On Mother's day - May 10th 2009

my mother

This is the picture that my mother sent to me in 1972 when I was in France.

To-day, I went to a 5-hour show about the Vietnamese mothers. The show was performed by a Vietnamese group called the Friends with the participation of Tran Thu Ha a well-known figure among the Vietnamese artist singers. The orchestra was excellent and the show was good and rose a lot of emotions when evoking the Vietnamese mothers and their sacrifices for the children. I do not realize that in the Vietnamese literature, there are so many poems and songs about the Vietnamese mothers. Suddenly, I feel the urge of writing about my own mother and my family.

my father

My father died at the age of 51 in 1960. I was in 11th grade and was ready to take my first part of Baccalaureate in French. I remembered having some premonitions about my father death. It was at the approach of the New Year and my family bought two beautiful pots of chrysanthemum to put at the front porch as part of the tradition to bring luck and happiness to the household. In my dream, one of the pots was broken and when I woke up, I was so scared and I had a bad feeling of something not normal about to happen to my family. So I prayed Buddha and at my catholic school, I prayed at the Virgin Mary 's grotto for the protection of my family. All my prayers seemed to be in vain because a few days later, my father came back from some friends' reunion and he had a stroke. At that time, in Vietnam we did not know much about heart attacks and did not react fast enough to save him.

My mother had a high school diploma but had quit her job as a lab assistant when she got married and stayed home to take care of us. My father's death was quite a shock to her and left her in a situation where she had to work to pay for our school tuition and to raise us. To add up to our misfortune, we were requested to move out of the house because it was part of my father's function. We had to move back to our former rented house where the owner was trying to raise the rent and kick us out of the house.

My mother was still very young and she was also very pretty. She had many suitors then but she did not want to marry again and decided to stay as a widow to raise her two children.

At that time, my uncle was a businessman and helped us out by giving her a job as a gas station manager. Her salary was good but it was nothing as compared to my father's earnings. Both my sister and I attended a Catholic school and the tuition was quite high. I remembered when the school reminded us to pay for the tuition and when I talked to her, she had to go borrow some money from my uncle to pay for us. I was very close to high school graduation so she did not want to change schools for us and tried her best and made sacrifices to get us through high school.

At my father's death, I lost all my faiths in God or Buddha for almost a year. Everything appeared to me like a dream and I hoped to wake up with my father still alive. However, when I saw all the difficulties my mother had to go through to raise us. Her job at the gas station was hard because she had not worked for so long and the job involved accounting, personnel management, stock control etc... I saw her staying up late at night trying to learn her new job. I told myself that I had to pass all the high school exams and as soon as I got my Baccalaureate 2nd part diploma, I would go find a job to help her out.

In fact, after my high school diploma, while attending the pharmacy school in Saigon, I got a part time job as a technical translator for the local French Asian radio station (Phat Thanh Phap A). I had to pass a test for the job and was selected among many other candidates. I did not know how I passed the test but at that time, I had a strong will to be successful in whatever I did to help my mother.
My job turned out to be more than just a Vietnamese French translator, I was requested many times to go outside of Saigon to do interviews and write reports on dams and bridges newly built, hundred of miles away from Saigon. I had to refuse to go and I knew that I would not be able to hold this job very long if I did not go along with the type of job.
At the pharmacy school, students started to talk about government scholarship selection to go study abroad :Australia, New Zealand, the United States etc...Together with my class mates, I applied for the "leadership scholarship" to go study in the United States. The purpose of the scholarship is to train future young leaders for the country. After many days of testing, sixty of us were selected out of many thousands of candidates coming from all over the countries from the North to the South : thirty were selected as regular and the other thirty candidates were alternate to replace the regular candidates in case of technical or health problems.
I was among the thirty "regulars".