MY MOTHER WAS A WOMAN WHO COULD BUTCHER A deer, carve up a pig, and decapitate a chicken with the flick of a knife—but she was afraid of mice. She was in the kitchen one day when she spotted a mouse scurrying across the floor, and she began to scream. That was a sound my mother rarely made. All the children came running to the kitchen to see what was wrong, and when we saw the mouse, some of us began to scream too. A moment later my father calmly walked into the room, looked at everyone screaming, then raised one bare foot and stomped the mouse flat, which made everyone scream even more.
That was my image of my father growing up: strong as steel and tough as leather—considering the things he had experienced in his life, it was understandable that he would appear that way. But the terrible things he experienced growing up had another effect on him, and it was something we had to deal with every day.
Whenever a human being suffers trauma or experiences extreme stress, there are predictable psychological consequences; this is especially true after the trauma of war. The mental and emotional struggle that soldiers often experience in the aftermath of war has been given different names over the years. Centuries ago it was simply called “nostalgia” or “exhaustion,” and during the Civil War, it was given the tender name “soldier’s heart.” In World War I they called it “shell shock,” and in World War II it was known as “battle fatigue.” Today we know the phenomenon by its official name: post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
But in the wake of the Vietnam War, when half a million American soldiers were trying to forget the horrors of war and return to their normal lives, their mental and emotional struggle was called “post-Vietnam syndrome.” It was appropriate that the syndrome was labeled “post-Vietnam” and not “post-combat” because soldiers are not the only ones who struggle after a war. My father never fought in a war, but he grew up surrounded by its terrors: Viet Minh uprisings, Cambodian reprisals, Viet Cong kidnappings and assassinations—even a full-scale invasion and the overthrow of his country. He experienced many of the same horrors that American soldiers did, so it’s no surprise he suffered some of the same aftereffects.
When my brother Thai was a boy, he was taping up posters in our bedroom one day and wanted to place a poster high on the wall near the ceiling. He couldn’t reach that high, and we didn’t have a ladder, so he used the bed like a trampoline to leap as high as he could and try to stick the poster to the wall before he came down again. On his final jump he caught his finger on the sharp metal hook that holds the curtain rod, and it ripped his finger open. He tried wrapping it with every Band-Aid in the house, but the cut was too deep to heal without stitches, and it was impossible to hide. Thai finally had to show the cut to my father, and when my father saw the blood, he became almost hysterical. He flew into a panic and demanded to know how something so terrible could possibly have happened. Judging by my father’s response, you would have thought Thai’s arm had been severed at the shoulder.
My father couldn’t stand the sight of blood, which is not a quality commonly associated with someone strong as steel and tough as leather. It wasn’t because he was weak; it was because he had been constantly exposed to the sight of blood growing up, including the severed head of a Viet Cong that someone had placed in a paper cone and hung by the bridge in Tham Don near one of the rice mills. Whenever my father saw blood, no matter how small the amount, it brought back the memory of all the terrible things he had ever seen.
Of course, my brothers and sisters and I had no way to understand that. We thought our father just had a bad temper, so we did everything we could to avoid making him angry. When I was growing up, I rarely cried because crying would have signaled something was wrong, and that might have set my father off. I feared getting injured, not because of the pain but because my father might find out and get angry. When he got angry, he exploded, and there was no way to talk him out of it—we just ran for our rooms and locked the doors.
It wasn’t just the past that fueled his anger; it was the present too. Each year when he received his thirty-cent raise, he was bitterly reminded of everything he had lost and all the things he would never have again. There was a Vietnamese saying he quoted from time to time: “I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice.” He was a quiet man who didn’t share his emotions; he never once said “I love you” to us kids, and he never apologized because he never admitted he was wrong.
Most of the time, his worries and frustration just made him irritable. My mother once cooked a dish for him that he thought was too salty, but since she had been cooking that dish for years, she disagreed—so my father pasted a big label on her salt shaker that read, THIS IS SALT AND IT IS VERY SALTY. At other times he just blew up, and after it happened my mother would always come into our rooms and quietly try to explain why my father got angry. That was my mother’s role: she was an interpreter, a translator, a mediator between us and our father.
We learned to go to her first whenever there was a problem, and she would help us fix things before our father found out. She had a different style of discipline than her husband. She never shouted or got angry; she just told us stories that always had a moral or lesson attached. There was the story about the Vietnamese girl who ran away from home, got pregnant, and brought shame to her family; and there was the story about the Vietnamese boy who got involved with drugs, dropped out of school, and never amounted to anything. Some stories were tragic and some were inspiring, and she had a way of telling them in a calm and quiet voice that could reduce us to tears.
My father just got angry. If a bill arrived in the mail that he had already paid, he exploded. If any of us got into trouble, he was furious. When anything broke or whenever there was an unexpected expense, it all came out in anger. Once he cooled down, his anger was not only gone but forgotten. He never carried a grudge, and sometimes he couldn’t even remember why he got mad; the event itself was only a trigger. My father was like a geyser that constantly built up pressure until it just had to let off steam. Unfortunately we were often standing near the geyser when it went off.
It was often fear that triggered his anger—fear that something might go wrong. That was understandable, too, considering that unexpected things went terribly wrong throughout his childhood. His house burned down, his father died, and he was left in poverty; he knew that the worst could actually happen, and he was afraid it might happen again. My father’s way of dealing with that fear was to avoid all potential danger and minimize every possible risk. My mother has a driver’s license, but she has never driven a car because my father is afraid that something might happen to her if she does. She could never drive us to school, and a friend or neighbor always had to drive her to the grocery store. My mother is in her seventies now, and she still doesn’t drive.
My father always feared that the worst would happen, and he worried until he knew everything was okay. When any of us traveled, we had to call him as soon as we arrived because he wouldn’t be able to sleep until we did. If we drove somewhere and our car broke down, he would say, “Why did you have to go out at all? If you hadn’t gone out, your car wouldn’t have broken down, and I wouldn’t be so angry.” That was the way he reasoned. If you take no risks, nothing can go wrong. Stay here, sit still, and be safe.
Hypervigilance, controlling behavior, overwhelming feelings, overreacting, fear of change—they are all common symptoms of post-traumatic stress. My father was a Vietnam veteran; though he never served a day in the military, he was a veteran of the conflict nonetheless. One American GI recalled his experience in Vietnam this way: “Fear of the unknown was my biggest fear—the constant worry about what’s around the bend, booby traps, enemy contact or incoming enemy mortar rounds. It seemed to take a lot out of you physically and mentally.” Those were my father’s fears too: the hidden dangers, the concealed enemies, the unexpected threats that could come from anywhere.
Another Vietnam veteran once wrote, “A tree line two hundred yards away across a flat meadow still triggers my PTSD,” and he wrote that forty years after his final combat mission. A simple tree line across a meadow was enough to trigger his overreaction or overwhelming feelings, just as the sight of blood or a potential risk could trigger my father’s.
I have no way to know for certain that my father suffered from actual PTSD. It’s possible he had only a general anxiety disorder or that he had a temperament like Grandmother Chung’s. That’s what some of my siblings say: “He just got it from his mother,” and it’s possible he did. Maybe his anger and fear were genetic, or maybe he became like his mother because they both grew up in the same wartorn nation and shared many of the same traumatic experiences.
My father knew the Chinese proverb, “Life can never give security; it can only promise opportunity,” but he wanted both for his children, and he was constantly torn between the two. He wanted all of us to go to college, but he couldn’t understand why any of us would want to go any farther than the University of Arkansas, just down the road. He wanted us to have every opportunity that he never had, but he was constantly worried that something would go wrong along the way. It must have been a terrible tension for my father to live with—to wish for something that he feared at the same time. For his children to have opportunity, they had to take risks; but when we took risks, it scared him to death.
There is nothing more difficult to understand than someone else’s irrational fear because understanding requires reason, and there is nothing reasonable about the irrational. I was in high school before I realized my father’s behavior was not normal and all fathers did not act the way he did. A part of my life’s journey has been to understand my father, and I think I finally do—at least in part. I’ve learned a lot about his experiences growing up in the Mekong Delta, and I think I understand how painful and terrifying they must have been. But I’m not able to feel them the way he did—and until I can do that, I will never fully understand the power they have over him.
What impresses me about my father is that he did not give in to his fear. He did not let his longing for security deny his children opportunity, and when he saw us take those opportunities, it made his struggle seem worthwhile.
When I was a senior in high school, my father walked out to get the newspaper one morning. He had been working in the factory for a decade by then, and the day before had been a brutal one for him; he had even said to God, “I don’t know how much longer I can take this.” When he opened the paper, he saw a photograph of his own son on the front page, and I was holding a football in one hand and a calculus book in the other. The caption told him that his son had been voted Arkansas male scholar athlete of the year—and my father wept.