DURING MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL CAREER, my father attended only one of my games, and I didn’t know he was there. It was the biggest game of my senior year, against our perennial rivals, Southside High. The bleachers were packed, and the band was playing as loud as they could to be heard over the crowd—the players could barely hear each other in the huddle. We lost that game in the final sixty seconds, and as I trudged back to the locker room with my head hanging low, I heard my father’s voice calling my name. I looked up at the bleachers, but my vision was so poor I couldn’t see him—he just kept calling my name from the crowd.
That was probably the first football game my father had ever seen, and I doubt he knew what was going on. But he came, and he cheered for me though I never saw him.
I think that football game was a symbol of my entire childhood. Some of my teammates that I bummed rides with spent entire games sitting on the bench, yet their fathers never missed a game. But I knew my family was different. I didn’t expect my father to attend football games, PTA meetings, or awards ceremonies because I knew he was always working, and I knew he was working for our family. My father made it possible for me to accomplish a lot of things, but he usually wasn’t there to see it happen—not because he didn’t want to be there but because he couldn’t.
I graduated from high school as valedictorian, but my parents were not there to see it. My mother’s mother, Grandmother Truong, died from a massive stroke just prior to my graduation, and my parents had to miss my graduation ceremony to attend her funeral in Washington, DC. Grandmother Truong was seventy-two when she passed away, and my mother inherited some of her genes. During my sophomore year at Harvard, she suffered the first of a series of ministrokes that temporarily took away her ability to speak. She recovered, but each stroke seemed to take a little more out of her and leave her with less energy. When I first left for college, my mother was the five-foot-two spitfire I had always known, balancing work in the restaurant, cooking for the family, and caring for five-year-old Du. But during my college years, I didn’t see her for months at a time, and each time I came home for Christmas break, she seemed to be moving a little slower.
My mother was ill again when I graduated from Harvard, and since my father needed to be with her, my parents missed that event too. Graduating from Harvard wasn’t a big deal to me, in a way, because I knew I was bound for medical school, and my undergraduate degree was just a stop along the way. But my graduation from Harvard was a very big deal to my father. When I was first deciding what college to attend, I wrote this in a letter to Leisle:
Dear Leisle,
My dad wants me to go to Harvard. Cool, huh? I almost didn’t apply to Harvard. I’m so glad I did. My dad heard that I got interviewed for Harvard and looked up “Harvard” in the encyclopedia and in his Chinese dictionary. He was really impressed. He told me that he heard of Harvard when he was about nine years old in Vietnam! Yes, he’s really impressed. He read about it in the encyclopedia. Now, he knows more about its history than I do.
When my father was a boy back in Vietnam, he saw a group of Chinese men reading newspapers one day, and one of the papers was called Mĕi Guó. Mĕi is the Mandarin word for “beautiful,” and guó means “country”—when you put the two words together they mean “America.” My father remembers reading that newspaper and seeing the name Hā fó dà xué, which in Mandarin means “Harvard University.” For some reason that name stuck in his mind, and when I mentioned Harvard almost fifty years later, it triggered a very old memory. For my father, my graduation from Harvard was more than the completion of a four-year degree; it was the fulfillment of a fifty-year-old prophecy.
After my first year of medical school, I received terrible news: my mother had suffered a major hemorrhagic stroke while she was visiting Jenny in Virginia. She had just finished delivering a testimony at a Vietnamese church, and the moment she sat down, she collapsed and had to be rushed to a nearby hospital. Neurosurgery was necessary to stop the bleeding, and afterward she lapsed into a coma that lasted two days before she finally began to regain consciousness. Her recovery from that stroke was painfully slow; she spent almost a month in the hospital, followed by an extended stay with Jenny until she was strong enough to return to Arkansas.
Jenny called me and told me the terrible news, and when I heard, I was afraid I might never have the chance to speak to my mother again. But my classes had ended, and I was free for the summer, so I could stay with her for two or three weeks while she began the long process of rehab. My family took turns spending the night with her in the hospital, and as I watched her lying motionless on the bed while each of us rotated in and out of the room, it made me realize again that this precious little woman had always been the sun that our planets revolved around.
My father realized it too. He was beside himself at the thought that he might lose his wife, and he kept berating himself for every selfish or thoughtless thing he had ever done to her, despite the fact that all those things had been “dropped in the ocean” long ago. I think that after years of struggling together, he could not imagine his life without her. In Vietnamese there is an expression, nhà tôi (pronounced nya thoy), which literally means “my house,” but it can also mean “my spouse.” There is a profound truth behind that double entendre that my father understood: after years of living together, his wife had become more than a marriage partner—she was his home.
Though my mother recovered remarkably well, when it came time for me to graduate from Harvard Medical School, she was still too weak to travel. The twenty-five-hour drive from Fort Smith to Cambridge was out of the question, and for some reason flying drained her of energy and left her feeling confused for days, so my father was the only one able to attend the ceremony.
Two years prior to my medical school graduation, Leisle decided to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School, and we both completed our degrees and received our diplomas on the same day. On our graduation day more than fifteen thousand students gathered in Harvard Yard for an opening ceremony, but Leisle and I both had to miss it. It was a wet, rainy morning. Leisle was three months pregnant, and her parents insisted that a pregnant woman should not sit in the rain. As always, Leisle honored her parents’ wishes, and since she didn’t attend the ceremony, I didn’t either.
By afternoon the weather had cleared for our individual school graduations. The business school and medical school ceremonies were scheduled just minutes apart, so we had to split up to cover both of them. Leisle and her parents headed over to the business school to pick up her diploma, and as soon as her ceremony ended, they rushed over to the medical school to try to catch the end of mine.
My graduation ceremony was uneventful. Medical students tend to be a bit more subdued than the average undergraduate, so when the diplomas were handed out, no one performed an embarrassing display of enthusiasm or disrobed and streaked across campus. The ceremony was held under a tent, and the graduates sat quietly in long rows and waited for their names to be called. The highlight for me was hearing my professional title used for the first time—no longer just Vinh Chung but Dr. Vinh Chung. After receiving our diplomas and handshakes, we all returned to our seats and pretended to pay attention to a congratulatory speech delivered by someone we didn’t recognize. At the end of the ceremony, we were officially pronounced doctors, and Leisle and her parents joined the other grateful families in an enthusiastic standing ovation.
When the ceremony was over, an outdoor reception for the graduates and their families was held on the medical school quad, a beautiful grassy area surrounded by three magnificent buildings with marble facades and Roman columns. We decided to take a photograph on the steps of one of those buildings, and as I stood there in my doctor’s cap and gown, proudly displaying my medical school diploma for Leisle’s camera, I noticed my father standing in the background and watching with satisfaction while his son had his picture taken.
I had to work long and hard to get to that day, but my journey had been nowhere near as long and hard as my father’s. As a boy I had to struggle every day against the awkwardness and confusion of an unfamiliar culture and the isolation and feeling of inferiority caused by a language I couldn’t speak—but I never had to fear the Imperial Army of Japan or live under the rule of the colonialist French or dodge the machetes of the Cambodians and Viet Minh or hope that a Viet Cong assassin did not have a rifle trained on my back.
I had to struggle with hunger because I hurried off to school without eating breakfast, but I never had to wonder where my next meal was coming from—not even once.
I had to suffer the heat and humidity of a restaurant kitchen owned by my own family, but I never had to work the dirt of a tenacre farm, where I had been banished by my own government.
I had to spend long, boring hours studying to get into the college of my choice, but I didn’t have to spend long, boring years working in a factory because I had no choice.
As I looked at my father, my mind went back to that high school football game against Southside, when he was sitting in the stands. He came to the game though I never saw him; I learned later that he had been there watching and cheering for me all the time. That was what he had been doing for me all my life: sitting in the stands because he couldn’t play the game himself, cheering me on while no one cheered for him, then heading back to work after everyone else went home.
I wore a doctor’s cap and gown and paraded across a stage to receive a gold-embossed diploma while my father’s only reward was a sense of personal satisfaction. He was the one who had made it all possible for me. I was the one who should be cheering for him.
I called my father over.
I pulled off my gown and put it over him, set my cap on his head, and handed him my Harvard Medical School diploma.
He looked around nervously. “Are you sure it’s okay? Will we get in trouble?”
“Sure, it’s okay,” I told him. “I rented this gown, and we don’t have to return it for a few more hours.”
My father looked down at himself and grinned. The look of sheer delight on his face was something I had never seen before, and I knew that I wasn’t just seeing my father in a costume. I was seeing the man he would have become if only his life had gone differently. It was my graduation gown, but it fit him too.
I put my arm around him and said to Leisle, “Now take the picture.”
Leisle’s mother later made the comment, “It was a long journey and well deserved.”
And she was right.