Family in Six Tones by Lan Cao & Harlan Margaret Van Cao

Author:Lan Cao & Harlan Margaret Van Cao [Cao, Lan & Van Cao, Harlan Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

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I MADE SEVERAL ATTEMPTS AT DECLARING A MAJOR. I was drawn to courses in politics because they inevitably touched on war and history and the arrogation of power.

Almost all my teachers in the department saw Vietnam as their experience, their rite of passage, the trigger to their disillusionment, the portal to their identity and worldview. They wanted their Vietnam to be my inheritance. I already had my own inheritance of loss, which came from my parents. My teachers told me those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But what they wanted was for me to remember their past, to accept and ventriloquize their memories, even though I was still trying to make sense of mine.

Like always remembering that my father had taken part in fifty-three airborne assault landings in Long An Province, almost all of which he commanded. I did not know this from him; my father did not talk to me about the war unless I asked him very specific questions. I knew this only because I found his Legion of Merit documents in a box that Papa Fritz gave me. Like remembering my mother’s multiple lives, each one sifted and rebuilt from the ashes of the prior ones: first, life in a village risen from the emerald fields of Sóc Trăng, burned down by insurgents; then fleeing from another hamlet pillaged by Japanese soldiers; and then escaping the French by floating corpselike, eyes closed, arms and legs outstretched, down a river bloated with decapitated heads and swollen bodies. Moving to the North before partition and then fleeing back to the South after 1954. Building a life in Saigon and then leaving in 1975.

Like asking myself how it felt to watch your family carry on like nothing had happened, like when Tuấn climbed on a roof in his flannel shirt our first year in Virginia, pretending that he and his cousin had installed cedar roofs in Vietnam all his life so a foreman would keep them on the job.

I remembered and hoarded my own memories, keeping quiet, deciding to take the easier path of capturing bliss and immersing myself in the quotidian wonder of life here, the glory of fall foliage, the pristine beauty of a snowstorm. The splendor that covered up the abyss below.

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