Conversation with my father

See, this is the basis of the book in my dreams. This post is the equivalent of scratch work, like a rough rough draft. My math scratch work is just a bunch of numbers vertically, with some equations and thoughts and many question marks and capitalized words stretching diagonally across the page, hoping to head toward a solution. Generally I number my scratch work pages in hopes of finding some sort of narrative thread between all of them, and this thread is in fact the solution, more or less. With some editing. So here goes the scratch.

My father just said to me that I am the first person he has told his life story to, and we only had a one hour conversation. My father entered the war in 1965. Today is July 10, 2010. It has taken him 45 years, two wives, five children, and three grandchildren to find someone to talk to. And there's so much to say. Here's another quote. "Our conversation as 90% me and only 10% you. But you talked about knowledge, and I talked about... memories." These words do not convey what I want them to say, and that is because it's too difficult for me to translate both my emotions and the Vietnamese onto the page. Generally I can handle my own life and walk it into ink, but even with French I find it hard to transfer the emotions. For instance, in our conversation I kept trying to say 'a mon avis' and I couldn't figure out how to say that in either English or Vietnamese. Anyway.

My paternal grandfather died when my father was a baby. He was buried on the other side of a war zone, and my father and his mother could not visit his grave. In fact, the first time my father visited his birth father's grave was in 2004, when he first visited Vietnam with my two elder brothers with the same name. This is old news.

My grandmother remarried (also, she died last year and no one bothered to tell me for weeks) and had five more children. Dad ended up caring for the first three as they grew older, as his stepfather was at work and his mother was busy rearing babies. He had three stories about his three siblings. Watermelon, being sick, and calling your kindergarten teacher a bitch.

He was in the air force for 12 years. Enlisted when he was 20, in 1963, entered the war at 22 in 1965. Married in 1967, had my older sister in 1968. My oldest brother in 1969. Left Vietnam in 1975. Three stories of almost dying. One, the short runway. Two, the commercial flight. Three, the mid-air near-collision. A lot of bamboo.

In 1975, met my mother in Minnesota. Married in 1976. Had a child in 1977, named after his dead son left in Vietnam. Had another son in 1983. A daughter in 1988 (that's me!). When did he find out that my half-siblings were still alive? Not before I was born, certainly. I met my half-brother, I remember it so clearly. I was in my room, which means my oldest brother had gone to college already. So I was at least seven years old. A nice man made me an origami flower and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. That's it really.

Everything I wrote earlier, about our insignificance and how it's hard for me to take my life, my problems and my sufferings seriously? Straight out of Dad's book. Because he has actual problems, but they're nothing compared to some other peoples'. And nothing compared to our places in the universe.