On a humid morning in 1997 in the small town of Hồng Ngự on the border of southern Vietnam and Cambodia, a band of smiling children in red handkerchiefs walked around a frenzied school yard with empty condensed milk cans in their hands. I was still in second grade, and we had just finished our morning assembly where we were told of the greatness of our Vietnamese nation, and where we all exercised in unison because “a strong country started with healthy children,” as I was often told. Like many of the other half-awake adolescents, I was still hazy from getting up so early when a group of older students approached me asking for donations for a country called Cuba.
“Cu ba,” one girl repeated for the second time but louder, as if her volume would make me understand what or where this place is. “We are taking donations for our brethren and for the hungry children of Cuba,” another boy said after her. Having grown up in that provincial town in Miền Tây, I had never heard of this place whose two-syllabic name sounded foreign yet phonetically intelligible.
I didn’t know where Cuba was on a map or why they needed our help, however, having been alive during the 1990s in Vietnam, I was made tacitly aware that hunger and poverty were not unique to any place, nor did a stomach growl need any translation beyond what was universally understood. I had seen it with my own eyes. In that small town, I had seen frail children whose family couldn’t provide enough. I had seen children whose scabs, matted hair, and ill-fitting school uniforms signifying a lack and worldly precarity that I could not yet name. I knew the difference between the houses that had tile floors with a balcony, and the ones made of compacted dirt and thatched or tin roofs. I was reminded of this each time there was a heavy rain.
The rest of the school day was a blur, but that night, I had a mission. The first was to find where this place was on a miniature paper globe my mother had given me. The second was to ask the only people immediately capable of helping me help Cuba, my parents.
On that first goal, I was immediately successful. No sooner had I spun that tiny globe in animated fashion than when my fingers landed on Florida, a premonition of my future home, perhaps, though at that point, I would not have known. And just below my index finger, there it was. Long and thin, jutting out into the Atlantic, the place I needed to save. First step done.
My second goal, however, was not so easily accomplished. When I pleaded my case to my mom on the urgency of rescuing the children in Cuba, I was met with a steadfast reprimand, “tao không có tiền cho cu ba hay cu mẹ của họ.” (“I don’t have money for their dad’s penis or their mom’s penis.”) Alas, my mission had failed. It seems I would not be able to hold my head high upon my return to school the next day. Nonetheless, I did return to school. And while I was unfortunately unsuccessful in my original quest to help Cuba, something lingered in me.
A few weeks later, my parents told me that our family would soon be visiting my grandparents for the Đám Giỗ of my great grandparents. It was one of those events where we’d see the entire Pham clan. In my family, it typically lasted for several days with women cooking from sunup to sundown, children scuttling around, and where bearded men, who besides from killing a pig or chickens, customarily sat at their own rounded table solving world problems over a potent bottle of Rượu đế.
Every year, we would make several pilgrimages to this ancestral home. It was the place where men in my family would ask for their blessings in marriage, where announcements of new cousins being born, and where we sheltered each other when a clan member died. The land had been in my family for generations, and while the result of 1975 took much away from us, most of my family still lived in the environs, as well as their former staff who took care of the family graveyard.
Hearing the news of this visit caused much excitement in my young mind. I was fond of climbing the mango trees that surrounded the house with my cousins, and swimming in the river where my family anchored their sampans. But that family house, for all our reverence and attachment, was in disrepair. Shells during the war ruined the integrity of the structure, and greed and necessity claimed most of what was left after.
So having been inspired by the incident with Cuba, I came up with a plan. What if, I conjured in my eight year old brain, instead of collecting money to send to Cuba, I collected money to help fix the ancestral home? The next day at school, as I walked around with an empty condensed milk can and pleaded my case, children would hand me their wrinkled bills and innocent sympathy.
Today, I couldn’t tell you how much I had brought back home. What I do remember is being so proud that I had done something for the family, even when no one had asked. Maybe this year, I thought, my ông nội would look at me and say, “you’re ready to sit with the men.” Then reality came crashing down…
“Con có nói với người ta là mình nghèo không?” (“Did you tell people we were poor?”) my grandpa asked. In fear, I nodded with folded arms. He then commanded, “trả lại hết đi, nhà mình không lấy tiền của người khác.” (“Give it all back, we don’t take money from other people.”) Again, I had failed. It didn’t occur to me that it was wrong to ask for money.
There was a pitiful but dignified tone to his reprimand. This man looked down at me in his white pajamas with blue trims, and a mother of pearl encrusted wooden cane in his left hand. A wrinkled solemn face coldly staring at me, which said without saying that our pride has no price.
Yet to me, at that cusp of naivete and a growing sense of duty, all I saw was disappointment. Not in my intentions–idealistic and innocent as they were–but how I had unknowingly admitted out loud what my family refused to accept; that the marriage bed of aristocratic values and looted coffers by the new regime meant the reality my family remembered versus what I had only known to be true were tragically incompatible.
Oh how we have shamefully fallen, and worse than that, how I had demonstrated and confirmed our newfound economic depravity by soliciting the charity of others. What utter disgrace had I wrought upon us by vocalizing the rotted structures of our homes, the tilted pillars of this Confucian vernacular. I had tainted our ancestral name, a betrayal worse than the holes in the fired tile and palm-leaf roof, the weathered, ironwood beams, and more scarring than the faded crevices of the family altar cabinet where the mother of pearl inlays were lifted and peddled for tins of rice.
Neither debt nor duty, I learned that day, could be made up by wads of cash, nor adolescent good will. How swiftly I had mistaken dignity as something to be calculated and exchanged.
***
Wrapped in plasticky packaging. Lá bồ đề noodles were one of my favorite snacks. A simple yellow package design with red and green lettering. The lunch lady would open one and break the stiff yellow noodles in half. The flavor was “vegetarian,” which was a genius mix of what I presume was mushroom seasoning, salt, and glorious amounts of MSG. Magic. The lunch lady would pour half of the perforated seasoning package over the noodles, followed by some boiling water she had ready over a mini gas stove. Once the water was poured, this woman whose name has been lost to memory, would cover the bowl with a ceramic plate and would wait a few minutes before serving, always al dente.
Back in the late 1990s, a half noodle package on the side of the road would cost about 500 VND, which was half of my daily allowance for food and snacks. So if I wanted to have, say, phở that night, I’d have to skip seeing the noodle lady. Until I learned that I could eat on credit, which is when I began to see her daily.
Was it the regularity of our encounters? Was it the intimacy of a small meal on tiny faded plastic stools by the school entrance in torrid humidity? I still can’t tell what made those memories stand out. There were days when I had money, and days when she would just “put it on my tab.” I was good for it, considering I had paid her back several times. I didn’t know it then, but years after I had moved to the US and learned about the show Cheers, you know, the place “where everybody knows your name,” I would think back to her.
In the spring of 1998, when our papers had been accepted and finalized, my family hurriedly and abruptly sold our house and belongings. In a short few months, our lives were reduced to a few small suitcases, and we were on our way to Saigon to say goodbye to the only country I had ever known.
A few weeks later, on that 747 somewhere over the Pacific, after the joy of being on a plane for the first time had subsided, a sense of panic struck me. In our abrupt departure, I had failed to pay back the lunch lady. And worse than that, it occurred to me that I might never be able to.
In 2009, after graduating from high school, I finally returned to my hometown with a mission. I wanted to find this woman whose face I can’t remember, but Hồng Ngự had changed. By then, more than a decade had flown by, and my once small town became a city with new tall buildings that replaced the older, smaller ones. Neither that lovely woman who fed me almost daily nor my elementary school could be found on a map.
When I asked my cousin what happened to the school, they told me that the four-room school house was bulldozed to make room for more housing, and a newer bigger school was built on the other side of town. I was saddened that my debt could not be repaid.
Little did I know that on this same trip, my mother was carrying her own silent debt. Weighted down by guilt that she had borrowed money from her best friend when we first left Vietnam, my mother brought back a few thousand dollars in cash. For years, she was waiting for the chance to repay a woman who had selflessly helped us start a new life by lending what little she had. To my mother’s chagrin, as well as everyone else’s horror, when she finally did see her best friend, the friend was lying on a hospital bed in Saigon slowly dying of cancer. In the face of death with only a few months left, that money seemed almost silly. Her dark eyes lit up and streams of tears came out when she saw my mother. As we sat there exchanging her few last words on this earth, her hands locked with my mom’s, and all of us realized how inadequate our sense of debt suddenly seemed.
On that trip, both my mother and I learned that some things could never be repaid, even with the world’s best intentions. Oh, the privilege to live and learn.
***
A few months ago, my parents stopped talking to me. This wasn’t the first time. I suffer their silent treatment every time I act too American for their taste. Their goodwill, despite the purportedly unchanging love they had for me, vacillates like the tide.
When I flew home in anticipation of Tết, my AirPods ironically blasting Quang Le’s “Xuân Này Con Không Về,” (“This Spring I Will Not Return”) I was met with a wall of silence. Text messages left on read, calls went straight to voicemail, and the family group chat a void.
I could have been livid, throw my hands toward the sky and blurt obscenities that my ancestors could hear. Why had they chosen to ice out their son during the time of year you were supposed to put everything aside? Had I done something wrong again? Had I not been present enough during the past year? Had word of my supposedly libertine life in the northeast reached the balmy shores of West Palm Beach? What emotional debt had I incurred during this absence?
But instead of all this, I solemnly accepted that this was their way of being. As quickly as it crept in my mind it was as quickly expelled to make room for peace. Like having been absolved from my debt to Vietnam upon my return. On that trip to Florida, I learned that I no longer owed them anything. Unlike Na Tra (Nezha), who cut his flesh in an act of sacrifice to repay his parents for his own birth, I felt nothing.
What was the cause of their frozen ire? It was, as I came to find out, because I was more than thirty years old, and not only was I living in NYC, an apparently hellscape of bachelor debauchery, in their eyes, but alas I am also childless. And as an academic with a clandestine vow of poverty, who explicitly writes about our diasporic life, I had betrayed both Phước, whose namesake I carry, and Lộc, whose heavenly riches I’ve yet to experience. And with my penchant for Japanese whiskey and Spanish wine, who knows when I’d let Thọ down as well.
It would seem that the shortsightedness of my lust and mundane carnal desires have precluded me from the good graces of our precious Ngọc Hoàng (Jade Emperor). I was allegedly gallivanting in Brooklyn cosplaying the Marquis de Sade instead of dutifully repopulating the earth with my precious seed. Even Leo Bersani would be proud.
My dad used to say, “con đừng bao giờ cho người ta mượn tiền; nếu có thì cho luôn, đừng có khó khăn.” (“Never lend people money; if you have it then just give it to them—don’t make it difficult.”) My father, who is a devout Buddhist, rarely had an attachment to material things. And his concept of debt was a never-ending cycle of pain and suffering. So to break the cycle, one is always better off just never having expectations of repayment, and that to truly give something, we should never expect anything in return.
So on my flight back to NYC from Florida, as I looked out toward the Atlantic Ocean with its turquoise water melting into the horizon, I accepted what could not be changed. I took a sip of my tiny bottle of California chardonnay, and with a tartness on my tongue, I thought to myself all debts are gone.
After my grandpa had passed away, I finally returned to my family’s ancestral home in Vietnam. To my surprise, it was fully rebuilt in the Indochine style typical of the Mekong region. The once imposing teak table in the salon where more than ten people could sit was replaced by a smaller round coffee table meant only for four. Tall teal, cement columns and French double glass doors replaced the ironwood pillars and bamboo paneling. I then learned that the money I had earned as a teenager working odd jobs, which I gave my mother for safekeeping, had been used to build this home. Finally, mission accomplished.
In the diaspora, some of us work ourselves to death in menial or high-paying stressful jobs trying to prove our worth and to pay our dues. Some drive themselves mad attempting to gain titles and accolades so that friends and relatives might boast and brag on their behalf. The pressure to provide and perform–whether materially or by way of social currency–leaves very little room for our lives to be our own. Yet there is neither job prestigious enough nor paycheck big enough to bear the cost of this prideful burden. Some call that community, I call that eternal debt.
Guilt or debt? To whom do we owe, and to whom do we pay for this brief existence? Nation or country–is the former not simply the supplemental driving soul of the latter? Vietnam or family–are they not all scrambled notions of belonging, indistinguishable in their demands? No one can answer these questions for us other than ourselves. All that and a mother tongue.
Vinh Phu Pham, PhD, is an artist, literary scholar, and cultural critic whose work explores Vietnamese contemporary art, the musical legacies of the Republic of Vietnam, and Asian American literature in diaspora. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Vietnamese Studies(JVS), the edited volume Republican Vietnam, 1963–1975: War, Society, Diaspora, Rising Asia Journal, BBC Vietnam, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos, Saigoneer, and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN). He currently serves as Assistant Professor of World Literature at Bard High School Early College–Queens, in New York City.
