Chapter 2 Conversations with my Father

I was not born a murderer.

My earliest memory of anger and shame goes back to when I was eight years old. It was a hot summer in Provo, Utah. The snow melt had filled the ditches with fresh stream water. My younger brother and I would build rafts out of Popsicle sticks and float our GI Joe action figures down imaginary river rapids. We chased the rafts downstream in flip-flops and shorts, icy water almost up to our knees. It was a welcome relief from the hot sun beating down on us. 

Some older kids and what looked like adults were on a fence at the top of the ditch. They began throwing rocks down at us, and one of them yelled, “Go back to your country!” This was not the first time we were teased for our race. This day, though, we felt brave because the fence was high and they seemed so far away. 

“Come and make us!” we yelled back. 

They jumped the fence and made their way down one side of the ditch. We grabbed our action figures and homemade rafts and clambered up the other side. The adults at the fence began cheering, and we ran as fast as possible. Somewhere along the way, I dropped my action figures and stopped to pick them up. My younger brother turned to face our aggressors, and they pushed him to the ground. He tried to fight back until one of the older kids punched him in the face, and he rolled over. They held his face to the ground and shoved dirt in his mouth. In between choking and crying, he looked up at me for help. 

I stood in fear and did nothing. 

We both walked home crying, our faces covered in dust, broken up by the tracks of our tears. When my father found out what happened, he looked at me in his quiet way. “How could you let this happen to your younger brother? You are supposed to protect your family.” I felt ashamed that I had let my family down. 

Later that summer, I was in the sandbox at my elementary school with a couple of other kids playing. I had taken off my shoes to play in the sand and tied them around the handlebars on my bike. Another kid with blond curly locks began playing with us, too. Somewhere during our back-and-forth banter as children, he stated that my family ate grasshoppers. I went into a rage and punched and kicked him. He fought back, and I fell down with him straddling me. He began to choke me until I hooked both my feet around his face and chest and forced him backward. His head hit one of the metal poles of the swings, and he fell over and began to cry. 

I did not stop there. There was so much humiliation I felt after the incident with my brother. My father never said anything about it again, which made things worse in my mind. I already promised myself the next time somebody insulted my family, I would fight them to the end. Whatever the end was. 

The kid had curled up outside the sandbox. I sat on top of him, grabbed his hair, and slammed his head and face into the concrete. The more he screamed, the harder I tugged and shoved his face into the ground. Tufts of his hair came loose in my hands and I gripped more of it. I felt an exhilarating sense of power as I was doing it and did not want to let go. The other kids in the sandbox stood in silence. When I heard the voice of an adult, I got up and rode away. As I pedaled my bike, one of the shoes I had tied on the handlebars came off, and I turned back for it. I knew my father would yell at me for losing my shoe. That is when the adult grabbed me. 

“Look at what you have done to my son!” he screamed at me. 

His son’s face was already swelling up, and there was blood over his nose and mouth. I was terrified and began to cry. The kid’s long yellow locks were now stuck and matted to his head. “Why did you do this?” the dad asked. 

“Because he said we eat grasshoppers.” I wept. 

The dad turned to his son. “Did you say this?” 

The son nodded. The dad sat us down and began to share that his family grew up so poor they gathered dandelions to eat as kids. He turned to his son and stated that he should never say anything about another family. 

I wish all my experiences with ignorance, bigotry, and racism ended with such valuable learning lessons as this. At school, we were the only Vietnamese family for quite a while. Everywhere we went it seemed people would look at us, point, laugh, and whisper. Our house was decorated with toilet paper a few times. Religion played such a great social factor in Utah, and we were subtly, but not maliciously, treated as outsiders. Utah is predominantly Mormon, whereas my family is Roman Catholic. 

Of course, I have come to understand these were mostly isolated incidents, and the vast majority of people in Utah are kind and warm-hearted. But these events led me to believe there was something different about me and my family, that we were outcasts. I only wished we could be like everyone else. 

Luckily, I had my father to turn to during these times of doubt. I could always go to him and ask him questions and he had all the answers. He made everything all right. He was a kind and gentle man. His first job in our new country was as a custodian during the graveyard shift at the local supermarket. With savings from his first few paychecks, he bought himself a bike so he would not have to walk to work. As a young boy growing up, my father was my hero, and I believed he was invincible. I recall numerous stories of how he had attended the Vietnamese Military Academy. There were many old black-and-white photographs of him in his officer’s uniform. My fondest memories of my father were his morning car rides to neighboring states. Early one Saturday morning before dawn, I happened to wake up and see my father getting dressed. He was pulling on his familiar green military jacket that he wore everywhere. 

“Where you going, Dad?” 

“I have some business to take care of this morning,” he whispered. He straightened his jacket, then looked down at me. “Do you want to go?” 

I nodded. 

We left early when it was still pitch black. While on the highway, I witnessed the early light of morning, when the darkness began to lighten up with faint hues of purple. I began to make out the familiar silhouette of the Rocky Mountains. I did not blink, and I did not breathe. The moment was magical, and I got to experience this beauty in the company of my father. We both stayed quiet and soaked it all in. 

From that day forth, on our trips, I always tried to not blink when the sun was rising so I could catch the exact moment when the first rays of light would separate from the darkness. Then I would close my eyes and sleep until we got to wherever we were going that morning. My father drove to neighboring states to help fill out the DMV or Social Security paperwork for other Vietnamese families. 

This seemed boring, and I did not understand why my father would drive all that way to do paperwork for people he did not even know, especially since he was not getting paid for it. He told me something about helping people in the community, but I could not grasp the significance of what he was teaching me at the time. What I did enjoy was his company, though, just the two of us. These early morning business trips of his would take all day, and we would get home late in the evening, tired and hungry. Of course, my mother would have something hot and delicious waiting for us on the dinner table. Our family would all eat together. It became a ritual that I accompanied my father on these business trips of his on the weekends to help out our community. These trips with my father are the strongest memories I have of feeling loved and safe as a child. 

On these road trips, I also had all my life’s questions answered. One of my biggest dilemmas growing up was why my peers were so much bigger than I was. In my elementary years, I was smaller than kids my age because I was born premature. I asked my father about it. He had all the answers. My father explained that I was actually blessed because being smaller meant that my brain would not have to pump as much blood throughout my body. This in turn would make me smarter than my peers. 

Problem solved. 

During the ’80s, martial arts shows were popular on television. Bruce Lee was one of my heroes. One day, I noticed that the actors had a funny way of talking. The majority of martial arts movies were dubbed, but as a young child, I did not understand that. All I knew was the mouths of the actors moved weird when they spoke. I was horrified as I realized that I must have looked like that when I talked! This explained why kids made fun of me at school. I got in front of the mirror after the kung fu show and began mouthing out words. 

“Hello. How are you? What are you doing?” I said to myself, paying particular attention to how my mouth moved. I still could not figure out this mystery until I brought it up with my father on an early morning ride. My father laughed in that gentle way of his and explained to me how English words were dubbed. He told me the reason the kids made fun of me at school was because they did not understand us and that I should learn to be proud of our culture. This in my mind did not exactly add up because I wanted to be normal like the other kids, but I accepted it because my father knew everything.  

My father was involved in political activism for displaced Vietnamese communities. Sometime in the ’80s, he founded the Vietnamese Refugee Association. They coordinated many of our cultural celebrations in which Vietnamese communities throughout the neighboring states would come together to celebrate. My father was constantly on the local television newscasts and in the newspapers, which only made him more superhuman in my eyes. Because of his political connections, we soon had politicians at our house for dinner several times a week. These politicians told me that when I grew up, I should attend the United States Military Academy at West Point so I could be like my father. These politicians encouraged me, from a young age, to be the first Vietnamese American to enter the academy. This was perfect because I wanted to be just like who I thought was the most extraordinary person in my life—my father.

My mother, on the other hand, is a stoic woman. There always seemed to be an emotional disconnection between us. Compared with families in my neighborhood and on television shows, my mother always seemed unhappy. Her words usually felt harsh, although they were not unkind or demeaning in any way. She constantly stressed the importance of attaining an education but seemed to dismiss our needs to be children and go outside and play. My mother placed tremendous importance on our family image and reputation. Everything was about what other families might think about us. I was expected to get good grades, attend Mass, and be a good kid. It never seemed I could measure up to her standards. 

My mother did express her love, though, through cooking. She is an amazing cook. She has an amusing habit of standing and watching the family eat, preening with a sense of satisfaction while everyone wolfs down her food. She never said she loved me, but I do remember feeling loved whenever I sat down to eat one of her delicious meals. 

My younger brother was my best friend. Being only a year and some odd months apart, we were constant companions. According to family lore, my brother was always bigger because he was born in America, while I was born premature in Vietnam. But our culture elevated me above him because I was the firstborn child. Therefore, not only did I have a bigger companion to accompany me wherever I went, but I also had somebody who would listen to whatever I commanded. This family dynamic instilled in me a lot of the entitlement and arrogance issues I struggle with to this day. At the time, though, I just thought it was normal for me to tell my brother what to do. Most of the time, the commands came in the form of me telling him to catch bugs and hold them up close so I could examine them. My brother was fearless. He would grab bumblebees, caterpillars with lethal-looking spikes on them, or whatever other insects seemed to catch my attention that day. We would cut orange wedges and shove them into our mouths as mouth guards and slugged out fight scenes from the movie Rocky. We also loved football and endlessly played against each other in the living room. I would represent the Dallas Cowboys, and his team was the Washington Redskins.  

Now, if my younger brother was my foot soldier, our youngest sister was our personal slave. She happened to be born last into a family of two older brothers who had to exercise their sense of power. She was at the bottom of the pecking order. We ordered her to grab frozen chocolate Charleston Chew bars from the freezer when we were engrossed in our Atari video games. She was expected to refresh us with ice-cold Popsicles when we came back from battle in the backyard. We called her from our room while she was playing with her stuffed animals to hand her empty cereal bowls to put in the sink. My father took a picture that perfectly summed up our childhood. In it, my brother and I have our arms around our baby sister and smiling, while she is crying and sitting on the toilet. Even in her most intimate moments, we terrorized her. 

During this time, my father was diagnosed with leukemia and hospitalized. Up to this point in my life, everything at home still seemed all right because I could always turn to my father if something went wrong. But to hear that my father had cancer and might die scared me. He was the foundation of our family and the center of my universe. Of course, I did not believe that my father could ever actually die, but for him to even get sick was quite frightening. If something were to ever happen to him, whom could I turn to for my life’s questions? How could we ever catch the first sunrise again on our trips? 

My father worked at the coal mines in a neighboring city when a tunnel collapsed. It was all over the news. He escaped unscathed; some rocks had fallen on his shoulder, but he went back to work within the week. Then, many of his coworkers were also diagnosed with cancer. There was some type of class action lawsuit against the government, alleging a connection between the diagnoses and underground nuclear testing. The lawsuit was later dismissed, but that was one of the reasons given for how my father might have developed leukemia. Five years later, he died.

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