AFTER TWO YEARS AT ALLIED GARDENS, IT BECAME obvious my family could no longer squeeze two adults and eight growing children into an 1,100-square-foot apartment, so my father went searching for an affordable house in an area east of Fort Smith, called Barling. In the summer of 1982, we became genuine American homeowners for the first time.
Barling was the place to go for affordable housing because it was a low-income, high-unemployment area with housing values significantly lower than the state average. It was a working-class town with neighborhoods interspersed with run-down trailer parks, where a home security system meant a rottweiler without a leash. The houses were nothing to look at; most of them needed paint or repair, and some of them had broken-down cars rusting on cinder blocks in weed-infested yards. But the houses were definitely inexpensive, and that was the selling point for a family like mine.
We purchased a three-bedroom house with one and a half baths and a single-car garage, which we walled off to add an additional room. Since Bruce was the oldest boy, he claimed the garage for himself, and since he was also the biggest, he got the privilege of sleeping on a bed all by himself. The other four brothers had to share a bedroom with a single bunk bed; two of us slept together on the top, and the other two on the bottom. There were mattresses on the bunk bed, but sheets were optional, and most of the time we didn’t bother. There were no assigned places for sleeping. The first one to get into bed got his choice of locations, and when the last space available required climbing over someone on the top bunk, it was usually easier to just sleep on the floor. The sleeping arrangement was intimate, to say the least; when one of us wet the bed, two of us had to change.
The girls all shared a bedroom, too, but their sleeping arrangements were based on seniority. Number-one-daughter Jenny got a twin bed all to herself while her sisters had to share a bunk bed. Number-two-daughter Yen claimed the convenient bottom bunk, and number-three-daughter Nikki was left with the top.
My parents had a bedroom all to themselves, but with eight children and only one and a half baths, they had to share the only shower with the rest of us, and that was the worst thing about the house. Getting ready for church every Sunday taught us the meaning of eternity because my sisters barricaded themselves in the bathroom for hours, and it drove the brothers crazy. The boys required less privacy; when it was our turn in the bathroom, we left the door unlocked and rotated in and out as needed. While one of us was in the shower, scrubbing, the next in line was taking off his clothes and trying not to stumble over the brother sitting on the toilet while he yelled to the brother in the shower to leave some hot water for him. I never knew what hot water felt like until I went to college.
Living in a house was more expensive than living in an apartment, and we had to look for ways to save money. My father loved to find a bargain; he read the Southwest Times Record from masthead to classified ads and clipped every money-saving coupon he could find. His favorite place to shop was the new Walmart because they promised to match anyone’s prices—but they sometimes set a percustomer limit on our most-needed items, such as toilet paper. To circumvent that rule, my father used to take us to Walmart with him and hand each of us a coupon with instructions to check out at different registers. Somehow I doubt that anyone was fooled when eight Asian children all bought toilet paper at exactly the same time.
My mother had spent her entire life learning how to make ends meet, and those lessons came in handy in Barling. She loved to barter, and she drove a hard bargain. She was different from my father in that respect; my father loved to find a bargain, but he hated to negotiate because it embarrassed him. My mother was never embarrassed to haggle, and she didn’t mind doing it in broken English or just by waving a coupon in someone’s face and pointing—and she usually got what she wanted.
She planted flower and vegetable gardens, but instead of having nice brick borders, she used random pieces of scrap wood that my brothers and I scavenged around town. Sometimes she would be working in the backyard and would call to us, “I need another piece of wood! Go find one for me!” and off we would go. She used the leftover wood to build things for the house; once she built a box to put the trash bag in so the dogs would not get into it before the garbage man could pick it up. She nailed the box together with rusty nails and covered the top with a piece of screen wire from an old door. It didn’t win any prizes for original design, but it did the job.
She sewed clothing for us out of old curtains, like Maria in The Sound of Music. She could convert any piece of clothing into something we needed; she used to get hand-me-down bell-bottoms from Uncle Lam in Virginia and magically turn them into straight-cut jeans. Everything got passed down; we have photos of five different brothers wearing the same shirt.
Eight children required a lot of clothing, and that meant a lot of laundry. We no longer had to go to the Laundromat as we did at Allied Gardens because in Barling we had our very own washer and dryer. My brother Thai and I took turns doing laundry. We each kept track of how many loads we did, and it became a form of exchange for us: “I did three loads of laundry, and you did only two. You owe me a load.” We kept careful accounting, and we were expected to pay our debts. I once went to Virginia with my mother to visit her brother and sisters, and when I returned, Thai told me, “You owe me sixty-five loads of laundry.”
Eight children required a lot of food, too, and my mother could turn anything into a meal. Squirrels, eels, even the leg of a black bear once—you name it; she could butcher it and cook it. One time we were given an entire deer, and when my brothers and I dragged it up onto the deck for her, she gutted it and skinned it like an experienced hunter. Nikki hated it because the deer reminded her of Bambi, so in an act of brotherly compassion, Bruce and Thai put the deer’s head in the freezer for the next time she opened it.
Every day my brothers and sisters and I came home from school, dropped off our books, and ran around the neighborhood until dinnertime. Our favorite thing to play with was our bicycle. It was a thing of beauty: a black BMX dirt bike with mushroom grips and bear-claw pedals. We found it on sale at Walmart for $85, which was an unthinkable amount for us, but my father agreed that if my brothers and I would earn $60, he would pay the rest. It took months for us to save up the money, and when we finally brought it home and assembled it, we couldn’t wait to ride it. We lined up and took turns riding once around the block, but we soon got tired of waiting and decided that the four of us could all ride it at the same time. Anh sat on the handlebars, Hon straddled the bar behind him, I took the seat and pedaled, and Thai held on to the seat behind me with his feet on the rear axle posts and the tire spinning between his legs. Space was limited, so we eliminated any unnecessary items like helmets and took off around the neighborhood.
I was probably in the safest position because I had an actual seat and two five-year-old air bags to protect me—but Thai was precariously balanced on those axle posts. One time we got going fast and went over a bump; Thai’s feet slipped off, and he came down, straddling that spinning tire. There was nothing he could do but hold on while his thighs gripped the tire like human brake pads and brought us to a gradual stop. Thai saved the day, but his thighs paid the price; to this day he still has scars from that event.
But Thai was always accident-prone, so no one was surprised when we were riding our bike one day and Thai fell off and hurt himself. Grandmother Truong was visiting from Virginia at the time and saw what happened. Even though Thai got up and dusted himself off, my grandmother was afraid that her grandson might have suffered invisible internal injuries. Fortunately for Thai, Grandmother Truong was a practitioner of Chinese folk medicine and knew exactly what to do: she mixed ginseng in an herbal tea and then added a powerful secret ingredient—the urine of the family’s youngest child. In our case that was Hon, who dutifully delivered a dose of secret ingredient, and when Grandmother Truong mixed it into the tea, she made Thai drink it down.
Thai was instantly cured of his nonexistent ailment, which not only convinced my mother that the remedy worked, but that Hon himself had mystical healing powers. To this day, if my family is in a restaurant and someone begins to choke, my mother will turn to Hon and say, “Go over and see what you can do for him.” It has to be Hon because only Hon has healing powers, and only he can produce the secret ingredient.
A year after we moved to Barling, my mother received some totally unexpected news: she was pregnant again, despite her “thin blood” that was supposed to make it impossible. And she was not only pregnant; she was pregnant with twins, which seemed like a tender mercy after her tragic miscarriage on the beaches of Malaysia. It would be her second set of twins, and if not for the brutal conditions in Malaysia, it might have been her third.
My mother knew that adding two more children to our family would really stretch the household budget thin, so after my twin brothers Bao (pronounced Bow) and Toan (pronounced Twon) were born, she decided to earn some extra money by taking a job. She went to work for O.K. Foods, a poultry processing plant in Fort Smith, but she left after three months because they kept the factory so cold that her hands kept going numb.
Next she tried working as a seamstress in a clothing factory, where she sewed the same things over and over again for just a few cents per finished item. But she began to get so tired that she could barely keep her eyes open at the sewing machine, and she couldn’t understand what was wrong with her.
She was pregnant again.
My mother was almost forty-six at the time, and she felt a little embarrassed to be bearing another child at that age, but she considered each child to be a gift from God. My father loved the idea because children were a form of wealth to him. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that says, “Who has children cannot long remain poor; who has none cannot long remain rich,” and my father believed that. Other Vietnamese men used to tease him about the size of our family; they looked at our tiny house and asked, “How can you all fit in there?” or “How can you even breathe?” But later on those same men admitted to him, “I wish I had as many children as you do.”
On Halloween in 1988, my mother gave birth to her eleventh and final child, my brother Du—which, believe it or not, is pronounced You. At that point working outside the home was no longer realistic, and she decided it was time to retire from the public workforce to enjoy a leisurely life at home—which meant figuring out how to stretch her husband’s salary to feed, clothe, and care for eleven children ranging in age from twenty-one years down to a newborn.
“Who has children cannot long remain poor,” the proverb says, but my family managed for quite a while.