Bố Character Analysis

My parents escaped Việt Nam on a boat so their children could grow up in freedom.
You’d think I could be more grateful.
I am now older than my parents were when they made that incredible journey.
But I fear that around them, I will always be a child…
and they a symbol to me—two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.

My parents are retired, in good health, and free to do as they please…
…but also lonely, aging, and quietly wishing we’d take better care of them.
In Việt Nam, they would be considered very old in their seventies.
In America, where people their age run marathons or at least independently, my parents are stuck in limbo between two sets of expectations…
…and I feel guilty.

Soon after that trip back to Việt Nam (our first since we escaped in 1978)…
…I began to record our family history…
thinking that if I bridged the gap between the past and the present…
…I could fill the void between my parents and me.
And that if I could see Việt Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost…
…I would see my parents as real people…
and learn to love them better.

Though my world was small,
I would sometimes dream of being free in it.
This was my favorite dream.

To understand how my father became the way he was,
I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy.
It took a long time
to learn the right questions to ask.
When I did, the stories poured forth with no beginning or end—
anecdotes without shape,
wounds beneath wounds.

I had never, before researching the background of my father’s stories, imagined that these horrible events were connected to my family history…

I grew up with the terrified boy who became my father.
Afraid of my father, craving safety and comfort.
I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own.

Every casualty in war is someone’s grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover.
In the decade of the First Indochina War, while my parents were still children learning their place in the world…
…an estimated 94,000 French soldiers died trying to reclaim France’s colony.
Three to four times as many Vietnamese died fighting them or running away from them.
This was the human cost of ending France’s colonial rule in Southeast Asia…
…and winning Việt Nam’s independence.

“But the month I spent in the Communist North had a very different effect on me.”
“It was true that the Việt Minh had won independence by winning the WAR.”
“But the new society I dreamed of didn’t EXIST.”
“Here there was no freedom of thought, no allowance for individuality.”
“I was fourteen. Sài Gòn represented a whole new world of possibility to me.”
“Who would choose a world that had become so narrow, so poor and gray?”

I imagine that the awe and excitement I felt for New York when I moved there after college—
—must be something like what my father felt when he arrived in Sài Gòn in 1955.

I still have the chessboard my father made when I was a kid, and the wooden set of pieces we played with.
the CHARIOT
the ELEPHANT
the GENERAL
the COUNSELOR
the SOLDIERS
Revisiting this game of war and strategy, I think about how none of the Vietnamese people in that video have a name or a voice.
My grandparents, my parents, my sisters, and me—
—we weren’t any of the pieces on the chessboard.
We were more like ants, scrambling out of the way of giants, getting just far enough from danger to resume the business of living

The contradiction in my father’s stories troubled me for a long time.
But so did the oversimplifications and stereotypes in American versions of the Vietnam War.

My father explained to me that there was a word for our kind—
NGỤY
It meant “false, lying, deceitful”—but it could be applied to anyone in the South.
It meant constant monitoring, distrust, and the ever-present feeling that our family could, at any moment, be separated, our safety jeopardized.

We were now BOAT PEOPLE—
—five among hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into neighboring countries, seeking asylum.

That first week of parenting was the hardest week of my life, and the only time I ever felt called upon to be HEROIC.

My parents escaped Việt Nam on a boat so their children could grow up in freedom.
You’d think I could be more grateful.
I am now older than my parents were when they made that incredible journey.
But I fear that around them, I will always be a child…
and they a symbol to me—two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.

My parents are retired, in good health, and free to do as they please…
…but also lonely, aging, and quietly wishing we’d take better care of them.
In Việt Nam, they would be considered very old in their seventies.
In America, where people their age run marathons or at least independently, my parents are stuck in limbo between two sets of expectations…
…and I feel guilty.

Soon after that trip back to Việt Nam (our first since we escaped in 1978)…
…I began to record our family history…
thinking that if I bridged the gap between the past and the present…
…I could fill the void between my parents and me.
And that if I could see Việt Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost…
…I would see my parents as real people…
and learn to love them better.

Though my world was small,
I would sometimes dream of being free in it.
This was my favorite dream.

To understand how my father became the way he was,
I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy.
It took a long time
to learn the right questions to ask.
When I did, the stories poured forth with no beginning or end—
anecdotes without shape,
wounds beneath wounds.

I had never, before researching the background of my father’s stories, imagined that these horrible events were connected to my family history…

I grew up with the terrified boy who became my father.
Afraid of my father, craving safety and comfort.
I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own.

Every casualty in war is someone’s grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover.
In the decade of the First Indochina War, while my parents were still children learning their place in the world…
…an estimated 94,000 French soldiers died trying to reclaim France’s colony.
Three to four times as many Vietnamese died fighting them or running away from them.
This was the human cost of ending France’s colonial rule in Southeast Asia…
…and winning Việt Nam’s independence.

“But the month I spent in the Communist North had a very different effect on me.”
“It was true that the Việt Minh had won independence by winning the WAR.”
“But the new society I dreamed of didn’t EXIST.”
“Here there was no freedom of thought, no allowance for individuality.”
“I was fourteen. Sài Gòn represented a whole new world of possibility to me.”
“Who would choose a world that had become so narrow, so poor and gray?”

I imagine that the awe and excitement I felt for New York when I moved there after college—
—must be something like what my father felt when he arrived in Sài Gòn in 1955.

I still have the chessboard my father made when I was a kid, and the wooden set of pieces we played with.
the CHARIOT
the ELEPHANT
the GENERAL
the COUNSELOR
the SOLDIERS
Revisiting this game of war and strategy, I think about how none of the Vietnamese people in that video have a name or a voice.
My grandparents, my parents, my sisters, and me—
—we weren’t any of the pieces on the chessboard.
We were more like ants, scrambling out of the way of giants, getting just far enough from danger to resume the business of living

The contradiction in my father’s stories troubled me for a long time.
But so did the oversimplifications and stereotypes in American versions of the Vietnam War.

My father explained to me that there was a word for our kind—
NGỤY
It meant “false, lying, deceitful”—but it could be applied to anyone in the South.
It meant constant monitoring, distrust, and the ever-present feeling that our family could, at any moment, be separated, our safety jeopardized.

We were now BOAT PEOPLE—
—five among hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into neighboring countries, seeking asylum.

That first week of parenting was the hardest week of my life, and the only time I ever felt called upon to be HEROIC.