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 transitioned to digital only a few months ago. Near the table stands a medium-sized bookcase that contains our family’s collective photo library. The pictures cover some 60-70 years, although those that survived the burning are few compared to the rest.
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 holidays, she presented to each of her three children an album that tells our individual story. The earliest pictures have us as newborns in our home in then Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and Mom has carefully noted the date on almost every one of them. The last pages of the albums show graduations, weddings, and eventually pictures taken only at what looks like family gatherings. By then, we were no longer in the same house on a casual basis, and each photo was an occasion.
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. Somehow, my sister seems to have had the most photographic moments.
My one album is not quite full. Aside from my tendency to shy from photographs (although I like taking them), my mom explained that there simply were not that many taken in the first few years of my life. Sure enough, the black-and-white pages in my volume were many fewer than those in my siblings’.
The first six faded photographs are digital copies of the originals; they depict Mom and the three of us kids, and in them I look like a newborn. She had made copies to put in each of our collections. My dad must have taken those pictures, as he was not in them and they were all taken on one occasion. That was March or April, 1975, although the marginal note gives only the year: “SG 75.” The only other three pictures from 1975 are actually in color and dated “7-5-75” (May 7, ’75). In them, my mom is holding a napping baby outside of our house. These photographs are smaller in size and have a white border, and the colors have a slight yellow tinge.
I have seen elsewhere a 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 was small. He 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 bares the date “9/81” and shows me and my brother in matching silk shirts in what looks like a formal family portrait. My dad had on a tie and his signature smile, looking untouched by the six years of hard labor and brainwashing.
Two pages earlier is another formal family portrait without Dad and with “28-3-76” 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 his two sons, who are exactly five years apart. 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—my age now.
Our family went to the zoo often. At least those were the occasions that warranted group photos. Before 1981, it was just Mom and the three of us; after that, Dad was also in them, including one dated my seventh birthday, in 1982. In that one, our family was joined by eight other kids and a woman whom I do not recognize. My album contains only two photographs taken in Ho Chi Minh City from 1983, our last year in Vietnam.
The demarcation was not just chronological but also chromatic, as the photographs dated the latter half of 1983 were full-sized and in full color, taken with an SLR in France, where our family lived for over two years before moving to the United States. There are many more from this period than in Vietnam, and they capture my first time on skis, family outings, holiday performances (my brother and sister are both musicians), and the obligatory birthday shots. Strangely, the sharpest picture is a black-and-white one taken on a sunny day in the middle of Paris. My dad snapped the shot of my grandmother and me marching in a demonstration to draw the French government’s attention to the plight of Vietnamese still living in concentration camps in the old country and of the hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to escape by boat.
Overall, these photographs are more cheerful and show more variety than the earlier ones. One shows me sleeping and leaning on a train window while my grandmother watches. Another has my mom and me on our knees praying in a Buddhist temple. And the one dated “6-5-84” frames my brother and me reading a book together on a mattress in a room that was about ten square feet. For about nine months in Paris, we lived in a community home founded by a Vietnamese refugee for other Vietnamese refugees. The mattress covered half of the room, and we propped it against the wall during the day to make a living space of the room. Our family of six lived in two of those rooms, with my parents sleeping in one and my grandmother sleeping with us kids in the other. The picture of me and my brother reminds me of one I have seen of my nephews reading together on the floor of my mom’s house a couple of years ago.
Each of these pictures is a full story, and the ones missing tell even fuller stories. Before we left Vietnam on a plane, sponsored by the French government in return for my grandfather’s military service in the French occupation army before France’s eviction from Vietnam in 1954, my parents burned most of the pictures that depicted anything related to America, the former South Vietnamese government during the war against North Vietnam, and any kind of activism. My mother attended college in the United States for four years and my father was a political activist even in his early twenties, so there were many to burn.
These are the surviving stories in pictures. The rest we have to rely on the photographs taken by our memory, which can be unreliable and less truthful.
