Every night after dinner, my grandfather and I played Chinese Chess on the floor, laughing loudly. His wooden chess set was an uneven assembly of chipped and cracked round pieces with carved Chinese characters. Missing or damaged pieces were replaced by substitutes found elsewhere, some with slightly different appearances or materials from the rest. When we had no option and desperately wanted to start a game, a missing “canon” piece was replaced with a Fanta soda bottle cap. We kept going.
Every night before bed he washed my feet in a tub of water and wiped them dry with a towel he carried on his shoulder. We were all devout Catholics, and I recognized this act from the many Catholic masses I went to over the years. I came to understand the symbolism of that ritual much later in my life, but I’m still convinced my grandfather did it because my feet were always dirty from running around barefooted, and he simply wanted me to go to sleep with clean feet.
***
My grandfather was a writer. He didn’t write very much, but he was well respected. His pen name was Hà Tri Lão Nhân. He never explained what it meant to anyone, even when asked. In my limited Sino-Vietnamese understanding, the meaning sits somewhere between “an old man who might or might not have the answer” and “an old man wondering if he can ever be known.” Once in a while when I write him a birthday or a Christmas card, I address him as Hà Tri Lão Nhân and wait for the big grin on his face I know I’ll get when he reads it.
He took me out to celebrate whenever he received compensation for his writing. Our celebration always involved taking the bus to downtown Saigon and going to the biggest bookstore in the city to read books for free all day, maybe even buying one sometimes. If I did well in school or received an award, he would reward me with something of my choice on those celebratory outings.
For my entire childhood, every kid’s dream was to eat ice cream at Kem Bạch Đằng, the most famous ice cream café in Saigon. I had just won a major math competition, and I knew exactly what I wanted. When my grandfather received his payment, he came to me with the question I had been waiting for, “So what do you want for your reward this time, huh?” And I immediately yelled out, “Kem Bạch Đằng.”
The day came. My grandfather and I put on our newest-looking outfits, took a bus to downtown Saigon, and walked straight into that legendary cafe. We sat down at a small table next to the sidewalk, and he ordered me a large cup of chocolate ice cream I wanted. Nothing for himself. He just sat there with a smile and watched me eat my ice cream.
I was underwhelmed. It was good. And it was cold. And it was chocolatey. But it just tasted like ice cream, not the heavenly food I had imagined. My grandfather, meanwhile, was looking at me so lovingly that I felt guilty for not loving it, and even guiltier for performing enthusiasm. I lied to him and prayed he hadn’t seen through it. He never asked me how much I liked the ice cream, even after we came home, even in passing.
The largest denomination for the Vietnam Dong at the time was 5,000 VND, and my grandfather already had one of those blue notes out and placed it neatly in front of him, unfolded, ready to pay the bill proudly. The check came, and it was 7,000 VND. He needed more money to pay for my ice cream. He quietly took out his wallet, pulled out his second and last 5,000 VND note, and placed it on top of the other. He then turned to look at me, rubbed his palms together, chuckled somewhat nervously, and asked, “So… what kind of books are you looking for today?”
***
At the beginning of every school year, in August, he took apart every single page of all my textbooks and rebound them with his own glue, needle, and thread. He kept the bound books pressed under two repurposed green army ammunition cans filled with sand on the floor to the right of his writing desk. He told me we wanted my textbooks to stay flat on my desk when I studied. “It’s better for your eyes,” he said. I remember the unique feeling of lifting a single page, turning it past the midline to ten o’clock position, letting go, and watching that page land softly and effortlessly onto the stack on the left. It felt inevitable.
At the upper right corner of the hard cover of every textbook was a small label with my full name, class, and subject matter, all handwritten beautifully in black ink with a long steel-nib dip pen that was always on his desk. The letters looked less like handwriting and more like my grandfather drawing every single one of them with intention and care. The long upright strokes of the h, k, and l were strikingly tall and had a stoic, defiant air about them. The tails of the m, n, and u were a hair longer than normal with a very slight wiggle that gave a faint sense of hesitation, as if suggesting he wanted to say more than what the words themselves could hold. I tried to imitate his handwriting for years, well into my early university days, but couldn’t. I could imitate the ink strokes, but not the soul that produced them.
***
French-educated and a devout Catholic, he worked as a teacher in North Vietnam before fleeing South on foot with his wife and four small children after the Communists took over. He became a major in the army of South Vietnam and served as a communication officer in the Presidential Palace until the Communists’ tanks knocked down its gate. He only fired his sidearm once, he said, during a drill. That sidearm and his officer uniform were thrown away on the street of Saigon, together with countless others’, when he ran home to his family. He was released on good behavior after serving six years of his ten-year sentence in the Communist “re-education camp.” Not once did he talk about his experience during those six years, what he went through, what was done to him, or how he felt about it. No one in our family ever asked.
He said he saw himself as a writer, not a soldier.
***
The only time I saw my grandfather cry was when I was eleven, at Tân Sơn Nhất Airport in Saigon, the night my whole family left for America. My mom and I were there just to send them off and say our goodbyes. We had been denied our visas because my mom had a child. My grandfather and my aunts were waiting to board the plane that would take them to Los Angeles.
Everyone had already checked in, but they hung around outside the gate to spend the last few minutes with the dozens of relatives who were there to send them off. My aunts all wore huge, thick coats in the middle of the Saigon heat in October as if they would be entering the cold climate of America right after they went through the gate.
And I could not stop crying.
My grandfather raised me for eleven years. I never saw him cry. He never raised his voice at me. He never told me to stop crying. He did all three things that night. He didn’t promise me we would reunite one day. He didn’t scold me for being unreasonable, for being embarrassing, for being a nuisance. The only thing he yelled at me, with tears in his eyes, was, “Nín tắt!” Every time he yelled “Stop crying!” at me, I heard more pain in his voice and felt more hope that he would really stay and never leave me.
My crying stopped nothing. All my aunts hugged me, squeezed me tight, and said their tearful goodbyes. My grandfather never did. He never looked back at me, even as I screamed tearfully towards him. He walked through the gate quickly, almost running. My mom and I lingered for a while in that god-forsaken airport, not knowing what to do next. We hadn’t thought that far ahead.
I hate that fucking airport.
We went home. I walked through the door and thought I had gone to a different house. The half-finished rice bowls my grandpa and everyone ate hastily before we left for the airport sat cold on the table. This house had been filled with all kinds of noise every minute of the day, even late at night. The voices of my family talking, sometimes arguing with each other. The clanking of my aunt’s sewing machine’s foot pedal. The creaking of my grandfather’s chair when he sat at his desk. The shuffling of clothes and bodies against the bed. The soft breathing and loud snoring sounds.
All quiet. Too quiet.
A different sound kept me awake for so long after that – the sound of gone-ness.
***
Growing up, I slept with my whole family in one huge room under a roof that leaked every time it rained. Each bed would be moved and rearranged like Tetris to avoid getting hit by water coming in through the roof and to make room for the buckets catching it. My grandfather never had a problem. He slept on his foldable green army canvas bed that he would set up every night and fold away neatly into a bag every morning. He had a thick and smooth black canvas cloth that he used as a blanket. He smoked heavily for years but quit right after my grandmother died. There was a cigarette burn hole in a corner of that black cloth that was very close to my heart.
After he left for America, that black cloth became my blanket. In my first tearful letter I wrote to him shortly after they left, I told him how much I missed him and how I hugged that black cloth, smelled his scent on it, and cried. I slept with that black cloth every night for ten years. Sometimes I tied two corners together with rubber bands and wore it loosely around my torso like a toga I had seen in the illustration of the Roman mythology book from his bookshelves. That cloth wasn’t just filled with love and memories. It was also unexpectedly comfortable and versatile. I took it with me when I myself moved to America ten years after he left. My grandfather kept that first letter I wrote to him and showed it to me himself when I arrived in the US. I took that black cloth out of my luggage and showed it to him.
It is still my blanket.
***
I lived in my grandfather’s garage my first three years in the US. He gave me my own first corner to start building a new life in a new country. Together we hauled home a small desk and a mattress from the recycling dumpster to furnish my space. We taped cardboard pieces together with gray duct tape then put them up as walls. He strung telephone line across the yard from the main house to the garage so I could have an internet connection for school. Not a single word was said during the whole operation. We kept going.
He was an expert at navigating the bus system of Los Angeles County, and he taught me all of it. For weeks, we rode the bus together everywhere and nowhere. I sat next to him on the bus, feet dangling, feeling excited like a kid again. “Maybe we’ll stop for ice cream,” I thought to myself and smiled. He made sure I knew how to read the bus schedules and was comfortable with the rhythm of stepping on, tossing the exact change into the fare box, and pulling the get-off signal cable that made a delightful “ding” sound. I learned from him what a “transfer pass” was, and he, playfully smug, showed me his “senior pass” that allowed him to ride buses for free anywhere. The bus was instrumental to my life in my early months in the US before I got my first car.
When I was living with him and had no food for lunch, he gave me a few dollars and told me to go buy chicken and fries at Popeyes so we could eat together because “he really liked the fries there.” He seemed to really enjoy his Cajun fries, or maybe it was because he gave me most of the chicken.
He was in the car during my first merge onto the “scary” freeway. I had just gotten my license and had never gone on the freeway before. Everyone in our family insisted that driving on the freeway was dangerous and too soon for me as a new driver. Some of them avoided getting on the freeway altogether. One day, I was driving my grandfather to lunch, and we were approaching a freeway entrance.
I asked him, “Wanna go?”
He asked, “Do you feel confident?”
I said, “Of course.”
He said, “Then go.”
And he sat there quietly in my passenger seat, hands on his lap, as I nervously bore down on the gas pedal and my beat-up salvage car strained itself to catch up to the highway speed of the 10 freeway. He didn’t say a single word or even move during the merge. When I turned to give him a proud and excited look, he didn’t say “good job” or even smile. He wasn’t excited, happy, or nervous. He was just neutral, sitting there with hands on his lap. He didn’t mention it to anyone when we got home. He probably already forgot about it.
He took me to the Vietnamese-owned pharmacy where he picked up his prescriptions and proudly introduced me to the pharmacist owner. Apparently, he had bragged to her more than once about his “smart grandson,” for whom he had been waiting for ten years. She took me in, allowed me to volunteer there to learn about pharmacy, and eventually wrote the letter of recommendation that got me into pharmacy school.
That was twenty-three years ago. I’ve been a pharmacist for fourteen years now.
***
My grandfather will turn 100 years old this year.
He lives three hours away in Los Angeles with my aunts. I used to visit him frequently.
I haven’t seen him since I opened my pharmacy four months ago.
He can barely hear, so I have to write out what I want to say to him. My aunt tells me he brags to everyone that his grandson is now a rich pharmacy owner. He smiles big every time he sees me and asks, “Are you making good money?” I always write, “Of course,” then add some sarcastic exaggeration like, “I don’t know where to put all my money,” so I can tell myself I’m joking and not lying to my grandfather. I can’t bring myself to tell him how I’m still losing money every day waiting for my new pharmacy to grow.
He lives on SSI money, which is not much, but he would jump at any chance someone would offer to drive him to his favorite restaurant. Last time I visited, he hadn’t been able to go out to eat since he had a fall three weeks prior. I asked him what he felt like eating so I could buy it for him to eat at home. Immediately he told me he wanted miến gà – Vietnamese glass noodles with chicken, as if the answer were always there waiting for the question.
I picked up the food from his favorite restaurant, took it back to him, and sat there across the table watching him gleefully slurp the soup and eat every single spoonful. He enjoyed it so much he completely forgot I was there. He didn’t thank me or even look at me when he was eating. He looked almost like a child.
He still plays Sudoku by himself, quietly, every night after dinner.
Huy Diệp is a pharmacist and pharmacy owner in San Diego, California. He attended Lê Hồng Phong High School and studied at the University of Architecture in Sài Gòn before building a new life and career in Southern California. He writes in both English and Vietnamese, drawing on the influence of both cultures. Writing is for him a personal practice of reflection and meditation. This is his first published essay.
