Faded Photographs

January 2004
Lawrence Tan

Do I believe in religion? Of course, I do BELIEVE in religion, only the part where it brings peace to people on earth. I only accept things that I can understand. Admittedly, I am very limited as a person. I am very judgmental in that if I cannot comprehend or accept certain explanations, I attribute this as a failure of my teachers. No, I do not have a lot of blind faith; that cost a lot of money and besides, I hate that people try to manipulate me. I do not believe in miracles, everything must have an explanation. Maybe the explanations for certain phenomenon are sometimes beyond our capability of understanding, but that does not make them miracles. Are we still foolish enough to think that our God’ is the only true God, and all others are just idolatry? Who are we to declare such an arrogant statement? Who give us the right to go out and ‘rescue’ other people by attempting to yank them off their own believes and get them to ‘join’ our cause, disregarding the consequence of tearing the fabric and the order of their society and culture down? We do all that to accumulate more ‘credits’ for ourselves, closer to a ticket to heaven? Should we call all that egoism or selfishness? I believe that it is that very condescending attitude that directly or indirectly contributes to the sufferings of humanity, all in the name of God! In the history of humanity, more people died in religious wars or because of religions. Have we not seen enough?

Please do not get me wrong, religion is very important to a lot of persons. Religion is like nourishment to our souls. It teaches us to manifest and maintain our good side. The problem is there is a shortage of genuine and good teachers.

I believe everybody out there has an agenda, no matter how miniscule or grandiose. All rituals are just traditions evolved in human communities and societies over time; there is
nothing godly about them. To me they are just forms of submissions. In my mind, religious persons are those that live by their codes, truly believe in and practice what they are taught. As oppose to those that only seek some short moments of inner peace or just dutifully satisfy a habitual urge and revert to their alternative behaviors that sometimes contradict to the teachings that they receive.

True religion and God is in one’s heart. The best way of preaching and sharing is to live our own lives according to the principles and values that we believe in. There is no need to show off, argue, debate or coerce.

The year must be some time in 1960; we woke up with the curfew imposed all over town. Everybody supposed to stay inside; we all gathered around the radio in the house and listening to the Military Radio Station. I did not know what to make of it. The adults said that there was a coup-d’e’tat going on against the regime of the President Ngo Dinh Diem. I was a little scared and excited; the only thing I know was that that day, we did not have to go to school. So I had to figure out what do to the whole day inside with my cousins, Nhat Ai and Nhat Minh.

The house is at 142 Vo Tanh (Saigon). Actually that was my aunt’s house; her mom bought it for her. My aunt’s family owned the jewelry store Dai Tin in Saigon. The store had the same stature as ours, Vinh Hoa, but they decided to continue their trade when settled in Saigon. Maybe my grandparents should have done the same. We were running Nam Quang in Saigon and Tay Do in Can Tho at the time. I rarely went out to the movie theater in those years, except when we had some good movies for kids or some special shows on stage. I was too young at the time to comprehend what was going on between my parents but my uncle and my aunt took me in. That was ok with me since I had my cousins there to play with me. All my belongings fit in a small carton box.

The houses on that street were all row house with a decent size for the middle class. The houses there were slightly elevated from the street level which required a two step threshold that spans the width of each house. The entrance to the house was not framed like most of the houses in the States but instead, was protected by a folding steel door that opened to both sides of the house, a pretty typical style for the row house in town. Inside the house, there was an electrical fan installed on the ceiling right above an open area, then a modest size dining room set, behind which was a queen size divan.

The dining room set and the divan were made of black cherry imbedded with the mother-of-pearls patterns of legendary beasts such as dragons andphhoenix and of some gold fishes. I don’t remember any sofa in the house. Perhaps my uncle and aunt never formally entertain any guest there. My uncle had a folding Table-Tennis table and had it opened up in the open area from time to time to play with his friends who dropped by the house. The divan was actually against a wall that housed the staircase that went upstairs. Beyond the staircase was a small atrium with a concrete water tank. It was customary for each house to have such a tank to save the water, just in case when the supply was cut off from time to time. During later years into the war, we lived with a daily rolling black-out for electricity too. One side of the atrium also housed the bathroom and a toilet separately. Beyond the atrium, the kitchen is in the back, where chi. Son, our cook prepared our daily meals.

On the second floor, to the left of the staircase was a catwalk which overlooked the atrium. It led to a small room in the back of the house right above the kitchen. It was used as a storeroom. It could be converted to a room for my cousin later on. The right side opened up to a sitting area where my uncle had his stereo, a bar and a mahjong table. The stereo was basically a box the size of a small table which housed some speakers and a turn table. That was where I first listened to Johnny Mathis (A Certain Smile), Nat King Cole (Around the World, Autumn Leaves), Pat Boone, Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka and etc… The bar was set against a wall that separated that entertaining area and the master bedroom. My uncle had that bar done twice; he just did not like the first design. The master bedroom had a large bed and a smaller twin size bed built against the wall. Minh slept with his parents, Ai was in the small twin bed and I slept on a straw floor mat on the floor, kind of next to the Air Conditioner of the floor. Ong Chu, an old time friend of my grandmother, tutored us a couple of nights a week. All three of us spent an hour or two with Ong Chu going through our homework upstairs on that mahjong table. The highlight of every evening during the school days was after Ong Chu left, we were always waiting for the people who sold the sweet soups coming by. The nice thing was that the soups varied mostly every evening, sometimes even from the same merchants; they varied their soups once or twice a week. Some of them come by in push-cart, others were basically on the baskets attached to a pole balanced over their shoulders. Ong Chu commuted on his old Mobilette; he had very distinct styles of his own I failed to understand. He always hung his right foot aloof the pavement instead of putting it on the pedal like his left foot while the bike was moving. He had eleven kids, nine girls and two boys. A few years later I moved out of my uncle’s house and went to live with Ong Chu’s family.

Vo Tanh Street in Saigon went from one end connecting with the Six Corners of Saigon (Nga Sau Saigon) (vs Nga Sau ChoLon where you could have those clams by the bushel (thau), I liked it with limejuice over the salt and pepper). The other end extended to the circle where Cinema Khai Hoan is and beyond and eventually ended up close to the Tran Hung Dao street. To the left of the house was an electronic store Vopco, managed by two persons, a tall and young man, probably in his late twenties who always sported a white short sleeve shirt hanging outside of his trousers and an older and shorter man in his forties. I used to hang out there from time to time. To the right of the house was a driving school where I saw a lot of miniature street signs laying around on a table that had the drawings of a variety of street patterns. That school was even smaller than the house we lived in. When the school is open, I could see the only class just by walking by outside. Towards Vopco, across the street, the famous Pho 79 was just a couple of blocks down. Next to the restaurant, the local newspapers were sold there. My uncle got his newspaper from there from time to time, the popular newspaper available at the time were Chinh Luan, Tieng Chuong and Tia Sang. A few years later Tien Phong became my favorite magazine. Much later, after I left the area, I understood that Lam Hoan Toan, my classmate, lived in the close by neighborhood.

At the time, I was in Charles DeGaulle. We paid for the school bus transportation. It actually was a customized van that opened up in the back of the vehicle. Inside we had benches along side the vehicle can seat ten to fifteen kids. The crew consisted of a driver and a helper in the back managing and helping the kids in and out of the bus. The bus was all over town Saigon/Cholon. Depending on my stop, some years I got to travel, chat and play with my favorite buddies on the bus longer than others. There were years where a bus stop would have some of our favorite snacks, we would ask the driver to give us a few minutes so that we could purchase the snack and eat it on the bus. He normally complied.

Charles DeGaulle was a private French school run by a Vietnamese. It locates on the…Charles DeGaulle Boulevard which later renamed to Cong Ly. It was not too far from the Institute of Pasteur and the Hien Vuong Street famous for its Beef and Chicken Pho. Compared to any school in the States, Charles DeGaulle was pretty small. It occupied a complex that consisted of a small main building in the middle of the lot and of a number of surrounding classrooms in the back. The gate is actually to the left of the complex. During the hours where the kids were in recess or before class in the morning, there were always a few street merchants showing up outside of the gate. The food and the money were exchanged via the open slots of the gate in between the iron bars. I remember mostly the ice scream guy who had his ice scream in a portable thermos and a person who sold the delicious flavored syrups on shaved ice, a choice of grenadine (red), menthol (green) or lemonade (yellow). To this date, I still don’t understand how those people made a living. It just could not be by just selling that stuff? They must have lived meal to meal. I am not sure if the main building might have housed a classroom or two but I know for sure it was where the office of the principal was. If you got summoned there, it meant big trouble for you. The complex in the back was a two-storied building. My first year there was in a classroom in the lower floor (12e`me). That was where I did not understand whatever my teacher told me. Coming from a Chinese school, I was at a loss most of the time. My 11e`me was in a single floor stand-alone structure right across from the Principal’s office. I used to be bullied by a kid smaller than me in 12e`me, but I must have grown faster that he did, that year he stopped bullying me. My 10e`me was in the back building, a classroom kind of next to the staircase to the second floor. That was where my teacher, a young and bored woman, used to hit me viciously on my open palms for my chicken scratches writing. The rest of my years there, 9e`me, 8e`me and 7e`me were all upstairs in the back of the complex. On the second floor, the classroom of the classes that I mentioned located respectively from the head of the staircase and into the end of the structure. There was also an open area connecting those classrooms in the back building to the second floor of the main building in the center of the lot. There was a door there, but it was always locked. We spent some time there during recess without having to go downstairs.

At the end of the day, all the buses were waiting for us inside the playground. The helpers of each bus made sure that he had all the kids before the bus left the compound. This was where I met Lang Du. At the end of the year of 7e`me, two boys (me and Lang Du) and two girls made it into Jean-Jacques-Rousseau and Marie-Curie.