I was born in Ha Noi, Vietnam in 1952. My family is large
with 11 children and I was the third child with an older sister, Teresa and a brother, Tri. My father is a second generation Chinese-Vietnamese. His father
died very young while studying medicine in Ha Noi. His mother was a Vietnamese
housewife and a habitual gambler. When my grandfather died, my father had to
quit school at 16 and went to work since his mother abandoned her children to
spend time gambling. I was told that my father’s household fell into disrepair
and abject poverty. He had to take care of his sister and 2 younger brothers.
They ate left-over cooked rice and simple broth, and their food was sometimes
covered with ants and insects.
Eventually, my father gained more experience and was able
to get a job with some Chinese landowner whose daughter married one of my
father’s younger brother, uncle Thanh. My father met and married my mother, a
Vietnamese woman through the wealthy landowner. They worked, saved and were
able to own a successful department store in early 1950s.
In 1941 the Japanese landed in Hai Phong harbor and
marched into Ha Noi accepting the French colonial power surrender. My father
was a young man watching the surrender. A young Vietnamese boy was pointing and
laughing at the Japanese. A Japanese officer stepped out and in a sudden and
violent sweep lopped off the young boy’s head then without a word returned back
to the march.
At the end of World War II, the French colonists returned
to power after the Japanese surrender. The Vietnamese Communist Party under Ho
chi Minh failed to gain traction with the US administration to gain independence.
However, they won the decisive victory against the French at “Dien Bien Phu”
allowing them to demand the demarcation of Vietnam at the 17th
parallel with the North under Ho Chi Minh who was supported by Russia and China,
and the South under Ngo Dinh Diem supported by the French and subsequently by
the Americans.
My parents left Ha Noi with me and my two older siblings,
Teresa and Tri to Gia Dinh, a neighborhood in Saigon, South Vietnam. The
evacuation was legal but all their assets were either confiscated or lost. They
re-started their lives in South Vietnam with nothing. This was 1954 and I was
two years old.
The house we lived in South Vietnam was very small. It
had packed dirt floor. The walls were unpainted. My mother converted a small
shipping carton box into the family altar. The streets were unpaved. There was
a common restroom several hundred feet away for several homes to share. There
were quite a number of insects, mosquitoes and rats in and around the house. My
father started out at the bottom driving bus and taxi. More kids arrived. My
father was enterprising getting jobs with airline companies and eventually for
Air America in Saigon for the last several dozen of years before the fall of
South Vietnam in April 1975.
Memories are like jumbled jigsaw puzzle pieces. Some fit
perfectly. Some are so strange that you can’t figure out where they belong. I
just found a stash of old photos my dad gave me before he died. Several photos
of me spanning back more than sixty years: an infant on his mother lap, a young
lad in Boy Scout uniform, a first year college teenager student arriving in Los
Angeles airport. The “me” in the photos seemed to be a stranger, but also had
the vague familiarity of memories long faded.
Since I had some English ability more than anyone else,
during the 1968 Lunar New Year Communist offensive, my oldest sister Teresa and
I were assigned to stay at our meager home to protect it. The village was
infiltrated by the Viet Cong. I was there to explain that we were civilian, not
communists if the American soldiers were to assault house by house. I still
remember the awesome sight and frightening sounds of the gunship fire demolishing
a nearby home where the Viet Cong were hiding.
I passed the two consecutive years Baccalaureate I and II
with highest honors and was selected to leave Vietnam for college in the US.
The war was raging on in Vietnam in 1970 when I was granted this very rare
privilege. We were very poor and without any connection hence the approval
allowing me to leave was an exceptional opportunity. My parents told me and
their relatives many times about their joy and pride of their son’s early
achievement.
My financial situation during my undergraduate years was
pitiful. I arrived with eleven US dollars in my pocket. I was granted the
monthly amount of $150 (US dollars) at the official exchange rate. Of the 150
dollars, I set aside 50 dollars for my family. The black market value of the US
dollar was several times higher than that of the official exchange rate. One of
my mother’s distant relative by marriage, Uncle Xoi was very wealthy in Vietnam. It was not legal
for Vietnamese to stash money - of which some or most were ill-gotten gains - in
foreign banks. The uncle already having a Chase account, illegal at the time in
Vietnam, allowed me to deposit the 50 dollars monthly to it. In return, he gave
my parents inflated Vietnamese piasters, helping my family with a little more
money due to this exchange.
Life was quite tough. I still remember the good smell and
rare treat while visiting the apartment of well-off Vietnamese students from
wealthy families and was invited to share some of their sumptuous home cooked
steaks. I struggled to balance school, and my night and weekend jobs:
housekeeper at Long Beach Memorial hospital cleaning toilets, floors, removing trash
as well as the operating rooms’ hazardous waste; also working at Jack-in-the-Box
and as a student assistant at the University library. These under-the-table
cash payments – since I was not allowed to work openly and legally – and the
monthly $100 allowed me a very meager existence at the same time paying for
school tuition and fees. (My scholarship was only partial.) The university fees
were maxed out over 12 semester units. Most Vietnamese students took very high
number of semester units to save money.
I had a small 125cc Honda motorcycle for commuting to
school. During the second year, I had an accident which broke my right leg and
left me bed-ridden for the whole several months. Thanks to the kindness of
friends and neighbors I was able to get food and water for the duration.
In early 1975 I spent several months explaining to my
father that the situation in Vietnam was very desperate and the final collapse
was near. My father was a low level employee of Air America which was the
airline subcontracted to the CIA in Vietnam (see Figure 1). I contacted the CIA
in Virginia to plead for my family’s evacuation. I threatened to talk to the
Long Beach Independent and the Los Angeles Times newspaper. I wrote letters to
California Senator Alan Cranston, Dr. Henry Kissinger to ask for their
intervention. I also met with Dr. Stephen Horn and his wife, Nina who also
wrote letters to Senator Alan Cranston to support my plea. Dean Willard Reeds of the University Civil
Engineering department loaned me the keys and allowed me to use his office
telephone to call Vietnam. This was the rare time that I earned C’s in classes,
due to time spent waiting for the Agency calls, calling, pleading, threatening
the Agency, and calling my father at night in Vietnam. These activities took
most of my day time and energy. I had to return to campus in the middle of the
night to phone my brother-in-law’s office, so they could call my father to the
phone. Imagine a 22-years old foreign student with limited English proficiency
determined to use whatever channels necessary to rescue his family. Some have
said that not 1 in a million could have done this.
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has
forced the social distancing and lock-down restriction on many around the
globe. Here at home, millions faced this disease with disbelief as if their
life has been turned upside down and cast inside a horror science fiction
movie. This brings out some of the best in us and also for many, the worst. Restricted
in their home, feeling more restless each day and realizing the uncomfortable
fact of living with the less-than-optimum others, my siblings grew anxious,
onerous, difficult and eventually hostile to each other via phone calls, texts
or email.
My siblings, who are mostly
over fifty years old, started with perfunctory niceties but gradually descended
into the sanctimonious abyss of discussions, debates, mocking, guilt-tripping,
and then open hostilities and hypocrisy. The tenor became unbearable. I tried
not to get involved in their squabbles or take the bait of their criticism,
even as I was targeted as the unresponsive, the callous and "wealthy"
older brother not offering much help to needy family members. Their worldviews including those of family
relationships, responsibilities, gratitude and money (mortgage, expenses, loans
and debts, …) are naïve and downright ignorant. There were innuendos, pontificates,
half-truths and lies. Speculative events or presumed facts without any proof,
evidence nor documentation which happened more than thirty years ago were
dredged up and wrapped in nonsense and fallacious argument. Inside their
need to find a villain, they called up innocent actions from long ago,
embellished them with speculation and drivel, and wove them into an outlandish and nasty narrative in which they assigned guilt and blame.
My purpose in writing this is
to bring forth the factual records in hope of reducing or better yet end the
speculation of malfeasance. If this makes the other siblings to slow down and
re-examine their own lives and their own moral sanctimony it would be a greater
success I can hope for.
Katie Hafner: Journalist (@NYTimes mostly), Internet historian, book author (#MotherDaughterMe paperback just out ). And daily solutions to #FirstWorldProblems.
A Letter to Sheryl Sandberg. "Dear Sheryl,
My heart aches for you, even more because the same thing happened to me. You will get through it. But you never will get past it. I was so very sorry to hear about your husband’s death. You must be inundated with condolence letters and here I am, adding one more to the pile.
I write from a position of knowing, which makes me unspeakably sad for you. My own husband, Matthew Lyon, died in 2002, while on a business trip. He died suddenly, on a treadmill in the gym of a Seattle hotel. He was 45. Our daughter was eight. Nobody plans for this. We would all go insane if we did. Because we live life as if we have time. Here is what I can tell you: From now until forever — a forever your husband will not get to share with you, which contributes to the pain of this — you will question everything you thought was true about your life. Your trust in everyone’s ability to get from A to B without incident will never be the same.
We all know that nothing is certain, but we know it in a vague, theoretical, I’ll-think-hard-about-that-tomorrow way. You now know it as established fact, and this changes the way you see everything. People will tell you that time will heal. This is true, but only in part. You and I — and the thousands of others who have lost our spouses suddenly — wind up walking through a world washed grey with grief. The fact of his sudden death will nag and tug, and sometimes it will feel stuck in your throat. You might even have trouble swallowing. There’s a medical term for it — globus hystericus, and I had it for weeks after my husband died. I called it my “grief lump.” It will go away.
When you go outside, the world will seem somehow out of joint. How can people still be walking their dogs, standing on street corners laughing with a friend while waiting for the light to change, jogging with their earbuds in, carrying their Starbucks cups? Don’t they know?
There will be self-recriminations. You might think about the last conversation you had with him, and wish you had said something else. You’ll think about the last conversation that your kids had with him. (They will too, over and over.) These are the things over which we have no control.
Yet there are many things over which you do have control. The well-worn advice about waiting a year to make any big changes is the best advice of all.
And here are a few other things. Once you are no longer distracted by the oddly pacifying logistics of death — the funeral, the letters to read and respond to, the countless floral arrangements, and, in your case, the thousands of beautiful memories of your husband shared on Facebook— you will be left to deal with everything that hangs in suspended animation; a modern, intensely personal version of Pompeii. You will have his voice mails on your phone. You will have his computer, containing the poetry of his life. You will have to decide whether to read his personal email (my advice: don’t). You may discover things he never told you. Love him all the more for this.
How the next weeks, months, and years go for you will be colored deeply by the most personal details of your life, your outlook, your resources (wealth, of course, but far more than that — wealth can help with the nuts and bolts but is no help at all for much of this).
Here are some recommendations that, I think, are universally helpful. First, let people take care of you. Have a few people around at all times. Don’t allow yourself to be alone, especially at night.
Everyone will have a lot to say to you. Every once in a while someone will say something strangely insensitive, perhaps even hurtful. Remember that what they are saying is about them, not your husband, and definitely not you. And, for the most part, they are trying to help. Just as you didn’t prepare for this moment, neither did they. Be forgiving.
Matthew Lyon, with daughter Zoe, 1996
And everyone will want to help. Let them. Delegate. Allow your friends and family to deal with his death certificate, his frequent flyer account, his cell phone. But don’t delegate your children. Keep them close to you as much as you can. Because in the way children have of squaring themselves with the world, they figure if they could lose him so suddenly, then you too are up for grabs.
In a few weeks after everyone who has flown in from all parts has left, it will get worse. Because you will find yourself sitting with just yourself. You might think you’re fine, that you can go back to work. You are clearly a remarkably self-sufficient person, and your fame has come, partly, from helping women find their inner confidence. But then something will happen — you might receive a bill from the hospital that tried to save him addressed to him — and you will fall to pieces all over again.
When you drop your children off places, as they are getting out of the car they might say to you, “Promise you won’t die.” With this, they’ll mean, “Don’t die today.” And you won’t be able to make that promise. Tell them you will do your very best not to die today, or tomorrow, or any time soon. And hug them close.
Know that a child’s grief is ineffable, complicated, and unpredictable. Adults do predictable things: we cry, we experience an unfillable hole in our hearts yet we are able to articulate that; we feel and express our pain, our anger, our guilt. We feel and carry through on a need to tell people how it happened, and with each re-enactment we are working our way through to the other side. If we are in a fog, we are conscious of our fog. Then we emerge and carry on. We get up in the morning, take a shower, drink coffee, get dressed, put on makeup. Yet we’re bloodied and bandaged inside.
Our children’s insides roil too, but in a way they cannot comprehend or confront. Go, immediately, and find a grief therapist. My daughter’s therapist saved her life. At least that’s what she and I tell ourselves.
Your children will eventually stop remembering their father in the deep way that you do. Their memories will be airbrushed, in both directions — sometimes adding heroic myth, sometimes colored by anger or confusion. And the memories they do have won’t necessarily jibe with what you remember.
And one day, you will wake up and say to yourself, “My kids are okay.”
My daughter is 21, and she is fine. And I am now happily remarried, to a wonderfully compassionate man (who, in fact, suggested I write this letter to you). Yet when I remember that Zoe’s father won’t be here to see her graduate from college in two weeks, I want to kick a wall. And no, he is not here in spirit.
Here’s the oddest thing: I’m thirteen years into this and still my husband’s visage comes to my mind’s eye unbidden. Even in the broken light in which he appears, I can see that he hasn’t changed a bit.
You have helped millions of women with your advice. I hope mine is helpful to you in this terrible moment. Please know that I am thinking of you every day and for many days yet to come.
"Wow! Should we tell our children to quit school, advise them to take hard drugs, drink at a young age, live in ghetto or on the streets, get in and out of jail, be dirt-poor and subsist on welfare... so that they will somehow and automatically be more honest? This kind of "studies" is junk, anecdotal and lacking of statistical understanding. These sloppy "experiments" with problematic sample size and population, incorrect inference and poor regression analysis imply ludicrously that an indigent person is (always or most probably) more honest than a "Bill Gates"! Correlation does not imply causation: a BMW driver who did not stop for pedestrians could be a teenager jerk and not because he/she is rich!!!"
Jean Bosco WalshI wonder if you saw the monopoly game part of the video? your way jumping in correlation. ... not this study...
Michael Wyn "I watched the entire video. The monopoly game had too many variables (age, gender, population, sample size, location...) to be statistically significant. Several years ago a study claimed an increase of cancer incidents of children living under or nearpower line. Regression analysis identified the flawed methodology: most of the subjects in the study were poor, unhealthy children who also were living near or under power lines. Being poor does not make you virtuous."
Jean Bosco Walsh30 studies on thousands......?? There are many flawed research studies to point to... just not sure it is relevant with this.... Let's play the rigged monopoly game , I bet we would both change given some time in our positions.... human nature....
Michael Wyn "Power line causes cancer. Vaccinations trigger autism. UFO's in Area 51. Flat earth. Fake moon landing. Money brings immorality. Conspiracies...: all have been soundly discredited. Human morality is not formed by how much money we have or have not. It is instilled by our upbringing, our family, friends and peers we have, inner strength to know right from wrong and our continuing daily assessment of our life. Throughout history there have been lots of noble wealthy folks and absolutely horrible poverty-stricken despicable characters."
Jean Bosco Walsh I know there are a lot of rich people who do good
things with their money... got it.(And the video even showed some who made the
pledge..... point of the study is the title..... "Take two
normal....." Have you read the book "Only the super rich can save us"
by Ralph Nader? It's a novel ... so don't start arguing facts with me!.
Michael Wyn I am glad that you agree with me and that you don't
like facts! There are many sensational one-liners and sound bites
which are misleading and wrong. Who and what are two "normal" people?
Are these mathematically average or median? Where do we find them? Are they
randomly picked from (name your favorite town/locale: ghettos, Beverly Hills,
rural or Harvard university, ... )? re. Ralph Nader: Isn't he a bit
anachronistic?
I have been engaging in a short online discussion with several young physicians (friends of Amy) who believe that God can be found through logic and intellectual inquiry. I believe that is not possible. Saying that I don't like/want to eat broccoli is not a matter for
scientific inquiry. Faith is believing and from some other reference frame it can
look quite illogical, unscientific and maddening. The Bible is not a history nor scientific
book. Folks who try to fit it into an engineering/scientific framework do not
understand science nor Faith. There have been attempts to make religion more
"respectable" by cover it under a scientific/intellectual facade. A famous quote:
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
This is not science. It is speculation. There is no evidence of life after death. Quantum physics says nothing about "consciousness moves to another Universe at death"! Please see http://www.skepdic.com/nde.html (and many reputable other sources) in which "....(scientists) attribute the feelings of extreme peacefulness of the NDE to the release of endorphins in response to the extreme stress of the situation. The buzzing or ringing sound is attributed to cerebral anoxia and consequent effects upon the connections between brain cells (op. cit., 64).
Dr. Karl Jansen has reproduced NDEs with ketamine, a short-acting hallucinogenic, dissociative anesthetic.
The anesthesia is the result of the patient being so 'dissociated' and 'removed from their body' that it is possible to carry out surgical procedures. This is wholly different from the 'unconsciousness' produced by conventional anesthetics, although ketamine is also an excellent analgesic (pain killer) by a different route (i.e. not due to dissociation). Ketamine is related to phencyclidine (PCP). Both drugs are arylcyclohexylamines - they are not opioids and are not related to LSD. In contrast to PCP, ketamine is relatively safe, is much shorter acting, is an uncontrolled drug in most countries, and remains in use as an anaesthetic for children in industrialised countries and all ages in the third world as it is cheap and easy to use. Anaesthetists prevent patients from having NDE's ('emergence phenomena') by the co-administration of sedatives which produce 'true' unconsciousness rather than dissociation.*
According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with some god,..."
Michael WynI share your hope and wish that there is life after death. But as far as we know now the prospect does not look too good. I am more a skeptic and would like to see better evidence... before believing...
David RamosMichael interesting stuff. If you haven't already, you should look into DMT / dimethyltryptamine - it takes what you've described with Dr. Jansen to a much more profound level that dwarfs the outer body effects of those ketamine derivatives ... Science does not trump such speculation nor rule out the possibility of life after death - science has no greater weight than speculation when it comes to arguing over these grand questions of life / death. In my humble opinion, science as we know it is much speculation, especially when you're talking all this quantum physics stuff and are trying to understand reality, the universe, etc on that deep, relatively unknown level of research and science. If anything, the effects of the substances / drugs you've described, coupled with the sheer power of the brain, the mind, and how very little we know about it all, leads me to lean towards the supernatural rather than nothingness.
Michael WynHi David: Thanks for your note. Science is based upon careful observations, empirical evidences and rigorous testings, typically across many disciplines by separate, independent and unbiased observers/scientists. The purpose of scientific study is to discover principle, rule(s) to support or contradict a theory. Science does not rely upon speculation. Bertrand Russell's teapot is the analogy to demand burden of proof upon speculation. Carl Sagan paraphrased as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Quantum physics is not speculative: in my work we have to adjust satellite atomic clocks regularly thanks to quantum effects and relativity; laser light demonstrates the quanta property of electromagnetic radiation, tunnel diodes are real.... Science cannot argue the possibility of life after death because proving a negative (example: prove that unicorns do not exist) is not possible nor is a scientific method. Science is "organic" meaning if there is evidence/discovery identifying a certain principle violating current understanding science will change. Anyone who identifies a person returning from real death will probably get an immediate Nobel prize in Medicine.
"I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. Still, illness led me resolutely toward the contemplation of death. That led me to the subject of evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and I became engulfed on my blog in unforeseen discussions about God, the afterlife, religion, theory of evolution, intelligent design, reincarnation, the nature of reality, what came before the big bang, what waits after the end, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death, death.
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s 'Herzog,' I say, 'Look for me in the weather reports.'
One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the moment of passing."
Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.” I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named 'Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.' Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.
Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.
To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot."
