Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

The Unlikelihood of Fathers

158 The Unlikelihood of Fathers It was an improbable start to be born American in a French clinic in Saigon, Vietnam, on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, at the start of the Vietnam War. My mother said the Vietnamese nurses at my delivery giggled furiously. My dad was on faculty at Southern Illinois University’s Vocational Technical Institute, which at the start of the 1960s sent a team to Vietnam with the Agency for International Development, or usaid. In Saigon, he was assigned to Phu Tho National Institute of Technology and flew by fourperson Pipers to towns in the Mekong Delta to help small industry. Our family lived in a compound built, owned, and operated by the U.S. embassy. It was a neocolonial life. Diplomatic staff, foreign contractors, aid workers, and military families lived in spacious stilt-houses with big backyards. There was no rent. We had a maid who also cooked meals and cared for me, a gardener, and a driver we shared with other residents. My pigtailed sister kept a pet monkey and rode to school in a bus with grenade screens over the windows. My mother was one of many foreigners in Saigon teaching English, the new language of ambition in the buildup, and she loved Vietnam and its people all her life. But the American War, as the Vietnamese called it, was growing, and her marriage was embattled. The November that both President Kennedy and South Vietnam’s President Diem were murdered, we flew home as a family on leave. We were supposed to be going back when things settled down. But shortly after the flight landed in southern Illinois, my dad went one way and we went the other. Due to the war and the unlikelihood of fathers 159 subsequent embargo between both countries and spouses, for thirty years I would need more than a passport to see either Vietnam or my father again. r Boys who grow up fatherless ask endlessly, hopelessly, listlessly,“What is a father?”, fearful of the answers,and unaware they’re actually asking,“What does it mean to be a man?”For their troubles,they get castoff bits and dead pieces of fatherhood from other families and unchilded men, offered with the best intentions. The boys pat these together into golem-fathers that strut around grotesquely in war medals, clenching bubble pipes in their teeth and telling ridiculous tales. When I was growing up, my father was little more than a Kodachrome ghost in a brown paper sack.On his first military id,he looked like a young hell-raiser, crazy-intelligent-mean, if you wanted to see that. Maybe he was the Devil, as my mother said. But why then, in another photo, was the Devil an affable middle-aged man in a guayabera, sitting on a tropical lawn with a monkey on his back? If you’re a little devil yourself, you insist on knowing how these things go. When I was seven, they told us he’d been posted to Afghanistan, so I imagined him, oh, gazing up the Khyber Pass and drinking cups of tea. I couldn’t imagine why he’d abandoned his infant son. When they said a few years later he’d moved to Indonesia, I searched books for the tin mines where he was said to advise. Meanwhile I studied other fathers: a lawyer, a state trooper, engineers, miners,a restaurateur,a factory worker with the brimstone hair and hillbilly eyes of Jerry Lee Lewis. I wondered what they meant. What did they signify ? Was it responsibility? Caring? Hard labor? Big plans? What about the wild dumbasses like my cousin Billy Joe, who won his friend’s glass eye in a poker game then shot him in the ass when he tried to take it back? What about the drill sergeants, the professors, the corporate bosses? Was the meaning of a father aggression, willfulness, knowingness, compassion ? The possibilities hung like haze, and I thought maybe we should choose our fathers in dialectic pairs just to ensure balance: God and Devil; Tolstoy and Chekhov; John Lennon and Paul McCartney. 160 the unlikelihood of fathers In the end I had many ersatz or partial fathers. My uncle Carl, a lawyer and former state’s attorney, lived in town. He’d had my father put in jail overnight for trying to leave the area, and Carl used his political connections to try...