Over dinner last night Isabelle shared with me a piece of her writing on the nature of time for her AP English class. It was funny hopeful and forward looking. My immediate reaction was typical of a father in an AI-induced time, Isabelle pls tell me that Chat GPT did not write that. No daddy. She showed me her other writings and vigorously explained the class writing process to ensure no computer would be involved. I breathed the sound of relief and happy that my daughter had produced an original thought of her own. But then that changed to feelings of embarrassment due to my own self absorption of the past week of being away which I rarely do during the entire 15 years of raising her to my feeling of inadequacy of being a distracted father who had failed to see the growth of his daughter in front of his own eyes. This is the first time since she started 9th grade that she had shared any of her writing to me. Han and I always wondered incredulously of how she would be getting As' in her English writing class so far this year when we hardly saw her reading in front of us and constantly absorbed in her ipad watching something or another with the foulest language over my meek objection.
Yes I have been absorbed this past week with my own trip back to Boston for a friend's wedding, and then to Cape Cod, Manhattan and Brooklyn. My first trip back to the East Coast since landed in San Diego last June. It has been many many years that I have been back and finally was able to catch up w friends from my Amherst and New York days after decades being away. It was an important trip in so many ways because first and foremost it assured me that I was not leaving anything behind but is starting something new and this is a continuum of a journey that had started many many years ago. I explained to Isabelle that family does not usually just pick up and leave their friends to settle on the other side of the country. in her mind it was a huge disruption of the past year of moving and adjusting to a new environment, new school, new friends and routines. In my mind I am now back to the more familiar routines of moving and adjusting that i had been doing for the majority of my life since leaving VietNam. I have come to realize that there is a difference between moving willingly vs moving unwillingly.
Saigon April 29th 1975, Time started for me at 3pm when I first climbed on to the ship Anh Tuan and saw that I was about to share the pending journey w one thousand people from families like my father and I waiting anxiously to leave a panicking city. My father had promised me that there would be only a handful of families and I had pictured idyllically playing badminton (my favorite sport at the time) on the ship. With every inches of the ship covered by desperate and worrying faces the age of my innocence was slowly replaced by a new reality that was once a nightmare waking me up one night that the only city I knew was now covered entirely by the yellow star on red flags. A normal reaction for a child who was about to see the approaching dread that would soon to dominate the rest of his life would be to close his eyes and wish for the next instant of when it would be over. He would soon learn that Time always passes and the horrible would then become tolerable and the tolerable would then become manageable and eventually be livable. Nothing would be forever and time would always be marching forward. But the memory within a child would last forever as it becomes an imprint into adult life as part of the pattern for life's survival tool kit. I am happy that Isabelle's relationship with time will be different than mine as well as countless of children today who are currently experiencing wars and involuntary migration tragedies.