Home, in Parts
Bao Long Chu


In 1975, the wind was rising. I remember a morning of thunder and iron sky. To my right, my sister Khanh; my left, my sister Van. We stood in the order of our births, the six of us holding on to each other´s hands. My father and mother, ahead in line, kept admonishing us: Don´t lose each other. My mother held my brother Hung (only eighteen months) in her arms, and at her feet, a Samsonite full of photos. We were waiting for what? Flight to where? No one told me. I remember a light rain was beginning to fall, drumming the tarmac. The crowd started to press against us, or collapse against us. One giant helicopter—a gray whale—lifted itself overhead. Then another, then another. The whirling blades drowned out my heart´s beating. Miles in the distance, a bomb exploded.

In 1976, my father had a vision. He gathered all of us to the dinner table, which was really a rusty foldout card table, the vinyl top tattered. He opened a Reader´s Digest magazine, pointed to a picture of the Astrodome, and said, “We´re moving here.” We looked at the white dome lit against blue sky. We tried to imagine this new, vast city. My father told us of the Space Center. My father said, “Houston is the city of the future.” We were in Miami then, nine people in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. When the landlord stopped by, my mother would tell us to hide in our bedroom and not make a sound. We hid well, the seven of us on top of one another in the gap between the two mattresses laid side by side on the floor. It was a game. We tried not to giggle.

In 1957, my mother saw Giant at Dôc Lâp (translation: Independence), the movie theatre her grandmother owned. This was the same movie theatre where she worked summers, and where, she said, the neighborhood boys would line up just to talk to her. That was in Da Nang. Nineteen years later, across oceans, my father told my mother he wanted his family to live in Texas. She thought then of James Dean and how he had been crushed by that oil-filled and expansive state.

In 1976, my father drove us from Florida to Texas in a white station wagon with a trailer hitched to the back. The trailer was filled with belongings from strangers, given to us by the charity group of a Cuban church. In Miami, the Cubans loved us. They identified with our plight. They gave us food and donated clothes. They wrote about us, the newly arrived. I remember when my brother Dang got his picture taken for the cover of a local magazine. The photographer posed my brother on the stoop of our cramped apartment. In the picture, my brother looked angelic, but lost. He was barefoot. The cover read Su Patria Tambien Fue Traicionada [His Mother Country Also Was Betrayed]. I remember how I wanted to be photographed, too.

In 1979, I was eleven. The noon summer sky filled my lungs. We all loaded into the family wagon. My father drove us from Houston to Galveston so we could spend the day at the beach. I sat in the back with my sister Han. The cooler filled with ice and sodas sloshed next to us. Han and I smiled and waved at the passing cars. Some of the drivers waved back. We kept up the waving and the smiling for a while. Suddenly, we noticed a white pickup truck tailgating our car. I could see that the man driving the truck was gesturing furiously. An older woman sat next to him; she didn´t look too happy either. We told our father to pull over. My father was annoyed and probably nervous. The man in the pickup truck came up to my father´s side of the window. He spoke angrily. Then my father told me to go and apologize to the woman. “For what?” I asked, stunned. “He said you made an obscene gesture at his mother,” my father yelled, ashamed at being yelled at by this white man. I got out of the car, shuffled to the pickup truck, its engine idling loudly. The old woman looked down at me, her pallid lips a permanent scowl. I mumbled, “I´m sorry.” “You better be,” she said. Then the truck took off. The pebbles on the side of the road made a crunching noise. Flight to where? The exhaust fumes stung my eyes. An ache in my throat, the oil-slick iridescence at my feet.

In 1979, I met Chris, who later became my best friend. I was waiting for the bus at the end of our street. It was the first day of seventh grade. I had on a shirt that had been donated by our Cuban friends, which I had never worn before. It was a blue polyester shirt with the repeated patterns of a man in a fedora smoking a cigar. I was carrying my violin in one hand and my book briefcase—not a backpack—in the other. Chris was dragging a trombone case bigger than he was. “Are you Chinese?” he asked me. I said, “No—I´m from Vietnam.” “Where´s that?” Chris asked. I said, “You know—the Vietnam War.” But Chris looked blank. I thought everyone knew. Then Chris said to me, “I like your shirt. Welcome to Houston.”

In 1997, I read that the Vietnamese population in Houston had exceeded 150,000. Vietnamese noodle shops serving the ubiquitous pho were outnumbering tacquerias. The mayoral election that year brought up issues concerning the Vietnamese-American community: gang-related crimes, ethnic representation in the police force and government agencies, more crimes. Three years later, a young Vietnamese man in prison awaiting trial for two gang-related murders started writing me. He found my name in a newspaper article about my work with Vietnamese-American students. He wrote of his wasted youth, what life was like in prison, how his father´s tremulous grief, keening within him, kept him from sleeping at night. He was only eighteen then. His name meant “mountain” or “nation.” I wondered if his parents named him that to remind them of home, his name a shadow floating past their remembered mountain.

In 1980, my father was one of the few Vietnamese physicians with his own clinic practicing in Houston. His office was across the street from St. Joseph´s Hospital. I worked there on weekends and in the summers, doing simple tasks like filing and answering the phone. My father must have thought that if I were exposed early enough to the family business, the desire to be a physician would take. It never did, of course, but I enjoyed working there, listening to people and their stories. In those early years, he saw many of the newly arrived. They all had stories. Some stories I could not take in: the sadness was unbearable. The people were always grateful to my father, even—or especially—when they could not pay. My father would simply wave them off. But pay they would—not in cash, but in gifts like freshly caught fish or homemade sweets, hand-sewn shirts, handmade trinkets. I remember my parents coming home in those evenings, their arms heavy with the riot of gratitude.

In 1998, the stories I held inside me spilled onto the streets. As I was driving through downtown one morning, there they were: names of Vietnamese historical and mythical figures and places on street signs from Webster to Alabama, San Jacinto to Milam. Hai Bá Trung: the two Trung sisters who led the first national uprising against the Chinese in 40 A.D. I remember my grandfather saying that if the sisters had not resisted the Chinese when they did, there would be no Vietnamese nation today. Mê Linh: the fabled city near the Hong River, north of Hanoi, where Trung Vuong established her royal court. Nguyen Huê: one of the three Tay Son brothers who staged the 1780s uprising against the Lê rulers. These were the stories of my youth: filial ashes, heroic vanquishers, burnt citadels, honor and pride. These were stories told to me in the dark when rumbling gunfire echoed a long way off, stories I slept to. It was like a dream to see them suddenly legible as street signs lit by the sun in my rearview mirror. It was as if everything inside me took wings.

In 1987, I was alone. The sky was dark, a storm brewing. I had parked my car on the other side of Cong Thanh Mall between Travis and Milam. I was crossing the street when a small truck careened by, and the driver yelled from his opened window, “Hey, gook, go home!” I caught a glimpse of his face, no more than seventeen, the evasive beauty of youth. Driving away, he gave me the finger. Before I took in his words, he was already crossing Elgin, a trail of metallic exhaust. The rain came down in sheets. Later that evening, I lay in bed. I imagined running after that plume of smoke, catching up to him in his pickup truck. The words I had wanted to say in response flew from my throat: I am home. I am home. The words would wrap themselves around him like a coat. The words would float from my windows, a glitter of dust settling into cracks and crevices, sills and stairs, the wide, unending streets of Houston.

Copyright©2000 Bao Long Chu

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