THE TOWN OF FORT SMITH IS ONLY ABOUT 5 PERCENT Asian, and there were only two types of places where Asians could mix and mingle: a few small Asian grocery stores and the occasional Chinese restaurant. But while we were living at Allied Gardens, we discovered a third place, and that one changed our lives.
One of our neighbors at Allied Gardens told my parents about a Vietnamese church that had recently been started in Fort Smith, and he said there were about thirty or forty Vietnamese who attended every week. Thirty or forty Vietnamese all in one place—to my parents that sounded like Saigon. When our neighbor told us the service was translated into Vietnamese, we were sold, and the following Sunday the neighbor’s unsuspecting nephew dropped by. He expected to drive a small family to church but found ten of us waiting to pile into his pathetic little car.
When the smoking car limped into the church parking lot, we were all amazed—the church building was enormous. My father was the only one who could read the sign, though he didn’t understand all the words: Grand Avenue Baptist Church.
The Vietnamese church at Grand Avenue Baptist became the single most powerful influence on my family in Fort Smith. My father made sure we attended that church without fail, regardless of weather or circumstances. Bruce once sprained his ankle and thought he had the perfect excuse to stay home. He told my father, “Dad! I can’t walk!” but my father just said, “Put on your shoes and get dressed. We’re going to church.” The reason my father was so adamant about church attendance was that the church played a far more important role in our lives than it does for many natural-born Americans. For my parents, it completed a spiritual journey that had begun long before they ever reached America.
My mother had never been able to understand the vivid dream she’d had shortly before leaving Vietnam—the dream about a long-haired, bearded man in a white robe who pointed to our family and brought each of us back to life. No one was ever able to explain it to her or help her identify the mysterious figure who had the power to raise the dead. But the first time she walked into the lobby of Grand Avenue Baptist Church, she saw a portrait of Jesus hanging on the wall—the first image of Jesus she had ever seen—and she took one look at it and said, “That was the man in my dream.”
I have asked my mother about that experience many times, and she makes it very clear that the portrait of Jesus did not remind her of the man in her dream—He was the man. For my mother, walking into that church solved a mystery that had puzzled her ever since she had left Vietnam. She felt as if the portrait were saying to her, “I am the one who delivered your family from death. Welcome to America.”
The church completed a spiritual journey for my father too. After six days adrift on the South China Sea and nearly dead from thirst, he had cried out to the Creator God for rain and minutes later found himself frantically bailing water. Onboard Seasweep, when he had heard Stan Mooneyham speak about Jesus, the Creator God was given a name, and my father made a commitment to Him. There were other refugees aboard Seasweep who had made that same commitment, but as soon as they reached Singapore, many of them returned to their former rituals and the worship of their ancestors. My father couldn’t understand how they could so quickly abandon a commitment they had made, a commitment he fully intended to keep. When he walked into Grand Avenue Baptist, that was what he was doing: following through on a commitment he had made to the faithful Creator God.
There was another reason my parents were so adamant about their children attending church: fear. Not fear that God would punish us if we didn’t—that has no place in Christian belief—but fear of all the things that could go wrong for us in America. Fear is one of the most powerful influences for a refugee; it is often the hidden motivation behind obsessive discipline and drive. There are so many things that could go wrong for the refugee, so many mistakes that could be made, so many things to be afraid of—and there is no margin of error. I walked a path two inches wide and eighteen years long, and my parents were determined their children would not step off that path the way other children often did.
I have asked my parents what their image of America was before they came here; their answers seem humorous now, but they were no laughing matter at the time. My father thought all of America was like Las Vegas: morally loose, self-indulgent, and superficial—which is understandable when you consider that many foreigners only know America through television shows such as Baywatch and All-Star Wrestling. My father had been misled by American media too. Back in Vietnam he had seen photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor and assumed they were typical American women.
My mother thought America was all big cities, where everyone smoked and drank and hung out in bars all day. Since she didn’t smoke or drink, she had no idea what she was going to do with her time once she got there. She had no idea what Americans themselves would be like because in Vietnamese comic books Americans were always drawn with long noses and hair like a porcupine’s quills, and they were portrayed as so dimwitted that a Vietnamese child could trick them into doing anything he wanted.
Those were groundless fears, but there were others that were all too real. We constantly heard stories about other refugee families and all the things that went wrong for them: sons who joined gangs or became criminals and went to prison, and daughters who got pregnant and ran off with their boyfriends never to return. Those were not imaginary stories; they were real ones, and my parents constantly related them to us to graphically illustrate the world that awaited us if we ever dared to step off that two-inch-wide path.
One of the values my parents tried hard to instill in us was to never forget where we came from. There is a Vietnamese expression for it: Mất Gốc (pronounced Mutt Goch), which means “to lose root.” Our language, our heritage, our traditions, our ethnicity—it was all part of our root, the centuries-old source material that defined who we really were. Losing root was a risk for every refugee trying to adapt in America, though not every refugee thought it was a bad thing. Some believed their best chance of success in America was to assimilate as quickly and completely as possible—to just erase their past and blend into the American culture. That was certainly the easier way to go. For my family, “keeping root” meant living in two worlds at the same time—learning to be American while at the same time trying to remain Chinese.
I had a Vietnamese friend growing up whose parents decided to take the assimilation route. They changed their son’s Vietnamese birth name to David, and they abandoned their original language completely and spoke only English at home. As a result, David learned English a lot faster than I did, and he was able to blend in better too. I envied David, and I wished that my parents would let me choose a cool American name.
My brothers and sisters wished it even more than I did because their names were a source of difficulty for them all throughout school. Jenny’s birth name was not “Jenny”; it was Yen Nhi, which is pronounced In Nyee. No teacher reading her name from an attendance list ever guessed the correct pronunciation. Yen’s name was originally Yen To, and because she used to go everywhere with her older sister, people used to tease, “Here come Knee and Toe!” Nikki’s birth name was even harder for people to pronounce: it was Nga, which is pronounced Nya; and Bruce was originally Luong, pronounced Loong. Thai and I were the lucky ones because our names were easy for our teachers to figure out, and Anh and Hon, who came after us, were fortunate as well.
Jenny, Bruce, Yen, and Nikki eventually adopted Anglicized versions of their names: Yen Nhi chose the similar-sounding Jenny; Yen To shortened her name to Yen; Luong took the name of his boyhood hero, Bruce Lee, and Nga just picked Nikki because she liked the way it sounded. But none of them changed their names until later on. Jenny and Bruce were in college before they did, and part of the reason was Mất Gốc—their names were part of their root.
Our language was a big part of our root too. David learned English quickly, but in the process he also forgot Vietnamese. In our home we spoke only Cháo zhōu and Vietnamese because my parents knew that our schools would teach us English, and they didn’t want us to lose our native tongues. But I left Vietnam at the age of three and a half, so I had only a rudimentary knowledge of Vietnamese, and I would have lost that language if it were not for the Vietnamese church. Our church service was translated into Vietnamese, but our Sunday school was conducted in English, so every Sunday we were able to practice both languages. My knowledge of Vietnamese is still fairly elementary, but the only reason I can still speak it at all is because of our church.
I envied boys like David at first because I desperately wanted to fit in, but as my brothers and sisters and I got older, we felt sorry for boys like him. Thai even came up with a sympathetic name for Vietnamese kids who could no longer speak Vietnamese: lost gooks. They had lost part of their root, and in the process lost a sense of identity and direction that the church helped people like us retain.
For us, the Vietnamese church in Fort Smith was a community where people with similar problems and needs could come together and help one another; it was a place of learning and spiritual growth; and it was where we learned to serve others and to give back. We were a poor refugee family “fresh off the boat” in America, but we felt blessed to be here and believed we had a responsibility to give back, and the more we gave the more we received. That’s a mistake often made in America: we spend our lives seeking to be served, instead of seeking to serve others, and the more we receive, the less we seem to have.
I walked a path two inches wide and eighteen years long, and I’m grateful the church and my family were there to help me do it. My father had to walk that same path, only his path was a little longer: his journey lasted twenty-three years, and he had to do it all by himself.