war stories, or your 1980s,

episode I

You trace the roots of your vanity and weakness, your amusement at visiting the halls of power and your curiosity about them, your contradictory Groucho and Karl Marxisms, your existence as a man of two faces who might be a spy, a sleeper, a spook, to your refugee origins and coming-of-age in the era of Ronald Reagan, himself a man of two faces, perhaps the ultimate late twentieth-century embodiment of both the Quiet American and the Ugly American. B-list actor and president of AMERICATM from 1980 to 1988, the Republican Saint and the costar of Bedtime for Bonzo, along with a chimpanzee, defines your childhood and adolescence, the years when you suffer the requisite emotional damage necessary to becoming a writer. Or at least your kind of writer.

Your 1980s overlap with your San José, where you live from 1978 to 1988, arriving three years after the end of Saint Ronald’s governorship of California, the largest state of the fifty United States if one does not count the invisible fifty-first: the state of Denial. You spend your adult life in greater Los Angeles, but San José remains your emotionally radioactive core, inseparable from Ba Má. This decade is the second-longest period of her American years when your mother is completely herself. In your 1980s, Ba Má loom over you, always immense, emerged from nowhere, natural outcroppings of towering strength. The idea that Ba Má might once have been children or weak or ill hardly ever occurs to you, except when your mother tells you about the famine.

It might be the morning or the afternoon or the early evening. Daylight shines through the living room window and its red velour curtains. Ba Má work constantly, but there is time for moments like this, the two of you sitting together on the red velour sofa that looks like it belongs in the brothel of one of the westerns always being shown on TV, where the cancan girls wear lace chokers around their necks and hike up their skirts and pinafores to reveal hose held up by garters. Perhaps there were not too many moments like this, which is why you can remember this time when you are perhaps ten or eleven, plucking gray hairs from her head. Má has invited you to do this, offering a nickel a strand. She has been using a mirror to try to see the top of her head, and perhaps she really does need your help. But perhaps she just wants to spend some time with you. Perhaps she knows you will soon enter the Age of Awkwardness, when you are neither a little boy nor a young man. For now, still a little boy, you are attached to Má, relishing the occasions she scratches your back with her long nails in long, luxurious strokes. She is not yet, for you, a completely separate person but someone with whom you are still unselfconscious.

The house is even quieter than usual since your brother left for college. Má gives you a pair of tweezers from the toolbox of her makeup kit, an off-white case a little larger than a shoebox and as sturdy as a suitcase. Its lid has metal latches and, when snapped open, reveals an array of mysterious powders, jars, and devices that hold no interest for you. You examine the part in your mother’s long wavy hair. A few silver threads weave through the black layers. It does not occur to you that one day you, too, will have gray hairs. The tweezers are awkward in your right hand, and you use your left to press down around a silver strand, pursing your lips as you attempt to pinch the guilty hair with the tips of the tweezers. The root clings to the scalp, and you are afraid of hurting Má, but with one quick tug the hair comes out cleanly and your imagination provides a satisfying pop of sound. Má stays silent as you contemplate the strand in the light with its tiny bulge of a root at the bottom.

I saw a child dead on a doorstep, Má says.

Perhaps she says this not after the first hair but after the third or fourth. But she says it. The remark comes from nowhere, as you would never initiate a conversation about dead children, and you are not empathetic enough to ask your mother about her childhood. Your range of conversational topics with Má, as with Ba, focuses on your education, diet, religious beliefs, and behavior. Your few hundred words of Vietnamese are not enough for you to attempt to understand Ba Má.

So many people died, she says,

or you think you remember

her saying. Of hunger.

If you have plucked a hair out of her, she has sown a seed in you. Not understanding what she is talking about, you categorize it under the list of Horrifying Things That Could Have Happened to You If You Had Never Left Việt Nam, Including Persecution, Discrimination, Death by Land Mine in Cambodia, General Despair, and, Now, Starvation.

When Má saw this starved child, Má could not have been more than seven or eight years old. Younger than you as you pluck her hairs, although this will not occur to you until many years later. As you extract those hairs, you are unable to imagine that Má was once a child like you.

Many years later, as you seek to understand who you are and where you come from, you read about the great famine that killed one to two million people in the north120 in the waning years of World War II, induced by Japanese occupiers and facilitated by French colonizers. The total population of the north was a little over seven million.121

One out of seven dead is equal to two children in your son’s class, dead. Eight of your department colleagues, dead. Three thousand undergraduates at your university, dead.

You don’t know what brought this memory on, whether she searched for it or whether it sought her. Put the tweezers down. Embrace her, the way your nine-year-old son does, spontaneously, when he asks you about Má and sees you affected by her death. But you do not. Your family does not embrace.

As is so often the case, you

say nothing and keep pursuing

the gray hairs. A few more and you

can buy the next issue of Spider-Man.

Does your house feel eerie because of these occasional stories that leak out of Má—you do not recall Ba ever telling such stories—or because you fear the dark? So many things must frighten your parents, perhaps even haunt them, but Ba Má never seem intimidated. Only now do you understand that this is how they love you, by protecting you, by never letting you see them afraid.

Decades later Ba tells you that when he saw the location for the future SàiGòn Mới, occupied by a jeans store, he wanted it. With less than fluent English, he asked the proprietor who owned the building, called the owner, persuaded him to sell it, then applied for a loan.

Saint Ronald and the Republican Party would have

loved Ba Má, although not enough to invite

them to their clubs. That privilege is

saved for you.

Ba Má never take welfare, never need food stamps, even if they needed the entire U.S. government to rescue them from communism, not only in 1975 but in 1954, when the U.S. Navy boat-lifts them to the south in Operation Passage to Freedom. Perhaps the refugees believe these boats will carry them into the future, but perhaps some can also foretell that they, like these vessels, will be borne back ceaselessly into the past.

You first read about the boat lift in Deliver Us from Evil, the bestselling memoir of one Tom Dooley, so popular that it finds its way to your sixth grade classroom’s bookshelves. Dooley is now mostly forgotten, but in the 1950s he was an American hero, a navy captain, youthful doctor, and patriotic Catholic who went to Indochina and helped the suffering Indochinese, including the

wretched, sick, and horribly maimed122

Vietnamese refugees fleeing south from the northern

Communist hellhole.

You imagine Dooley standing on a high peak, gazing

over the coastline and a flotilla of navy ships, as he says

All in Viet Nam dream123 and strive for freedom . . . the

people who toil in the rice fields with backs bent double and

faces turned to the brackish mud, the naked children playing

in the monsoon, the little fruit sellers in the arroyos of the

markets and the poor with amputated arm or hand

outstretched. They have one dream:

Freedom.

Freedom! Does any other word short-circuit the American brain more than this one, besides, perhaps, “Supersized”? Americans love everything Supersized, including their God, their Dollar, their vistas, their freeways, their houses, their cars, their dreams, their guns, their sexual organs, their amnesia, their innocence, and their mythology of themselves. Whatever their political disagreements, both Ugly and Quiet Americans agree that what the world needs is Supersized Freedom (with a side of military weaponry, since AMERICATM is the planet’s biggest arms seller).124

And what kind of American is Tom Dooley? An anti-communist, freedom-loving icon to much of the American general public, and a publicity-hungry, closeted gay man whom the U.S. Navy blackmails into encouraging American involvement in Indochina. His stories of desperate Indochinese and atrocity-committing communists fit the Cold War narrative of AMERICATM, with Ba Má cast as extras in the Greatest Story Ever Told: How the USA Can Deliver the Entire World to the Promised Land.

The rescue of Ba Má, twice, is reparations of a kind for AMERICATM instigating a war that did not need to happen, given that an ostensibly communist Viêt Nam today is on very good terms with the United States. But anti-communism is an American religion, and most Vietnamese refugees, including Ba Má, are devout followers. Anti-communists see the world as anti- and pro-communist, good and evil. This worldview, with no middle ground, no demilitarized zone, fits perfectly with devout Catholicism and its vision of Heaven and Hellholes.

Somehow, in your 1980s, you develop a resistance to this worldview, which later grows into an inherent skepticism of all orthodoxies. When, in the sixth grade, Saint Patrick tells all its students of non-American origins to create a flag to honor their country, you open the World Book Encyclopedia and see that the flag of Việt Nam is a red field with a yellow star. At home, you meticulously draw the star on the white poster board you have been given and then color the poster board red and the star yellow. Ba Má are too preoccupied to ask you about this or any other homework, and you hardly talk to them, thankfully so in this case, for the next day you discover that you are none too smart. A Vietnamese student in another grade understood the assignment. Her flag is chosen to represent your homeland: a yellow field with three red stripes, the banner of the Republic of Việt Nam, the anti-communist country where she and you were born and that no longer exists. Your red flag is the flag of your enemies. You, it seems, are already a communist sympathizer without even knowing it. Neither an Ugly American nor a Quiet American, but an Un-American?

The anti-communism of the 1980s and the internal and external war against Un-American activities culminate in the destruction of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when you are a sophomore in college at UCLA, having transferred from your last-choice university. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!125 says Saint Ronald. Tearing down walls and building walls emerge from the same mindset:

Fear of the Other, the Non-

American, the Un-American, the Anti-American.

Fear that the deeply Un-American or very American crimes,

depending on one’s point of view, that you have done

to Others or want to do to Others shall be

inflicted on you Americans.

Tear down the wall so your side

can conquer the other side; build that

wall so your side can keep out the other side,

even if the otherness is already inside of you,

was always inside of you, long before

you met your Other.

You do not have political conversations with your parents in your 1980s. You are aware of what they do not know: that you are, if not yet an atheist or an agnostic, an apathetic when it comes to the religions of God and anti-communism. But you also do not like confrontation, either because you are a filial son or because you are a coward. Or both. You vaguely sense that your future will be as a Godless Commie scribbler (or so some people see you), but for now you pretend to be the obedient son who does what his parents order him to do.

Your parents tell your brother,

gone away to college, that

you don’t do anything

they want you to do.

Who are you going to believe?

Don’t answer that question.

In 1982, when your brother tells you he is on his way to Harvard, you are not happy for him, although you appear so at his high school graduation party. You are eleven and feel abandoned, again. When anh Tùng tells you the news about Harvard, instead of singing Hallelujah! you retreat to the bathroom crying. You don’t love me anymore! you sob when your brother follows, even though you have never said I love you to anyone. Your parents have never said I love you to you. Fellow Vietnamese refugee Lac Su126 even titles his memoir I Love Yous Are for White People, although many white people tell you they come from hardy European stock where parents also did not say I love you.

But even if no one in your family says so, you know Ba Má and your brother love you through deeds if not words, through sacrificing and being sacrificed, through the offering of their bodies and psyches and time and well-being, through giving up so many pleasures and things they could have otherwise had, through following the example of Jesus, who sacrificed himself, and not God, who sacrificed His only son, which is why you can say, You don’t love me anymore!

You make your brother cry, which you have not seen him do since the Christmas Eve Ba Má were shot. You do not come from people who cry or express emotion. Perhaps you make anh Tùng feel guilty. The way he shows his love in the future is to buy you the things that Ba Má won’t, or won’t even think of: your first banana split, your first computer, your first set of weights, your first stereo and speakers. When you start dating your first girlfriend, J, your brother tells Ba Má you’re sleeping at his place when you are actually with J. That is love.

Ba Má married as teenagers, but the American style of dating as teenagers is not something of which they approve. Too frivolous and too dangerous at the same time, a distraction from your education and your future. They fear any threat to your future prosperity, because their origins are in a poor quê known for nurturing hard-core Catholics and hard-core communists. Even though Catholics and communists often oppose each other—viciously—they both believe in one trinity of justice, suffering, and equality, as well as another trinity of redemption, sacrifice, and utopia.

Your parents are hard-core Catholics.

You, you hope, are a hard-core writer.

Ba Má follow a different Word and find comfort in the eternal afterlife, logical given how their entire lives in Việt Nam were stamped indelibly by colonization, famine, war, poverty, and becoming refugees. So they pray to God and the Virgin Mary and in memory of all their dead, including those who passed away when Ba Má had already left. You are too young to remember Má crying when her mother died in the homeland 8,760 miles away, too young to remember Má being sent to the hospital in Harrisburg.

Your mother comes back, but

you do not remember her return.

Má is simply present again.

Maybe you remember the grief, your own incomprehension or terror at something so powerful it disappears your mother. You do not want to feel any emotion so strong it could dismember you, even if that emotion cannot be separated from love, the love your mother felt for her mother, a feeling so strong it dismembered her.

Perhaps you cry because you never forgot being abandoned by your parents, even if you never mention it, even to yourself. Even if Ba Má had not actually abandoned you. And because you never want to feel abandoned again—because you never want to feel what you felt when you sobbed before your brother in 1982—because you do not want to feel any pain at all—you will not cry again for twenty-three years.

Actually, you will cry again in 1990,

but you will forget for decades that you did so.

After your brother leaves for college, the house is very lonely and quiet. Unlike most Vietnamese families, which often have four, five, six, and more children, yours is very small, with only two (birth) children.

We tried a lot, Ba Má tell you many times.

Normally reticent about their past, this is one story they enjoy telling, although they do not dwell on the actual effort they must have expended. Your usually vivid imagination is blank. Was it fun for them? Or not? All you know is that they tried for years.

We went every weekend to

pray to the Virgin Mary, they say.

When prayers and effort fail, they adopt their first child, your sister, chị Tuyết, from an orphanage run by nuns. And if there is a God, perhaps He rewards them for adopting a girl by giving Ba Má your brother not long after.

Seven years later, the most important event of your life occurs:

you are born.

You hope Ba Má had a lot of fun trying to conceive you.

You do not remember if you remembered having a sister. You last saw her when you were four, and how long did your memories of her persist after that? You do not remember if Ba Má or your brother talked about your sister in front of you. You do remember when you first started thinking of her again, in 1980, when you are nine and she sends a photo of herself. So many Vietnamese refugee families have photos of those left behind. The absent presences. The living ghosts.

What you feel is sadness. Melancholy.

Guilt. You are here. She is not.

Did Má feel guilty for fleeing, for not

being with her mother when she died, for

leaving her adopted daughter behind?

Perhaps all refugees who make it to

safety feel survivor’s guilt.

Perhaps all survivors feel haunted, by

the absent presence, by the alternate

universe where they did not make it out.

What if you were the one left behind?

What if you were the negative space in

someone else’s life and memory?

And if you feel this way, with no

memories of this sister or the country

back there, what must she feel? And

what must Ba Má feel?

This is a war story.

Another war story: Ba leaving behind his entire family in 1954 to move south, following Má’s family. When your father is eighty-eight, you finally ask what it was like to leave his family.

It is just the two of you at the dinner table. In old age, Ba, your formerly stern, driven father, is gentle, quavering, and affectionate. According to his documents, he is eighty-six. But he was really born at the end of 1933, not October 1935.

Vietnamese people usually do not celebrate birthdays except for the first and the eightieth, so it’s not surprising that your father, confronted with an official asking for your birthday during that stressful time when you became refugees, recorded your birth month as March instead of February. Having two birthdays is perfect for a man of two faces.

Vietnamese refugees who come to AMERICATM sometimes rebirth themselves, becoming younger or older depending on what they need from bureaucracy or vanity.

Being a refugee always involves time traveling.

From one country in one time to another country

in another time. And most of all living in the

present while feeling the past, always

lurking, always haunting.

Over a dinner of red wine and medium-rare filet mignon, which you always cook for your father because he loves it, you ask Ba, Why didn’t your family come with you? His family then were mother, father, three younger brothers, and one younger sister.

Ba smiles, looks at his plate, doesn’t hear you. Or pretends not to.

He refuses to wear his hearing aids.

You don’t ask again.

What else could he have felt?

Why must he say it to you?

You remember a black-and-white photograph from your youth, on that bookshelf with no books. Your father with his younger brothers. For years you walked by that photograph without understanding its impossibility. Ba last saw his brothers when they were boys and he was a young man. In the photo stand four middle-aged men.

Then one day the photo punctures your eye and your memory, and you see, at last, the jagged line. On one side the younger brothers, shoulder to shoulder. On the other side, Ba. He has taken two photographs, spliced them together, and framed them. He can at last be with his brothers.

You stare at the jagged line for a long time.

The frame and its photos have disappeared. When did your father decide he no longer needed that picture? You ask if he recalls that missing picture of himself and his brothers, re membered.

Ba smiles, shakes his head, says, No, I don’t remember.

You let it go because he has let it go. You,

who have forgotten so much,

understand that forgetting

can also be a blessing.