My Ong, Casualty of War
My mom, the youngest of seven kids, was a Daddy’s girl. I can hear in her voice the respect she held for my grandpa, a man I know only through stories. Before the civil conflict penetrated North Vietnam, my Ong was a contractor and provided for his family a secure, steady life. My mom, a classic beauty, retells school girl stories with a glint in her eyes and a tinge of amusement in her voice. The boys that chased her, clumsily and hopefully. The ways she avoided them, instructing her older brother or cousins to fabricate white lies for her. “Tell them I’m not home!”
Her voice contains a hint of betrayal, a trace so small she probably doesn’t notice it herself. Her childhood, rooted in normalcy, should have transitioned into predictable adulthood: college, a job, marriage, and children.
At age 27, she found herself in America without the college credentials she earned in Vietnam. Her marriage, a decision made out of necessity, illustrated what it meant to live in a war zone: “Do we escape together or not?” And her first child, conceived in refugee camp in Thailand, would be a welfare baby.
The greatest injustice, though, was not in the career she left behind or in the wedding dress she constructed out of leftover fabric; but it was in who she had to leave behind: her father.
My mom says she has two regrets in her life — the first one, the decision to leave Ong in Vietnam, haunted her for the six years they lived apart from each other. The second and the bigger of her two regrets surfaced after my grandfather arrived in America.
At age 85, Ong no longer possessed the competency or authority he did in his homeland. And my parents, with four children, including a newborn and one income, did not have the resources to adequately care for him. He lived the remainder of his years in a nursing home, something unheard of in Vietnam, a culture built on keeping the family unit in tact.
I met Ong once when I was a child — in the family photos, I am sporting my least favorite haircut, a mullet my mom gave me after she became frustrated with detangling my long hair from toothpaste, gum, and other sticky substances. I am wearing a red Espirit sweater with a colorful triangle print and my pink pants clash with my top.
My mom pushed me towards her beloved father, a man now hollowed by old age and displaced by trauma. I could sense she wanted me to love him, to embrace him. But I could not see him for who he was — a disciplined father and provider, a well-respected boss, a kind and generous neighbor.
And because I could only see a fragile body devoid of spirit, I became scared and refused to hug my Ong. I wish I would have put my arms around his shoulders, let my soft cheek touch his sweater, and spoken to him in my halting Vietnamese: “Thua Ong.” I would smile for the photo and put my hand in my mother’s hand. And through this action, I could erase the grief from her eyes and release her from the misplaced burden of her guilt.
Instead I cowered behind my sisters, only willing to participate in a family picture. My grandfather is like a ghost, motionless and colorless. And my mother is a still life portrait, the face of a woman who has endured a war. She is weeping sorrow, bleeding grief for decisions she had to make that were never really her choices in the first place.
