Khaira Ledeyo's story of Nhan  

My mom’s name is Nhan Thi Nguyen. She was born in North Vietnam, in 1931.  She grew up in a small village a few hours from Hanoi called Ha Dong.  Her father’s last name was Nguyen and her mother’s was Dang. 

This is her story as I recall it from my memory of stories she told me and also from various accounts of her life by my older siblings.  As she is now in her late stage of Alzheimer’s I have no way to verify these details with her. 

She was the fourth or fifth girl in a family of nine girls and one boy, who was also the youngest of the clan. My mom recalls how she was a lazy child, a dreamer and a tomboy. She was not considered pretty, either. She was also a little over-particular, making a point of washing her chopsticks and bowls separately from the rest of the family’s and insisting upon storing them apart from the rest, as well. 

She was first married in her early twenties. When the Vietnam War began in 1954, she was pregnant with her first son. Her husband left to South Vietnam to avoid the draft in the North. He took all their valuables and went into hiding; they planned to re-unite as soon as possible. 

My mom soon went after him, leaving her family and village for the first time in her life.  She worked  her way south, following word that he was safe, hoping to find him.  She was late in her pregnancy, and somewhere in Central Vietnam when she admitted herself into a hospital and gave birth to Tuan Ngoc Le. 

In Vietnam, hospitals were not responsible for the food or personal care of patients. Being alone, she had no food or help. The woman next to her asked her husband to bring an extra portion of food for my mom, at mealtimes. She left the hospital with my brother and when they returned to the place she had been living, she found that it had burnt down. All her belongings and her stock of rice had burnt with it. 

She sought work in an orphanage so that Tuan could stay near her throughout the day. Eventually she left the orphanage. Somebody took pity on her and helped her to start selling vegetables on the street-side, using baskets that she would balance on her shoulder. She found that she was quite enterprising and after a short time she was ready to continue her journey south, following a rumor of her husband’s whereabouts. 

There is a story that tells how my mom was raped by a border official, or a man who told her he was a friend of her husband’s and could take her to him. Either way, my mom was pregnant again. And when she finally arrived in the South, she was told that her husband had remarried and moved to the United States. 

My mom settled in a seaside town called Vung Tau, a few hours from Saigon. She began building her life again and continued to buy and sell in the marketplaces. 

In Vietnam it was acceptable for men, whose wives did not bear them sons, to seek what is called “small wives”. (It was acceptable to have a “small wife” for any reason at all, actually). One such man, apparently finding out that my mom was pregnant, thought that he could help my mom and also himself by offering to take her on as his “small wife”. In this way, she could avoid a “bad reputation” and he could possibly have a son. The arrangement did not work out as my mom gave birth to a baby girl. Since it was also acceptable for men who took on “small wives” to abandon the woman if she could not bear him a son, he ended their agreement. She named her daughter Thu. 

As the years passed, her abilities as businesswoman eventually had her excelling in buying and selling real estate as well as being the supplier to the kitchens of the U.S base in Vung Tau. 

During this time, my mom really fell in love. But he was married. According to my sister’s stories, he was well respected and well loved in the small town. They chose not to make their affair public. She became pregnant and gave birth to another girl named Hien. Shortly after Hien was born, the love of her life died in a motorcycle accident. 

My mom would rent rooms out of her properties and in the late 1960’s an army officer of the South Vietnamese army came to ask her about a room. She married this man, named Trung Dung Le and had three more children with him – a daughter in 1968, a son in 1970, and me her last daughter in 1972. Our names were Van, Ai and Huong. 

In 1975, the U.S. Army was on its’ way out of Vietnam and my mom took Tuan, Van, Ai, and me in a boat and fled Vietnam, arriving in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia after a dangerous journey. Thu and Hien were not with us. There, we stayed in a refugee camp while papers were processed for us to fly to Vancouver, Canada, where my Dad, Trung, and our Grandma were waiting. 

We arrived in the winter. We lived in Vancouver for a year and then we moved to Edmonton. My mom and dad were not happy together but because she believed she had to stay with my dad  “for the family’s sake”, we lived with him and often worked with him but, officially, they were separated. 

My mom worked every single day until she retired. She worked cleaning restaurants, in mushroom factories, selling vegetables at the flea markets, and then opened up a pizza place in 1989, where she worked even harder. 

One of her proudest moments was buying a new car – a white Chevrolet Celebrity, and in 1984, she bought a house. However, she was mostly very frugal and used to tell us, “For every grain of rice you leave uneaten at the bottom of your bowl, you will come back one lifetime as a maggot!” 

When Vietnam first re-opened its’ doors to overseas Vietnamese and tourists in 1989, my mom and my eldest brother, Tuan, returned to Vietnam and searched for Thu and Hien, my sisters who had stayed behind in Vietnam. After they found the girls, she returned to Vietnam almost every year. She was able to see her family in the North again, after almost 40 years of seemingly having disappeared. 

In 1996, she was 65 years old and moved to Vancouver to be with me. She sold the house in Edmonton, in 1998. 

In Vancouver, she spent her days with friends or at the Vietnamese Buddhist Temple on Commercial and 1^st. She was well loved and very popular and respected among her friends and community. She was a very devout Buddhist. She was a joker among her friends. She was still physically and mentally very strong. I didn’t notice the signs of her becoming ill. 

In 2001, after a frightening trip alone to Vietnam, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. As her mind became weaker, I remember moments of heartbreaking beauty, like when she once called me to the window with such excitement. 

“Look, look, Huong! There is something up in the sky! What is it?”

It was the full moon.

She continued to live with me in Vancouver until it was no longer possible for me to care for her at home. My sister, Van, and I decided to bring her back to Vietnam for a final chance to see her family while she was still in the early stages of her disease. She stayed there for five years, first in Hanoi and then in Vung Tau, to be cared for day to day by Hien, and hired caregivers. In October, 2005 we brought her back to Vancouver.

She does not remember our names, nor can she acknowledge her newest grandson but, in her eyes, I can see so much of the way she was and the way she lived. She taught me, best of all, about compassion. And my favorite memory of the way my mother used to be is of all of us kids in the backseat of the rickety old van, heading out to the outskirts of Edmonton. On the metal floor of the van was a large turtle, ready to snap at our feet. We were going to release the turtle back into the wild. We arrived in Devon and my mom carried it to the edge of a marsh, lowered it into the water with a prayer, and watched it swim away. On the way home, she told us that it had turned around and nodded to her in thanks.