IN FEBRUARY 1965, THE UNITED STATES BEGAN STRATEGIC bombing in Vietnam, and the Vietnam War was in full swing. When my parents married a year later, a quarter of a million US combat troops were already on the ground, and by the time the war reached its peak, that number would more than double.
Americans sometimes have the impression that during the Vietnam War, every square inch of Southeast Asia was embroiled in bloody conflict, but that was not the case. Some parts of South Vietnam were left relatively untouched by the war, and the Mekong Delta was one of them. True, a riverine war was fought between the Viet Cong and US swift boats on the larger distributaries of the Mekong River, but in more remote areas, such as the district of Mỹ Xuyên, life went on as usual.
For my family, war was even good for business. They weren’t purposely trying to profit from the war; it was just a mathematical reality that with more mouths to feed more rice was needed, and it all had to pass through rice mills like the ones that belonged to Peace, Unity, Profit. Lucrative government contracts now filled the big river barges that transported tons of rice from our mills down the Bay Sao and up the coast to Saigon. Employment was up, too, because there were plenty of young Vietnamese men who fled south to avoid military service. Because of my father’s two-year exile in Cambodia, he sympathized with their plight, and he offered jobs to many of them at our mills.
Business was good for my family, and that meant life was good for my father. Though he was married now, his lifestyle had not changed all that much. He still left for his office every morning and returned at night. He still did what he wanted, bought what he wanted, and generally lived the same life he always had—only now he had a wife waiting for him at home. My father was well known in the community and highly respected. People knew him, liked him, and wanted to be with him—including women.
There was a young woman in Soc Trang who was ten years younger than my father and very attractive. She liked my father very much, and she wanted to get closer to him, but there were two problems: she was from a poor family with no status, and my father was married. The first problem would be difficult for her to overcome, but the second problem didn’t bother her at all. She knew her family’s low status would never allow her to cross paths with my father in a social setting, so instead she took a job at his rice mill, which allowed her to be around him every day.
There was nothing personal about their relationship at first. She was just a kind and considerate employee who paid special attention to my father and spent time with him every chance she got. Her family lived not far from the rice mill, and sometimes at the end of a long and tiring day, she would invite him to stop off at her house to rest and wind down before he headed home. Everything she did was innocent and acceptable—and carefully planned.
My mother’s becoming pregnant in the first month of her marriage made for a quick transition to family life—so much for the honeymoon. But she came from a large family and knew she wanted one of her own. She carefully counted the days, and one week before her due date, she left Soc Trang and traveled to Bac Lieu, where her mother could be with her to help with the delivery and recovery. My mother was more than happy to go because it was the only excuse she had to escape the endless household duties and her mother-in-law’s iron rule. Maybe that’s why she had five of us in six years.
My father did not go with her to Bac Lieu. After all, he was responsible for running the family business, and business didn’t stop just because his wife was having a baby. My mother was left to travel to Bac Lieu alone, but the moment she went into labor, word was sent to my father that his wife was about to give birth. As soon as that message arrived, he dropped everything, hurried to her side, and stayed with her for a day or two before returning to the mills.
My mother remained in Bac Lieu for another month, and there was a reason for her extended stay: the child mortality rate was high in Vietnam, and the first month of a baby’s life was a crucial time. If the baby managed to survive that long, it was likely to live; if not, it was a comfort to have your mother nearby.
My mother returned to Soc Trang with a healthy baby girl, my sister Jenny, in tow. Life soon returned to normal, which for my mother meant her usual exhausting daily routine of shopping, cooking, cleaning, and massaging, only this time with an infant to care for. Grandmother Chung wasn’t particularly sympathetic since she had managed to raise six children in abject poverty all by herself. I imagine my mother heard that story more than once.
And Jenny was not the only baby in the house. My uncle and his wife had already added to the chaos with a baby of their own. Each time a baby was born, a local twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl was hired to help with the newborn or care for the older children while the mother nursed the baby. So every new birth added two more bodies to the household, the infant and a teenage nanny, and each additional body meant extra cooking and cleaning for my mother.
One year later she was pregnant again.
It was during this pregnancy that my mother first began to suspect that something was wrong. My father seemed increasingly cold and distant. There was nothing specific my mother could point to or put her finger on—just a vague intuition that something was different. When she asked my father about it, he denied that anything was wrong and told her it was just her imagination.
In late August 1968, my mother traveled to Bac Lieu to be with her mother for her second delivery. A week later my brother Bruce was born, and once again my father went to visit when news of the birth arrived. He came a little later this time and didn’t stay quite as long, but my mother didn’t expect him to because he was a busy man.
Busier than she knew.
The year 1968 was a very rough one for everyone in South Vietnam. It was the deadliest year of the Vietnam War. In May alone more than two thousand American soldiers were killed, and by the end of the year, three hundred more were dying every week.
Every evening fifty million Americans were tuning in to their nightly news, and 90 percent of every broadcast was devoted to images of napalmed children and bleeding American boys being dragged to waiting helicopters. As a result the American people’s attitude toward involvement in the war radically changed. Just three years earlier, 80 percent of Americans had supported the war, but that number now had been cut in half. A new president, named Richard Nixon, was elected in the fall, and he had campaigned on the promise that he would withdraw American troops from Vietnam. That may have been a welcome promise for the war-weary people of America, but it was a sobering thought for the people of South Vietnam. Even with all their military might, the Americans had failed to root out the Viet Cong and halt the advancing army of North Vietnam. How would the South Vietnamese army manage all by itself? As the rumor spread that the Americans might leave, a sense of dread began to grow.
It was also a rough year for my mother. The return to Soc Trang after her second delivery was much harder. My uncle and his wife had just contributed a second child and another nanny to the Chung household, and my mother’s return with baby Bruce added two more. Her responsibilities were growing exponentially, and as the physical and emotional demands on her increased, she began to feel depressed. Take one part physical exhaustion, two parts emotional disconnection, add a dash of postpartum depression, and you have a recipe for a nervous breakdown.
One day my mother’s depression finally overwhelmed her, and she ran from the house with two-year-old Jenny in her arms. Our house was situated near a bridge that spanned the Bay Sao River, and her plan—if that word can be used to describe an act of spontaneous desperation—was to throw herself off the bridge with Jenny in her arms. She couldn’t swim a stroke, and the river was deep, and she knew she would sink to the bottom like a rock.
It isn’t clear why she intended to take Jenny with her. It may have been that she didn’t want her daughter to be left to grow up in that environment, or it may have been that Jenny was her most precious possession and she didn’t want to be separated from her, even in death. Or it may have been that she was not thinking at all—she simply happened to be holding her toddler when she was overcome by depression and ran.
But as she ran toward the bridge, baby Bruce began to cry in the house behind her, and when she heard his cry, she stopped. She knew she couldn’t abandon him even if it meant she would have to go on living. She turned, walked slowly back to the house, set Jenny down, and picked up a broom.
I believe there is a profound lesson to be learned from my mother’s actions. There is no greater love than to give one’s life for a friend, but giving one’s life does not always mean dying—sometimes it means living. Living can be a sacrifice, too, and a noble one, especially when it’s done to benefit someone else. Dying might require more love, but living takes a lot more endurance. To me, my mother’s sacrificial act of continuing to live for the sake of others is more than an inspiring story—it’s the reason I am alive today.
Nine months after Bruce was born, my mother was pregnant for the third time. It was during this pregnancy that my mother heard a shocking report: a young woman who worked at my father’s rice mill was also pregnant—and she was unmarried. It was scandalous news. The young woman’s pregnancy meant that she had lost her virtue, and that was a loss no single woman could afford. Who would ever marry her now?
But to my mother the report was more than juicy gossip. She suspected that my father was responsible, and once again she confronted him, and once again he denied it. This time she took her suspicions to Grandmother Chung, but my grandmother rebuked her for making scandalous accusations about the family.
“Besides,” she said, “aren’t you his wife? Aren’t you the one he comes home to every night?”
My uncle had a similar response. In fact, everyone with whom she shared her suspicions told her the same thing: “It couldn’t be true. He loves you. It must be your imagination.”
My mother’s suspicions were not confirmed until it was time for her to deliver her third child—my sister Yen. This time, when the message was sent to my father that his wife was once again in labor, he didn’t come at all. Though she remained in Bac Lieu for her usual month, her husband didn’t come to visit her even once.
That’s when she knew—and she decided to do something about it.
My mother was sick and tired of confronting her husband only to have him deny the accusation, and the rest of his family would probably just remind her that she was lucky to have a husband who came home to her every night. She knew she would get nowhere by going to his family, so she decided to confront the other woman herself.
My mother’s half brother, who lived in Bac Lieu, owned a big Suzuki motorcycle just like my father’s. She ordered him to teach her how to operate it, and after one quick lesson my five-foot-two mother hopped on that three-hundred-pound motorcycle and went wobbling off down the road toward the mistress’s house.
After only one lesson she had learned to work the throttle but had no idea how to switch gears, and she wasn’t really clear about how to work the hand brake. She knew how to get started but wasn’t quite sure how to stop, so when she came to the mistress’s house, she had to keep circling until she figured out the best way to get off the motorcycle with most of her skin intact. She dropped the bike on its side with the wheels still spinning and charged into the house, wielding two long pieces of sugarcane like a ninja warrior—a disciplinary technique she learned from Grandmother Chung. The mistress was there, and so was my father—he had stopped by to take a nap during a break from his work. My mother was breathing fire and had every intention of using the sugarcane to teach the mistress a well-deserved lesson, but when she saw her, she couldn’t do it—the young woman was cradling an infant in her arms no older than my mother’s own. My mother may have been furious, but she was still a mother, so instead she turned her fury on a table that was set with cups and saucers and smashed everything on it.
When the young woman’s mother heard the crash of dishes, she came running from the back room, and when she realized what was happening, she tried to attack my mother. But at that point my father stepped in and defended his wife. I wish I could make his actions sound more heroic, but considering the situation, I don’t believe it’s possible. My father’s decision to take a mistress and his family’s willingness to turn a blind eye seem despicable in today’s world, but polygamy was common in Vietnam, and so was the practice of taking a mistress. A mistress was viewed much like a luxury car; if you could afford one, you could get one. My father could afford one easily, and when my mother complained to anyone about her husband’s infidelity, she was always told, “It’s his money. He earned it. He can spend it however he wants.”
What seems even more incomprehensible is that the mistress’s parents not only knew about their daughter’s behavior but encouraged it. They were a poor family whose daughter had managed to hook up with a wealthy man, and now that she had borne his child, he was responsible for her. The mistress understood the culture’s rules: she knew she was just like a luxury car, and she knew that when a man buys one, he is responsible for taking care of it. My father was her meal ticket, and in the eyes of her parents, any meal ticket was better than none. They believed it was better for their daughter to be a rich man’s mistress than a poor man’s wife.
But just because a practice is culturally acceptable does not make it right, and my father’s infidelity was breaking my mother’s heart. What did she care that she possessed more status than the mistress or that she was allowed to use the lofty title of wife? Her husband was sleeping with another woman—a woman five years her junior. It was not fair, and it was not right, and her heartbreak once again was turning into depression.
A few months after my mother’s confrontation with the mistress, she tried to take her life again. When my father was away at work one day, she tried to overdose by downing an entire bottle of one of my grandmother’s alcohol-based herbal remedies. It was not enough to kill her, but it was enough to make her very sick and very drunk. When my father came home, he found his wife lying unconscious while baby Yen nuzzled her body, trying to breast-feed.
My father panicked. He had to revive his wife before Grandmother Chung came home or large objects would begin flying through the air—most of them in his direction. In Vietnam a common treatment for general ailments was coining, a practice that involved rubbing a hard object, such as a coin or a spoon, over the patient’s back until the skin turned black-and-blue with bruises. The theory was that the bruises brought blood to the surface of the skin, and when the blood released its heat, the malady would be cured. The treatment worked but not because it cooled my mother’s blood; the coining just gave her time to sober up.
My father never really explained or defended his actions to my mother. Whenever she complained about his mistress, he simply responded by assuring her that she was the only woman he really loved and the one he came home to every night.
His relationship with his mistress continued, and over the next few years the mistress matched my mother baby-for-baby. When my mother got pregnant, the mistress got pregnant; when my mother had a baby, the mistress had one too. By the time my mother had borne eight children, the mistress had delivered four of her own.
I wish I could tell you that my father had a change of heart and gave up his mistress out of love for my mother, but he didn’t. He lived in a world of wealth and privilege, and in that world a mistress was just one of the perks.
And I wish I could tell you that the reason my mother remained married to my father was her boundless love and devotion, but it wasn’t. She simply had no other option. In Vietnam a woman with eight children had nowhere else to go.
What I can tell you is that my father eventually did give up his mistress. He experienced a radical change of heart, and that caused him to leave his faithless past behind and become a devoted father and a committed husband.
All it took was for his entire world to collapse.