Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey

The narrative shifts to GB’s adulthood in the US and focuses on the lives of his siblings and the death of his paternal grandmother, Le Nhi. GB and Lisa live in New York, Manny in Florida, and Vy in California. GB includes an illustration of the US map beneath a family portrait. In the map’s legend, he designates Arizona as the “Parents’ Republic of Vietnam,” the states where he and his siblings live as the “Federation of Free States,” the remaining states as “The Great Generational Divide,” and the oceans as the “Sea of Cultural Loss” (97).

GB meets Lisa at the airport to fly to the hospital where their grandmother Le Nhi is dying of cancer. On the flight, GB recalls a memory of playing Scrabble with Le Nhi and Lisa when the entire family lived together in Arizona. When Le Nhi makes a comment about Lisa’s birthday, GB calculates a series of dates and mistakenly thinks his mother, Dzung Chung, was pregnant with Lisa before she married Tri Huu. He doesn’t realize that Lisa is his half-sister, the daughter of Tri Huu and a French woman rather than Dzung Chung. In a caption to this flashback, GB admits that as a youth he was “clueless” about his family’s past because of their reticence as well as his own indifference.

Several short panels follow this episode and depict GB’s memories of his mother and the cultural differences of his upbringing in America. As a child, he asked her if he could change his name from “Gia-Bao” to GB because his teachers couldn’t pronounce his name. As a teen, he laughed when his mother mistook the term “co-worker” for “co-walker,” and as an adult on his wedding day, he complained to her about wearing the traditional Vietnamese attire for the groom.

Lisa tells GB how her French birth mother abandoned Manny and her—and how much Dzung Chung supported them as their stepmother. GB and Lisa acknowledge their father’s selfishness, and when GB complains about his lack of support for GB’s art career, Lisa admonishes him and tells him he has it easy. Lisa and Manny had to pay for their own college, and their father physically abused Manny just as often as Tri Huu’s own mother, Le Nhi, abused him.

Lisa and GB reunite with their family at the hospital, and Dzung Chung is disappointed to hear that the two siblings rarely see each other despite both living in New York. When GB retorts that his father has no contact with his own father, Dzung Chung corrects him and says that Huu Nghiep tried multiple times to contact Tri Huu after the war, but he never replied to his father’s letters. During those years, both of GB’s parents were too preoccupied with adjusting to their new lives in South Carolina and the difficulties of assimilation. A series of single panels depicts Tri Huu speechless when he’s told that South Carolina is just like Vietnam, Dzung Chung failing her driver’s test, Le Nhi’s encounter with a local who doesn’t know what croissants are, and Lisa being dropped several grades lower because of her level of English.

In a double-page spread, GB illustrates a Scrabble board with tiles that quote his mother: “In a foreign culture threatening our own” (108-09). Panels that depict the Tran family’s early experiences as refugees compose the boardgame’s background. The images include scenes of the family sleeping together on the floor of a room, encountering racist epithets, using food stamps, and shopping for secondhand goods. Additional illustrations depict cultural conflicts between the parents’ and children’s generations, such as the siblings playing video games, listening to Blondie, and eating food from McDonald’s under Tri Huu’s disapproving gaze.

Back at the hospital, Manny comments that second-generation Vietnamese Americans struggle with their “double lives” (110) between American and Vietnamese cultures. Lisa and Manny feel that despite his faults, Tri Huu tried his best to fulfill his role as a father in an entirely new country. As for their French mother, Lisa and Manny nonchalantly accept the fact that parents commonly abandoned their children during wartime. In the final scenes of this section, GB recalls his grandmother’s suggestion that he ask his parents about their lives in Vietnam while they’re still alive. Le Nhi’s advice alternates with panels of her on her deathbed at the hospital and Tri Huu holding her hand as she passes away.

Dzung Chung resumes her narrative of the past by describing how she and Tri Huu first met. Tri Huu took a teaching position in Vung Tau and commuted from Saigon. The distance strained his already-troubled marriage, as each partner refused to change for the other. His French wife left him and their two children, and Tri Huu moved from Saigon and settled in Vung Tau. In addition to his teaching job, he painted and gave Americans language lessons in French and Vietnamese. Do and his wife moved to the beach town too, and they helped Tri Huu raise his children. An American friend named Leonard took Tri Huu to Saigon to check in on his mother and half-brother. During his visit, Tri Huu learned that his half-brother, Thanh, accepted an offer to study in France, leaving Le Nhi under Tri Huu’s care.

Dzung Chung’s family migrated from Lang Son to Vung Tau, where she attended the school where Tri Huu taught. The two fell in love and married. Dzung Chung’s mother, Thi Mot, was hesitant about their union because of Tri Huu’s two children from his previous marriage. However, she gradually accepted their relationship and gave her blessing, whereas Le Nhi didn’t even attend their wedding. The section ends with a collage of actual photographs of Dzung Chung and Tri Huu in their youth.