Mr. Phuoc then stands up and introduces the wife of the pilot in command of the rescue helicopter, Mi-8, that crashed searching for my mother. Her name is Ms. Lan. She stands up quickly and rushes toward the front of the room. Short and feminine, with resolute features, she hugs my mother, who, nearly twice her height, embraces her like a child. Ms. Lan remains standing, looking at my mother, as she describes to the journalists the longest weeks of her life. It took a month before her husband’s body was found in the jungle. “It felt like a year,” she says, her face reddening, tears running down her cheeks. She was twenty-six years old at the time and five months into her first pregnancy. My mother’s hand rises to her mouth in horror.
Three more women come forward: the widows of the pilot, the copilot, and the technician on flight VN 474. They look at her with care and also a kind of eagerness. Later they tell me that seeing her and hearing her recollection of the crash brings them closer to their loved ones in their last moments of life.
The wife of the pilot, Ms. Thuy, relates, “Anytime there’s a plane crash, we can feel the pain of the victims’ families. They must be as lost as we were twenty-two years ago.”
Next, journalists line up to interview my mother. A young reporter introduces herself to me and says, “I am amazed by your mom. She was so brave—eight days in the jungle? I wish—I think we all wish—we could be as strong as your mother was.”
This is strange. To see my mother accessible to many, to see those same lessons I take for granted affect so many people. I suddenly see my mother as 3-D, as separate from myself, separate from the person who raised me, put me in bed at night, and scolded me for my manners. I see her as the survivor of an airplane crash, the woman who not only struggled for eight days in the jungle to stay alive but also integrated it as a positive experience.
I know my mother’s story inside out. It’s my “party story,” the story I tell people when I am asked for a fun fact. Then editing the manuscript of Turbulence the summer before my junior year acquainted me deeply with it. Yet that’s all it was for me at the time: a story. Even as I read my mother’s own words describing her survival, it seemed as if they described a different person. Moreover, she has the habit of playing down her ordeal.
Now it is real to me. It becomes clear how she has internalized her misfortune but hasn’t let it take over her life. She uses what she learns but isn’t overcome by it. When I am with her in a crowded subway without water, I see her panic, I see the claustrophobia, the phobia of being without water settle in. I see the thoughts flit with panicky minors across her eyes. But then as I keep watching, I see her recognize the fear, tell me the fear, sit still with it, let it be, and overcome it. She doesn’t blame the accident or whine; she remembers and goes on. I now understand how those lessons influenced my upbringing. “You can’t control what happens to you,” she would tell me when things went awry, “but you can control your reaction.”
Now, in Vietnam, seeing readers and reporters line up to meet her, seeing the awe in their eyes, it all comes together. My mother makes them feel empowered when she speaks of her survival and when she tells them they have that same ability within themselves.
The Flight
The next part of our journey is a trip to Nha Trang, to the base of O Kha Mountain. We are picked up in the lobby at five a.m. the following day. It appears First News has tried to replicate the journey of 1992 as much as possible, for they have booked the exact same Vietnam Airlines flight to Nha Trang as that fateful one nearly twenty-two years ago.
The cameras are on us from the moment our car arrives at the airport, where the widows of the two pilots greet us; they are coming with us to O Kha. Our seats are in the second row on the left of the non–Yak-40 plane, exactly where my mother and Pasje sat twenty-two years ago. But now I sit beside her, not Pasje. Through the window I can see the terrain she flew over—and into.
“Are you afraid?” I ask tentatively.
“No,” she responds firmly. “Now I trust.” Then she thinks for a moment and adds, kissing me, “And you are here.” She always says that fear rests largely on trust.
When we get off the plane, she communicates her memories calmly, almost casually pointing out the spot on the tarmac where she lay on a stretcher. As usual, she has an uncanny ability to make light of things. She compliments a woman’s leather jacket as she usually would, normalizing the situation.
Mr. Tan, the Vietnam Airlines official who climbed the mountain with her, is waiting for us. My mother exclaims in delight when she sees him, and the two catch up excitedly. It’s strange to see them interact; I have heard and read much about Mr. Tan but have never fully understood the extent to which they relate to each other. I feel like an outsider.
After passing another wall of photographers, we see a big, blue tour van waiting for us. It has 192 HOURS and my mother’s name written across both sides. Mr. Tan, my mother, and I sit in the first row, and the rest of our crew—the interpreter, An Dien; the two widows; and various photographers and journalists—fill in the rows behind us.
I look out the window in disbelief as we enter the mountains in the customized van. We are in the very mountain range where my mother crashed! The place of “fortune and misfortune,” as she calls it. A distant world I have previously only glimpsed through the pages of Turbulence.
During the car ride the usual speculation about the details of my mother’s rescue come up. An Dien tells us in a hushed, excited voice the rumors he has heard that the head of the police was seconds away from shooting her after she was found. Maybe the pressure of a half-dead, white foreigner was more than they could handle after all? We are intrigued, but as with most rumors, my mother shakes it off. How much can you really know for sure?
We stop to have a snack in a restaurant, where we are met with a great surprise: The owner of establishment turns out to be one of my mother’s seven rescuers! His name is Ho Trong Nhung; he is sixty-four years old and slim, with thinning gray hair. My mother greets him joyfully, and he smiles back at her, remembering. An Dien asks him if he would share his side of the story.
Ho Trong Nhung scrunches up his face, remembering the horrible smell of the bodies—a smell that, so many years later, has stayed with him. He recalls the persistent leeches on my mother’s body. He is a little shy for cameras but tells his story strongly and confidently: How he carried her down for five hours. How they fed her only rice water, no rice. How she begged for a smoke, which he laughingly imitates, putting two fingers to his lips. He remembers how my mother waved at them, how he initially mistook her for a monkey. First a ghost, now a monkey? Nice, Mother . . . charming.
The Orange Man
The orange man is the definite climax in my party story. My mother has always spoken about him with tenderness and enthusiasm. In a way, he gave her life, and in turn gave life to my brother and me. Meeting him is also the anticipated climax of our trip, the part I am most looking forward to. We follow An Dien down a dirt path into breathtaking scenery. As if I have a breath to take! My heart is pounding at the prospect of meeting the man I have heard so much about. Low, green mountains provide the idyllic backdrop for endless short yellow-green grass with sparse trees and a few cattle grazing calmly.
There he is. A slim man in green, high-waisted trousers and a tucked-in pale yellow shirt standing beneath a tree. Cao Van Hanh. The moment my mother sees him, she drops her bag and runs toward him. As they embrace, she seems like a giant in comparison. They join hands and look into each other’s eyes. All he can see is her, and all she can see is him. They don’t notice the swarm of cameras that surge out of the bushes and trees behind them, all trying to capture the moment.
I step forward. The moment Cao and I make eye contact, the clicking cameras and the immense heat fade away. I see tears glistening on his cheeks and I am taken aback by the tangible emotion in the air. I reach for his hands, and he lets me hold them. I ask the translator to please thank him on behalf of me and my brother for saving our mother.
• • •
Cao comes with us in the van a short ride to the foot of O Kha. Before us is a large, open space, with a small stream running through it. The widows separate to perform the worship ceremony for their husbands. They hold smoking sticks of incense in their hands as they stand with bowed heads. The mountain is a constant presence over us. I imagine my young mother, alone amid those trees and in the shadow of that mountain. Then I look beside me, where she stands staring at the same spot. I see the scars on her arms and legs that have been familiar to me since I was a toddler.
A few feet away, the orange man is also gazing at O Kha Mountain. Three very different yet deeply connected people thinking the same thoughts.
We walk back to the car together in shared silence.
• • •
At lunch in the community center in To Hap, Cao tells us through An Dien that he was born in Ba Cum Bac village in 1959 and is from the Raglai ethnic group. He was drafted into the army at age fifteen, where he served from ’73 to ’79 as a nurse; he was never involved in the fighting. After he was dispatched from the army, he met his wife in her hometown, To Hap, in 1980, and they married the same year. Together they have five children and two grandchildren.
He seems to recall the day he found my mother clearly. The morning of the plane crash, he was having breakfast with his family at home; it was raining. Suddenly, he heard a big explosion but didn’t know what it was. He was told the next day that it was a civilian crash and was mobilized by the military to look for the wreckage. He just kept looking until he found it. He describes how the paths were much rougher in 1992, and much denser, how deforestation has changed the landscape. It is almost a different mountain now. As he speaks, I note the sincerity in his eyes, the sharp, defined bone structure of his cheeks, and the energy that makes him almost like a little boy, while his face shows the strain of his sixty-five years. Then, he shocks us with the news that he had been the head of the police at the time, and in charge of the rescue mission. Wait!? Didn’t An Dien tell us it was the head of the police who had wanted to shoot my mother in the first place? That does not fit our heroic image of him at all! Was our hero also crying because he had luckily changed his mind?
An American and a Vietnamese Daughter
Back at Ho Chi Minh City Airport, more photographers and selfie requests await us. A small-framed, quiet-looking girl with glasses approaches me and in perfect English introduces herself as Ms. Lan’s daughter, Bao. She is able to translate some thoughts that perhaps her mother feels more comfortable translating through her daughter than through An Dien. “My mom is truly happy that your mom survived. She does not have any hard feelings toward her. My mom is grateful to your mom, and feels a mutual understanding as a fellow widow.” Ms. Lan stands beside Bao as she speaks, enthusiastically nodding her head. “I was still in my mother’s womb when my dad died,” Bao shares. “I never met him.”
Then Bao turns and hands me a large frame. It is a hand-embroidered screen with a clock skillfully incorporated into it, delicate little stitches indicating each hour. On the back is written “To Joosje, from Bao.” The embroidery depicts a young girl sitting on the ground and looking thoughtfully into the distance.
“That’s you,” Bao tells me.
I am stunned. I expected Bao to resent me; her father died looking for my mother. Instead, she is open and kind. She has even put thought, care, and a lot of effort into a gift for me.
The American War: C Chi Tunnels
We are given one “vacation day” in Ho Chi Minh City. No interviews, no calls, no signings, no public appearances. Finally! I thought The star needs to rest!
We decide to use this day to take a tour offered by the Hotel Continental of the C Chi tunnels, a vast network of underground tunnels that were used by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War, and their base of operations for the Tt Offensive in 1968. A chance to learn more about the military history that was an irreplaceable part of Vietnam’s history. Coming out of a year of AP US History in school, I have learned in depth about the war between the United States and Vietnam. The “Vietnam War” as I had been used to hearing in class, but the “American War” to the Vietnamese, as our guide referred to it.
The morning of our free day we awake early to meet our guide in the lobby promptly at seven thirty. She is a young, small-framed woman, both a student and, as she excitedly tells us, an entrepreneur who created an antimosquito mixture. Talking with her is easy during our ride to the tunnels, and we quickly grow to like her.
Throughout the tour, she constantly refers to “the enemy.” Not the Americans, only the enemy. Having grown up in the United States, I feel a partial responsibility for the destruction and ignorance it released upon this country. Yet I can still hear and see in my head the American veterans of this war, the war of two sides, like any war. I see and hear them say, “I am a veteran of the Vietnam War,” with pleading eyes. I see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial before me, from a class trip to DC in eighth grade. I see the 58,307 names inscribed upon it. The enemy. Our guide proudly describes the array of devices displayed from wartime—these traps were used to trip the enemy, to make them fall, capture them, puncture them, spear them in their “big fat bellies.” I think of young American boys in a country whose culture could not be further from their own, boys who had no idea what they were drafted into.
We walk through the forest, largely unchanged since the war. My mother even comments on the similarity of the light coming through the trees to her jungle. Suddenly, guns go off in the distance. It makes me shiver. A mock shooting field near the site of the tunnels for gun aficionados where they can practice shooting targets in a realistic environment. Call of Duty in action. Here, of all places! But we can’t see that. All we see is nature in all directions. The fact that civilization is quite nearby completely exits the mind, and the sounds of those bullets fills and overcrowds the air. It gives me a small taste of what it must have been like during that brutal war. How must the soldiers have felt as they trampled through these woods? The Americans weighed down with equipment, terrified and utterly unsure of the way, and the Vietnamese, more familiar with the terrain but horrified by the American equipment and attitude? Both charged with the fear of bumping into the enemy.
Then there were the tunnels themselves. Just ten seconds within one is enough to shoot off countless what-if scenarios in my head. Not to mention the claustrophobia.
What if the ceiling collapses? What if water floods? What if I suffocate? What if, what if? It takes my life of hearing my mother protest what-if thinking to calm myself down. What’s more, during the war all those what-ifs that for me are silly, self-indulgent, panic scenarios were actual, real possibilities. The anxiety alone is unimaginable.
Readers’ Questions
The same day we arrive back in Ho Chi Minh City from Nha Trang, we have a meet-and-greet with readers in Fahasa, the biggest bookstore chain in Vietnam. It is raining so hard it seems as if no one will come, but we don’t realize how regular the rain is. Every afternoon, the sky opens up and lays all its woes onto Ho Chi Minh City. It pours with dense, thick drops. Yet the area Fahasa has set up in the front of the store fills up completely; people are standing in the back due to the lack of seating.
The audience is charged with excited energy. The journey to Nha Trang has been a tiring one, yet despite her exhaustion, my mother gives her introductory speech smoothly and with heart. Now it is time for questions.
After satisfying the usual curiosities, a lady from the back raises her hand enthusiastically.
“How do you stop yourself from crying?” she asks.
My mother clearly enjoys this refreshing question and takes a moment to think. “You have to shift your focus,” she answers. “It’s practice, I guess. As a trader on Wall Street, crying was not an option. I learned to choose my moments.”
The lady laughs and contently concludes, “So it is not about not crying, but knowing when to cry.”
“And knowing when to f
ight and when to surrender,” my mother adds, moving the attention to the second half of her book, the part about autism. [Autism is a delicate subject in Vietnam, where disabled children are seen as a punishment for their mothers’ bad karma. Their parents hide them out of shame.]
“Other than being in a plane crash, or being stuck for days, one of my greatest fears was having a child with autism. That fear also came true. Once I learned to accept him, I could see the beauty in him. He became my Buddha, and I celebrate him every day.”
Mr. 601
Pasje’s “Mr. Fix-It-All,” Mr. Hung, has invited us for a drink at the Norfolk Hotel, where Pasje used to live. Both meeting him and seeing the hotel are a first for my mother in almost twenty-two years.
A large group awaits us at a table in the lobby: Mr. Hung and his wife, managers of the hotel, and two lovely women who worked there in 1992. The women recount how kind Pasje was, how he always took the time to speak to those working at the front desk. They tenderly called him Mr. 601, after his room number. The general manager of the hotel offers us more than a drink. “We also invite you both to stay the night in his renovated suite,” he says.
Turbulence Page 24