Inheriting the War Read online

  “This is important, Ba. It’s important that people know.”

  “You want their pity.”

  I didn’t know whether it was a question. I was offended. “I want them to remember,” I said.

  He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Only you’ll remember. I’ll remember. They will read and clap their hands and forget.” For once, he was not smiling. “Sometimes it’s better to forget, no?”

  “I’ll write it anyway,” I said. It came back to me—how I’d felt at the typewriter the previous night. A thought leapt into my mind: “If I write a true story,” I told my father, “I’ll have a better chance of selling it.”

  He looked at me a while, searchingly, seeing something in my face as though for the first time. Finally he said, in a measured voice, “I’ll tell you.” For a moment he receded into thought. “But believe me, it’s not something you’ll be able to write.”

  “I’ll write it anyway,” I repeated.

  Then he did something unexpected. His face opened up and he began to laugh, without self-pity or slyness, laughing in full-bodied breaths. I was shocked. I hadn’t heard him laugh like this for as long as I could remember. Without fully knowing why, I started laughing too. His throat was humming in Vietnamese, “Yes . . . yes . . . yes,” his eyes shining, smiling. “All right. All right. But tomorrow.”

  “But—”

  “I need to think,” he said. He shook his head, then said under his breath, “My son a writer. Co thuc moi vuc duoc dao.” How far does an empty stomach drag you?

  “Mot nguoi lam quan, ca ho duoc nho,” I retorted. A scholar is a blessing for all his relatives. He looked at me in surprise before laughing again and nodding vigorously. I’d been saving that one up for years.

  Afternoon. We sat across from one another at the dining room table: I asked questions and took notes on a yellow legal pad; he talked. He talked about his childhood, his family. He talked about My Lai. At this point, he stopped.

  “You won’t offer your father some of that?”

  “What?”

  “Heavens, you think you can hide liquor of that quality?”

  The afternoon light came through the window and held his body in a silver square, slowly sinking toward his feet, dimming, as he talked. I refilled our glasses. He talked above the peak-hour traffic on the streets, its rinse of noise; he talked deep into evening. When the phone rang the second time I unplugged it from the jack. He told me how he’d been conscripted into the South Vietnamese army.

  “After what the Americans did? How could you fight on their side?”

  “I had nothing but hate in me,” he said, “but I had enough for everyone.” He paused on the word hate like a father saying it before his infant child for the first time, trying the child’s knowledge, testing what was inherent in the word and what learned.

  He told me about the war. He told me about meeting my mother. The wedding. Then the fall of Saigon. 1975. He told me about his imprisonment in reeducation camp, the forced confessions, the introductions, the starvations. The daily labor that ruined his back. The casual killings. He told me about the tiger-cage cells and connex boxes, the different names for different forms of torture: the honda, the airplane, the auto. “They tie you by your thumbs, one arm over the shoulder, the other pulled around the front of the body. Or they stretch out your legs and tie your middle fingers to your big toes—”

  He showed me. A skinny old man in Tantric poses, he looked faintly preposterous. During the auto he flinched, then, a smile springing to his face, asked me to help him to his foam mattress. I waited impatiently for him to stretch it out. He asked me again to help. Here, push here. A little harder. Then he went on talking, sometimes in a low voice, sometimes grinning. Other times he would blink—furiously; perplexedly. In spite of his Buddhist protestations, I imagined him locked in rage, turned around and forced every day to rewitness these atrocities of his past, helpless to act. But that was only my imagination. I had nothing to prove that he was not empty of all that now.

  He told me how, upon his release after three years’ incarceration, he organized our family’s escape from Vietnam. This was 1979. He was twenty-five years old then, and my father.

  When finally he fell asleep, his face warm from the Scotch, I watched him. I felt like I had drifted into dream too. For a moment I became my father, watching his sleeping son, reminded of what—for his son’s sake—he had tried, unceasingly, to forget. A past larger than complaint, more perilous than memory. I shook myself conscious and went to my desk. I read my notes through once, carefully, all forty-five pages. I reread the draft of my story from two nights earlier. Then I put them both aside and started typing, never looking at them again.

  Dawn came so gradually I didn’t notice—until the beeping of a garbage truck—that outside the air was metallic blue and the ground was white. The top of the tin shed was white. The first snow had fallen.

  He wasn’t in the apartment when I woke up. There was a note on the coffee table: I am going for a walk. I have taken your story to read. I sat outside, on the fire escape, with a tumbler of Scotch, waiting for him. Against the cold, I drank my whiskey, letting it flow like a filament of warmth through my body. I had slept for only three hours and was too tired to feel anything but peace. The red geraniums on the landing of the opposite building were frosted over. I spied through my neighbors’ windows and saw exactly nothing.

  He would read it, with his book-learned English, and he would recognize himself in a new way. He would recognize me. He would see how powerful was his experience, how valuable his suffering—how I had made it speak for more than itself. He would be pleased with me.

  I finished the Scotch. It was eleven-thirty and the sky was dark and gray-smeared. My story was due at midday. I put my gloves on, treaded carefully down the fire escape, and untangled my bike from the rack. He would be pleased with me. I rode around the block, up and down Summit Street, looking for a sign of my puffy jacket. The streets were empty. Most of the snow had melted, but an icy film covered the roads and I rode slowly. Eyes stinging and breath fogging in front of my mouth, I coasted toward downtown, across the College Green, the grass frozen so stiff it snapped beneath my bicycle wheels. Lights glowed dimly from behind the curtained windows of houses. On Washington Street, a sudden gust of wind ravaged the elm branches and unfastened their leaves, floating down them thick and slow and soundless.

  I was halfway across the bridge when I saw him. I stopped. He was on the riverbank. I couldn’t make out the face but it was he, short and small-headed in my bloated jacket. He stood with the tramp. Both of them staring into the blazing gasoline drum. The smoke was thick, particulate. For a second I stopped breathing. I knew with sick certainty what he had done. The ashes, given body by the wind, floated away from me down the river. He patted the man on the shoulder, reached into his back pocket and slipped some money into those large, newly mittened hands. He started up the bank then, and saw me. I was so full of wanting I thought it would flood my heart. His hands were empty.

  If I had known then what I knew later, I wouldn’t have said the things I did. I wouldn’t have told him what he had done was unforgivable. That I wished he had never come, and that he was no father to me. But I hadn’t known, and, as I waited, feeling the wind change, all I saw was a man coming toward me in a ridiculously oversized jacket, rubbing his black-sooted hands, stepping through the smoke with its flecks and flame-tinged eddies, who had destroyed himself, yet again, in my name. The river was behind him. The wind was full of acid. In the slow float of light I looked away, down at the river. On the brink of freezing, it gleamed in large, bulging blisters. The water, where it still moved, was black and braided. And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over—to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world—and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable.

  T.K. LÊ grew up in Westminster, California, and currently resides
in Los Angeles. She obtained her MA in Asian American Studies at UCLA, exploring how two war monuments, a cemetery near her parents’ place, and An-My Lê’s photography provide alternatives to US nationalist memory of the Vietnam War. After that she birthed a chapbook called The Labor of Longing, a series of meditations about her mother. The chapbook is a companion to A Roof and Some Refuge, a collection of poems and stories about her father. She is currently exploring new forms of writing to bridge war memory and the ongoing violence and erasures produced by US empire building. She turns to crafting, cats, and Steven Universe for therapy.

  PART OF MEMORY IS FORGETTING

  I’m not a social butterfly. I like the warmth of my cocoon. It was only after a year of dodging invitations and one particularly difficult teaching day that I agreed to attend a happy hour with my co-workers. We arrived at the bar, assembled tables together, shuffled chairs, and before I knew it, I was locked somewhere in the middle, unable to make a getaway without getting my chair’s legs tangled with those of someone else’s. We exchanged the usual pleasantries. Work, weather, drinks of choice. And like clockwork, exactly what I was expecting to happen did.

  “So,” she said, shifting her gaze from her cocktail to my face, “What . . . is your ANCESTRY?” My coworker’s eyes got wide and the sleeves of her dress shirt swept up and around, reflecting a loose timeline of how far back she wanted me to go.

  My initial reaction was to challenge her, but I reeled myself in because she was someone who worked above me and anyway, she seemed to be choosing her words carefully. Most of all, she seemed nervous, and I kinda like making white people nervous. So I was about to answer politely, but before I could utter a single word, another coworker interrupted me.

  “She is a Viet Cong,” she said, taking a long gulp of her beer. And she laughed. I stated as firmly as I could that I didn’t consider it funny, which made her laugh even more.

  I listened to her laugh echo in the bar. It was as if something about my face was a riddle, a joke, and Viet Cong was the punchline.

  Surely you have seen the photograph. On February 1, 1968, south Vietnamese troops captured a suspected officer from the north by the name of Nguyen Van Lem. The police chief from the South, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, held a gun to the head of the soldier from the North, and in that moment there was the sound of two clicks: first the gun, and then of Eddie Adams’ camera. Nguyen Van Lem’s face was twisted in utter fear while the police officer’s face remained stoic. The shock value of violence held still long enough for examination made this photo infamous. It was used as a message against the war in Vietnam. Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer for it.

  When I was a teenager, I saw Dave Navarro give a tour of his crib on MTV. In the entrance of his home, not far from wherever the magic happens, he had a wall-sized image of this execution. He said something along the lines of being reminded that he’s living, or some shit like that. Humanity and whatnot.

  My dad worked as a photographer during this American war and told me that he got more money if he fit soldiers from the North and South into the frame. 100 USD.

  Early last year, I saw an item go up for sale on Etsy. It was the identification card of a young Vietnamese girl, a black and white portrait of her stared at me from the left-hand side of the card. Her hair, parted down the middle, framed her expressionless face. Her fingerprints had been pressed on the other side of the card. The description said:

  MAKE ME AN OFFER I CAN’T REFUSE!

  Female’s date of birth: October 1, 1958

  The card was issued in Tan-Binh, Vietnam on December 18, 1973. These cards were issued to civilians in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. After the fall of Saigon in September [sic]1975 they were no longer issued and are now invalid. This is one of the many ID cards that my husband had in his collection. He served in Vietnam with 3rd Marine Division in 1965.

  Due to the age of the card the corner on the lower back has started to slightly curl. Identities for sale. I wondered if that woman were still alive. She would have been around my mother’s age. My lip curled, slightly.

  I could talk to my coworkers about how my parents were both refugees and about the life or death decisions they had to make at ages younger than ours. I could talk about the My Lai massacre, about the systematic rape of entire villages that meant even less than “just making a point.” Agent Orange, burning skin, landmine amputees, and all the dead children. But I won’t satisfy her with the gratuitous imagery of a war I never knew.

  The violence, after all, is written in her everyday lexicon: I killed the job interview. I raped that test. I’ll shoot you an email.

  I speak that same language, fluently. And even though I wasn’t alive during the war, I’ve been living through it since I was born.

  Part of memory is forgetting. In Vietnamese, there is no verb conjugation; we understand a sentence is in the past by the context of the words around it. I have kept my ear close to the floor of our house for years now, listening for anecdotes of my family’s history. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that silence is the history.

  U.S. history books triumph the 60s and 70s for the peace movement and advancement in journalism—literature and film critics hail this as an artistic renaissance, changing the ways in which stories are told, stories that reflect the ambiguities the Americans felt in fighting the war.

  Make the other poor bastard die. Good morning, Vietnam. Five dolla. The horror, the horror.

  And now I suppose my coworker’s calling me a Viet Cong could be a punchline, but about bombing and maiming a country already broken, and then calling it art.

  At the bar, I let the flow of the conversation wash over me. They had already begun on a new topic, sports or travel or work minutiae. As more people arrived, it turned into a shouting match of life experiences.

  I participated at a minimum and gave short responses to their inquiries. I found it useless to give answers to people who had them already.

  I took the bus home, enveloped myself in the memory of the night, and searched for a language I would use to write it down.

  ADA LIMÓN is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. Her stepfather is a Vietnam veteran and she grew up keenly aware of the trauma of war that reverberates for years after the war’s end.

  LISTEN

  “I have always been disturbed by the romanticizing, the glorification of war. There’s nothing good about it, it’s kill or be killed. Nothing glorious.”

  Sometime around 2 AM in the canyon dark, no moon, the house wailed open with a guttural yell that shook me awake on the couch. In an instant I knew what it was, that painful loud bellow that echoes around the quiet night like a siren long after the fire’s gone out. For years, this is how my stepfather, B, awakes from a bad dream. A violent yell that makes my heart beat so fast that I can’t sleep for hours afterwards. When I was a kid, I remember him coming into my room to make sure I knew he was okay. “It was just a dream,” he would tell me, “go back to sleep.” He never talked about the nightmares, but we knew what they were about.

  Just last weekend, we all traveled together to Southern California for my grandparents’ 67th wedding anniversary. It was on the second night, in a friend’s condominium where we were staying, that he woke with one of his shouts. It made sense. That night after dinner, B and Grandpa were discussing the wars, their different and individual stories of serving in the United States Army. My grandfather, raised a rural farmer and woodworker, fought in the battle at Monte Cassino at 18. He had never had a meal in a restaurant. My stepfather was 19 when he went to Vietnam with the 4th Division. He couldn’t legally drink or vote at the time. When family members have been to war, it becomes an impossible subject to avoid. My grandfather is asked why he
married so young: “Well, we knew I’d be drafted and time was running out.” Which turns into the story of how B ended up in Vietnam.

  Despite their darkness, their heaviness, the stories are achingly wonderful. They are not heroic or served with false bravado. They could be stories about growing up poor, or having a heart broken for the first time. They are their life experiences. Simple and painful and human. Both men are inherent storytellers, deft at the nuances of balancing pain with a humor that can only come from the most honest of places. Everyone is rapt, empty glasses in front of them, dirty dishes. They stop for a second. We’re quiet. The refrigerator roars louder. Then another question. Vietnam and World War II are diametrically opposed wars in so many ways, the country behind them, the global community, the different eras of consciousness. But they are also the same. These men, kind, funny, tender, the men you want every man to be, have done unimaginable things. Have seen their good friends die in the most horrific circumstances. Gruesome images that cannot be erased, but must be lived with. These are their coming of age stories.

  When you live with a veteran, the language of war becomes a natural thing. When I went away to college, B walked all around the neighborhood of my first apartment. We watched him from the window. “He’s checking the perimeter,” Mom said. In the car on the way to my grandparents’ house, my mom talks about some purse she saw online and I make a joke about how she’s obsessed with purses. I tell her I’m going to write a book called, The Things She Carried. The only thing B has ever expressed great hatred for is rats. I don’t know too much about the origin of this hatred, but I do know that there are rats referred to as “corpse rats” in almost every war. On a hike in Kauai, the landscape reminds him of the Vietnam jungle sparking a two-hour fascinating conversation about the conditions during the war. This is family conversation. The unfolding of our histories passed on. What we don’t ever discuss, and for this I am grateful, are the contents of his nightmares.