Yet in a letter written two days before that, dated March 30, 1975, when we still did not know for sure if Father would make it back alive to Saigon from Danang, upon learning that Brother now worked in a supermarket in San Francisco, you, my younger self, wrote to him: “Be careful stacking chicken eggs and don’t break them! The Exorcist is about to be shown here. Oh how scary! Goodbye.”

Goodbye indeed. Not too many people have their childhood ended so precisely. But that was what happened to me. The war ended. I fled. And I became someone else entirely.

When I came to America, I suffered a certain kind of self-imposed amnesia. Pubescent and not fully formed, I was old enough to remember Vietnam, but young enough to embrace America and to be reshaped by it. A few months after my arrival, my voice broke. Going through puberty, I began realizing that America was not just changing me on the outside but on the inside, too—that is, I believed my Americanization process was somehow magical, and that English had altered my vocal cords.

As it turned out, not only would you not get a new dog, but the three dogs that you had dearly loved, along with the house you lived in, your neighbors, relatives, schoolmates, teachers, servants, and, ultimately, a way of life, would all be taken away from you, too.

If a part of me was mourning for what was lost and gone, another part was enthralled at my own rapid transformation. I couldn’t wait to put all the chaos and sadness of Vietnam behind me, to bury the shock of exile with newness. I desperately embraced English so I wouldn't stand out. I would mimic characters from sitcoms, and memorize entire TV commercials, reciting lines like sutras. Each morning, in the shower, I would practice new vocabulary words out loud. “Business,” I would pronounce. “Stress!” I would shout. “Necessary!” I could almost see the words with their sharp edges and round arches taking shape in the steamy air.

So much so that by the time I went to high school a few years later, I had stopped speaking Vietnamese altogether, had shaved the accent from my American tongue, and at times pretended that I was American born. I even said so to a few who asked. Left behind to cobwebs and dust was you, the Vietnamese boy who sat writing these letters, dreaming of fabled America, its 31 flavors of ice cream, its majestic high-rises, its falling snow.

I have seen plenty of snow. Snow lining the Mirabeau bridge in Paris, snow on temple rooftops of Kyoto, snow at Lake Tahoe. But I have largely forgotten who I used to be. In reading these letters three decades later, I am pulled back to a childhood that had all but faded. I did not, for instance, remember The Exorcist being shown in Saigon, but having now read that passage, I regained that long-lost afternoon in an instant. I remember: In the newspaper called Black and White, a woman had a miscarriage at the premiere. You had wanted to go see the movie, but considering the situation at the time, and the subject matter, Mother strictly forbade it, and you had sulked.

It all comes back. I see you again in a courtyard drenched in sunlight; the dogs asleep in the doorway, the red bougainvillea wavering above the iron gates, the shading blue sky. At your desk, you struggle for words to the brother overseas, and above that desk I see your treasures: stamp collection, French comic books, and Chinese martial arts novels. I hear again the street vendor’s lyrical and nostalgic voice, echoing in: Ai an bong co hot luu khong? — “Who wants grass jelly and passion fruit soup?” and the faint but constant roar of motorcycle mufflers. I can almost feel the coolness of the tile floor under my bare feet, and smell that burning wood smoke that emanates from the kitchen.

And the nights. Cool spring breezes that carried the sound of distant bombs in through the open windows from the countryside. Not loud. But the rhythmic explosion echoing like a childhood lullaby. And how, hearing Mother weeping in the next room, you struggled toward sleep.

I hold the letters and I have a glimpse of that past again: a sense of being insulated within a structure of family and clan, of being shrouded in my primal language that held me and everyone

I knew within its Confucian familial embrace, a life within a walled garden.

And I remember you, you who had guarded your innocence the way you guarded your stamp collection, the only item from that era that, by the way, survived the escape and subsequent exile; you the reader of books, who hadn’t made that jump yet between those who loved reading and those who loved writing: that one passion could often lead to the other.

It may surprise you then that you who lived so much in the present, who pretended history had nothing to do with you, would grow into an American writer with a Proustian obsession with the past, with what was robbed from you, from us. You may not know that history was alive and often unpredictable, but the man who writes these words has grown acutely aware of how the personal and the historical are but rivers to the sea. You had thought the borders were nearly impossible to cross, but I have for a long while now discovered that the borders have always been porous, and that epic loss can loosen one’s tongue.

So I write. The past is gone, but the past is ever-present. And was it not Edward Said, the cultural critic, who once noted that if one wishes to transcend one’s provincial and national limits, one should not reject attachments to the past but work through them? Irretrievable, the past should therefore be at least remembered and assimilated.

All those letters in which our family left no space unfilled once addressed the faraway brother, and now address me. They tell me that it is so easy to forget all the sadness and joy and the love, forget who we used to be, and how we used to feel. But in reading them again, they also tell me impossible distances can be filled with love, with the written word.

Andrew Lam ‘86 is an editor for Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to California magazine. Perfume Dreams, his book of essays on the Vietnamese diaspora, won the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award for authors of ethnic diversity. His preview of The Peony Pavilion appeared in the July/August issue of this magazine.

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