PICKING UP THE PIECES: THE AFTERMATH OF THE VIETNAM WAR

by Thái Phương Nam

 1980S - THE AFTERMATH OF WAR

The year was 1980, five years after the bloody war in Vietnam came to a tragic end for the Southern Vietnamese people, my family included. I was nine years old living with my family at the very southern end of Vietnam, in a region known as Mũi Cà Mau. A step further south would require the support of a seafaring vessel or else one would be swallowed up by the relentless, indifferent salty waves of the South China Sea. 

The war was over, but we still tried to escape its long shadow. Like fugitives, we would move from one town to the next, traversing further and further south away from the city of my birth, Sài Gòn, into the deep, tropical jungle of south Vietnam. My father would leave home first, then send word to my mom a few months later to join him in the new town with a new name and new identity. The reason, as I learned from late night whispers that sometimes escaped from the adult gatherings in the house, was because my father’s birth name happened to be on the wanted list of the newly formed communist government. They intended to send him to re-education camps in the North, along with thousands of former Southern Vietnamese soldiers and servicemen to wash away the contamination of capitalist ideology imported from the US, in order to make room for a new political ideology imported from the Soviet Union.

Those five years were like an impressionist painting of soft fluffy clouds with pastel colored blue sky against the muddy delta river that flowed into the sea. For a nine-year-old, I was viewing the world through fresh lenses filled with wide-eyed curiosity and imagination. My head was full of immortal adventures and fairy tales that my parents used to read to my siblings and me from books they kept hidden in a locked chest disguised as a coffee table that was covered by an unassuming tablecloth. Fairy tales of faraway lands such as 1001 Arabian Nights, 1000 Leagues Under the Sea, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Pinocchio and Snow White leaped into my life like an exciting adventure in which I was always the main heroine banishing evil from the world. Living with one foot in the shadow and one foot in the light as if we were playing a game of hide and seek, I felt safe, reassured and secure under the protection of my parents, oblivious of the omnipresent lurking danger.

Day after day as my parents plotted and planned our escape to freedom via the high seas, dead bodies were being washed ashore, dragged and displayed by the police border guards in the middle of the town plaza. It was a warning by the new government to deter people from escaping the country or else they would be swallowed up by the salty seawater that carried them to their ultimate ends.

Then the day came when we were supposed to all leave together, only my father managed one last time to escape. However this time, there was no telling when he would be able to send word and where we would be able to join him in the foreign land. 

The day my father left felt like as if someone had lifted a thin veil from my face. All of a sudden everything seemed to come into sharp focus to reveal the cruel reality of the human conditions. My mother cried every night for a year in the bed she shared with my youngest brother who was only six months old when our father left. My older sister and I cried every night with our mom for about a month. We stopped crying because our sorrow turned into fear, anxiety and hunger.

One night not too long after our father left, we were woken up by a huge commotion with bright flashlights waving in our faces. Our house was raided by the local police to see if we were hiding city people who had come with plans to escape by boats aided by local fishermen. It was true that my mother had hidden some city folks on occasions, but as luck would have it, it was not on the day that the house was raided. They did manage to search the house to discover the locked chest with all foreign books translated into Vietnamese including my childhood fairy tales. A few days later, all the people in our small fishing village were ordered to come to the village plaza to participate in the big bonfire where they burned all the foreign books, especially the ones that were from the capitalist West. 

The years that followed were harsh because one had to eat a couple times a day. My mom worked as a seamstress, however, most people at the time could only afford a few new outfits during the Lunar New Year, Tết. The rest of the year, she made all kinds of foods, snacks, cakes and dessert drinks, selling them at home, on the sidewalks, at the outdoor movie theatre that came to town twice a year. When business was slow, my mom would pack up the food she made and my two sisters and I would carry them around to sell to our neighbors. For a while she raised pigs and even sold lottery tickets for a living. In the end, my mother had no choice but to sell all our precious possessions, including furniture and jewelry. Our big house was the last of our possession to go. We moved into a simple hut with a roof that was made out of palm leaves. The roof leaked and the whole house swayed in the howling winds during each monsoon season. We survived somehow with the kindness and charity of our neighbors giving us free nourishments from the sea during fishing seasons. Even so, we would go to bed hungry most nights. In desperation, my mother decided to break up the family. She sent four of us away to live among aunts and uncles in different towns. For a year or so, only my youngest brother and I would remain with my mother in our village.

My siblings and I had minimal schooling at the village school run by two teachers who could only manage to teach us three main subjects: Vietnam history, Vietnamese language and math. Vietnamese history consisted of the glorious history of the Vietnamese people who continuously fought for independence and self-determination by driving away foreign invaders such as: the Chinese, the French, the Japanese and they defeated the Americans. Vietnamese language class was politically neutral for the most part as we learned correct spelling and mastered calligraphy. Math class was quite graphic. I learned addition, subtraction, multiplication and division from word problems with illustrations of big, white, hairy, blue-eyed American soldiers being shot and killed by petite Vietnamese soldiers in plain clothes and cone hats. A typical word problem would be something like this: “if our comrade has a small riffle with 10 bullets and each bullet can shoot and kill three capitalist US foreign invaders, how many of them can our comrade kill with 10 bullets?” 

Three years after my father left, his oldest brother came to visit us from Cần Thơ where he lived. It is half-way between Sài Gòn and our fishing village. He and my mother talked for what seemed to be a very long time. Before he left, he gave us our father’s address in Canada. My mom started crying again every night for a few months before she broke the news to us that our father gotten married to a second wife. They now live in Canada with their young daughter. 

My mom’s sorrow did not stop her from trying to find a way for us to escape Vietnam in search of a better life for herself and her six small children. If anything, it fueled the burning desire that she had to fight against all odds and at any cost. She tried again and again, but each time we were all caught and released back to our village. 

One memorable attempt was when we were all hiding in a deep jungle waiting for nightfall in order to sneak out to sea along with some other city folks. I remembered distinctly the buzzing of mosquitos surrounding and feasting on our flesh. Despite the itchiness, my mother constantly reminded us not to make a sound. Then all of a sudden, as the sky was about to turn into blind night, the whole jungle was lit up! The kids in the group let out a soft sound of awe and wonder as we caught the illuminating fireflies and kept them in our palms as they continued to float and glow like flickering wickers in kerosene lamps. In those moments, time seemed to stand still. All my sorrows, fear, hunger, thirst, discomfort from the itchiness of mosquito bites faded away as the magical world of wonders emerged into the foreground. Even the buzzing sounds of the mosquitoes had transformed into a soothing melodious lullaby. In those brief magically enchanting moments, I was a kid again! 

Then I was violently yanked out of the midsummer night reverie. An adult in the group grabbed my arm. There was loud screaming and yelling everywhere: “Chạy chạy chạy.... Nhanh lên, nhanh lên, nhanh lên!” (Run, run, run… faster, faster, faster!). I heard gun shots as we ran. I did not have time to transition back to reality and let fear overtake my physical self once again before we were captured by the border guards. They rounded us up and put us in a temporary holding shelter. We were released to go back to our village the next day. I learned years later from my mom that some of the men from our group had gotten away that night. The reason we were released the very next day without having to pay any fines was because the head of the border guards at that station recognized my mother. He was from my mother’s village. They grew up together in the 40s and 50s. They went to the same school and used to write romantic love poems in their high school newsletters during their adolescent years. According to my mom, when they were about 15 or 16 years old, they were recruited by the communists to join the guerilla force in the North to fight against South Vietnam which was backed by the US. The US were replacing the French colonial force to take control of Southeast Asia. My mom did make the journey halfway to the North, (perhaps she was traveling on the route that later became known as the Hồ Chí Minh Trail), when she changed her mind and went back home because she was homesick and missed her mom. My mom and the border guard had not seen or heard from each other for more than 30 years and yet, there they were, meeting each other again in a different set of political circumstances, one was the victor and the other as loser. 

Attempting to leave together as a family unit proved to be almost impossible. Alas in 1983, my mother made a heart-breaking decision to send her three oldest children myself included, on a perilous sea journey that changed our lives forever. Our tiny boat carried a total of 21 people, mostly women and young children and only five able-bodied men. We were intercepted by Thai pirates on the third day at sea. When they were about to take all the women and young girls to their big ship to commit atrocious acts of violating the women’s bodies, the fear that ran through my body was terrifying. I felt like my life energy had escaped and dissipated from every physical cell that I possessed. My feet and legs must have turned into lead since I couldn’t move a muscle in my body. I froze since there were nowhere to run and hide in the confines of that small fragile shape of a wooden boat. We were surrounded and engulfed completely by turquoise water, the sea color that was so captivating to me in the last few days now suddenly seemed cruel with its deafening silence and indifference. 

Then as suddenly as they came, the pirates left, disappeared without a trace after one of them spotted what seemed to be a navy ship at a far horizon. I was later told in the refugee camp that it must have been one of the United Nation High Commission for Refugee (UNHCR) patrol ships that were sent to rescue refugees at seas due to an international outcry over the high number of boat people perishing at sea throughout the 80s. We made it safe to a beach in southern Thailand that evening before night fall with only the clothes on our backs since the pirates had dumped all our personal belongings, including food and fuel into the sea.

For the next two years in refugee camps, my siblings and I were hoping and dreaming of reuniting with our father in Canada. That dream proved to be legally impossible because, unbeknownst to us, our father had changed his name again and forever buried his real identity in the soil of Vietnam so that he could start a brand-new life as a newly married man in a country called Canada. My siblings and I sat dumbfoundedly and helplessly as the officer from the Canadian office explained to us over and over again through an interpreter the technical legal jargon of the reasons why we were not admissible to Canada. The ramifications of this legal rejection was never totally understood and acutely felt by me until much later in my young adulthood.

Therefore in 1985, after two years of chasing futile dreams in the refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines, my older sister, my younger brother and I were finally accepted to emigrate to the US as unaccompanied minors and placed with a foster family outside of Buffalo, NY with the help of the Lutheran Social Services. My older sister was 15. I just turned 14 and my younger brother was 13 when we landed in Buffalo, NY – my new home for the next 10 years.

The first five years in the US was a blur. Upon arrival in the US at the airport, I was given a bilingual English-Vietnamese pocket dictionary as I started a new life in the US. I had no choice but to learn to speak, read and write English very quickly.  Needless to say, the only subject that I excelled in was math since I was already fluent in the universal language of numbers.  It almost went without saying that this time math problems did not involve any killing of any kind. 

The first year with the foster family was beautiful and I am forever grateful of the foster family’s kindness and generosity toward me and my two siblings. We got a glimpse of the American dream in real time. The foster father was a veterinarian, the mother was a housewife. Their three adult children were away in college who would come home during the Christmas holiday to shower us with gifts. It lasted exactly a year and almost restored my hope in humanity. 

The Lutheran Social Services moved us to the second foster home that was only willing to foster girls not boys. Therefore, my younger brother got separated from us and placed in another foster home in a nearby town. My brother never really recovered from this traumatic experience which scarred him for life. But that is another story for another time. We would see each other once a week during church service since both foster families attended the same church. The adults involved all tried their best to reassure us that we did nothing wrong and the only reason they had to move us to the second foster homes was because the foster parents were filing for divorce. They said that we had nothing to do with their family breaking up. 

The first two years with the second foster family were bearable. My older sister and I had been through so much in our young lives that we seemed to endure whatever life had to offer at that point. My emotions were numb and blunted as I was dazzled by the external stimulants and the abundance of everything in America. The tears of missing home, missing my village, missing my mom and young siblings, missing my friends dried up between the intervals of the letters from my mom in Vietnam and my father in Canada. My siblings and I had been corresponding with our father since we got to the refugee camps in Thailand. He wrote to us at least once or twice a month, sending us some gifts and money orders so we could get some treats for ourselves. I held on to the hope that he would come to visit us one day in person wherever. If we had the money and the means to travel, we would have visited him at the first chance we got. 

1990S – COMING OF AGE AND LETTING GO

During the third year with the second foster family, my older sister had moved away to college and I found myself alone without an emotional anchor. Six months before graduating high school in 1990, I ran away from the second foster home to live with my high school best friend and her family, who became my third and last foster family. My friend’s parents did not plan to foster any children, but they became foster parents nonetheless so they could foster me. They provided me with a “normal family life” that I had yearned for all my life. There is a famous first line from Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina which states: “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” My third foster home was a happy home and thus, there was not much to be said. Just think of a picture of a happy and stable home and they would be it, no drama. I will cherish them until my last breath for they provided me a shelter from the storms of life when I needed it the most. They taught me that blood is not thicker than water.

In retrospect, the circumstances that led to my running away from the second foster home was not too black and white as it seemed at the time. I remember bits and pieces of the gradually built-up resentment that I harbored toward my second foster mom who forbade my sister and I to speak Vietnamese in front of her. Our brother was not allowed to visit and stay overnight at the house. We were not allowed to cook fish-sauce flavored Vietnamese foods for fear that it would stink up the house. She made little remarks here and there regarding the superiority of the white race. There were Sunday church services that we were required to attend every Sunday to witness mostly white people having convulsive spiritual trances, speaking in tongues, passing out in front of the church podium. I was horrified the first time I witnessed such an uninhibited display of human emotions. I rationalized in my mind that these people had to be temporarily mad to believe in such a scary looking and bloody, crucified stature of a man on the cross whom they called “Jesus.” I was born and raised during war time and the immediate aftermath of war. My parents were too preoccupied with survival and they didn’t have time to indoctrinate us into any particular religion, and here I was, exposed to the sound and fury of the American-born-again Christian movement head on and trying to make sense of it all.

I was 21 years old and it was early 1993. I was in my third year of college in Western New York.  My father had stopped all forms of contact, correspondence and phone calls when he learned that my mother had arrived in the US from a refugee camp and resettled in San Jose, CA with my younger siblings. My brother who was bouncing from one foster home to the next in Buffalo New York, dropped out of high school and moved to California to reunite with our family as soon as he could.

For a year and a half of my college life, I experienced a period of existential crisis. I questioned my own existence almost daily. I questioned the meaning of my life, the meaning of the human condition, of human happiness, if it existed at all and for whom. I questioned why there were wars throughout human history. I could not imagine how it could be necessary to kill another being. I wondered if there was a point in all of this. I lost myself in the books and classes on philosophy, history and ethics as I searched for answers to life’s eternal questions. I walked around college campus in a frame of a fragile petite Asian girl with the biggest invisible burden on her shoulders. 

I remember distinctly one wintery afternoon walking between classes. It was lovely. The snow was falling gently. Beauty was all around me, but I didn’t take any notice. I was preoccupied with the same unanswered question of why my father did not respond to my 10th or 15th letter. The number didn’t matter. I had written a lot, almost one letter per week, initially, then once a month before I only sent cards for special occasions such as Father’s Day and Christmas. Each time before I began a new letter, I wrestled with the question: should I even bother. After I finished writing, I asked myself: should I mail it. After I mailed it, I would look forward to checking my mail daily for a letter that would never again arrive from Vancouver, Canada. But that wintery afternoon was different. It was cold, but I felt warm. It felt as though the pot of resentment that was brewing inside me had reached the boiling point. I literally felt it evaporate and escape from my physical cage. I felt light as a feather and, for the first time, I could stand up straight with my head held high marching forward and toward the unknown, but with a purposeful stride. As I learned years later in the psychotherapy literature, the experience is known as, “catharsis” – the process of releasing, and thereby relief from, strong or repressed emotions. And just like that, I set my father free, and in the process, I liberated myself from him, from memories of him and from my yearning for his love.

From that day onward, I threw myself into my studies. I studied all the major world religions just to conclude in the end that they were all absurd and boldly declared myself an atheist. All was not lost, however, as I settled on the Western interpretation of the Buddhist teachings of nurturing and cultivating compassion in order to lessen human suffering without the extra promises of heaven and hell or reincarnation. When it came time for me to declare a major, I chose the humble profession of Social Work since it seemed to be the closest to the promise of delivering a service of compassion without having to resort to living the celibate life of a religious nun.

In 1995 as the millennium came to a close, I moved West to the Bay Area to reunify with my mom, my siblings and relatives. I worked in various non-profits in San Francisco as a social worker and community organizer before I went back to school to get a Master Degree in Social Work at San Francisco State University. 

2000S – IN FULL PURSUIT OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

If the 90s was one continuous decade of confusing existential crisis, coming of age and learning to let go, the next decade proved itself to be a decade of accelerated changes and chaos. I had a baby out of wedlock, graduated with a Master Degree in Social Work, moved to San Jose, got married in order to bring the baby “into wedlock”, bought a house, had another baby, then the housing market crashed… all in that order. 

I was working nonstop through it all, sometimes two jobs at a time, contributing to the community at large while nurturing and growing my little family nest. As we witnessed the rise and fall of the economy, relatives losing their jobs in the private sector and struggling economically, my mom would constantly praise me for having strategically chosen the right profession because, “let’s face it,” my mom would say, “when the economy is good, they need social workers. And when the economy is bad, they need social workers even more.”

2010S – REOPENING OLD WOUNDS

It was the summer of 2011 and I found myself with my two sisters, Loan and Thu returning from our quest in Vancouver, Canada to look up our long-lost father whom we had not seen for 30 years and had not heard from for 20 years.

Thu, my younger sister did not want to, so she said, but she yielded to sibling pressure from me and our oldest sister, Loan. Loan who organized the trip, insisted that we should all go. As for me, I would never say no to a road trip with my sisters, and being a good social worker, I want to be there to support my siblings in our quest to seek the truth of why our father abandoned us.

My work at the time as a county social worker was to seek out potential foster parents for foster children triggered my curiosity to reflect on my own history in the foster care system. At the same time, I thought I was ready to seek closure and to reconcile with my painful past once again.

After a few days of sight-seeing in Seattle Washington: Pike Market, the Space Needle, the Woodland Park and Zoo and spending a day at the Butchart Garden in Vancouver Island, we were ready to head north straight through the Canadian border to Vancouver City, British Columbia.

After checking into the hotel, Loan wasted no time making a call to a paternal male cousin, Tâm, who had escaped by boat with our father in 1980. He was now married with two teenage children. Tâm was not surprised to hear from my sister. He had heard through the grapevine, namely my father’s older sister, my paternal aunt: Cô Ba, that we were heading up his way. 

The very next day, Tâm, his wife and their 18 year-old daughter, all took a day off from work to spend the day as gracious hosts, showing off Vancouver and all its glories. By the afternoon as we were admiring and taking photos of the Totem Poles at Stanley Park, Tâm discreetly made a phone call to my father. After treating us to dinner in Chinatown, Tâm and his family drove us back to our hotel. On the way back, he drove by our father’s house, which ironically happened to be only a few blocks from the hotel where we stayed. Tâm said he had probably already gone to bed and that he was a morning person with a strict daily routine, waking up around 5am and in bed by 7pm. 

Before saying goodbye to us at our hotel, Tâm informed us that he had called the house and that our father’s second wife picked up the phone. Tâm asked if we could come by for a visit, she said it was not a good idea, that there was no purpose to our meeting. She said that my sisters and I belonged to a past that played no part in the present and future of their current life!

We thanked Tâm and his family for their hospitality and we parted quickly. I was glad since I could not hold back my tears any longer upon receiving the news.

That night, we stayed up until 2am, talking, analyzing, theorizing why our father had stopped all forms of communication with us the year that our mother finally made it to the US. We came up with countless scenarios which were only limited by our imagination and 20 years of wondering. The theme Loan kept coming back to was to blame the second wife for forcing our father to sever all contacts with the first family as evidenced by his changing his whole identity, his family name, claiming that there were no other family members left in Vietnam and declaring his new family. He was therefore, not able to sponsor us to Canada when we were in refugee camps. I based my theories on my social work training, diagnosing our father as suffering from some form of permanent amnesia and disassociation as ways of coping with his painful past, so that he would be able to go on with life. Thu, being the youngest, couldn’t make sense of any of it. It was beyond her comprehension at the moment. We all cried silently in our beds that night.

The next morning, we woke up early and checked out of the hotel. The sky, which had been so blue, sunny and promising all week long, suddenly became cloudy and bleak. We all agreed that we needed to head for the US border, back to our lives, back to our own families and familiarity as soon and as fast as possible.

After five minutes of driving, however, Loan stopped the car abruptly. Thu and I looked out the car window. We were parked one house from our father’s house. Our father was gardening in his front yard. As if he knew and was expecting us, he stopped his work and looked straight at the car.

Loan got out of the car first. She went over to my side, opened the door and literally dragged me out of the car with her. I said: “Okay. Okay. I am coming!” I waved at Thu to come with us. She shook her head furiously. 

What happened next was surreal. I felt like I was walking in a dream. We approached him. He did not show any signs of recognition of us. We exchanged greetings. He was old but when he started talking, I recognized him right away from a slight peculiar positioning of one of his upper front teeth.  It was just one of those things that a nine-year-old daughter would remember about her father so that she would be able to identify him 30 years later in case they got separated. 

Not in so many words, we told him that we were his children, that we had come to look for him and asked if he remembered who we were. He was calm. In his eyes, I saw no sign of recognition. He said what happened in Vietnam was a like a fairy tale story to him. He vaguely remembered what happened before. He only knew about his life now with his new family in Vancouver. Then he started talking about how his health was failing, that he had a stroke a year ago that almost killed him. He showed us the leg scar that he had from a surgery last year. By then, tears were involuntarily streaming down my face. I tugged at my sister’s arms, urging her to go. We said our goodbyes briefly and went back to the car to find our poor little sister Thu’s eyes all red with tears. We drove to the borders in silence, each lost in her own thoughts.

We stopped by the duty-free shop at the borders as it started to pour. My two sisters went on a shopping spree aka retail therapy and bought just about one of everything in the gift shop. They urged me to buy something, anything. I reluctantly picked up the red mug with the word: CANADA imprinted vertically on the outside.

Back at home, in the warmth of family and California sun, I thought I had left my past once again behind me, but to my surprise, my past was sitting right there on my kitchen table. Apparently, my foster parents just sold their home in upstate New York and moved to a retirement community in Central New York state. When they sold the house, they found and shipped to me the stuff I had left behind when I moved to California in 1995. Inside the box, there was a fluffy senior prom dress, old school-year books with my pictures of puffy hair from a bad perm by a school friend, some cheap jewelry, some ribbons that I won at various art fairs. At the very bottom of the box, there was a small binder with the label: Letters from Father 1983 to 1991!

I took the binder to my work and for a month, I stared at it during lunch breaks while sipping tea from my new red Canadian mug. Finally, one day I stayed late at work. After waiting patiently for everyone to leave, I conjured enough courage to start looking into the binder. My heart skipped a beat as I recognized my father’s familiar, handsome poetic Vietnamese handwriting.

There were close to 100 letters. I read each one of them through and through, and for each one, I cried and cried uncontrollably. I asked myself over and over again: Why? How? Why did he stop writing? How could a person who had so much feeling and love for his children as he had expressed in his letters, suddenly decided to cut all ties without any hints, without any explanations? I wanted answers! I demanded answers!

I tried to piece together fragments of my father’s mind through his letters. Now as an adult, I could empathize with his feeling of hopelessness and helplessness as a new refugee in a new country, not being able to speak the language or to find satisfactory employment in order to provide for and to protect his own children. In one letter, he blamed Loan for disobeying and betraying him by disclosing to our mother about the affair he was having with his mistress, now his second wife. That was the reason our mother decided to stay back in Vietnam with all the children when we were all supposed to escape together that one fateful night so long ago. Father was the captain of the boat that would deliver us all to the promised land of the western world. Gosh, Loan must have been living all these years with the enormous guilt that she was the cause of our family being broken up.

In a few letters father mentioned the names of his two new children, my half siblings:  Maryann and Randy. I googled my half-sister’s name, resulting in several matches. I emailed the one in Vancouver, Canada and introduced myself as her long lost relative. She responded back instantaneously as if she had been waiting for me all her life. She went on and on about how she was getting married the next year and in the process of putting together a family tree, but her father was so mysterious about his side of the family that she didn’t have anything on her paternal branch, and I would be the missing-linked cousin, who could help her crack the mystery of the father’s side. She was so enthusiastic about it that she even invited me to her upcoming wedding!

It was too much for me to bear it all alone so I told my sister, Loan about the new connection. Loan wasted no time to email our half sister. They were corresponding for about a month. Maryann insisted on knowing the blood order of our relationship. I gave Loan the greenlight to email Maryann everything we know about our father’s past life and our family lineage. 

Understandably, Maryann’s initial reactions were that of shock and denial, saying that we had made a big mistake, that her parents had always told her that they were married in Vietnam, that they used to live with our paternal grandparents and that our father had a big fallout with his family, so he disowned all of them except for Tâm, who escaped Vietnam with him. 

Loan’s response was that father’s story was the biggest lie ever told in history, and that we have proof from relatives living here in San Jose as well as old photos of our whole family taken in Vietnam. Maryann’s last email to us was that she did confront her parents and they did admit to father’s first marriage and that he had a family before in Vietnam, but because something horrible happened between father and his sister, Cô Ba, that he had no choice but to disown all of us, including his own wife and children. It was so horrible that even Maryann did not want us to know about it. She was given the choice of continuing to have contact with us and be disowned by her parents, or to stop all communication with us and they would pretend this subject never came up. I don’t blame her for the choice she made. 

My mom and maternal aunt in San Jose consoled me and my sisters that we should forget about our father once and for all, and that the cold temperature in Canada had changed the character of our father’s true tropical heart. They advised that we should consider him dead. My therapist, who also happened to be Vietnamese, asked me what I expected when I went to see my father? Did I really think he would apologize to me and my sisters? Did I really think a Vietnamese father would apologize to his children? Not in a million years she said. She could not help me decide whether or not I should get rid of all the letters or hold on to them since I dared not look through them one more time. I did not want an apology. It was too late for that. I wanted closure, and I guess in a way, I did get some messy form of closure. 

I looked up the word: Canada in Wikipedia.com and it says it comes from an Iroquoian word “Kanata” which means: village or settlement. As a displaced people, the Vietnamese-refugee boat people, we are eventually responsible for choosing our own new villages and resettlements. But even in the furthest of new villages and new resettlements, is our past really ever far from our present and future?

We never heard from Maryann again until late November 2015 when she invited us to attend our father’s funeral in Vancouver Canada. It was an early solemn and cold December day when my two sisters and I returned to Vancouver one last time to pay our last respect to our father. He looked at peace even though Maryann did not honor his wish not to have a funeral, let alone having his children from the previous marriage come for the final viewing. He was lying in stillness, beyond the reach of earthly attachments and associations of hate, love, lies, past, present and future. I thought I would feel much more anger, jealousy, resentment, self-pity, sadness, sorrow when I came face to face with my father’s widow, my half siblings, Maryann and Randy for the very first time. But I felt nothing! I did cry a little, although, I am still unsure about the meaning of those tears. I supposed I did feel bad for Maryann and her family.  After all they had known him and shared this earth with him for the last 35 years. I could not compete with that. I did not want to compete with that. 

Peering one last time into the distant memory of war and the immediate years that followed, I resolved to let go of the final remaining fragile thread that bound me to my father throughout the years. What now remains is but a biological imprint of our shared DNAs. It was the very last time I had to do so, but this time without grief, without regrets, without the need for answers, without wishful thinking.