“Ba, what’s my name?”
The Bee Gees’s “Stayin’ Alive,” with Barry Gibb’s siren falsetto, cut a suave silhouette from the radio’s single speaker, the accidental theme song for the Trần family. My father sat at the table, my mother bustled over the stove, and I was saddled upon my rocking horse, corralled in the corner of our eat-in kitchen.
Four years old, I was pondering a playground encounter with a freckly blond boy who had asked me my name, and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to answer the most basic playground question: What’s your name? It wasn’t rocket science, but I answered it like the alien I was: “I’m not sure.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t know my name. I didn’t know which name to tell the boy. My family, as with all Vietnamese households, wielded a series of pronouns, nicknames, and endearments for me in addition to my given name, Phúc. I answered to all these monikers as my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents summoned me, upbraided me, teased me.
Con. Cưng. Cháu. Em bé. Honey. Sweetie. Kiddo. Baby.
My father shuffled some papers and was scribbling items into a ledger when I asked him. He replied without looking up. “Your name is Phúc. What kind of question is that?”
“No, I mean: What is my name in English?” I was hanging upside down from the rocking horse.
My father admonished me in Vietnamese, the lingua franca chéz nous. “Don’t hang from the horse—you’ll knock it over again and get hurt. We can’t afford that.” He meant the last part. Hunched at the kitchen table. Hacking through a jungle of paperwork. Scratching out a list of how much each paycheck was, how much they needed for bills, and what they could afford to send to my grandparents—his parents—still in Sài Gòn. A secondhand scarlet dictionary lay on the table next to him, thudding open as he consulted it for vocabulary that he didn’t understand in the rustling white of bills and checks. Amount Due. Gross Pay. Net Pay. (Helpful hint for future English learners: you can’t just look up the definitions of net and pay and put them together.) As he signed checks, he carefully wrote his name the American way. In Việt Nam, names were written and given as Last, Middle, First, but in America, we had to relearn our names backward (First, Middle, Last) to fit in. Do things backward to fit in—a fitting metaphor.
This is the earliest memory I have. Dangling from the horse’s legs, bouncing upside down from the springed coils that held them, I was trapped indoors and trick-riding my plastic pony. My two-year-old brother, Lou, was still more accoutrement than accomplice, leaving me a lone ranger for playtime. With a napping baby, I had to find something quiet to do. Hanging upside down on the horse was my best effort at quiet.
My mother was preparing dinner, mincing onions, broccoli, and beef for a quick and cheap stir-fry, and she echoed my father’s admonition. “Stop hanging from the horse, you monkey!” Con khỉ. Monkey. The sharp edges of her injunctions were always smoothed over with a sweet endearment.
Our apartment’s kitchen, my ersatz O.K. Corral, was a twelve-by-nine rectangular combo eat-in kitchen—the apogee of postwar efficiency and the nadir of seventies style—a kitchen into which my parents had shoved a secondhand white-and-gold-flecked Formica kitchen table and four matching chrome seats with squeaky patched vinyl upholstery. The kitchen’s oak laminate cabinets overflowed with three nearly complete sets of donated dishes, utensils, pots, and pans—an incongruous scrum of kitchenware. The rocking horse reared in the corner; past the sink, stove, and refrigerator rumbled the washer and dryer in the back. We ate, cooked, did the dishes, and washed (and dried) our clothes all within twelve feet. How was that for all-American economy? It was barely a four-yard running play, but what a score for our first down in America. A washer and dryer in the tightest end of the apartment. A winning combination.
That 660-square-foot apartment at 214 Walnut Bottom Road was our first home in Carlisle. The apartment complex, Colonial Square Apartments, was owned by one of our sponsors, Bill Hooke, a real estate developer, who had set aside a unit for our nucleus of four. Short-looped emerald-green carpeting padded the entire apartment. Stiff, durable, and easy to clean, the verdant wall-to-wall carpet rolled through every room, a tightly landscaped golf course, a putting green for a family with no sense of the long game. We didn’t know that we’d be in this apartment for the next decade.
The unit was outfitted with used furniture that our American host families had assembled for us, the Trầns from the land-of-no-furniture. The Hookes and the Burkholders—American families in the luxury and safety of small-town America—were moved to help nameless refugees from the other side of the world. We received an array of household items, scattershot all over Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: pots and pans, clothing, a dictionary, shoes, toiletries, toys, a small black-and-white TV, and the aforementioned plastic rocking horse. Having traversed the globe for four months from Sài Gòn to Guam to Wake Island to Fort Indiantown Gap and finally to Carlisle, Chánh and Chi Trần were grateful for any semblance of stability. They set up a home and were allowed to feel hopeful there on Walnut Bottom Road.
Hanging upside down, I awaited my father’s answer to my question.
What’s my name in English? This was more than just a four-year-old’s questions about penises, vaginas, and where babies came from. This was a four-year-old’s question about where he came from and why something as simple as his name had more than one answer.
Here’s a vulgar family secret: I’ve said my name wrong my entire life because of this very moment.
In Vietnamese, my name is phonetically pronounced fuhp. It sounds like a baseball clapping into the lithe, oiled leather of a catcher’s glove. Fuhp. Also, because Vietnamese is tonal (like its northern neighbor, Chinese), there’s a rising tone to it, so your voice upswings like a Valley girl if you say it correctly. FUHp? The letter c at the end of my name isn’t even pronounced like a c (thanks to archaic orthography and sound changes in the language)—it’s a p sound.
My question precipitated a flowchart of choices for my father. In that moment, he had to make the decision that many immigrants are burdened with when their mother tongue is not compatible with their adoptive homeland’s phonetics. This is the original game of broken telephone.
What are our choices? What do you do when Vietnamese doesn’t sound like English? How do you pronounce Phúc? Well, I’m glad you asked, Mr. Trần.
Behind Door #1: Approximate the sounds (but stay true to the pronunciation)! Fuhp.
Behind Door #2: Make slight adjustments that don’t sound like the original but seem to make sense with the spelling! Fook.
Behind Door #3: Pick a new name and bury that old name as a vestige of a country lost and forgotten! Americanize it completely! Peter or Paul? John or George?
My dad thought for a few minutes about my query and went with door number two: slight adjustments for English that don’t sound like the original name but make sense with the spelling.
He answered my question. Finally.
“Fook. I guess your name is Fook … in English.” He went back to the mathematics of survival.
And Fook was born. You know the poem about a path that diverges in a wood and you take the one less traveled? That’s the one we took. Less traveled but easier to pronounce, as if easier-to-pronounce would make my path any smoother.
The vowel sound was different. No rising tone. Align the c at the end of my name with English orthography to make a hard, velar stop instead of the bilabial p sound. Vietnamese pegs squeezing into Colonial squares.
I mouthed the name. Fook? It didn’t feel like Fuhp … No one said fook within the confines of our apartment. My parents and grandparents would never say it this way. Fook didn’t exist except for out there, on the other side of our green hollow-core door. Fook was out there. In the real world. In America. In the real America. I had to get used to him. I had to respond to that name. I had to introduce myself as him. “Fook? Okay … Fook.” It wasn’t a question anymore. It was a statement. An assertion. A declaration.
With that small and benign act of linguistic legerdemain, we rechristened Phúc with his alter ego Fook.
Fuck it. Phuc it.
“Dad, what’s a Wookiee?” I was lying in my father’s lap on the floor of the living room, cradling The Star Wars Storybook, C-3PO and R2-D2 in their glossy glory on the cover.
“Let me see.… Ah, that’s Luke Skywalker.” My father read it aloud, enunciating each syllable slowly.
“And who’s that?”
“That’s Han Solo.”
“Who’s that?”
“That’s Chewbacca. It says he’s a … Wookiee.”
“What’s a Wookiee?” Neither of us knew. Wookiee? We went to the dictionary, as we always did, to look up words from the American storybooks that my parents read us.
Wood … Woof … Wool … Woolen … No Wookiee. We looked again in the Star Wars book to make sure we were spelling it correctly.
W. O. O. K. I. E. E.
I asked my father to look yet again. Still nothing.
“I don’t know, Phúc. It’s not in the dictionary. I don’t know what it is.”
“Really? Are you sure you’re looking it up right?” I was incredulous. “Are you sure it’s not in there? Aren’t all words in the dictionary?” The dictionary had all the other words that we had looked up, and it never occurred to either of us that Wookiee was a made-up word, because who would make up a word? Wasn’t the point of writing to use real words?
In my pique over Wookiee, I had more to complain about. “Also, you know the story 101 Dalmatians? That dog’s name is not Col-o-nel, Dad.” We had a secondhand Little Golden Book of the Disney movie that my parents read to us often (as much for them to practice their English as it was to entertain their children).
My pivot from Star Wars to Disney surprised my father. He pronounced colonel as call-a-knell. “What do you mean? That’s how it’s spelled. Col-o-nel. That’s pronounced col-o-nel.”
“No, it’s not! At show-and-tell last week, I brought 101 Dalmatians into school, and I told them that my favorite character was Col-o-nel, and Derek Elkins laughed at me—everyone laughed at me! Derek told me it was pronounced ker-nel. It’s ker-nel, Ba. Not col-o-nel.” I was annoyed at his not being able to find Wookiee, but recounting the humiliation of mispronouncing colonel rushed back to my throat. I reddened, and my confidence in my father faltered. No Wookiee? I assumed that he couldn’t find the word and not that the word didn’t exist. Wookiee obviously did exist because it was in the Star Wars book. But colonel? The dictionary was still in front of us. “Just look it up! Look colonel up!”
He did. COLONEL. At least he found it (which galvanized my doubt that he was looking up Wookiee correctly). The mysterious diacritical marks did not help, but he pieced it together, pointing to the phonetic guide: / ˈkər-nᵊl /. “Well, I don’t know what the upside down ə is, but there is an r there. Geez, that’s strange. I guess it is pronounced ker-nel. Huh. English is hard.” He shrugged.
Vindication. Increased doubt. “SEE? See? It is ker-nel!” I didn’t have anything else to say. I needed to trust in my dad’s ability to navigate the world at large, and I was already doubting him. He seemed adrift and lost, and I didn’t know where to put my doubt. Five-year-olds were supposed to believe what their parents said. Maybe some kids’ parents still had the golden nimbus of infallibility, but not my parents and not for me. Not Chánh and Chi.
I placed my disappointment squarely upon my parents without their knowledge. I needed to figure out English, to figure out Carlisle, to figure out my place in it. And I needed my parents to know the answers, because that’s what kids need their parents to do: to know the world and to explain it to their kids. Without their expertise, the world felt uncertain and chaotic. How did you say certain words? Even if my parents said that this was how a word was pronounced, how could I be sure?
My early childhood memories are overgrown with thickets of faith and doubt. And in knowing the supposed truth, I furrowed a deep groove in myself for my doubt to root.
When I first read Camus’s The Plague as a teenager, I read it with the sensational (and juvenile) lens of an apocalyptic survival story. Pestilence! Death! Rats! Camus’s prose (in translation, at least) was yeoman-like, plodding steadily like the inexorable march of its disease. But I read it again, and its themes coalesced with our struggles, struggles that I had seen in my parents and in myself: the sinewy strain between faith and knowledge. In The Plague, Camus refers to the tension as a menace. As Dr. Rieux realizes that the plague is upon Oran, he no longer can enjoy the simple, ignorant pleasures of life. He knows the truth—the menace of knowing—and his knowledge conflicts with his faith, his desire to believe, his need to hope.
My faith in my parents’ competence was withering as I watched them flounder. Misreading a storybook or laboriously translating the newspaper. Navigating the obliquely named sections of the grocery store. Looking for a toilet when it was euphemistically labeled Restroom. They wandered in the ineluctable labyrinth of America.
If they couldn’t figure out small stuff like how to read a kids’ picture book, how would they navigate the big picture? I already doubted that they could. And if I couldn’t believe in my parents, in whom (or what) could I believe? In vain I groped about for an answer, and my doubt in them germinated, nourished by their shortcomings. My doubt contaminated everything we did—and everything I wanted to believe in.
Faith. Knowledge. Doubt. They weaved in and out of our lives with a baroque intricacy, a background fugue to our stumblings on the stage.
I remember none of this, but I know all of it. I know all of it because it is the family story.
I was not yet two when my maternal grandparents, Ông Bà Ngoại, made the decision that we were all leaving Việt Nam. My grandparents both worked for the US embassy, and our family had been monitoring the thundering advance of the Việt Cộng army as closely as they were fretting the quiet unraveling of the Republic of Việt Nam. The call to evacuate came at the end of April, and my mother’s parents made the arrangements for ten people: themselves, my mother and father, her sisters and brothers. I was their only grandchild (as my mother was the eldest). My father chose to accompany my mother and me, leaving behind his parents and his two youngest siblings who, without the proper paperwork, were unable to board the American transports. We waited for the bus that would take us to the airfield amid a swelling throng of frantic South Vietnamese. Bus after bus filled as desperate families pushed on, bulging them beyond capacity. We moved up the line, finally at the front, and were ready to board. Our bus pulled up; the doors opened. Half of my family members were already on board when—according to everyone’s account—I began to shriek so loudly and inconsolably that our family agreed to deboard the bus.
My grandmother comforted us as we stood in line again. “Let’s wait—it’s okay. We’ll take the next one.” As we watched that bus pull away, it was struck by mortar fire and exploded, killing everyone on board. We lay on the ground, cowering. Some bystanders scrambled to the wreckage to help, but it was war, and a losing war at that. With the burning carcass of our bus still in view, we boarded the next bus, not knowing if it, too, would explode and kill us all. But it did not explode.
As we passed a checkpoint, the South Vietnamese military police separated the evacuees into two groups: able-bodied men into one area and women and children into the other. They were conscripting men of fighting age for fodder in their last stand against the North Vietnamese army in Sài Gòn, and all the young men from our cohort were detained. Heartbreak and terror. My father, along with my uncles, was held behind. He watched as my mother and I boarded a helicopter. One of my shoes came off with the push and pull of evacuation. We lifted off, leaving behind my shoe and my father. To where? How could we possibly find one another? The only plan was to escape from Sài Gòn, and in the din and chaos of the evacuation, our family was broken apart.
My mother and I landed on an aircraft carrier, took another helicopter, and landed at another base.
That was the beginning and the end. South Việt Nam collapsed. The army was in retreat. Government officials were fleeing. Even in that ending for us, in the great collapse of Sài Gòn, it was not the end that so many others suffered. It was not crashed planes, abandoned babies, or mass executions. In that end was our beginning. In that death lay the seeds of a new life. We weren’t bodies in a shallow grave. We weren’t the nude children in the war photos with our clothes burned off. We were fortunate even in the midst of such misfortune.
We landed in Guam, and from there, we were relocated to Wake Island. My mother was distraught. Had my father been killed? Did he manage to escape with my grandmother’s connections to the embassy? How would he know where to find us? Thousands of evacuees, wrenched from loved ones, scratched out desperate notes and posted them on walls all across the airfields of Guam and Wake Island. “If you see this note, please find us at…” “We’re alive and at the camp at…”
Luck of all luck: my father and uncles were reunited with us, weeks later on Wake Island. He had escaped Sài Gòn, and somehow, four thousands miles away and two weeks later, he arrived on the same island. In a refugee camp full of strangers, strangers uprooted by war, the splinters of our family were reassembled.
We needed to stay together, all twelve of us, and we said this as we filled out paperwork, talking to the camp staff, hoping to be sponsored. Only Ông Bà Ngoại knew English from their work at the embassy, but the army officers spoke too fast and about things they didn’t know, using vocabulary they hadn’t learned. Refugee. Relocation. Asylum.
The Trầns were being sent to Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. Where was Pennsylvania? We didn’t know; beggars were not choosers. Off to another camp. Upon our arrival, Red Cross volunteers and camp officials greeted us with clipboards and signs in English, which we couldn’t read. Lutheran volunteers came from their parishes to help the military. My mother’s side of the family was Catholic (my father, Buddhist, had converted to Catholicism to marry my mother just before their wedding). The Lutherans found us sponsors, the Burkholders and the Hookes, while my family was still wondering what Lutherans were. Who were these sponsors? Were they Lutherans? Where did they live? Carlisle, Pennsylvania. So many names, all hard to pronounce. Our sponsors found us apartments and jobs for the adults, and by the fall, my mother peeled apples at an orchard and my dad drove a cement mixer. It wasn’t being a lawyer, as he had been in Việt Nam, but it was a job.
We needed to blend in, adopt our new country as it had adopted us. My parents were navigating all the straits and inlets of living in America, holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving, driving in the snow, the difference between ketchup and catsup.
Within the first year of arriving in the United States, my mother got pregnant. What was more hopeful (or more stupid) than having a baby as a refugee family? My brother, Louis, was conceived while we were at Fort Indiantown Gap, and he was born in March 1976. Louis was supposed to be named Lú (in accordance with a Vietnamese proverb), but my parents decided to Anglicize it to Louis, an American name with a French wink-wink to Việt Nam’s Franco-colonial past. Louis’s non-Vietnamese name was a small sliver of the diaspora. The assimilation had unknowingly begun while we were at the relocation camp.
Maybe my brother’s birth was the most hopeful thing they could have done. Maybe it divined happy days ahead in America. How would we survive? How would we fit in? Who could say whether the hardest part was behind us or ahead of us?
We were tired and poor. We took one last huddle, knelt for a miracle play as we touched down in Pennsylvania that summer of 1975.
Carlisle Tire and Rubber employed hundreds of workers, manufacturing small-diameter tires for lawn mowers and golf carts; the factory provided regular work, a livable paycheck, and good benefits for high school diploma holders—and recent immigrants.
A year after his arrival in Carlisle, my father shifted from his first, gear-grinding job of driving a cement mixer to the slightly less grinding gig of the tire factory. He had studied for and earned his GED at the local junior high through its night classes, and the equivalency diploma opened the factory doors for him. He worked on the quality-control team, checking tires for defects as they rolled off the manufacturing line. Because the tire factory operated 24/7, my father toggled through a biweekly rotation of a day, night, or graveyard shift. He was gainfully employed with a burgeoning grasp of English.
My father, twenty-nine years old, came home from the factory shifts reeking of freshly extruded tires. He wore the same work clothes several days in a row, and by the third day, his jeans and flannel work shirts smelled of burnt rubber, spattered with the dark spots of adhesives and black latex. Standing at a slight five feet five inches, he had shaggy black hair that was parted on the left, a pronounced underbite, and rogue stubble that sometimes rallied itself into a sparse mustache after a few weeks’ growth, only to be repelled by the razor. In photos from these first years in Carlisle, his large dark almond eyes are bright and hopeful. He gives off an air that is a mix of youthful exuberance, American potential, and Vietnamese optimism.
At break time, a few of my father’s coworkers at Tire and Rubber sidled up to him. “Hey, Tran. TRAN. How’s it going?”
“It okay. How are you?” He didn’t know that particular employee’s name. He glanced at the name tag. “Oh, you name Mr. MacDaniels?”
The other workers laughed at my father’s formality. “Oh, lookie! MacDaniels got a promotion! MISTER MacDaniels!”
Laughter? “You not Mr. MacDaniels?” More laughter.
“Oh no, I’m MacDaniels all right.” MacDaniels grinned and shot a stern look at his entourage as they quieted. “Say, Tran: Do you know all about our customs here in America? You know, like breakfast and lunch and stuff like that?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Christmas? You know about Christmas?”
“Yes, but it called Noël in Việt Nam because they French.”
“Oh, that’s good! Yeah, Noël … Right, Noël. And what do you brush before you go to bed, Tran?”
“Sorry?” Maybe my father had misunderstood the question.
MacDaniels bared his teeth and pointed to his pearly whites. “You know. Before you go to bed. What do you brush?” Some of the workers whispered, He’s gonna say it watch he’s gonna say it. “What do you call these?”
Smiling back, my father understood. “Oh yes! Of course. You brush your tit.” The circle of workers exploded with laughter. “That wrong?” My father was confused.
“Oh no, you said it just right. Teeth. That’s right.… You said it just fine. But say it again.”
“Your … tit?” The men behind him were laughing so hard, they had to wipe their eyes. MacDaniels smiled but kept his composure. My father knew they were laughing at him, but he didn’t know why. “Don’t you brush your tit before you go to bed? Is that wrong?” A bell rang out over the scene. Break time was over.
The circle dissipated as the assembly lines hissed and clanked to life. Saved by the bell. My father trudged back to his quality-control station, and at the second break, he avoided the cafeteria by sitting in his car, an old green-and-black Pontiac. Back to the line when the bell rang.
The abuses of the factory rolled off the assembly line, black and steaming like the tires they were manufacturing, and my father bore them with a stoic resolve, their barbs blunted by his ignorance of English and American social cues. Only a few factory workers targeted him among the many shuffling clock-punchers who were grinding out their paychecks, and their cruelty was offset by the kindness that our sponsors showed our family, week after week. More donations of clothes, family dinners, visits to check in with us.
Years later, my father always talked about the kindness of our sponsors, the incredible generosity of the Americans who helped our family of a dozen refugees. For their entire lives, my parents and grandparents maintained contact with our original sponsors, our annual holiday cards and graduation announcements serving as a declarative that we had made it, that we had been worth the rescue effort.
Random strangers had saved us. And random strangers were cruel to us, too. My father’s coworkers were Americans, but not the same Americans who sponsored him. How hard was it for him to maintain his faith in the goodness of America? It was, indeed, harder for him to put his faith in the good ones. Who were the good ones? How could you tell? What could he be sure of?
Camus writes that in the midst of the plague, as the citizens of Oran are dying in droves, Dr. Rieux affirms himself in his work. What do you have control over? And what is beyond your control? As Camus’s protagonist, Dr. Rieux offers an answer: when the world is coming apart, you do your job.
That my father and mother could do.
In the uncertain air of their new life in America, they inhaled the work. They lived and breathed work. They counted on it. They believed in it.
“Why don’t you go play on that playground?” My parents were strolling with me and my brother when they spotted the playground and allowed us to run over to the swings. The playground was modest—just a small five-foot slide, some gymnastics rings, two swings, and a seesaw. My brother, three years old, clambered up the slide ladder as I hopped onto a swing and pumped my way into Star Wars orbit. My parents stood by the fence and Vietnamesed quietly with each other while Lou and I played. A little blond boy approached us.
“Why are you in my yard?” He hopped onto the other swing.
I swung past him. “What do you mean? We’re just playing.” He and I were on opposite arcs, his up to my down, my down to his up.
“This is my yard. I mean, it’s okay to swing, but it’s my yard.”
I looked at the playground, noticing for the first time how close it was to the apartment building and how small it was. It wasn’t a playground. It was his yard and his swing set.
I jumped off the swing. “Oh, I’m sorry.…” I started to run off. “Come on, Lou! This isn’t a playground.” Trying to leave before my embarrassment could turn into humiliation.
The sliding glass door of the adjoining apartment opened, and a woman with a bleach-blond bob, baby-blue tennis polo, white shorts, flip-flops, pink nail polish, and smooth, muscular legs appeared. A neighbor right out of Three’s Company, a shimmering vision of network prime time, but we hadn’t come and knocked on her door, and she wasn’t waiting for us. I stopped, and she walked by me, patting me gently on the back of my head. “Oh, sweetie, you can keep playing. Go ahead. It’s all right.”
I vacillated, weighing what course of action would be more embarrassing, but my hesitation was broken by the boy’s question. “Hey, do you like Star Wars?” And with that question, my embarrassment was quickly displaced by Star Wars, my otherness replaced by galactic familiarity.
“Yeah, I love Star Wars! Wanna play X-wings?” I slid back on the swing next to his and off we soared. His name was Tim. I told him my name a few times as he whipped past me. “Phuc: rhymes with Luke.” He nodded affirmatively. Tim was a little younger than me. He liked Star Wars, I liked Star Wars, and that was enough for a best friendship.
His mother walked over to my parents and smiled widely, extending her hand. My parents shook her hand and bowed simultaneously, and their heads bobbed up and down as my father did most of the Englishing. Her eyes crinkled and she angled her head to one side (the universal posture for I’m-listening-as-hard-as-I-can). I could see my father’s head tilting and tipping as he gestured in the direction of our apartment. I heard her say, “Come over anytime.” She treated us as though we were like everybody else. With a smile and with kindness. The kindness that kept my parents’ faith flickering.
In those early years in America, my family (in various configurations of aunts, uncles, cousins) visited the grand trophies of the Northeast: Washington, D.C.; Niagara Falls; New York City (where my eldest aunt and her family had immigrated). But Philadelphia was not on the list, and without any friends or relatives there, we never made the two-hour drive east to bask in brotherly love until that year. En route my father drove while my mother read the directions to him, which he had written out ahead of time. My brother and I dozed, played, and fought in the back seat as the turnpike miles whirled away. My parents didn’t bother to quiet us, too preoccupied with navigating the highways and exits to North Philly, my father parsing my mother’s mangled pronunciations, which he had to retranslate. What street? FRANG-LING CHREE. What? What street?! FRANG-LING CHREE! FRANG-LING CHREE! What street?! What is FRANG-LING CHREE? Is it Franklin Street? IS IT FRANKLIN STREET?
My father didn’t say it any better than my mother. And we missed the turn. U-turn. We finally found Franklin and parked on a side street.
“Why are we here again?” I realized they had never told us the reason behind the road trip to Philadelphia.
“To pray for Mom,” said my father, pulling back the curtain, no longer hiding us from what they had been keeping from their five- and three-year-old sons. How could they explain to their young children something that they themselves hardly understood? They didn’t, and they chose not to disclose anything until they were compelled to, and there, in our Pontiac on the side streets of Philadelphia, they had to tell us the truth. Our innocence and ignorance had nowhere to hide in the narrow confines of our car. “Mom has to have surgery next week. They’re going to cut her open to see if she has cancer in her lungs.”
“What’s cancer?” I asked. Lou deferred the cross-examination to me.
“It’s a disease.”
“Is she really sick? Are you going to get it?”
“You can’t get it from her, but we don’t know what it is yet.”
I turned to my mother. “Má, do you feel okay?”
“I feel okay, dear. I’m tired. And I’m having a hard time breathing.” She smiled thinly for us. My mother and father kept it simple. Just the facts.
My father continued. “We drove here to pray for her at a church.”
“Why?” We already went to church all the time—and by all the time, I meant every Sunday. “We came to Philadelphia to go to church?”
“We’re going to pray to Saint John Neumann. He’s a saint. You need to pray to him for Mom.” My father’s voice strained as he said the last few words, and I felt a tug of fear in my abdomen. My mother was scheduled to go into surgery the following week, and my parents were there in Philadelphia to exhaust their faith in God before they entrusted themselves to the knowledge of doctors. It was their last-ditch effort. The phrase Hail Mary attempt is figurative, but my parents’ pilgrimage was a literal Hail Mary. Plural, actually. Hail Marys.
In the early summer of 1979, my mother started to have difficulty breathing. A trip to the hospital and several X-rays later, Dr. Castrina told my parents that she had polyps and tumors all through her lungs and trachea. My grandmother, who coincidentally worked at the hospital in Carlisle and had the best grasp of English in our family, had looked up the X-rays herself during her break time and told my father that it seemed dire. Dr. Castrina wrote some things on notepaper for them. In the scarlet Thorndike Barnhart dictionary, my father looked up Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Cancer. Mortality. In their English, cancer sounded like cang-say.
Behind closed doors, my mother and father fretted and planned. Not knowing the Vietnamese words for pathology and diagnosis, Lou and I blithely watched The Electric Company in the living room and played in our bedroom, unaware of our parents’ ills and anxieties.
The photos of my father from that time are stark: my brother and I are making faces, sticking out our tongues, but my father’s face wears the worry, his eyes grim and heavy. He is staring directly at the camera with a steely look. He’s thinking about a life without his wife, burdened with two small children, with the prospect of making ends meet on his $160-a-week salary at Tire and Rubber. The fourth year in his new country.
When I think back to this time, I don’t recall my parents’ worrying about the cancer’s prognosis. I remember all the things in which my parents chose to have faith despite their uncertain future. They exhibited faith in its buoyant, naïve, dumb form: kept saving money; talked about plans for a home someday; hoped for better jobs; prayed for opportunities for me and my brother; prayed a lot in general.
That’s why we were there in Philadelphia.
The sooty gray Gothic church stabbed a single sharp spire upward. The stonework and iron fence stoked my imagination, and I nudged Lou. “Whoa—look at that! Looks like a castle!”
My father corrected me. “It’s a church.” My parents walked ahead, my father limping along next to my mother (a motorcycle accident in Sài Gòn had put him in the hospital for six months and granted him a lifelong hiccup in his gait).
The shrine was brighter and shinier than our Saint Patrick’s Church in Carlisle. As we pushed through the veils of candles and smoke, the altar loomed before us. My brother and I knew the protocol for church: no shenanigans or else. We were intimately familiar with “or else,” and it was not an idle threat. Lou and I trailed behind our parents, our tomfoolery doubly checked by new and strange surroundings. The shrine was hushed in between mass services, but parishioners were free to enter and pray. My parents walked to the front toward the altar, where the prie-dieux arrayed themselves in perfect, religious order. Behind my parents, I tarried so that Lou and I could sit in a pew, but my parents marched us to the prie-dieux to kneel alongside them.
Then I saw the dead body.
We stood before a long glass case like the jewelry display at the Montgomery Ward department store. But in the place of Seiko watches or zirconia earrings, in this glass case stretched a dead body. And it was dressed up like a bishop.
“What is that?” Lou was aghast. “Is he dead? Who is he?” We both hesitated—my parents had given us no warning that on our first trip to Philly, we would be kneeling before a corpse.
My father leaned down between us and church-whispered, “That’s Saint John Paul Neumann. He was just canonized as a saint. We’re going to pray to him now for Mom.” He knelt on the prie-dieu and took a rosary out of his pocket.
My mother knelt, and Lou and I knelt alongside them. “Dear God: please help my mom. Dear Saint John Neumann: please help my mom. Thank you.” That was the extent of my praying abilities, and I repeated those prayers a few times before my mind wandered over to Saint Neumann’s corpse and the waxy mask that covered his face.
My parents’ lips fluttered their prayers to God, their rosary beads clicking quickly as they glissandoed from one Hail Mary to the next and on to the next. Lou and I stared at the glass coffin, running our eyes across its landscape of snowy fabric, the intricate embroidery, the ivory gloves. I stared so long at Saint Neumann that I thought I could see a rise and fall in his torso. Was he alive? Was he giving us a sign? I saw a twitch. I thought I saw him twitch. Then I convinced myself that I saw him twitch. Maybe he didn’t actually do it, but I believed that I saw it. I stared for so long, I didn’t know what I believed anymore.
“Did you see him move?” I asked. My brother shook his head, then immediately doubted himself.
“He didn’t move, did he?” A younger sibling’s pliability.
My parents finished their rosaries, made the sign of the cross, and stood up. My mother’s eyes looked distant. My father’s visage was downcast, having expended all his effort on the prie-dieu, unable to look at the shrine anymore.
Lou was jubilant to be standing. “Are we done? Are we going to go home now?” Our boredom muddied time’s passage, and we were unsure whether we’d been praying for thirty minutes or three hours.
“We just need to stop in the gift shop.” Gift shop? We definitely did not have a gift shop in our church in Carlisle. But we also didn’t have a dead body inside a glass case, either. With their dead body and gift shop, Philadelphia Catholics seemed to do things differently.
The cathedral gift shop did not have stuffed animals or snow globes or anything cool, instead vending rosaries, wallet prayer cards, ornate crucifixes, and other devotional items. Lou and I walked around, examining the prayer cards for various saints—the trading cards of Catholicism. I wasn’t sure about their value, but how could you put a price tag on salvation? Did people trade these? Did you collect them? Was it a sin to trade three saints for a Jesus if you already had two Jesi? Or was it more like poker? Did Mary and four apostles make a full house of worship?
I was most intrigued by the illustration of Saint Neumann wearing a red hat and cape—far different from the waxy death mask that we had just seen in the shrine. His posture, the raised gesture of his hand, and the rays of light that emanated from his head all gave him a superheroic look, and I recognized the power pose.
My parents came over to usher us out, my mother clutching a small plastic bag that held her purchase. “What did you buy?” I asked.
She halted her careful gait to show us her purchase and pulled out a small, clear plastic case. It was padded with gray foam as if for jewelry, but I couldn’t make out what was in it. I held up the plastic box closer to see the contents. Nestled against the foam was a sand-colored shard of wood. “Is that a piece of a chair or something?”
My father took the box from me. “It’s a relic. Do you know what that is? A relic is a piece of the saint’s body. This is a piece of his bone.”
“Whaaaaat?!” My brother and I were aghast. “What do you do with a piece of a saint’s bone?!”
“We believe that it has power. He is a saint, after all. We believe this relic has the power to help Mom.” My father was firm in his conviction, unshakable. “Here, we got you and Lou these prayer cards.” He handed us each a Saint Neumann trading card. Lou and I held our cards as we walked back to the car. I flipped mine over to look at Saint Neumann’s “statistics,” which were a prayer and his title patronage.
Saint John Neumann, Patron Saint of Immigrants and Sick Children. What about a sick immigrant with children? Close enough.
My mother clutched the bag to her chest as the turnpike guided our Pontiac home. She and Lou nodded off once the car was pinned on I-76 with an hour to go. I stood in the back, putting my chin over the front seat. “Hey, Ba … Hey. Hey, Ba.” He was silent for a while.
“What is it? You need to sit.”
“I will. But why did you ask God to forgive us and to forgive Mom?”
“What?”
“I heard you say that in the church. Why? Why did you ask God to forgive her?”
“Because that’s what you do when you need help. You ask for forgiveness.”
“But … what did Mom do?” He was silent again. “What did she do that she needed forgiveness for?”
“You need to sit. NOW! It’s dangerous to stand.” My father’s rebuke woke my mother, who asked if everything was okay. “It’s fine, dear—just go back to sleep. Phúc, SIT DOWN NOW!”
I sat again in the back seat, feeling frightened and alone despite being in the car with the whole family. I felt the fear and isolation of powerlessness. My head on the cold glass of the window, watching everything blur by. I felt the powerlessness of being a child, deepened by the desperation that my parents were feeling. A few hours ago, I learned that my mother might have cancer, that she was getting surgery next week, and that we had driven all the way to Philadelphia to pray for a cure. Praying for a cure or a miracle—which seemed as far-fetched and desperate as could be. Even I understood that, and knowing that terrified me.
In the logic of my mother’s theology, which was a muscular, if simple, Catholicism, good things happened to good people, and bad things happened to bad people. That was the nature of justice. That was the nature of God. Even in the aftermath of Việt Nam’s civil war, some of my family members clung to this idea of divine or deserved justice. Our family had escaped. We had been rewarded for our probity. We deserved what we got.
If that were true, how did we understand my mother’s cancer? Cancer was undoubtedly a bad thing, and my mother had it. Did that make her a bad person? But my mother was the kindest person I knew. Did she deserve cancer? My parents couldn’t believe that even if it was their logic: Could bad things happen to good people? To people who didn’t deserve bad things? Did God allow that?
For my parents, that was unimaginable. Their blind faith in the power of prayer and the goodness of God was immovable.
While my mother had surgery, we stayed with Ông Bà Ngoại. I don’t remember for how many days, but one afternoon, my grandmother told Lou and me that we could go home. We bounded up the stairs at Walnut Bottom Road and saw her. My mother. Frail. Tired. Bandaged.
“MÁ!” Lou and I were beside ourselves with relief.
She Vietnamesed feebly. “Oh, sweetie … I’m okay. I’m going to be okay. Be gentle though.”
“Where is it? Did they cut you?” No understatements or soft-pedaling. I wanted to see the scar.
“Yes, right here.” She opened the top of her shirt and my brother let out a cry. Her neck was bandaged along the bottom of her throat. She lifted the gauze to show us: across the width of her neck was a precise incision that went from side to side, sutured together. It looked like someone had slit her throat (they had), and from the front, her head looked like it was stitched onto her body (it wasn’t). Her black hair, falling on either side of her languid face, framed her seam all the more. No one expects to see their mother’s head Gothically sewn onto her body à la Mary Shelley.
Despite my worry for her health and her wound, I hugged her gingerly around the waist. “I’m so glad you’re home, Má.”
From behind, my dad spoke. “They didn’t find any cancer. Nothing. No tumors. No polyps. Nothing. The X-rays were wrong. Her throat and lungs are fine.” We didn’t see my father’s face, but his voice was shaking, and in his voice, I heard the sharp and distinct confidence of his faith. “They didn’t find any cancer, thank God. It’s a miracle. A miracle.” He meant that last part—he believed it. I didn’t know what to believe. I didn’t know what a miracle was. I only knew what I could see: that my mother was alive.
My dad sat at the kitchen table, the tape recorder in front of him—a rectangular box with faux wood paneling and a silver speaker. He held me in his lap as he read from the newspaper. He pressed the record button and began reading.
“Thee ree-sen ee-ven in dee Midduh Eest ah affec-teeng dee price of gaz all over dee wuhld…” He read on for a few more paragraphs before stopping and rewinding the cassette tape. He pressed play, and his voice, a little higher and squeakier, wobbled out from the perforated speaker part.
He turned to me. “How did that sound? Did I sound like an American?”
“No, not really.”
“What word sounded wrong? I think it’s pretty good.” He wanted to do better.
“Well, I don’t know what all those words mean, but the word world: you said it as wuhld. It’s wer-ld. There’s an r in there.”
“Wulhd.”
“World.”
“Wulhd.”
“Whir-ld. Try saying it like it’s two sounds. Whir. Uld.”
“Wuhld. There! I did it!”
“No. Whir-uld.” This went on for fifteen more minutes, then my dad moved on to other difficult words like street (he said chreet) and girl (he said gull). Over and over, he would rerecord himself reading, listen to his recording, and jot notes down in his pocket notebook.
“Wuhld. Wuhld. Wuhld. Geez … English is so hard to pronounce.”
“It seems fine, Dad. I mean, I know what you’re saying.”
“No, it needs to be better. It’s not good enough for you to just understand me. My accent is terrible—you sound like an American already. It’s great. Okay, it’s bedtime. Time for you to brush your teeth.” He pronounced the last word with emphatic articulation. Brush your tee. Th. It still came out sounding like tit, but I knew what he meant.
From the bathroom, I could hear him still practicing as I brushed. “Thee ree-sen ee-ven in dee Midduh Eest ah affec-teeng dee price of gaz all over dee wuhld…”
Why was it so hard for him and so easy for me? Why couldn’t he just say it the way it was pronounced?
The first bricks had already been laid for me to doubt my father, and my doubt cast a long shadow over my faith in him even as he placed so much of his own belief in the importance of mastering English, in the American dream, in a boundless future for his children.
He had so many things to fuel his faith. We were alive. We had a roof over our heads. We had a sage-green Pontiac. These weren’t the compacted dirt roads of Việt Nam. These were the smoothly paved highways of America. Land of the free. Home of the brave.
“Can we stop to get McDonald’s?” My grandfather pointed to the Golden Arches in the distance as we drove home from the mall. McDonald’s was pronounced Magk-Doh-Noh. Did I already mention how hard American consonant clusters are for native Vietnamese speakers?
“Why don’t we just go through the drive-through?” My father vetoed the idea of dining in at McDonald’s. “We can just get food and eat it at home.”
“What does it matter?” my grandfather insisted. “We can all eat in the store. That’s fine. We’ll do that.” According to Vietnamese hierarchy, my father should have deferred, but he didn’t.
My father rebutted. “There’re too many of us.” Too many? Five of us sat comfortably in the car. “They probably don’t have room.” The Pontiac had pulled into the driveway and idled in the drive-through lane.
“Why don’t we go in? It’s all the same.” My grandfather huffed his annoyance that my father was not deferring, and Ông Ngoại’s patriarchal authority was rendered moot by the smooth pleather of the passenger seat. He was not behind the wheel.
“There’re too many of us.” My father’s voice was agitated. “There’re too many of us, and people will stare. Who knows what will happen? Do you know how they treat me at the factory? You know how they laugh at me? What will happen when they see so many of us?”
This was the menace of knowing.
I didn’t understand the anxiety that my father felt, but I eventually would. That was my inheritance. The anxiety of being stared at. Maybe someone would walk past our table and tell us to go back to our country. Maybe they would be rude to us. Maybe they wouldn’t serve us. He didn’t want to subject us to that and, in the driver’s seat of the Pontiac, ushered us through the timeless tradition of the drive-through. Out of sight at the drive-through, we were like everyone else. That is, until we spoke into the intercom.
The car thrummed as we pulled up to the illuminated speaker, which crackled and barked, haloed in the translucent glow of all the holy glories that McDonald’s had to offer. My dad had to repeat his order several times, and he started each time with “Hello. How are you? I would like … tree chee-burka, two Bic Mac, tree fend fry. No, tree. TH-REE. Yes, fend fry. No. Tank you … yes, tank you.” I repeated our order from the back seat with perfect clarion enunciation.
The aroma of beef-tallow fries and hamburgers warmed the car, and as my uncle Thái held the bags next to me, my father called back to us. “Save the container for the Bic Macs, okay? We can use them for sandwiches for your school lunches.” After dinner, we washed and rinsed the yellow Styrofoam containers carefully and set them on the drying rack.
At lunch the next day, I pulled out a pale yellow Big Mac container from my lunch bag, laying it next to a banana and the pint of milk that was handed out to everyone.
Craig crowed his approval. “Holy moly! You got a Big Mac for lunch! You are so lucky!” Other kids chimed in, amplifying the chorus of approval. I beamed.
Then I pulled out a cheese sandwich—a homemade one, not even grilled.
The table’s waves of envy reversed into a riptide of laughter as I held my sandwich over the opened clamshell container, the supposed pearl of a McDonald’s sandwich now in reality just a square of cheese pushed between two slices of white bread. I ate it wordlessly, staring at the Big Mac container with disgust.
Amid the laughter, Shawn asked if there was really a banana in my banana, and the jokes rolled on from there. Was there really milk in my milk?
I had thought that my parents, in their thrift, were ingenious for reusing the McDonald’s packaging, but no one else did—at least, no one at Mooreland Elementary School. My admiration for the package soured, and from that point on, whenever my mom packed my lunch in a Big Mac container, I would break it, purposefully pushing my thumb through the top or snapping the clasp so that my parents wouldn’t use them anymore for my lunches.
“I guess these aren’t as good as they look.” My mother tossed another one in the trash.
My father scratched his chin. “That’s strange. Mine has been fine for months. I think Phúc is just too rough with them.… I can keep using them. Just give him a plastic bag.” My father continued using the Styrofoam containers, a small bit of scrimping so that his son could be spared the ignominy of it and be like everyone else.
That was the delusion. We weren’t like everybody else. I now had the menace of knowing, and it infected everything I did.
I was reminded of it constantly in ways large and small: my parents’ wobbly accents as my English became arrow-straight, the long and confusing searches in the grocery stores for simple items, the stares from strangers at the mall. These reminders that my family was not a normal American family—that we didn’t look like the rest of our town, that we were from somewhere else—wove into my very fabric a need to belong, a need that was a glittering and slippery yarn. I would never be able to untangle it from who I was and who I wanted to be, and it seemed that if I tugged on this thread, everything would unravel and leave me exposed.