“I’m not going to spank you.” We heard him speak those words of mercy, but the tenor of his voice said, “But I want to spank you.” In the rearview mirror, my father’s eyes were narrowed, darkened pupils fixed on the road ahead. His voice ground thin and tight, as if in the wrong gear. My mother shifted noiselessly in the front seat (she was always silent under the grays of his forecasted anger), and Lou and I were relieved at his announcement. We hadn’t been spanked since Mrs. Boose’s visit.
Our car sped along a stretch of country road that led from Saint Patrick’s newer church, erected in fields of whispering corn, folded in undulating meadows of wheat as if its spire sprouted up as part of the golden harvest. Pennsylvania farmers tilled the earth for corn, wheat, and faith.
Lou and I had found church that Sunday morning even more boring than usual, so he and I played Spider-Hand. I hummed the Spider-Man theme quietly to him, while my left hand, outstretched like an arachnid, crept glacially toward him, making small minatory movements as we tried to maintain a fragile bubble of Christian composure. The sacrosanct surroundings of Saint Patrick’s demanded that we comport ourselves with the respect that was eternally due to our Lord and Savior. Jesus’ effigy floated triumphantly above the altar and its proceedings, his statue’s complexion painted the same beige color as JCPenney’s mannequins, but instead of offering summer khakis and blazers, Jesus was presenting eternal salvation with his palms outstretched, revealing his wounds to us.
In the pew, my father glared at Lou and me, sensing that nincompoopery was afoot. My mother’s attention, as always, tuned in faithfully to Father Fontanella’s homily even if her listening comprehension was unreliable. Her chin raised up as if she were at a microphone too tall, the uptilt of her face allowing her to watch Father Fontanella and mannequin Jesus at the same time.
My left hand crept slowly toward Lou, who was awash in chortles as Spider-Hand inched closer and closer. I softly sang to him: Spider-Hand, Spider-Hand, friendly neighborhood Spider-Hand. My mother heard Lou laughing and elbowed me.
Lou snorted, covered his mouth with both hands, his face frozen with a look of both terror and hilarity. He and I sprung leaks of snickering, which in church sounded loud. And inappropriate. My father hissed at us to be quiet, and the white family in front of us did the looking-but-not-looking-over-the-shoulder glower of reproach. My mother’s face turned scarlet with embarrassment, and my father grabbed Lou by the arm, sliding him over to the other side of the pew. Game over.
After mass, we piled into our red Ford LTD (which had replaced the green Pontiac), Lou and I anticipating some repercussions of our misbehavior in mass. My father’s brow was creased, asymmetrically folded and ruddy, like angry origami. His chin, flecked with the weekend’s stubble, bent an unmoving frown. Trouble was up ahead. Lou and I were relieved when, in the car ride home, my father announced, “I’m not going to spank you.”
The cornfields whooshed by in the open window and then slowed. He pulled the car onto the shoulder. “Get out.” He didn’t turn around, and Lou and I weren’t sure what he meant and whom he meant.
“What?” I looked at the rearview mirror to see that he was bank-shotting a look at me. “What do you mean, get out?”
“Get out, I said! Phúc, get out of the car!”
“What are you doing? He can’t get out!” My mother’s voice was shrill and frantic while Lou and I remained frozen. No one was getting out of the car.
My father raised his voice to a full yell, “GET OUT OF THE CAR! GET OUT RIGHT NOW! OUT OF THE CAR!”
I got out. The smell of August’s fresh manure stung my nose and eyes. I scanned the berm for a comfortable place to lie down. If he was going to beat me by the side of the road, at least we were out of public view, clear of humiliation. Was I going to lie in the grass? On some fallen cornstalks? I knew that he didn’t travel with the metal rod, and the more I anticipated being spanked, the more I was oddly confident. I was confident that I could physically endure whatever he had to mete out since he didn’t have the metal rod. My butt was ready for whatever—except for what happened next.
He closed the door behind me and peeled away in a crackle of gravel and acceleration. My butt was not expecting that. I heard my mother through its open window. “What are you doing?!”
Between the road and the cornfield, the dust drifted behind the car, settling down as my surprise rose up. What had just happened? Was this their version of leaving me in a basket of reeds by the Nile? I listened to the shushing of the tires until I heard nothing but the faraway gargling of a tractor and the rural fugue of crickets, birds, and distant dogs. The late-summer corn was taller than I was, and on both sides of the road arose rustling walls of green. This was a joke, right? They couldn’t possibly have just left me on the side of the road. Did they?
I had a vague notion of which direction to walk and was surprisingly sure that someone would help me. I knew my address and my phone number.
I didn’t believe that I was abandoned by the side of the road, and my seven-year-old brain calculated that getting kicked out of the car was better than getting beaten. No fear for what was going to happen next. No fear of the future.
Totally calm, I squatted in a small grassy strip, picking up a few flat rocks to toss. I pushed the roadside gravel into a small ziggurat and put a stalk of wheat at the top to crown my achievement.
For seven-year-old Phuc, the math on this one was easier to explain: Abandoned > Beaten = Calm. This was another theory of relativity. Not brilliant, but just as practical.
I had experienced so much dread by that point in my life that being forced out of the car on a beautiful August day was—well, it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. When a kid gets the tar beaten out of him for the first seven years of his life, what more will be an effective deterrent? My past wasn’t a Dickensian horror show of Victorian orphanages and hard labor, but it did make my present predicament relatively benign. I decided that I would walk home in a few hours (or at least head in the general direction of what I thought was home), but for the moment, I figured that it was better to stay put in case my parents changed their minds about Moses-ing me, and came back around.
I hummed the Blondie song “The Tide Is High” that my uncle Thái played constantly on his 45-rpm single, as I picked up more rocks to toss by the side of the road.
After some time had passed, my stomach growled, and I grew restless. I stood up and found a stick to swat at the cornstalks for fun. In the most dire circumstance, I figured that I could walk to a nearby farmhouse for food. Pacing back and forth, I whacked the cornstalks with my stick as hard as I could. Thwack! Thwack! Maybe a half hour had passed? Maybe an hour? The August midday sun throbbed, and the manure in the air had a cloying smell as the breeze pushed it around; the odor hovered at the edges, but it wasn’t going anywhere.
Two cars had passed by me since I had been roadside, neither of them stopping or even slowing. I had been so intent on busying myself with my stick and rocks that no alarm was indicated. Just a seven-year-old Vietnamese kid in the Pennsylvania countryside, whacking cornstalks with a stick. No big deal.
I heard another car drive up and slow down, eventually stopping next to me. It was our Ford. Without turning around, my father growled from the front seat. “Get in.” I opened the door and slid across the vinyl. If I had guessed, I would have surmised that my mother had begged my father to come back to get me, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to risk being misinterpreted and getting kicked out of the car again. Silent as we drove home.
I was hot and thirsty and happy that I didn’t have to walk home.
Did we have a meaningful discussion about why my father kicked me out of the car? We didn’t. My father’s one parenting tool—physical violence—seemed no longer to be an option, but his rage and spring-loaded temper remained flexed, ready to snap at any trigger. Without a physical recourse in his parenting, since he now feared the shame of having my teacher come to our home again, he resorted to yelling and the tyranny of fear. Fear would keep me and Lou in line, but what did Lou and I fear now that we didn’t fear his beatings? Did he think that we feared our abusive, ill-tempered father would abandon us? Did we fear that someone else would have to care for us?
That didn’t seem like a terrible proposition to me.
I know that I was not the first kid in the history of the world to wish that someone else were his father, to wish that his parents were anyone else. I would have settled for one of my aunts or uncles for my parents. They were nice. They could take care of us. My uncle Chú Thu took me and Lou swimming at Dickinson College all the time (he was a chef for the college’s dining hall). Who else could be our parents? Maybe some white people? Maybe one of our sponsors would adopt me and Lou? That seemed fine to me. Their houses were grand multiroom castles. They always smiled and said things like “come on in” or “make yourselves at home” or “can I get you something to drink?” And even if they did beat their kids, maybe that was a price worth paying in order to have a home like they did. For what was I paying my price?
From the back seat of the Ford, looking out at the grand expanses of farm and country, I murmured a pagan prayer, not directing it to Jesus, God, or anyone in particular. It was to the universe. To everybody and nobody. A message in a bottle. The worst outcome would be that nothing would change. Was it a sin to pray for different parents? A dad who didn’t beat you? A mom who protected you? Parents who understood the world that you lived in?
I didn’t pray for my father to be different or kinder or more loving, because I couldn’t imagine him that way. He never spoke to us with affection or tenderness. His anger and his violence shaped how I saw him, and I wasn’t sure he would even be my father without the anger and violence. But I didn’t want him as he was—“as is” was the terms of sale for parents and children.
The wish for different parents fuels the archetypal fairy tales about evil stepmothers and children left in the woods. These fairy tales pivot around the wish that our parents, irascible and imperfect, aren’t even our real parents, that a fairy godmother will reveal to us our true royal bloodline or magical lineage. Whether you’re Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or Cinderella, the fantasy is that the adults who are raising you aren’t even your real parents, that your real parents are kinder and magical. The fantasy is that you have a destiny that is greater and more splendid than your current fate’s contours.
On that car ride home, I dismissed that unbridled fantasy with stiff, sobering logic: if this was the worst that could transpire, I would be okay—I would be okay because I had known worse. My father hadn’t beaten me or Lou in months—that was already an improvement, and I could live through the punishment of getting kicked out of the car. My past was worse than my present, and if my present indicated my future, I could live with that.
My mother’s footsteps clomped down the stairs.
“Turn off the scary movie! You guys are scaring the other kids!” my mother Vietnamesed at me. “Look at your cousin Thi! She’s crying! She came upstairs crying!”
“What are you talking about? We’re watching a Christmas movie on CBS! This is a Christmas movie—it’s about Jesus … maybe.” I implored her to keep the TV on. I had invoked the name of Jesus, not as expletive but as costar. I didn’t know if Jesus was in it. I had heard on a commercial break that the movie was called A Christmas Carol, and I knew that Christmas was sometimes about Jesus. If anything stopped my mother in her tracks, it was Jesus and the invocation of Jesus.
My mother’s two eldest brothers and two eldest sisters had married and added their own kids, so there multiplied a quorum of young cousins in the basement (among whom I was the alpha cousin). This meant that nearly a dozen kids were all shoved downstairs with a couch and TV while the adults gathered upstairs to prepare dinner. Cooking was an all-day affair for the grown-ups, which meant that, without real adult intervention, it was Lord of the Flies in the basement. TV was the common denominator and pacifier. TV offered a respite from noogies, wedgies, arm burns, and all other punishments that trickled down in the brutal basement economy.
“This is NOT a Christmas movie!” my mom pushed back. “Why is that old man screaming?”
“He’s being haunted by ghosts.”
“Why are there ghosts in a Christmas movie?”
“I don’t know. But it is a Christmas movie.… It is! LOOK!” My mother assumed that I was lying until I presented Exhibit A: The Evening Sentinel’s TV guide, in black-and-white. “Look. A CHRISTMAS CAROL. See? I told you it was a Christmas movie!”
This was no comfort to my cousin Thi, who was still sniffling. On the small TV screen, the ghost of Christmas Present had just revealed two emaciated orphans beneath his cloak, and we were all transfixed. I was excited to see that it was sort of a horror movie and sort of a Christmas movie—a strange holiday film to be sure. There was no Santa, Claymation Rudolph, or jazzy Charlie Brown. Just ghosts and regrets and British people.
My mother looked resigned. “Well, it’s too loud. Turn it down.” I noted that she said turn down. Not turn off. Christmas won.
Triumphant, I lowered the volume on the TV, but my mother’s question began to haunt me. Why were there ghosts in a Christmas movie?
When I first read A Christmas Carol, I wasn’t scared of the ghosts. I was, however, captivated by the idea of being haunted by the past. And beyond the chokehold of regret, I loved Dickens’s reflections on the past, on the present, and on the cautionary lessons for the future. It’s one of the earliest time-bending stories, shuffling the time deck backward and forward. Ebenezer Scrooge is trying to save his future, but unlike the Terminator and Marty McFly, Scrooge seeks his salvation not by altering the past, which for Dickens is unalterable, but by changing the present—changing the present so that he can save the future. The future is what’s at stake.
Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts. Scrooge visits himself as a child, and in the next moment, he sees himself as a young man. Dickensian time is jumbled, relative, and malleable. At the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge awakens in the present day, realizing that he can still save himself, that he can indeed save the future. Scrooge is overjoyed and cries out twice, “I will live in the Past, Present, and the Future!”
For a long time, this passage in Dickens didn’t make much sense to me, until I started to think about my parents, my grandparents, and me. We were the past, present, and future, each of us an element of that continuum, yet constantly shifting, depending on the other’s perspective.
Lou and I bounded into Ông Bà Ngoại’s apartment ahead of our parents, where everyone had gathered. We made the rounds like good little Confucian Catholics, bowing to our elders as instructed by my parents, saying chào, the formal Vietnamese greeting. We bowed, moving from one elder to the next. Hugs and kisses showered us from our aunts and grandmother while our uncles and grandfather nodded at our greetings, waving us off. Chào, Ông Ngoại. Bow. Chào, Bà Ngoại. Bow. My great-grandmother Bà Cố, eighty-five years old, was seated at the head of the large table, holding court in the dining room. Chào, Bà Cố. Bow.
“Bà Cố, can you do bà phù thủy? Do bà phù thủy! Please!” Lou and I begged her to do her game of “old witch lady.”
In the initial tide of Trầns in 1975, my great-grandmother Bà Cố, at seventy-nine, made the journey to America with us. With iron resolve, she’d endured a lifetime of wars, the escape from Sài Gòn, and various relocations from refugee camp to refugee camp. A force of nature, the spirit of our family incarnate, she was an unbreakable woman. A relic of the old country, a piece of the past.
While all the other women in our family wore Western-style clothing, Bà Cố always wore an áo dài, the traditional Vietnamese long dress that women wore. Because her hair grew far past her lower back, she braided and wrapped it in a piece of black velvet (which was like a giant sock or a woman’s stocking) and then wrapped the braid around her head in a large black turban. As the eldest in our family, she was distinguished by and revered for her age, set apart by her status and her distinctive turban.
Bà Cố hugged us as Lou and I begged her to play bà phù thủy. Her tiny, thin hands—bones wrapped in skin—reached up behind her head and released her turban, which uncoiled to her left in a slow, serpentine stretch. The soft dark velvet of the turban wrap loosened to reveal silvery hair in a waist-length braid that Bà Cố unraveled with a high, shrill cackle.
Lou and I were giddy as her braid came apart into a gray sheet of hair. She pulled all her hair forward so that it shrouded her face completely. Her hair was so long that it pooled around her knees and hips as she sat, motionless, behind the white pall. We laughed and pushed each other at the macabre sight as Bà Cố reached under the folds of her hair. After a moment of stillness, we heard her remove her dentures with a wet sucking sound and a row of human teeth emerged from the hair. Lou and I were beside ourselves. She placed the dentures on the dining room table next her, and with her face still hidden behind the curtain of her hair, she began to moan lowly.
“Oooooooh … ooooooh … OOOOOOOOOOH!” Her hair moved in and out, and she moaned louder. Lou and I were chattering in laughter and terror. She lurched out of her chair, both hands clawing out for us blindly in front of her. “OOOOOOOOOOH!” Lou and I both screamed and fell to the floor, but we didn’t scurry away. She parted her hair just at her chin, revealing only her wrinkled mouth, shapeless and glistening from the absence of dentures. Her moans now became audible words. “Bà phù thủy! Bà phù thủy!” I’m the witch! I’m the witch!
We were writhing on the floor in mock terror as she huddled over us, her hair shrouding us. We smelled her Tiger Balm ointment, which she always wore as both a perfume and arthritic analgesic. Her toothless maw, warm and wet, slobbered on our cheeks and the nape of our necks as she pretended to eat but was really kissing us. More screaming and shrieking. Bà phù thủy! Bà phù thủy!
My mother interceded. “Okay, that’s enough! You two go to the basement and leave Bà Cố alone! Go watch TV!” Bà Cố caught her breath and straightened up, brushing her hair back and plopping her teeth back in as she smiled. One last hug and wet kiss before we headed to the basement. Lou and I heard our cousins’ laughter at the basement door, the clacking of a Ping-Pong game, the TV in the background as we clambered down the steps.
Lou and I scanned The Evening Sentinel’s TV guide section: “Late-Night Movie.”
“What movie are they showing?”
“It just says ‘Late-Night Movie,’” I explained to Lou.
“Is it a good one? What movie is it?”
“Good grief, I don’t know. ‘Late-Night Movie.’ That’s all it says. We’re just gonna have to see.”
“Dad, can we sleep on the couch tonight?” My parents talked to each other for a minute. It was a Wednesday night, but during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, every night was an excuse to pull out the couch and stay up late.
On special occasions, my parents let me and my brother sleep on our pullout couch. The break from routine, the exceptionalism of sleeping on the pullout, was a huge joy for us even though our bedroom lay eight feet away.
“Okay, sure. You two can sleep out on the couch.” My brother and I hopped up and down as if a piñata had burst overhead, and hugged our parents—they might as well have declared a second Christmas. Cushions off. Couch out. Blankets, pillows, and a few stuffed animals trailing us from the bedroom.
Carlisle’s local ABC affiliate broadcasted old movies after the eleven-o’clock news, a random assortment of black-and-white films and seventies cinema: The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon, Shane, The Dirty Dozen. The highlight for us was when they had aired King Kong a few months back. That night—King Kong night—we stayed up until the national anthem played, an American flag glowing in the dark for a few minutes before the static signaled the end of TV, the thing that seemed to have no end.
We theorized about what the movie might be, but in truth we didn’t care. We were nestled into the somnolent fortress of pillows and blankets, basking in the TV’s blue light. Programming was irrelevant.
A made-for-TV drama came on after The Fall Guy, and our boredom led to inactivity, and our inactivity led to drowsiness. Lights on. TV blaring. Our parents covered us, turned off the TV, and retired to their bedroom because Lou and I had fallen asleep long before the start of the late-night movie.
At some point in the night, I jolted awake. I thought I heard something.
Sirens. Fire trucks. I saw the tail end of red and white lights fluttering on the curtains of the living room.
In the dark, I rubbed my eyes and glanced around at the scratchy silhouettes of the television, the lamps, the coffee table. I looked down the hallway toward the bedrooms, and I saw my great-grandmother standing in the hall. She stood right in front of the bathroom door, silent and unmoving, but I knew her immediately by her form, her tiny stature topped by the bulbous turban. “Chào, Bà Cố! Chào!” I greeted her and put my head down on my pillow, settling back to sleep.
I lay next to my brother, listening to the fading sirens. I thought for a moment about my great-grandmother being in our apartment. Why was she there? Did my parents go get her? When did they do that? Since Lou and I were in the living room, maybe she was having a sleepover in one of our beds. I’d find out in the morning. Too tired to continue, I drifted back to sleep.
Suddenly I was awake again. The lights were on. Was it morning? My mother nudged me and Lou. “Phúc and Lou, get up.” She stood by with our coats in hand. “Put your coats on. We have to go.”
My father came out from the kitchen. “There was a fire at the other apartment building where Ông Bà Ngoại live. A big fire.”
Our coats went on wordlessly as we ventured outside. The cold December set our teeth rattling.
From the back seat of the Ford, Lou and I were knuckling the sleep from our eyes, trying to piece together what my parents were saying to each other. A fusillade of questions from us: What happened? Who started the fire? Was anyone hurt? How big was the fire? Were there fire trucks? Is it still on fire? They ignored us. I could see my father’s brow clenched deeper than usual as we drove uninterrupted through the blinking traffic signals, as my mom cried in the passenger seat. Lou and I stopped talking as we felt the cold glaze of fear and dread frost over in the car.
Past the short six blocks we pulled up to Ông Bà Ngoại’s apartment complex; the flashing of the fire engine lights illuminated the parking lot and onlookers. Dozens of neighbors stood around in the late-December air with hastily pulled on layers, bathrobes, coats, slippers, boots. Their warm exhalations puffed red and white as emergency lights pulsed. My grandmother, grandfather, my uncles and aunts, crowded together on the sidewalk, fire department blankets cloaked over their shoulders, disheveled and disbelieving. My parents parked near the fire engines and told me and Lou to stay in the car. We pivoted to our knees to look out the rear window as they headed over to the crowd, their profiles glowing with lights. Even from inside the car, the December air was smeared with smoke and the sickly sweet of burnt plastic. It looked like everyone was okay.
In spite of the army of fire trucks amassed, the building wasn’t the ash heap I was expecting. From where we were parked, it looked normal, except for one blackened, broken window up to which a fire ladder extended. Around the window, a halo of soot and melted beige vinyl siding marred the otherwise mundane building face, a gouged and charred eye socket.
My parents stayed for a while, helping to arrange for everyone to stay at my uncle Châu’s apartment, which was in the same complex, and we headed home exhausted.
Back inside at Walnut Bottom Road, still zipped up in our winter coats, our parents sat us in their laps and told us that Bà Cố was hurt badly in the fire. She had been taken away to the hospital and we would know more in the morning. As they told me this, I looked down the hall of our apartment where I had just seen her. I hadn’t seen her in the group of survivors, but I assumed that she was sleeping over at our apartment. I saw her in our hallway that night. I saw her. And now my parents were telling me that she had been trapped in the fire.
Lou asked more questions that my parents couldn’t answer while I sat, glancing occasionally down the hallway.
I started to doubt what I saw. Maybe I didn’t see Bà Cố in the hallway? But I did. But she hadn’t been here. She was in the other apartment building. We later learned from the fire department that the fire had started in her room, and no one was able to get past the flames to reach her. Unresponsive and badly burned, she had been taken in an ambulance to the ICU.
Bà Cố. She had survived all the wars, all the helicopters, boats, and planes, all the relocation camps in Guam, Wake Island, Fort Indiantown Gap; had lived to see snow for her first time as an octogenarian, only to be engulfed in flames in her apartment.
That weekend, the apartment management moved Ông Bà Ngoại, my aunt, and two uncles across the parking lot to another three-bedroom unit, and we helped them drag the smoky remnants of their possessions in plastic shopping bags into the new apartment.
My grandparents visited my great-grandmother in the ICU and reported what little news they could parse from the doctors, but we younger children didn’t go to the hospital. We were planted in front of the television as the grown-ups began stoically piecing together their lives again. My parents helped Ông Bà Ngoại and everyone collect and sort more clothing and furnishings from our sponsors. If they suffered or were devastated by the fire, they didn’t show us, shouldering the tragedy with a tacit steeliness.
Bà Cố never regained consciousness, and she died a few days later from her burns and smoke inhalation. She was eighty-five.
My grandmother, Bà Ngoại, as the new matriarch of the family, insisted on an open casket at Bà Cố’s funeral—her first unilateral decision, a decision that was roundly protested but dutifully obeyed. No one wanted an open casket for a burn victim, but my grandmother insisted.
At the funeral (my first), Lou and I recoiled at the charred remains of Bà Cố, the smooth polish of the casket a sharp counterpoint to her blackened features, only vaguely human and distinctly not her. Great care had been taken to wrap the turban around her head even though all her hair had burned off. A pastiche of the past.
My father pushed me and Lou toward the casket as we protested, but he insisted that we pay our respects. Confucian filial piety, laminated with third-world Catholicism, overrode any sensible restraint. He gripped our arms as he marched us down to the prie-dieu to kneel.
I lowered myself in front of the casket, remembering the false terror that Lou and I had felt in our game with Bà Cố, feeling the awful, real terror of beholding her disfigured face and hands. Lou and I held hands and cried together, shedding tears that she might wake up and be in pain from the burns, tears for her death, tears for the horror of beholding what used to be her.
Nearly every book and film that has ever had a ghost in the plot will tell you: a ghost doesn’t randomly show up without being a crucial narrative element. When ghosts show up in literature or film, they expedite or pivot the story. In Hamlet, a murdered father appears to demand his revenge; in Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi slips into the snowy vapors of Hoth to tell Luke where to finish his Jedi training; in The Odyssey, our hero, Odysseus, goes to Hades, the Grand Central Terminal of ghosts, to get some advice and direction that, apparently, he couldn’t get from the living. And of course, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has the nightmare of spooky visions of what would have been, what is, and what could be. The ghosts create meaning and impetus.
In the aftermath of seeing Bà Cố’s ghost, I didn’t know what it meant. Bà Cố didn’t say anything—she just stood there. I saw her in the hallway, and I went back to sleep. And then she was burned in the fire. Was she a premonition of an unavoidable tragedy? If so, why did I see her? Was she a vision of the past, present, or future? Or was she just a ghost, an apparition, a phenomenon with no larger or deeper significance than what I wanted to make of it? Maybe she wanted to see me one last time. Maybe she wanted me to see her one last time. I believe that I did.
“Do you want to go to the movies next weekend?”
I was shocked. My father had asked me if I wanted to go to the movies. The movies.
Going to the movies had been a chore outsourced to my uncles and cousins. My cousins on Staten Island had taken me to witness Rocky Balboa defeat Apollo Creed in Rocky II. My uncles dragged me to see Cheech & Chong’s weed-fueled adventures, which I distinctly remember not understanding nor enjoying. Some older cousins took me along to see The Blues Brothers, which I also didn’t understand. Sometimes I was brought along at the insistence of Bà Ngoại. “Oh, you’re going to the movies? Why don’t you take Phúc, too?” Their eyeballs rolled their annoyance that their young tagalong was coming, too. Of course, no one gave a moment’s thought to the movie’s rating, and my frequent suggestions that we see an animated or kids film were quashed unilaterally. I wanted to see Tron, but we saw Friday the 13th instead. I wanted to see The Last Unicorn, but we saw Conan the Barbarian instead. And during the movies, I triggered a landslide of shushing from my cousins. Who’s that? What’s this? Why’s he smoking that? Why is he killing that guy? Who’s that guy anyway?
Shush. Shush! Jesus, you’re so annoying. Shush!
My father, however, rarely took me to the movies. I immediately assented to his suggestion to see a movie and threw my arms around him. “A movie! Sure! What movie?”
“I read about the movie in the newspaper. It’s the best movie in America—I think we should go see it.” He was referring to the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture that year, not that it made a difference to me. Reading The Evening Sentinel was my father’s daily, ongoing effort at gaining some cultural competency and improving his reading comprehension.
“The best movie in America? That sounds good! What’s it called?”
“Chariots of Fire.”
“Whoa, that does sound good!” I had never heard of it, but with the logic of a third grader, I parsed the title Chariots of Fire literally and aggrandized my father’s enthusiasm at seeing the best movie in America. I had seen Clash of the Titans at my grandparents’ house. The Trầns were moving up in the world. My grandparents had premium cable television and a VCR, and with that, Ông Ngoại had begun a small collection of movies that he pirated from HBO and PRISM. Clash of the Titans, with its sword fights, skeleton armies, and a Kraken, reigned as a household favorite. How much more awesome could Chariots of Fire be than Clash of the Titans?
“Can I bring a friend to the movie?”
It was rare that my parents allowed us to invite friends to the apartment or on outings with our family. The idea of a sleepover was a foreign concept, and they didn’t understand why we would want to invite other kids to our house to play as opposed to meeting outside and playing there.
My father’s past history, built upon so many no’s, tottered with an uncharacteristic yes. “Yes, you can bring one friend. We can get popcorn, too. Maybe that will be fun.” He said yes and he said fun. I hardly recognized my father, the stern, domineering killjoy who reigned with an iron bar. I didn’t want to push my luck with more questions. The date was set. Chariots of Fire. Next Saturday. There would be popcorn. I could bring a friend. It would be fun. This was not the father that I knew, not the Chánh Trần of the past, not the one whose replacement I had prayed for.
At recess that Monday, I ascended the monkey bars and surveyed my choices of whom to invite. This was Chariots of Fire, after all. From my perch, I considered my options. Craig Fleckman, my long-time friend since kindergarten, was in the other third-grade class. It was the first time that we were not in the same class together, which meant that we might as well have been on different planets. Our love of Star Wars was strong but not that strong. We were on hiatus. Lizzie Kenyon? She was sort of a friend but to invite a girl? Nope. I didn’t want anyone to think that I was asking a girl to be my girlfriend, and especially not Lizzie Kenyon. No girls. That eliminated over half the class. I could invite the kids with whom I wanted to be friends, but that seemed like an overreach. With only one berth for moviegoing, I couldn’t risk the humiliation of asking a series of kids only to have them refuse.
Eli Huey it was. Winner. He was my go-to friend at recess, and I his. Eli was new to our school that year, and he and I were seated near each other. He was a fast runner, laughed at my jokes, ate his boogers, liked Star Wars. He lived in a nearby apartment complex and was the only other kid I knew in my class who also lived in an apartment. The parallels of our housing situations allowed me to map my experience onto Eli, which I couldn’t do with other kids. Maybe people banged on his apartment floor too, as they did at our apartment? Maybe he shared a room with his sibling? Maybe his mom said no to toys because they didn’t have enough money?
I asked Eli if he wanted to go to the movies with me and my dad, and he, like me, was hooked by the title.
“Chariots of Fire? Yeah, definitely! I gotta ask my mom, but yeah, I definitely want to go.” His mom said yes that night, and for the rest of the week during recess, Eli and I agreed to play Chariots of Fire in anticipation of the movie. Our imaginations ran unbridled. What do the chariots look like? Do you think they’re always on fire? Do you think they shoot fire too? What sorts of creatures do you think pull them? Horses? Maybe Pegasuses? In our frenzy, we hoped that the movie was a sequel to Clash of the Titans or at least borrowed from Greek mythology. By Friday’s last recess, Eli and I had unspooled a tangled plot about the heroes, villains, and monsters, all of whom rode chariots—chariots of fire.
Saturday afternoon we drove to the theater, Eli and I excitedly discussing the movie on the drive over. How could the movie not live up to the title? It was the best movie in America. And it had chariots (of fire) in it. And my father had suggested that we go. His involvement was thrilling for me. My father had not taken me to Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back, but here we were together. Seated on red upholstered movie theater seats. Popcorn in our laps. My father on my left and Eli on my right.
The theater darkened, and trailers for upcoming releases of boring talky movies flickered on the screen. And then the movie began.
A church flickered onto the screen. Some sort of mass. Okay, this was weird. And then a bunch of men in white underwear were running on the beach. I thought maybe we were watching a trailer for another movie, but the title card came up. Chariots of Fire. Had we made a mistake? Maybe the chariots would come later? Patience. It had only been three minutes. I looked at Eli, who was munching away at his popcorn. He caught my eye and shrugged, happy to be eating an entire bag of popcorn by himself.
An eternity passed. Still more running on the beach and through town. There were long close-ups of faces and even more running. The time period was not a mythical era with Medusas or Krakens. It was twentieth-century England. There were no swords, sandals, or togas. It was just supercilious Englishmen, talking and running against the synthetic swelling ch-ch-ch-ch-ch of Vangelis’s theme song. At least that sounded cool.
The movie ran on longer without any signs of a chariot or fire. My confusion was supplanted by embarrassment, thirty minutes into the movie. This was not the Chariots of Fire that we had made up in our heads. This was not what I had promised to Eli, and I couldn’t bear to gaze upon the disappointment that he shared with me, the disbelief that this movie was actually about Englishmen talking and running. I didn’t want to look at Eli even there in the dark, but I did. I forced myself.
Eli was asleep. Asleep amid unpopped kernels and the collapsed rubble of his popcorn bag. He snored slightly. I had invited one friend to a movie, and that movie was so boring—so terrible—that he fell asleep.
My father nudged me. “Wake up. It’s time to go—the movie’s over.” I didn’t remember falling asleep. The credits were rolling, and my lips stung from the salt that had crusted the corners of my mouth for the last ninety minutes. My father seemed chipper. “That was a pretty good movie, huh? Very inspiring. Geez. It was very inspiring. Did you sleep through the whole thing?”
“Sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.
Eli piped up. “I get so sleepy when I eat, and then in the theater it gets dark.…” He shrugged and picked his nose.
We were silent on the car ride home from the theater, fully awake and refreshed from our nap but bereft of the customary post-movie postmortem of wasn’t it cool when and what about the part when.
We dropped Eli off at his apartment and headed home. Lou wanted to know right away about the movie. “How was Chariots of Fire?”
“It was okay, I guess.”
“What? Just okay? What do you mean?”
“I mean, I fell asleep. And Eli fell asleep.”
“But it was Chariots of Fire!”
“I know … but it’s not what you think. I can’t tell you what it was about, but it’s not what you think it sounds like.”
We kids lived in a world that was barely metaphorical, where titles for movies and TV shows were tantamount to the ingredient labels. Fantasy Island was a fantasy island. The Love Boat was a love boat. The Dukes of Hazzard were the Dukes of Hazzard.
But Chariots of Fire? No chariots. No fire.
“It was very inspiring! Good story!” My father put his arm around my shoulders, but having fallen asleep, I couldn’t disagree. It was an optimistic appraisal. I was still deflated and cranky from the movie not living up to my expectations, and I squirmed in his embrace. I placed all the blame squarely upon my father. He had said that it was a great movie, but it was actually terrible. He had failed me. Again. I heaped Chariots of Fire on top of Wookiee and colonel, and countless other misunderstandings and errors. Another instance of his inability to navigate the world with competency.
My embarrassment from the Chariots of Fire fiasco was acute, but in retrospect I’m able to see more clearly that he tried. It was, after all, the best movie of 1982. It had a cool title and we had popcorn. I can’t remember many moments in my childhood where my father made a good-faith effort to do something fun, but I remember this one.
As an adult, I’ve been able to understand that my father was not as trapped by his past as I thought he was. He was often violent and angry, but now I can look back and see that he tried to do fun things from time to time, things that didn’t fit into the narrow, cartoonish image that I formed of him. Fossil hunting on the shores of Pinchot Lake. Visits to the Indian Echo Caverns in Hummelstown. Impromptu trips to Washington, D.C., to see the Smithsonian because it was free. I had witnessed the tension of who he was and who he was trying to be. I wanted him to be loving and kind. But his old behavior, his temper, his rage, eclipsed his attempts at being a better father.
The past pulled us and the future pushed us. The tension of tenses.
We lived in the Past, the Present, and the Future. It wasn’t only laid out in my grandparents, my parents, and me. It was in our relationships, it was in how we treated one another and how we looked at one another, heedless of who we actually were. My adult uncles were still slapped as if they were children. We could never grow up in our parents’ eyes, but they could not grow or change in ours, either. Our past behaviors, our present needs, our future goals—all of them snares.
But even if the past is unchangeable, maybe our perspective of the past can change. And maybe the way we see past events can change, and if that can change, maybe the past event itself does change—not in action or outcome but in purpose and intent.
I couldn’t see it in the moment, but through the years, with the interplay of memories, experience, and perspective, I’ve come to see our trip to the movies not as another failure by my father, but rather as an attempt to connect to his son. But in that present moment, I couldn’t see it for what it was. I was unable to see past our past.