always been presented to me as a choice, and utter failure. I was raised to agree, but I’ve always had a soft spot for all those who are uncertain, seeking and wandering. I have certainly tried a bit of it myself. Being the dust of life is traditionally reserved for men, but so are a lot of things I do.
In most of my fond or neutral childhood memories we are going somewhere. I am eight or nine and we are on I-95 with the windows rolled down for the very humidly Virginian summer evening. My dad is smoking a cigarette and I start vehemently rubbing my eyes. He sees me in the rearview and barks, “What’s wrong with your eyes!” He doesn’t believe me that ashes from his cigarette are flying into them. My mom has to turn back to investigate and confirm. He says a clipped, apologetic “oh” and flicks his cigarette out the window.
I loved to trace the journey of a spent cigarette on night drives. It would bounce along, its heart still burning red and I’ d square my shoulders up to the rear window and keep track of it for as long as I could. So Bụi Đời.
Question:
What happened to you when you were little?
_____
The memories where we are not in motion are terrible. I am sobbing under my bed, or holding my breath in my closet. We are stuck; he is siphoning the life and safety out of our home.
When I was around ten he was arrested for a D.U.I. and lost his driver’s license for a year. He had to get a moped. He would let me ride it in circles in our backyard. The only time I rode with him, we were a few blocks from home, but I did not recognize our surroundings, and I was scared to be with him in a place I didn’t recognize. I started to cry and asked to be taken home. To his credit, he took me back right away.
Whenever he showed up throughout my teenage years, we just let him slip right back into our wriggling amoeba, inching forward. One late summer morning my mom had to take me on a tour of my new middle school. He happened to swing by the house and tagged along. He wouldn’t come into the school with us. He stayed outside and meditated under a tree right outside the front office.
The last time I saw my father, I was a few years out of college and home visiting my mom. He had heard I was in town. He called and said, “Come meet us for lunch at Eden—Chu Thanh and Bac Phuc want to see you.” Chu Thanh and Bac Phuc were my dad’s friends from the early days of resettlement, whose daughters I’ d grown up with. Both men have since died.
Mid-meal, my dad said he had to check on something and stepped out. He took an excruciatingly long time to come back. Chu Thanh and Bac Phuc always cared for me and didn’t want to leave me there alone at the restaurant, but had to get back to work. I told them, “Please don’t worry, go back to work. I’ll wait for him.” They paid and I went into the bathroom to cry and berate myself for being such a fucking sucker. As I was leaving the restaurant, my dad walked up. He said, “Where did they go?” In my experience of him, he is often surprised. I stood on the curb and stared at it. I told him in teary Vietnamese and English, “You are a bad father.”
He said, “What do you want from me? You want money? I don’t have it. What can I do?” He always said what can I do in exasperated English when it was very clear there were a lot of things he could do. He peered at me and said, “Are you crying?” Then he said, “Can you help me get on the internet? I need to find a bus ticket to New York.”
_____
When I want to learn about Vietnamese things I ask my mom. She’s the only one I feel comfortable with, asking questions or explaining concepts in my hodgepodge of Vietnamese and English, starting out in Vietnamese but so quickly stymied by my vocabulary deficiency—which, by the way, I do not blame myself for. I am always quick to point out: you only know what you’ve heard. And if I’ve only ever heard words for food and financial stress and physical safety, then that is what I know how to say. I’m very shy with my aunts and uncles; I am mostly silent. They are lovingly and cruelly quick to point out an incorrect word choice or an off tone caused by a leaden tongue. I only see them for a few hours over a couple dinners a year; we don’t have time for that. But my mom, she loves my communication unconditionally, patiently, and without critique. She always seems to know what I’m getting at.
In Vietnam I watched, delighted, as my mom haggled with fruit vendors. She was salty, electric, and thriving. She led us down side streets looking for a place to eat; she ordered for everyone at the table.
In the United States, which is the only place I’ d known her before our trip, my brother or I always order for her, out of necessity or just out of fear of necessity. Typically, at a restaurant after we tell them she’ d like the fish, the server will look directly at her for her drink order, and she will say slowly and deliberately, orange juice, and we will both hold our breath with our old anxieties.
In Vietnam my mom was intensely vibrant, but she says she doesn’t need it. She says, “I’m just a tourist there. I don’t need to go back. My life is here.”
I choose to believe her because it’s easier that way, and it might be true.
_____
Questions:
What did you see in the war? Just give me one example.
Do you think you do not know how to love well because you were not well-loved?
Or do you have a sickness?
Do you go out for phở on weekend mornings?
Do you have stepchildren?
Do you fix their cars?
Do you remember teaching me about cars reversing?
Were you fine to go the rest of your life without seeing me again?
Where did you learn to dance?
_____
When I was eight or nine we were walking in a parking lot and my dad stopped abruptly and put out his arm to stop me too. He pointed at a car ahead of us, backing out of its spot. He said, “See there? You see its white lights? Whenever a car’s white lights come on, you know it’s reversing. Be careful.”
No one else in my life has ever warned me about a car’s white reversing lights, and I have never needed them to.
Thao Nguyen in Conversation with Soham Patel
