It wasn’t until after we landed in the Philippines hours later that I completely realized I had now escaped and was out. I flew to the US the next day, two weeks before South Vietnam fell completely to the North.
I will never know what prompted the pilot to take off, defying the order, but I’m forever grateful. I often think about how my life would have turned out had it not been for a series of kind acts from strangers like this pilot.
Cherie helped me reunite with my brothers. She also gave me the half of the ripped hundred-dollar bill that the first pilot had given to her and told me to keep it as a memento of the battle for my life.
When I first saw my brothers again, I looked at them before our big embrace, and they looked at me. It reminded me of the look we had when we were on that last plane and I was taken off—a look of complete disbelief.
But this time the emotion was reversed—it was pure joy, tremendous happiness.
It was a huge relief knowing that I was with my brothers again, with my family again, and knowing that from now on I no longer had to worry about how my brothers and I were going to survive.
* * *
JASON TRIEU was born in central Vietnam and came to the United States as a child in 1975. After graduating from high school, Jason worked for a few years and then went on to earn his BS degrees in speech communication and computer science and has worked in IT/software engineering ever since. Jason currently lives in the state of Washington with his wife, Jaclyn, and two daughters, Tionni and Lena. In his spare time, Jason enjoys art, traveling with his family, skiing, playing tennis and Ping-Pong, and being in the outdoors.
This story was told on June 14, 2017, at the Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles. The theme of the evening was Domestic Tethers. Director: Sarah Austin Jenness.
So there’s a story about my childhood that my children loved to hear when they were little, and wanted to hear over and over again. We called it “The Gaggy and the Snake Story.” Gaggy was my grandfather, the Reverend Calvin Titus Perkins. Everyone called him CT.
He was a roving evangelist. He was a preacher. But he never had a big church for any period of time. He pastored tiny little country churches, and he would kind of bring them back to life and then move on.
And this story was a memory I had of a day, I believe it was a Saturday, when I followed my grandfather to the little country church of the moment. He was mowing the lawn, and I was poking around in a shed out in the yard. I looked down beside me, and there was this enormous snake coiled up and just looking up at me.
So I race out of the shed. My grandfather hears me. He comes to rescue me. In my memory the snake follows me out of the shed and rears up—it’s taller than my grandfather. He has a hoe, which he swings, and in one fell swoop he kills the snake.
He has vanquished evil. He’s vanquished the serpent.
And that is a perfect story to capture my grandfather. Faith for him was a battleground. The world was a treacherous place. It was full of dangers. It was full of temptations to sin.
He was an expert on sin. And the result of that was a list of don’ts, of rules to avoid sinning. I didn’t have to follow all his rules as my mother had as a child, but it was very clear to us that he’d prefer it if I would.
You weren’t supposed to drink or smoke or play cards or dance or go to movies or even go swimming, because if you went swimming, you might have to wear a revealing bathing suit, and you might tempt someone to think about sex. The older I grew, the more I was sure that all these rules really came back to trying to avoid having us think about sex.
I went far, far away to college, and that whole religious world of my childhood just ceased to make sense. I grew very “smart” and learned things that I hadn’t known before. I learned in history class why Southern Baptists were Southern Baptists. It wasn’t anything I’d ever wondered about. It wasn’t a question I’d ever asked. And the reason was that Southern Baptists were the ones who wanted to keep their slaves.
And yet, growing up, I had learned that Southern Baptists were the only ones going to heaven. Methodists didn’t even have a fighting chance.
So I went home for Christmas that year. I didn’t confront my grandfather—that’s not how I would approach him.
I asked him, “Gaggy, why the ‘Southern’ in Southern Baptist?”
He hesitated. I don’t think he knew the answer.
Then he finally said, “Well, Jesus was born in the south of Galilee.”
I was furious. I was disgusted. Whether he was being deceptive, whether it was willful ignorance, or whether he wasn’t brave enough to say “I don’t know,” I was done with his religion.
I became a very political person. In my twenties I ended up in divided Berlin. I ended up on this great geopolitical canvas where good and evil were being acted out again. It was very easy to believe that in a grand way in that Cold War world of the 1980s.
But in that place, too, those clear, crisp distinctions left me wanting. I knew people on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall who had nothing and who created lives of dignity and beauty and poetry and intimacy and meaning. And I knew people on the western side of that wall who had everything by definition and whose inner lives were impoverished. And none of that was dependent on politics.
So I found myself asking questions which I very reluctantly realized were spiritual and religious questions. Questions like why are we here? What makes for a worthy life? What are we to each other? I resolved that I couldn’t possibly take religion in myself or in the world seriously if it couldn’t be very different from that world of my childhood, of my grandfather. I had to be able to apply my mind. I had to know that it could be relevant and reconciled with all the complexity that I had experienced in the world.
I ended up taking myself to the British Isles. There I discovered the world of the great mystic writings, like Julian of Norwich’s Showings and Brother Lawrence’s The Cloud of Unknowing. I listened to the BBC. I discovered this quantum physicist, John Polkinghorne, who had also become a theologian later in life and who talked about how he could take what he was learning about the cosmos as a quantum physicist in chaos theory and find echoes and explanations of reality that could infuse his sense of the nature of God and what happened when he prayed and what happens when we die.
I gained this ever-growing sense that both reality and mystery are much larger than we can possibly imagine. And that mystery is absolutely rooted in physicality and in both the mess and the beauty of human life.
And I found this described most exquisitely in the Bible itself. It has no fairy-tale heroes, only flawed, flamboyant human beings as prone to confusion as to righteousness. Like us, millennia later, they have trouble reconciling the political and the private, the sexual and the societal. Moses quarrels with God. King David is at once a great leader and also an adulterer, a military hero who sends the husband of his mistress to the front lines to die. Jacob is a quintessential late bloomer, a conniver, and an egotist. The Bible calls him “clay-footed.” He becomes Israel after many foibles and false starts and through wrestling through the night with an angel who just might be God.
I was also very drawn to the Celtic idea of thin places—“thin places,” “thin times”—the idea that there are places we can experience where the veil between heaven and earth is worn thin, where the temporal and the transcendent seem to touch.
I had experienced a place like that. I remember standing on the west coast of Scotland, which is one of these places that is physically both bleak and gorgeous at the same time, and feeling like, Here I can breathe, God.
And so I followed that feeling. I went to divinity school. I studied theology. And the funny thing is, all that took me straight back to my grandfather. If I was thinking about my sense of who God is or what it means to be religious, it was all infused with him. But it wasn’t infused with his rules. It was infused with Gaggy’s physicality, with the fullness of him, which I now realize
d was full of contradictions.
He was strict, but he was also one of the funniest people I knew. He was playful. He once broke his ankle chasing me around the house. After he retired from preaching, he bought a farm and planted vegetables, and he had pecan trees, and he built birdhouses. In fact, he was one of the earthiest people I knew as well.
I had experienced enough of the world to be smarter than I was as a sophomore in college, and I realized that even his rules made some sense. They had intelligence behind them. Only a couple of generations ago, things like drinking and gambling, addictions, alcoholism—before AA, before the Twelve Steps, these were death sentences. They were things that devastated lives and families. And so, in another time, did getting pregnant under the wrong circumstances.
I also remembered and cherished the fact that my grandfather actually had a very interesting mind. He had a second-grade education, but you could throw a mathematical problem at him and he would be able to calculate this thing in his head in an instant. You could pull out a calculator and check it. It was very strange. He didn’t know what to make of it. We didn’t know what to make of it. It was kind of a party trick.
But I think that Gaggy held the strength of his mind in tension with his faith—and not a creative tension. He held it off to one side of the passions and beliefs that were so important to who he was in the world. I don’t believe he ever felt that his mind—and its questions—were invited into his faith.
I came through all this and ended up creating a radio show where I take up the animating questions behind religion and spirituality, this question of what it means to be human, and look at how that runs through modern lives and all the disciplines we’re engaged with, in the twenty-first century. And I came to feel early on that I was studying theology and leading this life of conversation, asking these questions for my grandfather, with my grandfather.
Fifteen years after I heard John Polkinghorne on the radio in England, I had him on my show. I was talking about quantum physics and theology, somehow with Gaggy in mind, asking questions he couldn’t have asked.
But my show was also in and of this twenty-first-century world, not just talking to Baptists and the occasional Methodist, but to Buddhists and Jews and Muslims, Atheists. I really could not imagine that would ever be something that Gaggy would be comfortable with, that he would give his blessing to. And that was a real source of sadness to me.
When I wrote my first book, which was a kind of spiritual memoir, I ended up writing a lot about my grandfather. And I wrote this whimsical passage, which was edited out of a very early draft, where I fantasized that somehow, wherever my grandfather was, beyond space and time, he was cheering me on. I imagined my grandfather, who was a teetotaler all of his ninety years, raising a glass of champagne in my honor. As I say, I edited that out early on because it wasn’t serious enough, and I thought it might erode my credibility.
But later in the process of writing, I took myself again back to those magical British Isles, this time to the west coast of Ireland. I was there with a bunch of writers, and a lot of these other writers were taking a pilgrimage to the local lady who “read stones.” This is the last kind of thing that I would ever take seriously or consider doing. But when everyone else came back, they would tell these stories at breakfast every morning about how she had seen inside their souls. She had told them about things that she couldn’t possibly have known. She talked about their past and their present, their future, people who were living and who were dead.
So I finally thought, Okay, fine. I’ll try it. I’ll do it.
I find myself then, about a day later, sitting with this absolutely beautiful view over the Bay of Mishkish, with this woman named Mary Maddison, who has the most beautiful, ageless, wizardlike face. My feet are bare, in a bowl full of stones from the Irish coast.
And she is in fact telling me things she can’t possibly know. She knew nothing about me. She doesn’t even ask your name or what you do. She told me about my work. She told me about myself. She described my children exquisitely. And then she started describing this gentleman she was seeing, and clearly it was my grandfather.
And here’s what she said:
She said, “He’s proud of you.”
“He’s not as serious as he looks.”
She said, “I think he was pretty stern in his lifetime. He must’ve had a lot of rules. He realizes now that he was even too strict with himself, that he denied himself some things.”
“He realizes now that we can become closed-minded when we could be investigating.”
I don’t know what happened in Mary Maddison’s house that day. I don’t know what she taps into. It’s in that realm of mystery for me, which I honor. I do know that since that day I have felt that I have my grandfather’s blessing.
And I forgot the best part. When she finished describing him to me, she said, “He’s raising a glass to you. He’s toasting you.”
Maybe he’s toasting all of us right now.
But I knew on that day that I had his blessing. And he has mine.
* * *
KRISTA TIPPETT created and leads the On Being Project, hosts the On Being radio show and podcast, and curates the Civil Conversations Project. She received the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2014. And she speaks widely and is the author of three books: the New York Times bestselling Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Einstein’s God, and Speaking of Faith (in which Gaggy features prominently).
This story was told on November 10, 2012, at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. The theme of the evening was Saints and Sinners. Director: Catherine Burns.
I never wanted to have kids, and when I was in my thirties, all my friends were sweating about having a family.
They would say things to me like, “When you see a baby, don’t you just want to gnaw on its pudgy little thighs, and inhale its forehead, and then grab it and run away?”
And I was like, “No! What are you talking about?!?”
I did not understand their weird Hansel-and-Gretel fantasies. I just didn’t get it.
When I was in my thirties, I had goals. They were to feed and clothe myself while living in New York. I wanted to have a bedroom with a bed that I could walk around all three sides of. And then there was one big item that I thought, If I owned that, I’ve made it! And that item was: a wine fridge.
That was my dream.
And with wine in it that lasted more than one weekend.
So I’m the youngest of six kids, and growing up, my mother always said to me, “Never get married and never have kids. They’ll ruin your life!”
It’s not exactly what you want to hear from your mother, but what she meant was that she wanted me to be able to have a career, follow my dreams, not feel pressured to settle down. Do whatever I wanted. It was very much what she wasn’t able to do, and I took it to heart.
Now, in my forties things started to gel. I had a bit of a career, I was married to a guy I loved, I traveled. It felt pretty good. So I ordered a wine fridge.
And then the next second, a sledgehammer went through the whole thing.
After a routine mammogram, I was diagnosed with breast cancer (early-stage breast cancer, but as you know, there’s no such thing as lucky cancer).
I fell apart. Thus started a year of hell.
And I did not respond to it by having a Tig Notaro moment and spinning the whole thing into comedy gold. I was destroyed. I fell apart. I dragged myself to one surgery and then another surgery, appointments and tests, and then thirty days of radiation.
I completely lost any sense of myself. I didn’t relate to who I was in the past. I didn’t even know if I could think of who I would be in the future.
There’s this little bit of wisdom people say all the time, that you should live in the moment. Let me tell you something: there is nothing worse than being forced to live in the moment. T
hinking about the future, just musing on what could happen next, that is for the happy and the carefree.
So at the end of that year, I went back to the doctor, and of course they don’t really use the word “remission” anymore, but she said, “You responded well to all the treatments, and things look really good. So we’ll see you in a year and test you again.”
I tried to ease myself back into my old life, or figure out what my new life was. But before I could really even get it together, I got pregnant—by accident. It was unbelievable, mostly because I honestly didn’t think my body was capable of ever doing anything beautiful again.
I didn’t think that I was ever going to be able to do anything normal. It was like looking out onto a cracked, barren, soil field and seeing a tiny green shoot. I have to admit, I didn’t think so much about gnawing on pudgy thighs. I was just elated that maybe this meant I was supposed to survive.
Could I get excited? Should I be concerned?
Before I could even pick one, I miscarried.
I hate saying that word. I know you hate hearing it. It’s so common, though. It makes me think we should talk about it more.
But I got a call from my ob-gyn, saying that the miscarriage was something called a “partial molar pregnancy.” It’s a genetic mistake. It’s not based on age or prior health history—bad luck, as she said. What was growing in me wasn’t so much a fetus but an irregular group of cells. And what is an irregular group of cells considered? Cancer.
My own pregnancy had given me another cancer scare.
To make sure that it didn’t develop into cancer, I needed to get tested by giving blood every week for six months. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I was never going to be able to move forward. I was depressed.
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