Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  Then one of the Viet Minh heard a little child crying somewhere in the darkness, near the side of the house. He searched and found my grandmother and little Lam hiding in the outhouse, and they dragged my grandmother out and demanded the key to the safe. My grandmother took one look at her weeping children lined up for execution in front of the ditch and quickly relented, but by the time she could locate the key, it was too late; one of the Viet Minh had lost patience and fired several bullets into the safe in an attempt to open it. But the bullets not only failed to open it but jammed the mechanism, so the safe could never open again.

  The frustrated Viet Minh shouted more threats, but there was nothing else they could do. They were forced to leave without money, but they did not leave empty-handed; as they departed, they stripped the house of everything they could carry.

  At the peak of the communist uprising, it was no longer safe for my grandfather to even leave his house. The Prince of Bac Lieu would have been a prime target for kidnapping, blackmail, or even assassination as a member of the wealthy bourgeoisie. With my grandfather confined to home, the family business fell apart. To put food on the table, the two wives were forced to become merchants themselves, scavenging whatever items of value they could find and selling them in the town market.

  With both wives out of the house, the children became my mother’s complete responsibility. That was a full-time job, and it left no time for her to continue school. Her formal education hadn’t even begun until she was nine years old, and because of her new responsibilities, it abruptly stopped when she was only thirteen. Whatever opportunities and challenges my mother would face in her life, she would have to face with only an elementary school education.

  Despite all the domestic tensions within her family and the political conflicts that surrounded her, my mother still considered herself fortunate. She had a kind father and a remarkable mother, a woman who had been taken from her family in China as a teenager and forced to play second fiddle to a jealous and vindictive woman. Despite all that, my grandmother remained loving and kind. She was a woman who had known both poverty and wealth; a woman who had experienced the pain of losing a child; a woman who could manage a houseful of children and deal with communist cadres too. My grandmother was a strong woman, and she passed that strength on to her oldest daughter.

  My mother was going to need it.

  Six

  ASSISTED MARRIAGE

  THE TRADITIONAL RELIGION OF SOUTH VIETNAM WAS a strange brew. There were many committed Catholics and devoted Buddhists, but the religion of the average Vietnamese villager was a combination of beliefs and rituals borrowed from Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. In Vietnam this was known as the tam giáo, or “triple religion.” From Buddha they borrowed a pantheon of enlightened beings and an attitude toward suffering that seemed well suited to their experience in war-torn Vietnam; from the Tao they borrowed an ethical system that guided their relationships and daily behavior; and from Confucius they borrowed two practices that virtually define the traditional Asian family: filial piety and ancestor worship.

  Filial piety simply means a child should have a pious and respectful attitude toward his mother and father, but in practice it means a lot more than that. It means a child should be faithfully devoted, unquestioningly obedient, and eternally bound to his parents. And not just his parents; in a traditional Asian family there is a strict hierarchy of authority and respect that is very easy to remember: the older has authority over the younger—forever.

  My younger brothers are twins. Anh and Hon were born minutes apart—first Anh, then Hon. Because Anh is older, though by mere minutes, he enjoys the privilege of addressing his younger brother by his first name: “Hello, Hon.” But Hon is required to address his older brother in a form that shows respect: “Hello, older brother Anh.” Every casual exchange between them reminds them of their order within the family—and that hierarchy never ends. No matter how old they become, Anh will always be older than Hon, so Anh will always have authority, and Hon must always show respect.

  For my father and uncle it meant that no matter how old they became they would always be Grandmother Chung’s children. That gave her the right to discipline them—not only as children but even as grown men—and it was their duty to accept her discipline in complete submission. Which they did.

  When things went wrong in the family business or a decision was made without Grandmother Chung’s approval, the boys were required to kneel in front of her while she disciplined them with a bamboo rod—even when the “boys” were in their forties. It was their duty to quietly accept their discipline without objection or complaint even if the discipline raised welts or drew blood. To a Westerner that practice sounds unjust and even abusive, but to this very day my father and uncle think their mother was a saint. I have never heard them say a single bad thing about her, and if you ask about those disciplinary sessions, they are both quick to say, “We deserved it. She only did what was best for us.”

  If you can comprehend what I just described, then you’re ready to understand ancestor worship. Ancestor worship is almost impossible for Westerners to understand, but once you fully grasp the concept of filial piety, you can see that one is just an extension of the other: you obey your parents when they are young, honor them when they are old, and worship them when they are dead. In the Mekong Delta every village and most large homes had a family shrine that held figurines of heavenly beings and framed images of ancestors long dead but never forgotten. It was the family’s job to light incense and place bowls of fruit in the shrine to honor them and seek their blessing.

  It was my father’s duty to obey his mother regardless of his age—so it should come as no surprise when I tell you that when my father reached his early twenties, my grandmother informed him that he was going to get married.

  She had two reasons for arriving at that decision, neither of which particularly appealed to my father. The first was that he was a playboy, which my father found very fulfilling but my grandmother considered immature and irresponsible. To her way of thinking, a grown man needed to settle down, and a wife was the best way to begin the process.

  Her second reason was that she wanted grandchildren. Her son wasn’t getting any younger, and neither was she. She wanted to hear the pitter-patter of little feet—or maybe the march of tiny minions. She wasn’t just building a business empire; she was growing a family, and she decided it was time to expand. My uncle was already married by that time, and my grandmother decided that now it was my father’s turn.

  Of course, that left the problem of actually finding a wife for him. My father had met several young women who were interested in marriage, especially after he became rich and successful. There were even other business owners who approached my grandmother to suggest that a marriage between her son and their daughters might be beneficial to both of their businesses. But in each case Grandmother Chung considered them either a bad match or a bad merger and rejected all of their proposals.

  My grandmother wanted her son to get married, but she knew he lacked the motivation to find himself a wife and probably lacked the wisdom to pick a good one—which meant one she approved of. The poor man needed help. My father thought he was happy and living the good life; how could you trust a man like that to make a decision for himself?

  That was why my grandmother sent for a matchmaker.

  Arranged marriage is a misleading term. It calls to mind secret alliances struck between mothers and fathers that bind their children from birth to marry someone they neither know nor love. I suppose that happens—at least in fairy tales—but that was not how it worked in Vietnam. My family practiced what might better be called assisted marriage, which is a respected tradition practiced all over the world. Assisted marriage is based on two basic but rarely recognized realities of life: very few young people know what kind of person would be best to marry, and even if they did, they probably couldn’t find them.

  That’s where a matchmaker comes in. Some families
in Vietnam employed the services of a professional matchmaker, an ancient and honorable profession that probably has a parallel in every culture of the world. Choosing a mate is not only a science but an art, and throughout history women have always handled the matchmaking. Women just seem to do matchmaking better, and it’s a foolish man who is searching for a mate and turns to his brother for help.

  The woman my family employed was not a matchmaker by profession; she actually was a caregiver who had once lived with my family. Matchmaking was only her hobby, but apparently she was good at it, and she kept her eyes open for potential clients all the time. One day the matchmaker was in Bac Lieu, the town where my father was born and lived until age nine. She struck up a conversation with a woman in the town marketplace, and the woman happened to mention that she had a single daughter—a daughter who would eventually become my mother.

  When the matchmaker heard the word single, she was on it like a tiger. “Is your daughter promised yet?” the matchmaker asked. “Does she already have a family?”

  “No,” the woman said, “but she’s a seamstress, and she makes very good clothes. Do you know someone who would make a good husband?”

  “Yes, and he’s from a good family. I lived with them once. I watched this young man, and I know him.”

  “Is he ready for marriage?”

  “His mother says he is.”

  “What does he look like?”

  Every good matchmaker carries a client portfolio, so the matchmaker showed the woman a photo of my father. The woman looked at the photo and saw that my father was very handsome and had thick, wavy hair—just the kind of son-in-law a woman would want.

  The matchmaker immediately reported back to my family that she had found a possible match. My father’s older sister thought the match had potential. She was particularly impressed when she heard that my mother had begun to take night classes to learn to be a seamstress when she was only eighteen and had become so skilled that she was able to set up a classroom in her house to teach other young women to sew. My aunt wanted to see this young woman for herself, and the fact that my mother was a seamstress gave my aunt the perfect excuse to meet her: she hired her to make an outfit for her. That gave my aunt the chance to spend time with her, and the more my aunt got to know the young seamstress, the better she liked her.

  My aunt was sold, and my father’s fate was sealed. From that point on it was just a matter of informing my father that a wife had been found for him and convincing him to accept his fate. My aunt met with my father and told him the good news, and she asked him to go to Bac Lieu and see this woman for himself.

  But the matchmaker had not been working fast enough to suit Grandmother Chung, so she had been doing some shopping of her own. She, too, visited Bac Lieu—the place where she had found her own husband—and managed to find two women of marriageable age whom she thought might make a suitable match for her son. The two women were sisters, and they conveniently lived across the street from each other.

  My father was not cooperating. The idea of marriage had been acceptable to him in theory, but when it came down to choosing an actual flesh-and-blood woman, he balked. My aunt couldn’t convince him to travel all the way to Bac Lieu just to take a look at one woman—but when Grandmother Chung threw her two prospects into the ring, that made three, and at that point my father found it difficult to refuse. My grandmother added an extra incentive by threatening to beat him if he didn’t go, and that’s when a field trip was planned to look over the candidates.

  He looked in on the two sisters first—literally. He figured there was no reason to waste time talking to them if they didn’t even appeal to him physically, so he strolled up and down the street until he could get a good look at both of them.

  The first sister wore way too much makeup; her face was so white that she looked like a Japanese geisha. That was a real turn-off to my father, so sister number one was eliminated in the first round.

  The second sister seemed a bit odd. She walked around grinning all the time, and my father wondered if there might be something wrong with her. That was enough to eliminate sister number two.

  That only left the seamstress.

  My aunt felt confident that the seamstress was the one, but just to make sure my father didn’t pass over her after a cursory glance, she personally escorted him to the seamstress’s house and introduced him to her parents.

  My father was sitting and chatting with my mother’s parents when my mother came walking down the stairs, carrying a tray of tea to serve her guest. He looked up and saw her as she was descending the stairs; first he saw her legs, then her hips—and then he caught a glimpse of her left arm.

  To this very day my father swears that when he saw my mother’s left arm, he instantly fell in love with her. Her arm was so beautiful, so perfect, and her skin looked like velvety porcelain.

  I would give my right arm to have seen that left arm. I try to imagine an arm so beautiful that it could make me fall in love before I even saw the rest of the woman that was attached to it. But that’s the way it happened for my father; one glimpse of that perfect arm and his heart was gone forever.

  My mother was a very beautiful woman. She was officially known as the second-most beautiful woman in Bac Lieu. There was never any pageant or contest to decide the issue, and no one seems to know exactly how that title was bestowed on her. In an Asian culture beauty involves much more than physical appearance; it also involves character, reputation, and achievement. My mother was considered not only physically attractive but an outstanding person—the second-most outstanding woman in the city. I don’t know who number one was, but she must have been impressive.

  A beautiful woman usually has options, and my father was not my mother’s only suitor. More than a dozen hopeful young men had managed to make it past her parents’ background check and land an actual interview. A potential husband’s occupation was one of the most important considerations for a woman considering marriage, and my mother’s suitors were referred to by their trades. There was Mr. Coal and Mr. Teacher. Her parents warned her not to marry Mr. Silk because the work would be too exhausting. Mr. Ice Cream did sound tempting, but none of her suitors made as good a first impression as did my father, so she decided to go with Mr. Rice.

  Since the first interview went well, it was time for their first date. In that culture a date meant a lot more than it does in the West; by appearing together in public, they were announcing that they were considering each other for marriage. The date itself was not a candlelight dinner for just the two of them; it was a public event. They decided to go to a movie, and everyone in both families went with them. As the crowd walked to the movie theater, people came out of their houses to watch.

  The young couple sat side by side in the movie theater with their families packed around them. Popcorn was not served in Vietnamese theaters in those days, so my mother sat beside her suitor and held out a handful of pumpkin seeds while my father picked them from her hand and ate. My mother doesn’t remember what the movie was, but my father does.

  My parents still had a few obstacles to overcome before they could marry. A fortune-teller, hired in Saigon, first had to evaluate their compatibility based on the years of their births. In the Chinese zodiac each year is represented by an animal. There are twelve of them in all, and not all animals get along. A rat should never marry a goat, for example, and a tiger with a monkey is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately my mother was a horse, and my father was an ox, so the stars were in their favor.

  Another obstacle came from people who wanted to prevent the marriage. My father was a wealthy man, and other families still had hopes of marrying one of their daughters to Mr. Rice. Some of them dropped by my mother’s house and tried to plant seeds of doubt about my father: “Have you noticed his dark skin? I’ve heard he was adopted. They say he’s really half-Cambodian.”

  Others visited my father to tempt him with other options: “Did I mention I have a single daughter? I just happen to
have a picture.” Then they would pull out photographs of their daughters—in bikinis.

  But none of the obstacles were insurmountable, and my parents went ahead with their marriage. They met for the first time in January, and four months later they were married. My father returned home to Soc Trang after their first date while my mother remained in Bac Lieu. They met only twice more before the wedding: when my father stopped by to present a formal request to marry and again for an engagement ceremony. During the presentation of the formal agreement, their relationship took a giant leap forward—they were actually allowed to talk without a chaperone.

  One date, two meetings, then marriage.

  I’ve asked my mother many times, “Did you love Dad when you agreed to marry him?”

  My father likes to answer the question for her: “Of course she did!”

  But my mother answers a different way: “My father said he was the right choice.”

  “I know, Mom, but did you love him?”

  “My father said . . .”

  Same answer every time. Even love bows to filial piety.

  My parents’ marriage was not arranged, but it was thoroughly assisted by their extended families and communities. Without my grandmother’s assistance my father would have probably remained a playboy. Without my aunt’s assistance he never would have met my mother, and she might have spent her life as Mrs. Silk, slaving in a garment factory, or as Mrs. Ice Cream, trying to lose weight.

  In the West, where individualism is all but worshiped, this kind of assistance might be called intrusion. We prefer to choose our own partners, thank you, and we are convinced we know how to do it best.

  I wonder.

  My parents’ approach to marriage seems almost laughable in today’s world, but there is nothing laughable about the fact that they have been married for almost fifty years or that their marriage has survived unimaginable hardship and challenge. Modern marriages might be more romantic, but they are rarely as enduring.