Letter From My Father
Letter From My Father
Letter From My Father
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LETTERS
FROM
MY FATHER
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
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38635.AmShortStories.INS.qxp 6/13/02 10:32 AM Page 476
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weather. It is cold today. It is hot today. Today there are clouds in the sky.
Today there are no clouds. What did that have to do with me?
He said, “Dear Fran” because my name is Fran. That’s short for Francine
and the sound of Fran is something like a Vietnamese name, but it isn’t really.
So I told my friends in Saigon that my name was Trán, which was short for
Hôn Trán, which means “a kiss on the forehead.” My American father lived
in America but my Vietnamese mother and me lived in Saigon, so I was still
a Saigon girl. My mother called me Francine, too. She was happy for me to
have this name. She said it was not just American, it was also French. But I
wanted a name for Saigon and Trán was it.
I was a child of dust. When the American fathers all went home, includ-
ing my father, and the communists took over, that’s what we were called,
those of us who had faces like those drawings you see in some of the book-
stalls on Nguyen Huê Street. You look once and you see a beautiful woman
sitting at her mirror, but then you look again and you see the skull of a dead
person, no skin on the face, just the wide eyes of the skull and the bared
teeth. We were like that, the children of dust in Saigon. At one look we were
Vietnamese and at another look we were American and after that you couldn’t
get your eyes to stay still when they turned to us, they kept seeing first one
thing and then another.
Last night I found a package of letters in a footlocker that belongs to my
father. It is in the storage shack at the back of our house here in America. I
am living now in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and I found this package of letters
outside—many packages, hundreds of letters—and I opened one, and these
are all copies he kept of letters he sent trying to get us out of Vietnam. I look
through these letters my father wrote and I find this: “What is this crap that
you’re trying to give me now? It has been nine years, seven months, and fif-
teen days since I last saw my daughter, my own flesh-and-blood daughter.”
This is an angry voice, a voice with feeling. I have been in this place now
for a year. I am seventeen and it took even longer than nine years, seven
months, fifteen days to get me out of Vietnam. I wish I could say something
about that, because I know anyone who listens to my story would expect me
right now to say how I felt. My mother and me were left behind in Saigon.
My father went on ahead to America and he thought he could get some
paperwork done and prepare a place for us, then my mother and me would
be leaving for America very soon. But things happened. A different footlocker
was lost and some important papers with it, like their marriage license and
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But the little girl said, “You’re not my daddy. I know my daddy. He’ll be
here soon. He comes every night to say good night to me before I go to bed.”
The man was shocked at his wife’s faithlessness, but he was very proud,
and he did not say anything to her about it when she got home. He did not
say anything at all, but prayed briefly before the shrine of their ancestors and
picked up his bag and left. The weeks passed and the mother grieved so badly
that one day she threw herself into the Saigon River and drowned.
The father heard news of this and thought that she had killed herself
from shame. He returned home to be a father to his daughter, but on the first
night, there was a storm and the lights went out and the man lit the oil lamp,
throwing his shadow on the wall. His little girl laughed in delight and went
and bowed low to the shadow and said, “Good night, Daddy.” When the
man saw this, he took his little girl to his own mother’s house, left her, and
threw himself into the Saigon River to join his wife in death.
My friend says this story is true. Everyone in the neighborhood of her sis-
ter’s friend knows about it. But I don’t think it’s true. I never did say that to
my friend, but for me, it doesn’t make sense. I can’t believe that the little girl
would be satisfied with the shadow father. There was this darkness on the
wall, just a flatness, and she loved it. I can see how she wouldn’t take up with
this man who suddenly walks in one
night and says, “I’m your father, let me
tell you good night.” But the other guy,
W hen my father met my mother the shadow—he was no father either.
When my father met my mother
and me at the airport, there were and me at the airport, there were people
people with cameras and micro- with cameras and microphones and my
father grabbed my mother with this
phones and my father grabbed my enormous hug and this sound like a
mother with this enormous hug shout and he kissed her hard and all the
people with microphones and cameras
and this sound like a shout smiled and nodded. Then he let go of
my mother and he looked at me and
and he kissed her hard and all the suddenly he was making this little
people with microphones and choking sound, a kind of gacking in the
back of his throat like a rabbit makes
cameras smiled and nodded. when you pick him up and he doesn’t
like it. And my father’s hands just flut-
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tered before him and he got stiff-legged coming over to me and the hug he
gave me was like I was soaking wet and he had on his Sunday clothes, though
he was just wearing some silly T-shirt.
All the letters from my father, the ones I got in Saigon, and the photos,
they’re in a box in the back of the closet of my room. My closet smells of my
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perfume, is full of nice clothes so that I can fit in at school. Not everyone can
say what they feel in words, especially words on paper. Not everyone can
look at a camera and make their face do what it has to do to show a feeling.
But years of flat words, grimaces at the sun, these are hard things to forget.
So I’ve been sitting all morning today in the shack behind our house, out
here with the tree roaches and the carpenter ants and the smell of mildew
and rotting wood and I am sweating so hard that it’s dripping off my nose and
chin. There are many letters in my lap. In one of them to the U.S. government
my father says: “If this was a goddamn white woman, a Russian ballet dancer
and her daughter, you people would have them on a plane in twenty-four
hours. This is my wife and my daughter. My daughter is so beautiful you can
put her face on your dimes and quarters and no one could ever make change
again in your goddamn country without stopping and saying, Oh my God,
what a beautiful face.”
I read this now while I’m hidden in the storage shack, invisible, soaked
with sweat like it’s that time in Saigon between the dry season and the rainy
season, and I know my father will be here soon. The lawn mower is over
there in the corner and this morning he got up and said that it was going to
be hot today, that there were no clouds in the sky and he was going to have
to mow the lawn. When he opens the door, I will let him see me here, and I
will ask him to talk to me like in these letters, like when he was so angry with
some stranger that he knew what to say.
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2. What are some of the ways you see Fran struggling for her identity
in this story?
3. What do you think is the significance of the game the children play at
the cemetery in Vietnam?
6. THE AUTHOR’S STYLE In telling Fran’s story, Butler uses bits and
pieces of her past such as photos, paintings, letters, memories,
and even an urban legend. Which of these do you think best
defines Fran’s character?
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