By the age of 7, my grandfather was a fatherless orphan, abandoned by his mother in a lonely cottage in the province of Sơn Tây, Vietnam, left to be financially (not emotionally) raised by his father’s family.  By the age of 20, he has grown into a handsome, smart, and valiant young man, and he fell in love with a girl named Phi. He intended to marry her.  

However, around that time, Hồ Chí Minh (the man whose face is on the Vietnamese money) and his Việt Minh troops (now known as the ruling Communist party of Vietnam) had made their way into North Vietnam territory.  They were looking for recruits, and who is a better target than a young, tall and handsome man who never knew of love or belonging but who were also fiercely driven by his Confucian upbringing’s ideology and wanted nothing more than to drive the French colonizers out of his homeland?  

And so my grandfather joined the Việt Minh and quickly rose the ranks to become one of their leaders.

Phi's father, however, belonged to the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng), a separate segment that was also trying to overthrow the French.  The VNP were enemies of both the Việt Minh and the French.  Since my grandfather decided to follow the Việt Minh, Phi left him and joined the VNP.

A couple of years later, Phi and her father came back to my grandfather and asked him if old promises were still honored, because she still wanted to marry him.  He declined and explained that he was already married, which was a lie.  My grandmother witnessed the fateful conversation as she was sitting outside of the house because she was selling at the merchants’ market at the time.  At this point my grandfather and grandmother were only courting, and had not intended to marry.

After my grandfather’s rejection, Phi and her father left and went back to VNP territory.  As they crossed the border, they were caught by the French troops and ambushed beyond recognition.

However, my grandmother’s family were also staunch enemies of the Việt Minh, and her father leaned towards the VNP. After all, their house was burned down to the ground when Việt Minh troops raided their village, and my grandfather was one of the leaders of that raid. 

But love and war make logical people do crazy, illogical things. When my grandfather married my grandmother, he had to make a choice between love and principles. I don’t know why he abandoned his principles for my grandmother but not for Phi. And so, in 1954, after killing 6 Việt Minh officers with the help of 3 friends, my grandfather escaped North Vietnam with his wife and my father.  And that was the foundation upon which my existence was built.

I wish I could tell you that their young little family rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after, but we all know that’s not how history played out.  In our culture, we believe in the karmic effects of our actions, and when a foundation was built on the blood of at least 8 people (that I know of), there are prices to pay. And for the next half a century, we paid. Ohhhhh, we PAID!  In some ways, my generation is still paying the remainder of that karmic debt today.

I’ve only skimmed the surface of this monumentally tangled web we’ve weaved, of course, for the full story is simply far too complex and lengthy to be shared on this platform. For the rest of his life, my grandfather slept with a pistol by his side, and I often contemplate if our existence, MY existence, was worth the fallouts that rippled upon our family for decades.

I can’t say whether my grandfather was wrong or right. But I do know this: when I watched my grandfather’s eyes glimmering with pride as he gazed upon his perfectly imperfect bunch at every Christmas, every graduation….I know that if he were given a chance to rewind the clock and relive the exact same scenarios again…he would do absolutely NOTHING differently.