When Prompted

Time constructed through writing.

My father has lived in the United States for 37 years, but he will never be Người Mỹ – quite literally, in Vietnamese, a person of America.  The Girl Scouts, rap music, talking back and Italian food were only for Người Mỹ, he always told me as I quietly ate dinner to the quick scrapes of chopsticks against white enameled porcelain and the mutterings of Simpsons characters.

Years later, in my American history classes, I learned about the Người Mỹ on slideshows and in textbooks.  In 1969, their names were translated into numbers, picked out of shoeboxes, and shipped to Vietnam.  They arrived to mountainous terrain, tropical monsoons, and undefined purpose.  If they didn’t die young, they returned, wounded, scathed, and nobel.  They wrote The Quiet American, The Things They Carried, international law, and foreign policy.  They became senators and presidential candidates and Secretaries of States, touting their Medals of Valor and their lessons learned in Vietnam as career credentials.

My father packed up his Southern Vietnamese war fatigues and became an egg picker in Biloxi, a dishwasher in New Orleans, and a machinist in Houston.  He made scant American wages and wrote checks home of thousands of Vietnamese dollars.  He mailed them to Saigon and, in return, he once received a hand-written letter telling him his father was dead – maybe murder, maybe starvation, probably politics.  And so he stayed, raised two daughters in Texas, drank Budweiser, received American citizenship from the Người Mỹ, and officially became a Vietnamese man in America. 

I.

Write, in 250 words or less, a passage that represents your “writing life."

As a child, I was taught how to use each section of Houston Post.  Spread the classifieds across the table for dinner.  Make sure that the napkins are placed over the obituaries, throw your chicken bones on top of the used car advertisements, and envelope and crumple the stray bits of rice, the fatty remains of the caramelized pork, and the droplets of pungent fish sauce within the newspaper folds.  Throw the balled paper in the garbage can.

Use the sports section to cuông.  Put the Charles Barkley trade, the high school football results, and the Astros’ World Series appearance in a metal pot.  Burn it for the ancestors, letting the flame rise and dissipate into the humidity.  Throw the ashes in the garbage can.

Leave the front page for Mommy and Daddy.  Set the Oklahoma City Bombings, the Bosnian War, and Clinton Sex Scandal next to the light blue Vietnamese-English dictionary with the worn spine.  Stand nearby so that you can explain what lethal injections, subpoenas, and executive powers are.  After the pages have been flipped, return the Vietnamese-English dictionary back to Daddy’s desk.  Throw the front page in the garbage can.

 II.

I was in desperate need of a story the morning I was to take the last possible SAT.  I looked atrocious.  My face looked more sickly pale than usual, its tone reminiscent of the Pillsbury Doughboy.  I had stayed up the entire night memorizing geometric formulas while simultaneously wondering how I had acquired the mathematical ability of a cardboard box.  This test will determine my future, I thought as our gray Nissan minivan inched closer to the testing facility.  I am about to ruin my life.

My father, noting the anxious expression on my face, offered his usual solution of purchasing fast food to alleviate my worries.  He ran through the entire trans fat food chain of McNuggets, Sourdough Jacks, Popeyes Chicken to no avail.  Noticing that I was already on the verge of throwing up the entire contents of my stomach, he switched to another plan.  Fumbling with the radio tuner, he quickly changed the Vietnamese news channel to the station that played top-40 garbage.  “This is Janet Jackson,” he said, proud of himself for being cool.  He turned up the volume.  Under normal circumstances, the sight of a 55-year-old Vietnamese man blasting Janet Jackson in his minivan would make me forget my problems.  This, however, was not a normal day.

Never wanting to leave a problem unsolved or his youngest daughter unhappy, my father turned to his last resort.  The neighborhood we were driving through was a familiar road heading toward downtown.  He pointed to an old apartment complex.  “I used to live in this area when I was not married yet.”  I listened attentively as we passed by a run down strip mall.  “Over there was a place I used to go to for fun,” he continued. There was a brief, hesitant silence.  “I used to go sing karaoke and drink lots beer.  All the women used to love me.  I think they still do,” he said as he self-deprecatingly gestured to his Santa-like bulged stomach.  I was so appalled and amused that I did not notice our arrival at the dreaded destination.

Four dignity-stripping hours later, my father and the minivan arrived to rescue me from my misery.  This time, my mother tagged along for the ride.  As we passed by the karaoke bar of my father’s yesteryears, I tapped my mother on the shoulder.  “Did you know that dad used to live there when he was single?” I asked, hoping to garner more incriminating information.

My mother turned to my father and said, “You never told me that.”

 III.

During one adolescent summer, my father chose a road trip as our once-every-five-years vacation out of Texas.  We drove our gray Nissan minivan through the visible southern heat waves, which curled against the van and distorted the endless stretch of flat, leathery terrain.  My father insisted that we only turn on the air conditioner between noon and six to conserve gas.  Every few hundred miles, I would ask if we had arrived or if we could stop for strawberry shortcake ice cream bars.  Occasionally, my mother would give me a can of Sprite to stick on my head, shutting me up during the non-air conditioning hours.

Along the way, I had picked up green and purple beads in New Orleans and tied raw chicken thighs onto twine, throwing them into the Alabama coast, reeling in blue-shelled crabs with the aid of a net.  In Pensacola, I built a sandcastle using a blue Solo cup as my shovel and bucket.  In my neglect to smear watery squirts of sunblock on my nose, rubbed off flakes of burnt skin dotted the carpet of the minivan, accumulating along the back seat as we furthered east.  We stopped in cities seeming arbitrary in theme except for the existence of $89.95-a-night La Quinta, which we rented to cook packages of ramen and pickled vegetables for dinner until the next La Quinta.

Beginning in Beaumont, as we traversed the Texas-Louisiana border, my mother would scream, “Ai ya!” – each yelp indicating that I had thrown up in another Piggly Wiggly grocery bag.  “Slow down!” she would yell at my father followed by stern instructions to tie up the spew-filled plastic bags and hurling them out the window.  My mother would turn on the air conditioner for a moment to ventilate.  As we entered Mobile city limits, the stench of barf lingered in the minivan, mixing with the hot air and enveloping us in pungent sourness.

By the fourth Piggly Wiggly puke 40 miles north of Pensacola Beach, my father massaged his forehead with his free hand, disrupting my mother’s cries with a Vietnamese story.

“I used to get sick like this all the time when I first came here,” he began, looking into the rearview mirror.  I rubbed my stomach, straining to keep the acid down.  Leaning against the headrest, I swallowed as much saliva as I could produce and diverted my attention to predicting the end of this story.  Something about punishment.  Or perhaps redemption.

“On a farm in Pensacola, our sponsors wanted us to go to church and pick eggs,” he said pointing to the land outside our windows.  It blurred into a mess of brown hues in my peripheral vision.  “Me and my friends just got drunk all the time.”

At “drunk” my mother slapped my father’s shoulder.

“It was always too hot or too early,” he continued.  My father pulled two tissues from my mother’s plush Pomeranian-covered tissue box on the dashboard.  In the heat, the Pomeranian shed its fake white hairs.  Thin lines of pseudo-fur floated in the vomit-scented air and tickled his nostrils.  He blew his nose twice.

“I threw up in the church right in front of the priest,” he said.  “And once, I threw up in the chicken nest, all over those eggs.  The farmer got so mad.”

“So, you found God after you puked in the church,” I said.  I wiped the fusion of puke-induced perspiration off my forehead as I slouched further down the seat.  “He beat you with a broom stick and you never threw up again, right?”

“No,” he laughed.  “He kicked me out.  I still got drunk.”

He looked over his right shoulder and winked.

“I just threw up in Biloxi, then Baton Rouge and then New Orleans.  Just like you.”

Write a Hybrid Text.

Binh woke to three light taps on the door followed by a scrape-step cadence of feet.  He reached for his lucky tiger’s eye on the milk-crate nightstand, but he didn’t find it.  Hearing the sound diminish, he moved his hand from the milk-crate to the top edge of his bed sheet.  The coarse fabric easily slid down his sweaty body.  He thought about opening the window, but decided against the possibility of more welts from mosquitos.  He reached for a mosquito net that he remembered would not be there.

As he writhed his body in search for a cool patch of bed, Binh heard the static hiss from his alarm clock that would precede the burst of voices from the local Vietnamese morning show.  He stepped out of bed, his feet avoiding stray newspapers and emptied bottles of water.  He felt the ground for a belted pair of black slacks and hoped that there was one more clean polo in the closet to finish off the week.

4:45 in the morning and I’m still late, he thought pulling one pant leg up.  Knocking over a Johnnie Walker Black as he dressed, he picked up the bottle and poured a shot-sized stream into his mouth.

Binh emptied the last of the Folgers into a styrofoam cup filled with warm water, stopping short of tapping the end of the tin can for the remaining grounds.  Anh hated waking up before sunrise; Thanh was a light sleeper, and Binh was too tired to argue and apologize.  He walked towards the door, past towels hanging from the dining room set and stacks of rain-warped phone books unevenly holding ashtrays.

Outside, a piece of paper adhered to the door with torn pieces of masking tape.  Binh looked at the print, bolded, large, daunting, trying to anchor himself in a word.  He found only an “is,” “please,” and a “the” to hold on to.  He tore the sign off the door and decided to ask the Mexicans for help.

V.

Photo:  The United States, South Vietnam, and Texas flag flying in tandem at the Houston Vietnam Memorial.

In the break room at lunchtime, Binh washed his hands twice to remove the smell of coolant from his fingers.  The running water seared a fresh cut on his left ring finger – a lazy mistake of picking up a freshly cut metal pipe without his gloves.  The Mexicans sat behind him, the scent of platanos, beans, rice and microwaved plastic filling the room.  At his spot at the table, he placed a container of baked drumsticks he had over seasoned with salt and pieces of lemongrass.

Click here to learn more about the technical and theoretical framework of this piece.

Text by Jennifer Nguyen; Photos taken by Jennifer Nguyen and family (polaroid effect created in Photoshop CS6)