wretched of the earth

My ong ngoai passed away very early this morning. He had a heart attack at home, called all his daughters, and accompanied by my youngest uncle and my mother, he died without prolonged suffering. One of his last wishes because he had already a lifetime of suffering. His heart was broken after my ba ngoai died two years ago. The had been married over 60 years.

He was a good man who lived through a lot of hardship. Born a Catholic peasant in 1925 in a tiny hamlet called Lien Thuy under French colonization, though he was chau dich ton--the patrilineal heir, the firstborn son beget of the firstborn son beget of the village chief and so on and so forth, he tilled the catholic-ceded land land under peonage to his own grandparents for his disowned father's gambling debts; his mother left him at age 7 and a baby brother behind to become a wet nurse in the big city Ha Noi. He minded the water buffalo, ploughed & harvested the rice paddies and fished in Ha Long Bay and learned to be self-sufficient though unloved. He never gave up the hope and faith that his father's family would love him and perhaps even restore him to his rightful place.

As he grew of age, he was conscripted as coolie labor to the colonial Army and learned to build bridges and to hate the French. He had an customary arranged marriage with my ba ngoai. In his teens, he survived the Japanese invasion and their torching of the granaries and their deliberate famine that took 2 million lives. When armistice was declared, he joined the Viet Minh to prevent the French from regaining colonial power. And when it became clear that religion and Communism would never reconcile, he left behind his what ought o have been his ancestral lands, uprooted his family--ba co|his mother, ba ngoai, my eldest aunty and mother--to enter the South where he tried to find a small piece of earth to call his own. Roaming through the Mekong for many years, they finally settled in Quy Nhon in the Central region where my parents grew up.

My ong ba ngoai, my parents & siblings (& me in the womb), 4 aunties, 3 uncles, all left Viet Nam to join my oldest aunty in Honolulu where land was scarce to be had and jobs even scarcer. My grandparents, 3 of my aunties and 3 uncles tried to make a go of it in Missouri but the winters and the chicken factory were misery.

We were all reunited in San Diego; we all lived together until I was 12. I still mark time not by years but what street we lived on--Reynard then Ohio (ong ba, aunties, & uncles on Whitmen) then Auburn (then ong ba and 2 youngest uncles on Alta Dena), then mom & us separately Oro Vista, and finally Jason; for peasant stock, we were awfully nomadic.

I learned so many things from my ong ba ngoai. My ba ngoai of unconditional maternal love, spoke the love language of food. My ong ngoai though had only his stories of loss and perseverance to give to us grandkids, and at Tet, his handmade banh chung and his sesame candy gooey and almost scalding. I am one of the only grandkids who is fluent enough and was around enough to have listened to his stories. Ong ngoai secretly loved my siblings and I best he once told me years ago because he said, my mother suffered the most from my father's heroism and fate; and perhaps too, because we were his only full Viet grandkids and he had not the prospect of a chau dich ton|patrilineal heir to carry on the Phamily name and to remember his legacy. He taught me to be proud of being Viet; that was my first day of kindergarten when we lived on Reynard Way, when I came home proclaiming I was American, he took me by the hand, squatted down beside me, and told me that to Americans, I would always have yellow skin, black hair and eyes. I would always be Viet.

I learned to love tools and making things from watching him make banh chung|pork sticky rice cake every Tet, building non-permitted additions to our rented houses (Ohio & Auburn and later their house on 54th), and making flapping wooden angel harnesses from scraps of wood and cloth for the Christmas pageant (Auburn Dr).

I don't grieve very well. I tattoo.

I lost my father when I was too young to understand and taboo to speak of it. And so, I write. I feel so bereft to have lost my roots in this world. There were so many more things I wanted to learn from them, about them. And with the narcissism of youth and American-ness, I marked not the time until too late.

My grandfather wore 3 piece suits, fedoras and pocket watches, loved cognac and good food, made the best banh chung and keo me every Tet up until very recently, and lived to play with his great-grandchildren. In his elder years, he learned to forgive (not the French nor Japanese) but certainly his paternal family, and to love. He still dreamed I think of water buffaloes and rice paddies (and thit cay on occasion) but he and my grandmother had their garden, family, and Church. And now he has peace and rejoined my ba ngoai in the either.

An era has passed. I am disconsolate, desiring what is in the past, a byproduct perhaps of being partly raised by my grandparents. I feel in this modern society we lose our rituals and I feel it the most with death. We've lost our rituals of death and honoring our loved ones by being with them as they die and our hands that loved them so well, preparing them for their final resting place. I am bracing myself for the artifice of mortuary preparation and the dullness of performance.

whoa nellie

Today Trang took us (Trang's daughter LA, me, T, & VL) to her secret kid spot The Brunk Children's Museum of Immigration in nearby Andersonville. Like any great children's museum, it had really great interactive roleplay exhibits; in this case, of life in the old country, the journey to America, and life in America. Not to detract from the museum's Swedish mission nor to detract from the basic fun-ness of it, I must allow that it's a rather grandiose museum name that surpasses its subject by far since it focuses on a very specific segment of Swedish immigration in the 1800s. The museum acknowledges as much:

The Museum has a Swedish focus; however, the story of Swedish immigration parallels that of many other groups who left the old world behind and forged new lives in America.

Indeed, there was the almost universalized American romantic meme of immigrating to America in the 1800s-a least if one was a European settler and not an African slave or a Chinese coolie or a dispossessed Injun. That substantial historical context aside, there was definite wholesome, rustic charm to delight my girlish homesteading heart having grown up reading & watching Little House on the Prairie. Think roleplaying Laura Ingalls Wilder. Plus, who doesn't love kid-sized pinafores, cast iron stoves, coffee mills, and chamberpots? The wooden milking cow that one could actually milk was RAD. So Sweden farmhouse in the 1800s was lots of fun for the girls. They cooked us fish, made us coffee, and had lots and lots of kitchentime fun. Then we took the cruise ship to America, a quick journey really because the girls weren't interested in rowing or shuffleboard. And then onto pioneer America of the 1800s, where the little one room cabin was adorned with hand embroidered aphorism in cryptic Swedish, with Ikea furniture (I kid you not), and *real* animal pelts-ugh, it looked way cuter on the actual racoons and coyotes. There was a darling garden handmade with recycled/repurposed rubber tires, boxes, fabric. Tucked away in a corner in front of the emergency exit was a small life raft-a story symbol of the desperate third world refugee influx to Sweden. This display was marked DO NOT PLAY. Refugee boat stories are depressing and not to be roleplayed, apparently.

At any rate, I thought wouldn't it be great for VL & LA to have kid-sized dioramas of vietnamese life? Oh, or better yet, a children's museum that could really reflect the diversity of immigration experiences? To come over, one could chose the boat or an airplane or... climb a barbwire fence. And then Life in America could reflect more recent realities like uh, urban homesteading, public housing, section 8, refugee camps... While not without humanitarian precedent, this roleplaying idea quickly devolved. Perhaps like the fragile refugee life-raft diorama, some stories are not meant to be roleplayed...

How do we tell our stories to our children?