A Real American

I used to have a friend, he was of Vietnamese extraction, although he was definitely not any sort of hyphenated American. He used to see the people in the Asian-American club and he would spit on the ground and glare at them. They were mostly born here. “Phew! Just a bunch of idiots!” His name was Tran. I met him when I was at the University of Virginia, when he was 16, in his second year already. He was in the engineering school, but he also liked to read literature, he learned to play the guitar and he loved playing Jimi Hendrix. He understood the intricacies of football, he loved the Redskins. He was definitely a genius. By the time he graduated he had enough credit hours that it only took him a year to get his Master’s degree. Then he got his Phd.

He was also a lot of fun. There was no challenge he would shirk, no drink he wouldn’t drink. And he drank a lot. We all did, but he only weighed 110 pounds; still, he tried to keep up but he passed out a lot, he usually wound up under the coffee table. Every Friday after classes he would do the hour of power with someone. The hour of power was very difficult, I tried it once and only lasted about 34 minutes. The idea is, you drink a shot of beer each minute for one hour, if you vomit you are out of the game. Sixty minutes, that is only sixty ounces, only five beers. Sounds simple but it isn’t. The foam builds up in your system. I remember he tried to get my roommate Bobby to do it with malt liquor. Bobby was a black guy, he said “I’m not drinking that shit!” and just laughed. He wasn't hyphenated either, he was very country.

One Friday after the hour of power I said “OK, let’s get in the car, we have to drive around!” I had no idea where we were going, I just used to say things like that. They called me Frank after the Frank Booth character in Blue Velvet. I was something like that, in some ways. In those days anyone, even us outsiders, could go to the fraternity parties and drink for free. I would quote lines from the movie and get into Frank Booth character. I tended to freak the fraternity boys out a lot, they were afraid of me. Anyway, on this Friday I said, to my friends, “C’mon let’s go for a joyride! Let's get on with it!” So we piled into the car, and Tran was in the center of the back seat, between Steve and Hugo. After a few minutes he passed out and his head flopped over onto Hugo’s shoulder. “Hey Frank, turn the car could you? Tran’s on my shoulder!” I flipped the wheel a bit, but then his head flopped over onto Steve’s shoulder. “Frank, turn the car!” This went on for a while. I couldn’t manage to get Tran's head straight and off of their shoulders, so finally we just came on back.

We all piled out of the car but Tran was still passed out, in the back. I think it was about 3PM. Someone took the dice I kept on my rear view mirror and put them around his neck and we took a picture. Someone said, “Hey, we should use that picture and run him for student council President.” It seemed like a big joke at the time. But that is what actually happened. He ran for student council President, his platform was pretty simple: “I am an extremist!” It really was all a big joke after all of course. The guy he ran against was a guy from one of the houses, or fraternities. He had wanted to be student council President at UVA since he was nine years old or some such thing. None of us belonged to fraternities. That wasn’t for us. Anyway, Tran wound up getting a third of the vote. It was pretty amazing.

Some people thought he was silly, but I knew otherwise. And I will tell you why.

He told me this story once, while we were driving down to Charlottesville from Alexandria, it is about a two hour drive so he had plenty of time to talk.

One time I walked to Cambodia. I had to walk back though. We were trying to get out of the country and we were supposed to meet in Phnom Penh, but we all had to go separately or they would stop us. I hitch hiked and took some buses and then walked over the border, then I walked to Phnom Penh. I sat down and waited around for about a week, then walked back home to Saigon. It turned out my family couldn’t get across the border.

My mom decided we should try to get to Thailand in a boat. It was just me and her, my sister we would send for later. My dad didn’t want to leave Vietnam. My mom saved up enough money and exchanged it for gold and U.S. dollars. She sewed the gold and dollars inside my shorts so the pirates wouldn’t take it. We had to leave in the middle of the night on a canoe with an engine. Things went OK but after a while the engine quit. We couldn’t get it to start again, so we started rowing. Then the pirates came, they pointed rifles at us. They pointed to the girls in the boat, the younger ones, and then they took them away and we never saw them again. We kept rowing but then more pirates came, they were angry that the girls had been taken but they took each one of us and felt around our bodies, they found my gold and U.S. dollars and took them by taking a knife and cutting my shorts off. I then only had shoes and a t shirt on. We had gotten very close to the coast of Thailand where the refugee camp was. Another set of pirates came, they were really pissed off because we had no girls and no money, so they took machetes and chopped the canoe up into pieces, so we had to swim to the shore. It was a long swim, about five minutes.

There were tents in the refugee camp and they gave us food. I got a job after a few days. Eventually we got here and we lived in an apartment on Columbia Pike, my mom worked and then she sent for my sister. I went to Wakefield High school when I was 12 and skipped a bunch of grades, I went right to senior. Then my mom got us a small house and I came to school down here. Hardcore man!

He used to say “Hardcore man!” a lot. He loved speed metal and he had scars on his face. He wouldn’t ever say how he got them though. His sister is a doctor now and he is teaching in the bay area of California. His mom died quite a while ago. I miss him sometimes, I will never know anyone quite like that again.