Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice

This story starts out with a man dreaming about writing a poem and about his father coming to visit. When she wakes up, he realizes his father has arrived early. He says to himself, “It felt strange, after all this time, to be speaking Vietnamese again.” This makes us believe that he hasn’t seen his family in some time, and also may allude to a small estrangement between he and his father.

We are shown that it seems there is a definite distance between him and his father. He seems to have moved to Iowa and away from his Vietnamese heritage, while his father is still very “old school”. His father says, “A day lived, a sea of knowledge earned.” The son then says, “He had a habit of speaking in Vietnamese proverbs. I had long since learned to ignore it.” My hypothesis about them being estranged was proven later when we are told, “I hadn’t seen him in three years”, referring to his father.

He then tells us a little bit more about the situation and says, “The truth was, he’d come at the worst possible time. I was in my last year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; it was late November, and my final story for the semester was due in three days. I had a backlog of papers to grade and a heap of fellowship and job applications to draft and submit. It was no wonder I was drinking so much.” We are then introduced to someone named Linda, who appears to be his girlfriend. He says, “I told her my father doesn’t know about her.” She said nothing. “We just don’t talk about that kind of stuff.”

In order to cure his writers block his friend tells him he needs to write about Vietnam. He tells him, “Ethnic Literature’s hot. It’s important too.” He doesn’t go for it and replies, “I’m sick of Ethnic Lit.” Instead his friend Faulkner says, “he said we should write about the old verities. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

We are given some history on the relationship between him and his father. He tells us, “My father was drawn to weakness, even as he tolerated none in me. He was a soldier, he said once, as if that explained everything. With me, he was all proverbs and regulations. No personal phone calls. No female friends. No extracurricular reading. When I was in primary school, he made me draw up a daily ten-hour study timetable for the summer holidays, and punished me when I deviated from it.” He concludes by saing, “I learned to hate him with a straight face.” This explains a lot about why the things are the way they are between them, and how their relationship has suffered as a result of how his father acted when he was growing up.

He starts to think about his past and what his father had done for him, and also how he had abused him. He says, “here is what I believe: we forgive any sacrifice by our parents, so long as it is not made in our name. To my father there was no other name—only mine, and he had named me after the homeland he had given up. His sacrifice was complete and compelled him to everything that happened. To all that, I was inadequate.” It seems as if he feels overshadowed by his father, and he feels like he can’t live up to what his father expects of him.