Prodigal
I want to write a post that lets me accomplish two things. The first is to put up a photograph from when I was in the Navy, that I scanned last year but never used. It is a picture of a second larger refugee boat that the USS Ranger (CV-61) encountered the year I was on the ship. I had posted a picture of another boat at the time of a previous post. That scan simply came out better. Another picture of that same craft was used in the Ranger's cruise book for that year (these are Navy versions of a high school yearbook) - a brief check of WorldCat reveals no catalog record for that book, although three other USS Ranger Westpac cruise books have managed to get cataloged 1964, 1982,
1987). This also allows me to continue telling stories belonging to other people.
A boat of Vietnamese refugees encountered by the USS Ranger during the 1979 westpac. Picture would have been taken from one of HS-4's helicopters
In exception to liturgical order I have a prodigal son story. Normally these are stories that get told the third Sunday after Ash Wednesday. The Parable (Luke 15:11-32) illustrates point of inclusiveness and acceptance against several varieties of pride: Parable of the Prodigal Son - Wikipedia .
My friend Tran shared this following story with me last week: A few years ago one of her brothers, one of three brothers and also three sisters she has, is married and in medical school. At Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Money becomes tight and the family contributes some funds, and along with it perhaps some judgement. This situation continues and intensifies. Eventually the brother breaks off contact with the family, and leaves the area. They do not hear from him for several years. Now after five years he shows up the week before Christmas. In the uniform of an United States Navy Ensign, with oak leaf insignia. He had signed with the Navy to pay for and finish medical school, and was stopping by on his way to his first duty station, which she told me was in San Diego. Tran's father was very proud of his son, following in his footsteps. The Father's career in Vietnam had been in a medical practitioner/pharmacist catagory. The moment probably was of most importance to him. But Tran was also affected in an singularly intense way. She knew the thread of the story that drew from her brother going into the US Navy would appeal to me, as it did. She also gradually wound the story around to greater length to explain the special appeal to her.
I knew that there had been a point in her life when she and her whole family had been imprisoned. I had mistakenly placed this period immediately after the fall of Saigon when she was still very young. This period; though, her father imprisoned as an accomplice of the enemy (the U.S.), is when Tran, her mother and siblings were sent to the rice farm in her mother's home town in the Mekong Delta. The period of her imprisonment was actually when she was around ten. This was in response to family's attempt to escape by boat which ended when they were captured by the Vietnamese coastal patrol set up to prevent citizens from steering a course away from the paradise of the proletariat. This inprisonment lasted some months to half a year. After the family is released two older brothers leave on another attempt and successfully make it to Thailand by boat. Two other brothers, one only age twelve - just a year older than Tran, try to follow the same way a while later. But they are never heard from again. The family is finally allowed to emigrate from Vietnam in 1995, when diplomatic relations with the United States are restored. They resettle in the US becoming naturalized citizens. Tran had the feeling that she had told me more of this story, from the period of stories and their sense of loss before, when she hadn't. There had been times when she seemed to have more to say, but never said it. Knowing only a little, I set this down to ingrained response to a life as an outsider, suspected and watched even in ones homeland. Of keeping deep and sad memories at bay. I think, also, that this was a Vietnamese story, existing to her in only the Vietnamese language. Never recast into the harsh unfeeling english language, never rendered down to uncomprehending American experience. With no easy shared referent, or partially disassociated marker to be pointed to. No handfull of simple words that could be spoken softly, to cover a larger reality. Much would have to be said, and even more explained. All to the dubious value of such effort. I acknowledge my inability to follow the true weight of this. As a small point of connection I am aware that the South China Sea that US Navy placed me in for a while many years ago, is the same dangerous sea that her family set out in repeatedly to find freedom. My enduring memory of it for years was looking out over the eastern ocean from the the top of Victoria Peak in Hong Kong; with only the sense of youthful aesthetic adventure within me. Now, through knowing her, it becomes a signifier of a more complex reality which coexists with every perspective and every moment. In this play of sibling character, I see challenges and response occurring among the personalities of a single family. The struggle to avoid the trap of an incomplete break with the old. The importance of the returned brother who went away, but came back.
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