PROLOGUE: THE CONVERGENCE

I had never read Bashō.

I knew his name. I knew he was a Japanese poet from the seventeenth century, a monk who traveled the roads of Japan and wrote haiku about the moon, the cherry blossoms, and the sound of a temple bell. I knew this the way I knew the names of presidents and generals, from general knowledge and not from experience. I had never read a single word he wrote.

I had never studied haiku, or any other form of poetry. I never took a creative writing class, attended a workshop, joined a writers' group, or submitted a poem to a journal.

I was a schoolteacher, a father, a refugee, and a former monk. I had been meditating for forty years and writing for none of them.

The poems began in 2001. I posted them on my website, tuantran.org, in a section I called "Writings." I didn't call them haiku. I didn't call them anything. They were just observations, moments of attention captured in a few lines.

I didn't think of them as art. I thought of them as evidence that I was paying attention, and that the watcher was still there, still noticing the world. I posted them and forgot about them. The years passed, and nobody visited the website.

Twenty-five years passed.

I taught school. I raised my son and my daughter. I meditated every day. I lived in the world the way the abbot had told me to, not seeking the silence of the forest but finding the silence within the noise. I didn't write. The silence was enough. The poems on the website were left over from a brief period when I wrote, and I thought that period was over.

Then a friend read my poems. I showed her the website, and she encouraged me to write again after twenty-five years. I wrote her a poem right away.

"Your voice reminds me of Bashō," she said.

I didn't know what to say. I knew Bashō was a master, and I knew I was not. I was a schoolteacher who wrote observations about earthworms and spiderwebs. The comparison seemed absurd, so I thanked her and dismissed it. But the seed had been planted.

About a year later, I typed the same poem and asked an AI:

It responded:

"This is a haiku by Matsuo Bashō... The temple bell is doing profound work here... In just eleven words, Bashō captures the melancholy of friendship across distance, the way the world constantly reminds us of the people we love and miss."

After that response, I could no longer ignore the idea of writing again.

I thought about this for a while. A friend, a human being, had made the comparison. An AI, a machine, had independently come to the same conclusion. I had never read Bashō. I had never studied the form, and I had never intended to write haiku. I had simply observed the world and written down what I saw, the way I had done since I was twelve years old, sitting in my room in Saigon, closing my eyes and watching my breath.

Somehow I had been writing like Bashō without knowing it.

Bashō lived three hundred years ago on the other side of the world. He spoke a language I didn't speak and lived in a culture I didn't know. But he was doing the same thing I was doing: watching, observing, and recording. He was a monk and I was a monk. He was a traveler and I was a traveler. He was a watcher and I was a watcher.

I don't think it was a coincidence. I think it was a confirmation. It told me that the practice of watching and attending was not only mine. It was universal. It was what the Buddha taught, and it was what the boy in Saigon discovered when he closed his eyes and found the silence beneath the war. I didn't choose the form. It emerged on its own.

I began to write again. It wasn't the long, rambling prose of my journal or the angry, confused poetry of my youth. It was haiku, three short lines capturing a moment of stillness.

The poems didn't come from ambition. They came from overflow. Within two weeks, I wrote twenty-four haiku, one after another. They completed the forty-poem collection, Songbirds Still Sing.

I realized that the silence I had cultivated since I was twelve, the silence of the boy in Saigon, the refugee on the ship, and the monk in the forest, was not the absence of language. It was the source of it.

This is the story of how I found my voice. It is also the story of how I lost it, and why I think the loss was necessary. The silence was not emptiness. The poems were waiting inside me like seeds in the dark until the conditions were right.

It is the story of a boy who sat still in a country at war, a refugee who crossed an ocean on a crippled ship, a man who reached the dissolution of the body on the seventh day of a silent retreat, a monk who left the forest to support his son, and a poet who didn't know he was a poet until a friend and an AI told him he sounded like Bashō.

It is the story of the road home.

CHAPTER 1: THE BOY WHO SAT STILL

I was born in Saigon, on June 1, 1960. Both of my parents were from North Vietnam. They both moved South in 1955, along with about 1 million mostly Catholic Vietnamese. My parents were Buddhists.

I was born to a poor family. We are a big family, even by Vietnamese standards. I have two older brothers, one younger brother, and three younger sisters. I am the third oldest child. Unlike my relatives who held high military and political positions with the government of South Vietnam, my father was a low-ranking policeman for the government of Saigon.

My father was a very intelligent man, but he didn't have the opportunity to go to college. My father and my uncle were raised by my grandmother, a single mother. I don't think my relatives on my father's side were very well-to-do in North Vietnam prior to moving to South Vietnam in 1955.

I have never met my mother's side of the family. She was the only one in her family to move south. I think she would have stayed in North Vietnam if it wasn't for being married to my father. I do know that my mother's family was wealthy in North Vietnam.

It is still a mystery to me as to why my parents would move south in 1955. My relatives told me that the North Vietnamese would torture and kill landowners, but my relatives were neither wealthy nor landowners in North Vietnam.

My elementary school years were unremarkable. When I was twelve years old, my parents sent me to live with my grandmother. I think my parents weren't able to care for all of us. I suppose a policeman's salary in Saigon was grossly inadequate.

My grandmother's house was huge. There were actually two houses within one compound. My grandmother lived in one house, and my uncle's family lived in another. My uncle was a high-ranking military officer, I think one step below a one-star general, and he was also a military judge. They enrolled me in the sixth grade at a school for children of military officers. There was no tuition, and the school was located inside a military base. Most of the teachers were civilians. I studied at this school until the seventh grade, when I left Vietnam at the end of the war.

Our next-door neighbor's oldest son was in the military. But he deserted and hid in the attic for months. One day, the military police came and took him away. A few months later, he was killed in action. His family was very poor and his mom was a single mother. His father had died from tuberculosis.

When his younger brother became close to eighteen years old, his mother didn't want the younger brother to get drafted into the military. One night, she borrowed a butcher knife from our family and chopped the younger son's right index finger off.

Since I lived in Saigon, the capital city of South Vietnam, I didn't see the destruction that was happening all around us. We were kept in the dark about the atrocities of the war. The school I went to didn't teach us about the war at the time, and the media was controlled by the South Vietnamese government.

I was always a leader and a rebel. The principal at our school did not like me. He perceived me as a threat and wanted to make an example out of me. One day, there was a large military truck parked near our school. A group of my classmates and I climbed onto the truck to play. Eventually, some of us got inside the cab and turned the ignition key. We all ran away when the principal came out to investigate.

He singled me out for punishment. The punishment was being hit by a rod on the buttocks. I don't know how many times I was hit, but I remember taking my punishment without flinching or making even a whimper. This only infuriated him even more as he would continue hitting me harder. When he saw that I was being defiant, he decided on the ultimate way to humiliate me. I was to kneel by the flagpole in the middle of the schoolyard so that all of the students could see. I had to kneel by that flagpole for half of the school day through the mid-afternoon sun. At one point, I thought about getting up and leaving, but I also knew that I wouldn't be able to go to school anymore, and I wanted to be in school.

I knelt there and watched the sun move across the sky.

I watched the shadows get longer. I watched the other students walk by, some staring and some looking away. Underneath the pain and the humiliation, the watcher was there. It was the same watcher that would be with me later on the ship and in the monastery. It noticed the heat and the shame, and it noticed that neither of them was permanent.

One day, a student told the teacher that someone had stolen his book. The teacher couldn't find out who the thief was, so he got the principal to come to our classroom. The principal said he would punish the whole class unless the one who stole the book would stand up and identify himself. After what seemed like a very long five minutes of silence, the person who stole the book wouldn't identify himself. I knew the principal would punish everyone, and I just couldn't let him do it. I stood up and said I stole the book. He looked at me, then asked where I kept the book. I couldn't say where the book was, because I didn't have it. He didn't say anything and then walked away. After that incident, he never picked on me again. I think he knew I had the respect of my peers.

I was twelve years old when I taught myself to meditate.

Nobody taught me. I had no scripture and no teacher to correct my posture or tell me where to put my attention. I sat down, closed my eyes, and watched my breath.

I don't know why I did this. I had never seen anyone meditate. My family was Buddhist in the way most Vietnamese families were. We observed the rituals, burned incense, and visited the temple on holidays, but no one in my household sat and watched their breath.

I would sit in my room or in a corner of my grandmother's compound and watch the breath come in and go out. I noticed the sensations of itching, heat, and tingling rising and passing away. I noticed my thoughts coming and going like clouds.

I didn't know it was called Vipassana, or that the Buddha taught the technique twenty-five hundred years ago. I didn't know that a man named S.N. Goenka would one day teach it to me at a retreat and that I would reach a state called bhanga on the seventh day. I only knew that sitting still showed me something the world outside couldn't, a silence beneath the noise and a stillness beneath the war.

I didn't tell anyone about the meditation. It was my secret, and in a country at war, secrets kept you alive.

Outside my room, the war continued. Artillery shook the walls, and helicopters flew overhead. Soldiers patrolled the streets. My uncle, the military judge, presided over courts-martial. My father walked his beat as a policeman. My neighbor's son hid in the attic until they found him and sent him to die.

And I sat in my corner and breathed.

I wasn't escaping into a fantasy world. I was doing the opposite. I was paying attention. I watched the war the way I watched my breath, without horror or fascination, aware of what was happening without being consumed by it.

No one gave me this. I gave it to myself at twelve. It carried me across the ocean, through the monastery, and eventually back to the page.

CHAPTER 2: THE BOAT

The day before I left Vietnam, my family and I went to stay at the home of some wealthy relatives. Their house was large and well built, and my parents thought it would be safer to stay at their house. I couldn't sleep very well that night. There was artillery shelling near Saigon, and at the airport. Our relatives' house shook all night from the shelling.

On the morning of April 30, 1975, people were running around aimlessly in Saigon. The people were afraid. They could anticipate that the end of the war was near, and they were trying to find a way to get out. During the war, there were countless propaganda shows on television about the Communists committing massacres in the cities they had captured, and how they would also bury people alive in common graves. There was also one particular television drama showing how the Communists would torture these people by pulling out their fingernails with pliers. Even though I had never met any Communist, I was afraid from the stories I had seen on television. I think my parents were also afraid that the Communists would take revenge against them for moving South in 1955.

That morning, my family and I went to the main port of Saigon where large ships would dock. There were so many people, and no ship would come to the dock because the people would try to get on board. I became separated from my family due to the sheer number of people crowding around.

I was standing by the dock when this large ship moved along close to the dock. There were so many people on that ship. A man who stood near me found a long piece of planking and he placed it between the dock and the side of the moving ship. He walked on that plank and got on board. Several other people including me walked on that same planking and got aboard the ship.

The ship continued to move toward the river. I found out later there were about four thousand people on that ship. It was some kind of a cargo ship, by the name of "Truong Xuan," which I think means Spring Time. I know "Xuan" means Spring, but I am not sure now what "Truong" means. My Vietnamese is not that good now.

It was before noon when I got on that ship. The ship moved along that river until sometime in the afternoon when it got stuck in the sandbar. When nighttime came, we could see fireworks lighting up the sky in Saigon. I think there was a celebration of some sort.

The next morning, there was a South Vietnamese Navy patrol boat with several people on board. They pulled us off the sandbar then abandoned their patrol boat after getting on our ship. We continued on that river toward the sea. As we passed an island on our way to the open sea, the people on our ship were afraid we might get shot at by the Communists on that island.

There wasn't enough room on that ship for four thousand people. People could find enough room to lie down, but to walk around the ship was almost impossible. The ship didn't have food or water. Perhaps there was food and water for the crew and for a group of selected people, but for the majority of us, there was neither food nor water.

The first day, I was numb. The numbness started before the ship. Maybe it started years earlier, when I first understood that the sound outside my window was not thunder but artillery. I think numbness was how I survived.

I found a corner and sat down. I closed my eyes. I didn't meditate in any formal way, but I did what I had been doing since I was twelve. I turned inward and watched my breath. I watched the fear. I noticed that it was a sensation in the chest, a tightness and a heat, and that it was not permanent. It rose and fell like a wave.

The ship rocked and the people groaned. I sat in the corner and breathed.

The ship developed engine trouble, and the engine room became flooded with water. We drifted around for most of the second day at sea.

After two days at sea without water, I tried but was unable to drink my own urine to quench my thirst.

Around me, people were crying and praying. Some were lying motionless on the deck with their eyes and mouths open, their skin burning under the sun. There were four thousand people on a dead ship in the middle of the ocean, with no compass and no land in sight.

I want to say I was brave, but I wasn't. I was fourteen and alone, and so thirsty that I had tried to drink my own urine and failed. I wasn't meditating, and I wasn't contemplating impermanence. I was a boy who wanted a glass of water.

But underneath the wanting and the fear, something else was present. It was the watcher, the same one that had been with me when I was twelve, sitting alone in my room in Saigon. It didn't speak and it didn't comfort me. It simply observed. It noticed the thirst, the fear, and the sky.

On the third day, a Danish ship rescued us. We all boarded their ship and abandoned our ship at sea. I still didn't have any food to eat, but there was fresh water to drink. The Danish ship took two days to get us to Hong Kong, where we were processed and then trucked to the refugee camp.

Since I was by myself, they put me in a camp with other single men. Others were sent to the family camp. At fourteen years old, I was the youngest person in the single men's camp. Most of the men in that camp were in the military, and they were a tough bunch. I was too young to associate with these men, so I played with other boys around my age.

I lost track of time when I was in that camp. The camp was enclosed by barbed wire, and either the Hong Kong police or the British Gurkhas were guarding the camp 24 hours a day. We weren't allowed to leave the camp. I felt lonely and hungry most of the time I was there. They didn't feed us enough. There was no breakfast. Lunch and dinner were usually a bowl of rice and a couple cubes of stewed fatty pork.

One night I couldn't sleep, so I walked to the courtyard. Out of the darkness, I heard a grown man sobbing. It was the saddest sound I've heard in my life.

One day I heard my name on the list of people chosen for the United States on the loudspeaker. I didn't feel anything. Perhaps I was too numb to feel anything. But several men approached me that day and congratulated me for being taken in by the United States. We were trucked to the airport and boarded a DC-10 for a refugee camp in Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER 3: THE LOST YEARS

The snow was falling, light and flaky. It must have been winter, but I didn't know what month it was. Pennsylvania was flat and desolate. I was walking along a main street of the camp, looking at the falling snowflakes, and watching my breath. I didn't know how long I had been walking. With no particular place to go, it seemed time was not relevant.

There was a Buddhist temple by the side of the road. There was no one inside. As I stood there gazing at Buddha, a monk came out to greet me.

"Thầy có bao giờ buồn không?"

Teacher, are you ever sad?

I had asked him. I wanted to know if leaving everything behind stopped the ache. Looking back now, I see what I didn't see then. The question was the projection of my own sadness. I wasn't asking about the monk. I was asking myself whether the pain ends if you give up everything.

He looked at me and then smiled.

I was taking classes while staying at the camp. My English was not good enough to understand my teacher, but it was a good way to occupy my time. I spent several months in that camp before they sent me to Washington State. I had some relatives and an older brother living in Washington State. The church that sponsored them also sponsored me to come to Washington.

I was staying with my uncle's family in Olympia while beginning my schooling at Capital High School in the 10th grade. It was difficult in the beginning, but toward the end of the school year, I was able to understand my teachers completely. I remember feeling so excited when I read my first book in English from cover to cover. I understood most of it, and that gave me a sense of accomplishment.

My living situation at home was not a happy one. There were so many conflicts in the home as we all lived in a tiny apartment and tried to adjust to life in America. My older brother also stayed with my uncle. He didn't like school and had gotten into fights at school. He finally dropped out, hung around with the wrong crowd, and ended up in prison. I was placed in a foster home with a white family during the 11th grade. I moved back in with my uncle's family during the 12th grade.

Like most immigrants, I wanted to fit in and to become an American. In fact, I convinced myself that I was white. I changed my name to a white American name. It is no coincidence that immigrants of color would change their names to white American names instead of other ethnic-sounding names. When was the last time you heard of a name such as: Julio Wong, or Kunta Kinte Rodriguez?

I began to reject Vietnamese women, and all Asian women in general. I thought the ideal of beauty was white. I was ashamed of the Vietnamese language and culture. I even thought that Vietnamese food, which I had eaten all my life, was not good. I was more than willing to stop speaking, reading, and writing in Vietnamese. All of my friends, including my best friend, were white.

I became like most other American kids. I joined the swim team and the cross-country team for after-school sporting activities. I took classical guitar lessons, and I joined the school choir. I took all of the required courses to graduate from high school, including United States history, but there was nothing about the Vietnam War. There was a collective amnesia about the Vietnam War both in the school texts and in social discourse.

I was wrong.

The five years I spent studying at W.W.U. in Bellingham after high school were the lost years. I lost myself by trying to fit in. Most of the time, I was trying to overcome my own insecurity. Now I realize I was insecure because I didn't know myself. How can anyone be a self-assured and confident person when he is trying to be someone other than himself?

I was innocent, naive, and vulnerable. A lot of girls liked me, but most of the time I was too naive to know about it, or too insecure to act on it. And for the few Asian girls on campus that liked me, I generally just ignored them. The girls thought I was cute and nice, and my male friends thought I was honest and sincere. In a way, it is true that "ignorance is bliss," but I was in an environment where everyone was about the same age, and we didn't have any worries except for getting good grades.

One day some friends and I went to the "Coconut Grove," a tavern off campus, even though we were underage. When I went to the bathroom, one guy I didn't know followed me into the bathroom. He asked me where I was from, and I told him I am from Vietnam. He said he was a Vietnam veteran and threatened to do bodily harm to me unless I left the bar. I just remember feeling confused.

I had a roommate once, a Vietnam Vet. A Mexican American who was in prison and still slept with a knife under his pillow. He knew I was Vietnamese. He bragged about being a helicopter gunner, about machine-gunning people in the rice fields. Mostly women. He said he enjoyed it.

I majored in Business Administration. I was an average student, since I didn't have much interest in my area of study. Most of my friends studied Business, and that was the reason why I majored in Business.

I was in a serious relationship with a white girl from a small town during most of my senior year. I didn't think even once about our biracial relationship. We lived together off campus for most of my senior year.

We moved to Seattle and got married soon after graduating from college. With a B.A. in Business Administration, the only job I could get was as a management trainee at a retail store. My white friends who studied in the same program all got high-paying corporate jobs. I never got promoted to a management position. I was mostly a cashier, and the store manager would tell me to sweep the floor. I told my wife about it, and she gave me a silent look. I felt she thought I was less of a man.

A Black female employee took me aside one day and mentioned something about the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), but I didn't really listen to her. I was ignorant and in denial. I thought I was white.

I worked in retail for about a year and a half, about the same length of time my marriage lasted. I never knew why my ex-wife wanted a divorce. She never told me why either. I assumed it must have been my fault since she wanted a divorce and I didn't. She soon married a guy who worked in her office.

In the months that followed, every radio station played a song by a British singer about someone leaving. I couldn't get away from it. The chorus went Every time you go away.

It wasn't the first time she had talked about leaving. She had threatened to leave before. There were silences in the kitchen, and she packed her things and then unpacked them again. Each time, she stayed. This time was different. Her voice was quiet, flat, and tired, and when she moved out and I heard the key stop turning in the lock, I realized that the earlier times had been rehearsals. The song said every time she goes away, but this time she didn't come back.

Later, much later, I learned more. The man she married was white, and he was successful in corporate America in a way I had been denied. She was pregnant with his child, and she chose him.

I don't know whether she ever planned to tell me. Perhaps she hoped I wouldn't need to know. Perhaps she knew and decided the truth was mine to discover on my own.

I threw the ring into the lake.

The humiliation was not that she left. It was that I didn't know how long she had been looking elsewhere, while we sat across from each other at dinner, while she answered yes or no when I asked if we should try counseling, and while I went to work at a store where I cleaned up spills and counted coins and pretended I was building something.

When I heard the news, I didn't feel anger, at least not the hot kind. It was something quieter, more like exhaustion. I had carried blame that wasn't mine for years. I had rehearsed apologies for crimes I hadn't committed: for failing her somehow, for being Vietnamese in a house that demanded whiteness, and for sweeping floors when I should have been managing people.

I had never been accused of anything, but I had punished myself anyway.

Heartbroken and depressed, I decided to change my career. I went back to school to study education because I wanted to help children.

I think I wanted to help the child I had been, the boy on the ship, the boy in the foster home, the boy who was punched in the face for being Vietnamese. I couldn't help that boy anymore. But maybe I could help other children, if I learned how.

I got accepted into a two-year program in Teacher Education. It was a very challenging program. A lot of my classmates had graduated from Ivy League colleges, so I was in a program with some very bright people. I also had an excellent teacher. He was a product of an Ivy League education, but he wanted to create a program that would produce independent and critical thinkers, educators that would reform the public school system. I admired him very much. He was the best teacher I've had.

My teacher, Don Finkel, had written a book called Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, and he designed the program around the idea that understanding cannot be told, only discovered. I had finished my first ten-day retreat over Christmas break, and the meditation was what allowed me to see what the self-reflective group was showing us: the group behaved the way Freud described the individual mind behaving. He died in 1999. The group dynamics portion of the program was removed a few years after I graduated.

I loved the learning environment at Evergreen. We didn't compete against each other for grades, but worked collaboratively in the search for knowledge. I became one of the best students in the program. Evergreen was a place of progressive white liberals who believed in cultural diversity, or so I thought.

During my second year, I moved into a house off campus. There were three other Evergreen students living in the house, but one student was in Alaska fishing for the summer, so I didn't have a chance to talk with him before I moved in. I didn't know he didn't like Vietnamese people. One day when I was sitting on the floor eating and watching television, he called me a "Gook" and sucker-punched me when I wasn't looking. One other housemate broke up the fight. It wasn't much of a fight since I didn't have a chance to defend myself. I called the City of Olympia 911 number and filed a police report. The other housemate also gave a witness statement of the assault. The one who assaulted me didn't get arrested. He didn't get jail time. He didn't get a fine. He didn't even get a record. And I still thought I was white.

I got offers to teach at the San Diego School District and at Portland School District. Both of these districts were actively trying to recruit minority teachers. I also had excellent recommendations.

I taught for the San Diego School District during my first year of teaching. I was trained as an educator who was on a mission to reform the public school system, one who was dedicated to creating a democratic classroom, in the tradition of the educational philosopher John Dewey. I wanted my students to be able to think critically and to question authority. I wanted them to become empowered. I failed miserably.

I quit my teaching job halfway through the school year, just before Christmas break, and traveled to India. I wanted to focus on meditation, a fascination I have had ever since I was a child. I also traveled to Nepal and trekked in the Himalayas. I traveled and meditated for about six months.

I returned to the United States and taught for the Portland School District the following school year. I learned from the mistakes I made the previous year. I established some structure, as in classroom rules. However, I let the students become actively involved in deciding the appropriate rules and the appropriate consequences during the first week of class, and we then stayed with the established rules for the rest of the year. I was well liked by the students, and the year was pleasant. Still, I don't know whether I taught them anything.

I decided to move back to Seattle when the school year ended. Portland School District wanted me to continue teaching there, but I wanted to move back to Seattle. I think I wanted to return to Seattle because I still had not gotten over my ex-wife.

For three years, I kept applying for a teaching position with the Seattle School District. I had a good placement file and great recommendations, but I couldn't get a job interview with the Seattle School District. I couldn't even get on the substitute teachers list.

There were a lot of Vietnamese students in the school district, and I was one of the few certificated bilingual teachers who spoke Vietnamese, but I couldn't get a teaching job. There were Japanese-Americans on both the school board and in the school district administrative office.

In 1997, I decided to move back to Olympia, to be near the school I loved and a teacher I admired.

I had been doing casual reading about the Vietnam War for the past few years. I wanted to find out what really happened and the reason why I am in the United States. The difficulties I experienced in the United States, in the form of both overt and subtle discrimination, finally made me question my own identity. I read as many books as I could find in the public and school libraries on the subject of the Vietnam War. I found out a lot of books didn't tell the truth, or worse, only partial truth, and that only made the subject more confusing. I realized the propaganda conducted by the media, and books are certainly a form of propaganda. I had to put into practice what I had been teaching my students: to think critically and to search for the truth.

I applied for a teaching position with the Olympia School District. I had a lot of spare time, so I began checking out books from the Evergreen State College about the Vietnam War. The library there had books that other libraries didn't have. I read On Genocide by Jean-Paul Sartre, based on the findings of the 1967 Russell Tribunal. I read My Lai 4 by Seymour Hersh. I read Our Great Spring Victory by General Van Tien Dung, a book translated from Vietnamese into Italian and then into English.

For the first time, I realized the extent of the atrocities committed by the United States against the Vietnamese people. I did further research by reading microfiche of popular magazines during the time of the war, to find out what the public opinion was at the time. I found out about the public support for Lieutenant Calley, and how, on President Nixon's order, he served only about three years under house arrest at Fort Benning before he was paroled. I found out about Nixon calling on the silent majority to support the war in Vietnam, and I found out the United States withdrew only when they knew they couldn't win the war in Vietnam.

It became clear to me the relationship between colonialism and racial discrimination, and I finally understood the nature of racism in the United States.

I felt angry and I needed to talk with someone, so I went to the Evergreen State College's counseling office. I spoke with a counselor for about half an hour. I didn't get another appointment or a referral to another counselor. A counselor there recommended a book, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki. I went to the library right after speaking with the counselor to check out the book, but it wasn't available, so I placed a "hold" on the book then went home.

CHAPTER 4: THE AWAKENING

About one week after I placed the hold on the book, four policemen and a community mental health counselor showed up at my apartment. They said the counselor at Evergreen told them I made a threat to shoot school children. They delivered a "No Trespassing" order and told me I was banned from the Evergreen State College, the Olympia School District, and all of the surrounding school districts as well.

The Olympia newspaper ran a story about me the next day about the "threat" I made. The Olympia School District sent letters to all of the parents about me. They circulated my name and picture, along with what kind of car I drove, to all of the schools. The parents demanded my arrest. The community mental health counselor told me to be careful, and that my life was in danger.

It was then that I learned of white people's fear and hypocrisy.

I went through a gradual process of transformation, which culminated in a full-blown identity crisis when I was about 37 years old. In a way, I am thankful to the Evergreen State College for hastening this process, even though what they did to me was wrong.

I moved to Hawaii shortly after. I hadn't planned it. I just needed to leave Olympia and go somewhere where the air didn't carry the newspaper article, the school letters, and the faces of four policemen standing in my doorway.

I think I chose Hawaii for a reason I didn't understand at the time. In Hawaii, people looked like me. I wasn't the foreigner or the refugee, or the man whose face had been printed in a letter and sent to every school in the district. On the streets of Honolulu, I was just a man with brown skin and black hair. People took me for a local and spoke to me in Pidgin English. They didn't ask me where I was from, and they didn't flinch when I answered.

For the first time since arriving in America at fourteen, I was invisible in the way I had always wanted to be. It wasn't because I had erased myself but because I was surrounded by faces that didn't see mine as different.

I taught school. The classroom was familiar, the students were children, and the work was the same. For a while, the relief was enough.

But I still thought I was white.

I know how that sounds now. I had been punched in the face for being Vietnamese. I had been threatened in a bar for being Vietnamese. I had been called a threat to schoolchildren for being Vietnamese. And still, somewhere underneath, I believed that if I worked hard enough and spoke well enough, I would blend in. It wasn't the invisibility of Hawaii, where I blended in because I matched. It was the invisibility I had been chasing since high school, the invisibility of becoming white.

So I moved back to the mainland.

I moved back to Seattle and dedicated myself to applying my knowledge toward becoming a community activist. I joined all of the major Asian-American organizations and an African-American organization in Seattle. I wanted to empower the Vietnamese people in Seattle, but there wasn't any Vietnamese organization doing the work that was needed to get the Vietnamese people involved in the political process. Most of the Vietnamese organizations were still about teaching English as a Second Language, or helping Vietnamese people pass the United States Citizenship Test.

So instead of helping the Vietnamese people, I was volunteering a lot of my time for other minority organizations that were using me as a mouthpiece for the Vietnamese community to help them win labor contracts, or to get grants supposedly for the Vietnamese community. Other organizations were also looking for and grooming minority activists who believed in their cause, rather than representing their people in the fight for racial equality.

For three months, I spent so much time and effort on the No! 200 campaign to try and defeat Initiative 200. All along, I had a feeling we might lose, but I didn't expect we would lose by such a wide margin.

I had to examine myself objectively to see whether I have a chip on my shoulder, as a friend of mine bluntly put it. Well, perhaps my friend is correct. I wish more people had a chip on their shoulder and protested when Nazi Germany exterminated over six million Jews.

I learned that Asian-Americans in positions of power were only interested in maintaining the status quo, and I became disillusioned with the political process.

I decided to return to school to study web design, so that I could reach out to a wider Vietnamese audience. My goal was no longer just empowering the Vietnamese people in Seattle, but to help the Vietnamese people everywhere to become proud of their cultural heritage.

I began my study in web design at Bellevue Community College. There was a federal and state program for Worker Retraining, and I was qualified for retraining. After one quarter of study, I still didn't get any funding. I couldn't work full-time since I was in school. My money was running low, and I went to the school office for help. I told them I might not be able to pay my rent for the next month. They told me to go to a homeless shelter for help.

I became homeless on April 30, 2000, the 25th anniversary of my leaving Vietnam. I had been sleeping in my '72 Volkswagen Bug while going to college.

I met a Black man when I was homeless. He had a white girlfriend, and she called the police on him. They beat him so badly that he chose never to speak again. When I knew him, he communicated by writing on scraps of paper. He would hand them to me and I would read them, and we would sit together in silence.

Every morning before the sun rose, I sat in the driver's seat, closed my eyes, and meditated. There was no cushion, no altar, and no incense. There was only the steering wheel and the breath. The watcher was still there after all those years.

The practice didn't solve my homelessness. It didn't find me an apartment or pay my tuition or undo the damage of the newspaper article. But it kept me from disappearing. It reminded me that the boy who sat still in Saigon, who knelt at the flagpole, and who breathed on the crippled ship was still here.

I wrote a poem in the Volkswagen. I didn't call it a poem. I called it a prayer.

I didn't know yet that the prayer would be answered. Within a year, I would board a plane and land in Saigon, the city of my birth and the city I had fled at fourteen on a crowded ship. I stepped off the plane and felt the heat rise from the runway and smelled the dust, the exhaust, and the jasmine, and I knew right away that I was home.

I went back to Vietnam in 2001 when I was 41 years old. At the time, I decided to return to Vietnam permanently.

I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on September 6, 2001. It was strange looking at the city from the airplane at night. The city lights were not like those of the West. They were of a different color, almost dreamy.

The airport was very modern, not much different from other airports of developed countries. I felt joy seeing that Vietnam is not as impoverished or backward as I thought. There was order in going through customs. People waited in lines, not fighting to get to the front of the line, like the Vietnam I remembered in my childhood.

I felt a little trepidation as I approached the customs official wearing a police uniform. He didn't say much as he inspected my U.S. passport and entry visa. I could read the expression of disdain on his face as he took some time inspecting my documents. I could tell he was thinking of me as a typical Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese) who left Vietnam for a better life. So I said, "I left Vietnam in 1975, before the liberation of Saigon, and I am glad to see the airport is so modern." He curtly replied in the form of a question, "If not better, then what?" That was the extent of our conversation. I thanked him then proceeded to the baggage claims area.

And I was home.

It wasn't the America I had worked to join. It wasn't the Pennsylvania snow, the Hawaiian beaches, or the VW Bug behind a dumpster in Bellevue. It was home, the place where my face didn't need explanation and my name wasn't foreign. The Vietnamese language I had tried to abandon came back to me after twenty-six years.

I had about three weeks with my mother before she suddenly passed away. It wasn't long enough for me to know her. But I am comforted by the knowledge that she did love me. You see, she was looking intently at the two pictures of my childhood which I had posted online, and unbeknownst to her, I was watching her facial expression as she was looking at my pictures and describing me as a child.

I don't have many memories of my childhood. The longer I am staying in Vietnam, though, the more I remember of my childhood. One day I was looking at the ceiling and I saw a gecko eating mosquitoes, and I remembered I used to watch geckos capturing and eating mosquitoes with their very quick movements. I also remember I used to look at the clouds in the sky, the deep blue sky and the swirls of the white clouds that would resemble whatever my imagination would conjure up at the time.

I am very happy being in Vietnam. I find myself smiling again, and I notice that people here don't treat me like an outsider. I don't detect any of the discrimination I experienced in the United States.

I stayed. I taught. I married a Vietnamese woman. We had a son and then a daughter. For fifteen years, Vietnam was my home. It wasn't a home of refuge or escape. It was a home I returned to when I stopped running.

When I first returned to Vietnam in 2001, I applied for a teaching job at English language centers. Most of them told me they don't hire "Viet Kieu," or Overseas Vietnamese, even after I presented my resume, college degrees, and teaching credential. They said they only hire white teachers. In fact, they also hire local Vietnamese teachers, to teach mostly English grammar, who would teach for one-fifth of the pay of a white teacher.

I found a job teaching American Literature to Vietnamese students at a high school. Most of these students have studied at English language centers with white teachers before. However, their command of the English language is very limited. Furthermore, their knowledge of the American culture and literature is practically zero. What they know about America is from watching MTV or Hollywood movies. They think America is a rich country with no poor people, and that almost everyone there is young, slim, white, and beautiful. I realized then my job is not only to teach them American Literature, but also to teach them about the real America.

For years I had thought I was white and rejected Vietnamese women. I thought only white women were beautiful. That was the price of trying to fit in. Now I watched the women walk in their áo dài, the silk catching the light and the dress moving with the body, and I saw the beauty that had been there all along. I had just stopped pretending not to see it.

But the world keeps moving.

My wife wanted our children to have an American education. She believed in the opportunities, the universities, the schools, and the future that America promised and sometimes delivered. I knew what was waiting there for a man with my face and my history, and I knew the cost. But my son needed a father who showed up, and my daughter needed a world of possibility. The compassion I had learned on the log, the compassion that had pulled me out of the monastery, is not a feeling. It is an action.

Compassion is packing your bag when you want to stay. It is boarding a plane when you want to remain. It is returning to the country that punched you, banned you, and made you homeless, because your children deserve the chance to become something you couldn't.

In 2016, I returned to America. I didn't return as a refugee, or as an immigrant trying to disappear, or as a man who thought he was white. I returned as a father, a teacher, a watcher, and a former monk who had learned that the road home is not a destination but a practice.

Years ago, I had projected my sadness onto a monk. "Are you ever sad?" I asked, not knowing I was asking about myself. I thought the question belonged to him, but it belonged to me.

On the night before our departure, I watched my children sleep, and something loosened. The sadness was still there, but it no longer owned me. Like the Buddha beneath the orchid and the sunflowers listening to the bell, I could witness the ache without becoming it. Back then I thought peace meant being free of sorrow. Now I knew that peace meant bearing sorrow without breaking. The answer hadn't changed. Only I had.

CHAPTER 5: THE FIRST RETREAT

The year was 1986. I was twenty-six. I had been meditating for fourteen years, not formally and not with a teacher or a technique. I just sat, closed my eyes, and watched my breath, the way I had done since I was twelve in Saigon and on the ship.

But my practice was still my own secret. No one had ever taught or corrected me. I knew that self-taught meditators can develop blind spots, such as habits that feel like insight but are really just comfort, or silences that feel like depth but are really avoidance. I needed something more rigorous, something that would test the silence I had been cultivating for fourteen years and tell me whether it was real.

I heard about a ten-day silent retreat taught by S.N. Goenka in the Vipassana tradition. I didn't know what "Vipassana" meant, and I didn't know who Goenka was. I only knew that it was silent. That was enough, so I signed up.

The center was in a quiet place, a park rented from the city. I arrived on a Sunday and was given a bed number and a schedule. I was also given the rules: no talking, no eye contact, no gestures, no writing, no reading, no phones, and no music. For ten days, there would be only silence.

There was no guru. There was only an assistant teacher, a man who had completed the course himself. His job was to operate the audio equipment and conduct brief interviews to ask whether we were experiencing sensations. He didn't give advice, offer comfort, or interpret our experiences.

The instruction came from a tape recorder. Every day from morning until evening, we gathered in the meditation hall and sat in rows. The assistant pressed play, and Goenka's voice filled the room, calm, steady, and impersonal.

"Observe the breath," the voice said. "Observe the sensation at the nostrils. Do not control the breath. Just observe."

The voice didn't know me. It didn't know I was a refugee, or that I had survived a ship, knelt at a flagpole, been punched in the face, or slept in a car. It knew only the technique, and it spoke to all of us the same way.

Day One to Day Three: Breath Awareness.

For the first three days, the instruction was simple. Observe the breath at the nostrils where the air is entering and leaving. Pay attention to the sensation at the nostrils or the upper lip. If there is no sensation then go back to observing the breath at the nostrils or upper lip. Do not control the breath. Just observe.

I sat on the cushion, closed my eyes, and focused on the breath. And I could do it, right away, from the first sitting. I could stay focused on the breath for the full hour. My awareness naturally rested on the touching point of each in breath and out breath. It was like a sailor holding a compass in rough water. The needle swings, but it always returns to north. It felt familiar, as though I had done it before. There were painful sensations and pleasant ones, but my focus on the breath didn't waver.

I think fourteen years of practice had given me this. The boy who sat still in Saigon had become a man who could sit still anywhere. The technique was new, but the ability was old. Later I saw that many people couldn't focus on the breath for even ten minutes, but it came naturally to me. I wasn't better than anyone. I was just ready.

The assistant teacher interviewed me. He asked, "Are you experiencing any sensation?"

"Yes," I said. "Pain."

"Observe the pain," he said. "Do not react."

I went back to the cushion and continued to observe the breath in spite of the pain.

Day Four: Vipassana.

I observed my breath the way I had watched the artillery shells in Saigon, from a distance, with a steadiness that was not courage but something deeper. The watcher noticed the pain, the desire to move, and the resistance to that desire. I held all of it without flinching.

Then the Vipassana instruction started in the afternoon. The pain became excruciating. I was observing it, but I was still inside it. I was still the one who was hurting, and it was unbearable.

The Log.

During the 5 pm break, I walked outside. The center was near the water, and there was a beach with a log. I sat on the log and looked at the ocean.

Suddenly an insight came to me. It didn't come from the tape or the assistant or the technique. It came from the ocean, the log, and the silence that had been building inside me for four days and fourteen years.

I could see the pain objectively. It wasn't my pain. It was just pain, a phenomenon that moves through the body the way weather moves through the sky, arriving, intensifying, fading, and leaving. It didn't belong to me or to anyone.

And in that moment, I saw something else that broke me open. There is so much pain in the world. It wasn't just my pain, the pain of the ship, the flagpole, the punch, the divorce, or the homelessness. It was everywhere, in every body and every mind, in every creature that has ever lived and suffered and died.

I thought of the mother who chopped off her son's finger, the neighbor who hid in the attic, the men in the refugee camp, the man sobbing in the courtyard, the veteran in the bar, the housemate who called me "gook," the ex-wife who left without explanation, and the parents who demanded my arrest. All of them were in pain.

I was overcome with a sense of profound compassion. It wasn't pity or sympathy or sadness. It was compassion in the literal sense of the word, to suffer with. I felt the pain of the world as a direct reality and not an abstraction. I held the suffering of others in the same space where I held my own, and I saw that my pain and their pain were the same pain, with the same impermanence and the same arising and passing away.

I sat on that log and wept, not for myself but for the world.

Days Four, Five, Six.

The technique had shifted. From the afternoon of the fourth day onward, I observed the sensations throughout the entire body, moving my attention systematically from the top of the head to the tips of the toes.

I closed my eyes and started at the top of my head. I felt the scalp, the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, the jaw, the neck, the shoulders, the arms, the hands, the chest, the stomach, the back, the hips, the legs, the feet, and the toes. I felt heat, cold, tingling, numbness, pain, pleasure, vibration, and energy. I didn't react.

After the insight on the log, the pain was no longer mine. It was just sensation, vibration, and impermanence. I understood impermanence within myself, not as a concept or a doctrine but as a direct experience. The body was impermanent. The pain was impermanent. The self was impermanent.

The pain lost its grip. It didn't disappear, but it was no longer mine, and pain that isn't mine can't control me. It can only pass through.

The practice deepened. The sittings grew longer, the silence deeper, and the body stiller. I wasn't comfortable, peaceful, or enlightened. I was just sitting, breathing, and watching. But the watching had changed. It was no longer the watching of a boy trying to survive. It was the watching of a man who had seen the pain of the world and held it without breaking.

Underneath it, I felt a pressure building, a sense that something was about to break, like the surface of a pond before the rain. I didn't know what was coming. I only knew I had to keep sitting.

The sixth day ended and I went to bed. I lay in the dark and listened to the silence. It was no longer heavy. It was light, almost buoyant.

Day Seven.

I was sitting in the meditation hall. The sun was shining outside the windows and dust motes were dancing in the light. The silence was absolute, the breath was steady, and the body was still.

Then, gradually, it began. It was the bhanga state, the dissolution of the body. It wasn't a thought, a vision, or a dream. It was a direct experience.

The body disappeared. I could still feel it, but it was no longer solid. It was not a boundary or a limit. It was a collection of sensations, vibrations, and energy. My legs, arms, head, heart, and breath were all just sensations. Everything was vibration and everything was impermanent.

I wasn't the body, the mind, the thoughts, or the sensations. I was the observer, the watcher, the silence. I wasn't afraid or excited, happy or sad. I was just aware and present.

The world seemed like a construct, a projection, a dream. I wasn't in the story. I was outside it, the space in which the story was happening.

I sat in that state for hours. I don't know how long. Time had lost its meaning. The meals were served and the talks were given, but I wasn't there. I was in the dissolution, in the void. And in the void, there was peace.

Days Eight, Nine, Ten.

I wasn't the same person who had arrived on the first day. I wasn't the same person who had survived the ship, knelt at the flagpole, been punched in the face, or slept in the car. I was something older and timeless. I was the watcher, the silence, the space. I knew I would never be the same again.

The retreat ended on the tenth day. We were given a talk and a blessing. We were told to practice every day, to meditate for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, and to observe the breath, the sensations, the mind, and the world. We were told that the practice wasn't only for the retreat. It was for life. It was for the ship, the flagpole, the punch, the car, and the world. We were told that the silence wasn't the end but the beginning. The silence was the road home.

I left the center, got in my car, and drove home. The world was the same, but I was different.

CHAPTER 6: THE FOREST MONASTERY

The year was 2010. I was fifty. Twenty-four years had passed since the first retreat, and I had practiced every day. The bhanga state had come and gone like a tide, leaving the shore changed but not permanently.

The practice was solid. The watcher was steady. The compassion was real. But something was pulling me. It was a thread I had been following since I was twelve, when I first sat down and closed my eyes in Saigon. It had led through the ship, the flagpole, the punch, the car, the retreat, and years of silent sitting in apartments and houses that were never quite home. Now the thread was leading me to the forest.

I didn't decide to become a monk. The decision made itself. It came the way the insight came on the log, not as a thought but as a knowing. I was certain that the next step wasn't more sitting in my living room but something total, something that would strip away everything that wasn't essential and leave only the practice.

I packed a bag, bought a ticket, and flew to Myanmar.

Pa Auk Monastery was in a forest, not far from the nearest city. The trees were thick and green, and the air was wet and warm. I heard birds, insects, wind, rain, and the occasional rumble of distant thunder that reminded me of the artillery of my childhood.

It wasn't primitive. The monastery had electricity for the lights in the meditation hall and for the kitchen. The modern world had reached even there, and the monks didn't reject it. They just didn't need it.

I arrived at the gate and was greeted by an old monk with a shaved head, deep burgundy robes, and clear eyes. I bowed and he bowed. He showed me to my kuti, a small wooden hut on stilts above the forest floor, with a mat on the floor and a hook on the wall for my robes. That was everything.

I received the Samanera ordination and became a novice monk. The ceremony was brief and quiet. I had been preparing for this moment for thirty-eight years, and when it arrived, it felt like putting on a coat I had always owned.

There was no bed, chair, desk, or mirror. There was just the mat, the hook, and the forest. I stood in the kuti and looked around, and I felt something I hadn't felt since the ship, the simplicity of having nothing. On the ship, I had nothing because it had been taken from me. Here I had nothing because I had given it away. The difference was everything.

The routine began the next morning. I woke at 3:00 a.m. to meditate. At 5:00 there was group meditation in the hall, and at 6:00 the meal.

The villagers came to us. They brought rice, vegetables, fruit, and sometimes a curry or a sweet to the monastery. We lined up holding our bowls and walked past them as they placed food in the bowls. We didn't choose and we didn't refuse. We received what was given. The villagers were devout and had been feeding monks for generations. It was their practice of dana, or generosity, and we were the recipients. In return we gave them the dharma, or rather the silence the dharma lives in.

The kitchen staff prepared porridge for breakfast. We ate our main meal before noon, and after that we had nothing until the next morning.

At 7:00 a.m. we swept the grounds and cleaned the kuti. At 8:00 we meditated. At 10:00 we walked slowly and mindfully in the forest. We meditated again at 11:00, 1:00, and 3:00. At 5:00 there was group meditation in the hall, at 7:00 evening chanting, at 8:00 meditation, and at 9:00 we went to sleep.

It came to fourteen hours of meditation a day, with no talking except what was necessary, no entertainment, and no comfort. This was what I had come for.

The practice was different from the Goenka retreat. At the retreat, the technique was Vipassana, scanning the body and observing sensations. Here the practice was breath meditation, focusing on the breath and entering jhana, the deep absorptions of concentration the Buddha himself mastered. But the goal wasn't to attain jhana. The goal was to maintain awareness of the breath continuously throughout the day, not just on the cushion or in the hall but while sweeping the grounds, walking to the meal, eating, cleaning, and lying down to sleep.

This was harder than it sounds. The mind wants to wander. It wants to plan, remember, fantasize, and worry. The breath is always here and always now. It is the most boring thing in the world, and the most profound.

When I sat and watched the breath, the mind would settle, the body would dissolve, and the world would fade. I would be in a state of deep concentration, still and vast. But jhana wasn't the goal. It was a signpost showing that the mind was capable of extraordinary stillness.

The real practice was what happened after the sitting. Could I keep the awareness when I stood up, when I walked to the meal, when I received the rice from the villagers, when I swept the path, or when I lay down in the dark and listened to the forest? That was the test, and it was the test that would follow me back to the world.

The forest was peaceful and alive. I want to say this clearly because it contradicts what many people imagine about monasteries. It wasn't frightening or dark or a place of struggle. It was deeply peaceful, the kind of peace that makes you wonder why you ever lived anywhere else.

The birds sang in the morning, the insects hummed in the afternoon, and the frogs called in the evening. When the rain fell in sheets, the sound wasn't noise but music, the water drumming on the leaves, the streams gurgling, and the drops falling from the branches. I walked in the forest every day, slowly and mindfully, feeling each footstep on the earth. I watched the ants carrying their loads and the butterflies floating above the wildflowers.

I breathed and watched the breath, and the awareness was continuous. For the first time in my life, I wasn't a refugee, an American, a teacher, a husband, a father, a victim, or a survivor. I was just a monk in a forest, watching the breath.

It wasn't all peace. There were days when the mind wouldn't settle and desire arose and wouldn't leave. I wondered if I was wasting my time sitting in a hut on the other side of the world from everyone I loved. There were days when I felt I didn't deserve the robes I wore. But even the struggle was practice, and even the doubt was something to observe. I watched the doubt the way I watched the breath, without judgment or reaction. Slowly it would pass, the way everything passes, and I would return to the breath, and the breath would be enough.

I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life.

I told the senior monks my intention. I wanted to ordain fully and take the vows. I wanted to live in that forest, in that silence, until the body gave out and the breath stopped. They listened and nodded. They didn't try to dissuade me.

But the world had other plans. One day a message arrived from my wife. She told me she needed me to come back. She said our son needed me, and that a child requires more than a mother. He requires a father, and support, financial, emotional, and physical.

I read the message and sat with it. I watched the breath and the feelings that arose: conflict, longing, duty, and love. Every cell in my body wanted to stay. The forest was the home I had been seeking since I was twelve years old. But my son was in the world, and my son needed me.

The Buddha taught that attachment is the root of suffering. He also taught that compassion is the highest virtue, and compassion is not a feeling but an action. Compassion is leaving the forest to support a child and giving up the silence to pay the rent. It is returning to the world not because you want to, but because you are needed. I had learned on the log twenty-four years earlier that pain is not personal. It is universal, and the response to universal pain is universal compassion. At the monastery, compassion was quiet and contemplative. In the world, it is loud and messy and requires you to show up every day and do the work.

I packed my bag, took off the robes, and put on my civilian clothes. I had considered full ordination, taking the vows of a bhikkhu and committing to the monastery for life. But my son needed me, and sometimes compassion is taking off the robes and going home.

The clothes felt strange on my body, tight and loud. The fabric made noise when I moved and the colors were too bright. My pockets were full of things I didn't need: keys, a wallet, and a phone.

I bowed to the monks and they bowed to me. No one said goodbye. Goodbye is for people who believe in separation, and monks know there is no separation. I walked through the forest to the road, caught a bus to the city, and caught a plane.

I went back to teaching. The classroom wasn't the forest, and the students weren't the monks. The bell wasn't the temple bell, and the noise wasn't the silence. But the practice was the same. Watch the breath. Maintain awareness. Do not react, cling, or push away. The monastery had taught me what stillness looks like when it is undisturbed. The world would teach me what stillness looks like when it is tested.

EPILOGUE: THE ROAD HOME

I returned to America in 2016 and went back to teaching, to the classroom, the grading, the meetings, the parent-teacher conferences, and the endless paperwork that fills the space where silence used to be. I was a schoolteacher, a father, a husband, a refugee, and a monk who had taken off the robes. But I was also the watcher.

The practice didn't end when I left the forest. It didn't end when I put on civilian clothes or when I stepped off the plane into an airport full of announcements and crowds. The practice was the breath, and the breath was always there. I taught my students, graded their papers, walked the halls, and sat in the faculty lounge, and in every moment I watched the breath. I didn't let the noise drown out the silence.

It was harder than the forest. The forest was peaceful and predictable, and the practice could flourish there without interference. In the world, the practice had to survive the interference. But it survived.

For twenty-five years, I wrote nothing except one poem about a temple bell for a friend. I lived, worked, taught, loved, lost, grieved, celebrated, and aged. I watched the birds, the flowers, the snow, and the people. I didn't write because the words weren't needed. The silence was enough. But the poems were accumulating, not on paper or on a screen but in the body, in the breath, and in the spaces between thoughts. They were waiting.

Then the convergence happened. A friend read my haiku and compared my voice to Bashō. I knew Bashō was a master of the form but had never read his work. The comparison was made independently by my friend and by an AI, and I couldn't ignore it. It brought me back to writing after twenty-five years.

The poems didn't come from ambition but from overflow. I began to write again, not the long, rambling prose of my journal or the angry, confused poetry of my youth, but haiku, the three-line breath. I wrote haiku after the earthworm, after the spiderweb, after the bombs, and after the poem about my mother. I wrote about the road home.

I realized that the road home wasn't a place. It was a practice, the act of paying attention and seeing the world as it is, without the filter of fear, anger, or the past.

The boy who sat still in Saigon had grown up. He had crossed the ocean, knelt in the sun, been punched in the face, slept in a car, taught children, meditated for fifty years, and lived as a monk. And now he was writing. The silence was over, and the songbirds were singing.

The road home was long. It was fifty years, seven thousand miles, a thousand sittings, and a thousand breaths.

It started with a boy in Saigon closing his eyes. It continued with a boy kneeling at a flagpole in the sun, and a boy on a ship breathing in the dark. It continued with a boy in a refugee camp asking a monk if he was ever sad, a man in a classroom watching the breath, a monk in a forest maintaining awareness, and a father leaving the forest to support his son. It continued with a writer picking up a pen.

It ended here, with the realization that the road home wasn't a destination. It was the walking, the breathing, and the watching. It was the silence that was always there, waiting for us to notice it.

The boat was the road, and so were the forest, the classroom, the car, the cushion, and the pen. Every step was the arrival.

POSTSCRIPT: THE DOCTOR ON THE SCREEN

I was sitting in my living room when I saw it. A Vietnamese doctor, an elderly man, was being dragged off an airplane by police officers. His mouth was bloodied, his glasses were askew, and his shirt had ridden up, exposing his stomach. He was sixty-nine years old and a physician with patients waiting for him the next morning. He was a paying passenger sitting in a seat he had purchased.

The year was 2017. I was fifty-six.

The camera shook because the person filming was shaking. A woman nearby screamed. The other passengers sat frozen, some filming and some looking away. The officers pulled him by his arms and dragged him up the aisle. His head struck the armrest, and he went limp. They kept pulling.

I watched the way I have always watched, quietly and from a distance. But this time the face on the screen looked like mine. He wasn't the same man and it wasn't the same story, but it was the same face, the same dark hair, brown skin, and shape of the eyes that America has never quite known what to do with.

It reminded me of something I learned watching Rodney King in 1991. I saw African American men and women crying as they watched footage of their brother being beaten by police officers who faced no consequences. I understood it then, not intellectually but in my gut. When violence against a person who looks like you is broadcast to the nation, it happens to everyone who shares their face. The pain multiplies. Twenty-six years later, I felt it again.

I had been punched in the face by a housemate who called me "gook." I had been threatened in a bar by a veteran who hated the country I was born in. I had been reported as a threat to schoolchildren after I went to a counseling office to talk about the war. In every case, the system looked at my face and decided I was less than a person, someone who could be hit, silenced, or removed.

Now I watched a doctor, a man who had spent his life healing people, being hurt by the same machinery. He had paid for his seat on the airplane, and the police were pulling him across the floor, with blood on the armrest.

Nothing had changed. The country that had punched me, silenced me, and sent my photograph to every school in the district had grown older, but the reflex hadn't changed. It sees a face and decides this one doesn't matter, this one can be touched, and this one won't be believed.

Or perhaps everything had changed, because this time the cameras were on and millions of people saw. The shame belonged not to the man on the floor but to the men who put him there. The world looked at the footage and recognized what I had recognized decades earlier in kitchens, bars, and counseling offices, that a Vietnamese face in America is still a face the system feels entitled to move.

The doctor settled with the airline, and the amount was confidential. Policies were changed and statements were issued. I sat in my living room and watched the coverage, quietly breathing, aware that the bell had not stopped ringing.

It had not stopped ringing. In June of 2026, I was sixty-six years old and it rang for me again.

My wife needed a mammogram. Her English is limited. I am her authorized representative and her medical interpreter, and I have accompanied her to every appointment at Legacy Health for years. When I called to schedule, the office staff member insisted on speaking to my wife directly. My wife told me this same woman had been rude to her during a previous visit. I filed a complaint with the Compliance Hotline. Legacy Health did not respond.

At the appointment, the retaliation began. The same staff member sent the lab technician out to tell me that males were not permitted in the X-ray room, even though I had interpreted for that same technician during my wife's previous visit without any problem. I requested a medical interpreter, which is my wife's right under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Affordable Care Act. The technician told me none was available.

I pointed out that she was retaliating against us for the complaint I had filed. I also pointed out that she was a technician, not a doctor, and that her role was to perform the X-ray and not to enforce interpreter policy. I made no threats. I didn't raise my voice or display any aggressive behavior.

She called hospital police.

Three large white police officers entered the front office. One told me it was "a women's place" and asked me to leave the facility. I filed another complaint with the Compliance Hotline. This time a compliance officer responded, siding with the staff and warning that I would be banned from Legacy Health if I continued the same behavior.

It was the same pattern. A Vietnamese man asserts a right, in this case to interpret for his wife and to request the language access guaranteed by federal law, and the system treats it as a disruption. A staff member feels her authority is questioned, police arrive, the institution closes ranks, and the man is removed.

I wasn't dragged off an airplane. I wasn't punched in the face or called a threat to schoolchildren. But I was removed again, from a hospital where my wife was waiting for a medical procedure, by three police officers who looked at my face and saw a problem to be managed, not a husband, an interpreter, or a man exercising his federal rights.

The Evergreen State College counselor reported me to the police after I went to talk about the war. The Legacy Health technician called the police because I cited a law. Twenty-nine years separate the two, and the response was the same.

I wrote this memoir because the road home is not a straight line. It is a circle. You leave, you return, and you leave again. Along the way, you watch the boat, the snow, the fist, the forest, and the screen. You breathe, you notice, and you write it down, not because writing changes the world but because the watcher changes. The watcher is all we have.

The road home does not end. It deepens.

POSTSCRIPT: THE SHADOW OF THE MOON

August 21, 2017, was the day the world stopped to watch the sky go dark.

I was driving through Oregon with my two children toward a viewing site. We had planned this trip for months, to witness the total solar eclipse. I wanted my children to see it. I wanted them to understand that the world is vast and that there are wonders that have nothing to do with borders or wars.

We were on a rural road with trees along both sides. The air was already cooling and the light had a strange, metallic quality. The birds were falling silent.

Then I made a mistake. I took a wrong turn, a slight deviation from the route, and suddenly I was turning into a driveway that wasn't ours.

Before I could correct it, two white men stepped out of the house holding M16s. The sky above was turning black as the sun was swallowed, and on the ground two men were pointing weapons at my car.

My heart didn't race. It stopped. For a split second, I wasn't in Oregon. I wasn't a father in a car. I was fourteen again on a ship in the South China Sea, and I was twelve, kneeling in the sun. I was a boy who had learned that the wrong turn could mean death.

Instinct took over before thought did. I rolled down the window. My voice came out shaky and desperate.

"I turned into your driveway," I said. "I was trying to avoid a head-on collision. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

I kept saying sorry over and over.

The men looked at me, at the car, and at the sky, which was now almost entirely dark. They lowered their weapons. One of them said, "Just turn around."

I turned around and drove back onto the road. My hands were shaking on the steering wheel. My children were quiet in the back seat, watching me.

We made it to the viewing site and watched the eclipse. The sky went black, the stars came out, and the temperature dropped. It was beautiful and it was terrifying. But as I sat there watching the moon cover the sun, I realized that the darkness wasn't just in the sky. It was in the road, the driveway, and the M16s.

The war hadn't ended. I think it had been waiting for the right moment to show up again, for a wrong turn or a moment of vulnerability or a darkened sky. And I had brought my children into it.