Keep the Car Running

This is the eulogy I delivered for my father who passed away April 3, 2014. 

Thank you for being with us. Thank you to the church, Father Tuan, my family, my extended family whom I love very much, and to all my "extended-extended family" that is the Vietnamese community, the Bacs and Chus, the Cos who have watched me grow up. Some of you have traveled great distances to say goodbye and it's incredibly appreciated. He would have liked this. Many of you have known my dad throughout his life, his youth, his student activist years in Viet-Nam, his work as a journalist. And many of you have been right beside us in these past few years when things got really tough. I am not a practicing Catholic anymore but I believe there are angels in this world and my parents are fortunate to call many of them friends.

In writing this, I had to recall my Bo before he got ill. And the thing I kept remembering was hard he worked. Like so many people in here, he had just lost his country. Heck, the man was shot for it. The life he had worked so hard and prepared for was gone. But he didn't let that stop him from doing everything necessary so his kids didn't have to struggle like he did. He pumped gas, hustled his way into an engineer position at D.C. hotels and banks long before he got to Radio Free Asia.

He would come home, tired and sweaty from his day job in D.C. and after an hour of checking in with us kids, he'd plow straight into his second job, his real job:  Dien Dan Tu Do. This was his lifeblood and it was all consuming. He'd stay up late into the night. I could hear his typing from my room. I was the lucky one who got to work alongside him when we distributed the papers. Headlong into rush hour we'd go. 25 papers to Maxim, 20 papers to Queen Bee. I'd hop out and hustle the paper bundles to each store. The payoff was Bo Toai always finished the delivery route at Pho 75, right before closing time. Those nights were great. Just me and Bo Toai and awesome soup. I miss those father-son nights. I miss those ink-stained fingers. I miss hearing him work at night.

Now it wasn't always sunshine and roses. Having an overworking father meant he had a ridiculous standard for his kids. You couldn't beg or wish for something. You had to earn it. But look at what it did for us. Binh, his baby boy, his best friend, started booking his own rock shows and recording his own music at 14. His only daughter, Bi, not only put herself through grad school at the Actor's Studio in New York, but has become quite a popular actress on Philadelphia's stages. And his eldest works at one of the nation's most important classical theaters. While I know Bo Toai would have loved for us to be doctors or lawyers, for us to be Republicans instead of liberal Democrats -- I know he's proud of us. And of course he was. He worked to get us here. For someone who was very old-school Vietnamese, he was very American.

And don't get me wrong. Bo Toai loved to have a good time, too. We have all had the pleasure of sharing a drink with Bo Toai at some point during his life. He was always ready for a party and loathed turning down an invitation. I remember him having friends over to the house often and laughing --- big, loud, healthy laughs into the night. On Tet, I loved watching him play cards. He loved bluffing. And if you haven't danced the twist with him at a wedding then you missed out. There were some weekdays he'd surprise us with a trip to the movies. He'd just come in the door and tell us to pick a movie from the Style section of the Post and out we'd go. Or we'd go meet up with his friends at Pho Xe Lua and I'd nurse a ca phe sua da (Vietnamese iced coffee) for two hours while he talked up politics. And that's the thing -- Bo Toai didn't separate work from family. It was just one big life. He made sure we all had family dinner together and that he attended all of our important events: first holy communion, high school plays, concerts and graduations. He even attended Binh's rock shows --- all the way until he got too sick to drive. He was a huge fan.

When Bo Toai got sick, life as we knew it changed. Suddenly there was a new normal filled with hospital visits and a lot of sleepless nights. It was very hard to watch him get weaker with every trip to the ER, to dialysis. He was such a strong man whose stamina knew no limits. There were a lot of worried friends. A lot of me calling out of work to be with him at the hospital. Every trip to the beach, every holiday seemed like it'd be the last. But within this new normal, he didn't have to work so hard anymore so he got to rediscover people and their relationships with him. He got into painting. We went out to California to see his old friends there. He tried foods he never had before. Because of his illness, Kat and I moved closer to home and got to spend more time with him. He met his grand kids, Henry and Lucy. We made sure to gather for holiday dinners where Bi would come down and he'd utter an ecstatic, "con gia!" He'd eat and praise the cooking, laugh and play with his grand kids. Him getting ill was terrible, but it pulled us closer as a family. But what I've loved watching the most was how he fell in love again with Me Lan. It should be noted that I've come to admire my mom incredibly these past few years. She possesses incredible strength, resilience and patience. It wasn't easy. But I have never seen the two of them as happy as I have seen them these past nine years. They dated more, talked more. It seemed like he was finally able to relax, stop struggling and take in how rich his life was.

When I was my son's age, I would wait up for Bo Toai to come home from the late shift. Me Lan would leave his dinner out on the kitchen table and we'd wait for him together. I'd rush to the door when I heard the jingle of his keys and then sit and watch him eat. As he packed his pipe with Borkum Riff whiskey tobacco, I'd talk about growing up and buying him that Jaguar he always wanted and how father and son would drive around town together. Well, I hope they've kept the engine warm for you, Bo. No more work for you. Don't worry about a thing. We got it from here. Rest easy, Bo Toai.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

My mom always told me that it didn't matter what work I took on, so long as I was working. Cause a day without work is money lost. "It might only be $30, but that's $30 you wouldn't otherwise have," she'd say. I wish I could tell you that this instilled in me a great work ethic, but I'd be lying. I'm quite content with a pint of Ben and Jerry's, sitting in my boxers all day and binge-watching The Sopranos for a nth time. But her advice has kept me moving and has gifted me with quite a winding career path that led to both love and career as I met my the Mrs. when I was a shift supervisor at an independent movie theatre and fell into arts education because I wasn't hip enough to work as a bar-back in the East Village. But along that road, I have experienced a number of bumps and detours that aren't always worth celebrating. These (mis)adventures include brief careers in dinner cruise photography, managing a video store, wine merchandising, pizza making and catering at Christie's auction house.

The summer after my college freshman year, I told my parents that I wanted to wait tables as friends of mine were known for walking out with their pockets over-filled with cash every night. But despite filling out two dozen applications all over Georgetown and Adams Morgan, my parents hooked me up with a family friend to work at one of his pho restaurants. And not as a waiter, but as a busboy. Not exactly the hipster job I was looking for, but I remembered my mom's advice. At my "interview," the manager told me that everyone working for him was a newly arrived immigrant and that they worked their asses off six days a week and got paid in cash, under the table every night. He added that because I was a close family friend, I would get a special weekly wage plus whatever tip share I was entitled to at the end of the night. My wage was $200-a-week plus tips, averaging $500 a week total. In the mid-90s for a college kid looking for play money, this was more than enough. Except that, as I was soon to find out, there wasn't much time to play.

I went in every morning at 8am and worked until 8pm every day except for Monday. And this was not any pho restaurant, but a pioneer in the Northern Virginia region, known for it's incredibly balanced broth, generous portions and cheap prices. Because of these reasons, its patrons were plentiful and  the most diverse of any restaurant. Americans loved our soup, Koreans loved our soup, Africans and Latinos loved our soup and of course, the Viets loved our soup -- which is the most important indicator of a Viet restaurant's quality. Lunchtime crowds would gather everyday beginning at 10:30 a.m. and extending until 3 p.m., which is when staff would take their lunch. Dinner rush would start at 4:30 p.m. and not let up until 8 p.m. when the doors closed. A newbie to the restaurant world, I was not prepared for the volume of people. More importantly, I was unprepared for the nasty eating and social habits they brought with them. You gain quite an education from a busboy's perspective. Never in my life had I had people snap their fingers at me to gain my attention, but this became the norm, especially from the Korean businessmen who frequented the restaurant. Model-thin Asian girls would order large bowls piled high with all cuts of beef, only to leave that hunking pile on the table next to their half empty bowl of noodles and broth for me to clear. The more considerate ones would place it on top of a one-ply napkin. On a regular basis, I was greeted with half empty bowls with one or two cigarette butts soaking in the broth and a one dollar tip next to the bean sprouts. When I first started, clearing a four top was a challenge. It would take me close to ten minutes to dump the uneaten contents into the wet receptacle and sort chopsticks, stack large and small bowls and wipe down the table. But when you have a 4.5 hour lunch rush with 90 seated and 50 in line at any given moment, you need to bus faster. By the end of the week, I gave up on keeping my uniform  clean. Speed and efficiency were more important than keeping hoisin and sriracha off my top. And slowly but surely, I clicked over and became one of them. I joined them for staff meals, slurping down huge bowls of tendon and fatty brisket, throwing back an iced ca phe sua da and finishing off with as many 555s as I could smoke before the next rush lined up. I grew quite comfortable with my new Viet restaurant family, my already fluent Vietnamese absorbing their Southern, profanity-laced dialect. I joined in their ball-breaking smack talk and their incredibly un-PC conversations about certain guests.

But it was a short-lived club. I remember paying a visit a couple of weeks after I ended my tour of duty and though they allowed me to sit with them at the staff table, I understood from their once-overs of my collared dress shirt and my well-kept jeans that this wasn't a relationship worth continuing. I was a guest star, a privileged boy from well-to-do family who was temporarily slumming it, I was never one of them. At the end of each night, I'd hop in my hoop-d and trek into the city or to a friend's house to drink my earnings away. They did not have the luxury of such an escape. For the others, it was their livelihood and one that they relied upon to feed their families. I went out with play money while they went back to their government housing and stretched their cash far enough to get food on the table and keep gas in the tank while clothing their kids for American schools. I hustled six days a week and survived because I knew there was an end in sight. I would go back to college and they would still be bussing half-eaten bowls of soup with floating cigarette butts in them. For many of them, it wasn't a means to an end -- it was the end as all they had worked for and sacrificed had earned them a life in the most privileged nation on earth. While there was always the hope that something better would come along, hope was a silly thing to invest time and energy in. It was a better bet to invest in their kids new lives and education so that they could return the favor one day, hopefully before they got too old to enjoy it.

Living in the Suck

For the last 10 years, I watched my father get overtaken by a slew of health issues stemming from over 40 years of alcoholism and a two-pack-a-day nicotine habit. High blood pressure and diabetes led to a series of strokes and later to renal failure. After several years of dialysis, he passed away in April 2014.

In that decade, I had a lot of time to reflect and grow. In his years of illness, I formed a family of my own, marrying something fierce from the mountains of Pennsylvania and spawning an incredibly handsome boy and a cute-ass spark plug of a girl. Seeing your dad go forces you to meditate on your own life expectancy. What were my chances? How long do I get to enjoy this blessed life? Early on, after his first stroke, I gave up my chain-smoking habits and limited my drinking to a six-pack or less a week. But my father's demons were not mine to combat. My older body wasn't burning off the calories the way it used to and that extra weight has taken a toll on my mobility with arthritis in both ankles. While I love nothing more than following a dinner of pork fat and ice cream with some intense lounging, I was setting myself up for a shorter life span -- one in which I would not be able to run after my children, chase after a baseball or save my family from an impending zombie apocalypse.

If this outlook wasn't bleak enough, I had gotten mugged twice at gunpoint as an adult. The first time it happened, I was leaving a birthday party in a posh neighborhood, a block away from the theatre I worked at, when the guy came up to me and jabbed a hard object into my chest. While hindsight suggests that it was not a real pistol, this fat boy was not going to take any chances. After giving him the six dollars in my pocket, I took advantage of a passerby's presence to escape. The second attack took place in a hotel parking garage. I exited my car and saw three people approaching. Though I walked as fast as I could to the nearest exit, they caught up to me and shoved a gun in my face. While I gave them my wallet, I wasn't giving into their demands to lay down on the ground or taking the gun into my mouth so I prepared myself for a beat down. Luckily, a car came up the ramp and they scattered -- all of which was caught on a security camera.

So there I was. Growing fatter and slower while remaining ever so prone (and attractive) to prospective muggers. I am very aware that death is imminent -- that no one escapes it. But I didn't have to grease the skids. So at the ripe age of 35, I enrolled in krav maga. For those not in the know, this is the Israeli fighting system employed by their military known for both its efficiency and ruthlessness.

While I'm not a UFC addict (though I'm now a growing fan), I wasn't at all a stranger to the martial arts. After a bullying incident on the school playground, my mom signed me up for Vietnamese Tay Son kung fu. When I got bored of this, I moved onto Chung do Kwan-style Tae Kwon Do. I did well in both, learning to throw a mean sidekick and breaking a fair number of boards, but I stopped shy of acquiring a black belt in either discipline. But had I did, I'm not sure I would have had the skills to fight off those attackers (or the body fat).

Everything I had read and seen about krav maga told me it had the punishing rigor and practicality to address both life threats. And in the year that I've trained at my school, this has certainly turned out to be true. My first class had me gassing out fifteen minutes in, barely keeping up with the warm-up. I bloodied my unwrapped knuckles on their tombstone pads and did more sit-ups in an hour than I had in the previous year. But after six months of training, I tested into level two. The exam was the most challenging experience of my life and next to marriage and fatherhood, the most rewarding. No longer did I feel like a victim to the circumstances of my life. I was now in good enough shape and mindset to do something about it.

I wish I could say the same about BJJ. Get your minds out of the gutter - that stands for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Somewhere between wrestling and judo, this art involves a lot of weight distribution, breathing and grappling technique to submit your partner via joint-locks, chokes and other uncomfortable positions. I've been rolling for roughly six months now and only consistently (two-three times a week) for the last three. And I suck at it... hard.  Stand-up striking is something I grew up understanding through experience and pop-culture, but ground fighting and grappling while on your back was a real mind-f*ck. By far, the most foreign thing I've tackled as an adult, BJJ is incredibly humbling. It's not like in other arts or pursuits where moderate success and encouragement breeds future achievement. Nope. In BJJ, I live in the suck. And it's not like I aspire to much. I made peace with the fact that I'm not there to win. The first month or so, I was tapping so much you would have thought I was starting a drum circle. But the good news is each time I go back, I suck less. And for whatever reason, that's enough encouragement to send me back to the mats week after week. I focus on controlling my breath and not letting out high pitch squeals when a heavy, bony knee digs into my ribs or thighs. I can roll longer without tapping and actually know what to do when I successfully pass my partner's guard. Where I once only knew side control, I now have other positions to rely upon. Not to mention that the Mrs. seems impressed by the (slightly) less chubby hubby coming home after each class, nursing his giant bruises and washing his body with something so masculine, it's called "defense soap." And despite the muscle soreness and pains, my ankles haven't given out in a long while having found renewed strength via shrimping and reverse hip escapes. But don't get me wrong, I still suck, a fact my peers are always ready to remind me of. I just embrace it now and look forward to a long life in pursuit of sucking a lot less.