I guess pretty much all the kids who live in the United States have eaten a MacDonald hamburger. Long ago, my children and I also had our first MacDonald hamburger, and if you haven’t noticed it, I wrote “our hamburger” in single, not with an s. And this is the story I am about to tell you, as a tribute to my children, a tribute written very appropriately on Mother’s Day.
My two sons and I were among one of the early groups of Vietnamese refugees to reach the United States in the mid 70’s, shortly after we lost Saigon and our country of Vietnam to the North Vietnamese communists. We were not boat people but our struggle to survive in this country was not without big hurdles. We were very blessed not to have to fight stormy waves, suffer thirst, hunger and flee pirates at seas, or spend lengthy months, years in refugees camps in South East Asia or worse being lost at sea or sold into slavery. But our resettlement here was not easy. As I say, because we were one of the earliest people of these waves of people being given refuge by the Unites States, we left Camp Pendleton, a transit port of entry to the United States, very early, so early that we were not given the proper papers of immigrants status. We fell through the cracks because of the lack of paper handling skills of a military sergeant appointed to a task he had never done before to give refugees their “alien paper’ so not to be considered illegal aliens in this country. So after a fortnight in Camp Pendleton we exited this refuge to blend in with the American people and start our life as potential Americans in Los Angeles. My efforts to get help for resettlement were rejected rapidly as we did not have the proper papers. My search for jobs was fruitless as in all the menial jobs I applied for I was turned down, because my sketchy spoken English with a foreign accent was not adequate for waitressing jobs and other menial jobs. I guess I should have tried for other jobs such as maids or manual field labors but I did not know where to apply and where to leave my two kids, one of 6 and the other 1 and a half years old, while working. Not that I knew much of those works anyway as I was a medical doctor before all this happened.
Anyway, to make a long story short, we were pretty much at the bottom of the society scraping for a living. My 6 years old went to school with clothes so tattered that I could not even mend anymore, tattered to the point that his teacher threatened to report me to Child Protective Services for child neglect. As a newcomer kid, Chí, my eldest son saw his friends eating this wonderfully looking bun called MacDonald hamburger and has asked me on many occasions to have one, only to have me tell him with tears in my eyes that we do not have money left for that. At that time, we lived not too far from a Macdonald restaurant. One day, after school, Chí came home, beaming, saying ”Mom I take you and my brother to the restaurant, I have one dollar given to me by the Macdonald employee because I did a very good job sweeping the floor of the restaurant. We are going to eat hamburger”. So, the three of us hopped to the nearby Macdonald restaurant and Chi ordered and with his one precious dollar paid with pride for this one hamburger that he was going to split in three for us. Of course it was split in two, but like my two sons, I enjoyed this hamburger as much as they did, and as if we had never eaten anything as good in our entire life. Even his younger brother, as much as he enjoyed every bite of it, did not request more than his share.
Nowadays, many, many moons down the streams of life, Chi is working for a tech company in the Silicon Valley, has 2 children of his own, and Cang is with a financial institution in the Bay area and I fly back and forth between Hawaii, California and Arizona, every time I see a Macdonald restaurant, I feel again the exquisite taste of that hamburger in my mouth though I did not have any bite of it that day, because, even for two small kids, one hamburger between them is not that much to eat, lest for three persons. But, except for the happiness bestowed with the births of my two kids, the feeling of extreme relief I had when I could bring them physically unscathed out of that war furnace of our previous country and be able to give them the chance at life and freedom in their new homeland, and a few other miracles in our life, the remembrance of that day always brings on one of the most heartwarming feeling I ever have in this life. Of a nucleus family love, my sons have shown me that day how precious a simple genuine love can be, along with their ability of sharing and giving to other than themselves. And with this small hamburger, I know how big my sons’ hearts are!
To write this simple story today is my humble gift of love, appreciation and pride to my children, coming straight from a mother’s heart on this Mother’s Day of the year 2014.
Huỳnh Anh Trần-Schroeder