And few of us will ever have to face what they were about to.
Seven
THE DRAGON LADY
HOA CHUNG LOOKED AT HER NEW HOME, A TWO-STORY building in French colonial style with masonry walls and a tile roof verdant with moss and mildew. It looked like a row house, narrow but deep, with two units occupied by her husband’s family. The house was large, but not as large as the house she had come from in Bac Lieu. It was definitely larger than most of the homes in Soc Trang, many of which were little more than single-story huts with thatched roofs. Only the wealthy could afford a house with multiple levels, and the second story of the Chung house was a clear statement that the house belonged to someone with status and power—specifically, Grandmother Chung.
There had been no discussion of where the newly married Chungs would take up residence. By Chinese custom it was expected that they would move in with my father’s extended family, regardless of how large or unpleasant that family might be. The issue wasn’t space or compatibility; it was simply a matter of tradition, a force so influential in Asian cultures that it is impossible to overestimate and sometimes difficult to understand.
The tradition of a new bride coming to live with her husband’s family helps explain why sons have been preferred to daughters in most cultures throughout history. When a son marries, he takes a wife and brings her into the household, thereby increasing the size and influence of the family. But when a daughter marries, her father gives her away, and the family decreases in size. It’s simply a matter of give and take. Sons add, but daughters subtract.
There are even preferential forms of address for the father’s side of the family. We always referred to Grandmother Chung as Lai Ma, a term that literally means “inside grandmother.” But my maternal grandmother was always referred to as Woa Ma, which means “outside grandmother.” There are similar rules of address for uncles, aunts, and older and younger siblings. In a Chinese family there are no generic forms of address; every time someone addresses you, you are reminded of your position and status within the family.
My mother was about to become an “insider,” but she wasn’t just moving into a new house; she was about to begin living under the same roof as Grandmother Chung.
The honeymoon was over.
When her husband died in 1949, Grandmother Chung, though destitute, continued to live in her house with my father, Thanh, and his five siblings—an older sister, an older brother, and three younger sisters. By the time my father brought home his new bride in April 1966, three of the sisters had already married and moved away, and only the youngest sister remained. That left Grandmother Chung, my uncle and his wife, my father, and my unmarried aunt.
My mother made six—but it was about to get a lot more crowded. In the first month of her marriage, my mother became pregnant with my sister Jenny. Jenny was born in January 1967, and an almost uninterrupted string of pregnancies and births followed: Bruce in ’68, sister Yen in ’70, sister Nikki in ’72, and brother Thai in ’73. That made five more additions to the household, and my uncle and his wife had children too—four in all. Every new addition to the household contributed to the chaos and added to my mother’s growing list of responsibilities.
My mother was now an official resident of the Chung house, but there was no mistaking whose house it was. Though my father and his older brother were grown men of twenty-nine and thirty-two, everyone knew Grandmother Chung was the dowager empress. Her word was law—and if you somehow forgot, she was sure to remind you. There were two reasons for Grandmother Chung’s long and uncontested reign. The first was tradition—she was the senior member of the Chung family and by tradition deserved respect and unquestioned obedience. The second reason was more apparent: Grandmother Chung was a formidable woman with an unpredictable temper, and her cane could raise a sizable welt. Only a fool messed with Grandma—and my mother was no fool.
Grandmother Chung had very clear ideas about how her household should run. Every morning she would rise by five o’clock, and it was the job of her two daughters-in-law to be up before her and already downstairs, building a fire to cook breakfast. There was no electricity or running water in the early years; everything had to be done just as it had been done in Vietnam for centuries—and most of it had to be done by my mother.
The upstairs of the house was divided into rooms by corrugated metal walls that were easy to reposition as the family expanded. Regardless of how late my mother had been up the night before, she always kept one ear glued to the wall of Grandmother Chung’s room. The instant she heard movement on the other side of that wall, she was out of bed and headed down the back staircase to beat her mother-in-law to the kitchen and get that fire going.
To fail in her duty was to incur her mother-in-law’s wrath, and that was something she did not want to do. Grandmother Chung’s temper tantrums could last for days—shouting, throwing things, swinging her cane at anything within reach. When she ran out of steam at the end of the day, she would nod off, then wake up the next morning refreshed and ready to pick up right where she left off.
My mother faced a language barrier with Grandmother Chung that made conversation frustrating, and frustration could quickly turn to anger. My mother spoke Cháo zhōu while Grandmother Chung spoke mostly Vietnamese; her Chinese, though similar to my mother’s, had a different accent that made it difficult for my mother to understand. It was hard enough for my mother to meet all of Grandmother Chung’s demands; it was even harder when she couldn’t understand what they were.
When breakfast was finished, my father and his older brother headed off to work at the rice mill while my mother headed for the town market. Since there was no refrigeration, the day’s food had to be purchased every morning, 365 days per year. There was no such thing as a leftover, so by nine every morning my mother was headed for the market with a basket woven from rice reeds and her money wrapped in a small handkerchief.
The marketplace in a Vietnamese village was always located near the center of town and usually near a river because the river allowed even the poorest farmers to transport their goods to market. In my mother’s hometown of Bac Lieu, the market had been situated just a hundred yards from her front door, but in Soc Trang it was a longer walk, so it was important for my mother to buy everything she needed on the first pass. Her ability to do so was considered a test of her household skill; an efficient homemaker needed to go to the market only once. There were no late-night runs to the grocery store to pick up a few forgotten items; either you bought them in the morning or you were out of luck.
The marketplace itself was a square concrete pad about half an acre in size. In the center of the square was a tall, roofed pavilion where wealthier merchants paid for space to showcase their goods and stay out of the rain—something that happened a lot in Vietnam. The majority of the vendors sat cross-legged around the perimeter of the square, each with his own wares displayed on a mat or plastic tarp in front of him. The vendors grouped themselves by product, much like the shelves in an American supermarket. Fishermen displayed a dozen varieties of fish and eels in metal buckets, most of them caught in the smaller local rivers but some from the mighty Mekong or even from the South China Sea just a few miles to the east.
Next were the poultry vendors selling chickens and ducks, all still alive but without much of a future. The chickens lay clucking and ruffling their feathers with their legs tied together to prevent escape. My mother’s job was to pick a good one—a lost skill in the Western world. The feathers told her how old the bird was, and if the chicken looked back at her with drowsy eyes, that was an indication that the bird was sick. Then she would lift the bird and feel under its breast, which should feel plump and firm; if she could feel bone, she moved on. When she found the chicken she wanted, the vendor would tuck its wings back and cross them so they formed a kind of handle, and my mother could carry it home like a little feathered basket.
The meat section was next. In Vietnam pork was the preferred meat, displayed in the f
orm of an entire pig hanging from its haunches, with its head removed. The pig had probably just been slaughtered at three or four o’clock that morning, then beheaded, gutted, and drained of blood. No part of the pig went to waste; every part of its body could be used to prepare some Vietnamese dish, and all the parts were neatly displayed on a table in front of their former owner. The heart, the kidneys, the liver—even the intestines could be cleaned and used to pack sausages, and the head was always kept intact because a pig’s head was considered a delicacy. My mother would simply point to the cut of meat she wanted—the flank, the shoulder, the loin—and the vendor would slice it off and hand it to her wrapped in banana or coconut leaves. There were no bags or butcher’s paper; leaves were used to wrap just about everything.
The vegetables came next, and there were dozens of varieties. Then came the spices—dozens of those too—and baked goods, including both native breads and airier pastries adopted from the French. The more entrepreneurial vendors even set up a few stools in front of their offerings, creating a sort of sidewalk café where buyers could stop and eat—but it was generally considered unsophisticated to eat in the market, and the Chung children were never allowed to do so.
By ten o’clock my mother was finished with her daily shopping and headed back home. There the food was put away and the still-breathing chicken was set aside to reflect on its fate. In America we think a fresh chicken is one sold before the expiration date stamped on the plastic package; in Vietnam a fresh chicken was one that still had a head five minutes before it was thrown into the pot.
My mother’s next chore was the laundry. Though technically she was only responsible for her own husband and children, she always did Grandmother Chung’s laundry and the unmarried aunt’s laundry too. It was supposed to be the maid’s job to do their laundry, but Grandmother Chung thought my mother did it better, so she was given the job. The maid was supposed to mop the floor, too, but once again my mother did it better—so every night before bedtime my mother was on her knees, scrubbing the wooden floor. They apparently had a very unskilled maid, but it seems to me that what the woman lacked in talent she made up for in intelligence.
Laundry had to be done by hand with an old-fashioned washboard and tub. Soap had to be cut from a solid block; it was a few years before my mother had the luxury of buying imported American laundry detergent. She made her own starch, a concoction made by soaking rice in water, then using a homemade venturi device—basically a narrow pipe with a piece of rubber tubing attached—to blow the starch onto the laundry. My mother was always in a rush to get the laundry done because it had to be line-dried, and that required as much daylight as possible.
Next came the ironing, which was accomplished with a hand iron heated by hot coals from the stove. It was difficult to keep the iron at just the right temperature, and there was always the danger of burning the shirt or blackening it with coal dust—then back in the washtub it would have to go.
By the time the laundry was finished, it was time to start dinner, which took hours to prepare. Vegetables had to be sliced and diced, sauces had to be prepared, soup had to begin simmering, and then it was finally time for the chicken to walk the Green Mile. My mother performed the task with surgical skill; she would grab it by the head, pluck a few feathers from the neck, and then with one quick flick of a knife, it was done. Next she drained the blood, dunked the carcass in boiling water to make the feathers easy to remove, then plucked it, and cooked it any way she wished.
After dinner it was time to do dishes, and after the dishes it was time to bathe the kids and put them to bed—and there were eventually five of us. There were dozens of miscellaneous chores to do as well, like refilling the fifteen kerosene lamps that lit the house and cleaning the oily soot from all the glass chimneys.
When all the daily chores were finally finished, my mom still had one last task to do: she was required to go into Grandmother Chung’s bedroom and give her a massage. That was supposed to be the maid’s job, too, but as usual my mother did it better. I’ve often wondered if during one of those nightly massages my mother ever looked at Grandmother Chung’s neck and thought about grabbing her by the head, plucking a few feathers . . .
One time my mother and her sister-in-law failed to finish the dinner dishes and left some soaking in a tub overnight. The reason for their gross dereliction of duty was they had both been distracted all evening by a houseful of crying infants, and they were so exhausted that they left a few dishes to finish the next day. But Grandmother Chung beat them down to the kitchen the next morning, and when she saw those unfinished dishes, she grabbed the entire washtub and threw it across the kitchen floor. Dishes shattered, water went everywhere, and the tub clattered across the floor. My mother and her sister-in-law had to clean up the mess, then go shopping to replace every one of those broken dishes. Grandmother Chung never said a word to them about the incident, but they got the message anyway; there’s nothing like a visual aid to help get a point across.
To my grandmother’s credit, she could be very tender. At night, when the pace of life slowed down and she had mellowed a bit—at least on her good days—she spoke very kindly and appreciatively to my mother. “You’ve been working hard,” she would say, or “You’re a good daughter-in-law.” The problem was that Grandmother Chung had a mercurial temper, and living with her was like camping in a minefield; you just never knew when something would set her off.
My mother’s day would end about midnight—even later if any of us was sick or needy. It was my mother’s unspoken responsibility to be the last one in bed at night; to go to bed earlier might suggest laziness or, even worse, that she did not have enough to do. The last one in bed and the first one up every morning—that was daily life for my mother, and she completed her backbreaking list of chores every day from May 1966 until our family left Vietnam in June 1979.
Thirteen years.
You might wonder if my mother ever complained. She did from time to time—but no one listened. When she complained to my father about her workload or the way Grandmother Chung treated her, my father would simply tell her, “It’s okay because I love you.” Sometimes my mother tried complaining to my uncle, but whenever she did, she was simply told that it was her role in the family to be a good wife and to fulfill her mother-in-law’s wishes.
You might be tempted to think of my mother as overly submissive or even self-destructive. But to understand my mother’s thirteen years of sacrificial service, you have to view it in the context of a traditional Asian culture. My mother’s desire was to be a good wife to her husband and a good daughter-in-law to my grandmother—but it was a lot more than that. To fail as a wife and daughter-in-law would have been to shame herself and her whole family as well. To the Chinese, the family as a whole supersedes any individual within it. Family comes first—the family’s reputation, the family’s honor, the family’s wishes. If you view my mother through Western eyes, you’ll see her as a mistreated individual who should have stood up for her rights; but if you view her the way she saw herself, you’ll understand that she made an enormous contribution to an affluent and prosperous family, and to Asian eyes, that is the very definition of success.
Thirteen years of selfless service—and as each additional child was born, it became a greater challenge for my mother, not only on the domestic front but in her marriage. My father worked hard, and my mother worked harder, and their exhausting workloads left little time for a relationship. The same pattern repeats itself in marriages across all cultures: busyness produces fatigue, fatigue leads to isolation, and isolation ends in loneliness.
When Jenny was born, my father began to seem a little distant; when Bruce was born, my mother began to suspect that something was wrong; by the time she bore her third child, Yen, that’s when she knew for sure.
My father had taken a mistress.
Eight
DECEPTION
IN FEBRUARY 1965, THE UNITED STATES BEGAN STRATEGIC bombing in Vietnam, and the Vietnam War
was in full swing. When my parents married a year later, a quarter of a million US combat troops were already on the ground, and by the time the war reached its peak, that number would more than double.
Americans sometimes have the impression that during the Vietnam War, every square inch of Southeast Asia was embroiled in bloody conflict, but that was not the case. Some parts of South Vietnam were left relatively untouched by the war, and the Mekong Delta was one of them. True, a riverine war was fought between the Viet Cong and US swift boats on the larger distributaries of the Mekong River, but in more remote areas, such as the district of Mỹ Xuyên, life went on as usual.
For my family, war was even good for business. They weren’t purposely trying to profit from the war; it was just a mathematical reality that with more mouths to feed more rice was needed, and it all had to pass through rice mills like the ones that belonged to Peace, Unity, Profit. Lucrative government contracts now filled the big river barges that transported tons of rice from our mills down the Bay Sao and up the coast to Saigon. Employment was up, too, because there were plenty of young Vietnamese men who fled south to avoid military service. Because of my father’s two-year exile in Cambodia, he sympathized with their plight, and he offered jobs to many of them at our mills.
Business was good for my family, and that meant life was good for my father. Though he was married now, his lifestyle had not changed all that much. He still left for his office every morning and returned at night. He still did what he wanted, bought what he wanted, and generally lived the same life he always had—only now he had a wife waiting for him at home. My father was well known in the community and highly respected. People knew him, liked him, and wanted to be with him—including women.
There was a young woman in Soc Trang who was ten years younger than my father and very attractive. She liked my father very much, and she wanted to get closer to him, but there were two problems: she was from a poor family with no status, and my father was married. The first problem would be difficult for her to overcome, but the second problem didn’t bother her at all. She knew her family’s low status would never allow her to cross paths with my father in a social setting, so instead she took a job at his rice mill, which allowed her to be around him every day.
Where the Wind Leads Page 5