THERE WERE TWO HIGH SCHOOLS IN FORT SMITH, Northside and Southside, which were named after the two main regions of the city. Both schools had about the same number of students, but Northside had eight times more African Americans, four times more Hispanics, and three times more Asians than Southside. All eleven Chung children attended Northside High School, and needless to say, we felt much more at home there than we did at our junior high.
In my first year at Northside, I made the varsity football team. I continued to love everything about football: the game itself and the liberating feeling it gave me. I especially enjoyed the respect that my physical size and strength earned me from my classmates. I kept a growth chart, hoping I had inherited my father’s stature. My goal was to grow two inches and gain twenty pounds every year until I reached six foot two and weighed 220 pounds, and for a few years I was actually on track to do it. But it didn’t help to have a five-foot-two mother, and I eventually topped out around five foot eleven and two hundred pounds. That wasn’t very big for a guard and defensive end, especially when you consider that a high school lineman in Arkansas these days often weighs three hundred pounds. I wasn’t the strongest or the fastest in my school, but I was faster than the big kids and bigger than the fast kids, and what I lacked in size and speed, I made up for in aggressiveness.
An Asian who played football—that was a category-breaker for a lot of people. When the football coach first saw me, he wanted me to be a kicker because as everyone knows, all foreigners play soccer and, therefore, can kick. My coach soon discovered I could not kick at all, but I was very good at running into things, which was something I had a lot of experience doing due to the fact that I was legally blind.
In the United States a person is considered legally blind when his best-corrected vision is 20/200 or worse. The prescription 20/200 means that what other people could see from two hundred feet away, I couldn’t see unless it was practically in front of my nose. “Best-corrected” means “with your glasses on”—but when I played football, I couldn’t wear my glasses because they always got dirty and fogged up under my helmet, and my family couldn’t afford contact lenses. Without glasses my vision was 20/200, which meant that on a football field I was as blind as a bat.
Kickoffs instantly vanished, especially at night—and I was on the kickoff team. Sometimes I played defensive end, and on more than one occasion I accidentally tackled the running back carrying the ball—which was the right thing to do, only I thought the other running back had the ball, and I was actually aiming for him. My coach would always shout, “Great tackle, Vinh!” and I would look over at the sidelines and wonder which blur was the coach.
I didn’t even get glasses until I was in sixth grade. Until then the chalkboard was just a green fog, but I assumed it looked the same way to everyone else. At my first eye exam the optometrist said to me, “Son, you’ve been missing out on a lot in life,” and he was right. When I came home with my new glasses, I discovered for the first time that roses have petals and leaves. It was a great relief to finally get glasses, but they didn’t help my social life; I could afford only the cheapest frames, and the glasses I was forced to wear had “Nerd” stamped all over them in several different languages.
But my glasses didn’t really hurt my social life because I didn’t have one—there just wasn’t time. I never had time for a girlfriend. None of my older siblings had boyfriends or girlfriends until they were about to get married. My parents never said I couldn’t have a girlfriend; the idea just seemed impossible. To me, having a girlfriend was as unthinkable as owning a horse: What would I do with one? Where would I put it? How much time would I have to spend taking care of it? There were girls who used to wait for me outside the locker room after football games, but I had no idea why, and I didn’t ask. I heard rumors that there were girls who had a crush on me, but I had no clue what to do about it, so I did nothing.
My plan after graduating was to become a doctor, though to be honest I had very little idea at the time what a doctor really did or what it would take to become one. No one in my family had ever been a doctor, so no one was able to warn me that it would require four years of undergraduate studies, four years of medical school, then three to seven years of residency. I was shocked when I found out that to become a doctor, I would have to go to school until I was thirty. Thirty—surely there was a better way to become a success.
My father didn’t think so. When he was a boy, he dreamed of becoming a doctor, too, though like me, he really didn’t know what being a doctor entailed. In a way it didn’t matter to him because what he really wanted was to be a success, and in Vietnam a doctor was considered to be the epitome of success. So it’s understandable that when my father urged his children to be successful, what he really had in mind was that we would all become doctors.
If you ask my father today what he really wanted for his children, he will say, “I just wanted each of them to be as successful as possible”; but if you ask my brothers and sisters what our father wanted for us, they will tell you, “He wanted each of us to become a doctor.” In a way, both are true.
Jenny was the first to go to college, which was an accomplishment in itself. If my family had remained in Vietnam, my sisters might not have been encouraged to attend college at all. But in America my father wanted all of his children to have a college education and a chance at a high-paying job, which was a very enlightened attitude for a traditional Chinese man such as my father. Jenny had no money to pay for college, and my father couldn’t help much, earning $22,000 a year. But she applied for every grant, loan, and scholarship she could find and was able to enroll at the University of Arkansas in the fall of 1986 to begin her premed studies.
But Jenny put in only one year at Arkansas before moving to Virginia to live with Grandmother Truong, and a year later she was married to a man from my mother’s hometown of Bac Lieu—a match that was assisted by Grandmother Truong.
Bruce was next in line, and my father’s expectations for Bruce were especially high because he was the oldest son. Bruce had always been clever and inventive, but he was only one grade behind Jenny, and he faced many of the same academic challenges that she did. In high school Bruce was a C student, but that did not diminish my father’s hope that he would become a doctor. If he just applied himself more, my father told him, he could still make it happen.
But applying himself was the problem for Bruce. He grew up with a close circle of Vietnamese friends, and they all went off to the University of Arkansas together. There were two things they shared in common: since they all came to America at about the same age, they all had struggled through school, and since school was difficult for them, they all liked to party more than study. Bruce’s grades suffered as a result, and he began to struggle with the demanding premed curriculum. He managed to make it through biology and chemistry, but when it came to organic chemistry, physics, and biochemistry, he hit a wall. He just could not do it, and that was when he knew he would never be a doctor.
At the end of Bruce’s second year, my father called Bruce home. He was furious with Bruce. He thought his firstborn son had wasted an opportunity that he himself had never had, an opportunity that my father made possible for Bruce through years of backbreaking labor and sacrifice. Bruce told our father that he had tried his best, but the goal of becoming a doctor was just beyond his ability; my father, however, couldn’t hear it—he was just too overwhelmed by disappointment, grief, and a tragic feeling of loss.
That might sound like one of my father’s overreactions, but it was the reaction of a refugee. When an average American boy goes off to college and parties a little too much his first semester, it might merit a lecture and a stern warning from his parents—but in our family there was no margin for error. The path we walked was narrow, and when Bruce stepped off that path ever so slightly, my father was devastated.
Bruce didn’t fail college—he only failed to become a doctor, as do thousands of other college students every year who start premed programs and decide later to change majors. But my father’s deepest hopes and dreams were invested in his oldest son, and I think when Bruce dropped out of college, my father felt his own dreams dashed to pieces. He sent Bruce to work at O.K. Foods, which was the worst job any of us could imagine, and Bruce obediently worked there until Chungking Chinese Restaurant opened at the end of the summer.
Yen was next. She was a good student in high school, and she enrolled at the University of Arkansas in the fall of 1988. Her first year went well, but when she heard my father’s idea of opening a family restaurant, she caught the vision. Yen had experience working in restaurants, and she believed that with her help the restaurant just might become a way for everyone in our family to succeed. She made the decision to postpone her education after her freshman year, and for the next five years she lived at home and worked in the restaurant.
Nikki never did like school. She was younger when she arrived in America, so she was able to pick up English much more easily than Jenny, Bruce, or Yen. But Nikki didn’t like to read, and she didn’t like to study—it just didn’t interest her. When she graduated from high school, she didn’t bother to apply to any colleges; she just went to work in the restaurant with the rest of us.
One day Nikki walked into the restaurant with a suitcase. When she set it on the table and opened it, there was a mannequin head inside wearing a wig, and she announced to all of us that she had decided to go to beauty school. We were all shocked at first, but my mother just asked her if she was sure that was really what she wanted to do, and when Nikki said yes, my mother was fine with it. To everyone’s surprise, my father was fine with it too. I’m not sure he ever expected Nikki to become a doctor, and it wasn’t because she lacked intelligence. I think my father knew she just wasn’t interested.
Then came Thai. Thai was an excellent student and graduated fourth in his high school class of 318. Because of his academic success, he qualified for an Arkansas Top Ten Graduates scholarship, and along with his other grants and loans, it covered his tuition, his books, and even his room and board. Thai even had a little money left over, so he sent it home to my mother and father. When Jenny was in college, she did the same thing: she worked at the university library, and at the end of every week she mailed her paycheck home—every penny. Even as college students, everyone contributed to the family.
But Thai continued to be accident-prone, and during his junior year of college, he was involved in a serious car accident that knocked him unconscious and put him in the hospital. He suffered no permanent injuries, but his grades suffered for the rest of the year. He still graduated with honors, but admission to medical school was extremely competitive, and his MCAT scores were not quite high enough to get in. He applied three times and was even wait-listed, but after his third rejection he decided not to try again.
When my father found out, he was crushed—and for the fifth time, because not one of his five older children had succeeded in becoming a doctor. It was hard for Thai to think that he had let my father down because he had come the closest of all of them. I think Thai best illustrates the high expectation of success and zero tolerance for failure that existed in my family. Thai was a boy who arrived in America unable to speak a single word of English, yet he was able to finish fourth in his high school class and graduate with honors from a four-year university. How is it possible that a performance like that could be considered failure? Like his brother Bruce, Thai didn’t fail—he only failed to become a doctor.
I come from a family of failures. While working in Virginia and raising a family, Jenny managed to go back to college and finish an associate degree in business. While working full-time at the restaurant, all Bruce did was take courses in his spare time until he had an undergraduate degree in cytotechnology and a master’s degree in science management. Yen spent years juggling work and part-time classes but stopped with only a four-year degree in nuclear medicine technology. Poor Nikki worked at the restaurant until it closed, then worked part-time and put herself through college to only get a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. And Thai was a failure too; he graduated with honors in biology and was willing to settle for a master’s in information systems.
My five older siblings have five undergraduate degrees and two master’s degrees among them. That’s the kind of failure that most parents dream of for their children. If you ask my father today if he is disappointed in any of his children in any way, he will tell you, “Absolutely not!” and he means it. He is extremely proud of everything his children have accomplished, from Jenny right on down to Du. All he ever wanted was the very best for each of us, but when we were growing up, his passion for us to succeed was compounded by his fear that we might fail, and that placed a burden on us that was sometimes difficult to bear.
When Thai decided not to apply for medical school again, my father turned to me. I was next in line to become a doctor, and I was still on track to fulfill his wishes. I had the grades, I had the determination, and I had a plan for my future: I would enroll at the University of Arkansas just as my brothers and sisters had, I would do whatever people do to become a doctor, and then I would return to Fort Smith to live out my life as a very big fish in a very small pond. It sounded good to me, and I couldn’t imagine how a plan like that could possibly be improved.
I had a plan, but I had no vision. I didn’t even know what vision was—but I was about to meet a girl who had enough vision for both of us.