Days of wanting

Shortly after arriving in America as a war refugee in 1975, my brother David was hit and killed by a car. I was five and he was six. It was my oldest brother Thierry’s birthday, and the rest of the family was busy making preparations for the party. David and I decided to pick some flowers across the street. He was in front of me, just barely ahead. I don’t know if the driver who hit him never saw him or just couldn’t stop in time, but my next memories are David’s body on the street and people screaming and running around. Emergency services arrived, and I recall being excited by the sirens and the big, interesting vehicles, the sounds and the thrill of it all processed through the mind of a five-year-old lacking a working concept of death. I guess I am grateful that I don’t remember much more.

This is my first memory. It’s not that nothing else happened before that point; this was just my mind’s way of marking a beginning. The beginning of an American life.

We had come to America at the end of the American war in Vietnam. My family was from the aristocratic North, meaning we were wealthy, landed, and elite. It also meant we were hated by the Communists, and when they took control of the North it was time for us to go, which we did—first to the central mountainous area where I was born and then south to Saigon. America would lose 60,000 soldiers to this long, bloody war; Vietnam would lose more than 3 million people, most of them civilians. In the spring of 1975, when it became obvious that America could not win the war, the US government enacted legislation that granted political asylum to 10,000 “Vietnamese friends of America”; in less than a month, 140,000 came. It was an act of extraordinary generosity.