This was originally published at LA Stage Times and has been republished at 8Asians with the author’s permission. Christmas in Hanoi is currently running at East West Players at David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles. Wed-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Ends March 10. $26-$36. 213-625-7000.
By Eddie Borey
My parents never talked about the War.
My mother was born in Vietnam. My father, Irish-Catholic from upstate New York, met my mother in Saigon. It was an office romance. He fell in love with my mother, and the country. They wanted to build a life together over there, since they both thought, optimistically, that South Vietnam was going to last. That hope ended in 1975, although I didn’t learn until I was a teenager how close they cut their escape: three days before the fall of Saigon.
Sometimes, my mother talked a little about Vietnam — funny stories about her father’s alcoholic pet monkey, or a mishap involving baby ducks. To hear her tell it, Vietnam was like Mayberry — only bigger, quirkier, and tropical.
Incredible as it seems, I didn’t know that there had been a war in Vietnam until age 6 or 7, when I learned it from TV.
Every April, my parents’ moods would darken. Only when I was in my 20s did I realize that it was because April was when Saigon fell.
The silence is a wall. It is insurmountable. It doesn’t even get as far as “I don’t want to talk about it.” To say that much means admitting there’s something to talk about.
Other Vietnamese Americans say the same thing — their parents didn’t talk about it. Is it the scale? The American experience of the war is just a piece of it. In the entire civil war, millions of Vietnamese died. The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all the nations of the world combined in World War II, destroying life, the environment, art and architecture. That pain is felt as absence — in ancient places that became ruins, in ruins that became dust. Vietnam feels its heritage as a phantom limb.
Or does the silence come from the immigrant mentality? By definition, an immigrant moves on. Maybe the less you carry, the better. But if our parents’ gift to us was forgetting, why do so many Vietnamese-Americans of my generation feel haunted by the War?
