The Lucky Ones
By: Jacqueline Thanh
Tags: War, Trauma, Asian American, Refugees, Vietnamese

When sleep is a stranger— I remember the unusually hot nights that arrived in late summer when I was growing up in San Francisco. It was uncomfortably warm in a house that did not believe in heating or cooling. My mom would not sleep on nights like this.

The television stayed on like a night light constantly humming white noise via infomercials and news reminding her where she was. I would fuss and wake up to her eyes staring past mine— tears would fall that I did not know how to catch. I begged for her to turn on the air or find a fan. And she would always just tell me to practice being still.

She would remind me in Cantonese, 心靜自然涼 — when your heart is quiet you will naturally cool down. Then she would say, “You don’t know when you will need to stay so still your life counts on it.” When that did little to pacify me to sleep, she would pour stories into my universe until the early morning.

She would patiently paint Sài Gòn in detail with memories of her grandmothers hands, her favorite neighbors, streets she used to wander with the loudest street hawkers, and the way her grandfather doted on her and her six siblings until they could not.

She would tell me about how long days became when they lost her mother; how a friend appeared at the edge of her bed cold and wet one night asking for food—weeks before she knew her entire family had drowned trying to escape the country.

Sometimes she would tell me about how the ocean smelled like bodies in middle of the night during storms. She would tell me what they would throw into the waters when hands reaching out from the ocean would not stop rocking the boat.

My favorite stories were always about her older brother—tall and strong for his age, he wasn’t even seventeen. She would laugh as she divulged how he taught her how to swim by throwing her in the water again and again until she was unafraid.

But this was all before the fall, before the communists came, before my grandmother passed, before relatives went missing, before schools changed what was taught, before the food rationing—the world became smaller and infinitely bigger all at once.

She would drift off trying to explain where he was, “they said he died drowning but maybe he is just missing because they never found his body.” Every summer we would still burn offerings and clothes during ghost festival for this uncle I never met, just in case.

“He was not so lucky. But I was lucky. I got out.”

She never mentions the violence against women and children she witnessed and experienced, the hepatitis so many folks contracted on the refugee camps, or how they had to protect themselves from endless bouts of danger from mercenaries, men, and NGOs alike amidst constant uncertainty.

She wouldn’t mention till much later how my grandfather, her father, was also lucky. He got out of southern China as a child during Japanese occupation, only for him to get his children out of another country during another war. When he made it to America in middle age, he worked as janitor by day and went to school by night. He was lucky. Even with the life and community he lost. He got to start over with five kids still living and breathing in a tiny San Francisco apartment — and he began again.

She would unapologetically remind me during these stories, how we are the lucky ones.

Declaring again and again — I am the luckiest.

I am lucky to be born here.

To be American.

I am lucky she is here with me.

I am here with her.

I remember then, and reflect often now on all this luck.

What did it cost? What does it cost? Who does it cost?

I was born an American because our country made my mother a refugee. I knew then even playing the lotto isn’t free.

This illusion of luck has always been enough to keep so many living, forgetting, and remembering. But luck isn’t justice, luck only explains away inequities beyond our comprehension when we have seen too intimately what injustice can do. Luck is a cover for inexplicable grief. And when you are a product of the “lucky ones”— there is a relentless love enmeshed with guilt that often feels like too heavy a burden to bear.

Americans with our very own unrefined brand of exceptionalism do not always know how to metabolize this kind of love. A love saturated with fleeting high notes of hope and expectations with ever lingering base notes of fear, loss, destruction, and death.

War does not require nearly as much imagination as surviving the American dream does. The American dream for the lucky ones is like a smoke that you cannot exhale. Smoke that lingers over your every step—forward and backwards—time feels like it is at a standstill. How do we create innovate justice and movement if we cannot even see this? The complexity of this grief is like an oil spill in an ocean that cannot clean itself—it changes everything, touches life we did not know existed, impacts our becoming and possibilities; even when we have it in us to find freedom with resilience—we need help. We cannot do it alone.

As the daughter of ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, I know this firsthand. I recall all the ancestral memory in the marrow of my bones.

The ancestors in me and generations before me that have survived regimes, occupation, borders and oceans to find freedom.

As Dr. Denise Noble writes, “Diaspora is a practice of hope beyond mourning; day beyond night; tomorrow beyond today; there beyond here.” And my place and privilege in this diasporic journey is anchored in casting brave spaces where we find redemption through authentic advocacy as we tell our own stories.

In community, the brutality of grief, liberation, and healing from the intergenerational trauma of displacement can center truth telling; we can fight for accountability. We don’t have to conjure luck. We can do better than we did in 1975 — with immediate refuge and relief for Afghan refugees. We have an opportunity to offer restorative justice in our policies. We must act swiftly to employ humanitarian parole for Afghans escaping.

At this very moment, where we may feel so helpless alone, there is an opportunity to be present together in witnessing the fragilities and possibilities of humanity. We have the opportunity to disrupt the waves of trauma that will be entrenched for generations because we know better.

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The State Department has now set up a hotline at 1–888–407–4747(domestic calls) and 1–202–501–4444 (overseas calls), as well as a Repatriation Assistance Request form online for any U.S. Citizens seeking emergency flights out of Kabul.

PIVOT’s Statement on Afghanistan

International Rescue Committee