Elementary Vietnamese
On July 27, sometime past 11 a.m., my sister Suzanne and I were cruising down an unnamed tributary of the Mekong River, about 80 miles south of Saigon. I was thankful the rickety raft’s single engine drowned out her voice: She kept complaining about Vietnam’s Third World status, evidenced, she thought, by its lack of Diet Coke. I got here by accepting a Let’s Go job backpacking through Borneo and the Philippines. My reward for completing the itinerary was an open-ended airline ticket. I came seeking to confirm my mother’s stories, to see where my father had fought during the war and to meet my Vietnamese relatives for the first time. My sister came because she had finally accumulated enough frequent flier miles to fly International Business Class. After 15 minutes of smacking mosquitoes, we docked the raft on the river’s muddy outer bank. We could finally begin our trek through the forest to my grandfather’s grave.
Our entourage—my aunt, my uncle, two cousins and a family friend—mounted motorbikes driven by local men parked near the bank. These drivers sat here daily, dirtied by mud and sweat, eager to collect their fee of 2,500 Vietnamese Dong (roughly 17 cents). We bumped down dirt roads, ducking as tree branches swung at our heads, and were eventually dropped off in a field of tall grass. Somewhere past this field Ông Ngoai (Grandfather) was resting on the farm he cultivated as a young man—the same farm where my mother was born, the third of eight children. Suzanne doubted our relatives would remember how to get there. “William, there isn’t a street sign,” she said, not considering that there were no streets to be named.
In the absence of signs that read “this way to your family farm,” my aunt navigated using implicit directions; subtle bends in a stream and large rocks directed us. Along the way, a young boy, about eight years old, and his sister, probably nine, ran toward us like long-lost friends. My sister and I had never seen them before, but they knew who we were: the children born in America who didn’t speak our mother’s language, who had never been to Vietnam, who had never met our grandfather who died four years earlier. As we came to know, they were Ông Ngoai ’s neighbors, children who picked his fruit, two of the few people who had watched him die.
The children eagerly led us the rest of the way. After crossing a narrow footbridge, our family’s former hut emerged from a dense thicket of lychee trees. It was a modest brown and green construction that Ông Ngoai had built himself. He weaved chutes of bamboo together for the walls; he bound thatch together for the roof. The floor was smoothed dirt covered by scratchy mats and the bed was flattened bamboo draped with scraps of cloth. A black and white picture of him sat on the altar to the left of his bed, his image blurred by burning incense, his dark eyes staring out at my sister and me. He had a fat nose that looked like a chicken’s foot. His wide, prominent cheekbones rendered the shape of his face triangular. The resemblance was uncanny. Standing on these scratchy mats in this dank hut, I stared at Ông Ngoai through scented smoke and I could see my mother.
After making offerings at Ông Ngoai’s grave and battling through torrential rain, I traveled back with my family to their home in downtown Saigon. When Ma was seven her family moved into the city so the children could find jobs. My mother carried buckets of water, hanging from a long stick crossing her shoulders, from the city well to people’s houses; the lack of indoor plumbing at that time assured her of employment. Suzanne and I wandered through the market surrounding our family’s home, trying to envision how our parents met.
The market is set up between alleys surrounding decrepit apartment buildings. Elderly Vietnamese women sit frying pancakes while others skin fresh fish. Cuts of meat hang in front of tailors mending pants and enormous bags of rice prop up the occasional war victim without legs. It was here, in 1969, where my mom was sewing and selling dresses with one of her sisters. Amidst cackling chickens and radio reports about the war, my father stumbled into the market. Ma must have been beautiful to attract his attention. After all, he came looking for a wedding dress for his fiancée back in the States, not to pick up some Vietnamese girlfriend. But he couldn’t resist. He asked my mother out with the assistance of her English-speaking sister. Her response? A brutal “Never!” Her first husband had been declared dead by the South Vietnamese Navy just 10 days earlier and she had to take care of their son, my half-brother John. As my sister, another brother and I evidence, though, Dad’s yearlong courtship succeeded. He left Vietnam in June 1970, and proceeded to send my mother romantic missives which culminated in a proposal and an airline ticket. My mother came to the United States in April of 1973. Suzanne was born in 1974. The rest, my parents claim, is history.
While visiting Vietnam had confirmed many of my mother’s tales and descriptions, numerous questions remained unanswered. How could my mother board a plane and leave behind everything she knew? All she carried with her was a ratty suitcase and a ticket stamped with the words “Does not speak English. Please Assist.” Did she just run off with my father for the chance to leave a war-torn country? How do people understand each other, and more importantly, fall in love, when they don’t even speak the same language?
I assume the answer involves physical intimacy. I probe my mother about her dalliances with my father in Saigon and she claims not to remember the details. Still, I suspect that before she was my mother she was my father’s mistress. I asked my relatives to see those romantic missives, but the letters no longer exist. In 1975, when North Vietnam took over the South, my grandmother burned them. She had to destroy the family’s ties to America as the new government searched homes looking for evidence of treachery and conspiracy. I traveled to Ông Ngoai’s farm with a subconscious hope he’d greet me in those tall grasses but I had to settle for a tomb and an old picture instead. The memories my mother has forgotten, the artifacts that have been destroyed, the people who have died—each represents a component of my family’s history that has disappeared and that I can’t get back.
At the same time, it’s all part of a history that was never mine. My life starts in the United States, with the advantages of a childhood spent in school and a house made of bricks instead of bamboo. My mother’s situation is far removed from the life I lead, and until recently I’ve let it remain this way.
We don’t, however, live our lives in a vacuum. In truth, the story of my life begins on Ông Ngoai’s farm and in those alleys where my mother learned about survival. Poverty, toil and war—these are the things that shaped her survivalist mentality. This mentality remains a constant point of contention between us. When I took a late leave of absence last semester, she ridiculed the notion of “taking time off.”
“I never understand you,” she said when I returned to Georgia at the end of April. “You quit for no reason! How drop-out make money?” Suddenly she thought I might end up as a middle-aged man, dirtied by mud and sweat, eager to collect 2,500 Vietnamese Dong. During her childhood, depression and personal turmoil were to be expected. My task, she thought, was to press on, to speed through school and complete life’s mission to support my family. Instead of carrying water buckets I was to carry books—no matter what my state of mind. It’s times like this that her shoulders—still uneven from carrying those buckets—become most visible. Harvard is my chance, she reminds me, just like my father was hers.
As my family ages and memories die, I’m left knowing that eventually it will be up to me to follow those directions to the house that Grandpa built. With this in mind, I enrolled in elementary Vietnamese this semester. I stumble over words and mix up tones, sounding more like a cat in heat than a native speaker. Fortunately, I know in time it will prove worthwhile. Before visiting Vietnam, the country existed as some abstract place that belonged to my mother. But now I know a part of it is mine. When my friends ask, “What are you ever going to do with that class?” I don’t second-guess my intentions. I’ll return to Vietnam and speak with those children, with the market-goers who knew my family before they were mine, and wade through fields of grass toward Ông Ngoai’s grave. I’ll stare at his picture through scented smoke. He’ll look back with his triangular face. I’ll see my mother, and the three of us will finally speak the same language.
William Lee Adams ’04 is a psychology concentrator in Lowell House.