An essay from yesterday’s Times by the writer of the Pulitzer Prize
novel The Sympathizer about the war in Vietnam and the
life of immigrants from that country now living in California.
Losing My Son to
Reading
Books helped me gain independence. So it
saddens me just a bit to see my son reading on his own.
By Viet
Thanh Nguyen
Do you
remember when you learned to read? Like most of us, I don’t. Still, many people
can take comfort in knowing that this event, beyond memory, involved our
parents. The parents who took us to school, who read books to us at home, who
could speak to us in a shared language. But in my case, one of the things I
lost as a refugee, without even knowing it at the time, was a childhood where
my parents would have read to me.
I came
to the United States when I was 4, with my parents and older brother. Our
language at home was Vietnamese, but somehow, by 6 or 7, I had learned how to
read in English. My parents could speak English, but I have no memory of them
reading to me, and if they did, they would not have been reading to me in
English. It must have been my teachers who taught me, just as my 5-year old
son’s teachers taught him. Earlier this year I went away for a week and when I
came back, the little boy who I had been reading to for years was suddenly
reading by himself.
Being a father makes me reflective,
especially as I look at my son and remember myself at his age. Early in our
American years, my father chuckled when I called the kitchen a “chicken” in
English. He affectionately recalled for me how, when I was a baby in Vietnam, I
saw the cows eating grass and called it “salad.” Like my father, I take
pleasure in seeing my son learning a language, and through it, stories. I love
the way he loves stories, the raw emotions he brings to them, the way he
thrills to, or is terrified by, a powerful narrative. I know when a book is
great because he cuddles up to me and asks to have it read to him again and
again. The closeness a parent feels with a child, where boundaries are
permeable, is mirrored in how a powerful story pulls a reader through a page
and through the words and into the story itself.
The story of my parents involved
crossing a different boundary, the border of this country.
We lost many things
at the border, beginning with our shared language. Growing up and seeing my
parents struggle with building a life for themselves and my brother and me, I
could feel our closeness dissipating along with my Vietnamese. The better my
parents were at taking care of their children by working endless hours, the
less time they had to spend with us. It was the classic immigrant and refugee dilemma
— sacrifice yourself for your children and in the process sacrifice your
intimacy with them.
Books
saved me from feeling alone. I love books so much that I gave my son, for a
first name, a writer’s surname — Ellison. Ralph Ellison was not a writer of
children’s books, but a writer of the big truths, of the frightening world, of
the unknown interiors of ourselves. Children’s books, of course, deal with
those things, too. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t like Maurice Sendak’s Where the
Wild Things Are when I was 6 or 7. The story of a little boy lost in the
wild, having journeyed there by boat and separated from his parents, seemed too
much, in retrospect, like my life as a refugee. But my son loves Sendak’s book,
and I love that book now, too. It was only as an adult that I could confront
the childhood fears in it.
I
first found the book in a public library. Books were not a priority for my
parents, so we never had them in the house. I would go to the public library
every week and stuff my backpack full of books, which were barely enough for a
week. I never owned my own until high school. My son has a bigger library than
I ever had. While my parents showed me they loved me by making sure that I
always had enough to eat, I show my love for my son by making sure that he
always has enough to read (as well as to eat). For me, the library was a second
home, and I want my son to have his own home in my home.
By 11
or 12, I knew how to get to my second home by myself, on foot or on the bus.
But in remembering that childhood library, what I also know is that libraries
are potentially dangerous places because there are no borders. There are
countries called children’s literature and young adult literature and adult
fiction, but no border guards, or in my case, parents to police the borders and
protect me. A reader could go wherever he or she wanted. So, at 12 or 13, I
read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Larry Heinemann’s Close
Quarters.
All that stayed with me for decades
from Roth’s novel was the infamous scene where a young Alex Portnoy masturbates
with a slab of liver that will be his family’s dinner. As for Heinemann’s
Vietnam War novel, the graphic depiction of how American soldiers brutalized
Vietnamese people, including raping them, enraged me. I wanted revenge on
Heinemann’s novel, until I reread it as an adult in preparing for my own novel,
and realized he was right. Like Sendak, he wanted to show where the wild things
are — inside of us. As did Roth. When I became a writer, I paid homage to both
of them in my novel The Sympathizer, where
the shocked child has finally become the writer willing to shock.
Crossing the border into confronting those
wild things that I did not understand and that my parents could not protect me
from was part of how I began the journey to adulthood and writing. Seeing my
son reading, I realize he is taking one step further on his own road to
independence, to being a border-crosser, someone who makes his own decisions,
including what he reads and what he believes. Perhaps that’s why seeing him
read on his own is tinged with melancholy. I remember my own loss and I sense
the loss that is yet to come, when he is no longer all mine, as he is when he
wakes in the morning and says some of the sweetest words I will ever hear:
“Daddy, read me a book.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, a contributing opinion
writer, is the author, most recently, of The Refugees, and the editor of The
Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
