Hồng is Missing: A Retrospective on War, Trauma, and Heritage

Before embarking on this project, I had never formally met my grandfather. He had left my family before I was old enough to remember a thing. He always seemed like an enigma to me -- some ghost of the past that remained locked in our family's collective memory. My father, Chiến Hồng, was Tuấn's second son and yet, he refrained to speak of him. Whenever I asked about my grandfather's whereabouts, he would say, "I'll tell you when you older." I never wanted to press further. Therefore, I grew up only knowing my grandfather as a myth. This project was an attempt to discover who Tuấn really was and my heritage. After all of it, I've come to realize that my father was right to have refrained from telling me. 

Working on this project as a team, my cousin, brother, and I were the first in the family to know where exactly our grandfather resided. Not his ex-wife. Not even his five children. If I hadn't taken the initiative to reconnect with him, he might as well have gone missing forever. After spending a weekend of reconnecting and interviewing, I've come to realize that Tuấn is a man entirely defined by the Vietnam War. He wears his military hat daily, espouses South Vietnamese political views, and loves to talk about his war experience. During the interview he would often speed past all my preliminary questions to begin talking about the war. I believe my willingness to listen to him, validated his experiences. It is clear that the war and the extreme poverty that his family was subjected to changed him forever. 

Trauma followed him throughout his life and influenced every decision he made. It influenced him to flee the country through the Humanities Operations program, it influenced his desire to pursue an associates degree in Social Sciences, and crucially, it rendered him incapable of emotionally communicating with his family. In a life altering decision, he decided to divorce his wife and sever all contact with his children. In the interview, he stated having some arguments with my grandmother, but overall, he simply wanted to run away from his life. He was bored and tired of his family. This decision alone, in my opinion, transmitted his internal trauma on to the rest of his family. Like a contagious disease, that trauma spread across his children leaving them confused and marred with grief. Instead of uniting together, they all went their separate paths. My father worked tirelessly as a barber, alone. His brothers and sisters married and took up separate jobs. They all had children and vowed to give them the life that they could not have. Before the interview, I asked my father if he had any regrets regarding the family. He said that he wished his father sacrificed more after they immigrated to San Jose. He wished that he took stronger leadership in the family and opened everyone up to talk about their feelings and grievances. If every member pooled their resources together to help one another, they could have all been better off for it. Instead, everyone took their separate paths and all collectively suffered. In the end, the war rendered my family incapable of talking to each other. 

The topic of my grandfather never reaches family discussion. It is a shunned topic and, after many years, I was the one to open it again. Our missing grandfather was an open wound that never properly healed and I witnessed it first-hand. The day after my interview, my entire family came over for dinner to celebrate my return. I told them about what I had done and the conversation quickly escalated into open arguments with each other. Brothers and sisters were fighting back and forth. My own mother and father were even arguing with each other. All the while, my grandmother sat quietly, in pain. Her silence was loud and clear. Out of everyone in the family, she was the one that hurt the most. 

I spent three days in San Jose interviewing my grandfather. Every night, I was on the verge of tears. I was angry at my grandfather for what he had done to us. I was angry that I had to be the one to uncover and process all of this trauma. It was as if trauma was an electrical cord. The current was the war that traveled across the brass wire, passing the pain along from family member to family member, until it got to me: the two metal prongs. At the end of the day, I don't regret the journey that I went through. Despite my feeling about my grandfather, I understand that he was a flawed man. He is currently living happily with a different partner and our family is thriving. At the very least, future members of the Hồng family will know the answers to who our grandfather really was. I can live with that.

2026:

I'm returning to this reflection and distinguishing the passage of time because I believe I have achieved enough distance from the project to provide one crucial retrospective. In the original conception of this page, I provided a subtitle: "Threads of Trauma". I no longer resonate with this title, it implies that trauma continues through me.  I've come to realize much of my anguish towards the interview came from uncovering my lack of agency. I believed I was forced to carry on a burden I did not ask for and that I was helpless to change it. I've since come to realize why I am the two metal prongs in this long drawn out story. I am meant to discharge it -- expose it at its core and recontextualize it into something that our future family can learn and grow from.

Since then, I inquired more about my heritage. I have sought advice and perspectives from friends, teachers, and contemporaries. Most importantly, I have since visited Vietnam and gained access to people and histories I had never known. I know now that I am a storyteller and filmmaker. And these are the type of stories I am meant to tell. 

During Christmas 2025, I returned home to find that my grandfather had moved out of that apartment and gone missing again. Once more, he has absolved himself. Once more, he has chosen to be ephemeral. Perhaps I will not see him until his funeral. And so, I did in fact find Tuấn and I, too, am choosing to let him go. After all, his story is over and he will remain a myth to tell.