MY FATHER’S MOTHER WAS THE MOST FORMIDABLE woman I have ever known. It’s almost impossible to describe Grandmother Chung in a way that is both accurate and believable. In my eyes the woman was taller than bamboo, tougher than a water buffalo, and shrewder than a mongoose.
An Kim Trinh was larger-than-life. At almost six feet in height, she towered half a foot over most Asian men and a full foot above most of their diminutive wives. She was broad shouldered and stocky in build and walked with such fearless confidence that people stepped off the sidewalk to let her pass. She could wield a machete like a Viet Cong regular and had a temper like a Laotian land mine, a woman whose angry glare could make my oldest brother wet his pants. You could love her, you could hate her, but no one could ever ignore her—she made sure of that. Grandmother Chung was the first of the three extraordinary women who would shape my life and alter my destiny. I loved her, I feared her, and I count myself fortunate that some part of her still lives in me.
Grandmother Chung was born just after the turn of the century to a Chinese family in the rural Mekong Delta. She married my grandfather in her early twenties, and together they set about building a business and raising a family. Unfortunately for them, they were doing it at a time when the Vietnamese, Cambodians, communists, French colonialists, and Japanese were warring all around them.
Three times my grandfather’s business was completely destroyed, forcing him to begin again, and each crushing setback robbed a little more of his soul until, after his brothers died, he finally succumbed to alcohol and despair at age forty-eight. I have no way to comprehend the pressures my grandfather was forced to endure; what I do know is that the same pressure that can crush coal into dust can also turn carbon into diamond, and the same setbacks and disappointments that drove my grandfather to despair somehow only made my grandmother more determined. Tough times produce tough people, and my grandmother was the toughest of them all.
Grandmother Chung was widowed in the worst of times. The year was 1949. Vietnam, like most of Asia, was still struggling to recover from the ravages of a global war. In Vietnam entire industries had been destroyed, the few paved roads were left pockmarked by mortar shells and bomb craters, and rail lines were turned into little more than twisted knots of rusted steel. In the north almost two million Vietnamese died of starvation, when both the Japanese and the French made the monstrous decision to stockpile immense quantities of rice to burn in place of oil.
The economy of Vietnam was in ruins. No one trusted the currency because no one could be certain who would rule Vietnam next. Why trade in piastres if the French were about to depart? And why exchange piastres for the Vietnamese dong when the French might very well remain? And if the Viet Minh succeeded in their desire to throw everyone out—then what would happen? Commerce came to a standstill, food was scarce, and death was everywhere.
That was the world in which my grandmother found herself solely responsible for the safety and survival of six children ranging in age from seven to nineteen.
With all those hungry mouths to feed, her first priority was food, but she knew that scrounging for crumbs today would not provide tomorrow’s dinner; what she needed was a business—something that could grow, something that could put food on the table today and provide for tomorrow as well. But what type of business was open to a woman like her? And how could she start a business without skills, equipment, or capital?
The answer was rice.
One thing the Mekong Delta has always had in abundance is rice, and rice is the staple diet of all Asian countries. Everyone needed rice, my grandmother knew, so she began to scavenge handfuls of raw rice wherever she could find them and mill them by hand. Hand-milling is an ancient process that is still employed in underdeveloped areas of the world; it involves pounding the rice in an improvised mortar and pestle until the inedible outer husk and bran are removed. The process is labor-intensive but free, which made it a perfect fit for the unskilled Chung family.
When the first few handfuls of rice were ready, the three oldest children sold them on the streets of Soc Trang. My grandmother used the money to buy more raw rice, set some of it aside, and sold the rest. She repeated this process again and again until she had finally collected enough raw rice to fill twenty sacks, a substantial enough quantity to allow her to approach a commercial rice mill and pay to have the rice milled by machine.
That was how the family business grew: handful by handful, sack by sack, year by year, until it became one of the largest businesses in the entire Mekong Delta—a rice-milling empire worth millions in today’s dollars. It was a genuine rags-to-riches story, made even more impressive by the fact that it was accomplished by a woman with no financial resources and little formal schooling.
Education was never an option for my grandmother; in Vietnam girls rarely had the chance to attend school beyond an elementary level. Daughters were given a basic education and training in the domestic arts they would need to run a household one day. But building a business empire required more than knowledge of domestic arts, and Grandmother Chung was left to accomplish the task with only her native intelligence and fearless determination. Fortunately for my family, she had plenty of both.
There was a darker reason to limit a girl’s education in Vietnam—a timeworn Asian proverb that said, “A woman who cannot write is a woman of virtue.” According to the proverb, a girl who was taught to write would become an unfaithful wife who wrote to other men while a woman who couldn’t write would have no choice but to remain faithful and virtuous.
There was no tax-supported public school system in Vietnam, so education had to be funded privately. If you wanted your son to be educated, you essentially found yourself a teacher and hired him to teach. But in the Mekong Delta the uncertain economy and constant threat of violence made prosperity fleeting and education a stop-and-go process. Often a family could afford to send only one son to school at a time, in most cases the oldest first. When my family lived in Bac Lieu and my grandfather’s business was still flourishing, my father’s older brother started school. My uncle was an excellent student and was known for his beautiful penmanship, which to the Chinese is an indication of culture and intelligence. But when the family moved to Soc Trang and the business began to decline, my uncle’s schooling ended. His education stopped at an elementary level, and he never had the chance to resume.
Because my uncle was the oldest and strongest, he was most needed to help with the growing family business, and that gave my father the chance to begin his own education. My father loved school and dreamed of becoming a doctor one day. He was especially adept at languages and became proficient at several, including Vietnamese, Cambodian, Cháo zhōu (pronounced chow-joe), and several other Chinese dialects.
The year 1954 was pivotal for my family and for Vietnam as a nation. That was the year the Viet Minh finally defeated the French, and Vietnam’s hundred-year colonial era came to an end. It was also the year the United States first took an active interest in Vietnam. Fearing that all of Southeast Asia was about to turn communist, the United States backed a plan at a Geneva peace conference that split Vietnam into two separate nations, with a communist government in the north and a loosely democratic government in the south. No one could foresee it at the time, but that event made the Vietnam War inevitable.
When the nation split in two, an enormous migration took place in both directions at once. A million souls fled from north to south: Catholics, Buddhists, government workers, intellectuals—anyone who hated the communist land reforms or feared reprisals by the new government. About one hundred thousand Viet Minh activists migrated in the opposite direction to join their communist colleagues in the north, though many Viet Minh remained in their native villages in the south.
The migration put an end to open conflict and ushered in a brief era of peace and prosperity. That was the pivotal event for my family—a peaceful environment and stable economy that allowed my grandmother’s rice-milling business to begin to grow exponentially. The business was given an official name: Hoà Hiệp Lợi.
Or in English: Peace, Unity, Profit.
For my father, the name could not have been more appropriate. For seventeen years he had loathed the constant violence and the poverty it spawned. He longed for peace and the unity of the many ethnic groups that shared the Mekong Delta—and five years of hunger and deprivation had given him a desire for profit too. At last he had the peaceful world he had always hoped for.
It didn’t last.
Within two years the South Vietnamese government launched a campaign to root out and destroy the remaining Viet Minh in the south. To carry out that campaign, they needed soldiers, and in the war-weary south the only way to get them was to draft them. My father was at the perfect age for conscription, and the possibility of military service terrified him. He was a peaceful man who had always despised violence, and he was about to be forced to become part of it. And so, just a few years before American conscientious objectors began to head to Canada, my father fled to Cambodia.
It was my grandmother who gave the final order for my father to go. Her sons were the backbone of her growing business empire, and she was not about to let the political interests of the South Vietnamese government take precedence over her corporate plans. For my father, dodging military service was a moral and ethical decision; for my grandmother, it was just good business.
My father spent the next two years in lonely exile in Cambodia; but by 1960, the family business was growing by leaps and bounds, and my grandmother sent for her son to return home. Peace, Unity, Profit was about to experience explosive growth and undreamt-of success under the iron rule of my grandmother and the tireless efforts of her two obedient sons. But two events that year would alter the course of my father’s life forever. In the north Ho Chi Minh announced the establishment of the National Liberation Front with the expressed purpose of “liberating” the people of South Vietnam and reuniting the two countries. And in the south US advisers and journalists came up with a nasty pejorative to describe those remaining Viet Minh that the government just could not seem to eliminate.
Viet Cong.