HOA TRUONG CRADLED HER LITTLE BROTHER ON HER hip while she worked at the stove. Though her family was wealthy and her house quite modern by Bac Lieu standards, the old stove was still heated by rice husks burning in the belly of the great black beast. Rice was one thing the Mekong Delta possessed in abundance, and no part of the rice plant ever went to waste. Cooking with rice husks was something of an art because the paperlike husks burned fast and hot, and the only way the cook could control the temperature was by manipulating a long, metal handle to shift piles of burning husks to just the right place at exactly the right time.
Hoa Truong is my mother. By the time she was seven years old, she already cooked, cleaned, and generally served as housekeeper and nanny to nine children ranging in age from the toddler on her hip to a twenty-two-year-old boy. Children had to grow up fast in rural Vietnam, and they were given major responsibilities at an early age. That made the days long and childhood short, and life could be hard for young girls like my mother—but her life was harder than most.
Her father was born in China in 1903, and immigrated to southern Vietnam as a young man. He settled in the town of Bac Lieu because it had a sizable Chinese population, and he opened a small business that quickly began to prosper and diversify. My grandfather soon became wealthy, and in Bac Lieu wealth commanded respect. The people of the town referred to him as the Bac Lieu Prince, and some even called him a living Buddha. A prince and an enlightened being too—not a bad résumé.
In 1925, my grandfather married, and that same year his eighteen-year-old bride bore their first child, a boy. Over the next several years their growing family kept pace with their expanding business, and by the time their fifth child was born, their exhausted mother decided she wanted domestic help. A family of seven was not unusual in Vietnam; lots of women single-handedly bore the burden of households larger than hers, but she was wealthy and could afford to hire help. After all, if her husband was a prince, didn’t that make her a princess? What princess does her own cooking and cleaning?
The princess found a poor family in southern China who had a suitable teenage daughter, a girl sixteen years her junior. She was able to convince that family to allow their daughter to return with her to Bac Lieu to serve as au pair to the Truong family on a temporary basis. She traveled to China and personally escorted the teenage girl home.
That was when the trouble began.
The girl was not only capable and efficient; she was beautiful—a fact the princess could not have overlooked. The girl quickly caught the eye of the Bac Lieu Prince, and when the girl turned seventeen, he married her—with his first wife’s full blessing.
At that time polygamy was common and accepted in Vietnam, but it’s difficult to understand why a wife would not only allow her husband to marry another woman but actually encourage it. It may have reflected a rift in their marriage; after five pregnancies the princess might have been seeking someone to divert her husband’s affections. Or it may have been a way of securing the young girl’s services on a permanent basis. As an au pair the girl was free to return to China whenever she wanted, but as a wife she was bound to the Truong family forever.
Within the Truong family the girl was referred to as “little sister.” Though she possessed the legal status of wife, the princess made it very clear who was in authority—and so did her children. The princess and her brood constantly reminded the girl that the servant-turned-wife would always be a servant to them.
But the prince found something different and special in this beautiful young girl, and it soon became clear to everyone in the family that even though the princess still held authority, the new wife held her husband’s heart.
In 1941, at the age of eighteen, the girl began to bear children of her own. Her firstborn was a little girl she named Hoa—my mother. She was born prematurely and weighed less than four pounds at birth; given the state of medical care at the time, it’s a minor miracle that she survived at all. In total my grandmother gave birth to eight children, only four of whom managed to survive childhood.
With the birth of each of my grandmother’s children, the first wife’s jealousy increased. The princess grew more and more hostile toward my grandmother, to the point where any display of affection at all between the prince and his favored second wife caused an angry and often violent outburst from the bitter princess and her supportive daughters. As wife number two, all my grandmother could do was bow and submit to their anger—and all my poor mother could do was watch.
One year before my mother was born, the Japanese had invaded Vietnam, and it was five years before the last of the Imperial Army finally withdrew. When they did, the Viet Minh immediately began to launch guerrilla raids against the French authorities and anyone else they deemed friendly toward them, which included much of the civilian population of the Mekong Delta. The result was that a sudden and violent confrontation by the Viet Minh could occur almost anywhere and at any time. The Viet Minh were dedicated and ambitious, but they were also hungry, poorly equipped, and underpaid. They were in constant need of money just to survive, and many of their “uprisings” were little more than raiding parties that pillaged successful businesses and the homes of the rich, in search of money. In Vietnam the rich were often the Chinese, and in Bac Lieu that included the prince.
One day, when my mother was seven, my grandfather traveled to Saigon on business. That night a Viet Minh raiding party gathered outside the Truong house and began to kick down the front door. Inside the house my grandmother saw the door coming loose from its hinges and grabbed the closest of her children—two-year-old Lam—and raced out of the house just as the door burst open.
My mother and one of her older half sisters were upstairs when they heard the intrusion, and when the men began to shout Vietnamese expletives, the girls crawled under one of the beds to hide; they screamed when two strong pairs of hands grabbed their ankles and dragged them out from under the bed.
“Where is the owner?” the men demanded. “Where is the safe? Where do you keep the money?”
The men soon found the safe, but the safe required a key to open it.
“Where is the key?” they shouted at the two girls.
My mother didn’t know, and neither did her half sister, but the Viet Minh didn’t believe them and threatened to kill them if they didn’t tell. By then all of the children had been dragged from their hiding places, and they were marshaled outside and lined up along a ditch, facing away from their captors. The Viet Minh marched back and forth behind them, shouting and threatening to kill them all.
“Where is the owner?” they kept shouting. “Where is the key?”
My mother stared down at the empty ditch and wondered if the men were about to shoot her and throw her body into the ditch.
Then one of the Viet Minh heard a little child crying somewhere in the darkness, near the side of the house. He searched and found my grandmother and little Lam hiding in the outhouse, and they dragged my grandmother out and demanded the key to the safe. My grandmother took one look at her weeping children lined up for execution in front of the ditch and quickly relented, but by the time she could locate the key, it was too late; one of the Viet Minh had lost patience and fired several bullets into the safe in an attempt to open it. But the bullets not only failed to open it but jammed the mechanism, so the safe could never open again.
The frustrated Viet Minh shouted more threats, but there was nothing else they could do. They were forced to leave without money, but they did not leave empty-handed; as they departed, they stripped the house of everything they could carry.
At the peak of the communist uprising, it was no longer safe for my grandfather to even leave his house. The Prince of Bac Lieu would have been a prime target for kidnapping, blackmail, or even assassination as a member of the wealthy bourgeoisie. With my grandfather confined to home, the family business fell apart. To put food on the table, the two wives were forced to become merchants themselves, scavenging whatever items of value they could find and selling them in the town market.
With both wives out of the house, the children became my mother’s complete responsibility. That was a full-time job, and it left no time for her to continue school. Her formal education hadn’t even begun until she was nine years old, and because of her new responsibilities, it abruptly stopped when she was only thirteen. Whatever opportunities and challenges my mother would face in her life, she would have to face with only an elementary school education.
Despite all the domestic tensions within her family and the political conflicts that surrounded her, my mother still considered herself fortunate. She had a kind father and a remarkable mother, a woman who had been taken from her family in China as a teenager and forced to play second fiddle to a jealous and vindictive woman. Despite all that, my grandmother remained loving and kind. She was a woman who had known both poverty and wealth; a woman who had experienced the pain of losing a child; a woman who could manage a houseful of children and deal with communist cadres too. My grandmother was a strong woman, and she passed that strength on to her oldest daughter.
My mother was going to need it.