by Stephanie Tran Rojas
There was a game I played when I was young. Only at night. Only with my brother.
We watched the cars go by our house and listened to their engines—waiting, for the one coming home to us. It was a game where we pretended we were asleep by curfew. It was a game where we could see when our dad came home from work. I could hear his loud sighs. I smelled the lingering grease of the kitchen and strong smell of alcohol on his breath as he came to give us good-night kisses without fail, even though he thought we were asleep.
“Daddy, tell me a bedtime story?” is not something I asked my father growing up. Leisure time for fantasies were reserved for those who can afford to daydream. Instead, our family fought and conquered in the concrete jungles of urban America.
Working until ten o’ clock, his black kitchen uniform hid the sweat and grease, but not the alcohol taken as soon as work ended. Coming home with new burns and cuts on his hand and recurring pain in his back, he still starts everyday over like clockwork. We are not a family to pass down physical trinkets, but loaded histories. Through our heavy sighs, enraged family fights, or financial hardships, our daily lives become a clear transcription of tribulation. We pass down grief and anger through the generations, but also the intense vitality and inventiveness of survivors. We also share the pride and strength of a mighty people.
Someone once told me, “You’re Vietnamese? They’re an angry people.” And my tongue caught in my mouth as I tried to say, “you don’t know anything” while I kept hearing the old sound of the couch screeching as my father dragged my grandma out of the house. She clutched onto the furniture for dear life. His voice vibrated up through the walls to my second-floor room as I cowered on the ground. I wanted to defend my father’s integrity, but couldn’t deny the injustices he committed under the influence of anger. This total stranger hit the nail on the head. In ignorance, he had voiced a dangerously accurate statement on the emotional baggage of the family in my memories. The waves of anger kept swelling up in my memories and poured out into the crevices of me until I drowned in them.
But it has become a part of the family tree. The poisoned water fed the rotted roots. The foundation unstable and creaking with every passing gust of wind, but after so many years those signs of self-destruction became all I could attach to. This home defined the boundaries of what I knew existed, so I embraced it wholeheartedly. It started in Vietnam, maybe earlier, but festered again and again when my father’s family had to flee during the war. They ended up in a refugee island in Malaysia, and then the United States.
Originally, my dad wanted to risk his life. He wanted to join the military and fight for a cause he believed in. He grew up surrounded by lush, green rice paddies that stretched across the land. He was an active, bright child and this scene was part of “home.” To allow those fields to continue stretching without end or interruption from the war, he wanted to fight. But he was never given the chance. My grandfather had prevented him from enlisting because he was the youngest, even if he could be the bravest. Instead, he had to run to the U.S. It was a time new to Vietnamese people, where everyone was delegated Chinese for convenience, and racial slurs and tensions where palpable in the streets of Philadelphia. It was when my father had friends who went to jump people of different races in the streets for violence’s sake. In Pittsburgh, his hopeful college degree in Engineering was traded in short of his senior year to help the family in the West Coast. He gave up chasing his dreams for raising a nephew and working for the family. He didn’t know—couldn’t know—better as a young twenty-something year old.
They say war is fought twice: once in the battlefield and once in the mind. I see that battle in my father’s heart. I have seen him crawl through the trudges of bombshells after the divorce and watched the premature deaths surrounding him during graduation. Now, he stands solemnly at the service of the fallen without the spoils of war.
What does it mean to be the daughter to this history of pain?
Talking about his once opportunity-laden past, I sense the seas of sorrow he is drifting within and want to throw over a life jacket. I want to pull him out of the past and the regret, remove the yearning for a better life. But my arms could never span the decades or continents of regrets that haunt him. How could I reach him on his island of resignation?
So instead of talking about his past, I hoped to give him my future. I decided to build a bridge between our lives that gives him another quest for glory and the excitement of ripe opportunity.
I could give him my life, I thought. Use my future as my token of gratitude for his sacrifice, feeling that it was my duty as his daughter to at least give him this. I would bring home every achievement I thought he could yearn for and hoped he would one day be satisfied.
But eventually, I felt the full weight of that price. It was more than a straight A’s, extracurricular groups, or a great university and career track. It was waiting for a fulfillment that never arrived.
The bridge to his heart was built offering my own, not any certificates, plaques, or acceptance letters. Who knew a day together could outweigh a stack of annual achievements? On drives for groceries, the long highways stretch out before us and nostalgic music we both know fill the air. We sing, we critique, and we silently enjoy. He holds the steering wheel casually, with only his left hand and sits back into the seat. On the drives home, my left hand reaches for his free right hand, and I feel his sense of peace. His palms are large with muscular fingers and countless scars. True working hands. From chemical burns, to knife cuts, to machinery accidents, his hands show a full account of injuries. Regardless of the soot and soil collecting, his hands remained warm and steady. They are a childhood com- fort of mine. Our hands together are a worn piece of leather wrapped around a new piece of plastic. Within that mix is comfort and guilt, value and privilege packaged simultaneously and now at peace.
With each moment we shared together, his wall crumbled and his softness peeked through. I saw pieces of a once sensitive, emotional boy, the once hopeless romantic, the once cocky upstart, and the now tired man regaining vitality.
His healing became my salvation. I could lay down the black smoke pressing down on my shoulders, and it became my foundation to stand, transferring me from weighted to weightless. As I progress, I can straighten my back, relax my shoulders, puff out my chest, and look up.