The Best We Could Do Quotes

I titled my project “Buis in Vietnam and America: A Memory Reconstruction.” It had photographs and some art, but mostly writing, and it was pretty academic. However, I didn’t feel like I had solved the storytelling problem of how to present history in a way that is human and relatable and not oversimplified. I thought that turning it into a graphic novel might help. So then I had to learn how to do comics! I drew the initial draft of the first pages in 2005, and it’s been a steep learning curve working in this medium.

But if I surrender, I’m afraid I’ll want a full retreat—
to go all the way back. To be the baby and not the mother.

FAMILY is now something I have created—
—and not just something I was born into.
The responsibility is immense.
A wave of empathy for my mother washes over me.

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

I understand why it was easier for her to not tell me these things directly, and I DID want to know.
But it still wasn’t EASY for me to swallow that my mother had been at her happiest without us.

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.

The American version of this story is one of South Vietnamese cowardice, corruption, and ineptitude…
…South Vietnamese soldiers abandoning their uniforms in the street…
…Americans crying at their wasted efforts to save a country not worth saving.
But Communist forces entered Sài Gòn without a fight, and no blood was shed.

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.

The refugee camp was also a place where many people reinvented themselves.
Some people met each other in camp…
…and listed themselves on paper as married couples.
Some even adopted children traveling alone. So they could be resettled together.
Some changed their names or their age.
“If I’m ten years younger, I’ll find a job easier!”
“If I’m ten years older, I’ll retire earlier!”

Our cousins were older and had been in America for three years already.
We probably embarrassed them with our fresh-off-the-boat appearance.
“Don’t be such a REFUGEE! Eat it [the cereal] in a bowl with some MILK!”
“I don’t LIKE milk! And who DOESN’T eat cereal out of the box?”
“Well, at least don’t eat like that in front of my house where everyone can see you!”

This—not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture—is my inheritance:
the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to RUN when the shit hits the fan.
My Refugee Reflex.

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

I’m no longer a kid…am I?
Having a child taught me, certainly,
that I am not the center of the universe.
But being a child, even a grown-up one, seems to me to be a lifetime pass for selfishness.
We hang resentment onto the things our parents did to us, or the things they DIDN’T do for us…
…and in my case—
—call them by the wrong name.
To accidentally call myself Mẹ
was to slip myself into her shoes
just for a moment.
To let her be not what I want her to be
but someone independent, self-determining, and free,
means letting go of that picture of her in my head.

What has worried me since having my own child
was whether I would pass along some gene for sorrow
or unintentionally inflict damage I could never undo.
But when I look at my son, now ten years old,
I don’t see war and loss
or even Travis and me.
I see a new life, bound with mine quite by coincidence,
and I think maybe he can be free.