THE FIRST TEST OF MY LIFE

 

THUỶ NHƯ                    

(Click on the picture to listen to the Vietnamese version)

For my Dad, sons, nieces and nephews 

The sound of gunfire exploded through the air, drowning out the voice of a father who was waving goodbye to his son while backing away toward a battlefield shrouded in smoke. 

“Dad! Dad! Why do you have to go?” The little boy cried. 

“I have to go. I love you …” 

The father’s voice faded into the distance, and the boy suddenly woke up. He realized that he had been crying in his sleep, and his lips were still whispering: 

“Why do you have to go?” 

That scene came from a radio drama called The Price of Freedom, produced by Focus on the Family and purchased by my mother-in-law for my children. She bought an entire collection of Adventures in Odyssey radio dramas for them to listen to whenever we traveled by car. 

That day, my two young sons and I were listening to The Price of Freedom while driving to visit my parents, who were then living in Redlands. Looking into the rearview mirror, I noticed tears welling in my boys’ eyes. 

I stopped the recording and asked, my own voice trembling with emotion: 

“Are you boys scared of listening to this? Should I turn it off?” 

My eight-year-old son answered through tears: 

“No. I want to keep listening.” 

His younger brother quickly agreed. 

“Me too.” 

So, I pressed the play again. 

The drama told the story of Kirk McGinty, a boy whose father had been killed in the Vietnam War. Kirk’s mother had also worked in Vietnam, where she met his father. They married there and enjoyed a brief period of happiness together. Later, when the United States decided to withdraw its troops from Vietnam, Kirk’s mother returned home carrying Kirk in her womb, never having had the chance to tell her husband that she was pregnant. 

Only days later, he was killed in combat. 

As anti-war sentiment intensified in America, Mrs. McGinty moved away from the city and raised her son in the countryside to shield him from the cruel criticism and insults directed toward Vietnam veterans. 

Perhaps because his mother often spoke of his father’s courage and sacrifice, Kirk grew fascinated by military strategy, victory, and heroism. The more he admired his father, the more devastated he became when his history teacher, Mr. Altman, described the Vietnam War as a meaningless war. 

After class, Kirk stayed behind and asked the teacher what he thought of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. 

Mr. Altman reaffirmed his position. The war, he said, had been pointless, and the deaths of American soldiers had been equally meaningless. He even lent Kirk a book in which the author portrayed American soldiers in Vietnam as brutal killers. 

Kirk’s soul was torn apart on hearing all of that.

He lost his appetite, could not sleep, and was no longer the lively, energetic boy he had once been. The image of his father as a hero collapsed before his eyes. The man he had admired all his life suddenly seemed transformed into a villain. 

Fortunately, an elderly man named Whit noticed the change in Kirk. After learning what had happened, Whit spoke with Mr. Altman about Kirk’s father and his sacrifice in Vietnam. The teacher eventually realized that he had gone too far. 

Kirk’s mother was heartbroken to see her son’s spirit fading. With Whit’s help, she was invited to speak at the town’s Memorial Day ceremony. There she read aloud the final letter her husband had written before his death. 

After hearing his father’s words, Kirk regained faith. He came to believe once again that his father had fought for a noble cause and had sacrificed his life in service to the mission entrusted to him by his country. 

My children and I wept as we listened. 

I have forgotten many details of that drama over the years, but one line spoken by Kirk’s mother has remained with me ever since: 

“I’m sorry that your father was your first test.” 

With tears in my eyes, I said something similar to my children after the program ended. 

“I am also sorry that my father became my first test as well.” 

Then I began telling them about my own father. 

After 1975, my father was imprisoned by the Vietnamese communist government because he had worked for the former South Vietnamese regime, which was supported by the USA. 

I felt sorry for my mother, who had to struggle alone against every kind of hardship while raising her young children. We were far too young to share the fears and burdens—both physical and emotional—that weighed upon her during those years. She longed for my father to return home and help shoulder some of those responsibilities. 

Whenever we wished for something, Mother would say, 

“When your father comes home, he will do that for you.” 

I placed all my hopes in my father. I believed that when he returned, our family would be better off and I would once again be able to hold my head high among my friends. 

Like the boy in the story, I often wondered whether my father was truly a good man. Or was he really one of those “blood-stained criminals who owed a debt to the people,” as the communist authorities described men like him? 

I preferred to remember my father as the impressive, heroic figure he had been before 1975, even though I was very young then. After long business trips, he would return home, and I would sit at his feet picking the burrs from his socks and pant legs after he had walked through the grassy fields to reach the airplane waiting in the meadow to bring him home. 

But my father looked utterly different when Mother took me to visit him in prison. 

He appeared gaunt, exhausted, and frail—nothing like the father I remembered. 

“Prison does that to a person,” Mother said. 

I remember a movie from those years. I no longer remember its title—and have no desire to look for it now—but I do remember the song from it, “Em Sẽ Là Hoa Hồng Nhỏ” (“You Will Be a Little Rose”). 

In that film, the little girl's father, like my own, was in prison. He eventually realized the mistakes he had made while serving in the South Vietnamese government and became “enlightened.” The state quickly forgave him and allowed him to reunite with his family. 

After seeing the movie, I naively wrote a letter to my father, hoping that he would do the same thing so he could come home sooner to Mother and us children. 

My father never mentioned this letter. I think because it was thrown in a trash bin and it did not reach him.

My father was in prison for seven years—a period long enough for me to grow from a little girl who still needed her nose wiped into a teenage girl filled with dreams and aspirations. 

However, when my father finally returned, our family's situation did not improve. In fact, it became worse. 

The authorities would not allow him to live with us. Instead, they ordered him to return to our ancestral village twenty kilometers away. 

At the time, our family owned only one bicycle, which Mother used for her small trading business. My father could not find work because he did not have a household registration permit and therefore had no legal place to live. 

To this day, I cannot understand the twisted logic behind that wretched household-registration system. 

My father had been imprisoned before the household-registration policy was introduced, so naturally his name was not included in our family's registration book. 

The authorities argued that because he had been arrested in the village, he must return there after his release—even though he owned no land there and had nowhere to build a house. 

Meanwhile, the house he had built in town, where Mother and the children were living, was off-limits to him. 

I never knew whether the authorities truly failed to understand the situation or simply refused to listen, but they insisted that my father return to the village. 

The police came to our house every night, searching for my father because he was considered to be living there illegally. 

The irony was that our home was always full of relatives from the countryside who stayed with us temporarily. Cousins boarded with us while attending school or participating in meetings. Uncles, aunts, and other relatives stayed for months while receiving medical treatment. Yet the authorities never bothered any of them. The only person they wanted to arrest was my father. 

Nightfall became a time of fear. 

Our family lived under constant tension, anxiety, and dread. The stress showed on my face so plainly that some of my friends nicknamed me "the old woman with a worried face." More than once, I found myself wishing that my father were still in prison if only it would spare my siblings and me from such emotional torment. 

Some people told my parents that the problem could be solved by "greasing a few palms" with a little money. 

How I wished we had the money to do that. 

Instead, my mother devised a long-term plan. 

She had two roosters from our flock castrated and fattened up. Then she intended to present them as gifts—tribute offerings to those devils, as she saw it—much like the old saying about setting aside "a capon especially for the master." 

The plan worked. 

After countless nights when my father had to climb onto the roof and hide whenever the police came to inspect the house, while my siblings and I lay motionless pretending to sleep, we finally ended up with two plump capons a few months later. 

My siblings and I were thrilled. 

One would be given away. 

The other, we hoped, would end up on our dinner table so that we could finally taste capon meat and discover how delicious it was. Truthfully, any meat would have tasted wonderful to us. In those days we ate meat only once or twice a year. 

Then Tết (Vietnamese New Year) arrived. 

To our dismay, Father announced that both capons had to be given away. 

One would go to the village policeman in our ancestral hometown so he would sign the necessary papers. The other would go to the local policeman near our house so he would allow Father to stay there. 

We were so disappointed. 

We never got to taste the capon meat we had dreamed about. 

Both chickens were gone. 

And Father still was not allowed to live with us. 

There were simply too many devils to appease. 

Our family could never raise chickens fast enough to keep stuffing their mouths. 

Frustrated and exhausted, my father left Tam Kỳ (near Đà nẵng) and moved to Mỹ Xuân (near Sài gòn) to start over. 

A few months later, he wrote home and asked Mother to bring my younger brother, who was about to enter sixth grade, to live with him. I was preparing to enter twelfth grade and planned to join him after graduation. Mother would remain in Tam Kỳ with my younger sister until she finished high school because there was no high school where Father was living. My oldest sister was preparing to get married, so our parents no longer had to worry about her. 

Mother took my younger brother to Mỹ Xuân and, upon returning, told us all about the place where Father had settled. 

I listened eagerly. 

There was a garden and a fish pond. There were rice fields that could produce enough food for the family, and land for growing vegetables and fruit. Buyers came directly to the house to purchase produce from the garden, so there was no need to take anything to the market. 

Best of all, there were large mango trees bearing fruits as sweet as honey. 

As Mother spoke, I imagined a peaceful and prosperous life awaiting me in that gentle southern land, much like the places I had read about in stories. 

My disappointment was immense when I finally arrived in Mỹ Xuân in June of 1985. 

It was the rainy season in southern Vietnam. 

Every afternoon, it rained. 

The house Father had purchased sat on the lowest part of the property, so water seeped into the dirt floor and left it perpetually damp and muddy. From the inside, the house—with its coconut-leaf roof—looked charming enough, but from the outside it appeared shabby and ruined. The walls were made of mud mixed with straw. 

Whenever it rained, water leaked through the roof in every direction. Rain splashed against the walls and soaked into anything placed near them. 

During the rainy season, the weeds and wild plants grew wildly and quickly engulfed everything around us, making our home look like a lonely hut lost in the wilderness. 

The evenings were even worse. 

The dim glow of an oil lamp cast a melancholy light over the house. 

That desolate scene in the middle of the lonely countryside made me ache with homesickness for Tam Kỳ. 

Loneliness is worse than poverty.

I had no friends. 

Day after day, I worked in the garden—pulling weeds from the bean patches, planting sweet potatoes, transplanting rice seedlings, harvesting cashew nuts ... In the evenings, I would read and reread the few books I owned. I read them so many times that I grew tired of them, yet I had nothing else to entertain myself. 

I longed for someone to come visit me, but that dream was impossible. Our house stood far from the main road and had no real address. Letters took a month to arrive, and we often did not have enough money to buy stamps to send any in return. 

My father and I knew how to farm, but we knew nothing about business. As a result, life was extremely difficult. 

During the months before harvest, we sometimes had no rice to eat. My father would ride his bicycle 20 km to borrow unhusked rice from a distant relative. Even after bringing it home, we didn't have money to have it milled. When we finally took it to the rice mill, the miller would keep a portion of the rice as payment. 

A few months later, my father took my younger brother back to Tam Kỳ for several weeks to attend my grandfather's funeral. 

I remained alone. 

Our house stood in the middle of open fields. The nearest neighbor lived far away, and their house was always closed. In my overwhelming loneliness, I often found myself talking aloud to no one. 

Those were some of the darkest days of my life. 

Unlike Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, who boldly swore, “I'll never be hungry again,” after experiencing poverty, I did not dare make such a declaration. 

Instead, I simply cried out to God: 

“Lord, I never want to fall into such loneliness and poverty again.” 

I also found myself singing over and over a line from a song by Vũ Thành An: 

“Later on, and even many years from now,
I may still be sad,
but never as sad as I am today.” 

It was not the sadness of lost love. 

It was the sorrow and humiliation of being poor and not having enough to eat. 

The Price of Freedom was first broadcast in May 1988 during Memorial Day observances. My husband told me that back then in Berkeley where he was a college student, America had largely forgotten the Vietnam War.

Yet on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Vietnam's communist government had not stopped discriminating against families like ours. 

At that time, my younger sister had just graduated from high school and did not want to leave Central Vietnam. She did not apply to a university. Instead, she applied only to the English Teacher's College in Da Nang, hoping that a less prestigious school might give her a better chance of being accepted. 

She was not even allowed to take the entrance examination. 

Her application was rejected outright. 

When I heard the news, I prayed that she would not fall into the same despair and depression that had consumed my cousin in my memoir My Pretty Cousin. 

Reluctantly, my sister followed my mother south to live with my father. The house in Tam Kỳ was left to my oldest sister. 

At last, our family was reunited. 

My parents became Christians, and all of us began worshiping together at Phước Thái Church near our home. 

God brought peace into our lives. Friends from the church came to visit us, and our loneliness gradually eased. 

The following year, my younger sister enrolled in Biên Hòa College, just as I had done before her. 

Every day my mother carried fruit, vegetables, and flowers from our garden to sell at the market. Little by little, she transformed the property into exactly the kind of garden she had once described to me before I left Tam Kỳ. 

Life became reasonably comfortable. 

We believed that our future had finally settled into place in Mỹ Xuân, beside Highway 51. 

In the 1990s, the H.O. immigration program became widely available, but my father had no desire to leave. 

Our family had established a stable life on the land he had purchased. He was nearly sixty years old and did not want to start over in a foreign country whose language and culture were so unfamiliar. 

Perhaps, however, what truly held him back was the paperwork required for the H.O. application. 

He dreaded returning to Central Vietnam to obtain documents because the memories of imprisonment, harassment, and arrest after his release still haunted him. 

At the time, I did not understand my father's fears. 

Now, after experiencing much more of life, I realize that those fears were entirely justified. In the end, our family did make it to Mỹ quốc (USA)—not Mỹ Xuân, that little rural commune of years past.

When I was in my twenties, I heard someone say something like this: 

“From childhood to age ten, you think your father is amazing and knows everything. 

From ten to eighteen, you think he doesn't know much. 

From eighteen to thirty, you think he doesn't know anything at all. 

From thirty to forty, you realize he was right about many things. 

After forty, you realize your father is a hero.” 

I laughed when I first heard those words. 

Now, I think they are absolutely true. 

My father is approaching ninety years old now. Every day, he still drives my mother to enjoy the beautiful beaches of Navarre, Florida. He has a garden and chickens and people come for his vegetables.  He does not need to sell them anymore.

Most of his grandchildren were born in America. Some speak Vietnamese fluently, some speak it haltingly, and some cannot speak it at all. Yet they all adore their grandfather. 

His eldest grandson, though his Vietnamese is sprinkled with misplaced tones and imperfect pronunciation, loves his grandfather more than any of the others. 

Every now and then, he asks his parents if he can spend the night with Grandpa. 

The boy will lie beside him, gently pulling at the loose skin on his grandfather's arm and saying, 

“Grandpa, you're so skinny! You're nothing but skin and bones. You need to eat more.” 

My father strokes his grandson's head and quietly wipes away tears. 

These days I find myself looking back into the past more and more often. 

As I reread the journal entries I wrote during those terrible years in Vietnam, there were times when I believed that my life had been dragged down because of my father. 

Like Kirk in The Price of Freedom, I doubted my father—not for a few minutes, as Kirk did, but for many years. 

I wonder whether I could have endured what he endured. 

Could I have remained steadfast if I had been isolated, imprisoned, harassed after my release, and then forced to begin again in a place where I knew neither the language nor the culture, at an age when most people are preparing for retirement? 

I do not know. 

Now, when I see my parents living peacefully, I find myself hoping that I may enjoy such a life when my own retirement comes. 

And once again, I look up to my parents as role models, just as I did before 1975 when I was a little girl. 

Today I understand that this first great test of my life ultimately strengthened my faith in my father. 

It taught me to be proud of him. 

It confirmed the respect I felt for him as a child and still feel today. 

The man I once doubted has become the man I admire most. 

Thủy Như

Written on 4/15/2025 

Translated on 6/15/2026 with the help of AI and my husband

Source: https://thuynhu.weebly.com/th7917-thaacutech-2727847u-2727901i.html