A little about my roots

A little about my roots.

The year I was born, by family lore and my own imagination, was a year of hardship in every corner of Vietnam. 1984. My father was 32, my mother 27, my older sister 8, my older brother 5. Poverty is suffering. My father told me that he and my mother hadn't planned the third child. They decided to take pills so they wouldn't suffer more; they tried several times. Maybe more than ten — I exaggerate. And then one day he dreamed he took a stroll in heaven and met some immortals, who asked: is there a little kid who keeps following you around? My father didn't even know whose child it was, so he couldn't answer them. The immortals told him: he's your child, whose else would he be? So the next morning my father told my mother: this one is a blessing from heaven — let's take him as our own.

So they called me Hữu Lộc — "blessed." Thank you, immortals.

When I was born, I didn't know what suffering was — I wasn't old enough. My circumstances were just like the circumstances of any kid born into the world, with the same thought: the house you're born into is yours, and that's all there is. Poor or hard only show up when you compare yourself to the house next door. My house had no house next door. Not even a wall-to-wall next door — nothing. Three sides of my house were "đường mương" (ditch paths — the channel through a canal, so in Miền Tây people just call them ditch paths, usually meaning the place where water drains out to the river; where I lived it was the place where water got dumped), a garbage dump, and a stagnant pond. The lot was a peninsula, very nearly an island, and the only thing keeping it from being one was a one-meter-wide dirt path out front that cut through yet another pond so people could cross. My grandmother had asked to borrow this peninsula from my great-aunt and built a temporary leaf hut on it for my mother to live in. By the time I showed up, the house was cool in the dry season and didn't leak too badly in the rainy season, but nights were freezing because the walls on all four sides were barely walls at all. When my little sister and I played hide-and-seek, hiding in the bamboo thicket was harder than hiding inside the house. There were some metal panels fastened to the walls and I spent my whole preschool years wondering what on earth they had been used for before they ended up on our walls. Long research finally revealed that my father worked as an iron smith, and when he replaced rolling gates for customers, he'd bring the old panels home and nail them up on the walls for shelter. I'll tell you the truth — lucky electricity wasn't common back then, because at night any woman passing by who looked through those walls while I was changing clothes would've seen everything.

The remaining wall at the front of the house, I still can't figure out why it was made of lattice weaving. I'd nap here and every passing adult would ask, "napping, Lục?" — how was I supposed to sleep? And what were the other walls covering anyway? Nobody was going to be standing over the pond. That's why my whole childhood I spent thinking about "somebody" over and over, and I ended up more afraid of ghosts than of "somebody."

The clearest sign of our life improving was the process by which the house slowly offered fewer and fewer options for people on the street to greet me while I slept, and the shrinking number of bowls, basins, and plates we had to deploy to catch the rain in the middle of the night. The gradual warming of each night's sleep.

None of this made me feel my family was poor. I only felt we were poor when I went to play at the neighbors' — a Northern family — to watch TV, and they scolded me for sitting on a chair and made me sit on the ground. And I mean the ground ground, not the kind where your backside is on a tiled ground. Or when I played with their kids' toys, they worried I'd steal them to take home as my own. In the end I just went down to the river and dug in the mud and made up my own games — a million times more fun.

When my family climbed out of poverty and we got a TV, every night at 5:30 I'd tidy up the table and chairs and set out cups of water, ready for the neighborhood kids to come over and watch the children's program "Những Bông Hoa Nhỏ" (Little Flowers). I'd cycle from channel to channel like a properly scheduled TV host, even hunting down the Trà Vinh channel for the cartoons broadcast in Khmer, right up until 7 PM when every station switched to the news — and only then would I stop.

I lived next to selfish people, and so I want to give away everything I can give.

I lived in scarcity, and so I found ways to play as hard as possible. Now that I'm grown and have more, I still want to play as hard as possible.

I operate without holding money back, because I come from a family that had nothing. If I end up with nothing again, it won't faze me. But I'll do everything to keep from going back to being poor.

Forty years of living, and I've been sad more than I've been happy. I want to be happy more than I'm sad.

I'm happy when I give it my all.
I'm happy when I play as hard as I can.
I'm happy when I don't hold anything back for myself.