In my quest to understand my mother, I wanted to find out more about her youth and her relationship with her father. He died in 1968, when my mother was only sixteen. More than thirty years later, she still lives with the pain of his death. I wanted to discover the dramatic events that surrounded his death, his capture and assassination by the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive. My mother is rather reticent when it comes to this issue, and I've only heard parts of the story from other relatives, but I needed to hear her feelings on the matter. When I told her my intentions, she immediately referred me to her older brother and sister, who she said would remember more accurately the events of that fateful day. I told her that I was interested, for the time being, in her feelings. In response, she found a paper she had written on the Tet offensive, and she offered this to me in lieu of an interview. I told her that I would certainly use that as a supplement to the interview, but that I still needed to talk to her first hand about her experiences. Her reluctance to talk about the one issue she still keeps bottled up became very evident, but it was a part of her that I did not know, and a part of her that decisively forms her identity.
I decided to take the bus home for a day to try and warm her up to the idea of an interview instead of arranging a phone conversation. The interview was clearly on her mind, and thoughts of Vietnam were foremost in her mind. She insisted that I talk to Uncle San, who was with my grandfather in his last moments before his capture. He would surely know what happened, she told me. I expressed interest in this aspect of the story, but I wanted to know the other side, too, what happens to those affected by these events. She reminded me that she was young and that she wouldn't have too much to offer. I told her that was fine, knowing that her silence told a story in itself.
During the evening, she would make comments now and then about Vietnam, or her father, or something related. She mentioned once how as she was getting older, she felt that she was coming to terms with her father's death, and she didn't need to keep it inside so much. She would throw out what I thought to be vital bits of information about her story, which of course, was not during the course of the interview, so I cannot remember exact quotes. I remember showing her a preview of a movie about Vietnam in a glossy magazine I had bought for the bus ride from Providence to New Jersey. She read through the description, interested in the idea that it was the first American film to be shot in Vietnam since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Then she lamented America's lack of interest about these movies, recalling Oliver Stone's box office failure of Heaven and Earth, a story about a Vietnamese woman. I reminded her that even I thought it was a poor movie, and that I had more faith in this upcoming movie called Three Seasons. Her eyes then fell to the accompanying picture. A young Vietnamese girl stands on a path that extends into the distance. She is adorned in a traditional white ao dai, and she stands beneath an arch of red flowers, with the red petals strewn along the path, creating a picture of serene beauty. My mom said that she remembered those flowers from when she was young. She described how she had some of those trees near her childhood home and how they were so beautiful. "I miss that," she told me, "I really miss that."
My mother was born Tran Thi Nhu-Hong, the seventh of ten children. Stories of her early youth are lost because she apparently remembers little, and only the oldest few children actually had their childhood documented through photos and stories. The story of my mother's youth is still unclear to me. My mom spent most of her life in the imperial city of Hue. Before that, she lived in Quang Tri, where my grandfather was the mayor. So, her early childhood was in an environment of wealth and affluence. They lived in a government mansion and "it was really nice, so many servants and secret service, drivers, chauffeurs."
After my grandfather was involved in a government scandal, a story which my mom does not know, but beckons exploration someday, they moved to the house in Hue where my mom spent the rest of her days in Vietnam until her departure in 1972. She was so young that she barely noticed the change from her prominent position in society to a more integrated role. Her new home "wasn't a mansion, but it was big house. There was a gate and a long walk. We had a gate all around. We had a lot of fruit trees: lychee trees, we had four or five lychee trees, pineapple, bamboo trees, orange trees, a big yard with a walkway to the house." She paints a picturesque scene of this small city. She describes it as "a beautiful city, very peaceful and tranquil." She reminisces about visions of the Perfume River at sundown and memories of the girls rowing the sampans singing folksongs, "the echoes of their voice, such a poetic feeling. When the sun is going down, and you sit by the park, it feels so romantic, like poetry. That's why people in Hue, most people are so romantic." Growing up included summers at the beach and hiking in the mountains with her father and siblings. She especially cherished these moments with her father. She "adored him. Put him on a pedastal. I wanted to be like him... a politician." She grew up with the hope of being like her father, her dreams still unrealized, "but here, with the accent and the language barrier, it's a little hard to be a politician. Especially with the accent. Unless I could get rid of the accent. But now, I'm almost fifty, it's a little late to do that." She even resembled her father, in spirit and mind, if not in body. "He was worried that nobody would marry me," she said," because I had a personality like he did. I had his personality... Stubbornness and [I] like to argue and that kind of thing. Behavior that's a little unacceptable to the Vietnamese men. If I say something wrong, I have to argue to get my point across. You have to obedient and obey... I guess I was just a stubborn kid. In general, like you."
When I asked her questions about my grandfather, she talked to me from a trance, not really listening to me or talking to me, but reliving moments with her father. She told me of special moments she shared with him, "like one time, I was in the bathroom, and I put my lipstick on, and he said... ÔYou know, you don't need to have lipstick to look beautiful.' And then one day, I took him to the airport, and then I said I want to be a stewardess, but I'm not as pretty as those girls, he said, 'You can be anything you want. You're very pretty.'... And then we went to the beach, and he said something [like] I'm getting old, look at my hands, [they're] wrinkled, and I said, ÔNo, you're not.' He compared my hands to his hands. Little, small talks like that... I don't know if he did that to my sisters or not."
But when she talked about him professionally, her respect and adoration for him became clearer: "I asked him one time during the campaign season when he ran for the congress seat, and I asked him, how come you don't look nervous, the other guy, he seems so nervous. He said, yeah, I am very nervous, but I just don't show it. And I said how come you don't show your nervousness like the other guy: he walked back and forth, back and forth like crazy waiting for the results and my father was just so quiet and calm, so I thought that he was really not nervous. He said, no, I am nervous, you don't have to show your nervousness. But he looked cool all the time. So I always wanted to be like my father."
In light of the exceptional tranquility and beauty she grew up with, it becomes clearer why the events of 1968 shook her world and destroyed her innocence. Her father returned home from Saigon for the Tet celebration. Her older brothers and sisters also came home to help celebrate the year of the monkey. In her paper, she describes, "we stayed up late that night, eating special food, enjoying each other, and listening to firecrackers. The sound of gunfire mingled with firecrackers went on all night. We slept peacefully thorough the night." The Tet offensive of 1968 came unexpectedly according to my mom. After this evening of celebration, they woke up to a city of dead quiet. "The city just ceased to exist," she explained. No noises, no movement, nothing. I am struck with images of a post apocalyptic nightmare. And a nightmare it became. Following the silence came the bombing. "At the beginning, I was just scared of the bombing, the noise," she told me. Although "the bombing did not damage the house, it just only made a big hole in front of the house." Her nonchalance regarding this surprised me, and to clarify what happened, we made a comparison with our own house in New Jersey, and it would be the equivalent of a big hole in front of the driveway next to the mailbox. The giant hole in front of her house didn't seem to phase her much, but in comparison to other atrocities she experienced, property damage was a minimal concern.
After the bombing started, the family sought refuge in the convent nearby: "the bombing was just unbearable, you just feel like it's safer there. And everybody all got together, so you feel like at least you have each other, like a community. Everybody ran in there, in the convent. Somehow, we just felt better about the bombing in there, instead of just staying at home and hiding in the house. We just felt so unsafe there." I asked her if people died from the bombing, and she affirmed this telling me about her friend's mother who died: "She was carrying her baby and some little piece of mortar or something just came from somewhere. She was standing there, and then she just dropped dead."
The real horror, however, was about to begin. The horror that my mother still carries with her. "North Vietnamese soldiers," she explained in her paper, "walked into the convent, pushed the men into the courtyard, about an hour later, they took with them a lot of men from the convent and they took my father with them, too. We never saw him again." This was the essence of the interview that I wanted to get at, but it took at least 45 minutes to even approach the topic. When she told me that she was ready to retire, I mentioned that we hadn't discussed 1968 yet. To start, I asked her what she remembered, and after a long pause, she told me what I had never heard, her feelings about her father's death: "At the beginning, I was just scared of the bombing, the noise, and... and after the Viet Cong took my father away then we were just waiting and waiting for the news. All the conflicting news. Is he ok? Is he all right? He will come back. Things like that, so we lived with the hope that one of these days, he would be back, you know. Until we got the... we didn't even trust... when we found the body, deep down, somehow I thought that maybe it wasn't his body at all, maybe somebody else, so we'd keep hoping that maybe he'll be back, so the hope was still there all the time, that maybe somehow, maybe they kept him somewhere in the prison, in the north, and that he would be back. You know..."
She writes: "Two months later, we found his body in a mass grave. He was buried alive at age 50."