A Letter to My Young Self

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

This passage from Sister, too, in a letter marked April 12, 1975, was as ominous as it was unintentionally comical: 'Cousin Phuong and I talked about how things look so bad now. If the Vietcong come into Saigon, we will go out to the countryside, and there we will take up arms and become guerrillas.' How she would do this would be beyond anyone's imagination. The pampered teenager who was chauffeured to school, and whose routine was piano lessons at home, then swimming at the country club, didn't even know how to cook or wash clothes.

And here, on April 2, 1975, in atypically uneven handwriting that betrayed great distress, is a passage to Brother by Mother: 'The situation is chaotic. I hope that because we have been good people we will manage to escape this dire situation. No matter what, listen to me carefully: Don't come home. Even if you get a letter from me or your father, later, do not believe it.'

Both Father, who just barely survived the evacuation of Danang, and Mother were afraid that after the war ended, they would be forced by the communists to send for their oldest son in America, and he too would suffer their fate.

Yet in a letter written two days before that, when we still did not know for sure if Father would make it back alive from Danang, upon learning that Brother now worked in a supermarket in San Francisco, you, my younger self, wrote to him: 'Be careful stacking chicken eggs and don't break them! The Exorcist is about to be shown here. Oh how scary! Good-bye.'

Good-bye indeed. Not too many people have their childhood ended so precisely. But that was what happened to me. The war ended. I fled. And I became someone else entirely.

When I came to America, I suffered a self-imposed amnesia. Pubescent and not fully formed, I was old enough to remember Vietnam, but young enough to embrace America and to be reshaped by it. A few months after my arrival, my voice broke. Going through puberty, I thought that America was changing me not just on the outside but on the inside, too -- that is, I believed my Americanization process was magical and that English had altered my vocal cords.

If a part of me was mourning for what was lost and gone, another part was enthralled at my own rapid transformation. I couldn't wait to put all the chaos and sadness of Vietnam behind me, to bury the shock of exile with newness. I desperately embraced English so I wouldn't stand out. I would mimic characters from sitcoms and memorize TV commercials, reciting lines like sutras.

By the time I went to high school, I had stopped speaking Vietnamese altogether, had shaved the accent from my tongue, and at times pretended that I was American born. Left behind to cobwebs and dust was you, the Vietnamese boy who sat writing these letters, dreaming of fabled America, its 31 flavors of ice cream, its majestic high-rises, its falling snow.

In reading these letters I am pulled back to a childhood that had all but faded.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print