The permanence of departures

After my Bolinao 52 hatpost, I'm guessing a few of you (ok, maybe 1) may be wondering, "How did HAT's family get to the U.S.?"

If you were like my first ESL teacher, you would have stood in the middle of the classroom, flapped your arms like a plane-but-more-like-a-chicken, asking if we came by plane or by boat. (I've written about this in an essay while in grad school - and I know at least 1 person, Mrs. Oja, remembers this particular piece of prose - but it hasn't seen the light of day since then.)

If you were me back then, barely 7 and knowing only a smidgen of English, you'd have the same thought as I did -- namely, the teacher is crazy if she thinks we took the boat from Viet Nam to San Rafael, CA. But, never mind. I was little, very little, ok? I didn't think about geography too clearly. All I knew was that the distance was far, and we stayed in Bataan for several months before reaching the U.S. I naturally thought it was a stupid idea to ask if we came by boat or by plane.

Our stories are not unlike those of many other families. Our family narratives are as complex as they are long. But there are many stories that are similar to the narratives of the larger Viet diaspora.

Ong ba ngoai (mother's parents) had siblings who worked in the church (either Lutheran or Presbyterian, I can't recall). After April 30, 1975, when the northern Vietnamese Communist army invaded (they use the verb liberate) Saigon, the siblings were lifted and were taken to the U.S. Grandparents were eventually sponsored and settled in the U.S.

My dad's youngest brother, chu Trung, and his wife at that time, co Dung, managed to climb on some raft at the harbor and were picked up by US ships. No papers, no belongings, and she was pregnant with their firstborn. They eventually settled in Florida.

The years between 75 when my uncle left, and 86 when my immediately family came to the US, Chu Trung and my father prepared the paperwork to sponsor our immediate family. Many years of papers and interviews, questionnaires and money, back and forth. Proof of relations. Proof of blood relations. Proof of financial stability. Proof of economic, religious, political hardships. Proof. It was not to be until the mid 90's when I found the evidence: black and white photographs of my father and uncle, each of their images marked by my father with a red X to indicate they were brothers living in the same household and raised by the same parents. Red ink, so unlike the blood that tied them together.

We passed physicals and interviews and gave money and more money and eventually were issued visas. In November 1985, we left Saigon. That was one of the saddest days of my life -- I'm sure of it. I have photos to prove it. But I have so little memories of it.

We arrived in Bataan's refugee camp and promptly got stuck. We'd applied for entry to the U.S. but my uncle suddenly declared financial instability and couldn't go through with the sponsorship. I was blissfully ignorant of everything; I went to ESL class; I swam in the ponds; I worshipped in the small chapel. My parents, on the other hand, were frantic with finding a sponsor. I never knew how perilously close we were to being returned to Vietnam or, worse yet, having to stay at the refugee camp indefinitely. My mother's parents eventually sponsored us to California. We arrived in Bataan in November; we left in April of '86.

I have forgotten a large portion of that day's events. I remember the bus that took us from the refugee camp. I remember being sad. I don't remember at all the photos that were taken of us -- but those moments were captured on film and years later those photos were miraculously brought to us.

The day we left Bataan was another one of those saddest days of my life. At that age, at that time, departures of any kind felt permanent. That kind of leaving, even at my age, I understood.

It was a big plane. We arrived at SFO. We went through customs. I understood little. I remember nothing. My arrival in the U.S. didn't feel as memorable as my leaving Viet Nam and Bataan.

Now, it seems I've descended into memories and it's hard to pull back... I'll have to end this here until the next HATpost.

Of Childhood Memories

My first memories of school in the U.S. include:

(1) Paint by numbers. What images, what colors, I do not know. But they were there, those pages of black and white design waiting for me to fill in with colors, as if in filling them I could pour in the words and meaning in lieu of numbers and space.

(2) Painting with water. It was so easy. A brush, and color-infusing water that made the pages blush into pastels of blue, red, yellow, green. Painting outside the lines with clear water was different than speaking outside the boundaries in a foreign tongue. Each brush stroke was ten times easier than one syllable of sound.

(3) Paper money. A perfect quiz or a completed homework assignment earned paper dollars, and wads of currency were distributed like free consonants in the English alphabet. Eventually, for a bit of paint by numbers, or a sheet of stickers, I siphoned my treasure back into the vaults of the ESL instructor but my sister hoarded them like collecting vocabularies.

Of childhood memories

She spoke with a heavy American accent, the words swallowed in the back of her throat. The tones were even and uninteresting, as if someone had spliced away all the dipthongs and diacritics to create an auditory flatline. Whatever musicality inherent in the tonal Vietnamese language was gone. She didn't know the various pronouns for "I" or "you" and her English words were poor substitutions.

I was following my mother's cousin to school. She had been born in the U.S. to my grandfather's younger brother, and knew little about where I came from, other than that it was the country of her parents. I remember walking through the school grounds trailing behind her words trying to decipher her meaning as we weaved through the outdoor hallways. She talked the entire time we walked, with me not understanding a word and she uncomprehending the turmoil I could find no voice to articulate. It was spring, or perhaps a fair-weather day sometime in fall, and though there was no rain, everything felt dark and heavy as I entered the doors of the classroom.