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Katherine FitzGerald
My Trip to Vietnam
If you know me well, you know I have always wanted to travel to Vietnam. So at the Christmas party, when I learned an associate of mine and her husband were going there in a few days, it piqued my longstanding yet still unfulfilled desire to go. Later that evening, I reflected: Why the attraction? Sometimes understanding “the why” can be such an accomplishment that it takes the edge off “the NOT.”
Over the years, one thing after another took precedence over Vietnam. Graduate school, a spouse, children, mortgages, orthodontist bills, a move here, a move there, house-building, college expenses, and the like. Getting from point A to point B was tricky enough, let alone injecting into it a trip to Vietnam. Imagine the planning, time, and expense!
The day my associate and her husband were packing their bags, I got a phone call from Pasadena. My cousin’s son and his girlfriend, returning to the University of California at Santa Barbara after the winter holiday break, had died – “incinerated” – in a fiery car crash. I had just visited Jonathan (age twenty) and his family in August. Jonathan was excited about leaving the next day with his girlfriend, Angela (age twenty one), to visit Spain for two weeks. I didn’t get to meet Angela because she was home packing, but Jonathan struck me as one of the most remarkable young men I have ever known. He was gentle and brilliant, and I delighted in his inquisitiveness about everything – especially philosophy and white teeth.
While my associate and her husband were aboard something like Air Vietnam, I was on United. I didn’t understand why Jonathan’s funeral was in San Jose when his family lived hours away in Pasadena. Nor did I understand why the funeral would last four long days. Respectfully, I accepted their “California-style” arrangements. What I did know was the address of my hotel, the address of the funeral home nearby, and the time I was to be there for calling hours the next morning – an early 9 a.m.
The next morning I put on my navy suit, covered my weary eyes with Ray Bans, and directed the hotel limo driver to Oak Hill Funeral Home. There, I emerged from the limo into a strange and foreign world. There were at least four hundred Vietnamese mourners congregated in the entryway, speaking a language familiar to me because I had studied it for a time. What struck me was the number of mourners who exhibited the features of American soldiers and the men, all wearing the same commercially-made black suit. I wondered how they could have orchestrated that. I was overcome by the number of huge flower arrangements, at least two hundred, propped up on wooden easels and adorned with silk sashes bearing Vietnamese condolences written in glitter.
Soon a hush came over the crowd, and I was led by the sheer number of people into a large viewing room in the funeral home. I knew I was in the wrong room, but then so was Jonathan’s father because I could see the top of his silvery head. A Buddhist master, wrapped in orange linens, along with an entourage of eighteen female chanters, wrapped in gray linens, made their way down the aisle, prostrated themselves, and began to pray. The crowd seated themselves, and I could finally see the forward-section of the room. There, twin redwood caskets lay, each with an honorary diploma from U Cal – Santa Barbara poised on top. It dawned on me! I was at a double funeral. I was at Jonathan and Angela’s double Buddhist funeral. The sea of mourners were the relatives and friends of Angela. “Welcome to Vietnam,” I said to myself.
For the next four days, I mourned my way through Vietnam according to the printed funeral schedule. The first three days entailed calling hours that began at 9 a.m. and lasted until 9 p.m. That is, a mourner arrived at 9 a.m. and stayed until 9 p.m. During those hours, there was work to be done! In front of the caskets were two large tables – one for him, and one for her – that, in time, evolved into elaborate shrines to the dead. On them rested articles belonging to Jonathan and Angela, a vast assortment of mementos, mounds of colorful Southern California fruits stacked in unusual and artistic forms, innumerable Vietnamese culinary concoctions, copious bowls of rice, pictures and statues of Buddha, and Sony computers playing non-stop Powerpoint presentations of Jonathan and Angela’s happy faces from infancy to the week or so before their deaths.
The shrines required constant attention. A plethora of new items arrived daily, inspiring the families to constantly rearrange things until they were rearranging things on the floor and against the walls. The culinary dishes quickly lost their fresh appearance, requiring daily replacements scheduled at noon and five. Old food had to be scraped from its containers, wrapped, and placed somewhere near, next to, or behind the pile of eight hundred shoes that had created an imposing mountain in a rear corner of the room. Endlessly, the huge flower arrangements arrived at a room that could no longer contain even another wool coat. As if on cue, the delivery persons would stop and peer for a moment into the viewing room, expressing their dismay through some of the most interesting facial expressions I have ever read. But every four hours, the chaos came to an abrupt halt while the Buddhist master and his team of chanters led a prayer service, compelling as many as possible in the sea of mourners to lie prostrate on the floor, across the chairs, against the walls strewn with stuff, on top of the shoes at the base of the mountain, or on the floor in the hall outside.
During those three days, I learned a lot. I learned that San Jose is home to one of the largest communities of Vietnam War refugees, and their descendents, in the U.S. I learned that Angela was her mother’s only child and best friend. I learned that Angela’s father had “disappeared” as a soldier in Vietnam, never seen nor heard from again. I learned that the vast majority of mourners hailed from the Mekong River Delta, which occupies the southern portion of the country. I learned that the children were being protected from the news of Jonathan and Angela’s deaths until just before the service on the fourth day. I learned that Angela’s grandfather, congenial and quick to flash a smile full of gold, was a general in the Viet Cong army during the war, having spent several years “guarding” American prisoners-of-war. I learned that Angela’s mother’s five sisters, all present each day, were mothers to a total of thirteen children – all girls! (My heart broke because Angela’s mother was without her girl now.) And I learned what happens at a funeral if the deceased and his family lived a series of moves from Darien, to New York City, to San Francisco, to Tokyo, to San Diego, back to San Francisco, and then to Pasadena. Although Angela’s mourners outnumbered Jonathan’s, we all came to understand that neither family “owned” mourners. We were unified. We were one – as in Jonathan and Angela.
On the fourth day, I arrived at the funeral home for the 10 a.m. final service. The familiar sea of four hundred mourners from the past three days had morphed, easily, into a thousand. The new additions were generally young, California surfers, climbers from Oregon, skiers from Washington, and twin brothers from Nevada. They were students of journalism, anthropology, nursing, physics, and pre-med. They were members of the rugby team, the business club, the psychology club, and the entrepreneurs’ club. They were food service employees, staff from the school newspaper, whole dormitories, sororities, and fraternities, along with professors, administrators, and secretaries. U-Cal brought color in their attire, innumerable hugs, and refreshing and funny memories.
During the night, the funeral home personnel had moved the caskets, flowers, food, mementos, computers – everything – far down the hall from the room we had come to know so well and into the very large chapel. By 10 a.m., a thousand mourners had seated themselves there, lined its walls, occupied a cramped space in its vestibule, stood in the outside hall in a thick line that weaved its way far down to the main doors, or shivered outside in the chilly Garden of Comfort.
For three hours and forty-two minutes, various family members, friends, and students heartwrenchingly eulogized Jonathan and Angela. The young U-Cal mourners were unable to contain their grief, the Vietnamese women struck their breasts with hard blows and painfully cried out, the Vietnamese men flung themselves onto the aisle floors, pounding it with their fists and groaning miserably, the Buddhist chanters responded with strange staccato chants, impulsively and not in unison, the children cried and cried incessantly, and the entire congregation deteriorated into such a state of meltdown that I actually began to scope out exits should things ultimately bottom out.
Miraculously, the Buddhist master’s culminating prayer service refocused us. Integral to it was the burning of several bowls of incense. Heavy smoke billowed throughout the chapel, seemingly sedating the mourners. In time, they sank low in their seats, draped themselves against the walls and each other, rested on the floor, quietly grieved, and succumbed to their exhaustion. At the end of the prayer service, the Buddhist master shook the hands of Jonathan’s and Angela’s parents and grandparents while the other mourners seemed relegated to a state just before sleep. Then, without warning, he walked over to the two caskets, raised his hand high above them, and inflicted upon the top of each – first on hers and then on his – a quick, sharp blow having a force so great that it momentarily elevated us from our seats. The sounds crashed and reverberated throughout the room. The children wailed, and the others – stunned, terrified, and bewildered – trembled visibly. Paralyzed by fright, our celebration of Jonathan and Angela’s lives entered the surreal.
Finally, one by one, the members of the rugby team shuffled forward until all twenty-six of them occupied the space in front of the caskets. Then, eight of the team’s members repositioned themselves around Angela’s casket, and another eight did the same at Jonathan’s. As the caskets were being carried out of the chapel, the remaining team members and mourners followed, processing down the long and congested hall of the funeral home past the viewing room we had come to know so well and out the main doors where mourners littered the Garden of Comfort. Many of the mourners were asking questions because the printed funeral schedule had listed the Buddhist master’s prayer service as the final event. No one seemed to know where we were going, and many seemed too afraid to ask. I surmised that the burials had been inadvertently omitted from the printed schedule.
But the procession veered away from the sprawling cemetery to the right of the main doors and toward the structure that had confounded my senses for the last four days. Each day, I had pondered its strange and scary style – made of black rock, with a roof that had a series of knife-sharp peaks protruding out of it, covered in a thick greenish-black moss that eerily curled up at the edges and seemingly supported by a trillion stalky vines twisted so tightly as to create the energy necessary for them to impale the rock itself. I had questioned the structure’s utility and wondered why it seemed intentionally hidden by an extremely dense array of vegetation.
Once the forward section of the procession reached the intimidating structure, the Vietnamese mourners began a low wail that intensified abruptly. Their cries, loud and painful, penetrated the others. Then, a message made its way through the procession, passed on from one, to another, to another…The family members were to come forward and enter the structure, along with the pallbearers and the caskets.
Inside, a workman, wearing an “Oak Hill Funeral Home” shirt and blue surgical gloves, pressed two silver buttons, causing the two metal doors in one of the walls to lift open. Instantly, the Vietnamese mourners’ wails turned to hysterical screeches, startling the pallbearers who had to gain control of the two caskets that were heaving from left to right and dangerously close to landing of the cement floor. But the workman remained unaffected and instructed the pallbearers to slide the caskets into the metal door openings which were just large enough to receive them. Then, he pressed the two silver buttons again, and the metal doors closed. An intense sense of relief came over me because I understood that what I had witnessed was the placing of the caskets in a mausoleum. In there, Jonathan and Angela would finally rest forever.
But the workman continued working, pulling down a large lever which caused a red flashing “Danger” light to appear. Something mechanical could be heard igniting. Louder and louder the machine roared, drowning out the shrieks of the Vietnamese mourners. Smoke filled the room and billowed out through the open doors and windows, turning the daylight outside into a thick, brown haze. Then, gradually, the machine’s noise dissipated and finally stopped.
What had remained from the fiery crash remained no longer. Jonathan and Angela, along with their twin redwood caskets, had been returned to dust. Silently, the mourners filed out of the crematorium, embraced by those who had listened and watched from the outside. The rugby coach gathered his players and moved to an area deep inside the dense vegetation, speaking to them about strength and time. In a circle, with their hands folded and their heads dropped, they prayed the Our Father. The sea of mourners dispersed to the parking lot and drove away. And, later that day, I flew home from Vietnam.