Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  The girls all shared a bedroom, too, but their sleeping arrangements were based on seniority. Number-one-daughter Jenny got a twin bed all to herself while her sisters had to share a bunk bed. Number-two-daughter Yen claimed the convenient bottom bunk, and number-three-daughter Nikki was left with the top.

  My parents had a bedroom all to themselves, but with eight children and only one and a half baths, they had to share the only shower with the rest of us, and that was the worst thing about the house. Getting ready for church every Sunday taught us the meaning of eternity because my sisters barricaded themselves in the bathroom for hours, and it drove the brothers crazy. The boys required less privacy; when it was our turn in the bathroom, we left the door unlocked and rotated in and out as needed. While one of us was in the shower, scrubbing, the next in line was taking off his clothes and trying not to stumble over the brother sitting on the toilet while he yelled to the brother in the shower to leave some hot water for him. I never knew what hot water felt like until I went to college.

  Living in a house was more expensive than living in an apartment, and we had to look for ways to save money. My father loved to find a bargain; he read the Southwest Times Record from masthead to classified ads and clipped every money-saving coupon he could find. His favorite place to shop was the new Walmart because they promised to match anyone’s prices—but they sometimes set a percustomer limit on our most-needed items, such as toilet paper. To circumvent that rule, my father used to take us to Walmart with him and hand each of us a coupon with instructions to check out at different registers. Somehow I doubt that anyone was fooled when eight Asian children all bought toilet paper at exactly the same time.

  My mother had spent her entire life learning how to make ends meet, and those lessons came in handy in Barling. She loved to barter, and she drove a hard bargain. She was different from my father in that respect; my father loved to find a bargain, but he hated to negotiate because it embarrassed him. My mother was never embarrassed to haggle, and she didn’t mind doing it in broken English or just by waving a coupon in someone’s face and pointing—and she usually got what she wanted.

  She planted flower and vegetable gardens, but instead of having nice brick borders, she used random pieces of scrap wood that my brothers and I scavenged around town. Sometimes she would be working in the backyard and would call to us, “I need another piece of wood! Go find one for me!” and off we would go. She used the leftover wood to build things for the house; once she built a box to put the trash bag in so the dogs would not get into it before the garbage man could pick it up. She nailed the box together with rusty nails and covered the top with a piece of screen wire from an old door. It didn’t win any prizes for original design, but it did the job.

  She sewed clothing for us out of old curtains, like Maria in The Sound of Music. She could convert any piece of clothing into something we needed; she used to get hand-me-down bell-bottoms from Uncle Lam in Virginia and magically turn them into straight-cut jeans. Everything got passed down; we have photos of five different brothers wearing the same shirt.

  Eight children required a lot of clothing, and that meant a lot of laundry. We no longer had to go to the Laundromat as we did at Allied Gardens because in Barling we had our very own washer and dryer. My brother Thai and I took turns doing laundry. We each kept track of how many loads we did, and it became a form of exchange for us: “I did three loads of laundry, and you did only two. You owe me a load.” We kept careful accounting, and we were expected to pay our debts. I once went to Virginia with my mother to visit her brother and sisters, and when I returned, Thai told me, “You owe me sixty-five loads of laundry.”

  Eight children required a lot of food, too, and my mother could turn anything into a meal. Squirrels, eels, even the leg of a black bear once—you name it; she could butcher it and cook it. One time we were given an entire deer, and when my brothers and I dragged it up onto the deck for her, she gutted it and skinned it like an experienced hunter. Nikki hated it because the deer reminded her of Bambi, so in an act of brotherly compassion, Bruce and Thai put the deer’s head in the freezer for the next time she opened it.

  Every day my brothers and sisters and I came home from school, dropped off our books, and ran around the neighborhood until dinnertime. Our favorite thing to play with was our bicycle. It was a thing of beauty: a black BMX dirt bike with mushroom grips and bear-claw pedals. We found it on sale at Walmart for $85, which was an unthinkable amount for us, but my father agreed that if my brothers and I would earn $60, he would pay the rest. It took months for us to save up the money, and when we finally brought it home and assembled it, we couldn’t wait to ride it. We lined up and took turns riding once around the block, but we soon got tired of waiting and decided that the four of us could all ride it at the same time. Anh sat on the handlebars, Hon straddled the bar behind him, I took the seat and pedaled, and Thai held on to the seat behind me with his feet on the rear axle posts and the tire spinning between his legs. Space was limited, so we eliminated any unnecessary items like helmets and took off around the neighborhood.

  I was probably in the safest position because I had an actual seat and two five-year-old air bags to protect me—but Thai was precariously balanced on those axle posts. One time we got going fast and went over a bump; Thai’s feet slipped off, and he came down, straddling that spinning tire. There was nothing he could do but hold on while his thighs gripped the tire like human brake pads and brought us to a gradual stop. Thai saved the day, but his thighs paid the price; to this day he still has scars from that event.

  But Thai was always accident-prone, so no one was surprised when we were riding our bike one day and Thai fell off and hurt himself. Grandmother Truong was visiting from Virginia at the time and saw what happened. Even though Thai got up and dusted himself off, my grandmother was afraid that her grandson might have suffered invisible internal injuries. Fortunately for Thai, Grandmother Truong was a practitioner of Chinese folk medicine and knew exactly what to do: she mixed ginseng in an herbal tea and then added a powerful secret ingredient—the urine of the family’s youngest child. In our case that was Hon, who dutifully delivered a dose of secret ingredient, and when Grandmother Truong mixed it into the tea, she made Thai drink it down.

  Thai was instantly cured of his nonexistent ailment, which not only convinced my mother that the remedy worked, but that Hon himself had mystical healing powers. To this day, if my family is in a restaurant and someone begins to choke, my mother will turn to Hon and say, “Go over and see what you can do for him.” It has to be Hon because only Hon has healing powers, and only he can produce the secret ingredient.

  A year after we moved to Barling, my mother received some totally unexpected news: she was pregnant again, despite her “thin blood” that was supposed to make it impossible. And she was not only pregnant; she was pregnant with twins, which seemed like a tender mercy after her tragic miscarriage on the beaches of Malaysia. It would be her second set of twins, and if not for the brutal conditions in Malaysia, it might have been her third.

  My mother knew that adding two more children to our family would really stretch the household budget thin, so after my twin brothers Bao (pronounced Bow) and Toan (pronounced Twon) were born, she decided to earn some extra money by taking a job. She went to work for O.K. Foods, a poultry processing plant in Fort Smith, but she left after three months because they kept the factory so cold that her hands kept going numb.

  Next she tried working as a seamstress in a clothing factory, where she sewed the same things over and over again for just a few cents per finished item. But she began to get so tired that she could barely keep her eyes open at the sewing machine, and she couldn’t understand what was wrong with her.

  She was pregnant again.

  My mother was almost forty-six at the time, and she felt a little embarrassed to be bearing another child at that age, but she considered each child to be a gift from God. My father loved the idea because children were a form
of wealth to him. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that says, “Who has children cannot long remain poor; who has none cannot long remain rich,” and my father believed that. Other Vietnamese men used to tease him about the size of our family; they looked at our tiny house and asked, “How can you all fit in there?” or “How can you even breathe?” But later on those same men admitted to him, “I wish I had as many children as you do.”

  On Halloween in 1988, my mother gave birth to her eleventh and final child, my brother Du—which, believe it or not, is pronounced You. At that point working outside the home was no longer realistic, and she decided it was time to retire from the public workforce to enjoy a leisurely life at home—which meant figuring out how to stretch her husband’s salary to feed, clothe, and care for eleven children ranging in age from twenty-one years down to a newborn.

  “Who has children cannot long remain poor,” the proverb says, but my family managed for quite a while.

  Thirty-Five

  PEER PRESSURES

  BARLING WAS A LOW-INCOME AREA, BUT IT HAPPENED to fall within the school district of an upscale junior high school called Chaffin. Chaffin drew most of its students from the more affluent areas on the south side of Fort Smith; so when I began seventh grade in the fall of 1988, I found myself in a situation I had never experienced before: I was a poor kid surrounded by rich people—at least compared to me.

  By the time I started, Jenny, Bruce, Yen, and Nikki had graduated from Chaffin and moved on to high school; only my brother Thai was still there, in ninth grade. At Chaffin there were very few minorities, which made everyone in my family feel glaringly conspicuous. There were only a handful of blacks, and the only fellow Asians we could find were two Vietnamese sisters and two Laotian brothers who all spoke fluent English, which made it easier for them to relate to the American students than to us.

  What made us feel most conspicuous was our relative poverty. My brothers and sisters and I were part of a program that provided free lunches to students who otherwise could not afford them. Every Monday morning we had to go into the cafeteria kitchen to get a meal card for the week, and each time we received a free lunch, the card was punched for that day. We were grateful for the food, but it was humiliating to have to walk up to the cashier and pull out our little punch cards when everyone else was paying for their lunches with cash. When my older siblings were at Chaffin, my mother was doing laundry one Saturday and she found meal cards in their pockets that had been punched only once or twice that week. My father scolded them for skipping lunch and foolishly passing up free food, but coming from his background, he had no way to understand the shame they felt.

  To the casual observer, we probably stood out most in the way we dressed because in junior high the label on your clothing was enough to determine whether you were in style or not. Our clothing didn’t even have labels; my mother bought most of our clothes at flea markets, and she never passed up a bargain. She once found T-shirts for my brothers that were very reasonably priced due to a minor flaw—the enormous number “2” emblazoned across the chest had been accidentally printed backward. She bought shoes for my sisters that cost four dollars a pair, and the other girls used to giggle and say, “Oh, look at your shoes!” I know how my sisters felt because my classmates were all wearing Nike Airs while I was wearing Winner’s Choice tennis shoes from Walmart.

  My father probably had a coupon.

  My mother always bought our clothing two sizes too large so we could grow into them. Bruce had a pair of jeans like that. Every year as he grew taller, my mother let down the hems another inch, and by the time he wore the jeans out, there were three lines on each leg that told the age of his pants like the rings of a tree. But Bruce was clever, and he knew how to improvise. He had a secondhand shirt with a little penguin on the front, and it was the only shirt with a logo that he had ever owned. When the shirt finally wore out, he just cut the penguin off and had my mother sew it onto a different shirt.

  I wasn’t as creative as Bruce, but I was resourceful. When wealthier kids left unwanted clothing in the locker rooms, the items were put in a lost and found, and if no one claimed them after a certain period of time, anyone was allowed to take them—which I did. I once found a very nice girl’s jacket that I took home for Yen, and she wore it all the way through college and into her career.

  That was my advantage: I had no shame. It wasn’t because I was so confident. I just couldn’t have cared less about clothing, and I couldn’t understand why anyone else would. Clothing was communal in my family. With eight boys it just was not practical for each brother to own his own clothes. When my mother took laundry out of the dryer, she just dumped it all in baskets according to category: all shirts went in one basket, all shorts in another, and all socks in a third. When my brothers and I got dressed each morning, it was first come, first served; we just grabbed a pair of shorts, found a shirt roughly our size, and picked two socks that sometimes even matched. We never fought over clothing, and none of us could ever claim, “That belongs to me!” Style was irrelevant, and the idea of trying to match colors or patterns never crossed our minds. The only thing that mattered to us was that it fit, and “fit” was only approximate. The first one to dress each morning got to be comfortable that day, and the last one to dress learned the virtue of rising early.

  When clothing is handed down from brother to brother, it gets a lot of wear and tear, and my mother patched ours so many times that sometimes it seemed as if the original article of clothing had disintegrated, leaving us wearing a quilt worked of patches. And the patches didn’t always match the clothing. For my mother, the only consideration was durability, and if “durable” happened to come in a different color or pattern, that was what we wore.

  Sometimes my mother allowed me to buy my own clothing. When I was in seventh grade, she once took me to a clothing store that was going out of business, and I picked out some shorts that were extremely affordable. The next morning at the bus stop, one of my friends asked, “Vinh, why are you wearing boxers?” I had to ask him what boxers were; and even after he told me, I didn’t care. They were the most comfortable shorts I had ever worn.

  Chaffin was not only our first exposure to comparative wealth; it was our first experience of real hostility due to our ethnic background. Surprisingly, the greatest animosity didn’t come from the wealthier students at Chaffin—it came from the poorer students who lived around us in Barling. There were kids in our neighborhood that cursed at us, made “slanty eyes,” and told us to go back where we came from. A couple of kids once even chased us with an axe. Sometimes when we answered the phone, a deep voice would say, “Let me come over there and kick your butts with my patriotic boots,” and then hang up. During a Sunday service at our Vietnamese church, someone spray painted Go home gooks on the church van, and there was nothing we could do but wash it off and turn the other cheek.

  Then I began to learn a better way to deal with hostility. Thai and I had to walk about a mile and a half to our bus stop each morning, and the shortest path took us through the middle of a trashy trailer park, where unshaven men in grease-stained undershirts used to sit on their front stoops and glare at us as we walked by. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a very large, angry-looking man staring at us; and just as we were about to pass his trailer, he got up from his lawn chair and opened his mouth to shout something—but before he could get a word out, I turned to him, flashed a big smile, and said, “Hi! How are you doing?”

  He sat down again without ever saying a word.

  I didn’t say hi to be friendly to the man. I said it to prevent him from being unfriendly to me. I was launching a preemptive strike, and I was using a weapon I was just beginning to develop—words. Ever since arriving in America, I had felt powerless and out of control because of my inability to speak English. I got in trouble for saying the wrong thing and never knew the right thing to say to get out of it. Most of the people in Fort Smith and Barling were kind and gracious to my family, but hos
tility could erupt at any moment, and there was no way to predict the time or place. It was like living with a jack-in-the-box; most of the time there was pleasant music, but at any moment the lid could fly open and an ugly clown could pop out. We lived with a constant sense of nervous anticipation, a feeling that something could go wrong at any moment and that we were never quite in control. But I was beginning to understand how to control a situation with words. I was learning that if I said the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, I finally could be in control.

  The hostility we encountered from poor students at Chaffin was blunt and direct, but with the wealthier students it took a subtler form; to them we were invisible. We tried to be as friendly as we could to everyone, but every time we smiled or said hello to people as we passed them in the hallway, they just looked the other way. We were just too different, and at that age everyone was too concerned about being cool to associate with the ragtag refugees. We felt isolated and ignored, and it just wasn’t fair.

  It’s not fair might be the most common thought that ever crosses a refugee’s mind. The political climate in his country forces him to leave the land of his birth; that’s not fair. He doesn’t get to choose the city he will move to or sometimes even the nation; that’s not fair. He can’t get a decent job, regardless of his talents, because he doesn’t have a diploma from a school he could never attend; that’s not fair. He can’t learn the language any faster, he can’t change the color of his skin, and he can’t help it if his nation was formerly at war with yours. None of it is fair, and in the refugee it creates a longing for justice.