If there was any stew left over after lunch, my mother warmed it up again for dinner, and if there was any left after dinner, she served it the next day. We ate until the food was gone, and none of us ever asked, “Do we have to eat this again?” It was food, and we were grateful to have it. In my family it was a sin to waste food. I can still recall the first time I watched Nickelodeon and saw a food fight. I remember thinking, Do they have so much food in America that they can throw it away? Where I came from, things were different. In a country where food is scarce, food is sacred. In Vietnam, if you wanted to insult a woman, you called her “skinny girl” because it implied that she didn’t have enough money to eat. In America if you call a woman “skinny girl,” you may have made a lifelong friend.
Chungking Chinese Restaurant stayed in business for five years. The restaurant was open during my entire high school career. I started eighth grade the month it opened, and I left for college the month it closed. The restaurant turned out to be a break-even financial proposition for us, but it didn’t matter to my father because profit was never his primary goal. It definitely fulfilled his goal of keeping us all where he could see us. The restaurant brought the entire family together to work side by side, and that was what my father wanted most. It fulfilled his second goal too: it kept us so busy we didn’t have time to get in trouble. For five straight years I went to school, played football, worked in the restaurant, went to church, and slept—and almost nothing else.
I think my father had a third goal in mind when he opened that restaurant, and that was the one that changed my life the most. He wanted us to experience working long hours in a terrible environment, doing a thankless job that paid no money. In other words, he wanted us to know what his life was like—and he wanted us to dislike it so much that we would set our sights on something better.
Thirty-Seven
GHOSTS OF THE PAST
MY MOTHER WAS A WOMAN WHO COULD BUTCHER A deer, carve up a pig, and decapitate a chicken with the flick of a knife—but she was afraid of mice. She was in the kitchen one day when she spotted a mouse scurrying across the floor, and she began to scream. That was a sound my mother rarely made. All the children came running to the kitchen to see what was wrong, and when we saw the mouse, some of us began to scream too. A moment later my father calmly walked into the room, looked at everyone screaming, then raised one bare foot and stomped the mouse flat, which made everyone scream even more.
That was my image of my father growing up: strong as steel and tough as leather—considering the things he had experienced in his life, it was understandable that he would appear that way. But the terrible things he experienced growing up had another effect on him, and it was something we had to deal with every day.
Whenever a human being suffers trauma or experiences extreme stress, there are predictable psychological consequences; this is especially true after the trauma of war. The mental and emotional struggle that soldiers often experience in the aftermath of war has been given different names over the years. Centuries ago it was simply called “nostalgia” or “exhaustion,” and during the Civil War, it was given the tender name “soldier’s heart.” In World War I they called it “shell shock,” and in World War II it was known as “battle fatigue.” Today we know the phenomenon by its official name: post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
But in the wake of the Vietnam War, when half a million American soldiers were trying to forget the horrors of war and return to their normal lives, their mental and emotional struggle was called “post-Vietnam syndrome.” It was appropriate that the syndrome was labeled “post-Vietnam” and not “post-combat” because soldiers are not the only ones who struggle after a war. My father never fought in a war, but he grew up surrounded by its terrors: Viet Minh uprisings, Cambodian reprisals, Viet Cong kidnappings and assassinations—even a full-scale invasion and the overthrow of his country. He experienced many of the same horrors that American soldiers did, so it’s no surprise he suffered some of the same aftereffects.
When my brother Thai was a boy, he was taping up posters in our bedroom one day and wanted to place a poster high on the wall near the ceiling. He couldn’t reach that high, and we didn’t have a ladder, so he used the bed like a trampoline to leap as high as he could and try to stick the poster to the wall before he came down again. On his final jump he caught his finger on the sharp metal hook that holds the curtain rod, and it ripped his finger open. He tried wrapping it with every Band-Aid in the house, but the cut was too deep to heal without stitches, and it was impossible to hide. Thai finally had to show the cut to my father, and when my father saw the blood, he became almost hysterical. He flew into a panic and demanded to know how something so terrible could possibly have happened. Judging by my father’s response, you would have thought Thai’s arm had been severed at the shoulder.
My father couldn’t stand the sight of blood, which is not a quality commonly associated with someone strong as steel and tough as leather. It wasn’t because he was weak; it was because he had been constantly exposed to the sight of blood growing up, including the severed head of a Viet Cong that someone had placed in a paper cone and hung by the bridge in Tham Don near one of the rice mills. Whenever my father saw blood, no matter how small the amount, it brought back the memory of all the terrible things he had ever seen.
Of course, my brothers and sisters and I had no way to understand that. We thought our father just had a bad temper, so we did everything we could to avoid making him angry. When I was growing up, I rarely cried because crying would have signaled something was wrong, and that might have set my father off. I feared getting injured, not because of the pain but because my father might find out and get angry. When he got angry, he exploded, and there was no way to talk him out of it—we just ran for our rooms and locked the doors.
It wasn’t just the past that fueled his anger; it was the present too. Each year when he received his thirty-cent raise, he was bitterly reminded of everything he had lost and all the things he would never have again. There was a Vietnamese saying he quoted from time to time: “I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice.” He was a quiet man who didn’t share his emotions; he never once said “I love you” to us kids, and he never apologized because he never admitted he was wrong.
Most of the time, his worries and frustration just made him irritable. My mother once cooked a dish for him that he thought was too salty, but since she had been cooking that dish for years, she disagreed—so my father pasted a big label on her salt shaker that read, THIS IS SALT AND IT IS VERY SALTY. At other times he just blew up, and after it happened my mother would always come into our rooms and quietly try to explain why my father got angry. That was my mother’s role: she was an interpreter, a translator, a mediator between us and our father.
We learned to go to her first whenever there was a problem, and she would help us fix things before our father found out. She had a different style of discipline than her husband. She never shouted or got angry; she just told us stories that always had a moral or lesson attached. There was the story about the Vietnamese girl who ran away from home, got pregnant, and brought shame to her family; and there was the story about the Vietnamese boy who got involved with drugs, dropped out of school, and never amounted to anything. Some stories were tragic and some were inspiring, and she had a way of telling them in a calm and quiet voice that could reduce us to tears.
My father just got angry. If a bill arrived in the mail that he had already paid, he exploded. If any of us got into trouble, he was furious. When anything broke or whenever there was an unexpected expense, it all came out in anger. Once he cooled down, his anger was not only gone but forgotten. He never carried a grudge, and sometimes he couldn’t even remember why he got mad; the event itself was only a trigger. My father was like a geyser that constantly built up pressure until it just had to let off steam. Unfortunately we were often standing near the geyser when it went off.
It was often fear that triggered his ange
r—fear that something might go wrong. That was understandable, too, considering that unexpected things went terribly wrong throughout his childhood. His house burned down, his father died, and he was left in poverty; he knew that the worst could actually happen, and he was afraid it might happen again. My father’s way of dealing with that fear was to avoid all potential danger and minimize every possible risk. My mother has a driver’s license, but she has never driven a car because my father is afraid that something might happen to her if she does. She could never drive us to school, and a friend or neighbor always had to drive her to the grocery store. My mother is in her seventies now, and she still doesn’t drive.
My father always feared that the worst would happen, and he worried until he knew everything was okay. When any of us traveled, we had to call him as soon as we arrived because he wouldn’t be able to sleep until we did. If we drove somewhere and our car broke down, he would say, “Why did you have to go out at all? If you hadn’t gone out, your car wouldn’t have broken down, and I wouldn’t be so angry.” That was the way he reasoned. If you take no risks, nothing can go wrong. Stay here, sit still, and be safe.
Hypervigilance, controlling behavior, overwhelming feelings, overreacting, fear of change—they are all common symptoms of post-traumatic stress. My father was a Vietnam veteran; though he never served a day in the military, he was a veteran of the conflict nonetheless. One American GI recalled his experience in Vietnam this way: “Fear of the unknown was my biggest fear—the constant worry about what’s around the bend, booby traps, enemy contact or incoming enemy mortar rounds. It seemed to take a lot out of you physically and mentally.” Those were my father’s fears too: the hidden dangers, the concealed enemies, the unexpected threats that could come from anywhere.
Another Vietnam veteran once wrote, “A tree line two hundred yards away across a flat meadow still triggers my PTSD,” and he wrote that forty years after his final combat mission. A simple tree line across a meadow was enough to trigger his overreaction or overwhelming feelings, just as the sight of blood or a potential risk could trigger my father’s.
I have no way to know for certain that my father suffered from actual PTSD. It’s possible he had only a general anxiety disorder or that he had a temperament like Grandmother Chung’s. That’s what some of my siblings say: “He just got it from his mother,” and it’s possible he did. Maybe his anger and fear were genetic, or maybe he became like his mother because they both grew up in the same wartorn nation and shared many of the same traumatic experiences.
My father knew the Chinese proverb, “Life can never give security; it can only promise opportunity,” but he wanted both for his children, and he was constantly torn between the two. He wanted all of us to go to college, but he couldn’t understand why any of us would want to go any farther than the University of Arkansas, just down the road. He wanted us to have every opportunity that he never had, but he was constantly worried that something would go wrong along the way. It must have been a terrible tension for my father to live with—to wish for something that he feared at the same time. For his children to have opportunity, they had to take risks; but when we took risks, it scared him to death.
There is nothing more difficult to understand than someone else’s irrational fear because understanding requires reason, and there is nothing reasonable about the irrational. I was in high school before I realized my father’s behavior was not normal and all fathers did not act the way he did. A part of my life’s journey has been to understand my father, and I think I finally do—at least in part. I’ve learned a lot about his experiences growing up in the Mekong Delta, and I think I understand how painful and terrifying they must have been. But I’m not able to feel them the way he did—and until I can do that, I will never fully understand the power they have over him.
What impresses me about my father is that he did not give in to his fear. He did not let his longing for security deny his children opportunity, and when he saw us take those opportunities, it made his struggle seem worthwhile.
When I was a senior in high school, my father walked out to get the newspaper one morning. He had been working in the factory for a decade by then, and the day before had been a brutal one for him; he had even said to God, “I don’t know how much longer I can take this.” When he opened the paper, he saw a photograph of his own son on the front page, and I was holding a football in one hand and a calculus book in the other. The caption told him that his son had been voted Arkansas male scholar athlete of the year—and my father wept.
Thirty-Eight
FLYING BLIND
THERE WERE TWO HIGH SCHOOLS IN FORT SMITH, Northside and Southside, which were named after the two main regions of the city. Both schools had about the same number of students, but Northside had eight times more African Americans, four times more Hispanics, and three times more Asians than Southside. All eleven Chung children attended Northside High School, and needless to say, we felt much more at home there than we did at our junior high.
In my first year at Northside, I made the varsity football team. I continued to love everything about football: the game itself and the liberating feeling it gave me. I especially enjoyed the respect that my physical size and strength earned me from my classmates. I kept a growth chart, hoping I had inherited my father’s stature. My goal was to grow two inches and gain twenty pounds every year until I reached six foot two and weighed 220 pounds, and for a few years I was actually on track to do it. But it didn’t help to have a five-foot-two mother, and I eventually topped out around five foot eleven and two hundred pounds. That wasn’t very big for a guard and defensive end, especially when you consider that a high school lineman in Arkansas these days often weighs three hundred pounds. I wasn’t the strongest or the fastest in my school, but I was faster than the big kids and bigger than the fast kids, and what I lacked in size and speed, I made up for in aggressiveness.
An Asian who played football—that was a category-breaker for a lot of people. When the football coach first saw me, he wanted me to be a kicker because as everyone knows, all foreigners play soccer and, therefore, can kick. My coach soon discovered I could not kick at all, but I was very good at running into things, which was something I had a lot of experience doing due to the fact that I was legally blind.
In the United States a person is considered legally blind when his best-corrected vision is 20/200 or worse. The prescription 20/200 means that what other people could see from two hundred feet away, I couldn’t see unless it was practically in front of my nose. “Best-corrected” means “with your glasses on”—but when I played football, I couldn’t wear my glasses because they always got dirty and fogged up under my helmet, and my family couldn’t afford contact lenses. Without glasses my vision was 20/200, which meant that on a football field I was as blind as a bat.
Kickoffs instantly vanished, especially at night—and I was on the kickoff team. Sometimes I played defensive end, and on more than one occasion I accidentally tackled the running back carrying the ball—which was the right thing to do, only I thought the other running back had the ball, and I was actually aiming for him. My coach would always shout, “Great tackle, Vinh!” and I would look over at the sidelines and wonder which blur was the coach.
I didn’t even get glasses until I was in sixth grade. Until then the chalkboard was just a green fog, but I assumed it looked the same way to everyone else. At my first eye exam the optometrist said to me, “Son, you’ve been missing out on a lot in life,” and he was right. When I came home with my new glasses, I discovered for the first time that roses have petals and leaves. It was a great relief to finally get glasses, but they didn’t help my social life; I could afford only the cheapest frames, and the glasses I was forced to wear had “Nerd” stamped all over them in several different languages.
But my glasses didn’t really hurt my social life because I didn’t have one—there just wasn’t time. I never had time for a girlfriend. None of my older siblings had boyfriends or g
irlfriends until they were about to get married. My parents never said I couldn’t have a girlfriend; the idea just seemed impossible. To me, having a girlfriend was as unthinkable as owning a horse: What would I do with one? Where would I put it? How much time would I have to spend taking care of it? There were girls who used to wait for me outside the locker room after football games, but I had no idea why, and I didn’t ask. I heard rumors that there were girls who had a crush on me, but I had no clue what to do about it, so I did nothing.
My plan after graduating was to become a doctor, though to be honest I had very little idea at the time what a doctor really did or what it would take to become one. No one in my family had ever been a doctor, so no one was able to warn me that it would require four years of undergraduate studies, four years of medical school, then three to seven years of residency. I was shocked when I found out that to become a doctor, I would have to go to school until I was thirty. Thirty—surely there was a better way to become a success.
My father didn’t think so. When he was a boy, he dreamed of becoming a doctor, too, though like me, he really didn’t know what being a doctor entailed. In a way it didn’t matter to him because what he really wanted was to be a success, and in Vietnam a doctor was considered to be the epitome of success. So it’s understandable that when my father urged his children to be successful, what he really had in mind was that we would all become doctors.
If you ask my father today what he really wanted for his children, he will say, “I just wanted each of them to be as successful as possible”; but if you ask my brothers and sisters what our father wanted for us, they will tell you, “He wanted each of us to become a doctor.” In a way, both are true.
Jenny was the first to go to college, which was an accomplishment in itself. If my family had remained in Vietnam, my sisters might not have been encouraged to attend college at all. But in America my father wanted all of his children to have a college education and a chance at a high-paying job, which was a very enlightened attitude for a traditional Chinese man such as my father. Jenny had no money to pay for college, and my father couldn’t help much, earning $22,000 a year. But she applied for every grant, loan, and scholarship she could find and was able to enroll at the University of Arkansas in the fall of 1986 to begin her premed studies.
Where the Wind Leads Page 27