My father sent the recordings by email. He gave me no heads-up — a Dropbox folder of MP3s arrived in my inbox without explanation, and I mostly wondered who taught him how to use cloud storage. I opened “Nguyen Family Oral History” and discovered audio files neatly labeled with the names of my uncles and aunt. My dad had interviewed his siblings — who are all now in their 50s and 60s — about their life in Vietnam, and what it was like to flee the country when they were children.
He started the project around the time his mother, Bà Nội, became sick. She had written down her story by hand in Vietnamese, then my father typed it up in English and emailed it to the rest of the family, attached as “MyStory.pdf.” It was a detailed but restrained account of her life — losing her mother as a teenager, surviving the bubonic plague, living through the fall of French colonialism, the American war and the rise of Communism — an incredible saga, chronicled with the unsentimental distance of a Wikipedia entry.
After she passed, my father felt an urge to preserve more of our family’s history. Because he left Vietnam before his siblings did, he knew only the rough sketches of their journeys to the United States. My family is not big on heirlooms, as anything material that could have been passed down was abandoned when they fled 50 years ago, but at least my father could keep an archive of our stories. There had been very few reasons to revisit these memories. This project, he thought, could give him one.
My family tended to recount its history only in broad strokes. Everyone left Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, in April 1975, except my father, who acquired a visa to the United States for a college education in 1974. (“The University of Chicago,” he’ll tell anyone who asks.) The rest of the family’s voyage was more arduous, though I had only heard about their stories secondhand.
To my father’s surprise, the experience of interviewing his brothers and sister opened up a new kind of conversation. In the recordings, formality made space for his siblings to tell their stories in detail, from beginning to end. For the first time I heard them tell their stories in the first person: My grandmother, aunt and youngest uncle set out on a boat the size of a twin bed and were picked up by a U.S. Navy vessel, only to end up at a refugee camp in Indonesia for an entire year before arriving in America; another uncle had to fake documentation claiming he was a Chinese boy, which allowed him to board a boat that was later attacked by Malaysian pirates.
I was impressed that my father put this project together with such care, resurfacing stories my family had long repressed. I was also dumbfounded that he somehow had zero follow-up questions when my uncle said he was “attacked by Malaysian pirates.” The interviews are filled with moments like this, when my father deliberately turns away from a difficult or emotional revelation. He has other limits as an interviewer too: His line of questioning often confuses the chronology of the story; the sound of his phone ringing in the background intrudes; and any time an aunt or uncle gets emotional, my father simply moves on to the next question.
One moment in an interview with an uncle stunned me: My father began to discuss the passing of his father, Ông Nội, who was incarcerated for being a dissident just after the North Vietnamese took power. He eventually died in jail. Ông Nội was targeted by the new regime for his anti-Communist stances, and his stubborn bravery meant remaining in Vietnam after his wife and children fled.
This, my uncle corrected him, was not entirely true. Ông Nội stayed behind because it was easier to coordinate the escape of the rest of his family. And while he was briefly in jail, he actually died much later from complications following an asthma attack. In fact, my grandfather spent a lot of his family-less days watching soccer and enjoying himself.
“So why do I think that he died in jail?” my father asks on the recording. My uncle doesn’t have an answer to that.
In the audio, my dad is often corrected by his siblings. This doesn’t seem to bother him; he almost delights in the inconsistencies. “That’s kind of the beauty of it,” he told me, comparing the stories to the Rashomon effect. “I think you want to have an emotional history, as opposed to, you know, a factual history.”
I craved more clarity than that. I asked about the journey of one of my uncles who left Vietnam and landed in the Philippines, before bopping around California, Massachusetts and Indiana, the order of which hadn’t been very apparent from the recording. My dad eventually sent me a two-part text message with a timeline of my uncle’s journey to the States. “That is the real story!” he said.
But the narrative corrections felt hollow. I understood what my father was trying to say about emotional histories. As he later suggested, perhaps he wanted to make the relationship between the Communists’ treatment of his father and his eventual passing as direct as possible. That truth is more complicated than a precise sequence of events. Memory is not just about what you can recall but the things you try not to forget. If memories shape our personalities, beliefs and principles, my dad was not about to delve deeper, push, demand that his family further expose uncomfortable experiences or fill every gap in their history. The most meaningful part of his recordings, to me, is the effort — the decision that he should pass something down, and that maybe his children could take a lesson from it.
The post How Interviewing Your Own Family Can Change Your Life appeared first on New York Times.
