Bố Ơi

Twenty-five years later

Bố ơi,

Twenty-five years ago I wrote you a letter called Con Nhớ Bố. I was twenty-eight years old. I knew I had lost my father. I did not yet understand how much of you would continue to live inside the decisions I would make.

I began that letter by asking: Who was our Dad? What was he like? What do I remember when I think of him? I answered that you seemed to value two things above all: helping family, relatives, friends, and anyone who needed you; and the education of your children.

I wrote about the prison camps. About working the land after a life in uniform. About the boat. About how little water there was. About Palawan and the refugees you tried to protect. And I wrote about the nights you stayed awake beside a photocopier, copying textbooks four or five hundred pages long, one page at a time, because your children needed books.

Then I made you a promise.

I promised that we would guide the generations after us with what you had taught us—respect, education, patience, family, and the responsibility to help others.

At twenty-eight, a promise like that sounds almost simple.

Twenty-five years later, I know better.

So this letter is not another eulogy. It is an accounting.

Bố, did I keep my promise?

I cannot answer that by giving you my résumé. You never taught me that a title was the measure of a person. You had already lived the opposite lesson. Circumstances could take away a uniform, status, property, comfort, even freedom—and a person could still decide what kind of human being to be.

So I have to measure my life by a different standard.

Did I take care of my family?

Chrystina and I raised three children. I tried to give them what you gave us: not a path they were required to follow, but a place strong enough to begin from. I wanted them to know where they came from without believing that inheritance should decide where they must go. I wanted them educated, capable, grounded, and free to become themselves.

I did not always get that balance right. I am still learning it.

Did I honor education?

The degrees are the least interesting answer.

What stays with me is that photocopier.

I can still imagine you there after everyone else had gone to sleep: a textbook hundreds of pages thick, the machine beside you, one page, then another, then another. There was no audience. No one was congratulating you. You were simply making tomorrow a little more possible for your children.

I have spent much of my life learning, teaching, mentoring, building, writing, and trying to make institutions work better for people. And only now do I see a line connecting those things more clearly.

Your photocopier and my books are not the same thing.

But I recognize the impulse.

If you have learned something that may help the people who come after you, do not keep it to yourself. Pass it forward.

Did I help people outside our immediate family?

This is the question I probably inherited from your funeral.

I remember the people who came to say goodbye to you. Some were strangers to me. One man told me what you had done for his family. I had known you as my father. Only then did I begin to understand how many other people had experienced you as a guide, an advocate, a teacher, a person who would sit down and help them figure out the next step.

That changed me.

I cannot count my own life in the same way, and I do not want service to become another scoreboard. But I know that much of the work I chose afterward came from that day. I wanted my work to matter beyond me. I wanted what I knew to be useful. I wanted systems and institutions to leave people better than they found them.

I have tried.

Have I been as generous with my time as you were? I am not sure.

Have I always carried the same instinctive sense of responsibility for extended family? I am not sure.

Have I always given the people closest to me the patience I could give a difficult problem at work? I am not sure.

There are parts of the promise I can point to with pride. There are parts I am still growing into.

Maybe that is what I failed to understand at twenty-eight.

A promise like this is not something you keep once.

You keep it again and again.

In recent years I found language for some of these ideas. I call it The Way: receive what came before you; learn from it; question it; add what your own life teaches; then pass something useful forward without narrowing the future of the person who receives it.

I used to think of that language mostly as something I had discovered across many parts of my life. I now see more clearly that some of its oldest roots were already in front of me when I was a child.

You never called it The Way.

You just lived your way.

And perhaps the deepest thing I inherited from you was not a set of instructions. It was evidence.

This week, your children will sit together again, twenty-five years after you left us.

We are older now.

Old enough to understand some things we could not understand while you were alive.

The textbooks feel different to me now. The money you sent home feels different. The long shifts feel different. The people you helped feel different. Even the words Bố ơi feel different.

I wrote you a song for this anniversary.

It is called Bố Ơi because twenty-five years later I am still calling for you.

But I am not calling because I need you to come back and solve something for me.

I am calling because I finally have an answer I could not give you in 2001.

Bố, did I keep my promise?

I think I have tried to.

Not perfectly.
Not completely.
And not finished.

I have built a family. I have tried to serve. I have tried to teach. I have tried to turn what I learned into something another person can use. I have tried to give the people after me a stronger starting point without choosing their destination for them.

And I am still trying.

Maybe that is the answer.

Twenty-five years later, I am still your son.

And I am still keeping the promise.