bánh mì, grand-père & the multiverse
Bánh mì is a Vietnamese term for wheat bread, as well as the sandwich derived from them. As a sandwich, in its most popular form, it uses a loaf of baguette, chicken liver pâté spread, deli meats (especially chả lụa ham, char siu BBQ pork, and/or grilled pork), topped with julienned pickled daikon and carrot, a sprig of cilantro for aromatics, and a few slices of fresh jalapeño peppers.
There is a similar food, bò né, which is essentially Vietnamese steak & eggs, often served with pâté, sometimes grilled onions, and with a side of baguette. I jokingly call it deconstructed bánh mì, a sandwich that you eat off the plate. The day before my grandfather's funeral, I took my father out to eat some "deconstructed bánh mì".
"Did grandpa ever had to go to reeducation camp like you did Dad?"
I wasn't very close to my grandfather. I met him enough times to count on two hands, perhaps. And even during those times, it was difficult to communicate with him because of my limited Vietnamese language proficiency. Or maybe I was just very shy and didn't know what to say to him. It turns out he was more fluent in English than I gave him credit for. It was not until I was already in college that I first learned he was a poet, about anything interesting about him.
Dad said no; ông nội had already left the Republic of Vietnam's War Psychology Department, having served in the early 1960s for three years, about a decade before the end of the war between North and South Vietnam. He served as a battlefield journalist (aka war correspondent), reporting events from the front lines. I was curious whether grandpa—having served for an institution connected to the South Vietnam government that opposed the victorious communist political class—would have been incarcerated into reeducation camps following the end of the war. They were prisons with the purpose of de-radicalizing any possible insurgent elements loyal to the former South Vietnam. My father spent 3 years in one as a low rank-and-file soldier; and that was considered short and for good behavior. I asked that question wondering if grandpa had to endure that kind of hardship, on top of the fact that postwar Vietnam had to face difficulty in reconstruction while getting embargoed by America and by China due to Cold War politics. And although grandpa wasn't detained into one, I can only imagine what he felt knowing he had friends and relatives (my dad among them) who disappeared from his life for years.
Bò né as deconstructed bánh mì is a somewhat silly (and delicious) way of describing how I have this tendency to take things apart, appreciate the pieces, and then recombining them again. And so over the few years that I had a chance to try to understand grandpa, I placed his life in front of me, deconstructed it, and examined the moments of his life. There are many details to everyone's life, his included. But what I think stood out to me, as soon as I examined his life, was this inexplicable parallels to my own life.
Born Ngô Đa Thiện in 1923 in Quảng Trị, Việt-Nam, then part of the Indochinese Union as a French colony, he was the son of a Chinese immigrant from the nearby island of Hainan who married into a local Vietnamese family. Dad told me how grandpa was kind of the black sheep among his siblings. He grew up taking an interest in literature, especially foreign literature, while his siblings made their living through trade and business. In his youth he would participate in poetry recitals. By 1943, during the time of Imperial Japanese occupation, he would earn his Diplôme d'Étude Primaire Supérieurs Franco-Indigène as proof of his French fluency, and continued to learn English himself. Shortly thereafter, he would move to Saigon, work for a French commercial company as an accountant, marry my paternal grandmother, and have their first child in the late 1940s. My father would become their third child in 1949, whereupon my grandfather would move back to Quảng Trị to open up a portrait photography studio and operate it for ten years while becoming a father to more children (my aunts and uncles). By the end of his life, he would have 13 children; 11 with his wife, and adopting another 2. In 1960, he moved back to Saigon and served for three years as a war correspondent. In 1966, he would go work for an American financial company for three years. When my father sponsored the entire family over to the United States through the Orderly Departure Program, my grandfather would continue to hone his translation skills by taking courses in Japanese at a local community college, as well as helping translate news articles and poems among Vietnamese, English, French, and Chinese.
If I could speak to grandpa, I would tell him—despite not having grown up around him all that much—I grew up reading the English dictionary, and in my middle school years, started composing poetry. I learned French and Spanish in high school. Parlez-vous français pépère? I entered university UCLA and, rather than focusing on my computer science major—selected as the sensible thing to choose given many of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side had a career in the technology industry—I instead developed my photography and graphic design sensibilities. I dropped out of UCLA's computer science program, trying to pursue and survive on a graphic design career. Thinking that I had to try to get back into a "real career", I tried to pursue accounting. I could not get past the second quarter in it. And yet within the past 3 years, I would join my best friend Duy to help him create a financial technology company. And now I am married to my beloved Thuy. (As she was reading this paragraph noting the parallels between my and my grandfather's lives, she insisted on not having 13 children.)
Even my father has a creative streak: a singer-songwriter, musician, and three degrees in Buddhist philosophy, Vietnamese literature, and radio telecommunications.
And so there is a part of me that is in awe and wonder of the parallels of creative men of three generations. It is a mysterious coincidence, that perhaps there is some kind of underlying order in the universe that gives rise to this kind of repetition. My dad would say it is karma or that it runs in the blood. I don't know about karma. However I concede that there are still things about the universe human beings only have the faintest glimpses of understanding. Maybe our souls are mathematically divine states of quantum wave functions, vibrating like music along cosmic strings.
But the idea of human behavior running in the blood, or rather our DNA, has some merit. Consider that when kittens are born and begin to grow up, they instinctively know to use a litter box. There is plenty we do not know about human epigenetics, little "programs" within our DNA that facilitate certain behaviors. And then I had a rather interesting thought about my relationship to my grandfather and to my extended family on my father's side of 12 aunts/uncles and ~30 first cousins. Me and every single one of my first cousins have about 25% of each of our DNA shared with our grandfather. Each of us is literally 25% Ngô Đa Thiện. I felt like each us are an alternate reality of his DNA. I, Ngô Thiên Bảo, am the manifestation of his genetics living as a male Vietnamese American doing software engineering. My cousin Catherine Ngo is the manifestation of his genetics living as a female Vietnamese American learning animation. Christie Ngo is the expression of his genetics living as a female Vietnamese American studying statistics/informatics. And Richard Ngo is the manifestation of his DNA as a Vietnamese American aspiring to be a computer scientist.
There are times when I dream of alternate realities and alter egos, like a role-playing video game where you assume the life of another person. And yet, my family are the very physical, real, manifestations of my own genes played out in different lives in different ways. And when you deconstruct their lives, and then "replay" their lives to understand where each one is coming from, you not only build empathy, but start to become aware of your own possibilities. Family is the manifestation of your own personal multiverse. (I am aware of the multiverse connection to the recently debuted film Everything Everywhere All at Once.) Like it or not, they are what you are if you were born as another person. If that is not reason enough to state why family is important, then I don't know what is.
And so after understanding glimpses of grandpa's life, what is my possibility? What I see from his life, is a life filled with love and compassion (I mean... with 13 children and his wife, my grandmother, that is impossible to refute). I see a life filled with awe and wonder of the deep mysteries and patterns of the universe. I see a life of creativity, and the courage to take the road less traveled (one of the poems he translated in his book was "The road not taken" by Robert Frost). And it fills me with warmth and hope that that legacy that my grandfather has bestowed upon our family will carry on into my as-yet-born child who will draw breath this autumn.
Rest in peace grandpa. You're not only with me in spirit. You are me.
Ngô Đa Thiện (1923 Quảng Trị, Việt-Nam–2022 San Jose, California)
