Who He Was (Is)
It is a hot summer day. Two small boys run carelessly through the cool narrow alleyways of 1964’s Vietnam. And the reason for their laughter? They have just caught a small tadpole and have stored it in one of their mother’s old copper cooking pots. Two weeks later, their mother finds the deceased animal; the scolding ensues.
One of the two small mischievous brothers depicted in the anecdote above was my father, Paul Chen. He was born on June 13th 1959 to an already large family. His parents, Tong Chen and Lipp Chen, had already had three children before him. By the end of the decade, they would have four more children, for a total of eight, four girls and four boys. To me, this meant four aunts and three uncles, all distinctly different, with their own set points of views and opinions. Paul lived with his parents and all of his 7 siblings in a small house, which had seen better times. Because Lipp was an employee of the local office, his house was always littered with malfunctioning office chairs and unfortunately, iron nails and screws that had come off of the cast off office furniture. Says Mary, the oldest sibling “ I remember one time I cut my toe on a nail… it was a miracle it wasn’t infected…” The family led an unconventional lifestyle. They were poor, that is true, but they were always poised in the rare professional family portraits they took, and always kept their clothing clean, despite the general lack of them. And they had fun in their own way. As a small boy, Paul had befriended a stray German shepherd (of which there are many in Vietnam), and during floods would float with his pet around the house on office chairs, wading through the waist deep water with planks of driftwood serving as oars. As the years passed, Paul’s childhood evolved into his inevitable adulthood. Adulthood of course, must always come, but for Paul it came particularly early. He was the second eldest of the four males, but his older brother William could only be described as a deadbeat. William was perpetually lost and never found. He was rebellious and could always be missing when work was to be done. Later on, when it came time for the family to immigrate to the United States, he was almost left behind because he had been smoking cigarettes at a friend’s house. With his brother devoid of eligibility for the role of supporter of the house, Paul was forced to take a job that is almost painful for most children: selling ice cream. Even back then, Good Humor was a popular brand; unfortunately, it was also expensive, at least to the locals, like Paul and his family. So, here he was, a preteen who loved sweets, as most children do, forced to sell ice cream in the hot and humid Vietnam climate without ever being able to taste it himself. Perhaps this past occupation explains my father’s insatiable sweet tooth in the present; his favorite foods are now pound cakes, brownies, cookies, and of course, ice cream. His youngest sister was the only sibling ever to eat ice cream, because of her baby-like qualities and ability to soften their father’s otherwise stern and violent character. It was these same qualities that later led to her sale to an elderly white couple living in Vietnam at the time. Paul’ family was so impoverished that they almost sold his sister Betty, in order to have money for food. It was only after his and his siblings’ relentless begging that they were able to retrieve their sister. The Vietnam War caused the entire country, including Paul’s family, to change and to go through hardships and obstacles that they could have never imagined. Paul’s brother recalls the time when Paul was arrested. “They tried to draft him, you know, for the war… but he refused, how could he? He was only sixteen…our great grandmother had to bail him out”. The days that came after his jail time were even more hectic. Paul was in charge of the family, after his father, so he spent his days shuffling his siblings and his grandmother from temple to temple to cellar, looking for hideouts and avoiding inquisitions and bombing. Inevitably, Paul became friends with a few American soldiers. They were awed by his artistic talent (he liked to paint with traditional Chinese ink and would also etch sketches in the dirt floor with sharp rods). Therefore, when it came time for the soldiers to decide which families they would take to the United States, Paul’s was on the top of their list. After the harrowing flight on board an army plane, the family arrived in Arkansas, where they lived in a refugee camp for a few weeks. They were fortunate enough to leave to New York because their relative had somehow found them housing and jobs there. However, this did not mean that their lives were any easier. On top of keeping up with schoolwork, which was obviously harder for them, because they were immigrants, they also spent many hours in dim lighting stringing beads together to create sellable jewelry and sewing clothing for the factories. Paul lived with his family in a tiny cramped two- bedroom apartment in Bedford- Stuyvesant where he and his six siblings (excluding William) had to share one king sized bed. Once, after they had seen a scary movie on their grainy black and white television, all the other children snatched the single blanket they shared form Paul, claiming that his feet were too cold and sweaty, leaving poor Paul to shiver in the dark, thoughts of monsters and demons swimming in his mind. To highlight their sad situation, one needs only to look at an everyday staple: the toothbrush. Even this was scarce in the household; there were only three of them for the seven siblings. Toys then, were not even mentionable, my aunt Betty recalls playing with the huge cockroaches that shared their dwelling: “I would drip hot wax on one of them [of the two she would hold in captivity] so that it would get angry and fight with the other.” Later on, Tong, their mother, earned enough money to rent a house on Parson’s Blvd, where the children lived, only seeing their mother once every week, on Sundays, the only day she did not have to work. My father received a job at the local tofu market, where he served a delivery boy, wearing boots “three sizes too big” which caused him to trip and land at the feet of many a stranger. One of these strangers would later become my mother, Susan Chen. She was the cashier at the tofu store which he delivered to, and was intrigued by his upbringing, which seemed so different from hers, which has been relatively normal, in fact he did not even have to work like he did, she did so out of sympathy for her cousin, who owned the store. Their relationship proved true the age old maxim “opposites attract”. When the both of them had graduated from college (undergraduate and graduate), they were married with the permission of her parents, and years later after becoming established in their respective fields (he in social and case working and she in accounting) they had two baby girls. My father, for the most of my life, was a very enigmatic figure. Sure, he would distribute tidbits of information about his childhood, but he would always downplay that underlying tone of sadness and desperado that were present in each anecdote, but I would never truly be able to understand his life. He was not one of those parents who enjoyed reminding his children of “how good they had it” but rather one who allowed his daughters to shape their own lives relative to their own surroundings. While I many never understand him, I do understand this: my father does not need to be understood. There are parts of his life that would always remain unknown, but what is apparent, and has been apparent for everyday of my life for as long as I can remember, is his unconditional love.