November 17, 2020
Red, Green, and Blue: America Through Vietnamese-American Eyes
Dreams from the Fatherland My Father Got in the Land of Dreams
“You should really call Mom,” read the text message from my younger brother. It was different than the sports e-mails we usually sent back and forth. Those messages I don’t always respond to. Family messages get immediate attention. It’s all we came to America with, and it’s all we really have after everything is said and done, regardless of how much is said, and what is done.
I am the fourth-born of five sons to two Vietnamese parents. In a Vietnamese household, all of the pressure of parent-caring traditionally falls on the eldest son, because he is the one who has received the most assistance ad is expected to carry on the family plans. For immigrant families, although the former is still true, the latter is often too much to bear in a new land. Because my parents have five of us, they have been able to rely on at least one of us for a durable period of time. Such a dynamic can only be forged with solid communication.
For the last several years, I had spoken to my parents with more regularity than my other siblings. Even with the pandemic reshaping relationships this year, I attempted to maintain communication with them. I usually step away from that in October during election years. Before I was able to send an inquiry, the next message appeared. “Dad is going into surgery for his heart tomorrow. You should really talk to him before he does.”
My father is in his eighties. For an octogenarian in America, this is more common than we’re comfortable with. However, as an Asian-American, more specifically Vietnamese-American, instances of heart disease are far lower. I wondered if it was the results of the election that had such an adverse effect on him. Thinking about Trump could give many people heart attacks.
The Republican Party before Trump was easier to understand. Republicans support the military, not make snide remarks about the country’s veterans or dishonor the fallen. Republicans rally behind the second amendment, but rarely have ever encouraged the use of firearms especially against American citizens. Because Republicans are more open about their religion, they are often aligned with anti-abortion ideals, and recently railing frighteningly even against contraception. Perhaps the most important image which seems to hold better than anything about Republicans is how successful they are. Since many of the college educated white suburban voters were dispassionate about their candidate, it was the poor whites that came out in record numbers to support the self-promoting Donald Jenius Trump.
My parents are avid Trump supporters. After the 2016 elections, my father had facetimed me, a shit-eating grin on his face. I barely had the decency as a son to speak to him. When that call ended, we didn’t talk again for weeks. I was hoping to avoid repeating it.
* * *
It is American to have political spats within the family. This year has put a strain on many, doubly tested with the coronavirus pandemic. For the first several years we lived in America though, our family was more or less free of politics. Growing up, I hadn’t known the difference between the Democratic or Republican parties. I had suspected my parents hadn’t either.
As first generation immigrants, my parents did their best to blend in and taught us to do the same. As a 1.5 generation immigrant, I had spent most of my childhood trying to become like everyone else, without a clear memory of where I and my parents had come from. There was no time for either of us to fiddle in political discussions. Times were tough and I and my siblings were raised in poverty, but we were together, something we had always reminded each other when we left, promising to come back, only to leave again, to promise to nonetheless return.
Although those excursions were expected occurrences, much of the intermittent absences were the results of the dreams my father had for us when he had decided to emigrate from his fatherland, from Vietnam, a dream of improving the family’s social status. Education was paramount to that dream coming to fruition, and as my father understood early on, it was often not found close to home. Education, like a dream, is something that must be chased after, and grasped with both hands, held firmly and tightly, lest its chance slip away. He had the confidence and belief all his prodigal sons would find the way back, even kicking or screaming.
There is a famous phrase from my hometown. “Con gái Bình Định cầm roi đi quyền.” A simple translation would be Women from Binh Dinh carry sticks. The implication is intended to mean that women from Binh Dinh are strong, and are not afraid to whip their men around. It didn’t really matter how old their men were, too. And I and several in my generation found out it didn’t apply just to women, either. I don’t blame my parents for the child abuse. It was how they were raised, how their society raised every child. It was really not that long ago that capital punishment was also common in America. It has also made me the person I am today. However, that doesn’t mean it didn’t cause friction before I had reached adulthood.
It has been well-documented not only in Asian-American households, but in most immigrant households how their social order goes through phases of difficulties. What causes these rifts to occur between the parents and their children are harder to pinpoint. Although several similar patterns arrive, every immigrant demographic is unique to their own set of problems. In my family’s case, an accelerated ability to acclimate to American culture and American values had set us apart. We surrounded ourselves with social patterns, behaviors, and norms. At the same time, our parents were left behind, trying to earn a living often in a back-breaking environment. My father’s first job in the United States was as a church janitor, not much different than other families under similar circumstances.
We weren’t only changing socially, we were changing physically as well. In Vietnam, food was harder to come by than in the United States. Many children grew larger than their parents, whose growth spurts had been stunted because of unavailable nutrition. It only takes two generations of similar growth, or lack of growth, to establish the belief that being diminutive is not a product of the environment they came from, but their own personal genes. I won’t say it is unfounded, but if the following generation can reach the same size as its peers, it’s more difficult to believe stature is primarily tied to DNA alone.
So if you can see what is inside the pot, in this case a change in social mores coupled with growing even larger physical proportions who didn’t understand the source or the efficacy of abuse and refused to be compliant with it for very long, I think it’s easier to see how the disparity between parents and children of an immigrant family start. That isn’t to say it expectedly ends violently. I am half a foot taller than my father, and outweigh him by seventy pounds or so. Yet at the same time, if we are to scrap, I’d bet everything I owned he’d be able to take me out. It wouldn’t even be a contest. To me, my father is still a god.
That is why hearing about him being in the hospital, suffering from a heart attack, the most mortal of inflictions, was so surprising, even shattering my reality somewhat.
* * *
We hadn’t always lived among the Vietnamese diaspora. When my family first moved to America, we had been sponsored by a Catholic Church, and although the churches throughout Orange County, California had sponsored hundreds of Vietnamese immigrants, St. Anselm’s in Garden Grove had been the most generous, the one to sponsor us was thousands of miles to northeast, in a cold part of the Midwest.
None of us had ever seen snow before. We didn’t even know how to dress to protect ourselves from it. When my father worked as a janitor at St. Thomas, a 25 minute bicycle ride which my father made every evening, the temperature dropped at a significant rate as it will around the Great Lakes in winter. He had never worn cotton gloves before as a Xich Lo driver in Vietnam. He had no idea his hands could bleed from the cold alone.
After the community saw all of us in our enfeebled raiment, large quantities of warm donations arrived at our porch, accompanied with the warmest, friendliest smiles I can remember. Even though the clothes were a hodgepodge, gloves with no matching pair, and boots so dirty my mother spent days washing them and drying them for washing and drying again, my brothers and I felt no embarrassment. We wore them proudly, for it was the first time we had ever worn such accoutrements before. To not wear them with pride would be a disgrace to the wonderful people who were thoughtful enough to give them to us in the first place.
That was the impression that stayed with me about Americans, or at least Midwesterners. As a child, I did not know how they felt about immigrants, whether or not they were upset about an immigrant cleaning their church, or his sons attending their private Catholic school free of charge, with no one to cover the expenses but the good Lord himself. As a child, their smiles and friendliness did not make me think they felt anything more than pity and love for the unfortunate, and for that, it made me want to become exactly like them.
I grew up dressing like them, talking like them, even behaving like them. The line between them and me blurred together. When it blurred, it was never how they became me, but always how I became them. Growing up, my brothers and I, with the help of television, thought we had melded seamlessly into the community around us. We had gone to church every Sunday, with my father periodically, my mother never at all. We had even become altar boys. I remember memorizing my prayers so I could enter into my first confession, as if it was a mandatory requirement before I could be forgiven. I also remember failing the test I needed to pass before I could accept my first communion, but still receiving anyway the flavorless white wafer that represented the body of Christ, and taking a small sip of wine from the communal goblet, the wine which represented the blood of Christ, magically transformed by transubstantiation, which was formally a prayer spoken by the priest, and the power of every believer in the pews to make it so. Perhaps in that first venal sin, I had understood that the act of religion was in the failing, and the lying, and the guilt of accepting Grace nonetheless. There was perhaps nothing more American I had ever done at such a tender age. I whispered my All Fathers before bed, repenting against the desire of wanting to fit in with my classmates and my three brothers before me, of accepting Communion before I was granted permission.
One autumn, my mother received a letter from Vietnam. It was the first time I had seen Vietnamese before, with its dots and marks above and under vowels. Even phoneticized, trying to read it out in my childhood made it sound more foreign, pidgin at best. My mother, though, understood every word clearly. Known nowadays as a tiger mom, it was the first time I ever remember seeing her cry. Her father, my grandfather, whom I have no recollection of, had died. It brought out a side of her I had never known. From the pictures we had of him, it was more than likely of old age, when people still died of old age, and not of a heart attack or heart disease. More than likely, it was probably pneumonia. The reality of her loneliness hit her hard, of being away from her fatherland, away from people she could talk to.
The next day, before going to school, my brothers and I wore black patches pinned to our white collared shirts. When my friends asked about it, I told them my grandfather had died. Their countenances were sadder than mine, and very little else was asked. It was as if they had enough common sense not to pry deeper, that whatever I and my family were going through was too personal a matter. Even children understand that silence is golden.
The adults, on the other hand, asked several questions, as if expecting a nine year old to properly represent his whole culture. I failed miserably in trying to do so. By name alone, I knew where I came from. I knew the word, but that was all. I had no idea where to find Vietnam on a map, or what people made there, or what people ate there that could be different than what I ate here, or even why we had to leave there. But like most children, I agreed with most of what the adults said because I knew I could win their approval by doing so. It made me a good boy. A good boy brought out smiles, while a bad boy brought out consternation. It is the primary mechanism that drives us during acclimation, and for most of the Vietnamese that were displaced, still drives them to do the same.
However, one event, or more specifically, one remark did trigger a unique thought within me. Just as I had explained to my friends and classmates, the reason for why my brothers and I had black patches on display, my teacher added a comment that no one else had done. I do not believe she meant it out of spite. After everything the community had given us, it didn’t fit. She told me my grandfather was with God in Heaven. To this day, I believe she meant it out of solace. She couldn’t possibly know that it would send me down a path of divergence.
Heaven is an undefined concept throughout all religions. It is somewhere and is nowhere at the same time. And it is not unique to Christians. Most Vietnamese people will say the most important piece of furniture they possess in their house is not one imported from overseas. It is the ancestral altar where we place a picture of our parents who have passed on, along with traditionally an image of the Buddha, depending on the household. Whether it costs thousands of dollars or tens of dollars to construct, it seems to extend beyond monetary value, much in the same way that transubstantiation occurs, by a prayer, and the belief of those who are praying. We light a stick of incense, hold it high against our foreheads, and make a prayer. When we have finished, we place that stick of incense in front of the picture of our ancestors in a censer, allowing the incense to burn vertically, and its smoke to reach the heavens, so that our prayers may be heard by the dead.
So there I was, making prayers to my grandfather in the morning, and prayers to God before going to bed. At that point, it became clear to me that my family and I were not like everybody else. The identity that was being forged within me was something that was new at the time, a type of fusion that would either stick, or would be pulled one way or the other. To this day, I don’t really know which way it had gone, and wonder if it is even something that is possible to determine in just one generation. It was the beginning of the endless amount of questions I had about myself which others’ answers did little to address.
* * *
At the moment, my parents have a total of eight grandchildren, ranging from the ages of eleven years old to less than eleven months. For the first four, there was no overlap. Then in the last two years, the oldest and the youngest sons had children within a few months of each other. It was the reason my parents had bought a new house. My father
once had a dream that all of his sons’ families would live together under one roof. Though the house is large, it is hardly that accommodating. When we do all get together, it is still plenty of space for all of the grandchildren to run about. The joy and happiness was now spread around in every direction. Not to mention the energy my father and mother now had to exert.
Even though their family tree had clearly grown, only two of their grandchildren lived nearby, the progeny of their oldest son who married later in life than the norm, a trend that appears throughout many of the 1.5 generation. The rest of us come home every chance we have, but with the way 2020 has played out, not nearly as much as we would like to.
The oldest ranking grandchild, even if he is younger than my father’s four granddaughters, since in Vietnamese tradition the child of the oldest will always be the highest-ranked, is with the two of them regularly, seeing them at least once a week. There is nothing happier for Vietnamese grandparents than constantly having their golden child around, the golden child being the first grandson born from the eldest son. And my nephew, even at the young age of two, is more than a handful. A ball of energy hardly describes him. When he was born, he was the largest of all the grandchildren. When I last visited back in 2018, before he could walk, he was virtually the same height as my daughter, who was a two year-old at the time. Like all the grandchildren, and hopefully nothing my mother will take any offense to, he has shown to be particularly fonder of his grandfather than of his grandmother.
Once he did start walking, it required more energy for both of my parents to keep up. Looking back, regardless of whether he was wrong or not, my father always tried to the utmost of his ability to be attentive in our lives, whether it was desired or not. That same approach, energy or not, was continued onward with his grandchildren.
My sister-in-law, who like her husband is a doctor, noticed that my father was having an uncharacteristic and frighteningly clinical style shortness of breath. She called her husband, my oldest brother, and then another of my older brothers, another doctor. It was a very specific conversation, and if you have ever heard the way doctors speak to each other, it is like reading the Proteus chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, all-protein, with no word wasted, completely indecipherable to the average ear. To doctors though, everything is so concise that within those short few moments, the three of them had already formulated a plan of action. The diagnosis from the viewable symptoms that my sister-in-law had been able to catch led my brothers to believe that our father was possibly suffering from arterial atherosclerosis. His blood vessels leading to his heart were obstructed. An angioplasty was quickly decided on.
* * *
I don’t know if my father is a die-hard Trump fan per se, as much as he is a die-hard Republican. Growing up, he and my mother had not shown political inclinations. From where we came from, it was dangerous to express political ideas. That was one of the few statements they had told me as a teenager about the fatherland. Most of the Vietnamese community was like that. That all seemed to change one January day in 1999.
Another Vietnamese immigrant, who had taken on the spirit of small business as many of his peers had done by bootlegging Vietnamese-dubbed videotapes and renting and selling them from his store Hi Tek Video, one of many such shops along the strip malls of Bolsa Ave in Little Saigon, Truong Van Tran hung up two items behind his shop counter. The first was a South Vietnamese flag, a yellow flag with three red stripes stretching across the center, representing a jurisdiction that can no longer be found on the face of this earth except in the dreams of people old enough to remember it. The second was of a countenance widely recognized and used in different forms around the world. It was a portrait of Ho chi Minh, the founding father to the country that is currently recognized as Vietnam. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
I was in my fourth year at UCLA, and the Vietnamese student organizations, VSA and VRAC, before they joined and became VSU, tried to organize a protest alongside the residents of the Little Saigon area. For a month, it made Westwood feel a little more like Berkeley. Rather than just screaming at the Federal building on Wilshire Blvd, they now had something worthwhile to stand for. It was the whole reason student groups existed at universities on the first place.
My parents left messages on my voice mail, detailing what was happening, as if I hadn’t seen it on the news already. It was impossible not to know about it. It surrounded me and paralyzed me, and forced me to answer to my non-Vietnamese friends on behalf of a diaspora that I had never really identified with, because I had always just assumed I was American.
My parents thought they were American, too. As proud Americans, they did the most American thing they could. They protested. We were still in Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon, and although the memory is over forty years old, to them, it acts similarly to post traumatic stress disorder, a recurring nightmare that will never disappear, haunting them for their entire lives. Even escaping over the ocean, they couldn’t get far enough away. Then, someone had decided to reopen all those old wounds and scars, triggering a reaction that would bring all the things so many people tried to forget, to the forefront again. The images are so stark that our parents need us to remember them as well, because before they had flooded the parking lot of the Hi Tek strip mall, and the streets surrounding it, we had certainly put it well behind us.
Some Vietnamese people donned military uniforms, and I didn’t know whether to think that it was disingenuous or not. Those who had served in the SVA, many had discarded their uniforms, boots and all. Not all of them did, but enough had that the stripped uniforms lined the streets leading right up to the Presidential Palace in the center of Saigon, where the communist tanks crashed through its gates, capturing the largest and most prominent flag of the Republic of Vietnam, ending its twenty year existence. No one can blame them for abandoning their posts then. They had found the courage to fill those outfits once again, under no official decree.
I think my parents, seeing that they were now able to gather and protest, had discovered that they were allowed be political as well. There is power in numbers, as well as conformity. This moment was their Kent State, their Woodstock, and their million-man march all rolled into one. At that time, I had no way to understand that. My father had always told me to keep my head down and do my work. If I drew attention to myself, he guaranteed it would never be the kind of attention I thought it would be. Obviously, I rarely listened to his advice, and now he could see why. And it did make me feel it was something to be embarrassed about.
My father would never be embarrassed about it. If anything, that was the moment that changed the rest of his life in America. Understanding that he didn’t have to hide his politics away any longer, and knowing a large group of people had the same feelings he did, he became addicted to it, addicted to the commonality, addicted to the idea of community, and addicted to everyone’s strong anti-communism impression.
I envy my parents for that. Even in their new home in a new land, with their new passports and their newfound political courage, they knew exactly who they are. It was easy for them to turn into Americans, because they knew where they had come from. They were never plagued by the uncertainty and maligned sense of self which has plagued me for a long time.
* * *
An Angioplasty is a common procedure. First, a cardiac catheterization occurs. A thin plastic tube known as the sheath is inserted into an artery. Then the catheter, a long hollow tube, is guided through the sheath and up the blood vessel toward the heart. The fun is yet to begin. The primary purpose of the catheter is simply to get data about a person’s body, especially the healthiness of the person’s blood vessels.
Then the right choice of angioplasty is chosen. The two most popular types are the balloon and the stent. In a balloon angioplasty, a balloon-tipped catheter is inserted into the artery, and led to where the blockage is. Then the balloon is inflated, pushing the artery open to allow more blood flow. In a stent angioplasty, a small scaffold-like tube is directed to where the artery is narrow, and as soon as the stent is in position, the stent expands to the size of the artery and holds it open. The artery then naturally heals over the stent, allowing it to become a new permanent fixture inside the body. At this point, concerns of retrieving it are moot. Like things put into the ocean, the thought of removing it once it is in place isn’t even brought up.
Still, more than a million angioplasties are performed annually in the United States alone, making them the go-to solution to blocked arteries. Often, it is mentioned by the doctor because patients with clogged arteries want a solution to fix them, and the procedures will certainly do that.
There is also the alternative treatment involving medication, diet, and exercise, but many doctors are often uncomfortable with that choice, since the requirement of a whole lifestyle change is often too much of a challenge for the patients who have come to their offices with evidence of arterial disease. Trusting them to change in order to save their lives while a procedure that can be performed in a matter of hours feels far more proactive, and regardless of what Donald Trump says about doctors, they still enter the occupation with the hopes of saving lives. It is important to note that even after given an angioplasty, one’s coronary artery disease is not cured. That still requires a lifestyle change.
In the United States, the average age for an angioplasty is 61 years old, four years prior to the eligibility of Medi-Care. The average cost of one is around $32,000. For those fortunate enough to be covered, then the procedure is a nice option. That doesn’t mean it has no price tag. Trump claimed “premiums for Medicare health plans went up” under President Obama, and the premiums were lowered by 34% under his administration. He was talking about premiums for Medicare Advantage, a private Medicare option most Medicare beneficiaries don’t pay. For those who do pay them, the average national Medicare Advantage monthly premium went up by 46 cents under Barack Obama. In 2019, Medi-Care paid a billion dollars for angioplasties. It saved the lives of several of the elderly. Much of those elderly used their newly given time to both support and vote for Donald Trump. His statement sounded true enough to their ears.
* * *
When the Little Saigon protests had occurred, they had sent mixed messages throughout the Vietnamese community. To many 1.5 and second generation immigrants, the actions taken against Truong Van Tran had meant that it was finally okay to cast off the blanket of political silence. Growing up, we were often told not to draw attention to ourselves, since we were here in this great land only due to the graces of our most generous hosts. There was so much truth in those words that it was foolish not to follow them. After all, regardless of how well we did in the public school systems, many of us would not gain full legal rights of citizens until our own naturalization at the age of eighteen. So no matter how many questions we had about freedom, we knew our parents understood its fleeting nature far better than we did. And when they chose to express the freedom they had gained, we thought the gates had opened for us, too.
In 2000, John McCain was running to be the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. Seeing how the residents of Westminster, California strongly reacted to a picture from the old country, The Vietnam War veteran and US Senator from Arizona couldn’t think of a better spot to gain some noticeable support from some like-minded people.
Unlike the most recent president Donald John Trump, or Jenius as he suggests, his spelling not mine, John McCain actually went to Vietnam when his country called. His plane, an A-4 Skyhawk, went down, and Senator McCain spent five years in a prison in Hanoi. His bravery is beyond the call of duty. It is then understandable for him to hold certain feelings. It is even more remarkable that he can have different feelings in regards to another group with so many similarities. A reporter foolishly asked him on his Straight Talk Express bus how he felt about his Vietnamese captors, to which he honestly replied, “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” Nobody can tell a man who has experienced what he has experienced what he can and cannot say. At the same time, context is important.
It is almost certain that the instance on the bus was not the first time he had muttered the g-word. The internet buzzed with stories about Senator McCain’s choice of diction. As we all know, everything written on the internet is factual. At least, at one time, we could believe much of it was factual. The one thing about the internet many people do not remember is how it is not the internet’s job to discern what is fact and what is not. It never has been. However, there was a time when a whole lot less shit was posted everywhere. And in the year 2000, college students thought they had tapped into an endless supply of gossip, gook-filled gossip.
In the year 2000, Garden Grove Mayor Bao Nguyen had been a student at UCI. He and other Vietnamese-Americans, who have been seedily called gooks before at various times of their lives, something I too have experienced, decided the issue had not been fully explained, and it behooved them to get a little deeper. Personally, I cannot really understand why a word first referring to Koreans and mistakenly used to cast onto Vietnamese has gripped the community the way it does. In a way, it represents how Vietnamese allow others to characterize us, as if the reflection in the mirror changes, and we accept the cracked image it shows in return to be our own. Whatever my feelings, others like Bao Nguyen, wanted something more.
As Senator McCain approached the stage prepared for him in front of the Asian Garden Mall, built by Frank Jao, a Sino-Vietnamese-American, along Bolsa Ave, the busiest street in Little Saigon, groups of young Vietnamese-Americans also took the stage, wearing white T-shirts with the words American Gook written on them in permanent black marker. Before their message in front of their fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins could be heard, they were quickly rushed off the spotlight. They were pushed back by the same family members they had grown up with all the way to the edge of the streets, as if the crowd turned mob cared little if the children of their community were run over by the passing traffic.
Even as Bao Nguyen pleaded his case and to allowed to be heard, speaking in the tongue taught to him by those in the crowd, in words John McCain would never be able to understand, the crowd continued to push them all back, tearing at their shirts, until the police were finally able to make them stop. The message that Bao Nguyen wanted to express, or the message that John McCain wanted to usher, were in no way as clear as the message the older generation had expressed that night. The political freedom which was allowed to be expressed was not a freedom at all. It was a declaration, not of independence as their children had learned, but of loyalty, and the disloyalty, of bất hiếu. That night, the elders of the community made it clear which party they would commit their American lives to, and Republicans have been counting on that vote, regardless of how extreme and unrepresentative their party acts. My father and mother were also there that night to watch John McCain. They also have pledged what seems like an undying fealty to the Party. I wonder if they can tell the difference or not.
* * *
After several more images and scans, we came to understand that an angioplasty was not in the cards for my father. There was too much calcification in his blood vessels to risk it. It wasn’t just one as my brother had initially thought. It turned out to be evident in three arteries. The less invasive option was now off the table. The only option left to most likely save my father’s life was a triple bypass. It is also known by another terrifying name: open heart surgery.
When my father was born in the middle of the twentieth century, there was no coronary bypass surgery, no angioplasty. There weren’t even stress tests for the heart. In the 1880s, a Viennese surgeon by the name of Christian Albert Theodor Billroth had written that, “any surgeon who wishes to preserve the respect of his colleague would never attempt to suture the heart.” Because of Billroth’s stature, he had created the surgery to remove an ulcer that is still being used today, no one dared to even attempt to cross the line he had just drawn. To put things into perspective, for over a hundred years before Billroth had written his ultimatum, European doctors had been very active improving the state of surgery, from performing the first appendectomy to removing a brain tumor, essentially performing brain surgery, not to mention the application of anesthesia. The barber-surgeon Charles Francois-Felix had even famously removed an anal tumor, a fistula de ano, from the Sun King, Louis the XIV, launching surgery into modern times. Yet, removing a pain in the ass is hardly the same as attempting to fix a broken heart, it seems. So heart surgery, stayed off-limits for several decades.
Things began to change once the X-ray was utilized into medicine. Rather than opening up a person’s chest, it offered another way, a far less dangerous way, of taking a peek inside. Then after blood typing was discovered, the combination of the two made returning to heart surgery worthwhile once more. Alexander Fleming had discovered penicillin. And in 1938, Robert Gross performed surgery on the arteries of a young girl. Heart surgery was back on the table, pun fully intended. Things had greatly improved since Billroth had been operating.
In the 1950s, Walton Lillehei began performing open heart surgery to treat congenital heart disease. Of the 45 cases he performed, 29 had been saved. Although not the greatest of odds, without his procedure, all 45 would have met their end. In that respect, he was a +29. By 1967, heart transplants were possible. That didn’t mean it was always successful. In fact, most patients were expected to only survive for a year after the surgery. Still, who wouldn’t be willing to gain that extra year of life? By the 1980s, that year had been extended to almost five, with the assistance of antirejection drugs, and the success rate of the procedure itself went up to 75%. As fast as it was all improving, that 25% chance of mortality increased to 100% to the individuals who did not survive. Probability aside, death is still the end.
Another technique was developed in the late 1960s, a much safer one, was called coronary artery bypass grafting, or CABG for short, pronounced cabbage, which also reduced heart disease. The goal was not to replace the heart itself, but to remove what is preventing blood to enter the heart instead. The idea, though simple, seemed revolutionary at the time. Instead of trying to replace the whole engine, why not just replace a piston? There is less work and maintenance involved. CABG revolutionized heart surgery, and the success rate went through the roof. Not only that, but more than one artery could be grafted. This procedure, unlike its peers and predecessors, had a survival rate of ten or more years, and is the most common surgery conducted in the United States from year to year.
I suppose rather than be terrified of the thought, my father undergoing something developed by an American, performed endlessly on other Americans, and more importantly saving the lives of millions of Americans should be enough to complete the circle of his life. He could literally say they opened him up, and made him into an American.
* * *
My father doesn’t support all the great Americans who served in the Vietnam War. For instance, he was swindled by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth not to support Senator John Kerry, who has done roughly as much for Vietnamese people as Senator John McCain has. The main difference between the two is the letter in front of their names. For my father and mother, John Kerry, a Democrat, is not a hero in the way that John McCain is. My parents weren’t just Americans anymore. They were now Republicans.
It’s one of the reasons they and other Vietnamese-Americans of their generation did not come out for Hillary Clinton when she came to visit in 2016. Introducing her were several prominent Asian-Americans throughout Southern California, such as Olympic medalist Michelle Kwan, Democratic congresswoman Judy Chu, and one of their own, Trung Ta, a Vietnamese-American Democrat, an engineer who ran for the Huntington Beach School Board in 2016 in an attempt to add more diversity to what the Vietnamese community was learning and was not learning. Needless to say, similarly to Hillary Clinton, he had lost.
Senator Clinton’s mistake is the same mistake that every Democrat makes in regards to the Vietnamese diaspora. Democrats are quick to clump Vietnamese-Americans in with other Asian-Americans. In fact, the whole category of Asian-American has always been a misnomer, regardless of how many of us feel it is pertinent enough and worthy enough of a nomenclature to capture our experiences in the United States of America. The reality is, nothing can be farther from the truth. It is also the reason the Latin-American vote in the Southwest was so different than the votes in Texas and the Southeast. Demographics make it easy to compile data and statistics, but did anyone bother wondering if the supposed demographics could be fallible? Not addressing that issue and just assuming groups operate similarly to each other is also a form of racism, a racism from a party doing its best not to portray itself as prejudiced in any way whatsoever. Perhaps the biggest question not being asked is this one, does race even really matter? For my parents, it is more important to be American, than to be Vietnamese- American. It has become central to their identity.
* * *
When we moved to California, the year was 1987. My father’s work at Oldsmobile was winding down. It was a huge shock to him. He thought he had done a fantastic job. He had even broken his leg getting his work done for the company. The scars from the pins are still present above his shinbone. Loyalty was not enough to keep the factory open, and even after we had driven across the country, he still held hope that Oldsmobile would return, and he’d get right back to working there, a la Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld.
We were living in a two-bedroom apartment, the seven of us. I was ten years old and didn’t know then but the apartment didn’t allow for more than four people. That was why my mother allowed for my younger brother and me to go and play all the time. Things were harry at night when my uncle arrived for dinner. With my aunt and cousins there as well, we were suddenly eleven. My mother did all the cooking. Looking back, I don’t know how she did the job she did, and on such a shoestring budget. None of the Republicans she supports could ever be able to understand what she had gone through to put so much food on the table. It was also the reason I had learned to cook years later, so my mother wouldn’t have to worry about me.
After a year in that apartment, a letter finally arrived for my father. I had picked it up, and could read the word Oldsmobile on it. I knew this was what he had been waiting for. By then, I had already acquired new friends and a new life. The thought of going to church again after so much time away frightened me. How many Our Fathers and Hail Mary’s would I have to say before going to bed to make up for such an absence? I was facing my own Stephen Dedalus-like tantrum in regards to religion.
My father had left that letter lying around. I had been happy he wasn’t going to get his job back. After all, we had more family around us now, and there were more children who looked the way I did around town. The weather was nicer and the suburbs of Westminster seemed more bustling with life than the quiet streets of the capital of Michigan did.
Unlike in Michigan, because there were more people like us around, and the spirit St. Anselm’s Episcopal Church had in bringing Vietnamese families to the town was not the same spirit we felt in the Resurrection parish of Lansing. The donations and hand-me-downs I had been happy to receive no longer came. My mother bought my clothes for school at K-mart, and all the kids at school knew it. My shoes were from Payless Shoe Source, and all the kids at school knew that, too. I received free meal lunch tickets at school, as did the other Vietnamese kids. They were poor, too.
Once, my mother told me to go to the Alpha Beta, a supermarket chain from what seemed like days of yore which neighbored our house before the Vietnamese supermarkets opened up, and instead of giving me money to pay for it, she gave me food stamps. That’s right. We were on welfare. Welfare had helped support my family, before President Ronald Reagan and President George Herbert Walker Bush began to take it apart. Whether my parents acknowledge it or not, the democratic policy sustained our family for years before the Republicans they supported did away with it, blaming people exactly like us for abusing it. If there is such a thing as political abuse, then my parents suffered from all the symptoms.
* * *
Although I had been worried, especially with a surgery during a pandemic, my older brother reassured me that he would make sure all the precautions were being adhered to. Although he is the middle son, the third son, he is perhaps the most relied upon in our family. During the Bush presidency, my older brother had gone to Iraq. When he was accepted into Medical School, and there was no way to pay for his education, he did the only thing he could, he joined the military. Like many before and after him, he risked his life for a better chance to be more successful in America. Like both John McCain and John Kerry, he had enlisted with the Navy. For my brother, I also felt it had been a way to prove that he and the rest of my family belonged in this country, and that the value and offering of his life for the country would, in the future, no longer question who we are.
The military paying for an education became a tradition after World War II, a year after the Magnuson Act had passed, which repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which in itself was racist because at the time, all Asians were categorized together as Chinese. The military helping Americans reach their dreams hasn’t been told enough in the last decade or so, as our encounters in the Middle East have left more sad headlines than accomplishments. It’s not uncommon for most of the world to hear news of the American military and decide to run for cover, rather than to sit and discover how many careers began in uniform. For most who have seen the military at first-glance, what they see fall in more in line with the words of Arundhati Roy, compiled together in The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, by David Barsamiam.
As the Booker Prize-winning author for The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy is better known for her political essays. Perhaps that is the part of her that she would rather the world try to remember her by. It seems whenever she is in the news, it is always with a controversial comment alongside her visage. In 2010, she proclaimed that Kashmir had never been an integral part of India, all while Kashmiris were fighting for their right to be a part of the representative government in the world’s largest democracy. As a headline, Roy’s statement sends a terrible message. After sweeping through the muck and understanding the context, something that Roy herself rarely affords to those she herself attacks, in this instance Arundhati Roy was addressing the lack of measures taken by the Indian government to control what was occurring in Kashmir at the time. The anti-Indian sentiment was wholly unknown to most of India before her remarks brought the area into view. As for America, she discusses American foreign diplomacy down to two basic principles, paying off other countries to proceed with American Internationalism, or bombing them for the same desired results.
Looking back, Roy’s sharp words on American foreign policy during the time of the Iraq War, whether by the Decider himself President George Walker Bush or the one to inherit the mess President Barack Hussein Obama, especially to those that were labeled detractors, were not far off the mark, especially in regards to Americans who had been against the invasion of Iraq. As she states in the piece Not Again for The Guardian in September of 2002, “To call someone anti-American, indeed, to be anti-American is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: if you don’t love us, you hate us. If you’re not good, you’re evil. If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.” Now, replace the word terrorist for the word patriot, and you have the grounds for Trumpism.
Called anti-American, it would almost seem that the birth of Trumpism and its familiar tactics could be traced a decade earlier. What if we go deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, or better yet, the foxhole? The same dichotomy of ideas, between non-existence and overwhelming acknowledgement, allowed me to look more closely at where I too had come from, hoping to find the reason as to how we all ended up right here, in a polarized country of the greatest bastion for the hope of democracy around the world.
* * *
On the weekends, my father, my younger brother, and I would seek clients for my father’s new landscaping business. Being a landscaper is a fancy name for being a gardener. The Japanese- Americans had conquered the market, and there was more demand than supply. After The Karate Kid, the art of bonsai was on every Americans’ mind, and the deeper you go into the suburbs, the less Americans can tell exactly which country you are from. Asia is the biggest continent, after all. Its geography wasn’t quite as simple as North America. As an unequal equivalent, I still have difficulty telling Americans and Canadians apart. Just in case, my father used the alias Mr. Le, and his business was able to gather a track.
We had to roll up our flyers, sliding them into the handles on the garage door of houses we passed by. My brother and I would cover one side of a street, my father the other side. One man in his sixties or so, certainly retired, had his garage door opened, and inside was a lot of American war propaganda against the Japanese. Signs and pennants with the words Remember Pearl Harbor across them decorated his walls. Being an immigrant, studying was what we learned to do best, other than agreeing to everything, and I had just learned about World War II. Since American history is always told from one side, I had only learned that side, and I had embraced it as the truth, like any other American boy would have done.
The clarity for me probably disturbed what that older gentleman was seeing, a young Asian boy cheering on the side of the ones that killed so many who looked the same as him. I can still remember his face, and if I had read John Okada’s book No No Boy back then, perhaps I would have told him about the Japanese-Americans who had served alongside his greatest generation, throwing away the identity of their bloodline, of their parents’ fatherland, their own heritage, to be a part of this country, and to be able to have the same freedom to hang flags and pennants or whatever they wanted on their walls without people forcing them out of the homes they had paid for. I hadn’t learned any of that until I went to university.
As a Humanities major, and the only Humanities major in my family, I didn’t have the advantages that other Humanities major’s may have had, with their parents being native English speakers, or being in America for several generations. As I had done before, I soaked up as much as I could.
In my junior year, I took a class on Asian-American literature. To my surprise, the professor was a white woman. Her syllabus contained stories from Maxine Chang Kingston, Kiichi Hozaka, and other Asian writers who emanated the American spirit in their writings. And other than Maxine Chang Kingston, who wrote primarily in English, every other work was translated. Translated works aren’t a problem in academia. I had read Friedrich Nietzsche from the Walter Kaufmann translations, which are considered the gold standard of translations. However, every translation has its shortcoming, and it’s really hard to know what that shortcoming is in respect to the reader investing their time into it. To give an example, a popular song that was released while I was in university was The Bad Touch by the Bloodhound Gang. My roommate from China played the song regularly. As an exchange student, he got fantastic scores in his studies. At the same time, the basic meaning of the song simply flew over his head. To him, why don’t we do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel had nothing to do with sex, but with TV. In his defense, he was in America to learn engineering. As far as his English went, he had earned top scores in his home country, telling him there wasn’t any point to study it further. Some things require a cultural perspective.
I was seeing the same thing in class. I felt my professor was reading the translation far too literally. When I pointed that out office hours, she took a moment to consider what I was saying, and rather than beat me over the brow with intellectualism, she instead agreed that part of what I was saying was relevant. But she didn’t let me off the hook completely. Before I left, she had this comment for me, “Do you ever think a translation will ever be good enough?”
It took me years to understand what her words meant. At first, I thought she was challenging my argument. With time, graduation, and real life experience, I finally understood she was really challenging my basic understanding of humanity. I had questioned her expertise as a professor with my proclamations about the inaccuracies inherent once something attempts to transfer from one culture to another. She had unwittingly done the same to me in regards to my own American identity. In a sense, the two of us were passing at what we thought our whole lives had meant to be about.
* * *
During the war years from 1955 to 1975, even if Vietnam was always more or less in a state of war, if not with America, than France, China, and Cambodia, Vietnam could not be defined any better than by the nature of what Arundhati Roy is saying. While Hanoi and much of the northern part of the country was being bombarded with explosive projectiles, the Republic of Vietnam in the south was pretty much propped up by the flow of American dollars toward the war effort. While strategy certainly passed between the collaboration between the United States military and the ARVN, so too were the huge payouts, payouts that many Vietnamese had never seen so much of before. Those payouts found themselves in the pockets of every aspect of life in the capital streets of Saigon, from the bar owners who welcomed the soldiers that gave their patronage, to the madams of the whorehouses allowing those who would be responsible for a patronage of a different kind. All the while, the bombs failed to burst the hearts of those committed to the message Hanoi had to offer mostly with empty hands, whether that message was truthful or not.
As a student of the American Revolution, I learned about the earliest skirmishes and battles between the American colonists and the British army. The patriots who took up muskets against the King of England were certainly brave men, but the downfall of the British Empire across the Atlantic also came down to lots of things which could be pinned on another less savory emotion, pride, especially in those red uniforms. They had made for clear targets. Marching in a line with those lobster backs on made it easy pickings, rather than searching for them individually, where a single fire would compromise a shooter’s position. In a sense, a similar pride was what doomed America across the Pacific as well.
The more the bombs fell, the higher the death count, the easier the battle seemed. After all, fourteen million tons of explosives fell on Vietnam. They couldn’t have missed that many times, could they? If that was the way the war was perceived, then the following question should have also been asked, how many millions of tons more would it take to win the war? Missiles weren’t winning over any hearts and minds. Nor could they help to understand what was going through the enemy’s. More than any other one thing, and lots of things had been tried, a lack of understanding was most likely what led to how the war concluded.
The first was bringing in a Vietnamese leader who had legitimate claims to the country. Bao Dai, whose name literally means keeper of greatness, was the final emperor to the Nguyen Dynasty, the last ruling family in Vietnam. Of course, by the time he was born, Vietnam was no longer really in control, having been a colony of France since 1802. Yet he was the last line of puppet emperors that France allowed to sit on the throne. And even when the Japanese took over in 1945, Bao Dai continued to sit on his throne, before finally abdicating after the Japanese had surrendered, and Vietnam given back to the French. So it was no mystery as to why he was such an unpopular choice. He was later voted out of power in favor of Ngô Đình Diệm.
The American public back in the land of Manifest Destiny had been told the war was to stop the growth of communism. What better way than to show American citizens that democracy was spreading than by having an election? No matter how my father’s generation may feel about what happened in Vietnam, I doubt he could be very proud of Ngô Đình Diệm’s tactics to win the election. 98.9% were election results impossible not to be conspicuous of.
If the election of 1955 wasn’t bad enough, then how about the election of 1959? In 1959, the political opposition figure, Phan Quang Đán, considered a nationalist anti-communist, was arrested by then President Ngô Đình Diệm, not being allowed to take his seat in government. Everyone was okay with the elections being rigged, so long as the money continued to pour in. Economics was far better, far greater of a moving force, than democracy was. As long as someone was paying for the government, the government would continue to keep itself paid. But they could see the writing on the wall.
* * *
Ten years ago, I had made the decision to return to Vietnam. While many other expatriates had found their way back, even a small mention of the country made for contentious debate within my family. By that point, the protests of Little Saigon seemed like a lifetime ago. The rallying cries from time to time that continued to echo from Bolsa Ave. to the 405 and 22 freeways were always focused on preventing the spread of communism into the United States, a task that for other communities outside of ours probably seemed pointless. An equivalent statement going through the echo chambers at that time was fighting the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here. For a 1.5 generation immigrant like myself to really understand what my parents’ rage was about, there was only one thing I could do, since no one was willing to have a discussion about it over here. I would have to go over there. I wasn’t even the first in my family to return. In fact, before I had returned, the only other one to do so was my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, back in 1991. By anyone’s expectation, no one could have achieved the American dream more than my uncle, an immigrant like my father and mother, who to this day has remained apolitical.
When he returned, Vietnam had re-evaluated the original plans after Saigon fell. The austerity measures, to put them lightly, were failing the country, and the Party knew it. The Đổi Mới Policy, restoration, was instituted in 1986, with hopes of increasing more economic markets throughout the country. They threw in the towel on Lenin’s form of communism. It was too much for the government to bear. My uncle saw it as a way to give his remaining family there a chance at a better life. From his contribution, my mother’s side of the family grew that seed, a real one, not like those pitched by prosperity preachers on Christian TV networks, into a more prosperous way forward. After President Bill Clinton lifted the embargo, their plans began to take root, and their labors bore fruit. From the one house where they all lived in downtown Saigon, the business grew and allowed each of my cousins to have their own homes.
My father’s family, on the other hand, experienced life in the same slow growth pattern that most Vietnamese people experience. When my grandfather passed away, before my father had gotten married, he asked that the house be split amongst his children. My father’s older brother did not comply. It was not so much that my uncle on my father’s side flat out refused. In order to properly give my father the inheritance he was rightfully due, they’d have to sell the house, something nobody wanted. The only sensible thing to do was to pay my father slowly what his part in the house was worth. My father never received any payments. And when my parents had decided to leave the country, his brother felt he was in the clear. Perhaps this was the reason wealth did not fall on that side of the family tree. It served as a warning.
While he was still in country, my father had served in the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam. He had been captured late in the war, before April 30, 1975. The Viet Cong held him in prison for a year. After another following year, I was born. While my mother was busy working, it was my father who stayed at home and took care of the four boys he had at the time. My father has always been very good at child-rearing, as to why his grandchildren love him so much, even if their grandmother is the one always fawning over them.
It wasn’t as it was his choice to stay at home, though. Wherever he went, some Viet Cong agent was aware of it. Places don’t want to hire someone that is marked, for fear of the harassment, or extra harassment, they would receive. Instead, he bought a xich lo, a Vietnamese bicycle taxi, and spent his nights ferrying people back and forth around town.
By today’s standards, there’s hardly a point in taking one of these, other than the sheer thrill of it. In many parts of Japan, jin rickshaws still exist, and although those are also just for Instagram mostly, the men pulling you in these carriages know how to use a smartphone and its many cameras better than its owners. Exquisite areas also exist where only a rickshaw is allowed. In my travels of the fatherland, that was not the case for xich lo. We rode slowly, the driver and me, along heavy traffic, with more people honking their horns than waving at us. Most xich lo drivers feed off tourists’ sympathies for the largely inflated pay outs, spinning yarns about how poor they are and how many of their family members they have to support. The locals never use it. Drivers on motor scooters could take them where they needed to go much faster, and for a fraction of the price. Everywhere around, in panoramic view, there were plenty of signs that the xich lo driver was telling the truth. For me, the cost amounted to the loss of a café sua da and a couple Saigon Reds, the latter being so watered down it wasn’t even worth missing.
It made me think of my father, and the difficulties he must have faced in doing the exact same thing post-war. Even worse, when he did have a fare, the local policeman who watched him would ask him for a cup of coffee. Refusal was suicide. When he had a good night, the Viet Cong would inform others, and they’d go carousing at my father’s expense. Basic needs in those conditions became a dream, hard to fulfill, Sisyphean even. And my father was no exception. All the other men who served their short-lived country, a country born during his adulthood and ending during it, probably went through the same, paying the same dividends, in utter remembrance that they betrayed the country that did not end. It was emasculating.
It wasn’t the only emasculating thing my father had to put up with. With the fighting done, putting culture and tradition back in place was the next step. Upon starting a family, the ancestral altar must be constructed, for the well-being of the family. Upon that ancestral altar should be a picture of one’s ancestors, of one’s parents if they are deceased. However, since he did not have his own house, and my grandmother already had an altar, he had no place to honor his own parents.
I didn’t learn any of this from my father’s mouth. It was my mother’s family who had told me all about it. They could understand his shame while living in the fatherland even if he did not openly express it. And when he came to the house, and told my grandfather, my mother’s father who had passed away while we were in America, that he was leaving, tears streamed endlessly down my grandfather’s face, a face so strong and resistant throughout the years such a sight seemed hardly possible. My grandfather, perhaps was crying at losing his daughter, or perhaps because there was little to keep my father in country, which was clear to everyone. Grandfather, “I understand, khong. Go, and may you find a better world. God Speed.”
* * *
There is nothing more paramount in Vietnamese culture than family, and that family largely depends upon the respect a child has for their parents. The word in Vietnamese is hiểu. Hiểu embodies respect, but also love, understanding, and loyalty. In this one form, the marriage of these concepts come together, sometimes in a violent collusion of expectation. Because it is such a tied expression, it is often very hard to live up to. In occurrences where hiếu has not been appropriately shown, the child is bất hiếu. The accusation is a heavy one, and living in a new country with different social mores, not a well understood one. It is a dishonor no child wishes to bring upon his parents but does, apparently in ways ranging from waywardness to outright shame. For example, leaving home to live in another country, abandoning one’s parents, is bất hiếu. Not voting in the same manner your parents do, is also bất hiếu.
The problem does not clear itself easily by returning to the fatherland, either. Before the word bất hiếu, there is another word a person like me, a person who has lived much of his life away from the eastern side of the Pacific, must accept. That word is Việt kiều. This too is a difficult word to come to grips with, simply because of the politics tied to it. In my community, the word Việt kiều is rarely ever used. Geographically, I feel the word is appropriate, since a diaspora is a community is not located in the country of origin. But to admit to being a Việt kiều is also admitting another potential meaning for the word, that of an expatriate. On the surface, Việt kiều is a category to help with governance. Once a Vietnamese person enters Vietnam, that person has a different recognition than say someone with no Vietnamese heritage. Between the lines, it is a word referring to a person who escaped, who chose to leave the country, and perhaps a person who is not in alignment with the current nation’s politics. Some people could see Việt kiều to mean bất hiếu on a national level. The disloyalty is hinted at.
I had left when I was two years old. Like the Dreamers of DACA, I had no choice in the matter. My father, like President George W. Bush who he supported, had been the decider. Fortunately, Vietnam does not convict sons for the sins of their fathers. The real test for my father was whether or not Vietnam was still willing to convict him for his own sins.
* * *
My father survived his triple bypass surgery. People who do so are glad to be given a new lease on life, as it is often called, but it comes with a price. After such a procedure, many are forced to accept the grim reality of their own mortality, amongst other realities. Some things are easier to come by than others. It’s usually how relationships start to mend in America.
My father, for one, has accepted that he and I will be on opposite sides of the political spectrum. At first he had claimed it was because I didn’t understand what it meant to be Vietnamese. It turned out my father really didn’t understand what it meant to be American. Having a difference of opinion is a right this country allows which others may not. For example, section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, the lèse majesté law, can convict you for dishonoring the royal family. America has no such rule for presidents, sitting or past, regardless of what the once impeached and soon to be ex-president may feel. In the last several years, I have refused to engage my father in his political baits, knowing full well it would not get us anywhere. It doesn’t mean I don’t question the zealous nature he and my mother share for the Republican Party, though.
In 2002, my father visited the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum with a friend of his back. Ronald Reagan was the American president when we first landed in the beautiful country in 1980. That is the Vietnamese word for America, Mỹ. It is the land of dreams, the land of riches, the land of TV, so how apropos that an actor would be our first president? As a working father, he rarely allowed himself a day off. The only graduation he had gone to his first son’s, from medical school, largely because I was attending the same university at the time, and it was my job to get both my parents there. He took no pictures, maybe because he felt I would take enough, although it’s debatable, since he had never taken pictures before. With Ronald Reagan, it was as if he was a spy, and his mission was to capture the library and museum from every possible dimension. The smile plastered across his face in every one of those photos was an American smile, broad and proud, taking up most of the area on his countenance. It was larger than the smiles he offered in our family photos at home. My father even bought a cheap replica of the Air Force Once President Reagan had used, although cheap is hardly the right word. It was north of forty dollars. It sits atop the chest at home with all of our other family heirlooms, as if it was the most valuable piece there.
Donald Trump is the second TV star to be voted into the Oval Office. Other than that, few other comparisons exist between him and Ronald Reagan. He is often said to be a moral decision for Republicans. Did my father question his own morals before voting for the man? I doubt it. How different could Donald Trump be to John McCain or George Bush, 41 and 43, or his beloved Ronald Reagan? My father followed them to a T, or more truthfully, to an R.
Because of how powerful that image of success is inside my father’s mind, I could not even broach his line of thinking in terms of how Trump has put so many Vietnamese lives in America at risk, by reinterpreting a 2008 agreement with The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, expanding the reach of the people the country would be allowed to export. This includes those who have qualified for permanent residency, along with their children, a group my family should be able to identify more strongly with.
Strangely enough, it was the red and yellow figures that wanted to keep us here. Hanoi found disbelief in the new interpretations. According to then-US Ambassador Ted Osius, when the Trump administration suggested it would deny port courtesies, a type of VIP privilege, to then-Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc. Osius recalled the reply being along the lines of, “Well that’s easy. Then we won’t come.” They hadn’t seen it as a problem, Vietnamese people looking for success, and wanting to stay in America to find it. Hanoi finally agreed, mainly to avoid angering Trump, and avoiding the sanctions Cambodia and Laos have faced. It was the person my father voted for that was trying to deport Vietnamese people.
The Trump administration, shown in red on 2016 electoral maps, had been busy. As of Oct. 15, 2018, 28 Vietnamese immigrants in the pre-1995 category remained in custody; four had been in detention for over 90 days. And according to ICE reports, the number of Vietnamese deported has increased from 35 in 2016 to 71 in 2017 and to 122 in 2018. Suddenly, the return to a state of communism, or at least to the terror of the memory communism still holds in their memory, was very much real. My family, having been naturalized decades ago, is presumably safe from Trump’s immigration policy. That was good enough for my father. After all, he is now an American. For many other Vietnamese people, fear was in the air. The Red Scare was true.
* * *
In the early aughts, while my older brother was serving his commitment to the military, the news media got the story of Iraq incredibly wrong. I had sounded the alarm in my house. My father and mother refused to listen, quoting how no major channel was saying the things I was saying. It was true. You couldn’t hear it on ABC, NBC, or CBS. You certainly couldn’t hear it on the 24-hour news cycles of Fox and CNN. I heard it on what would have been considered alternative media at the time, with broadcasters like Amy Goodman on her show Democracy Now, a treasure to independent radio, and Ian Masters on his show Background Briefing, which the LA Weekly called the best program in Los Angeles.
Progressive news media outlets like theirs was also the first place I had heard about the television series “Breaking the Code,” which was based on the life of Dr. Alan Turing. His name has had a resurgence in pop culture recently thanks to Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma, which was the source material for the 2014 hit movie The Imitation Game, starring the incredible Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly, as they let the rest of the world into the machinations happening inside Bletchley Park, the British equivalent of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Although most historians will credit the results of both those secret projects with ending World War II, the resulting outcomes of the two programs could not have been any different. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the J standing for Julius, the father of the atomic bomb, gave us decades of nuclear weapons production. His legacy could not be summed up better than anyone other than himself as he quoted the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds…” Alan Turing’s research essentially gave us the modern computer, as well as the internet, and artificial intelligence. Whether that also destroys the world is yet to be determined. In his lifetime, he is credited for saving it. Alan Turing was the mathematician who is credited with being able to break the German code ENIGMA, essentially winning the war for the Allied forces. Because there have been no successors to Alan Turing since, could that also explain the result of the wars since his death in 1954?
The major news networks were wrong up to the lead up to Iraq. I wanted to know how they could have messed up so badly. Arundhati Roy didn’t feel it was a mistake. She had another word for it, psychosis. “So, unfortunately, we are dealing with psychosis. We are dealing with a psychopathic situation. And all of us, including myself, we can’t do anything but keep being reasonable, keep saying what needs to be said. But that doesn’t seem to help the situation, because, of course, as we know, after Iraq, there’s been Libya, there’s Syria, and the rhetoric of, you know, democracy versus radical Islam. When you look at the countries that were attacked, none of them were Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalist countries. Those ones are supported, financed by the U.S., so there is a real collusion between radical Islam and capitalism. What is going on is really a different kind of battle.”
She seemed to predict it coming, sooner or later. The seeds of doubt planted within me by the botched reporting then would lead to similar seeds of doubt that would be planted by another person, one who was far more gifted at manipulating the thoughts and actions of those listening to him. Because the major news media networks failed on Iraq, it gave Trump the freedom to criticize them repeatedly. And in a way, they failed on Trump too, giving him all the coverage who could and couldn’t ask for. Sooner or later, regardless of how important journalism is, his followers were going to demand something else, something alternative.
Another reason Donald Trump was successful at taking down journalists, as well as consensus reality, is because people have always embraced the absurd. On the same radio channel Amy Goodman and Ian Masters is on, another producer was putting stories about what different renditions of 9/11, based not on journalistic standard, but on what was referred to then as truthism, or how true something so speculative could possibly sound. In allowing such stories in, other truthism stories hit the airwaves, and those behind them allowed precious airtime to promote these ideas. Looking back, those people were smaller, less successful versions of Donald Trump, some from different countries. Massimo Mazzucco, an Italian filmmaker, was allowed to promote his DVDs. One featured a cure for cancer, using baking soda for treatment. There were no inquiries about how that procedure had resulted in a patient’s death, or how the doctor in the film was expelled from the Italian Medical Association, and found guilty of manslaughter. Instead, Masimo Mazzucco was allowed to promote freely without perspective.
Now it’s gone full circle, from the fringe-left to the fringe-right, and the fringes are being listened to far more on that side. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been warning us for several years about the growing possibilities of domestic terrorism, and the need to fight it over here. The right took offense to their claims, aggressively attacking their credibility. The right has several more websites, the media executive of one even once serving as Trump’s White House chief strategist. They also have more radio stations and TV networks. There are even rumors that the ex-president may even create his own media network, no doubt offering more truthism and more absurdity. Why not? The absurd gets people to tune in. The absurd offers the easiest, most illogical, undemocratic, and violent solution. The absurd can offer a type of closure that doesn’t exist in reality. No matter what information is real or fake nowadays, talking and discussing, and moving toward compromised and agreed-upon change leaves many without the terror that they are wishing for. News, like the politics he had relied on, can now be defined as what is popular, not what is real.
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From my days as a university student, I have been an avid fan of James Joyce. No other writer in my opinion has ever captured the full spirit of his people, even if it took his people such a long time to accept how his words were actually their words. It had taken over thirty years, on the fiftieth anniversary of the events in the novel, before Bloomsday became what it is now. Millions of people can be heard uttering metempsychosis all throughout Dublin. To me, that is the word that explains the immigrant experience better than any other.
Although many Vietnamese who have immigrated to the United States may not have heard of the word metempsychosis, we have experienced it for a long time now. Leopold Bloom explained it as the transmigration of the soul. It can be passed from body to body, and I’d like to add, from continent to continent. Immigrants have experienced a form of metempsychosis every day in the United States of America. When we turn on the radio and drive to work, we hear what music is popular and as we get older what topics we should be concerned about. When we turn on the TV, because a picture is worth a thousand words, we see what our houses should look like, with white picket fences and large patches of green, well-groomed grass, as well as how we should try to relate with one another. When we go to the movies, we know what a hero is, and what it means to be heroic. And so we attempt to live up to all of it, even if the scenes are often too rosy, the relationships too brittle, the endless connections too fantastic, we attempt to get as close as we can, even if never reaching. It is how we define not only America, but how we are to behave as Americans.
We have always known the mindset of Americans. It is the most popular mindset in the world. For the first time, a few American outlets are trying to get to know ours. Why, after all Donald Trump has done, do so many Vietnamese-Americans and Cuban-Americans still vote for him? For me, the answer has always been very clear.
The Vietnamese-American population is the fourth largest Asian-American population in the country. It is a key constituency in the future of American politics, and, as I have noted often, usually aligns itself to the Republican Party. In fact, according to PIVOT, the Progressive Vietnamese Organization, Vietnamese-Americans look like they have increased their 2016 support for Donald Trump by 16 points, up to 48%. Matthew Truong, a Vietnamese-American who emigrated at the age of twelve, and who recently lost his bid for US Congress in Northern Virginia, probably says it better than anyone else can. “We escaped from communism, we lost Vietnam to communists, we escaped from it as boat people, we arrived here and rebuilt our lives again. We knew communism, us Vietnamese. And so therefore, we do not want the United States to be a communist country. They know that they don’t want communism. They lived under it; they feel passionate about it and angry. And the way to get the anger out is to vote and we have done that in droves already.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuban-Americans felt the same. It’s good to note that Democrats also have no intention of turning America into a communist country, yet that detail is lost in the noise. It is an aspect of Trumpism that will not easily go away, he who speaks the loudest makes the only truth.
The word communism still conjures up powerful images. Those images often begin with poverty. Those of us who came from those countries came with largely nothing but our families. And even if I disagree with my father, I will be by his side, improved heart and all, as I’m sure is the sentiment of others similar to me. I suggest other Americans do the same.
Regardless of how the Republican Party is silently turning into the Party which forced many of us to leave our fatherlands, it will hard to portray that message. My father may not forgive me for acknowledging that I had been to the Ho chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi, and had read the notes the man had supposedly written on display there. Early in his life, his comments and notes were about the liberation of Vietnam from its rulers. Tracking them chronologically, the messages begin to talk less of Vietnam, and more of the Party as he got older, as if the Party was the only credible thing he could believe. After Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, he may have already believed Vietnam was already free. The conviction he had for the Party being able to govern the country smoothly once the US forces also departed was unwavering. He wasn’t alive to see its disastrous beginnings, and its necessary reboot in 1986. Ho chi Minh only had his ideology to fuel his dreams. By the time his dream became a reality, he had already passed on. On September 2nd, 1969, he had died of heart failure.
* * *
Barack Obama, in his famous star-making keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, had proclaimed there were not two Americas, not a Red America, or a Blue America, but one United States of America. Vietnamese-Americans, for the most part, believe it, that there is not a red America or a blue America. Vietnamese-Americans have always seen the United States of America as one America. A Green America.
If pollsters really want to have a better idea of what Americans around the country look like, may I suggest abandoning the groups Asian-Americans and Latinos. The Vietnamese-Americans and Cuban-Americans probably have more in common with each other than to Japanese- Americans or Mexican-Americans. If they really want to see us better, it needs to start with an idea, rather than an identity. Identity suggests a kind of egalitarian affinity toward equality. When you’ve left communist states with the memories my father had, you wouldn’t really dream to be equal. People dream to be successful. America, Mỹ, the beautiful country, the Land of Dreams, can offer that to you. That is why Democrats lose to Republicans. Many immigrants see money with Republicans, because Republicans convey themselves as the rich. A Democrat is usually the teacher to your child, who is not as rich, and usually is not as well- presented. If you’ve come from poverty, being poor is something you want to really distance yourself away from, at any cost. Democrats, in order to win these constituencies in the future, will need to find a better brand to market themselves as, a flashier, less edifying one. Brands are something Vietnamese-Americans are all about. The right one will make all the difference.
Thanh Thai Nguyen, 2020