To the Child Who Left a Letter at the Việt Nam Veterans Memorial
During my first visit to the United States in June 2007, I stood outside the Việt Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., refusing to enter. I didn’t know you had just been there. As visitors streamed past me, I stayed frozen, thinking: If I go in, I would betray more than three million fellow Vietnamese who died in the American war in Việt Nam. If I go in, I would be honoring the soldiers who contributed, regardless of how slightly, to those deaths. My mind kept returning to the innocent faces of the children I had just visited at Hòa Bình village back home in Việt Nam. Victims of Agent Orange, a chemical sprayed by American airplanes during the war, these children were deformed. Some had gigantic heads, others were without limbs, most were unable to speak.
My husband emerged among the crowd of strangers. At my insistence, he’d had to go inside alone. And now he took my hand. He quietly told me that if I didn’t see the memorial, I would regret it. He gently pulled me along and as I walked inside, I was struck by how black and massive the memorial wall was, with its rows and rows of names, which seemed to stretch until eternity. Visitors stood, their heads bent, some clutching flowers against their chests. The sight should have moved me, but instead I felt a fury coursing through my blood. “There is no single wall which can bear the names of all the Vietnamese dead,” I thought to myself. “Are there enough flowers for the hundreds of thousands still missing? And how about the many innocent Cambodians and Laotians who also perished in the war?”
The memorial’s marble surface was shiny, and among the delicately carved names, I saw my mother’s face. She was trembling, just like that day many years ago when she told me how she had thrown herself into a ditch while thundering American B-52 airplanes dropped their bombs onto the village road on which she was traveling. It was on the same road that my father had held the torn, bloody body of his best friend, howling: Moments before death hit, they had been cycling together to a local school where they worked as teachers.
“The memorial’s marble surface was shiny, and among the delicately carved names, I saw my mother’s face.”
My parents never came face-to-face with American soldiers, but they associated them with the American bombers that roamed the sky of their village, dropping death onto innocent people, homes, and schools. They were terrified of American soldiers, and I was, too. When I was growing up in my parents’ village in North Việt Nam, and later, in Bạc Liêu—a rural town that dangles on Việt Nam’s southern tip—sometimes I would dream that our home was being attacked by American soldiers. Such soldiers seemed to have jumped straight out of my textbooks and surrounding propaganda posters: Gigantic and hairy, they were monster-like. They killed and burned and raped.
Around me, in Washington D.C, sunset was falling. Its light blanketed the memorial wall with a blood-like red glow. I stepped away. I needed to escape the war and the memories associated with it. But suddenly my eyes caught sight of something fluttering at the wall’s foot, next to a single red rose. A letter. Blue handwriting on a white sheet of paper.
Your letter.
From where I stood, I could see the word “Dad!”
Everything became silent. There was no longer the wind rustling against surrounding trees; no whispers or footsteps. I recalled how my friend Trung has written countless letters to his missing soldier father. Trung always carried his handwritten words in a backpack as he crossed jungles and mountains to search for his father’s remains. It was his mother’s last wish that they find his father and bring him home.
I knelt onto the American soil. I picked up your letter.
“Dad! Today is my daughter’s birthday,” your words said. “I wish you were here to blow out the birthday candles with her. There isn’t a day that goes by without me thinking about you. Why, Dad? Why did you have to go to Việt Nam? Why did you have to die?”
My tears came, hot and unstoppable, as if I had buried them too long, deep inside my bones. I had not thought much about the families that American soldiers had left behind when they went to fight a distant war in my country. Families that had waited for their return, like my mother had waited for the return of her eldest brother.
I stared at your name. A man’s name. I imagined you to be a few years older than me. That you had had to live for more than thirty years by then without your dad. That your children never got to meet your father, never got to play with him like my children can with mine. I imagined you blowing out the birthday candles with your daughter, wishing for your father’s presence, wishing there had never been a war that took him away from your family.
Looking up at the wall, I studied the names of American men and women. They must have died young, as young as my mother’s brother, Uncle Hải, was when he joined the Northern Vietnamese (NVA) to fight against them. My uncle was lucky to have come home when the war ended, but he often sat in silence, his eyes fixed at the door. He never spoke about the things he had experienced. Until the day of his death, he was a sad man, and I regret not being able to help him. I was afraid that by asking questions, I would only make him more miserable.
As I re-read your letter, as well as other letters left at the foot of the wall, I realized that families in America had waited for their fathers, sons, and daughters just the way my own family had waited for my uncle. In my teenage years growing up in South Việt Nam, I saw the same type of longing in the faces of those who yearned for the return of family members—soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Việt Nam (ARVN)—who had fought alongside American soldiers, who were either missing or had been put into reeducation camps after the war by the winning regime. Once, on my way to school, I saw a commotion around a tree, and looked up to see the dangling, lifeless body of an elderly woman. She had committed suicide after waiting more than eleven years for her two sons, who never came back from the war. I knew this woman: My mother had often bought boiled sweet potatoes and maniocs from her, which she carried in a bamboo basket, walking the streets of our small town.
Your letter made me realize that instead of trying to flee from the war’s memories and repressing them, I had to confront them and acknowledge how they had shaped me as a person. More importantly, I needed to acknowledge the humanity of all sides: Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese.
“More importantly, I needed to acknowledge the humanity of all sides: Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese.”
Returning home to Việt Nam after that U.S. trip, I started to read literature written by American veterans such as Larry Heinemann, Bruce Weigl, and Yusef Komunyakaa. The honesty, sorrow, humanity, and regret in their works compelled me to translate some of them into Vietnamese. I organized readings and events in Việt Nam, featuring Vietnamese and American veterans. During these events, we often recited the words of the Vietnamese veteran poet Nguyễn Duy: “Nói cho cùng trong mỗi cuộc chiến tranh / Phe nào thắng thì nhân dân đều bại” —“In the end of each and every war / Whoever wins, the people always lose.”
In reading about the soldiers I once considered my enemy, I came to accept that I had rejected my own family history: One of my uncles (my father’s cousin) fought for the ARVN, alongside the Americans. For many years, I was told he was a traitor. It took me many more years to be able to visit his house on the outskirts of Sài Gòn. It was a small house surrounded by mango trees, their flowers like bursting stars. Inside, the uncle I had never met was smiling down at me from the family altar set up by my aunt. He looked so young, as young as my eldest brother, and just as gentle. He was a dedicated Catholic, the only son of his parents. He was killed in action at 23 years old, while my aunt was pregnant with their first daughter. From my aunt’s stories, I learned he was an avid reader who often sang songs to her and took her dancing. My aunt’s love still burned strong for him, and she never remarried. His daughter—my cousin—told me she wished her father had been there in her childhood, to lead her into church when she got married, to hold her children in his arms.
In talking to my cousin, I recalled your letter. Your pain. I wish I could meet you and tell you how sorry I am for your loss.
In the 18 years since I encountered your letter, I regret that I don’t remember your name. That I didn’t take a picture of your letter. That I didn’t write something and leave it next to your words at the foot of the black wall, for perhaps you could have returned and seen my words. I regret the fact that I have silently searched for you, yet you don’t even know.
This April 2025, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the American War in Việt Nam, I am going to return to Washington D.C.. In my new poetry collection, The Color of Peace, there is a poem entitled “Việt Nam Veterans Memorial”, which I wrote about my encounter with your letter. The poem bears your words, and my hope is that it will reach you, together with this letter. In my most beautiful dream, I will meet you at the foot of the black wall. We will exchange a handshake, or even a hug. I will tell you that if you decided to come to Việt Nam to find answers and healing, I will be your personal guide and interpreter.
There is a chance I will never find you, but I know we are bound to each other by the deep wounds that still cut into our two countries and our families.
About the Author
Born and raised in Việt Nam, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai was awarded Runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the first and only U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace. Her thirteen books, which include the novels The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, and the poetry collection The Color of Peace, vividly documents Vietnamese history as well as Việt Nam as a country with more than 4,000 years of history and culture. Her writing has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and has received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the International Book Award, the BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction. She is the Peace Ambassador for PeaceTrees Việt Nam, an organization which removes unexploded bombs in Việt Nam as well as an ambassador for Room to Read, an organisation that provides free libraries in remote areas. She has a PhD in creative writing. For more information: www.nguyenphanquemai.com
Read Quế Mai’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
Header photo by Ian Hutchinson.
