Half Bitter Jokes

As a young and brash teenager, my father allowed his equally insolent friends to shame him from taking his placement exams for university. It was only a half bitter joke within his circle that his father's prestigious position, as a locally reputed and high ranking police officer, had handed him life on a gold platter – a network of doting girlfriends and teachers, the freedom to come and go and to do as he pleased throughout his childhood; he could talk his way into and out of just about anything. In those days, young men in Viet Nam had but two acceptable paths to travel: pass your exams and lead a comfortable bourgeois life, or join the military.

My father has always been one with an ego and a loose enough tongue to dish out insult and ridicule. But when the butt of a joke involved him in any way–especially if it threatened his alpha male status–he would show the world what he was made of. My father balked at taking his exams and joined the military. He'd always had itchy feet.

The first time he left home was 1952. My father was eight years old. Earning a living through menial work, he sold newspapers and delivered bread for a baker. He crashed at friends' houses, and sometimes his grandmother's. Wandering about the city, he learned to play cards and hang out at hip cafes where locals often jammed together with acoustic instruments. After a couple of years he would run out of money and come home. The cycle repeated three times before he joined the military at 18.

My father's only constant during his traveling years was his grandmother. He names her as the most influential, and single parental figure in his youth. A vegetarian Buddhist, she ran a small local temple and lived charitably. She was a local household name; the saintly woman who cooked and fed meals daily to those in need. For years I struggled to understand my father's vehement contempt and almost violent disapproval for animal sympathists; He was more or less raised on a vegetarian diet most of his childhood when he lived with her. One day, he off-handedly mentioned, very matter-of-factly, that her diet was responsible for her chronic illness and eventual death.

At 17 he came home, (it was hoped permanently, this time) to fulfill an obligation. He had been betrothed to a girl from a well to do family in the city. His mother commissioned a custom tailored suit from the finest tailor in Saigon for the traditional ceremony a day before the wedding, in which he would ask permission to "take" the bride. His father and grandparents boasted to their friends about the bright prospects of their eldest son. He had demonstrated a special aptitude for engineering at a national level, and going to university would remove him from the trauma and atrocities of the ongoing war . There was even a warrant out for my father's arrest if he was caught attempting to skip town.

Just hours before the confirmation ceremony, he was no where to be found.

Lost Ship at Sea

The name I was given at birth was Bích Ty.

My mother was a demure and dreamy eyed bookworm as a girl–the kind that took to reading fantasy or fairy tale stories alone in her bedroom all day while her sister and brother were outside raising hell with other kids. There was an old romantic and nationalist Chinese poem she was particularly fond of, about a fair maiden who'd for years faithfully awaited her husband's return from battle. Each day, this woman sat by her window and gazed anxiously over a rich billowing sea of emerald-like grass that stretched beyond her vision into the horizon. When he finally appeared on the horizon, it was like a long lost ship at sea had found its way home. That oceanic field of grass is what I am named after; a body through which one finds her way home.

In the 1980s, political correctness and postcolonial theory were not as deeply embedded in mainstream culture as they might be in 2010. In kindergarten, flustered teachers and administrators who frequently mispronounced my name decided to call me Biddy; the two names are somewhat phonetically similar. In first grade, Mrs. Hart contacted my mother about kids purposely mispronouncing my name. I was called "Bitchy," she said. She urged my mother to respell and anglicize my name so as to avoid confusion and, more significantly, "help me assimilate into the American culture." It had to be explained that "in America," my name "sounds like a bad word."

So I am called Biddy. It is a common Irish name, short for Bridget, meaning "exalted one" in gaelic. The name is incidentally fitting, for the most part. But as in my case, poetry is so often lost in translation.

A Bona Fide Boat Person

In the dead of a Spring night, 1981, I left the country at 3 months old. My mother nearly killed me and the rest of our party. In the dark, while boarding the tiny boat, she slipped and smashed my head against the rim. My face was bright blue before an infantile shriek could awaken the jungle, and it's jingoistic patrollers. Mother's hand clamped my face shut. Drawing attention to ourselves would provoke consequences severe beyond a child suffocating. Fleeing the country is treasonous. The penalty for that would be at least imprisonment and torture. At worst and most likely, it would also mean death.

It's easy to forget that this road to Hell had been paved with good intentions. Revolutions so often merely hand injustice and power from one group to another.

My grandfather was in jail for 5 years after refusing to succumb to the whims of the new administration. After his release, prison guards who recognized him as a former detainee frequented his home, harassing him and his wife and raiding their pantry for food and liquor. Often he was expected to provide them with dinner, entertainment, and a place to crash. This was the corruption of the new administration.

The night of the rendezvous, these guards showed up at Grandfather's door. If they weren't gone by the time we were to leave, he'd have to kill them.