by C. L. Hoang
She raised a hand to stop the question on the tip of my tongue. “You needn’t worry about expenses. I have some savings set aside from the business the past two years, and I’ll make all necessary arrangements to handle payments and such. You won’t have to do a thing.”
Her eyes teared up as she sought to quell any protest from me. “When I was still Little Black Girl in our old neighborhood, you and your parents were the only folks who accepted me for who I was. You all treated me with real kindness, so much so I had often thought of you as my family. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. I just thank my lucky stars I’m now in a position to be able to help you. So please. Let’s don’t make a fuss about this.”
After their tremendous effort to pull things together for me, how could I possibly refuse the thoughtful generosity of my friends? I still choke up every time I think about it.
But next, I had to come clean to my parents about my disgraceful secret.
Let me just say it was one of the most difficult things I ever had to do. I had let my parents down in a big way, at the worst possible time. To this day, I still cringe with shame and anguish at the memory. But in the end I was still their flesh and blood, and despite their understandable disappointment, Bố Mẹ never stopped loving me. If anything, they felt sorry for me and worried themselves sick over my well-being. Together, we tried to weather the storm the best we could, and they supported my decision to get away from Sài-Gòn for a decent period of time. And so, in August 1968, at the start of my second trimester of pregnancy, I hugged my parents good-bye and boarded a plane to Huế for my first trip ever away from home, fighting not to cry in front of them.
I can visualize Lee Anne on that summer day, a brand-new war widow of twenty-one, three months pregnant yet none the wiser in the ways of the world, as she climbed the stepladder onto the plane, leaving behind her parents and her home in order to escape from the past. Meanwhile, eight thousand miles away, I’d been struggling to put my own life back together, totally oblivious of the crisis unfolding across the ocean, thereby wasting any last chances to come to her assistance. It must have been a horrendous ordeal for all of them, Lee Anne in particular. The unstated trauma, revisited thirty years later, is still evident through her trembling writing hand. It appears at this point she had to take another break from the letter, most likely adjourning for the day once again. Her next writing looks more steady, as if after a decent night’s rest.
The last months of 1968 went by uneventfully. I settled into my temporary life in Huế as a guest of Elise’s family. It was only after arriving that I discovered they had fallen on hard times following her father’s death. Yet they wouldn’t let me contribute, even modestly, to the daily expenses. “It’s just an extra bowl and pair of chopsticks for you, Liên,” Elise would tease, before suggesting, “Save the money and buy your mom a plane ticket to come visit when the baby gets here. She’s welcome to stay with us as long as she wants.”
In late January 1969, two weeks before the new Tết and a little earlier than expected, I started getting labor pains. Luckily my mom arrived the next day, in time to join Elise and her mother in rushing me to the hospital. It ended up a fifteen-hour affair. I don’t remember much about it except the ripping pain and one special incident, which I will now share with you.
It was around 3:00 a.m. on the last day of January. I had been in labor since noon the previous day, bathed in sweat, and out of my mind with pain. In that final instant when I felt I was going to pass out, my thoughts turned to you for comfort, and I cried out your name. Then something remarkable happened. I could have sworn I heard your voice answer me over all the commotion, calling my name as if you were trying to find your way back to me. It was such a welcome sound. It lifted my spirit and filled my heart with joy and relief. The next moment, the drawn-out struggle came to a sudden, merciful end. The pain lifted off my wrecked body and a calm exhaustion took over me, seconds before I was startled by that most miraculous sound—the shrill cry of a baby just arrived in this world. My mother, who had stayed by my side the whole time, leaned over with a fresh cloth and wiped the sweat from my face. She smiled and whispered in my ear, “Well done, sweetheart. You’ve got yourself a beautiful baby boy.”
I crash back against the chair and blow out through my dry mouth, my body depleted but all prickly from excitement.
“A boy. It’s a boy,” I scream in silence, so ecstatic to make the first discovery about my newborn child, as a proud new father would probably feel when he accepts the precious bundle into his arms and makes eye contact for the first time. Despite arriving some thirty years late, the news still boggles the mind and defies full comprehension. I keep repeating every nugget of information to myself, trying to get accustomed to the extraordinary fact. Lee Anne and I have a son together, born in the imperial capital of Huế at 3:00 a.m. on January 31, 1969.
Gradually, I’m filled with a sense of wonder and gratitude to have been, even if unknowingly until now, part of this greatest miracle of life. In the warm glow of revelation, a long-forgotten memory floats up from some dark crevice in my mind, awakened by Lee Anne’s mention of her unusual experience.
It was 1969, a fortnight before Valentine’s Day. I was stationed at Mather AFB, recovering from my recent bout with depression. On a walk during lunch break that day, I stumbled across a SAC Alert exercise conducted by the resident 320th Bombardment Wing. The awesome spectacle threw me into a panic attack. Knees buckled, I found myself trapped in a nightmarish vision, engulfed in a sea of refugees fleeing from a combat zone. Over the chaos, I suddenly heard Lee Anne’s voice, helpless and sobbing, calling to me. As I fought against the human tide to search for her, the hellish scene dissolved into thin air following the departure of the last B-52 on alert. I staggered to a nearby oak tree and collapsed to the ground, still whispering her name.
Looking back in amazement on this forgotten episode, I realize in a flash of insight that my experience coincided exactly with Lee Anne’s—noontime in California being 3:00 a.m. the next day in Việt-Nam. Incredible though it may sound, it appears that at the moment of our son’s birth she and I were somehow able to reach through to each other, albeit for just seconds. In a small way, through some wondrous phenomenon, I was present for the arrival of our child into this world. Clutching the letter to my chest, I wish I could have shared this belief with her.
Oh Roger, the minute I laid eyes on that bundle of miracle nestled in my arms, I knew I had fallen in love for life! All the pain and heartache of previous months were instantly wiped away, and my heart overflowed with love and blissful joy. He was a beautiful baby, so perfect in every detail, from the cute wrinkled nose to his tiny fingers and toes. All I could do was hold him snug in my arms and cry big tears of happiness. Weighing 3.5 kilograms (or roughly 7.7 pounds, I think, a good-sized baby by our norms), he turned out to be mostly you and very little me: light complexion, with threads of gold for hair and sleepy blue eyes that peeked up at me with gentle curiosity when he managed to open them. But none of that mattered much to me. I was just thankful he was healthy, first and foremost, and then, from all early indications, as sweetly disposed as his father.
My mom asked if I had picked out a name for the baby.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I shall call him Sơn.” It’s a popular Vietnamese name for boys, and it means “mountain.” I chose that name in your honor, Roger, because I remember how much you loved and missed your Sierra Nevada when you were away from home that year.
Out of respect for Debbie’s and your privacy, I put down “Unknown” for father on the birth certificate and gave our baby my last name—Trần.
I feel a stab in my chest at these sobering last words, which clearly capture the sorry status of our newborn son and presage the social stigma that would likely dog him his whole life. Even though I appreciate Lee Anne’s noble intention to keep me out of trouble and thus free to pursue my planned destiny, I can’t
help but wish she had involved me for our boy’s sake, consequences be damned. Nothing more was written on the subject, but I know as a mother she must have agonized over it, and now I share her heartache.
With the pregnancy behind me and greater responsibilities lying ahead, I sat down and began the serious task of planning our future. Sài-Gòn was my hometown where my roots were, as well as the land of opportunity and the safest place in the country. So it became clear that my best chance would be to move back there, even if it meant having to confront my past. Around that time, Elise herself concluded that she, too, would need to return to Sài-Gòn to find a job to support her family. We discussed between us, then two months after Sơn’s birth, we packed up and left Huế together to return to the capital, with the baby in tow.
The first thing I did after getting back was to find a new neighborhood to move my family to, in the hope we could start over where no one knew my past. I also invited Elise to come live with us so she wouldn’t be all alone like the year before. It worked out great for all of us.
We struggled in the beginning, but our guardian angel once again intervened on our behalf, this time from her new home in the States. Mme Yvonne asked her kind husband to write us a recommendation letter to a friend of his who worked at Bank of America in Sài-Gòn. Thanks to him, Elise and I got jobs as bank tellers and things improved for us from then on.
With my parents helping out with Sơn, I signed up for night classes at the university to resume working toward my bachelor’s degree in English. Meanwhile, Elise managed to get back in touch with Dean Hunter and they began seeing each other again on the weekends when he was in town. After all the tragedies and tears of the past two years, it was wonderful to see them back together and so much in love, a true miracle of happiness in those dark times. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving couple.
Our little boy in the meantime grew like a weed, or as we say in Vietnamese, as if he were being inflated before our eyes. Go ahead and laugh at me if you must, Roger, but I swear he also grew more adorable with each passing day, looking just like the little angels featured on the Similac calendars. And sweet-tempered he was, too, for he seldom disrupted my sleep at night or caused his grandparents much trouble during the day. In no time, this newcomer had become the bright center of all our lives, and he even had Uncle Dean and Auntie Elise wrapped around his little finger. He certainly was the reason I lived for, why I strived hard every day to build a decent life for us. Every time I cuddled his plump little body in my arms and listened to him coo softly at me, I thanked the heavens, and you, Roger, for this most precious gift.
During Christmas 1970, I traveled to Huế again, this time to be a bridesmaid to Elise at her and Dean’s wedding. It was a small ceremony attended by her family and some close friends, but also a farewell party since the couple was moving to the States after the wedding. I was thrilled to see that together they had made it safely through the war and reached their happy ending, but it was really hard for me to say good-bye to my remaining best friends. With everyone in our little group either dead or gone away, it was final closure to that special past we had all shared, those few glorious weekends in 1967 when life wasn’t all about war and death, but also about exciting new friendships and the sweet promise of love. As I bade the newlyweds farewell, I sensed my last thread of connection to you unravel, too. From this point on, all I had left was memories.
But life kept rolling on. In June 1971 I completed my bachelor’s degree in English, then qualified for my teacher’s credentials. Following a dream I’d had since before my university days, I quit my job at the bank and became an English teacher at a public high school in the neighborhood. Between my baby at home and my kids in school, my hands were pretty full. Life, while not great, could have been much worse.
Which was exactly what happened to all of us in the South when the thirty-year war abruptly ended on the last day of Black April, 1975. After the US pulled out of South Việt-Nam and cut off all aid to us, our defenseless country crumbled overnight against advancing communists from the North, fully backed by the Soviet Union and Red China. When Sài-Gòn fell on April 30, 1975, a long, dark night descended over our homeland.
Roger, there isn’t enough ink to write about all the misery and suffering the South experienced during our most recent “mulberry time.” Countless people were sent to “re-education camps” or “new economic zones” in the jungles and mountains, where they died from deprivation or maltreatment. The “luckier” ones among us were allowed to remain in the cities but now faced a collapsed economy and a police regime like we’d never known before. Because of my former association with Americans, “the people’s enemies,” I was stripped of my teaching job and my family got pushed to the bottom of the food-rationing list. We had become the fringe elements in this new “workers’ paradise” and were treated as such.
If not for Elise and Mme Yvonne continuing to send me money through Elise’s family in Huế (so it wouldn’t get intercepted by the government, who had me on their watch list), we likely would have risked starvation. As it was, we managed to survive one day at a time, but not my father, who suffered another stroke and passed away in 1977. The grief of his loss took a toll on my mother, and she soon followed him. By 1980, five years after the country’s unification under communist rule, our once-happy family had dwindled to just the two of us. Me and my boy against the world.
Sweat trickles down my back. I feel Lee Anne’s loneliness and despair, as palpable as if I were holding her in my arms, and my heart bursts with bitter anguish. Had I stayed in touch with my friends, I would have learned about all this and done everything possible to come to her and Sơn’s help. So much pain, so much time wasted that could have been prevented. I drop my head, the weight of thirty years crushing my shoulders.
The post-1975 years were really tough on Sơn, not just because of our personal losses and severe deprivation, but also because of the fostered hostility against Amerasian kids. There were a significant number of mixed-blood children in Hồ-Chí-Minh City (old Sài-Gòn) alone, most of them left behind by unknown GI fathers from the war years, now treated with scorn as reminders of a shameful past. Many were abandoned by their mothers, who could no longer support them. They ended up roaming the streets begging for food. Called Bụi Đời, or “Dust of Life,” these homeless kids were among the youngest victims in our broken-down society. Sadly, their plight was drowned out by the greater collective misery and went ignored.
Even Sơn, still fortunate enough to have a family and a home, could sense the growing bias against his American heritage from kids in his school and around the neighborhood. It only complicated matters that with each passing year, the boy grew to look more and more like you, Roger. All blue eyes and wavy brown hair with a cute, dimpled smile, which made it impossible for him not to stand out as an easy target for other children’s taunting. It pained me to watch him turn from a happy, outgoing young boy to one who was withdrawn and cautious beyond his age. Yet I was powerless to stop it from happening. Above all else, though, it was his innocent questions that tore me up inside.
One night when he was five or six years old and I was putting him to bed, he looked up at me with those eyes like marbles and asked, out of the blue, “Is he real big, Mommy?”
“Is who real big, baby?” I answered distractedly while tucking him in.
“Daddy,” he exclaimed, taking me completely off guard, the first time he ever asked about you. “Is he even taller than you? Does he have colored eyes like me?”
All I could do then was pull him close to me and rock him gently in my arms. “Yes, dear boy. Your daddy is taller than me by this much,” I managed, smiling through the tears and showing him with my hands. “And his eyes are sky blue just like yours. I dare say you look exactly like him, only a lot smaller. You know why? It’s so you can fit snuggly in my arms. Like this, see?”
Another day, when he was a bit older an
d we were walking home from school, he tugged at my hand and declared, “I want to learn to speak American. Will you teach me, Mommy?”
“Why in the world do you want to do that?” I played dumb, though with a sudden fluttering in my stomach.
His answer was ready, as if he had figured it all out in his little head, even without us ever discussing it. “Daddy is American, so he doesn’t speak Vietnamese like you and me, right? But I want to be able to speak to him when he comes to get us.”
My insides went cold. Those innocent words carried me back to my childhood days when young Mme Yvonne, then a poor little black girl without a father, had confided similar dreams and hopes to me. Like Sơn at the same age now, she had bugged her mother to teach her a few greetings in broken French so she could welcome her beloved papa, whom she had never seen except in her sleep, should he show up one day at their doorstep.
Averting my eyes from Sơn’s, I ruffled his soft hair and tried to sound as jovial as I could. “It will just make for more study and less playtime for you, you know. But I’ll be glad to teach you, honey, if you promise not to complain about that later.”
For a while he had a close friend in a little girl about his age who lived down the street, a war orphan recently brought to stay with her uncle and his family. Both kids until then had found themselves more or less isolated from their peers, one by her burden of grief, and the other by his Amerasian blood. Maybe they shared a sense that they didn’t fit in, and it brought them together to find comfort in each other’s company.
Then one day the whole family just disappeared. It was widely speculated they had made their way to the seaboard and from there escaped by boat out of the country, fleeing from this “workers’ paradise” with nothing but their lives. This sudden loss of his best friend affected Sơn more deeply than I had suspected at first, for he grew even more quiet and withdrawn. It all boiled up one afternoon when he rushed home from his sixth-grade class, visibly upset.