Page 56 of A Banh Mi for Two
“How did… your family do it? Survive through all that?”
She shrugs. “They did everything they could—found any jobs they could get, traded everything for food. By some miracle, they lived and I came into this world. But con, a life in Vi?t Nam was still so hard for many of us.”
“Did you… have to leave Hà Giang?” I ask the question I can already sense the answer to. I try to imagine that feeling, the sadness that would grip me if I were forced to leave Little Saigon and the only home I’d ever known.
“I was just a small child, but we left Hà Giang for Hà N?i, never looking back at the mountains and hills again.”
I reach out to squeeze her hand, the hissing of the fire filling the silence between us. Like my parents, Bà Hai was forced to leave a home she has always known—a place she clearly loved.
A lump forms in my throat. “I’m sorry. Was it better to live in Hà N?i?”
Still staring into the fire, she only nods. “We tried finding work in Hà N?i, waiting tables, or working for someone—anything to feed ourselves. But when the Americans came to Vi?t Nam, rain turned into bombs—which meant death.” Her voice cracks, and she lifts her hand to wipe away a tear.
“So, so many deaths,” she continues. “To the point that none of us could go to school anymore because who knows what would happen during school? What if one day, the bombs came while I was at school and I never saw my family again?”
“But Vi?t Nam won, right?” Something good happened. The country survived.
Bà Hai doesn’t respond. She continues staring at the hearth, still tossing leftover squid into the fire. She turns to me, her eyes glossy. “It’s not black and white. It never is. The war wasn’t just about winning or losing. It was us shouting at the world that we, too, are human.”
“How could it not be about winning or losing, when so much was at stake?”
“Con, if there is one thing about war that I’ve learned, it is that it takes and takes and takes, relentlessly, without mercy. Vietnamese people are the ones that suffered the most—no matter which side of the war they were on. On both sides—in fact, on all sides—the war took everything away from all of us. People left Vi?t Nam, fleeing to wherever they could.”
I suck in a breath. Bà Hai’s comments remind me of Mom. I think of her living with the aftermath of a war, and how different Sài Gòn was from the city I’m visiting now.
Bà Hai speaks again. “We were like puppets, forced to fight among ourselves while the world watched and laughed without a care in the world. Without a care that we were bleeding our own land dry.”
“I wish I had learned about this when I was growing up from my own parents. That they’d told me their stories. I never met my family here in Sài Gòn. I never knew what kind of people they were, and I felt like I missed out on such a big part of my own life.”
Looking into the fire, I see the history of Vi?t Nam the way I learned it as a kid in the States—as something insignificant and small, not worth being included in every high school curriculum. Even movies and media only depict Vi?t Nam as a war-torn place, a country that needed saving. They hardly touch on the atrocities that happened here or the boat people who braved the seas. For all their puppetry, we’re forgotten, our stories untold.
Bà Hai continues. “Hurt and loss take up so much space in our hearts—and they turn into hate. My husband’s father was sent to reeducation camp after the war ended for being on the American side. Two weeks later, my mom and I received news that my brother on the Northern side was never going to return home because he died on the battlefield.”
I say nothing, allowing the trickle of my tears to fall, staining my cheeks as I picture my own family tossed around in this war, facing horrors from all sides. Maybe Dad is right, that I can’t blame Mom for wanting to avoid talking about all the hurt and loss. Maybe Bà Hai is right, that the scars run too deep, that they’re too agonizing to face. Perhaps there isn’t a right and a wrong and a good and a bad and a truth and a lie… There are too many perspectives, too many personal losses and sacrifices and griefs to try to quantify what happened in Vi?t Nam into something simple, something people can learn for five minutes in history classes.
“But despite everything, we’re still all Vietnamese,” she continues. “And do you know what that means?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“When you’re Vietnamese, you have tenacity in your blood. You have the will to survive. So no matter what, we will always be okay, because we’re Vietnamese.”
Chapter Twenty-SevenLAN
“What are you looking at?” I ask Vivi, whose eyes are planted on the skyline in the distance. Behind us are noisy street food stalls, and the smell of bánh b?t chiên makes me salivate.
“Just the city,” she says. Rowdy students bump into our table, apologizing before scurrying away.
My hand glides up and down her back, and I can feel her shivering slightly beneath my fingertips. “What about the city?”
“I keep thinking of Sài Gòn from decades ago—about what you and everyone else has told me about how different life was back then. All this time, I’ve been falling in love with the Sài Gòn that’s in front of us, and I didn’t think about the Sài Gòn that existed before I was born. The Sài Gòn my mom lived in.”
I sigh, understanding Vivi perfectly—the war. Although the war ended more than fifty years ago, and she and I weren’t even born yet, its ghost still haunts us today. I think about Má, about how she lived in the wake of a country recovering from war. Like her, most people living in this city still carry the scars from those days, even the people with us on this very street.
“Do you think… that’s why your mom left?”
She sighs. “I don’t know—and I’m not sure if I’ll find the answer when we visit my family tomorrow. From being here, living here, I’m learning that sometimes, people have reasons to leave the place they’ve always loved.”
Her words squeeze my chest, and the dream of getting outside of Sài Gòn returns. But I also think about Tri?t, about how he left his B?n Tre for this city, and my great-grandma, finding a home in Sài Gòn as an immigrant. “Maybe being in America takes away some of that pain, when you’re so far from home that the pain doesn’t hurt as much anymore.”
