The Shapes of Silence

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Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen | Longreads | June 11, 2024 | (5,230 words)

Dad,

With our distance, what I miss most is our car rides. You listen to Little Saigon Radio on AM and I prefer to bypass radio frequency with my Spotify playlists. Together, we settle on so-called “easy listening.” You still use a physical map in the rare instance you go somewhere new. I use Google Maps for the most familiar of places. Our final destinations are usually different.

I learned the most about you sitting in the passenger seat. The most memorable conversations with you have been on Beltway 8 en route to the Houston airport before I fly away again. I still haven’t figured out why these drives have literally been the vehicle of our relationship—perhaps it’s the desire to mask the terrible soft rock station, or the monotonous freeway scenery, or your need to be candid since months will pass before we see each other again.

This trend started when I was 18, a few hours before I traveled to Washington, DC, for my first day of college. Our conversation began in your car and continued into terminal A of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport. We sat on a bench a few feet from security. Like always, we were too early.

On the Vietnamese zodiac, you are a water buffalo, typically steady in your movement and words. Like an egret, I relied on you for protection and nourishment. On this day, you were out of temperament. You had talked about your childhood in the car and, now at the airport, you had become an adult. You said, “Did you know that your grandfather died in a reeducation camp?”

By then, I had to go through security. It was time for me to take flight. It was perfectly timed or ill-timed, I’m still not sure. All I know is that I’ve thought and written about that conversation for years. I became obsessed with arranging the historical details of our lives.

In the decade after college, I still needed to be driven to the airport. One early Saturday morning, my final destination was San Francisco—the city I considered home, albeit second only to Houston. I had spent the past 10 years piecing together my family history and you were much more open to all my questions about your life—the escape from Vietnam, the lonely arrival in the United States, and the constant, lingering struggle of life as a Vietnamese man with US citizenship.

“Can I ask you something?” you said, interrupting the synth melody emanating from the “work-friendly” radio.

I was anticipating another significant life event to add to the patchworked narrative in my mind so I said, eagerly, “Sure, Dad.”

“What do you think of me dating again?”

I was baffled. No one coaches you on how to react when your father casually informs you that a family member died for political reasons in a reeducation camp. Similarly, no one tells you how to approach a dating conversation with your aging father. You finally needed me as much as I had needed you.

More confounding: this was the first time we didn’t talk about your past or my next steps. It was about your future.

I wish I had come out to you in the car. Instead, I started that journey alone on a December morning during a visit home. Born on December 25th, you have shared your birthday with what was formerly your wedding anniversary and what is always Christmas day. We often bought a single cake that forced a decorator to write a triple message in buttercream. Now the holidays also commemorate your lesbian daughter coming out.

Dad, it was strange to “come out.” I imagine it was like what you told me at the airport about my grandfather and on all the car rides across Houston. We never learned how to talk, so we kept things inside until we couldn’t.

In San Francisco, I volunteered at an organization where young people lined their office walls with colorful artwork depicting stories and slogans of coming out and being proud. I wasn’t like those kids. I hadn’t said anything to you yet.

I imagined my own artwork. I would draw a picture depicting my Vietnamese parents embracing me. I conjured the full conversations I could finally have with you because I thought my sexuality was the biggest barrier in our relationship. I thought of all the doctor’s visits and therapy sessions where I relayed vague symptoms of anxiety, fatigue, and stomachaches—the signs of being closeted, apparently cured with a serum called coming out. The narrative was too good for mere daydreaming.

I decided what I would do the night before. At daybreak, I positioned myself on the cream-colored polyester couch facing your bedroom door. Do you remember where that was, Dad? I know it has been years since the divorce and since you had to leave that house.

I was still a twentysomething who went to bed late and woke up later. You were a veteran of the South Vietnamese Air Force and maintained a rigid morning routine despite being decades removed from the war and nearly 10,000 miles away from Saigon. With a circadian rhythm more like a sloth than a soldier, I forced myself to wake up before you. As always, I was up, yet so tired.

I remember jolting at the familiar sound of your sticky door. The doors of our rooms expanded and contracted with Houston heat and artificial cold, never fitting perfectly in their frames.

“Jenny?” you said, inflecting my name in confusion. “Why are you up so early?”

“I have something to tell you I’m gay,” I heard myself say. The words fumbled out of my mouth without pause, as if stopping would halt my momentum and propel me back into the closet. Is that how you felt when you told me about my grandfather?

I vaguely recall your reply. It was either an “okay” or a misplaced pleasantry like “thank you” or “I understand.” Although I don’t recall the words, I remember what I didn’t feel: catharsis, relief, or the heaviness that was supposed to lift from my body. All I felt was cold. As I withdrew into my head, you disappeared into your morning walk.

Here is what you did not see:

I paced as the sun rose, awaiting your return, wondering, “What’s supposed to happen after I say it?”

Pauline’s door opened shortly after you left. She was being a dutiful daughter too, home for the holidays. With a drowsy shuffle and a satin sleeping mask on her forehead, she saw the scene: me—alone, confused, upset.

When you returned, I was relieved you decided to come back. I wasn’t used to either one of us returning so soon after an announcement. That relief turned to regret when you began to cry into Pauline’s shoulders.

“What’s going on?” I heard Pauline say.

“What did I do wrong?” you said softly.

I also wondered what I did wrong.

Years later, I now know what went wrong. It wasn’t you or me.

I should have known that before any other identity, I am Vietnamese American first. Before I knew I was gay, I knew I was your con gái—your youngest daughter. Before I was Jennifer, I was “Jenny” because Vietnamese elders flattened the “er” sound from its harsh pronunciation.

I was Vietnamese American in the way I approached the world, always feeling like the underdog fighting someone better. It’s in the arrogant guerilla-like confidence of knowing I have a chance to win despite the odds. It’s in my inclination to add fish sauce to a dish to add depth, how I prefer my beer watered down, enjoyed on a hot day. It’s in my preference for taking my coffee dark roasted, iced, and blunted by dollops of condensed milk.

Most of all, it’s in my way of talking or lack thereof. It’s always with contradictory deference to and skepticism for those who say too much. You always taught me to trust actions, never words. After all, in Vietnam people talked a lot, especially the Americans.

What was more important than talking was our ability to hold secrets. From you, I learned the many shapes of silence—how it can be used violently or as a powerful form of restraint. Rarer was silence as the embodiment of peace, where two people can sit together without words, but in mutual understanding.

Most of the time, we used silence to protect ourselves. You could tell no one of your escape from Saigon before it fell. Otherwise, someone—you, my grandmother, your father—would have died. Like you, Mom survived because she boarded a fishing boat leaving the country having told few people. Unlike those who lived, I imagine that your father died because someone extracted his secrets. Maybe he admitted that he worked for the South Vietnamese government, that he was a high-ranking civil servant, that he wasn’t a communist. He suffered the same ending as those who were open about who they were: he died far away from his family at the hands of the so-called enemy. Years later, no one has told you what actually happened.

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I also had secrets that felt scary to say out loud. The fear of death was not the reason I couldn’t tell you about my sexuality, though at times it felt like the end of the world. I didn’t want to add shame to your difficult life, so instead I tended it myself.

In your years working and living in America, you had to learn English beyond asking for food, water, and shelter—to not just speak English, but to talk in English. Like silence, there are contours to talking. There’s transactional exchanges and intimate conversations filled with emotional depth. You were fixated on talking as deception.

“Talk is cheap,” you often say. It’s your favorite American saying. Similarly, mine is, “Say what you mean, mean what you say.” From you, I developed an aggressive bullshit meter. I learned to listen with one ear and watch with both eyes. You distrusted Americans, but also Vietnamese people of unknown origins, politicians, coworkers, and sometimes your own family.

Dad, talking with you was not just cheap, but also rare. There was safety in keeping secrets, but you were also Vietnamese with limited English and tired from American life. I was too American with deficient Vietnamese and disinterested in our cultural history.

We were both displaced from each other. The divide meant I couldn’t tell you much—like my favorite bands, my day at school, the girl I liked. Instead, dinners were always wordless and so were most of the car rides. This is where silence was disquieting.

Looking back, we never had conversations, just announcements with no expectation of response.

“We’re going to the store right now.”

“I’m going away for college.”

“Your grandfather died in a reeducation camp.”

“I’m gay.”

Dad, you have trained me to be disappointed by talking and its lack of resolve. It worked. I had “come out” many times before I did so with you, all to less than satisfying results. I was so focused on just saying the words that I was never prepared for the responses.

I remember the first time I said “I’m gay” to Pauline. I rehearsed as I had seen on shows like Ellen. We were at a Brooklyn bar in autumn. I was in college, but still underage, so she bought me one of my first beers. I remember the bitter taste and my nervous tick in drinking liquids to quench anxiety. Once I finished, I began to scratch off the blue label, blending the paper with the bottle’s icy residue until a cobalt paste formed at my fingertips. By the time I had finally said “I’m gay,” the bottle had been completely stripped of its label. It was naked and transparent.

As it turns out, Pauline could have been gay too or at least a typical student at NYU because she gave me literal packets of “So You Think You’re Gay” information. Don’t worry, Dad. Your other daughter is, in fact, very heterosexual and a good ally. She didn’t seem phased except when she said this:

“You know, things are going to change with our family.”

Of course, we didn’t really talk about what this meant.

Then there was coming out in college, first to two of my closest floormates. They said something to the effect of “cool” and the conversation continued about something that wasn’t gay like chemistry class and dorm food. My statement was more of a comma than an exclamation in our dialogue.

The most disappointing experience was coming out to my first crush. I had imagined a situation where one of two extremes would transpire. She would either express her love for me as well or she would throw her lunch at me, telling me I was a disgusting fag. I had internet-stalked her enough to know she had used that word once.

Neither transpired. We had lunch in Houston during one of our college breaks. I was eating a sandwich when I told her.

“Thanks for letting me know,” she said as if I informed her that I would be running late.

“And you were my first crush,” I added to provoke something—anything—beyond the tepidness of the moment.

“I’m honored,” she replied, grinning through a bite.

I continued eating my sandwich. I drove home in a “why did I hold this in so long, what good did that do” silence.

Dad, in all of these instances, I was working up to you.

We were both taught that secrets would hide and protect us from pain, but perhaps we had less choice in the matter. There’s a difference between being silenced and being silent.

Vietnamese history is a long list of people trying to silence us, of our ancestors remaining quiet for survival. First, it was the thousand years of Chinese rule when we were merely a tributary state, meant to be a vassal for someone else’s trade and culture. Then there were the Catholic missionaries with their colonial conquests. They romanized our language so that we had to relearn how to read, write, and speak with each other. Then came the Japanese, who were cruel and led with disquieting fear and famine. When the French came and went, as most colonizers do, we stopped talking and began to fight each other for power. It was the North, the South, the mirage of the 17th parallel dividing a country along fictitious lines. Most famously, it was the Americans who decided to wage a proxy war with their ammunition and anti-communist messages. Like most hawkish powers, they left and so did their promises.

You and mom were supposedly the lucky ones. You became refugees. You left Vietnam and had two daughters in America where the silencing was passed to the next generation. In this part of our history, I now fight something that obstructs my ability to talk to you and be fully Vietnamese: American assimilation.

Dad, it was probably too hard to talk to me about the violence you witnessed, just as it was too shameful to tell you about my sexuality. To have a conversation requires an engagement or an exchange—something we could not do since we were in constant translation. To you, I was an American girl in a Vietnamese family living a life that you could not recognize. We spoke in updates, never in dialogue about relationships, sex, life in Texas, or your life in Vietnam.

In college, one of my goals was to learn how to talk. More specifically, I was practicing one of the most American traditions—talking about myself. For a long time, all I had were the words and narratives of others. In college, I was thrust into a world of queer activism. People were always late, used big words, and spoke academically. It didn’t sound like home. Instead, it confused me and made me feel stupid. My peers were encouraging me to watch coming-of-age movies and shows, which was a reel of early aughts life looped with raucous parties. It was the Pittsburgh warehouse parties of Queer as Folk and the gabby Sunday brunches of The L Word. Always a quiet person, I struggled to be heard and seen in these depictions. I listened to the coming out stories of others—the relief and acceptance that many of them felt almost immediately. I wanted to be afforded the same pride. I should have known that my narrative would be different.

In our household, you and Mom did not need to put on a performance. We never said the ultimate exchange of words: “I love you.” To be honest, I didn’t care. Like you said, “talk is cheap.” Words could be misunderstood, powerful, malleable, liberating, meaningless. Your actions said all I needed to hear.

From you and Mom, I learned that love was not about exchanging proclamations of feelings for one another, but the ability to live through pain—war, underpaid work, predatory loans, working-class jobs—to protect your family. In lieu of “I love you,” I learned there was always dinner. You and Mom always provided a four-course dinner consisting of rice, a clear broth soup, a meat, and a sautéed vegetable. We were short on money, but never short on food. Rather than verbal discussions, I could always depend on you picking me up from school activities well past midnight or mom appearing on the sidelines of a basketball game after her rotation of work and school. You were always there on time with a weary expression. Now I know how powerful that was because there are people who say “I love you” and never show up.

“I’m gay,” I told you that December morning.

I think about your response a lot. To be honest, there’s never a perfect “coming out” reply. What’s most interesting is the wording of your response.

“What did I do wrong?” you asked out loud.

Not say—do.

Dad, when I married Tracy, I kept my last name. It was partially out of laziness, but mostly because my surname is one of the last things about me that is purely Vietnamese. Everything else from my so-called mother country is broken and bastardized.

Now, I wrestle with whether I will have children. I mull not having a family, but I’m sad that I may never pass down the Vietnamese parts of us to someone else, just as our occupiers had once intended. Am I silencing us once and for all?

Our relationship is complex, woven with feelings of guilt, misunderstanding, and lost history. There’s a tension that naturally develops when two people share a similar personality, but are divided by historical luck, cultural upbringing, and a generation.

Part of my silence was the shame I felt in being able to live out my chosen future when you could not. Whether real or imagined, I used to think of my success coming at your detriment. The more I assimilated, the more it harmed you. Equilibrium in our relationship felt impossible.

A few months after I graduated from college and proudly landed my first job, you lost what would become the last job you would ever work. Our working-class family has always been susceptible to the ups and downs of an oil-dependent economy, but the cycle never came back up for you. Our splintered symbiosis meant you were cast aside despite years of loyal labor, yet I was allowed to ascend.

As I entered my long-term relationship with Tracy, your 30-year marriage was formally dissolving. As a bystander to that marriage, it was a long-due decision. Your union was a strained pairing that evolved from simmering pain to relentless wounds. I remember sitting in a hostel in Paris, simultaneously writing transatlantic postcards to the person I would eventually marry while reading your divorce paperwork transmitted via email. It was an odd feeling to write in cavalier, romantic language and to read, in legalese, all the reasons Mom needed to leave you.

Now, as I try to build a full life with Tracy, you work to minimize your belongings and luxuries to fit into your single life on a slender budget. No amount of phone calls or digital infusions of money can bridge the physical and emotional gulf between our lives. In the United States, you are always giving and I am always taking.

How American, right? Even my thinking has assimilated.

Since that moment I said “I’m gay” that December morning and you sobbed “what did I do wrong,” I can see the many years spent slowly moving toward one another. I had to pivot toward how we communicated best—some listening and a lot more doing. I slowly learned from your example and from Tracy, who introduced me as the Vietnamese girl from Texas, eventually shortened by her Chinese mother to just “the girl.” There was never a formal coming out. I didn’t even have to say anything. Instead, I showed up to dinners, baby showers, birthdays, days of death.

I learned that if you show up, you had better eat or do something. Here was the girl driving Tracy’s mom to the dentist. Here was the girl mediating conflict between our twin nieces. Here was the girl dancing with the 3-year-old nephew. The girl did this, the girl did that, the girl, the girl, the girl. I don’t think anyone remembered what I said.

Similarly, we began flying down to Houston together once every year, then twice a year. This was a strategy. I had Tracy install a Wi-Fi router at your house to help you access the world. She marinated meat for your Christmas-birthday BBQ. She showed up to every winter holiday for eight straight years save for the one year she couldn’t.

“Where is she?” our family asked. I knew then that our strategy had worked. We read books, we held babies, and we danced with toddlers to Bruno Mars. We drove people to the San Francisco International and the Houston Intercontinental airports and back. We brought beer to the parties, we attempted to cook, we ate, and we hosted. If someone needed a piñata, we bought it.

When Hurricane Harvey came along, Tracy was up despite the time difference looking through flood plain maps, calmly telling you and Mom what you could do next—where you should stay or go. For Mom it was leave, for you it was shelter-in-place. It’s no surprise that, just one week after Hurricane Harvey, I proposed to her. You seemed happy for me.

Along the way, the more I appeared fully, the more space there was to practice listening and talking, especially with you.

One July afternoon in Houston, I was home again. It was the usual checkup on your dry-rotted cabinets, your sputtering air conditioner, and that car with hundreds of thousands of miles. Amid the process, you allowed me to ask more questions, like a work-learn exchange. You told me that you left Saigon on April 28th at 10:30 PM. Your squadron leader said to your crew that “it’s over” and you had two choices: go back to your family or escape. You tried to go back home, but you couldn’t make it out of the airport because of all the shooting and killing happening outside. So, you escaped. The EC-47 took off despite a runway full of burnt planes and bodies.

Then it was a fall afternoon and I was glad to be back for another visit, a feeling that I started developing with age. We may have been at a Vietnamese restaurant on Bellaire Boulevard eating yet another plate of mì xào giòn. You let me ask another question as we waited for the greasy pan-fried noodles. You told me what happened after April 28, 1975. You landed in Thailand and stayed on a US Army base for four days. Again, you were given two choices: Guam or Wake Island. You wanted to follow all the refugees to Guam, so you were placed at a refugee camp there waiting to see if your girlfriend, mom, or dad would arrive too. They never came. Instead, you left the camp alone, headed to Pensacola, Florida.

“What happened to your girlfriend,” I asked.

“It’s a bad story. It hurts. It’s a bad story,” you replied.

There I learned to respect the boundaries of silence.

Jumping ahead to early 2020, it was the week before California decided to lock down from COVID-19. I happened to be in Houston. Newly 70, you were a perfect receptacle for the virus. In the morning, you ate one of two items stocked in your freezer—a Jimmy Dean sausage sandwich or a pepperoni Hot Pocket. You prepared for the pandemic with nothing else. I arrived at your house with soap, Emergen-C, and some vitamins. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to do except show you I could be helpful.

You refused the items, but eventually relented with: “I survived the war, I will survive this.” Do you remember this moment? I do because the war was no longer a whole story that I had to mentally prepare for. It was a hyperbole, a transition in a conversation, just one part of a full discussion.

A few years after the worst of the pandemic, we reunited again. Separated for so long with the fear of losing each other, I was more eager to talk and so were you. This time, you didn’t need prompting. You told me that your father died in 1976. He was a good man who never gambled. In fact, a director in the department of agriculture. Your mother could not leave. Instead, she died of cancer years later in Vietnam. That’s life, you said, the cycle of having children and dying.

In the process, I uncovered all the reasons you may have been silent.

“Không thể,” you said once. You can’t say because it’s too hurtful.

“I don’t want to talk too much about my life and blow it up. If you’re a loser, you keep your mouth shut. That’s the Vietnamese way,” you had explained to me.

“I love you, I want you to know. But not too much,” you said a few times before.

In a way, it all made sense. We had to talk about the silence for me to understand it and accept it. I had to show that I would not weaponize your secrets like others had before.

One-minute calls have stretched to five minutes, our conversations an even distribution of how my life was going and how you are doing. You call me after mass shootings like Colorado Springs and beg me not to go out. You spend a lot of time asking me what I am cooking for Tracy and whether it will be good. Cook for me one day, you now consistently joke. I will, I always reply. I like that part of the conversation.

My favorite exchange was on my wedding day. Do you recall that windy fall Sunday in San Francisco? It was your first time visiting me. Before I walked down the aisle, you held my hand. I was wringing yours. Our rare moments of physical touch usually solicit thoughts about the callousness of your machinist hands, the cuts that never seem to heal, and the awkwardness of holding each other. Instead, we were at the doors of the Randall Museum—on the verge of walking outside, down a sidewalk typically leading people into the museum, and onto a grassy knoll. My hand, moist and tense, gave everything away.

“You feel really nervous,” you said to me.

“I’m a little nervous,” I replied.

I felt you lightly squeeze my hand.

“It’ll be alright,” you assured me. That’s all I needed to hear. It quelled the voices in my head. Together, we were in perfect silence.

Then came the cue of our music. I took a small shuffle, then a big step. Together, we began walking.

Dad, we have worked so hard to free ourselves from silence—to give ourselves permission to talk when we choose. I became a writer because I wanted to learn all the ways to twist a narrative for protection and personal provocation. You are now free to move about your days not having to quietly endure a difficult marriage, a job that cut your hands on a regular basis, and the stress of having to raise American children on a working-class wage. For the first time in centuries, Vietnam is no longer under foreign occupation and can wrestle with itself. Dad, I know you and I are luckier than most people.

We also have a lot to work on. We still fight with the same Vietnamese stubbornness that is in our blood. I struggle with knowing far more English than Vietnamese. As you age, I fret about the ultimate silence of losing you. Although this dynamic will never go away, there have been new rhetorical tools to soften our challenges. Phrases like “I’m sorry” and, more recently, “I love you.”

I no longer want to think of our lives as an American zero-sum game. I hope we are creating something else, to allow us to move beyond coming out and toward just being together. That feels much more Vietnamese to me.

Dad, in this lifetime, you lived into your zodiac sign as the steady water buffalo, rooted in Houston, working steadfastly until your body broke. I was the egret, always able to fly away when needed, only coming back when convenient. In a different existence, I imagine a world where our pairing is swapped—where I can be the water buffalo and you can transport yourself as an elegant egret. I want you to fly above the world, through the clouds, to another place where there is life beyond war and peace. Then, upon your return, you can tell me what you saw and I can tell you what I did. We can be together in motion or in stillness, whatever we choose for ourselves.

So, let’s go back to the start of our circuitous journey, where we can begin again.

“What do you think of me dating again?”

I looked at you anticipating self-deprecating laughter that usually rescues me from responding to your statements. You were serious.

I’ve engaged in dating conversations with countless people, most of whom are not you and not over 65. Many of those conversations end with my watching with fascination as they swipe left or swipe right on their apps.

Is that what he is asking for, I wondered? To help him start a dating profile?

I thought of the steep learning curve you—a man who spent a lifetime cutting pipes for oil companies—endured to learn how to use a smartphone. You handled it with the same finesse you would use to mercifully kill a spider—jamming your finger into the glass with disbelief that a machine can transmit touch to action.

Say something, I thought. Say something other than “please don’t use Tinder and date someone my age.”

“You supported me being with Tracy,” I responded. “So, I’ll support you in the decision you make.”

I started to count the green exit signs to prevent myself from crying.

“Okay, good to know,” you replied.

Lost in the emotion, I don’t remember the specifics of what we said next. All I remember is that we talked all the way to the airport.

Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen is a creative nonfiction writer and proud native Houstonian currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Emerge (where she also served as editor), The Offing, Foglifter, the Ponder Review, and New Rivers Press as the winner of the American Fiction Award. Her writing has been supported by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She writes humorist pieces in “Thursday Letters with Jen” via Substack. She is working on her first book, “A Writer from Houston.”

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands