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.