By Steven Le, Global Vantage
For the past year or so, our family dining table at my mom’s house has been covered with boxes and piles of photographs. Many are black-and-white, and almost all were developed from film, as my mom only recently transitioned to digital. Near the table stands a medium-sized bookcase that contains our family’s collective photo library. The pictures cover some 60 to 70 years, although those that survived the cautionary burning are few compared to the rest that accumulated after our family had left Vietnam.
The photo-littered table has been my mom’s on-going project of organizing our family’s visual story. When our family gathered over the winter holidays, she presented to each of her three children an album that tells our individual stories. The earliest pictures have us as newborns in our home in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and Mom has carefully noted the date on almost every one of them. The last pages show graduations, weddings, and eventually pictures taken at family gatherings. By then, my siblings and I had moved out of our parents’ home; living on our own, we were no longer in the same house on a casual basis, so each photo was an occasion.
By the end of her project, my older brother and sister each received two albums to my one. My brother quickly observed that, while that was the case, his second album chronicles the lives of his two sons, who also are now our mom’s biggest joy in her retirement. Still, my sister somehow seems to have had the most photographic moments.
My one album is not quite full. My mom explains that, besides my tendency to shy from photographs (although I like taking them), there simply were not that many taken by my family in the first few years of my life. Sure enough, the black-and-white pages in my volume are visibly fewer than those in my siblings’ books.
I was not yet two months old in this photo, taken in front of our house in Saigon.
The first six faded photographs are digital copies of the originals; they depict Mom and the three of us, and in them I look to be a newborn. She made copies of these shots to put in each of our collections. My dad must have taken those pictures, as he was not in them and they were a series all taken on the same day. That was in March or April, 1975, although the marginal note gives only the year: “SG 75” (Saigon 1975). The only other pictures from 1975 (three in all) are actually in color and dated “7-5-75” (May 7, 1975). In them, Mom is holding a napping baby outside our house. These photographs are smaller in size and have a white border. The colors have a slight yellow tinge.
I have seen another picture taken in 1975 with my dad and me in it, but somehow it did not make its way into this small collection. The time window for photographs was small that year, between my birth in March and the fall. My dad left for an advertised “ten-day re-education course” in September of that year and did not return to us until 1981, almost six years later. In my album, the first photograph of all five of us together bears the date “9/81” and shows me and my brother in matching silk shirts in what looks like a formal family portrait. My dad has on a tie and his signature smile, looking untouched by the six years of hard labor and brainwashing.
In 1981, my father returned from nearly six years of imprisonment for his part in the war. He appears untouched by the four concentration camps.
Two pages earlier there is another formal family portrait without Dad and with “28-3-76” written at the bottom. That was taken a week after my first birthday; my brother was seven and my sister almost six. My brother and I could pass for my brother’s two sons at those ages. Everyone is looking at the camera except my sister, who seems distracted. My mom is the only one of us truly smiling, and the look on her face tells me that she probably did not foresee being a single parent for the next five years. She was 35 in that picture—two years younger than I am now.
Read the full article by Steven Le from Global Vantage.
