My wife and her family were refugees from Vietnam and her father’s father was an immigrant from southern China. Over a period of years, Amanda and I have worked on her father’s memoir. It has been a painstaking process of recording interviews in Vietnamese, translating into English, then writing the stories from his perspective.
You may call me Trần Quốc Cường, though that was not my birth name for I was born in Vietnam as Trần Phước Tài. Every male child in the Trần family received the same middle name “Phước,” which meant “blessing” while Tài meant “great.” My father, an immigrant to Vietnam, was ethnically Chinese, so he also gave me a Chinese name, Trần Bình Quốc. According to Chinese culture, every male child in my generation of the Trần family received the same generational name, “Bình.” Thus every one of my brothers and male cousins had the middle name, “Bình,” while my father and all my uncles shared another middle name. These names were all recorded in a generational poem for the Trần clan in our home village of Triều Châu in Southern China. It is still preserved in the village temple where the names of our ancestors have been inscribed on wooden slabs.
I was born in 1944, just two years before the First Indochina War between the French and the Việt Minh. My father had become a wealthy landlord in the village countryside, perhaps the second or third wealthiest landlord in our region. He owned many acres of land which he rented out to tenant rice farmers and took in about 5,000 “yah lua” a year, enough to feed about 1,000 people. My father, however, was not always a rich man. He had immigrated from a remote village in the Guang Dong province of China and his family was very poor. In those days, it was difficult to make a living in China because the country was crowded with many people and not enough land to share. So my father, the oldest of three boys, immigrated to Vietnam as a teenager. He came with his uncle and his youngest brother, seeking the chance to make a better life for their family. All he brought with him was a bag with two T-shirts, one long-sleeved shirt, two pairs of shorts, and a pair of pull-up pants. He was determined, however, to make a way for himself in this land of opportunity.
Soon after arriving in Vietnam, my father married a woman from the village of Tấn Lộc. Sadly, though, both she and their child died as she gave birth. My father mourned her loss dearly and the village elder took pity on him. He observed that my father was poor, but extremely hard working with a good sense for business. So even though the elder was a very wealthy man, he offered his youngest daughter to be my father’s wife. At the time, my father spoke only Chinese, but my mother would teach him Vietnamese in their early years of marriage.
My grandfather, the village elder, gifted the young couple with a plot of land to start their own business. With three older brothers and three older sisters, my mother was the youngest daughter in her family of seven. Her father divided his assets among all his children, but my mother and the youngest brother received slightly more because they were the babies. The oldest children would start their own families first, leaving the younger ones to stay longer in the home. The youngest children had the responsibility of caring for their parents and honoring them in death. As the baby of the family, my mother became the favorite daughter and received a generous dowry. According to a Vietnamese saying, the youngest child benefits from the family’s wealth, but receives a curse if the family is poor.
My father’s shrewd business sense and knowledge of human nature increased his family’s meager profits. For example, he knew that many spoiled, rich kids would go into the city and gamble money on blackjack and dice. The city boys were cheating them blind, yet even when they lost all their money they would pawn off their land to keep on playing. The pawn shops gave them a deadline to redeem the debt, but charged them exorbitant interest. Then as the deadline arrived, the gamblers still did not have enough money to redeem their land. So instead of losing everything, they would sell the deeds to my father and my father would buy their land at a discount. He became very prosperous, and soon after, built a large house in the village of Tấn Lộc for his growing family. Before that time, he and my mother had lived on a houseboat.
My mother managed the household, but also served as the village matriarch. Everyone in the village loved my mother because she was very kind and compassionate regardless of a person’s station, family, or wealth. She would always help the poor, giving them food to eat from our plentiful kitchen. During seasons of drought, she allowed all of the villagers to draw water from our well. Whenever a conflict in the village could not be resolved, the people sought my mother’s wisdom to help make peace. The villagers called her the “Living Buddha” and as one of the only literate people in the village, she also taught in the school.
I had seven siblings in my family: two older sisters, four older brothers, and one younger brother. I was the seventh child of eight, each of us separated by two years, with the exception of my youngest brother (who was six years younger than me). Chinese people are very superstitious, so for a family to have two daughters and five sons was considered very lucky. My birth as the seventh child and the fifth son, promised our family incredible good fortune. For this reason, my parents named me “great blessing.” Propitiously, the time I was born, coincided with my family’s growing success. Our fields were producing abundant crops. We were able to purchase boats and hire workers to transport the harvested rice. My father never returned to China, but instead dutifully sent money back to support his family, until, they too became wealthy landowners in China. Sadly, I never met my father’s parents. Although grandfather did visit Vietnam for several years, he eventually decided to return home. I sometimes wonder how widely our family’s path diverged because my father chose to live in Vietnam. In 1947-1948, when the Communists took over China, my father’s uncle in China hung himself. He knew that the Communists would kill him first as a wealthy landlord. My father’s other uncle, however, who had come with him to Vietnam, passed away in peace. The villagers loved him so much that they named a small stream in his honor. I am certain my father’s courage as a young man altered the destiny of countless generations.
