Back to Vietnam: Father's Past, Girl's Future
RALEIGH, N.C. —He cannot go home, so he buys his youngest child an airline ticket to Vietnam. She cannot remember the village in the highlands or her four grown siblings, so he spreads out the old photographs on the coffee table at home in Raleigh.
Here are your sisters, the women with the same round, pretty face as your mother. Here I am in black-and-white, a young man before the war and the nine years in the Vietnamese communist prison. Here you are in your favorite green-and-white striped sweater, standing outside the Catholic church in the village.
Treh, remember how we went everywhere together?
“I’m big now, and I’m too old to follow my father around,” Treh says.
Hip Ksor laughs, but his eyes stay fixed on the old photograph.
A decade ago, the family left Bon Oi Nu, a village in the Gia Lai province in the Vietnamese highlands, for the United States. They are members of the Dega, or the indigenous tribes of Vietnam also known as the Montagnards, the French word for mountain dwellers. Hip Ksor saved money for years so his youngest daughter, Treh Nay, and her mother could go home for a month this June.
Hip imagines 16-year-old Treh returning from Vietnam proud of her heritage. She will understand his insistence that she stay home and study to get into medical school. She will see what he has sacrificed to take her to the United States, the place he calls “the freedom country.”
Treh imagines 64-year-old Hip turning into a modern father who lets her listen to hip-hop and take late-night walks with her friends. He will understand why she has crushes on boys and would rather study music than medicine. He will forgive her for being more American than Montagnard.
He longs for the past, and she longs for the future. A week before she leaves for Vietnam, they sit together on the couch and look at the old photographs in silence.
This is how their search for each other begins.
My name is Treh
Vietnam is playing in the dirt with her best friend, sitting on her father’s lap and singing to a pearly moon. It is her sisters, who cried when she left, and her brothers, who played with her as if she were one of their kids. It is spicy food, pretty-smelling flowers and a village of people who talk in Jarai, the tribal language she speaks to her parents in Raleigh.
Treh is the last of Hip Ksor’s children, born a few years after he was freed from nearly a decade in prison. Her father was almost 50 and her mother, H’Loa Nay, was 45. She has her mother’s surname just like all Montagnard children. She is the same age as some of Hip’s grandchildren. In Vietnam, people often thought Hip Ksor was her grandfather.
He’s my father, the girl would say proudly. He always has somewhere to go, and I always go with him.
He was a schoolteacher and a talented musician who spoke Jarai, Vietnamese, French and English. She remembers clinging to him when they arrived in Memphis as new immigrants and then moved to North Carolina.
American sponsors from churches or veterans organizations often settle Montagnard families, but Hip wanted to make the decisions for his family. He found the family’s white ranch-style house with the big, tree-filled yard in Southeast Raleigh. He got a job in production at Martin Architectural in Cary and helped his wife, who spoke little English, get a job at a sandwich shop. He signed up the family at nearby St. Joseph’s Catholic Church off Poole Road.
“I am proud of my dad,” Treh says. “He is not like other dads. He was in jail for standing up for his beliefs. He is religious, and he is very smart. He speaks many languages. When I was little, I wanted to follow him everywhere he went. I wanted to be a good daughter.”
She sang with him at outdoor Montagnard picnics in Asheboro and Greensboro, where highlanders gather with American veterans to grill hot dogs and sing Leo Sayer songs together. Hip played his guitar, and they would duet with “Daddy Don’t Go Away,” a song Hip wrote in English for his children when he was in prison.
“We sing this together, and I remind Treh, ’Don’t let me go away, because if I go, you won’t have anything,’” Hip says.
She slept in her parents’ bed when she was a little girl, but she soon moved her yellow pillow stitched with the word “baby” to a cream-colored couch in the living room. She did not have her own room because her family shared the extra space in their home with other Montagnards. She left her teddy bears in a corner of her mother’s dressing table.
The Americans wanted to call her Trisha, but she refused. My name is Treh, she said firmly. They repeated her name without the rolled “r” in Jarai, and it sounded like TRAY.
In fourth grade, she sewed her name in giant letters on a pillow she made in art class.
Hip Ksor’s dream
Vietnam is the green grass and fresh blossoms in the Gia Lai province, which he still calls Pleiku. It is the guitar he played as the stars wept into the night sky. It is the farm and many houses he no longer owns. It is falling in love with a gentle woman, and it is the children and grandchildren he no longer sees.
Vietnam is home.
He cannot go home because he says the Vietnamese government will arrest him. Hip worked as a translator for the U.S. Special Forces during the Vietnam War and as a South Vietnamese government liaison for ethnic minorities before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Hip spent nine years in prison for having worked with the fallen government.
The ethnic tribes of the highlands have wished for autonomy for decades. They obtained pledges of autonomy from the French colonial government and also from the North and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War. But that autonomy never materialized.
The Montagnards rebelled, and the North Vietnamese considered them separatists.
Hip is in exile in North Carolina with more than 5,000 Montagnards, the largest population outside of Vietnam. He writes songs and stories about his culture. One of his favorite songs is called “A Dream.” It imagines a moment when the Vietnamese and Montagnards finally understand each other.
“I look at you, and you look at me. What should it be?” Hip says, reading the lyrics out loud.
Hip wants his daughter to be his voice in the United States. She learned English quickly and soon spoke it like a first language. She promised him she would become a doctor. He believed she could do it. She got good grades. She spoke with conviction and humor, and she made friends easily.
She grew from a lovely child into a beautiful teenager. Boys noticed her now. They called the house looking for her, and she spent too much time talking to them on the telephone. Hip became angry enough to throw the telephone across the room.
She studied less and less, and her grades slipped. She stopped hugging her father. She cooked broccoli and meat for her father’s summer lunches and expected him to let her stay out late in return. She did chores around the house with a sour face. Twice, she stayed out past midnight. Hip wept until she came home, then got angry.
He fears that someone will kidnap or kill her in some dark street. He worries she will become pregnant, like some of the most promising Montagnard girls.
“If someone cause her trouble, who will feed the baby?” he says. “Me? What can you do with your life if you have a baby in ninth or 10th grade?”
She will not become a doctor if she keeps wasting her time on the telephone and partying with her friends. He cannot stomach her failing in a country that offers so many opportunities.
“I sacrificed for you,” he tells her. “I don’t want you cleaning up bathrooms.”
She walks away from him. She goes to her parents’ room, closes the door and calls her friends. Some days, she says, she wants to scream. I cannot be the perfect child you want, she tells her father.
In frustration, she once cut her arm with a knife. She shakes her head today when she looks at the scar, wondering how her own life began to suffocate her.
A special friend
Her father says she has to choose. You must be Montagnard, not American. You must obey your parents and follow our customs. You must keep our culture alive.
“You are my goal and my life,” he says.
“What about my dreams?” she says.
She wants to be a singer. She tells him America is a free country. He tells her she doesn’t know what freedom means.
“Inside, I love him. Outside, I just don’t know what to do,” she says. “He’s all about his feelings. He’s not trying to understand me at all. He’s afraid I might forget my culture, but I feel like we have never in our life had a real conversation.”
She would rather talk to her best friends, Jerri Pitre and DerJuan Green, who are both 15 and African-American.
Her father likes Jerri, who goes to Bible study every Wednesday and gets good grades. He is not so fond of DerJuan, who has no parents around and has gotten in trouble at school. Hip doesn’t like the way DerJuan talks or dresses and believes he is a bad influence on Treh.
Treh and DerJuan met at Ligon Middle School, where she was a cheerleader and he was a star football player. He had dated many girls and looked tough, but Treh befriended him and discovered he had a soft heart.
They talked when she waited for the bus after school. He told her about his dead mother and absent father and how he wanted to go to college and open his own business someday. She told him about her faraway country and the parents she no longer understood. She sang songs to him.
He liked her exuberance, pretty laugh, accented English and dignified innocence. She complained that her father was too strict, but she always talked about Hip Ksor with respect.
DerJuan writes her name in calligraphy and frames the letters with sketches of flowers. He writes love poems for her in his school notebook. He once wrote Hip Ksor a letter asking for permission to date Treh. The boy promised to be good to her, and Hip invited him to the house to talk. Hip was polite to DerJuan, but told him that Treh was too young to date.
“He just wants what’s best for his little girl,” DerJuan says. “I understand what he’s trying to say.”
Treh does not agree, but she respects her father’s wish. The teenagers rarely see each other, but they have stayed close by telephone.
They just finished their freshman years at different schools. She cheered for him at his football games at Sanderson High School, and he came to her choral concerts at Enloe High School.
At her last Enloe concert in mid-May, he was the only person in the audience for her. Her father had to work a 12-hour overnight shift in Cary, and her mother cannot drive. DerJuan sat in the front row and clapped loudly.
After the show, she hugged him.
A fleeting moment
Two weeks before she leaves for Vietnam, Hip Ksor throws his daughter a birthday party in their living room in Southeast Raleigh.
He buys a white cake with extra-thick frosting and cans of orange soda. He orders egg rolls and fried rice from her favorite Chinese restaurant. He invites Montagnards, American sponsors and Jerri. Treh tells DerJuan not to come.
Hip Ksor lights the candles on her cake, picks up his guitar and leads the party in the Happy Birthday song.
“Every year, he gets the exact same cake,” Treh says to Jerri, as she sweeps her finger into the frosting.
Hip asks Treh to sing with him, and she brightens. Surry Roberts, a retired doctor and Special Forces veteran, has offered to pay for professional voice lessons so Treh can audition for the N.C. School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. Hip still dreams of her becoming a doctor, but softens when he sees Treh’s joy for studying music.
He strums the first chords of “Daddy Don’t Go Away.” Treh hums in a maturing voice that sounds soulful and womanly. She and Hip are about to start singing when the telephone rings. It’s a Montagnard who needs help with the U.S. State Department, and Hip cannot turn him away.
Treh is disappointed. She walks outside with Jerri, and soon, the girls are giggling and whispering to each other.
Hip finishes his phone call and walks outside to find Jerri and Treh rocking on the porch swing, talking fast in English. He lights a cigarette and smiles at his daughter before joining his own friends in the kitchen, talking just as fast in Jarai.
Almost there
The day Treh is to leave for Vietnam, she realizes how much she has forgotten.
She tells Jerri and DerJuan that she is going back to her country, but she cannot picture her best friend, who looked at the moon with her. She is not sure she knows enough Jarai to have long conversations with her sisters and brothers. She wonders if the thin teenage girls there will think she is fat.
“I feel like I will be seeing it for the first time,” she says.
She packs her flared pants and silvery heels, the tight dresses that show off her figure and a Mariah Carey CD. She slips a small photograph of DerJuan into her black handbag, which is decorated with the twins of Gemini, her astrological sign. She watches her mother, H’Loa Nay, stitch $20 bills for her children into her jacket.
About 20 Montagnards have come to help them duct-tape giant boxes of gifts and load them into a van. Her father takes out his daughter’s travel itinerary and checks the departure time — 6:30 p.m. He has highlighted the time in yellow and already looked at it several times today. Three days before, he called a number on the itinerary to verify that the flights on both American Airlines and China Airlines had not changed.
Everything is fine, the voice on the telephone assured him in English.
At 3:30 p.m., the family and friends pray together in the living room. A young Montagnard priest gives a 10-minute Catholic blessing in Jarai. Hip Ksor hugs his daughter after the prayer, then quickly pulls away. He is crying.
Treh is smiling when she hands her passport at 5 p.m. to an American Airlines agent at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. He taps her name into his computer and frowns.
Your flight left at 3 o’clock, he says.
She looks at her father in panic. That’s impossible, Hip Ksor says. He shows the agent the highlighted time on the schedule and insists that he checked the time again and again. But there had been a schedule change and the travel agent who arranged the trip with Hip did not tell him.
The American Airlines agent says he can’t do anything. He tells them to go home and calls for the next person in line.
They drag their luggage to the curb. Crestfallen, Treh rests her head on a suitcase.
Longing for Vietnam
Hip feels powerless. He never felt this way in Vietnam, where he could do business on his own without anyone’s help. He doesn’t understand what happened, and he doesn’t know how he can fix it.
He drinks two Coca-Colas and stays awake all night. He worries about his son, who has traveled from the highlands to pick up the family in Saigon. His son doesn’t have a cell phone, and Hip doesn’t know how to reach him.
Treh also stays awake, lying on the cream-colored couch in the living room that she uses for her bed. She wonders what she will tell her friends when they see her hanging around in Raleigh this month.
In the dark, they both long for Vietnam.
The next morning, Hip drives to the travel agency with two American sponsors and the mother of 16-year-old H’Tam Nay, a cousin who was supposed to fly to Saigon with Treh and her mother. They spend the day with the travel agent, Lisa Huang, looking for flights. Everything is booked through June.
The next afternoon, Huang finds three last-minute spots that day for the travelers. The family leaves immediately and just makes the evening flight.
“I can’t believe it!” Treh says at the ticket counter.
A few days later, she calls her father. Everything looks new and strange, but she is having fun, she tells him.
Hip is relieved. “She is so innocent,” he says.
He is in the kitchen that morning, smoking a cigarette and drinking a Coke. He flips through a binder that holds his poems and stories.
He takes out a novel he has just begun. It's called “The Rabbit and the Poor Family,”, and he's writing it in English. It's a story about a banished family searching for redemption in a homeland.
“I want very, very, very much to go home,” he says.
Before Treh left this summer, she said she wanted to bring back a piece of Vietnam for him. She has packed her camera and a notebook to record a country she cannot remember and he cannot forget.
When she comes back, she plans to spread out the new photographs on the coffee table in Southeast Raleigh and tell him what she has learned.
Here are the green hills and the exotic flowers, she will say to Hip. Here is the spicy food we ate at the village. Here I am with your sons and daughters — my brothers and sisters — and here are your grandchildren.
And here are the pearly moon and the weeping stars.
She has not forgotten how he lifted her into the sky to reach them.
