HOMES and ADDRESSES
HOMES
In late 1945 my high school education in Hanoi was often interrupted by school meetings and street demonstrations. To fill the lost time, I bought a copy of L’Anglais Sans Peine (English Made Easy) and started learning English through this French textbook. The first lesson introduced me to such terms as “I and you... to be and to have... tables and chairs... home and work...” and such phrases as “I am at home...You are at work...Our home has tables and chairs...” The h-sound hardly exists in French pronunciation. To indicate the h-sound in “home” the French text used the capital H and explained that this H should be aspirated as in the Latin “Homo sapiens.”
I had a tough time learning even such an easy term as “home.” And that’s why “home” was the first English word that stuck in my mind, indelibly imprinted.
The plural “homes” came into my mind in another roundabout way. In 1951, after I had been at the University of Portland for a year, I started doing crossword puzzles as a way to enrich my vocabulary. For a five-letter word I had the clue “The Great Five,” and I came up with the solution as the initial letters of the five Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior -- Homes of the Braves.
Danielle and I were married on February 1, 1959. I am going to tell you about some of the homes we have lived in since our marriage.
I was then a management executive of Standard-Vacuum Oil Company for Vietnam-Cambodia, and Danielle taught English at Gialong High School in Saigon. Late that year we bought our first house. It was located about two miles north of downtown Saigon and about a mile east of the airport. This 1,500-square-foot, two-story, three-bedroom, brick-and-tile building with a single-car attached garage cost us the equivalent of ten thousand dollars.
We made a 50 percent down payment and the other 50 percent was financed through the Chartered Bank of England. The loan was to be amortized over three years. We had sweet memories of this place with the first words and the first steps of our first four children.
When I was suddenly drafted into military service at age 33, this home attested to Danielle’s self-reliance and resourcefulness. During my ten-month training at the Thuduc Officer Candidate School, she had to solve several problems related to our car, house plumbing, electricity, and domestic help. This home also witnessed our financial and emotional struggles when my military pay was only about one-fifth of my former salary as a business executive. The resilience of our marriage was thoroughly tested during my three years of military service.
When I joined the faculty of the Catholic University of Dalat in 1964 and had to move away from Saigon, we invited my parents and youngest sister to come and stay at this house. That’s where they resided until the death of my parents in the early nineties and the emigration of my sister’s family to the United States in 1992.
The home we moved to in late 1964 was a two-story stone-wood-and-tile chalet, as part of the university housing complex, located in the resort city of Dalat, about two miles away from the university campus. It was built during World War II to house the families of Vichy French army officers, who were relegated by the Japanese authorities to Dalat in the central highlands of Vietnam.
The chalet was hidden in an idyllic setting with tall pine trees, mimosa bushes, rose shrubs, and pansy beds. A creek watered vegetable gardens and meandered about a hundred yards in front of our home.
This was where our son Michael was born one night in September 1965, when a wartime curfew prevented me from driving Danielle to the Dalat municipal hospital. We were lucky. Our friend, Dr. Hoang Khiem, an obstetrician, whose family lived only three houses down the road, came at midnight to help us out. The next morning I went down near the creek with a shovel and buried the afterbirth. This made the home truly Mike’s birthplace, the place where “the placenta was interred and the umbilical cord severed.”
The war was never far away. In 1968 during the Tet Offensive we saw the communist guerrillas, cradling AK-47 rifles in their arms, crawling uphill on the Dalat cemetery.
Danielle had just completed a sewing project and had hung up new drapes, when we had to move to confined housing quarters within the university campus. We stayed on the campus until July 1970, when I was appointed by the university Board of Regents as general administrator of the Dalat University Foundation to manage its income-producing properties in Saigon.
Within six months after moving back to Saigon we were lucky to find a large apartment on the second floor of the Catinat Building, located two blocks away from my office and Danielle’s bookstore. In early 1974 she managed to rent a shop on the ground floor of this building and went into partnership with Eve Andrews, wife of the Asia Foundation’s director in Saigon, to set up an antique and souvenir boutique. It was a thriving business from the start.
Danielle’s renovation and decoration of our apartment was barely completed in April 1975, when Saigon fell into communist hands. We were fortunate to just walk away from everything and to be evacuated across the Pacific Ocean to the United States. In my mind I credit the location of this apartment for our good fortune to be picked up by a U.S. Marine helicopter from the rooftop of the building next to ours.
In June 1975, when processed out of the Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, refugee camp, we moved to a large, 60-year-old house in Hillsboro, Oregon. This small town lies less than twenty miles west of Portland, where both Danielle and I had attended colleges in the fifties.
In June 1978, as an auditor at Far West Federal Savings, I obtained a construction and permanent loan from Far West to have a home built on the lot behind our previous home. We moved into this newly built home about two weeks after Thanksgiving Day that year. This home must have been built on propitious land, for we and our eight children found much happiness in this place. Good land, sweet home.
In their own parlance, Vietnamese sometimes refer to their spouses as “homes.” Thus a man may refer to his wife as “my home” or “Mrs. My Home”; and a woman, to her husband as “my home” or “Mr. My Home.” Since February 1959 Danielle has been my true, my sweet, my permanent home. I will never trade her for any other.
For Danielle, I borrow from the Vietnamese poet Tran te Xuong (1870-1907) the following epigram, which I render into English with some poetic license:
Woman Đànbà
A woman, a wine, and a tea, Một trà, một rượu, một đànbà,
Three trivial things that bother me. Ba cái lăngnhăng nó quấy ta.
Oh, I wish I could quit all three; Ôi, ước chi ta chừa được cả;
The tea perhaps, the wine maybe! Có chăng chừa rượu với chừa trà!
ADDRESSES
Page 16 of the 1995 Webster’s College Dictionary lists nine definitions for the noun “address.” On the next few pages I’m going to address myself to the task of making a distinction among several of these definitions.
Definition 1: the place or the name of the place where a person, organization, or the like is located or may be reached; and definition 2: a direction as to the intended recipient, written on or attached to a piece of mail.
Currently we own one acre of land with three houses identified by addresses as 727, 743, and 757 North First Avenue, Hillsboro, Oregon. The fourth property, still undeveloped and lying behind the address 757, has not yet been assigned a number. For these four properties, we already have 727 and 757 as two good numbers, and I wish the other two numbers could be 737 and 747. For a fee, of course, I could request the Hillsboro Housing and Planning Commission to accede, so that all four properties would bear those distinct numbers associated with Boeing jetliners.
My wife Danielle has recently closed down her real estate brokerage, Oregon Homes and Land. In her dealings with Vietnamese home buyers, she had to tangle with superstitions related to Chinese feng-shui or Vietnamese phong-thuy (wind and water) or geomancy -- divination by geographical features, figures, lines, or numbers. Some Vietnamese or Chinese believe that 9 is a lucky number, and 10 an unlucky one. They would be avid buyers of houses with address numbers as 36, 135, or 1134, which represent number 9 when the digits are added across. They would refrain from buying houses with numbers 37, 235, or 1234. Our daughter Peppy’s house, previously owned by a Chinese family for almost thirty years, bears the address of 252 Corral Avenue, Sunnyvale, California. Lucky for her.
Another definition of address is a label, as an integer or symbol, that designates the location of information stored in computer memory.
I am ill at ease with this definition, a gobbledygook. On page B1 of The Wall Street Journal of Tuesday, April 29, 1997, I read a news headline “Internet Addresses Spark Storm in Cyberspace”: another hocus-pocus that tends to give me a headache. No such headache for our eight children who are scattered from sea to shining sea with different addresses in five states across the American continent. They all have Internet addresses and can communicate instantly with one another through electronic mail, E-mail for short. They are operators of small Web sites. They are Web browsers, whatever that means. When they speak of Cyperspace, I am dismally spaced out, irretrievably lost in outer space, swallowed into a black hole. Whew!
Definition 5: manner of speaking to others; personal bearing in conversation; and definition 6: the use of a name or title in speaking or writing to a person: forms of address.
In early 1953 when I was a foreign student at the University of Portland and president of the Vietnamese Students Association in North America, a mutual friend mentioned my name to Mr. Ngo dinh Diem. Considering me a promising young man, he suggested that I write to Mr. Diem, a promising Vietnamese politician. Diem, then fifty-two years old, was a scion of a mandarin family. A province chief at twenty-eight and Minister of the Interior at thirty-two, he resigned from Bao-Dai’s imperial and impotent court in September 1933 to protest France’s heavy-handed colonial rule. He came to the United States in 1951 to seek support for his theme of Vietnamese nationalism. A Catholic and an inveterate bachelor, he stayed for two years at Maryknoll seminaries in Ossining, New York, and Lakewood, New Jersey.
So I wrote and he replied. Our correspondence consisted of my three letters and his two replies -- all in Vietnamese, of course. My handwritten letters started with Thua Ong (Dear Sir) and the salutation in his replies was Goi loi tham (Greetings or Regards). My English translation, written in parentheses, is at best an approximation of the Vietnamese original, void of its nuances or overtones. In my opinion, Vietnamese forms of address are not readily translatable into any language, including Vietnamese! In different contexts, Ong may mean one of the following: I, Me (uttered imperiously, or haughtily, or grandfatherly, or jocularly, by a male adult), You, Sir, Mister, Grandfather, Granddad, Grandpa (addressed respectfully, or formally, or indifferently, or familiarly, to a male adult), and He, Him, Mister, Old Man, Grandfather (referring respectfully or indifferently to a male adult). Then again, within a family setting, parents and grandparents may call or refer to their newborn boy as Ong. How confusing!
Diem’s salutation in his replies most likely connotes that he either did not know or did not want to call me by any name or pronoun. So he just addressed me by not addressing me at all. In fact, in his two typewritten one-page replies, he also referred to himself by not referring to himself at all. No pronouns, a neutral absence of first and second persons, an unvoiced understanding or misunderstanding of primary and secondary meanings. I still remember vividly his unique signature. The only handwritten calligraphy on the page occupied the space of almost one half of a line: NgodinhDiem. Too bad, I did not save those two letters of his. We did not click, Diem and I.
In his second and last letter Diem suggested that I come to Washington, D. C., to meet and work with a small group of his supporters. By June 1953 when I came to Washington, he had already moved to Bruges, Belgium. I met and spent two months with six supporters of his. Of this group of seven, two who claimed to be closest to Diem formed the inner core, doling out tidbits of Diem’s ideas and instructions to three others who made up the next ring, with another new recruit and me orbiting haphazardly in the outer ring. Quite a sight! In all this time, I never met Diem personally.
Early in August 1953 I left Washington to visit Times Square, the United Nations headquarters, and the Statue of Liberty. Then on to Niagara Falls and Chicago, where we held the annual convention of the Vietnamese Students Association, at which I was re-elected president. I came back to Portland just in time for my senior year.
Following are some historical facts. In January 1954 Ho chi Minh’s communist troops surrounded a large French force at Dienbienphu, which fell on May 7. On June 17, 1954, absentee Chief of State Bao-Dai, who stayed on the French Riviera to wait out the fighting in Vietnam, turned reluctantly and by default to Ngo dinh Diem and appointed him Prime Minister. On July 7, Diem formally assumed his premiership. On July 20, the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam at the Seventeenth Parallel, giving the northern half to Ho chi Minh and the southern half to Bao-Dai and Ngo dinh Diem. During his first year, with American assistance, Diem succeeded in consolidating his power by rallying or defeating other military and politico-religious competing forces. A national referendum dethroned Bao-Dai and the Republic of Vietnam was declared on October 26, 1955, with Ngo dinh Diem as president.
Eight years later President Diem lost American support and was overthrown on November 1, 1963. The next morning he was assassinated along with his brother-advisor Ngo dinh Nhu by his own insurgent generals.
I was there myself that night of November 1, 1963, at the headquarters of the Joint General Staff of the South Vietnam Armed Forces (JGS-SVAF). I was summoned by the plotting triumvirate of Duong van Minh, Tran van Don, and Le van Kim, who called themselves the Revolutionary Military Council, to translate into English their pompous proclamations, misleading news releases, and desultory addresses.
The next morning, on the way to Duong van Minh’s office to interpret his press interview with three American reporters, I saw the bloody bodies of President Diem and his brother Nhu in an armored personnel carrier M-113. They were later buried in unmarked graves within the JGS-SVAF compound.
I believe history will rehabilitate Ngo dinh Diem as a true patriot who died for his conviction. He fought the treacherous communists his own way with his own troops, though advised by Americans. He died with dignity.
Diem’s death was followed exactly three weeks later by the assassination of John Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson inherited the shambles of Vietnam.
The war was Americanized with the pouring in of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, half a million American combatants. A string of Vietnamese generals took orders from a series of American ambassadors. The war was lost in 1975.
Sorry for the digression. I got carried away. I am not sure why Diem and I did not click. Perhaps he felt that I did not address him properly in my letters. Who knows?
Grace is a title used in addressing or mentioning a duke, duchess, or archbishop. Thus in England when a baroness wants to retire or depart from a duke’s manor, she may address the duke this way: “I beg leave to leave you, Your Grace.” In granting permission the duke may reply: “You have leave to leave me, my lady.” How gracious!
Such etiquette reminds me of a French politesse lesson in my fifth grade taught by Christian Brothers. If I was about to wet my pants, I had to address my teacher this way: “Cher Maitre, oserais-je vous demander la permission d’aller au cabinet d’aisance pour faire mon petit besoin?” (Dear Teacher, may I dare to ask for your permission to go to the lavatory to have a small relief?). So genteel! The problem was that, by the time I was able to twist my tongue around such a mouthful, my pants were already wet.
I am glad that we and our children and grandchildren are currently living in an egalitarian society, where we can make such requests or statements as: “May I go now?” or “Go ahead, go” or “Teacher, I need to wash my hands.” Though we believe in the equality of all people, especially in political, economic, or social life, even here we still use a few forms of address as The Honorable and Your Excellency. In Oregon we had Senator Bob Packwood for many years, until the Honorable Bob Packwood had to resign from the Senate in a not so honorable way.
I want to modify the saying, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” to read as a motto, “Cleanliness, Holiness, Godliness.” I pride myself on clean living. So, in addressing me, if you want to, you can call me “Your Cleanliness.” Thank you.
1. Bio-Sketch, Evacuees - February 1997
2. Refugees, Parolees - March 1997 3. Names, Goals - April 1997 4. Homes, Addresses - April 1997 5. Birthdays, Angels - May 1997 6. Tongues, Spirits - May 1997 7. Scoops, Phoenix - September 1997 * Encounter of a kind 8. Charmer, Anthill - September 1997 9. Sand Crabs, Children, Sons-in-law - October 1997 10. Careers, Idealism, Titles - October 1997 11. Calendars, Customs - November 1997 12. Notables, Jobs, Missions - December 1997 |
13. [University of Dalat] Politics, Professors, Group Study… - December 1997
14 - Family, Parents - Sibling, Roots 15. Money, Cars, Drivers 16 - Controls - Grand-Children, Generations - Bananas 17 - Ancestors, Turtledoves - Transients, Ashes, Immortals - Migrants, Nature, Colors 18 - Nuts, Guts, Offices, Stones - November, Talents, Journeys 19. Eulogy to Yvonne |