(Helpful hint for future English learners: you can’t just look up the definitions of net and pay and put them together.) As he signed checks, he carefully wrote his name the American way. A secondhand scarlet dictionary lay on the table next to him, thudding open as he consulted it for vocabulary that he didn’t understand in the rustling white of bills and checks.

Scratching out a list of how much each paycheck was, how much they needed for bills, and what they could afford to send to my grandparents-his parents-still in Sài Gòn. We can’t afford that.” He meant the last part. “Don’t hang from the horse-you’ll knock it over again and get hurt. My father admonished me in Vietnamese, the lingua franca chéz nous. “No, I mean: What is my name in English?” I was hanging upside down from the rocking horse. My father shuffled some papers and was scribbling items into a ledger when I asked him. I answered to all these monikers as my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents summoned me, upbraided me, teased me.Ĭon. My family, as with all Vietnamese households, wielded a series of pronouns, nicknames, and endearments for me in addition to my given name, Phúc. I didn’t know which name to tell the boy. I didn’t know how to answer the most basic playground question: What’s your name? It wasn’t rocket science, but I answered it like the alien I was: “I’m not sure.” My father sat at the table, my mother bustled over the stove, and I was saddled upon my rocking horse, corralled in the corner of our eat-in kitchen.įour years old, I was pondering a playground encounter with a freckly blond boy who had asked me my name, and I didn’t know what to say. The Bee Gees’s “Stayin’ Alive,” with Barry Gibb’s siren falsetto, cut a suave silhouette from the radio’s single speaker, the accidental theme song for the Tr?n family.

Sigh gone phuc tran