I don’t remember the landing. It’s been a very long flight. Nor do I remember walking through the airport. We have no luggage anyway — like, none.
My first memory of America is sitting in the back seat of TuAnh’s uncle’s car — an Oldsmobile wagon with wood panel trim. I’m almost eleven and a half years old, and this is only the second time I’ve ever been in a car-car. It’s so smooth, not like a van or a bus, and you’re not squished between strangers. The Oldsmobile is taking us straight home, no twenty stops like that awful last bus ride from Saigon to Mũi Né.
Home is in St. Cloud. I don’t yet know how far that is from Minneapolis. It’s midnight-dark outside, but I’m wide-eyed, taking in the passing landscape. I’m tired but I want the ride to last — I feel like I belong to a rich family that owns a car.
TuAnh is my oldest brother’s wife. She’s the prettiest lady. The uncle's family will share their home with us — and “us” is six people. The uncle and aunt have six kids of their own. That makes 14 people in one house. (It’s only now I stop to realize that number. In Vietnam, if there’s still floor space to sleep on, then another kid will be born. When my mother comes to America, she thinks it’s a damn shame to use a garage for cars. A family of eight could live comfortably in a 2-car garage.)
The aunt has chicken phở already made. It’s the first time I’ve had the chicken version. She says the mint is from her garden. You’re supposed to eat phở with basil, but nobody cares — there’s mint in St. Cloud!
I watch the news with the uncle. I don’t understand a word, but I like seeing white people’s faces and listening to how fast they talk. The best part? There’s always something on TV. There’s no curfew. I fall in love with The Price is Right and Happy Days. You don’t need much English to watch The Price — numbers look the same in English and Vietnamese, even if Americans insist on putting the dollar sign in front instead of behind. ($50 instead of 50$ — pick a side, people.)
I like Happy Days because it has cute boys — Chachi and Fonzie. My family starts calling me Fawnzie. My name morphs from Phương to Fawn to Fawnzie. More recently, my son Gabriel, sensing I was stressed in conversation, said, “Mom, I need you to be Fawnzie right now.” And I knew exactly what he meant.
English class is the hardest. Every word has too many letters. While waiting in the school office for the uncle to enroll me, I learn the spelling of the phrase people say when they’re being polite: THANK YOU. I don’t get it. I never heard the YOU part. I thought it was one word, THENGKEW. Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. It’s Việt Nam, not Vietnam. It’s Sài Gòn, not Saigon. Even Nguyễn — arguably the longest Vietnamese word — is just one syllable. So no, it’s not Noo-yen.
I spend hours breaking up words just to remember them. I memorize BECAUSE as BE-CAU-SE. I’m a mute in all my classes except ESL with Mrs. Schnettler. And eventually — long eventually — I wake up one morning and realize my thoughts are in English. Someone flipped the switch in my brain. Except now it only flips one way. I can’t flip it back.
I spend the first eleven years of my life seeing only brown eyes. So it’s fascinating to see other colors — green, blue. Even weirder is when siblings have different eye colors. Weirdest is that a blue-eyed person sees the same red apple as a brown-eyed person. Speaking of eyes, Graham Smith has only one good one — brown. He’s the one who yells at me to go back to Vietnam. The uncle’s daughter translates for me. I want to punch him in the face and knock his eyeball out, but then he’d be blind.
My sister Kimzie is three years older, so now we’re 12 and 15. (Her name went from Nga to Kim to Kimzie. She claims she wanted to go from three letters to three letters, no more. I still think it’s dumb. At least Phương and Fawn start with the same sound.) We know exactly two lines from Peter McCann’s song “Do You Wanna Make Love,” and we sing them constantly:
Do you want to make love… Or do you just want to fool around…
One day, my brother’s friend asks him if we know what “make love” means. We shake our heads and keep singing.
The six of us eventually move into our own house. A big white one with a big yard and a porch. In winter, snow piles as high as the single detached garage. I make Jell-O by leaving it outside for 30 minutes. I remember the few bitter days when we run out of heating oil. I learn to ride my bike around the block that summer. A friend is surprised I didn’t know how to ride a bike until I was 13. I told her it was kinda hard to learn when I didn’t own a bike growing up. Same reason I didn’t know how to swim — not great when you live in the “land of 10,000 lakes.”
I get to visit St. Cloud this August. It’ll be my first time back since I left in 1979. I’ll be facilitating a full-day workshop, and St. Cloud will be just 70 miles away.
I’m flushed with nostalgia and gratitude — going back to my first home in America.