Fortunate Son

Going home is always fraught; going home to the place you fled, 50 years after the end of the war that decimated it, is something altogether different. Tony Ho Tran’s family trip to Vietnam—which, coincidentally, took place exactly five decades after the fall of Saigon—sets the stage for him to wrestle with his own upbringing, his parents’ past, and the complicated history so many millions share. It’s part travelog, part family dramedy, and all heart.

As my dad told that waiter and every other person we met, it had been 30 years since my parents had seen their home country. While they often told us stories about growing up in Vietnam—and even took us on a visit when we were little—I couldn’t quite identify their feelings toward the country as nostalgia. My mom and dad spoke of Vietnam as somehow both a lawless hellhole where people robbed and took advantage of you and a totalitarian hellhole where the government robbed and took advantage of you. Other than war stories, when my dad spoke of the country, it was to contrast his upbringing with the way my brother and I lived our lives. “When I grew up, we never ate this,” he said when I was 8, indicating my plate of dino nuggets. “I remember crawling through a landfill in Saigon for food when I was your age. Once, I found rotten pork floss and ate it with my sister.” Then he got a strange, wistful look on his face, as if his fondest memory were eating moldy meat in a dump. As if that were better than chicken shaped like a stegosaurus.