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Agent Orange and My Father
4.
My father was born on February 12, 1947 to Ton Nhu-Thi Thoa and Tran Van Hai (his mother and father, respectively) in Da Nang in central Vietnam. Growing up in a household with many children, my father was the one who was counted on the most. His parents pushed him to excel in school. With the added responsibility of taking care of his parents, my father grew up with a sense of duty and honor. He served his parents, and soon served in the Vietnam War as a bomber pilot for the Southern Vietnam Air Force. As a captain in the war his job was to drop bombs on orders. I don’t know how many bombs he dropped, how many times he went on missions, or how many people he killed. All I know is that he was a pilot and flew planes.
From 1970 to 1972, my father was in the U.S. as part of his pilot training. During this time, in 1971, U.S. forces ceased spraying Agent Orange after finding out that its components led to birth defects in laboratory mice. After the end of the war, the Viet Cong (VC) notified every Republic of Vietnam soldier that he must come forth to be imprisoned. My father did just that, and was imprisoned in the camps from 1975 to 1977 . He lived in the jungle and performed duties required by the VC. Prisoners were allowed two bowls of rice each week and cassava. The rest of the food came from the ground and the trees.
After he was released, my father was imprisoned again, this time for nine years after being caught fleeing the country by boat. So when my mother asked him the second time she ever saw him if he wanted to leave the country, his eyes widened and he asked her, “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to tell the Viet Cong?”
My parents met each other because my mom was curious about the men who had served in the war. One of her friends had mentioned that there was a man who had just been released from the VC camps. She wanted to see him, to talk to him. In her words, she wanted to see someone who had helped fight C ommunism. When she saw him for the first time, my mother described him as sickly. It had been two months since his release from the camps. As he sat near the railroad right behind his home, thin and brooding —about the disappointment of the war, of his first wife leaving him for a VC soldier while he was imprisoned, of his many failed attempts to flee the country—my mother spoke to him. According to her, his skin did not look normal. It had a yellow tinge to it. H is eyes told her he was tired of life.
But soon their courtship began and my parents married. Their first child together was named Cà-r?t, which phonetically translates to “ carrot” in English. Malnutrition caused her to die within months of her birth. When my mother was pregnant with her second child , the two decided to make another attempt at fleeing Vietnam.
En route to Hong Kong, my parents dealt with storms, sea sickness, and a scarcity of food . On one particular day, my mom felt pressure down below. She could feel the baby coming out, five months before the due date. Losing her first child with my father turned her into a determined woman, and she was determined to not let another baby die. With her hands, my mother held the baby inside her body.
After they arrived in Hong Kong, they settled into refugee camps with other Vietnamese . While my father worked for the administration as a translator, my mom stayed in the camps. Five months passed and my mother went into labor. She was taken to Saint Margaret Hospital. Lines of communication were not well-developed, so my father did not know she had gone to the hospital until after she gave birth.
In order to process the paperwork, the nurses demanded that the baby be given a name. But this is not the Vietnamese custom, where names are given a month after the baby’s birth. With a pen, my mother wrote down “Hong Kong.”
She named me Hong Kong to hold on to the memory of my birthplace—the country to which my parents fled from Communist Vietnam for a new beginning, and as a kind of shorthand for the adversity they had experienced as refugees.
5.
In an effort to address growing health problems and what they felt was neglect from the U.S. government, the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange, a non profit organization representing Vietnamese Agent Orange victims in Vietnam, was founded on January 10, 2004. VAVA consists of a group of Vietnamese doctors, scientists, and others who have spent nearly three decades working with Vietnamese Agent Orange victims.
On January 30, 2004, VAVA filed a lawsuit with the help of American lawyers against thirty-two chemical companies that produced defoliants used during the w ar. The first hearing was held on March 18, 2004 in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District in Brooklyn, New York.
According to the War Legacies Project, a non profit organization based in Vermont, the Vietnamese plaintiffs brought the case in the belief that the U.S. government and its contractors, chemical manufacturers of herbicides and defoliants, were responsible for the suffering of three million Vietnamese currently living in Vietnam with the long-term, adverse effects of exposure to Agent Orange. The plaintiffs also wanted medical and economic assistance, as well as social care for the purpose of facilitating victims’ adjustment back into the community.
On March 10, 2005, Judge Weinstein dismissed the case on the basis that although international law prohibits the use of poison in war, the use of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants was not intended to poison civilians. The chemical companies were government contractors at the time that they produced Agent Orange, which means they enjoy the same immunity as the U.S. government in a U.S. court of law. This did not stop VAVA, which filed an appeal to the Second Circuit Court later that year in September 2005. It wasn’t until June 18, 2007 that oral arguments from both sides were heard from three judges of the Court of Appeals.
On February 22, 2008, The Federal Court of Appeals in Manhattan, New York rejected VAVA’s claim to reinstate its lawsuit against the chemical companies. The ruling was based on the plaintiffs’ failure to show that the herbicides produced by the chemical companies and used by the U.S. military violated the ban on the use of poison in warfare. At this time, several U.S. veterans also filed appeals, but the court d ismissed them too, ruling that because the chemical companies were government contractors, they were not liable for any adverse health effects caused by Agent Orange. 6.
Family is big in our household. But our family is actually quite small—the nuclear family is what is most important to us. We hardly keep in touch with extended relatives. Dinnertime is also very important. It’s the one time in the day when everyone gathers around for a single, common experience. In the middle of our last meal as a family on the patio sometime in June 2004, my father rose up from the table and started across the porch and inside the house. I looked around the dinner table to see everyone’s reactions: my mom’s, my sisters’, my half-brother, my half-siste,r and her husband. “Ba ?ang b? ?au ?ó ,” said my mother. “He’s hurting.” My mother got up from the table to see what was wrong, to see if what my father was feeling confirmed her speculation. And it did. Wearing gray sweatpants and a white t-shirt, my father slipped into his shoes and got into the passenger seat of our Honda Accord. My mom drove him to the hospital where he was admitted that evening.
I don’t know what the doctors said. I don’t know why he went to the hospital that night. I do remember a sense of relief when he was released about a week later. But he didn’t come home to his bed. He had another bed waiting for him, a home hospital bed from a medical equipment company. For the next couple of weeks he was confined to that bed, which was set up on the first floor in the family room . He only left to use the bathroom. Sometimes he would pick up his guitar to play a few tunes. There is a picture of him on this bed in his hospital gown, much skinnier than before he had gone to the hospital in June, sitting up and smiling down at his guitar as he holds it to play.
My father would have to go to the hospital to get periodic check-ups. One time he went in for what we thought was another check-up, and that was the last time he ever saw his home.
That year I developed a fear of ringing telephones. I was so terrified because as long as my father was in the hospital and I was at home, a ringing telephone would bring news and updates on my father. On that Tuesday night my two younger sisters, Roselie and Lily, and I were in the kitchen when the home telephone rang. Lily picked it up. It was my half-sister on the other line. I opened the refrigerator door and stared into it, not looking for anything in particular, trying to act indifferently but still pay full attention to the phone call at the same time.
“Who was that?” I asked, closing the refrigerator and turning around.
“Chi Bi. She said that Dad died,” said Lily, still holding the phone in the air. Her eyebrows got closer together and she said those words, confused.
I walked towards Lily, past the peninsula in the kitchen. Half of me believed the words that I had just heard. The other half wished so hard that those words weren’t true. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t want to think about it until I had to. I didn’t know for sure whether those words were true, and so I didn’t let myself think such thoughts. I then made my way up the short flight of steps to my bedroom to grab a jacket. Chi Bi’s husband, Binh, was on his way to come pick the three of us up. I don’t remember much until we reached the hospital, but I do recall that when we were in the car, Binh told my sisters and me to be calm. We didn’t say anything, partly because we didn’t care much for what he told us, and partly because all I was thinking about was how good it would feel if my half-sister had lied—if my father really hadn’t died after all.
I remember looking at my father lying in the hospital bed. I remember asking myself where all these people in the room with my family and me came from, and why they were nudging me to go up to see my father. I don’t remember crying. The death certificate notes the date of death as July 21, 2004. When I looked at the clock it was before midnight on July 20, 2004. At the hospital, as much as I denied that my father had died, and as much as I had hoped that he would suddenly bolt up from the hospital bed, I knew he was gone. |
