Anthology
of an
Ordinary Life

by Lawrence Tan

Spring of 2006

Prologue

In a conversation with an old schoolmate of mine regarding his trip to China, he described certain places that are so remote, that time seems to slow down to a crawl and most of the ancient ways of life still prevail. These communities are mostly self-sufficient; the people are happy without much ambition and rarely need to travel to the world outside, just like their ancestors hundreds of years ago. Furthermore, thanks to their remote locations, these communities have so far succeeded in avoiding the frontal impact of the annual double-digit economic growth of the country. On one evening along the riverbank that runs through the city, my schoolmate witnessed a group of men bellowing out a few verses of a folk song, to which a few girls on a balcony across the small street started to sing in reply. This went on for a while. I can only imagine how beautiful that would sound! I cannot remember if I have ever seen such happy people myself.

Despite this happy story, I am having a little trouble trying to picture how someone could live an entire life in one place or even be born and die of old age in the same house. In my mind, when these people look back in time, they would not recall much because there was not much to remember. Admittedly, these rather uneventful lives could have occurred more often in the pockets of peaceful periods in human history.

At my age, just the mere thought of looking back at my life and failing to see anything but a blur of a number of forgotten years should have disturbed and frightened me deeply. However, that did not happen to me, and I believe that it did not happen to my generation; most of us have been affected and scarred by tragedies and sufferings caused directly or indirectly by the war—the Vietnam War that is. Most of us who survived have plenty of stories to tell. Even though my stories seem to be unique and indeed the mosaic of my life, from a further perspective they are merely a few small pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of my generation. Within that context, my stories are just those of an ordinary life.

I have always treasured my past—the good and the bad times. I always have in me nostalgic feelings for things that I once possessed. I have the sustaining feelings of longing for a certain time, a certain place and the characters that had been intertwined in my life in the distant past. As time goes by, my memory starts to fail me of the smaller details of things, like a disintegrating photograph weathered through time. I am sure someday there will be nothing left but just a blur in my mind. A certain smell or a familiar tune or melody can bring my heart instantly back to that lost time and place. All I have to do then is to close my eyes… I like to communicate and to share beautiful things. After all, when I leave this world, these very same thoughts that I am trying communicate are the only things that are really worth anything. For these very reasons, I try to carefully package these images and feelings and keep them as close to me as I can and bring them along with me for the rest of my journey. I have recorded some of the more significant events of my life, will record more as time permits, and will put them together like a scrapbook in the following pages.

Although some of these fragments of memoirs seem to have a chronological sequence, they are intentionally scattered and mixed with other independent dissertations and poems. As with this collection itself, not all the pieces that appear in it necessarily have a beginning or an end. In fact, I hope that after one finishes reading these pages, the images will seem to blur together as if one was waking up from a long dream with the feelings still lingering. As for me, I would not want the melodies interrupted, nor would I want to be awakened from my dreams.

A Short Reflection Of Fall

September 2003
Lawrence Tan

Ever since I settled in Virginia in 1975, I had chances to travel to a number of places around the country and overseas. Except the one and a half year I worked in Southern California and another equally long period I worked in Saudi Arabia, I have spent much shorter times in a number of other States and visited other places such as Canada, Europe and Southeast Asia. However, Virginia has always been my home. Anywhere else, I would feel like a stranger. Of course, I once had another place called home, but now it seems like it only exists in my dreams.

In the earlier years when I used to travel, each time coming home to Virginia, as the plane approached Dulles Airport, from the air, it was such a wonderful feeling to see the ominous color of green covering the ground all over. The warm feeling of homecoming sets in while I was driving through the hilly and winding roads both sides of which are mostly populated by all kinds of trees including pines and evergreen. The State and the Fairfax County in particular we live in have done an excellent job in preserving the natural environment. I just love Virginia. After all, I spend more than half of my life here where I raised all my kids and watched them blossomed.

Virginia is located in a very special spot. After living here for so many years, I have noticed that harsh snowstorms normally devastated further north; further south is always under the menace of the hurricanes every year. Every now and then, we get the tail ends of things but never have to confront the brunt of both kinds of extreme weathers.

I had friends that used to live in New York and eventually some of them migrated over to the West Coast due to the harsh winter up there. I guess we are the lucky ones who settled in Virginia. Virginia is for Lovers. In Virginia, you would experience the taste of the four seasons. However, spring and fall are rather short, from just a few weeks to sometimes a few days! But I always have something to look forward to. The humidity in the summer is sometimes unbearable. But we have Ocean City and Virginia Beach there, just a few hours away. When the kids were younger, we used to drive up to Valleyfield, Canada every winter and spent our X’mas up there. The Hua live in that tiny francophone town where people speak Quebecquois. It takes about 45 minutes from there to Montreal. Our friend Huy worked for GoodYear Valleyfield since he graduated from college up there in the early 1970s. They used to drive down here in the summertime and we took all the kids to Ocean City for a few days, every year, like a ritual, because that's what the kids wanted to do. Besides the crab feasts, the ocean, the kids loved to go to those mini-golf parks across the street from the boardwalk. Every now and then we could arrange to take an additional trip to the West Coast or overseas.

One year, we took them to Whistler to ski. The scenery of the mountain there was nothing short of spectacular. We don't ski, but we tried to take the kids to ski every year until the last two years. The ride up to the Blackcomb on the lift to its chalet (about 6000 feet?) is about twenty minutes; total silence. I have never experienced silence the way it was there. I felt its thick presence actually wrapped around me. My kids are fortunate compared to myself, they have been to places I did not even know nor dreamt of at their ages.

But the fall is for me, every year I wait for it to come patiently. I don't remember since when I started to fall in love with it. I embrace the pace of things in the fall. Fall is like a Sonata, it goes deep and slow enough for me to have time to sink in, to fall in love again, versus a Concerto where every note is strong, clear and forward like the crashes of the oncoming waves and laced with some staccato notes just to accent the space and time. Fall is my color. The beautiful colors of the leaves in the Shenandoah, which run from gold to red to brown with a multitude of hues in between, have inspired a lot of gazers and photographers every year. I have to admit I had been up there only once, a long time ago. We have plenty of magnificent colors around here too in our local areas. During fall, the morning is chilly enough for a light sweater, or at times, it is comfortable enough for me to brave the wind with open windows while driving to work in the morning.

Fall reminds me so much of Dalat. I believe I was there with my mom perhaps just for a few months during a sad and turbulent time of my family. I was seven years old; I still recall clearly my heart was with my grandmother in Saigon. I was never happy, no matter how hard my mom tried. I think I broke her heart.

Before we know it, Halloween is around the corner, then Thanksgivings and Christmas, the whole works, the Holiday Seasons. The weather is cold but everybody is warm at heart preparing for the Holiday Seasons. Perhaps, the pace of fall is the pace of my heart.

The Year of the Monkey

2003
Lawrence Tan

It was hard enough to go through our adolescent years when we had to cope with so many issues that seemed to come at us all at once in just a few short years. Our physical change, our self realization, the search and formation of an attitude, an identity, the yearning to understand more of everything that happened around us and the careful attempt to fit in with our peers as they were going through our same experience. All of that exerted an enormous amount of pressure on us. We started to have feelings that we had never experienced before, we were expected a little bit more by everyone around us. Growing up was tough enough, for our generation, war had no doubt accentuated and accelerated it.

1968 seemed to be an unremarkable year like all the previous years. My plans were the same. I had about a week off from school so I planned to be with my grandparents in Vinh Binh. I had the permission from my relatives to go and stay with Nguyen Tam Thien overnight and we hired a taxi early next morning to take us to the inter-city bus stop in Cholon. Thien's Mom lived in my neighborhood, off Cao Thang street. He stayed in his father's complex on Tran Hung Dao, close to the Dai Nam Movies Theater. Every now and then, he visited his Mom. This complex was two or three stories high and it was so big that it occupied an entire small city block. Every time I passed by and looked for him, I had to get somebody to go upstairs and get him; I got lost one time venturing up there by myself. Apparently, there were a number of families of all the aunts and uncles who shared that building.

That was the first time we traveled together. The bus was scheduled to leave at around 6 o’clock in the morning for a good five to six hours trip. It depends on whether we encountered the blockade set up by the guerillas the night before. Every now and then they came out at night and piled up dirt, rocks and buried a mine or two in the middle of the road to inconvenience the traffic flow. When that happened, we had to wait for the government’s military to come and dismantle it before the traffic flow resumed.

Thien’s grandpa, Mr. Nguyen Van Hao, built a pagoda on the outskirts of the city of Vinh Binh and planned some burial grounds for the family. So, it went without saying that Thien was always welcome there at the temple. From what I remember the temple was a good size structure and it seemed to have plenty of light (looking from the outside in.) It was the only building there on the side of the road. I guess the people normally came by on bicycle, motorcycle or ox-carts. It was a perfect place for the monks. It was a serene place surrounded mostly by rice paddies and near enough to the main road traveled by the inter-city buses; supplies could be dropped off easily. Tam Thien got off there, about half an hour to town. I gave him the instructions to find me if he decided to go to town. We would have dine and wine together if he ever showed up. But he never did.

I think I was there a few days already. One evening, I heard the rumor that the guerillas are amassing their forces close to town; but I had heard those kinds of things every now and then over the years. The people there were so used to the distant canons and bombs, but being from Saigon I was always a little bit more sensitive and worried. It was just past 9PM in the evening. I was shooting some pool with my friends in a billiard hall on the riverside. Suddenly I saw a military truck stop, dropping off a few soldiers and they got into positions with the 'mitreilleuses'(heavy machine guns). They were not bearing the M60’s. At the time the military still used the WW II equipment. I got worried and scared, stopped the game, hopped on my bicycle and started riding home. As soon as I got to the Movie House, I heard a government car coming by and declared immediate curfew via its bullhorn. It ordered everybody to go home and stay in the house until further notification. We cut short the movie show and passed along the same message to the audience. The people started leaving in a fairly orderly fashion...

It must be about 1 or 2 o’clock; I was awakened by a shot to the wall above my bed. Some of the plaster came down on me from the wall. The target was the neon light right above my bed and I heard somebody was yelling from the street ordering to turn the light off. I also saw my uncle quietly beckoning me from the doorway to leave. I jumped off the bed and ran crouching towards the switch, turned the light off and followed my uncle. We ran through the entire length of the auditorium to the dugout below the stage. The auditorium was larger than most of the movie houses I have seen in the States where we live. Below the stage was a large dugout area that had two set of stairs of a few steps each up towards a large backyard. Up on the backyard, on the left side of the left set of steps, there were a shower stall and a makeshift kitchen shared by the families who lived in the dugout. On the right of the second set of steps, way into the yard, there was an open well; a bucket attached to a rope was almost always there sitting on the ground besides the well. The men in their boxers and the kids living in the dugout sometimes got their showers there; the backyard was as wide as the movie theater ground. That was where we let all the chicken, duckling and a couple of pigs run wild. One of the pigs was mine, my grandmother raised it for me, and another one was my brother's. When mine was big enough, she would sell it as supplement to my school tuition in Saigon and other expenditures.

From the auditorium, the dugout was accessible from both sides of the screen via access doors. Behind each access door, the floor was split and there was a few steps leading up to the stage behind the huge movie screen and another set leading down to the dugout area. The movie screen could be slid off all the way to the back wall to make room for a stage area every time an opera troop came by and performed for a few days. There were three families living in the dugout area beneath the stage. The men were all employees of the movie theater. The painter artist, was an ethnic Chinese, but he spoke Vietnamese better than his ancestral language. He was married and had a small boy. He also had a young assistant and painted all our advertisement canvas panels, each one was around 10' X 10'. The colors used on the canvas panels were the washable kind. The right corner of the dug out, close to the staircase to the auditorium was used as his studio where he kept all his bowls of colors and paint brushes with his partially finished work for the next movies. These panels when completed were mounted and displayed on each side of the movie house for the currently shown feature film for a few days until the next feature film. In a larger city such as Saigon, a movie could last about anywhere from a week to two before you ran out of audience. At Phu Vinh, a feature film could last three days at the most. The second family was Muoi, one of the ushers, his wife and their young kids, a boy and a girl, Dzung and Hoa. Then there was the family of Trong, one of the projectionists, with a small child also. Besides the common area of the dug out, their private areas consisted of their beds and maybe a small table and a small piece of furniture. Each family fashioned a curtain or two to cover their areas for privacy. Seeing people raised their family like that really made me think hard at times. How many bedrooms do we want now?

The atrium in the back was surrounded by a wall and beyond the wall, the back of the row houses of the surrounding streets. There were five of us altogether, my grandparents, my uncle, my younger brother and I. We stayed there with the other three families hoping that the situation would eventually ease off, but we ended up staying there all night until around 4PM the next day. Then suddenly an explosion shook the whole building and dust was all over the air. As soon as it settled, Muoi and Kinh decided to crawl up to the auditorium to assess the situation. After a few short minutes, they came back and told us that the gate of the movie house was hit; the grille was mostly destroyed and all twisted, and the lobby collapsed. We decided that it was too dangerous there, the combatants (either side) might come in any time and we would be stuck in between. So we decided to take a chance....

We decided to leave the dug-out. We did not know the source of the explosion. It could be a 155mm canon shell or a rocket from a helicopter. In either case, that meant only one thing, that the guerilla force was in the neighborhood. Since we were right underneath the stage, and behind the projection screen, there is really nothing solid above us except a wooden floor. If god forbid, if one of those shells landed in there, we would not have a chance.

After the explosion, there were a lot of confusions. We had to make some fast decisions. We had a couple of challenges, we did not want to be exposed in the backyard fearing that the helicopter above would mistake us for the combatants of the other side because I understand that the guerillas did not wear uniform. The second difficulty that we faced was to figure out how to get my grandparents over the wall. My grandfather always had a limp because one of his legs suffered atrophy when he was young.

We started yelling across the backyard that we needed help and a ladder. After a few minutes, low and behold, we saw a ladder lowered from across the wall. We wait until the sound of the helicopter seemed to fly by then Kinh, my brother dashed out across the yard and on to the ladder. He got over it before the helicopter started approaching again. Then we let a few other folks go next asking them to wait on the other side to help my grandparents on their way down. My uncle dashed off with my grandmother, he was behind her on the ladder, and they went over. Then my grandfather and I took our turn. I was behind him.

He was kind of slow, but I was there just in case he slipped. During that commotion, I saw the painter used a long bamboo stick stirring the open well, kept calling for his son with a desperate and tiring voice, "Vinh, where are you?". He lost his son during the confusions; he was trying to see if his son fell into the well. Somewhere along the line, I knew the helicopter had seen us, because the time it took to climb the ladder and over the wall.

We all ended up in a narrow back alley of the back of other people's houses. We scattered and went to different houses. Our family stayed together and ended up in a house that sold motorcycles and parts. There was really not much space in there. I think we had less than twenty people all sitting on the floor, wherever we could make room for ourselves. We did not know what to think, all of us were still under shock. The owner of the house turned out to be somebody that my uncle knew. The house we were in shared a common open well with the house next door.

Above the well was a door that divided the houses. When the well was covered with a solid wooden lid, they can open the door above it and climb back and forth between the two houses. I was told that the residents of the houses were relatives. We were there for hours; not knowing what would to do next. What would you do? The movie house was destroyed and going back there was not an option. What would happen next? The people that owned that house we were in asked my uncle to join them in the house next door to play some cards to pass the time. My uncle politely refused. I would think he had his mind at the time on many things other than a card game. Just about half an hour later, there was a big explosion that shook the house we were in. The plaster and the dust were all over the air. By the time we recovered, we realized that a rocket hit the house next door. There was a lot of screaming and crying and of course the confusion reigned over. There were a lot of dead and injured people next door. Some who survived climbed over the well and came to our side, dazed and confused. My uncle was real lucky! My brother and I dashed to the door immediately. It was a solid folding steel door and it was locked from the inside and we needed the key to unlock it. We all pushed towards the door to try to leave the house. I was afraid that the house we were in would be the next target. I started yelling for the key while the owner said she forgot where she placed it!

Then her husband said he had it and shouldered his way to the door and unlock it. I told him not to open right away. We needed to peek outside first to see if it was safe to do so. Then again my brother went out first, because he was a young kid, hopefully the combatants would recognize that and the civilians would follow. We ran across the street by a group of two or three persons at a time. My uncle had my grand mother on his back; I had my grandfather on mine. Kinh was in front of us. I
remembered seeing an old man lying across the street, propped himself up with one of his arm, his head was all bloody. He was moaning about something. I guessed he was too weak to scream.

After I got to the other side of the street I looked back to the houses we just left. There was indeed a hole on the roof of the house next door, still smoking. I don't recall how many more neighborhoods we ran by or how many streets we crossed. We tried to run as far away as we could from that trouble zone.

Eventually, we ended up in the back alley of another neighborhood. By this time as a group, we were really scattered but our family still managed to stay together. A lady in her fifties that owned one of the houses stood in her back door and waved us into her house, God bless her heart! They were also some kind of merchant that I don't recall anymore. After she closed the door, we had about two to three families in her house. We all stayed downstairs and slept on the floor wherever we can find a space. The owner and her family lived upstairs.

Our family occupied the part of the floor that was closest to the steel door. The next morning, they came down and open the door and it turned out that their house was right at the market place. It was customary for a lot of families to live upstairs of their stores. Beyond the sidewalk in front of their house, was the gathering place of the market place. There were a lot of little stalls (sa.p) that sold anything you need, from clothes to foodstuff. All that time, we did not know how to thank the owner of the house. Of course, we all understood that we would use their resources only when absolutely necessary. That means no showers. The food I believed my family had some cash but we would just spend as little as we could, even on food, therefore all the meals were really meager. So it seemed like we were in the area of town controlled by the government troupes. But you never knew! At least we did not have to run no more at the time and that would give us a chance to think about the next step.

So we settled there. Due to the location where there were people bustling most of the time in the daytime. We learnt to deal with the situation over time. I did not dare to venture too far away from the house in the daytime because there were a few times when the government announced curfew in broad daylight due to some emergency situations. We got inside the house, closed and locked the door. When the steel retractable door is closed, I could not see the outside. At night when there were soldiers or the paramilitary walked by, I could see a little bit of their shadow through the crack underneath the door. And every time I heard them yelling or screaming at night, my heart seemed to jump out of my mouth. I laid there worried about any firefight in the area would be the end of us. This is the end of the road; there were no more places that we can go to.

Eventually, the fighting died down, we were allowed to go back momentarily to the movie house to get the things that we need but we were not allowed to stay there, so at least we could have some clothes to change. But we still got no showers. Have any of you tried not to shower for a month? The first thing I experienced was there was some pattern developed on my skin. I think it was the dust and your perspiration that settled on your skin so you started to look like a grey patterned gecko. Eventually, the situation got better, I ventured out in the daytime to look for some friends of mine. Luu Thai was one of my closest friends. His house is facing the municipal bus stop where all the buses would arrive and depart from there to and from other towns such as Vinh Long and Saigon. His Mom died when he was young, he lived with his father and his stepmother both of whom were really nice to me every time I hang out at his place. He also had a younger sister, perhaps ten years old. His family was in the grain business. They carried all kinds of grain, red, green and black beans, rice and etc.. So at least, one would not have to worry about being hungry there. And besides, those sacks of grains could make good shelters just in case. After we first re-connected, knowing our situation, he said his family wanted to
help. And of course, I told them the first thing we needed, a shower for everyone. I went back to the place we stayed and told my family.

And of course I was treated like a hero! Mind you that this is a cold shower! Normally, we would boil some water and mixed it with some cold water for the shower, but at a time like that, that was out of the question. A simple and typical bathroom, a big steel vat filled with water and an empty plastic can that floats on water was all that you need. And of course a piece of Savon Vietnam with the profile of a woman's face embossed on it. American soap like Dial or Camay would wash and smell better but that would be too luxurious. The first splash of water after a month of deprivation is something worth taking time to enjoy. Gosh! The water was so cold, but my body got used to it real quick after a few more splashes. Then came the wonderful soap that lathered all over my body, watching all the flowery patterns disappearing from my skin were such a delight. A sense of freshness and a new me came over me. I put on my pajamas and walked out the bathroom hungry. I don't actually recall how it was in Saigon any more but down there in that small town. A lot of people walked around town in the daytime comfortably in their pajamas. It was such a customary things that you would not even think twice about doing it because everybody else were doing it. The next thing Luu Thai gave me was a pack of Salem since I smoked at the time. He told me not to tell anybody else since we had other friends that came by too. Wow! The first puff was so wonderful, the nicotine rush from a Salem sent me to where a cupful of Nyquil would do for you. My arms and body felt so relaxed, I just let it go, let it go...

Nah! I am not going back to that habit, don't worry...

Eventually, his parent invited us to come and stay in their house as they made a makeshift area for our family in their vast warehouse, which is in the back of the first floor. We moved there because it would be a much better place and we felt like we were
in the way of the other family for so long. After we moved to Luu Thai's house not very long, about a few days, we got re-connected with my father in Saigon. He chartered a Cessna to come down there and picked us up. I left Vinh Binh with mixed emotions. We fed up of living in other people's house and we saw no way of reconstructing the movie house, we just had to move on. When we settled down back in Saigon, I had time to think about it and realized that my whole childhood world is gone. For the first few years, I often reflected about the people, the movie house, my friends, the various places that we used to have such a good times. There was no longer any excuse to go back there any more!

Farewell Tra Vinh, farewell my childhood and farewell my field of dreams!

Additional notes:

1968 was the beginning of a string of terrible years culminating in the defeat of the government of South Vietnam in 1975. The Tet offensive in 1968 was a coordinated attack from the local guerillas of the communist forces on all the major cities throughout Central and South Vietnam. It was an attempt to take over the South by surprise and by force. They were eventually routed, but not before causing a lot of damages in the inner cities. After this battle, the local guerillas forces suffered a lot of loss in personnel. That was when the time was ripe for the North Vietnamese to come down and help, moving closer down to the South to fill in the void.

The conflict in Vietnam cost the American side around fifty eight thousands lives, the Vietnamese, both the North and the South altogether between one to two millions lives.

In recent years, Vietnam and America re-established diplomatic relationship, business as usual...

For Better Or For Worse

December 2003
Lawrence Tan

I believe everything in life is relative. Everything including what we term as the good and the bad, the joys and the sufferings, the pretty and the ugly things and obviously even our own existence are relative to time and space. Sometimes, the good can be found in the bad, beauty can be found in the ugly and vice versa. We would fail miserably in the long run if we judge and handle everything in life by the principle of just black and white. Even in the digital world, there is something called fuzzy logic.

I learn that time will heal all, if it does not, then the subject will eventually expire, therefore the sufferings will dissipate, hence time will definitely heal. The scopes of things around us depend very much on our perspective. Again, this perspective can shift as we move to another environment or as time goes by. Thus the magnitude and the significance of everything that happens around us vary depending on where we are at in relation to time and space. The more focused the perspective, the more intensified the feelings will be. On the contrary, in a wider perspective, all things seem to be less serious. A life is so insignificant in the universe where distance is measured in terms of light years and time in millions of years.

Once again, when my family left Trà Vinh(Vinh Binh), we left behind all we had. In some way, this time was not as drastic as when we left our ancestral home in Haiphong, but it was no less pain. We left a lot of friends, acquaintances, and a way of life behind. I left my friends and my dear town where I grew up each summer in the most significant years of my life. It was there that I experienced the change in me, from a boy to an adolescent and into a young man. It was there that I felt joy and happiness. It was there that I hung my dreams on every summer. It was there that I felt true love and attentions from my grandmother who always worried for my well-being. After all, I am her first grandson of her eldest boy; this ranking bears some important significance in traditional Chinese family. Sometimes I told her that she worried too much, but deep down inside, I felt pampered, I felt loved and warmth. And I realized that the attention I got would only last through the summer until I had to return to Saigon.

As each summer concluded, part of me was excited thinking about going back to my high school(JJR) and starting a whole new school year, but of course my heart was heavy on the morning when I had to board the 6:00AM bus and leaving my grandparents, my uncle and my kid brother behind for another year. While I was always excited during the first nights in Vinh Binh at the beginning of the summer, I spent my first nights back in Saigon reminiscing my summer and the good time I had, often with tears on the pillow. However, I always looked forward to the day when I could go and pick up the books at school for the new school year. Like every year, the line was never too bad; we had to show a slip of paper (perhaps showing that the tuition is paid?) to a school official behind a window of an office, he then handed out a pile of books. We rarely got any new books, most of them were used. The first thing when I got home was to find a cozy corner to settle myself in and then enjoyed flipping through the books to see what would I be learning in the next coming school year.

After the New Year (1968, Tet Mau Than), we were once again uprooted and displaced. The life adjustment up in Saigon was hard. We had nothing left. People no longer greeted and treated us warmly as when we migrated from the North bringing along some wealth with us. When we got back to Saigon, I went back to my relatives’ home where I stayed at the time, off the Cao Thang street in Saigon. My grandparents, my uncle and my brother temporary settled on the top floor of my granduncle (my grandmother’s brother) house on Nguyen Trai Street in Cholon. The top floor was really a terrace with a tin roof; there wasn’t really any rooms per say. So basically they camped there until we figured out the next move. While they stayed there, my granduncle got sick and passed away. After he was no longer there, we started to hear unpleasant comments from the relatives. Sometimes those words even came from my grandma’s friends, those who used to be part of her entourage in the old days. Now they hung around our relatives instead. Since they stayed on top of the second floor, it was most difficult for my grandfather to walk those flights of stairs everyday because of his limp. On the rainy days, they used those large plastic sheets to deflect the rain from all the open sides of the terrace. Every time I thought about the general situation of our family, I felt deeply saddened. From a long and well-established family in the North, now we were reduced to almost homeless and subjected to all kinds of humiliations! My father lived in a flat closed to the Hoa Binh marketplace but it could not accommodate our whole family. I came and visited them mostly on the weekends. I believe I went and visited my Mom in NhaTrang that summer.

Eventually, my uncle found a job working as a foreman for a company called Amtraco, across the river in Khanh Hoi. It was a favor from a long time friend, Gia’. He was then some kind of a big wig there. He had his own office and a chauffeur. He used to hang around with my uncle during the first years in Saigon when we were still relatively well-off. My uncle foolishly burnt a lot of money in parties and with friends. I remembered him well; back then, like a number of others, he used to call my uncle ‘Anh Cuong’, a form of respect, all the time. My uncle got me a summer job at Amtraco. At times, I heard Gia yelling “Cuong! Where the heck are you?”, and my uncle would say “Yes Sir, I am right here!” I was so enraged, but that was life, wasn’t it? Seeing that I was upset, my uncle consoled me “Don’t you worry about it. After all, that’s life! All you have to do is work and study hard”. My uncle used to be a proud and carefree person; he now accepted the realities of life and took its beatings with stride. For that, I loved him more. As a young man with plenty of pride, my heart bled for him… Before this job, I was tutoring for pocket money. It was not so bad, but the job in Amtraco got me twice the money for working on the weekends only. I still remember the lunches in a humble food stand in the neighborhood across from our workplace. I loved the pickled mustard and the sliced pork in jelly and being with my uncle. I felt he was even closer to me than my father. At this time of his life, his kids, a daughter and a son, lived with their Mom. They were brainwashed and forbidden to come and visit him. As I grew older and became a father myself, I then realized how deeply that had hurt him. One good thing in Amtraco was that there was an old American manager, Mr. Tallyho. I got to practice my English with him and eventually I tutored him and a friend of his, a black man, elementary French! Of course I charged each one of them twice as much as the kids I used to tutor before. That was pretty good money on top of my salary in Amtraco as part time jobs. It was there that I read my very first English book ever, The World of Suzy Wong, at lunch and break times.

During this time we had moved out of our relatives’ house and to the Chi La(ng district. We rented a flat in a back alley. The owner is a retired Major in the Vietnamese Army. His house faced the Chi La(ng street. The back of his house was facing us across a narrow alley. My father and I then moved back there with them. It was the first time in many years we were reunited and lived together again as a family. The flat was tiny; we all lived in one room. My grandma and my brother on one bed, my grandfather in his favorite plastic chair, my uncle took the sofa, my father and I took the rest of the room on the floor. There were two more floors above us; each occupied by a bargirl. There was no other access except going through our floor. Each night each one of them brought in with them a different GI. Next to the door, there was a tiny desk against a window. I hung a light bulb there and spent a lot of nights studying for my TuTai II(equivalent to SAT). The older I got the more I felt the untold pains and the humiliations of my grandparents. Sometimes I saw my grandfather going through his check stubs of the transactions from his better days when we had our business, servants, chauffeur and almost a permanent entourage of friends who hang around our family for fun. I started to develop a pretty bitter attitude towards life. I refused to participate in any large gatherings that involve the relatives. I felt their hypocrisy and did not feel that I belong to those crowds no more.

At the time, I studied in Thuong Hien and my brother was in some school close to the movie theater Khai Hoan. I had a Honda. I dropped him there in the morning and picked him up after school. My grandmother managed to have some friends about her age to help her to cook meals in a makeshift kitchen in the open for us every day. I had a hard time adjusting to that level of poverty. That was the time when I saw some of my friends started having girl friends, but I realized that as far as for me, under the circumstances, that was really out of the question. I did not want to know anybody, I was afraid that she would know where I live. At the time, the only JJR friend I still visited sometimes but also fairly infrequently was Be Duc Viet who lived with his mom and his sister on a small street close to the Truong Minh Giang bridge.

Eventually my father got a job offer from the family of Mr. Lam Cat to work in Cam Ranh, a town in the Southern tip of VietNam. Mrs. Cat was a good friend of my grand-mother, they know each other since the early days in Saigon. Mr. Cat and his sons were very successful entrepreneurs getting lucrative construction contracts from the Americans. I believe Lam Quang, his youngest son, now is the owner of the well-known restaurant Vien Dong in Southern California.

One morning in the summer of 1969, my grandfather suffered an aneurysm and fell in the bathroom. He called out for my brother who was close by; he panicked and in turn called me. I ran back from the front of the house and both of us carried him onto a chair. While my uncle ran out and tried to call an ambulance, I talked to him. His speech started to slur, I quietly tried to pinch his right arm and realized that he no longer could feel any pain. He told my grandmother that he wanted some congee and asked me to change him in his best suit. I was scared but my brother and I helped him to put on his jacket and his pair of pants. He asked me to help him to comb his hair and I respectfully did. By the time the ambulance arrived he drifted into unconsciousness. When I got to the hospital on my Honda, a young doctor came out of the emergency room and said “He had left”. I took it rather calmly at first, but within a few minutes I burst in tears realizing that I had lost him. He was just there this morning! I slumped down from where I stood, holding my head against my knees, his images of the different times in my life started to parade through my mind. His last image was sitting in front of our place in Chi Lang, holding a bunch of check stubs, he’d got that distant look of a beaten and defeated man reminiscing the old times. At that image, a thought came to my mind that was may be it was time for him to stop suffering. May be he had paid off his debts; I should let him go. My brother helped me to clean his body for the very last time with a piece of cloth and some warm water. The next morning when I woke up, seeing his old beaten yellow plastic chair, I started to cry like a baby. I missed him so much! I remembered grandma put her hand on my head comforting me. My father flew back in time from Cam Ranh for his funeral.

During grandpa’s funeral, I took away the incense sticks from some of the old family friends while they were paying respect to my grandfather for the last time, and I asked them to leave! The turncoats that now preoccupied themselves to badmouth our family because we were no longer what we used to be. My uncle stopped me but he did not apologize to those people. Since our place was so tiny, his images were everywhere in our minds. We decided to move.

From Chi Lang we rent and moved into a larger and more decent flat on the Tran Hoang Quan Street in Cholon, pretty close to the Tiger Beer and the soccer stadium Cong Hoa. I believe that was in an ‘Officers’ Quarter’, owned by a major in the VN Air Force, a family friend. As time went by, we started to adjust to the new place. My uncle’s job was getting better and one day, he brought home a small refrigerator. Then a few months later he brought home a black and white TV. Even though the place was much better than Chi Lang, it was still very small for our family. However, it started to feel like a home.

The year was 1970. Luu Thai, my closest friend from Vinh Binh caught up with me. We corresponded every now and then after my family moved to Saigon. He invited us to go back to Vinh Binh to attend his wedding. His family had chartered a plane with all his and his bride’s relatives from Saigon/Cholon. At the thought of going back there, I was so happy. I just could not wait. My uncle and I accepted the invitation. By this time, I started my first year of study in Van Hanh University. My uncle flew with me down to Vinh Binh. My mind was totally preoccupied with the excitements and the expectations to see the old friends and the old place.

Heartbeats of the Fall

November 2003
Lawrence Tan

The night was young and the moon was bright
The music filled the air and the hold was tight
I danced through the evening and into the morning
But my heart still soaked in loneliness and wandering

Was it the music, the crowd, the smoke or the night?
I wanted to give myself up and my chest was so tight
I needed more beer and wine until the evening was ripe
Hopefully to free myself from the illusions of life

I know I got the songs and the sways
It is just I have to deliver them someday
As I close my eyes, the romantic melodies
Lull me into my own world of realities

Through your window, under the moon and the stars
Like my soul, your beloved tree bears a few scars
Like all willows on a pond, my soul weeps
At the thought of a face my heart forever keeps

I knew it was wrong, it had never been right
But it all seemed so fine under that moonlight
Was it her eyes, her mouth or her hair?
That made the ‘me’ say I don’t really care

Is that still love or is that hate
I can’t tell because I am truly dazed
Please help me to get out of this quagmire
Please help me to extinguish this fire

The House of Eternal Peace

August 2003
Lawrence Tan

It was once said that it is important for us to know where we are from in order to understand where we are going to in our lives. It really took some time for me to get the meaning of that. However, I think it is not an easy concept to convey and explain, but let me give it a try anyway… Our identity is partly defined by who we are in terms of our education background, the family and the community in which we grew up, the values that we are taught or adopted, how much we know our parents and their parents and their values in life. These are the pride and values that constitute the anchor of our identity. By upholding some of these values and absorbing the new ones along the way, we are in fact sketching the direction where we are heading in life as a person.

The family jewelry store that was managed by my grandparents in Haiphong had been established just about 99 years by the time we evacuated to the South sometime in 1955. According to the 1954 Geneva agreement, after the Vietnamese Communist forces defeated the French in Dien Bien Phu, the Northern part of the country, above parallel 17, was soon to be turned over to an effectively Communist government. The rest of the country in the South would supposedly be under a democratic government. For the time being, this is as much as I want to digress into the complex politics at the time. At that time in Haiphong, there were two major jewelry stores with well-established names, Vinh Hoa and Ddai Tin. Vinh Hoa was our store and it was the oldest and the most reputable. The name derived from Chinese meaning Eternal Peace. An established name of the jewelry store at the time was very important because it strongly implied the trustworthiness of the store. When I was growing up in Saigon (South Vietnam), sometimes I ran into older people that came from the same town, they all knew the store. The other established jewelry store was Dai Tin, (Greater Trust). My father was the eldest, followed by my Aunt Mei and Uncle Kiang. Actually, it was almost never mentioned but my father had an elder brother that died at a very young age. We all grew up without being aware of his existence; in fact probably I am the only one in my family generation that even know about it. I don’t know how he died but it was very likely out of illness.

The store was a double row house on a relative narrow street called Rue De Formose (Pho Hang Chao in Vietnamese, The Street of the Congee). As I recalled, there was a lot of streets that were named in similar fashion in Haiphong in particular and may be also in other old Vietnamese towns. I guessed that in the old times, people with similar trade had the tendency to flock to the same area, and the streets were officially named after the trades later on. Rue De Formose was obviously given by the French during their almost 100 year occupation. Directly across the street was the Sinh Ky Chinese Restaurant, which also re-established later in Cholon after 1955. The balconies of the two row houses that we lived in were connected. The houses as I recalled, were pretty deep and three-story high. I rarely went up to the top floor as it housed among other things, the altars of our ancestors. There were nights when I could not sleep, I looked out the windows of the balcony, across the street, I saw people dancing on the second floor of the restaurant. The street must be so narrow that sometimes I could even hear people’s voices from the restaurant.

I have two cousins from Uncle Kiang’s side. Nhat Ai(Yat-Oi), she was a year younger than I am and Nhat Minh(Yat-Ming), he is four years my junior. I don’t recall that I get to see a lot of my own sister, Nhat Tieu(Yat Siu), at the time. She was three years my junior. She probably stayed most of the time with my mom’s family. My brother Nhat Kinh(Yat King) and my youngest sister, Nhat Ngon(Yat Yun) were born after we migrated to the South. Each one of us had a separate nanny. I was much closer to my nanny than to anybody else in the family, including my parents. We called her Ma-Po. I clung to her all the times. I don’t recall that she had ever changed her appearance, the slick black hair all brushed back and held together in a bun cover in the back of her head. Her outfit was a typical Chinese lady outfit at the time, three quarter length sleeves and buttoned all the way down from the collar, crossing her chest to below her right arm and then all the way down to the side. The buttons were made from the same cloth, each button was really a fancy knot and the buttonhole was a sewn-in loop. Yat-Oi’s nanny, Ng-Sam (Aunt number 5), dressed very similar, but almost always in white tops as opposed to Ma Po who always wore black. When we migrated to the South, we took along with us some of the nannies and servants, including Ma-Po and Ng-Sam.

The two houses were connected inside via a door. Facing the street, the house on the left was the storefront, the house on the right side were mostly closed. The house on the right was a rather spartan office in the front and a big wooden and lacquer divan in the back, separated by a lacquer divider screen embedded with small mother of pearls patterns of the birds, butterflies and flowers. The house on the left was the storefront, there was a L-shape glass display case that extended from the left side of the store and ran along may be fifteen to twenty feet. I used to see my grandparents busy behind the display case. Along the right wall was a row of goldsmiths and apprentices, each with their individual stations and all the tools including an incandescent light and a blowing torch activated by a foot-pump. Uncle Lum was one of the apprentices at the time; he is now settled in Hawaii. I met him there during my last trip in Hawaii in 1989. My father passed away in Falls Church, Virginia a couple of months after that. The center of the store was large enough to set up about two to three large round tables at lunch and dinner times. Each sits about ten to twelve people. At every meal, we always had a lot of people. Those were the employees and family friends, some of whom hanging around our store pretty frequently. They were either friends of my grandparents or my father and his siblings. Small town, small schools and closed friends.

My father’s marriage was arranged via a matchmaker. My mom was from a well-established Vietnamese rice-merchant family in Hanoi. My mom told me that she did not get to meet my father until pretty much close to the wedding day. I was not as close to the relatives of my mother side. I was told that my maternal grandfather (Ong Nham) was also a driver license test examiner. He was notorious to be pretty strict at the exams and had failed a lot of candidates in Hanoi. He was also a martial-artist, practicing Viet-Vo-Dao, a traditional Vietnamese martial art style. Perhaps some of his blood is flowing in Felix and Vivian’s veins. He was a catholic, a quiet catholic. I don’t recall that he ever went to church. On the other hand, my maternal grandmother was a devout Buddhist; she was strictly vegetarian, in the religious sense, as long as I had known her. In the house that she lived, there was always a small room set aside for the altar of Buddha, where she spent hours every day praying and reciting the religious scriptures. She had a whole set of utensils including pots, pants, bowls and chopsticks that none of us can touch. She always cleaned them herself. She did not like the idea of her wares being soiled by mixing up with ours, all the earthlings’. She had four fingers on one of her left hand so she was always holding a silk handkerchief to conceal it. I never asked but it was probably an accident when she was young. She was always soft spoken and mild-mannered. Felix, Vivian and Yenni had the chance to meet her a number of years ago in California in my mom’s house. I had the impression that she did really shrink in size when she got older. She lived to close to 100 years old. I saw her pictures when she was young; she was very attractive. No wonder my grandfather fell for her. I would love to hear their stories. I was told that until just about a month before she passed away, her mind was still functioning very clearly helping my mother managing the affairs of the temple.

We migrated down to the South in 1955, so I must be less than 5 years old. It is truly amazing of how a person’s mind work. I can still remember these fragments of images after all these years! Every now and then, my nanny called from our balcony to a street merchant that passed by selling food, either Pho, bun rieu and a variety of sweet soups. I watched her lowering a basket with money and a bowl inside and later carefully pulled up the basket with the meal inside. I don’t remember why, but I was pretty much a vegetarian when I was young. For some reason, meat really disgusted me at the time. Yat Oi used to chase me around with a piece of sausage and I was running scared and in tears. I believed that I had seen a picture of myself riding on a big stone frog in the Park of the Frog. I still remember the scary feeling that it might come alive while I was riding on it for the picture! On one occasion, it must have been my birthday of four-year old; it is still so very clear in my mind. I was summoned by my grandfather to the house on the right, in the office area. When I got there, I saw a whole bunch of people standing in a circle and waiting for me. I saw an orange tricycle in the center of the circle of people, I was so happy, I went and climbed on it right away and started pedaling in a circle. The adults were all cheering and applauding watching me on the bike.

Even before I was born, not all the times were happy times. There was a rumor, perhaps spread by our competitors that our gold was of a lesser quality, therefore a lot of people, some even came from the country sides camped out in front of our store and demanded their money back. My grandmother quickly put together a one-page poem that explained and dispelled the rumor. I had seen a copy of it when I was young. She had thousands of copies of the poem spread in town and in the country sides by airplanes. Eventually, I was told that the customers were convinced and the situation subsided. During the war against the Japanese, my grandparents had to live in the countryside where the food was very scarce. They had terrible days. But apparently some of their more loyal servants stuck with them throughout the bad times. There was a famine at the time when the Japanese burnt most of the rice warehouses. Apparently, their policy was to punish the revolt during that turbulent time, they just kept enough rice supply for their occupying troops and controlled the people by controlling their stomachs.

My father liked to sing, dance and loved basketball. He was of a good and uncaring nature. He never seemed to care too much about anybody else, including his family. I did not recall he spent any time with me or with my brother and sisters. Perhaps in his time, he was a typical father, but in a way, he was a selfish person. He was with his friends most of the times. I never felt close to him. I guess his personality had cost him his marriage later on in Saigon. My mother separated from him and later filed for a divorce.

Uncle Kiang when he was young person, according to his friends that I chat with later in Saigon, was a good friend, a fun guy to be with and a troublemaker who liked to pull pranks on people. Good looking and being the son of the top jewelry store in town, he was pretty popular, at school as well as in parties. In one occasion, he drove the family car with his friends to the outskirts of Haiphong and peed on the jars of fermented shrimps that people left in the open. On another, he drove a whole bunch of schoolmates around including this girl who had the reputation of being a tomboy, pretty loud and rough. He stopped by the roads to let her go to the bush to pee, then he drove on with the rest of the guys back to town leaving her there! Later that day, that girl went to our Jewelry store and started screaming, yelling and cursing him, embarrassing my grandparents! Years later in the States, I ran into a girl whose mom was another schoolmate of his, told me that one time while they were playing basketball, uncle Kiang happened to pass the ball to her mom, just once, and that made her thinking about him for a while! How romantic people can be! I truly need a woman to explain this to me!

When we lived on Charles DeGaulle, he was the one that get me and the other two kids together and had us taken our shorts all the way down to our ankles and took a picture that he called the Three Mousquetaires. I saw that picture before. I swear I don’t have it anymore. When he was in BanMeThuot, he had taken pictures of himself with a big smile and two topless native girls, having his arms around each one on each side.

Still back in HaiPhong, Uncle Cuong, either out of ignorance or carelessness, impregnated his schoolmate, Dai Tin’s daughter who later became my aunt. Remember the time and place we are talking about. It was such a scandal! It was such a shame for my aunt and her family; she did not have too many choices. Her reputation was ruined, her family’s reputation was ruined and they would be the laughing stock of the town if she could not get my uncle to marry her. Of course, there was some negotiation going on at the time and my grandparents agreed to allow uncle Kiang to marry her. I was told that my aunt’s family discreetly sent her to HongKong where she gave birth to Ah-Oi, left her there temporarily with a relative, not knowing what to do with the baby, awaiting the decisions by the elders.

The wedding was one of the most lavish in town in years. Can you imagine how the union of the two most reputable jewelry stores in town must be celebrated? After the wedding, Ah-Oi was brought back to Haiphong from HongKong. I can imagine my uncle and my aunt went through a lot together at the time. It must be really rough for both of them. Unfortunately, they, like my parents, later divorced in Saigon.

According to the Geneva agreement, there was a window in which the people could decide where they would live, in the North with the incoming communist government or with the government in the South. After this window, the demarcation (parallel 17) is closed. Foreign countries provided cargo ships as the means of relocations for those who wanted to migrate. A million of people went south. A very insignificant number went north. We were one of the few privileged families that could afford to charter an airplane, from Haiphong to Saigon. I was airsick and uncle Kiang held me up over the sink to throw up in the back of the plane. I was then feeling homesick; I asked him when we would be going home. He looked at me and said: “It might be a while, son”.

Starting Over

July 2002
Lawrence Tan

Do I believe in destiny? Of course I do, but in a loose sense. I believe every one has a destiny. I believe that when we are born, we are already pre-programmed, equipped with certain genes, level of intelligence and a variety of intuitions with different potential degrees of intensity. I believe that is how destiny is defined. In other words, due to how we are equipped, we are pretty much limited in the extent of what we can do in a general sense. In addition to this fundamental premise, we should not ignore the environmental elements that influence our formation as a person. As weak as we are as human beings, the external influences are the catalysts that promote certain traits that we had been born with and had been so far dormant. The level of environmental influences and the degree of intensities of certain potentials that we are born with play a determinant role of our behavioral promotions. At times, these behaviors, once taken shapes, are very hard to reverse. As intelligent as we are, sometimes we can even manipulate and position others or ourselves under certain selected external influences. In that, we have some flexibility. This flexibility is in my humble opinion, often misunderstood as we are the masters of our own destiny. I believe that these thoughts of mine are very simplistic and fundamental; there must be other rules and exceptions.

We are Cantonese; my ancestors are from China and apparently came and settled in North Vietnam many years ago. It would not surprise me if some of them married Vietnamese wives along the ancestry line, besides their Chinese wives. The name in Cantonese is Tsaun (I make this spelling up myself, as close as I pronounce it in Cantonese), or Chin in Mandarin. I was told that this name actually derived from North of China and it bears the same official name of the era of the First Emperor. That was the guy who mistrusted the literates, buried the scholars alive, burnt a lot of books and united a big part of China and erected one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Great Wall of China. Tsaun is a pretty rare name and who knows? We might be related to The Emporor!

Chin Tzu Nien named all his grandchildren. All of us have the middle name of Yat (‘One’, the simplest Chinese character with just one horizontal stroke). Within the context of the names, it means the only and the best. In the order of age, I am Yat Sine (One Goodness), followed by Yat Oi (One Love), Yat Siu (One Smile), Yat Ming (One Brightness), Yat King (One Sacred Scripture) and Yat Yuen (One (good) Word). In the Chinese tradition, the ranking among all cousins are by age, in the Vietnamese tradition, the kids of the elder sibling are always ranked higher than those of the junior one.

Touched down in Saigon, we settled in a walled villa on Charles DeGaulle Boulevard. At the time, a number of major streets in Saigon still bear French names. Over time, they all changed to Vietnamese names. Charles DeGaulle Blvd. extends from the Saigon Centerville to the TanSonNhut Airport. The majority of its length, towards the Centerville, was lined with large and tall tamarind trees. The design of a lot of the major streets in Saigon had heavy French influence. The French had been in Vietnam for about one hundred years and exerted their influence in various aspects in the Vietnamese culture. From architecture, to food and the flair of savoir-vivre, the French culture was for a long while, regarded as prestigious and of a higher stature. I guess that was why my family sent me to a French school.

The trees on both sides of the streets formed a canopy of shades to the pedestrians as well as the traffic. It was soothing to see the perspective formed by the symmetrically planted trees on the sidewalks. In my adolescent years, when I had to walk to and from school, I felt so protected by the shade of the canopy during those warm days. I felt so peaceful and soothing as the occasional gusts of wind rustled the canopy. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered many similar streets in Shanghai, however the sidewalks are smaller and the trees are just not as tall. The Charles DeGaulle Boulevard was later renamed to Cong Ly, meaning Justice. Not long after the American got involved in Vietnam, their civil engineers enlarged Cong Ly by cutting back the sidewalks. This decision might be due for practical reasons because the traffic had increased, but it really diminished its aesthetic value since a large number of trees were also taken down in the project. I am sure that the American advisor had also suggested to turn Cong Ly(Justice) into a one-way street. We called it jokingly the One-way Justice Street.

For the stretch of the street where we stayed, it was closer to the heart of the city rather than the airport. The Institute of Pasteur was not very far from there. Most of the residences were of middle to upper class. Each villa was walled and gated; most of them are concealed behind some tall hedges for privacy. The house we stayed was also covered from the street by tall hedges, which are adorned by a decorative cement wall fashioned in the shapes of the fans just like what we would see in some of the deck rails in the States, therefore it is very easy to spot. From the street, an iron gate on the right opens up to a gravel driveway. The house, concealed from the street, was actually situated in the far left corner of the lot. As I recalled, the lot size might have been a third of an acre, which I guess was the sizes of most of the lots on Charles DeGaulle, a pretty good size right in the city. Immediately to the left of the gate inside the lot, there was a real large tree. I had seen a variety of salamanders climbing that tree. Apparently we shared that place with some other family friends of my grandparents. They also migrated from HaiPhong, North of Vietnam. I don’t recall how long we lived there but it seemed liked a relatively short time, may be a few months. I played with some kids around my aged that belong to the other family. In the monsoon season, there were a lot of heavy showers, we all liked to run out to the yard and played in the heavy downpour wearing only our shorts. After the rain, I liked to drag my toy car by a string around the yard, going through the potholes filled with rainwater, muddy sometimes. As the car disappeared under the water and emerged on the other side of the puddle, it made me feel it really came alive! There was a kid, a few years older than me, he likes walking around with his slingshot and he was good at it, hunting for chameleons and salamanders. I saw him shooting down some of these creatures from the big tree. It was so disgusting seeing those creatures destroyed and dying in agony. I don’t know what it is but I recall there was one red creature with golden eyes. I don’t think I ever saw something like that since then.

When we moved out of the house, I never saw those kids again for a long time. I had all forgotten about them, not knowing who they are. Over the years, their grandmother often visited my grandparents and I did not even know that she was related to those kids. Around fifteen years later, when I was in a military camp for college students (we were required to attend a military camp for about a month each year), I ran into one of those kids again. He was in my squad; he spoke Vietnamese with the northern accent. One evening, when we chat, we discovered that our families actually knew each other. He was a nice guy and we became instantly attached. His name is Phan. A few years later, his older brother, the chameleons hunter, died of a heart complication at 24 years old. I was at my job when I heard the news. I did not understand why, but I dashed to the hospital morgue at lunchtime and look for his brother. The morgue is air conditioned and built with a number of cement beds. Most of the beds are occupied. Each cadaver is fully covered with a blanket. The guy who took me in there, walked around with me and uncover each one for me to find Phan’s brother. I could not believe it; he was so young, lying there just like sleeping. I felt so sorry for him and his family, no one would feel comfortable lying on those cement beds, and it was so cold there. I felt sorry for his parents too. I went to his funeral. When the procession was heading down to the cemetery, his parents, according to our tradition, had to stay behind; all they could do was wailing and crying, because parents are not supposed to bury their children. Phan dated his second cousin and later married her. I saw her only once when they dated. She was kind of short, even for an Asian woman standard, but she was very pretty. I believe that Phan came to the States in the early nineties and settled somewhere in the Washington State. Some of my relatives told me about him and I tracked him down somehow. I talked to him a few times and now we have lost contact.

From there, we moved to 91 Testard St (Tran Quy Cap). That was when I believe I started attending Kindergarten.