Dear Dad

Dear dad,

Your story is a great one, something i’ve told to anyone that asks. Born and raised in the river villages of Vietnam, the war ended when you were 5, the war that left your people crippled, your elderly traumatized, your family hungry. Ong noi, Grandpa, couldn’t see you turn 12 with the tumors blooming in his lungs and a communist country that cared more about raising its fist in case of another attack and less about its own starving people, it’s own dying breed of mothers, its Agent orange colored children. You became the man in the house keeping 6 younger siblings and broken mother from decaying with the rest of the country, daddy you are the true soldier. You kept your father’s strength in your shirt pocket, clutched at it over the pacific ocean, held it close when you talked to mom for the first time, and engraved into your soul the day I was born. In 1st grade i came home one day and told you i wanted to be white. Buddha himself could never have seen the slap coming that stung more than my skin that stills itches my cheek today. In that slap I felt the sugarcane you harvested everyday for income in your calloused hands, I heard the bombs landing in the jungles of Camoa in the crack of your voice telling me to eat my words, i saw the smoke from your dad’s last cigarette in the rage that filled your eyes when you stared me down, furious that i wanted something you could never give me no matter how many oceans you cross. I felt, i heard, i saw Vietnam. I just didn’t understand how disastrously beautiful it was, to come from a country tainted by chemical waste but now blooms underneath with all the most succulent fruit, daddy i asked you if you knew what chink meant and you said it sounded familiar but even when i explained you didn’t see bombs, you saw comfort. You said, to leave everything behind just to carry it with you for the rest of your life it angered people who expected us to bleach our skin and bag their groceries. Throughout the years you have handed me bits and pieces of your strength,  , i will keep it in my shirt pocket and clutch at it when you give me away at my wedding, and let it engrave in my soul the day my children ever dare forget Vietnam.