Ky-Phong Tran with his wife Stacey Wong-Tran and one-day old Dominic George An Son Tran in the NICU at Kaiser hospital in Downey.
By KY-PHONG TRAN
Dear Dominic,
Whenever people meet you and see your cherub physique and sly, toothless smile, there is still some mystery as to the origins of your devilish charm and calm demeanor.
But me? I know you are descended from warrior-poets, scholarship boys, teachers, magicians, and acrobats so your guile makes perfect sense to me.
On my first Father’s Day, I wanted you to know a little bit about your family history and how that cosmic mix of ancestry has conspired to make you the special boy you are.
First off, like all the great ones in mythologies worldwide, you had a supernatural birth. Your mother’s amniotic fluid began to leak at the beginning of her third trimester and the doctors forced her to live at the Kaiser Hospital in Downey, Calif., to monitor your health and growth.
They planned to keep the both of you there for five weeks so your weight would increase but you decided otherwise. After 18 days of your mom and I living in a cramped hospital room, you’d had enough and came into the world two whole months early.
You weighed all of 4 pounds and 10 ounces, and when they strapped all those hoses, cables, and cords to your frail body, our hearts hurt in ways we didn’t know they could hurt.
But I suppose your untraditional birth just runs in the family. You see, when your grandma was six months pregnant with me, your grandparents and uncle and aunt boarded a massive army cargo plane and fled Vietnam as refugees. It was April 28, 1975, two days before the fall of Saigon signaled the end of the Vietnam War.
We ended up in a refugee camp in Arkansas and I was eventually born in Huntsville, Ala. Now that I’ve lived through a child’s birth, I am amazed that I made it through both the demands of that physical journey as well as the emotional toll it must have taken on your grandma to leave everything—family, friends, home, and country−behind without a plan and without saying good-bye.
The paternal grandfather, Dung Van Tran, the warrior-poet-teacher, is pictured with Dominic Tran, now a strapping 21 pounds.
The background of his maternal grandfather, George Wong, includes being an acrobat. Photos courtesy of the Tran family.
But we both survived because that is a Vietnamese specialty. So know that on your Ong Noi’s side, that’s my side, you come from hardy stock. In fact, during the war your grandpa, now old and gray, used to be a paratrooper and fearlessly jumped from both airplanes and helicopters.
And when he was a boy, your grandpa excelled in school and received a scholarship to move away from home and study in Hanoi. After the war, he would become a schoolteacher and according to a family friend he surprisingly “wrote eloquent poetry.”
So if you grow up with a penchant for academics and a way of words, you’ll know where those talents come from.
Sadly, over the past few months you’ve already attended two funerals. I was adamant about bringing you to both because I know that babies naturally balance the mood of such occasions.
And at both memorials (and another to come next weekend), I saw you work your magic, how your goofy smile lessens sorrow and your feigned bashfulness evokes laughter in even the heaviest of hearts.
Again, this is no coincidence: Magic is in your blood.
Your great-grandpa on your Chinese mother’s side was a magician and even owned a traveling circus in Malaysia in the early 1940’s. Your Ong Ngoai and great aunts and uncles performed in that circus as acrobats with one aunt able to arch her legs over her head and your grandpa known for walking on his hands indefinitely. So if you decide to walk on your hands before you walk on your feet in the coming months, I’ll understand.
Now that I am a father, I have understandably gained a newfound perspective on family and ancestors. Before you, I was just a post, a dead end of my lineage. But with you, I am now a bridge between generations, linking your grandpas’ difficult history of immigration and exile to your hopefully peaceful and safe upbringing in the United States as the son of two middle-class, college-educated parents.
That’s why your mom and I chose your Chinese and Vietnamese names to compliment one another. It is An Son and it means Peaceful Mountain because we wanted you to feel a sense of permanence and familiarity that your grandpas and I never felt growing up here. We wanted you to know that you belonged here and that we’d do everything in our power to water your plot and foster your magic.
On my first Father’s Day, I thank you Dominic George An Son Tran for every sleepless night and act of exhaustion. You’ve taught me that real love is a messy, tiresome affair and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I look forward to many, many more of these special days.
Love,
Your Daddy,
Ky-Phong Paul Tran
