The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,126

to agree to the marriage. They said that given my father’s family’s reputation and wealth, my mother might not get a better offer, that marrying well was her single greatest duty to her parents and younger siblings. She agreed, and thus began a brief courtship that had to be organized around the war. My father had been drafted, but my grandmother had bribed enough people to ensure that he would serve as a captain’s driver and not fight on the front lines. When he wasn’t on duty, he would ride his motorcycle to visit my mother on Saturdays in Hoi An, a two-hour trip that he had to wait to embark on until late morning to ensure that the American and South Vietnamese forces had sufficient time to clear the roads of any land mines that might have been planted overnight by the Vietcong.

My parents married on the sixth day of the eleventh month of the lunar calendar in the Year of the Monkey, also known as Christmas Day 1968. It was chosen because the people who knew such things said it was an auspicious day, a day that portended good fortune and many blessings. They married in Da Nang, with my mother and her family and friends traveling there several days beforehand and staying at a hotel to ensure that the trouble and inconvenience of war—torn-up roads and unexpected skirmishes—would not interrupt the festivities.

When I ask my mother if she loved my father when she married him, she says no; she says that she grew to love him over the years. Theirs was also a love born of familiarity, habit, obligation; a love born of surviving a war, Communism, and emigration together. Growing up, I didn’t see the love. Mostly, I saw lots of fighting, primarily my dad yelling at my mom, to the point where I thought he was verbally abusive. Maybe his anger came from the stresses of resettling in a new country, where he was nothing when he had once been something. Things got better through the years, as my father mellowed with age, as my mother grew more confident in this new country and learned to fight back. Nonetheless, I swore that I never wanted that kind of marriage, and certainly not that kind of love.

It didn’t seem like my father wanted love for me at all. I once asked him when I was in high school, even as my many Asian friends were sneaking around dating behind their parents’ backs, when I could have a boyfriend. He said not until I had graduated college, that all that “boyfriend-girlfriend nonsense” was a distraction from school and that he wouldn’t permit such indecency. I remember when we dropped my sister off at Berkeley for her freshman year, as we drove around campus my father would point to the girls wearing skimpy tank tops and makeup, and he’d say with the utmost derision, “Look at those slutty girls.” I was just entering eighth grade, but the message was loud and clear. My father wanted me to not be one of those slutty girls. No boyfriends. I had to focus on academic excellence. Since I couldn’t drive because of my vision issues, my father always dreamed of becoming my driver one day. He had it all planned out; I could get him a cellphone and buy him a car, and whenever I needed a ride, all I had to do was call him and he would come pick me up and take me wherever I needed to go. My father had endless patience when it came to driving, and driving me in particular. There was never mention of a husband or children in his dream scenario. I vaguely wondered if my father would drive me on dates and evenings out with my friends (for which, horror of horrors, I might dress like a slut).

It wasn’t until much later that I realized why there was never mention of a husband or children for me, why my father always stressed education (more with me than with my siblings) and therefore financial independence. It all made sense after my mother told me about my grandmother’s failed attempt to have me killed at two months of age, and my parents’ complicity in that attempt. Back then, in Vietnam, they were simply trying to save me from a life of miserable blindness, unmarriageability, and childlessness. After all, a girl’s worth rested solely on her ability to get married and have children.