23

23. Twenty-three. Double X’s, triple I’s. You know the number. It makes its way into your subconscious everyday and you don’t even realize it. It shows up in advertising, accounting, recipes, and other random places, often times, not even trying to be noticed, staying a subtle creature of mystery in the numeric realm. It was 23 years after I was born in Saigon that I decided to make my first trip back to my homeland since escaping the chaos and turmoil that was Vietnam at the end of the Vietnamese/American War. What took me so long? Why did I wait 23 years before making this important trek back? I have no good answer for this. I have plenty of half-assed answers, though. The type of half-assed answers that you could only get from a half-assed Vietnamese/Korean/American male: I was a teenager with my own selfish teenage goals to pursue; I was too busy doing nothing to take the time to do something; I knew where I wanted to be and that place was the central location of no direction at all. Fortunately, as with pretty much any and all ideas that exist in the teenage mind by the time the teenager stops being a teenager, all of those insipid ideas dissolved into nothing and being a full-fledged adult, I needed to replace my lack of direction with some kind of soul-searching and through a series of hits and missses, I made my way westbound over the Pacific Ocean into the humid country of Vietnam, stopping in the heartland of the former capital city, Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City.

My family in Vietnam are all natural born hosts. Their blood flows with the desire to show any guests a good time. Never was there a moment when an aunt wasn’t taking me somewhere to eat, an uncle not taking me out through the streets of the city, or a cousin not giving me fresh coconut juice straight out of a fresh coconut shell. But of all the things that I did while in Saigon, my favorite was to merely sit on the back of one of my uncles’ motorcycles or scooters, zipping through the city, and taking in the rush of being in Saigon. Everything I loved about riding through the city was about a hundred times better at night when all the lights were on and all the Vietnamese citizens were roaming aimlessly through the streets, using this time as a time to wind down from their long work day. And the uncle that was the most consistent about making sure that a night did not go by without my dose of cruising the city was my Uncle Hanh.

Uncle Hanh was not a blood relative but gained relationship to me through his courtship of my mother’s second youngest sister, my Aunt Ut U. He worked every day at a jewelry store, repairing and cleaning rings of gold and silver. At the end of his long 12 plus hour work day, he would come home and sit for a few minutes, then immediately wave me over to his motorcycle for another night out and I was never one to argue with him about it.

Uncle Hanh had this chopper. Maybe not an according to Merriam-Webster chopper in the sense of what a chopper is, but to a motorcyle layman like myself, it was just that: a chopper. A hawg. Heck on wheels. The other aunts and uncles had little Honda scooters that they used and sufficed for the mere task of getting from A to B. But I favored Uncle Hanh’s ride because if I wanted to get from A to B in style, well, the hawg beat any old scooter.

During my four week stay in Saigon that summer, I developed a lot of new memories and stimuli that did not exist before that 23-years later visit. The most memorable being the nights of zooming through the city on Uncle Hanh’s motorcycle. I had made two trips back to Vietnam since then and to this day, my fondest memories remain on those cool Saigon nights.

Take that number 23, flip the digits around, and you now have my current age, here in 2006. At the flipside age of 32, I was able to reunite with my Aunt Ut U, my Cousin Me, and my Uncle Hanh. Uncle Hanh sans the chopper, that is. On June 1st, after years of filling out documents after documents of legal papers for the US Immigration & Naturalization Service, my mother’s second youngest sister and her family had made their way to America for the first time. I met my family at the airport that late Thursday night. My Aunt Ut U looked pretty much the way she looked when I had last seen her: small, skinnny, and gentle with a slight hint of worry in her face, just like my mother and all of her sisters. Cousin Me was taller. She was now a young girl and no longer the little baby I remembered from Saigon. Uncle Hanh was still Uncle Hanh but his face was now fuller and his eyes more tired. I chalked this off as merely due to the long flight he and his family had just taken. I was reminded once again of those nights riding through the city of Saigon on the back of his motorcycle and immediately felt warm about his and his family’s opportunity to come to the United States.

It was the following Friday that I heard from my mother that Uncle Hanh was in the hospital. I had known that he was sick the Sunday prior and I, too, having been hit with a fever earlier that week along with my wife, Amy, dismissed it as something that would go away in a few days. That was on a Sunday and when his fever hadn’t gotten any better mid-week, my mother decided it was time to take Uncle Hanh in to the health clinic to be looked at it. The clinic diagnosed that his illness was more than a simple cold or flu and was likely something that needed immediate medical attention. He was ordered to stay in an isolated hospital room where he would have to stay overnight to be reviewed by the doctor the next day. I was not aware of any of these happenings because my mother did not want to inconvenience me by calling so early in the diagnosis but was not aware at the time how serious Uncle Hanh’s condition would become.

I got the call from my mother late Friday night telling me that I would need to come to the hospital the next morning to meet with the doctor so that I would be fully aware of the situation and could properly translate it to my family. The in-house doctor met with me early Saturday morning in which I was informed that my Uncle Hanh had an abscess in his liver that needed immediate attention. The doctor did not know what may have caused the abscess at the time, but he knew that there was a high level of white blood cells in my uncle’s blood and that he must have contracted some kind of infection while he was still in Vietnam (which squelched my mother’s theory that he got sick the night that she and my father took Uncle Hanh out fishing on their boat). The doctor said that it could be anything from a urinary tract infection to malaria and since he just came from Vietnam, they would need to test him for all sorts of possible diseases to make sure he wasn’t infected with one of the deadlier diseases. One can imagine how uneasy this made everyone in my family feel but we were relieved that he was in the hospital being treated and not still lying in bed at home where it could have gotten worse.

What started out to be a one to two night’s stay in the hospital ended up being 18 nights in the hospital, 16 of which were angst-filled and full of ups and downs in Uncle Hanh’s condition. It was upsetting to see Uncle Hanh lying in bed hooked up to two to three different bags of antibiotics and tubes running out of his side in hopes of draining the fluid that existed outside his liver and later for fluid outside of his lungs (diagnosed to have been caused by pneumonia). When the draining did not help in removing the abscess in the liver and the fluid outside the lungs, we were told that surgery would be needed to help Uncle Hanh get better. We were informed early on that he did not test positive for any of the major Asian diseases that were possible reasons for his illness so we were relieved about that, but the idea of surgery added a whole new level of stress for my family, who had been trading off on covering 6 to 8 hour shifts staying with Uncle Hanh at the hospital, doing everything we could to keep his spirits up because he had begun to sink into depression and the bright smiling face I was used to was no longer there. It was on the 7th day that Uncle Hanh would have to go under the knife. I took the rest of the afternoon off from work (where I had been coming in late every day in order to be at the hospital when the doctor was there in the morning to get an update on my uncle’s status) to be at the hospital during the surgery and was met by my mother who had just arrived there a half an hour earlier. Aunt Ut U, who had been trying her best to stay positive and cheerful through the ordeal, looked tired and showed signs of sadness. But the sadness in her face was no match for my mother who was the queen of sad faces. Even though this was just her sister’s husband who bore no blood relation to her, my mother’s face looked like it carried the burdens of her worries, along with Aunt Ut U, my family, and all of Uncle Hanh’s family back in Vietnam all on her own two small shoulders. I walked back and forth between my mother to comfort her and my Uncle Hanh who laid tiredly in the hospital bed, who only spoke when the surgeon’s assistant had asked me to translate any questions he may have had. I looked at my Uncle Hanh’s face and felt sad that in exchange for the many rides he had taken me on in Vietnam through the beautiful nightscape of Saigon, I was only able to offer a ride through a depressing teal green hospital on a wheeled hospital bed.

I looked outside the surgery waiting room and saw my mother facing a wall in the lobby where a cross adorned in dried vines and leaves was her main focus. Her head was bowed and her hand next to the cross. I gave her a moment to finish her prayers and then proceeded to let her know that the surgeon was now ready to take Uncle Hanh into the operating room.

My mother decided to go home and finish up on anything that needed to be tended to at her house during the surgery. I accompanied Aunt Ut U to the alternate waiting room for surgery patients’ family members where we sat and waited for the phone call from the operating room to let us know the surgery was done and that Uncle Hanh was alright. An hour went by without a single call. I sat with my notebook computer in my lap finishing a few projects for work. After I had completed my last sales report, I closed the notebook and stared at the television on the wall and blankly listened to the news. I don’t recall if anything of any importance had happened in the world during that next hour listening to the smug news anchors going on about whatever it was they were talking about. The only thing I remember is that when the phone rang at the receptionist’s desk and she called out my name, I was at full attention and anxious to hear that my Uncle Hanh would be fine.

Back in Uncle Hanh’s hospital room, we waited for the nurse to wheel him back in. He had been in the recovery room, which would be another hour of waiting, but we were informed that it would be a few minutes before he would be back in his own room, so we went upstairs to wait for him there. The surgeon had spoken with me and told me that Uncle Hanh’s surgery went well and that he would need about 24 hours for his body to finish recovering from the initial shock of the surgery. They were able to clean out the abscess in his liver and would monitor it to make sure that it did not fill up again. The next day, Uncle Hanh was asked to try and continually take deep breaths and to get up out of bed and walk around if her could. As I mentioned earlier, although the surgery was successful, the pneumonia he had had caused fluid to collect outside his lungs. This fluid was a new complication and although the first day after the first surgery showed signs of complete recovery, it was this fluid outside of his lungs that brought him into recession and once again in a state of possible fatality. My family had felt like we had been pushed through the ringer about a million times and now the thought of those ten days in the hospital and all the antibiotics that was being injected into him and the tubes in his side to the drain the liver abscess and now the surgery only leading to more danger made us all very sad. But my family is a family of fighters and this new setback was not about to cause us to give up. I think it was most clear to me one morning when I was in the hospital room with my father and another one of my uncles who had been caring for Uncle Hanh that morning. My father and the other uncle talked about fishing and soccer (which was Uncle Hanh’s only escape during this ordeal. It didn’t even matter that the broadcast of the World Cup tournament that he was watching was in Spanish because his English was not good enough to understand the commentary if it were in English). Eventually, my father brought up the subject of the great value in jeans that was available at the Wal-Mart Associate Store (which sold overstock and damaged products at a huge discount for Wal-Mart employees). During the discussion about the inexpensive jeans, my father said he was planning on going by the Associate Store later that day and asked Uncle Hanh what size he wore because my father was planning on picking up a few pairs for him. My Uncle Hanh in a very soft whisper said that he wore size 32 and my father made a mental note of it and told him he would pick up a few pairs for Uncle Hanh. The simplicity of this conversation was so clear to me as I watched my father and other uncle standing over Uncle Hanh’s bed (they were taking turns feeding him soft food and giving him sips of grape juice). Although there was still no end in sight to Uncle Hanh’s condition, not a single person in that room had any expectations that Uncle Hanh would not be leaving this room and that he would soon be able to try on those discounted jeans once he was home again.

A few days later, Uncle Hanh had another surgical procedure performed to remove more of the fluid in the abscess along with the fluid near the lungs. This operation was more intense and had a more traumatic effect on Uncle Hanh. It was the 12th day and Uncle Hanh had been moved to the Intensive Care Unit because his fever had returned and was growing weaker.

On day 14, I was informed that Uncle Hanh’s condition was improving and that he would be leaving the ICU to be taken back into his old room. Amy and I decided to go p to the hospital together to visit him. Amy had bought some flowers for Uncle Hanh and had been a great support for me through this ordeal. When the elevator doors opened and we saw Uncle Hanh walking through the hallways, a huge feeling of relief rushed over me. It was good to see him up and moving and when he noticed us and smiled, we knew that he would be soon leaving this place.

It was on June 4th that my Uncle Hanh first fell ill after what was intended to be a fun night of fishing with family here in America for the first time. 23 days later, my Uncle Hanh signed his release papers and was given permission to go back home to his new home in America in which he had only spent a few days in since coming to this country on June 1, 2006. Although Uncle Hanh is still weak and appears tired most of the time, he is able to smile when I visit and with the news that he is now on the road to wellville, my family is at ease and we look forward to his being fully recovered so that we can take him back out on the boat again.