My First Thanksgiving in America
Andrew Lâm
New America Media
Editor's Note: NAM editor Andrew Lam is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," and “Under the Dragon.”
SAN FRANCISCO – A week before Thanksgiving 32 years ago, my father showed up on the doorstep of our crowded apartment in San Francisco's Mission District. He was in civilian clothes carrying a small traveling bag in which he kept his South Vietnamese army uniform and just about everything he'd brought from his homeland. I barely recognized him; he was haggard and thin, but he was alive.
My mother, grandmother, sister and I had arrived at the apartment only a few months before, fresh from the Camp Pendleton refugee camp, having fled Vietnam two days before the Vietnam War ended. We joined my oldest brother and my mother's sister and her children. After we came, there were 11 people living in the apartment.
In my first few months in America I suffered a recurring nightmare: I have been left behind in Saigon. Our house is empty, except for me. I frantically search for my father when, suddenly, Viet Cong enter through the gate. I scream and run upstairs. They chase me, and one catches my ankle, and again I scream. I wake in a cold sweat and tears. I stare out onto a dimly lit parking lot through the San Francisco fog feeling confused and lost.
During that time, my mother, whose eyes seemed hollow with the absence of her husband, didn't say anything to us, but it was easy to read her mind. There had been no word of Father or his whereabouts. He was a South Vietnamese military official who opted to stay behind out of a penchant to be patriotic and to be loyal to his men. He would fight on regardless of the outcome. I had heard my mother whisper to my aunt, "Tử thủ" – "defending to the death." Some nights I went to sleep, weeping, "Tử thủ, tử thủ." I'd hear the words echoing in my head. In Vietnam, Father was the center of our universe, and his absence left a horrible void.
Across the street from our apartment was a supermarket, and my cot was by the dining room windows. Every night I watched the fog drift by and the soda pop machines glow in their eerie lights, and I listened to the wind, while fearing sleep.
Then, one afternoon the phone rang at the restaurant downstairs. Mother picked up the phone. On the other end was my father. She gasped. She cried. She was speechless. Then she laughed. When she hung up, she and my aunt hugged each other and cried. I watched from the counter, feeling both fear and elation. Father had survived, and he would soon join us.
In school, a few weeks before Father arrived in San Francisco, I'd learned the word Thanksgiving. "Ssshthanks give in," I repeated after my teacher, but the word tumbled and hissed, turning my mouth into a wind tunnel. A funny word, "Ssshthanks give in," hard on my Vietnamese tongue, tough on my refugee ears.
But Mr. K., my seventh-grade English teacher, was full of encouragement. "Very good. Repeat after me. 'Thanksgiving.' "
As I helped him tape students' drawings of turkeys and pilgrims and Indians on the classroom windows, Mr. K. patiently explained to me the origins of the holiday: Newcomers to America struggling, surviving and finally thriving, thanks to the kindness of the natives.
I could barely speak a complete sentence in English, having spent less than three months here, but Mr. K.'s story wasn't difficult to grasp. However, at that time, I had no reason to be thankful.
But on Thanksgiving – my first in America – I understood what it meant to be thankful. After Father, another aunt and her children came to our new home, the apartment was filled beyond its limit. There were 17 of us living there. That Thanksgiving we ate on the floor, with newspapers spread out as our table. We ate turkey donated by a religious charity. We talked and laughed and told stories of our escape from Vietnam.
After that, there would be heartbreaks, of course, disappointments and disillusions in our new homeland. There would be trips to Disneyland, to Europe. There would be marriages and divorces, births and deaths, and family quarrels.
These days, our Thanksgiving holidays are elaborate, celebrated in grand suburban homes. But the Thanksgiving I remember with great fondness is my first one, when my father was returned to me, and we ate on the floor, and I was just learning to pronounce the word.
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