On Genealogy

On Genealogy

I have spent some time, intermittently over the years, collecting and going over family documents, but more often than not, the information just sits there inside a folder, buried inside our file cabinet. I am not sure why the urge came, but this month I am determined to make some progress and to end up with a document as complete as I can make it. There will always be some knowledge gap, especially in the lineage of distant relatives, and conflicting information from different sources, many of them being hand-written notes and scribbles collected over time and passed on over generations without being verified for accuracy. And now, it is sad to say that most of my sources - parents, aunts and uncles - have passed away, invaluable sources that have dried out in the river of time.

Nevertheless, I feel blessed to have been left some information about people who have walked ahead me, even if I have never met them, nor will I ever know them personally. There are over a hundred of names in my files and charts, and sometimes a name would pop-up, sounding familiar as I recall my parents or other relatives mentioning them now and then over the years. Or just knowing their years of their birth or of their death is enough for me to imagine what their lives would have been like. Example: My paternal grand-father(Lê Ngọc Quang) was born in 1859. Wow, that was the year when Darwin published his Origins of the Species; the year after the end of the Crimean War, and two years before the American Civil War started; 1859 was also the year the French first attacked the port of Đà Nẵng in the Kingdom of Đại Việt, and within three years they started the colonization of our people. Those landmark events seem now so far remote from us, belonging to history books, and yet they were only two generations back in time in our own family lines. With a little bit of imagination, I can time-travel back to a war between Vietnamese farmers wearing conical hats and using archaic swords and muskets, bows and arrows to defend themselves against the Western state-of-the-art gun boats, as pictured in history books! Imagine my grandparents living at the crossroads of battling cultures and civilizations, and how much our world has changed since then! Fast forward a few decades from now, and just as the people of past centuries look so stern and puritan to us now, maybe the off-springs of our tattooed and nose-ringed grand-children will look at our own photos and videos and they would remark how dull and un-cool we were.

At a personal level, much of our national history can be compressed in a lifetime. My parents lived through the two World Wars, the Japanese occupation, the famine of 1945, and following that, eight more years of anti-colonial war, then another 30 years of civil war. They rarely mentioned those monumental episodes when they lived with us in their 80’s, but undeniably their philosophy and feelings about life were shaped by those historical cyclones. Thus, doing genealogy is just another process of reliving history through the lives of our own ancestors. Traveling back in time. Even when these events are but short chapters in our history books,they are well embedded in our own flesh and blood. 

Genealogy serves another purpose: supposedly, recording the family lineage and passing the information to the next generation. With aging comes the urge to save the past for future generations, as we realize that, for better or for worse, the future is essentially unknown, but the past will always be with us. Within us. Perhaps doing genealogy is a way of derailing absolute death and oblivion.

Typically, in the Asian tradition, a male descendant would be the guardian of his family’s memorable treasures, but there is no valid reason that this should apply to diasporas in this modern world and in our mobile society. My feeling is that perhaps one of my many dear nieces, Mary Thanh Tâm, Bích or Tường Vân particularly, would most likely be interested in keeping our family roots and branches, since they have always been the closest to me and they have been the ones who have shown the most interest in family matters. This has little to do with their places in the hierarchy in our family tree, but more with their sweet and affectionate personality, and their sense of belonging to a traditional culture. Bless their hearts!

As she knew that I was inquiring about various members of our family, Mary Thanh Tâm recently texted me a “thank you for completing the gia phả – a Herculean task”. Her message started the following exchange between she and I:

C: Completing?! Miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep!

M: Oh, I thought that you are close since you have passed my generation.

C: Your generation and kids are the easy part; even if Willa had 4 more siblings, it would still be easy, and I am not listing your pet dogs in the family line. It’s the back-tracking of ancestors who may have 10-15 children and 3-4 wives that makes me “điên đầu”. 

But it’s fun. […]

M: Imagine you being “điên đâu” sorting through all the concubines… Not that we are judging, but it is another reason to keep it as “one and done”! […]

C: Yep, at least, I don’t need a 23-and-Me genetic test to figure out who I came from; people say I have some undeniable facial features of my dad; and deep down, I also feel that I inherited his love of books and a 100% of his emotional sensitivity; as from my mom, I inherited 10% of her wisdom and mental strength, but that’s enough – no matter how we feel now, life has been so much easier for us than for her generation.

M: hugs

Genealogy – a product of love. Worth cultivating.     

  Happy Valley, Oregon, November 24, 2024

Autumn in Happy Valley

Autumn in Happy Valley, Oregon.

I woke up to a beautiful morning today. After a couple of days of rain and grey skies, the sun has returned. A stretch of white fog is rapidly dissipating over the green hills. In our garden, few juncos and towhees gaily jumped between the fence, the branches of our red maple trees and our bird bath, while flocks of black birds frolicked between the roof tops and young ash trees in our new neighborhood. High in the blue sky, geese in orderly V-formations are quacking a chorus of cheers, as they flap their wings migrating to warmer places. Mount Hood was visible between two houses across the street, covered with snow, a symbol of calm majesty and permanence.

 Nature is putting out her best show, seemingly unconcerned about the follies and the fate of man. She knows that seasons come and go, and on a day like this, she reminds me that we can and will eventually recover from any storm, any wild fire, any flood. Eventually.

 It doesn’t mean that today my heart is not heavy and my soul is not desperate. Like many other Americans, I was longing for a new kind of leadership where what counts the most is integrity, honesty, and community values. I am not going to do an analysis of Kamala Harris defeat on this post-election day, there will be plenty of pundits with a multitude of opinions, the most prevalent being the sour mood of the popular mass still dealing with the high cost of living since the Covid pandemic. Beyond that, not many would say out loud what I have feared all along. That many Americans are not ready to be represented and led by a colored woman, no matter how far we think we have come from the days when women could not vote (just some 100 years ago) and from the civil right protests of the 1960’s. No, America is not ready for her. What a shame!

My deep disappointment goes beyond the politics of the day or the promises of policy changes in a recycled, chaotic administration. To me, character matters most, and if a person’s character is not trustworthy, how can I trust his/her words and promises? And I don’t understand how many Americans feel they trust their future in the hands of a former TV-reality show man who is incoherent, erratic, and vulgar? By choosing such a man as its leader, America has shown that she has set aside all norms of social decency and moral conscience. And when Donald Trump – a self-adoring, self-serving bully and a convicted felon gets the most support from young male voters, he projects a model of “ a strongman” for our youth that makes me fear for the future of our country. My head hangs low.

Even as the world today will think less of us, America’s role and influence in the world continues to be strong, if not overbearing. For better and/or for worse, other nations see what we do as a justification for their own current and future directions and paths. I remind myself that America still has a lot of potential for goodness. Our sciences will continue to advance, and our liberal institutions, our freedom of expression through our press and our arts will not be easily beaten down. I also remind myself that all scenarios and matters in this world hang like pendulums. The pendulum has swung left to right, away from us now, but then will swingagain from right to left, back our way. Pendulums have swung back and forth for centuries and generations, and will swing after we have come and gone. Pendulums. Pulled by the gravity of life. Just like us.

As I see clouds of white flying in a sky of blue this morning, I remind myself that Mother Nature is resilient and will survive our recklessness. So let the sun shine through as we heal from our self-inflicted wounds and we will emerge from the coming winter of our follies and our discontent, someday soon, flying high again.

Happy Valley, Oregon, Wednesday Nov 6, 2024

On the value of a single payer healthcare program, again

An opinion published by Bloomberg News and reproduced in the Gazette Times ( April 11, 2024) suggested that, as a way to control healthcare costs and broaden access to affordable choices, lawmakers should reconsider introducing a public option – a government-run plan that would compete alongside private insurance companies. It cited efforts from states like Colorado and Washington that used legislative tools like premium-reduction targets, or price negotiations for reimbursement rates for hospitals and clinical providers, and concluded that it is “perhaps the most promising way” to solve our current healthcare problems.

 While early results from Washington showed the public option plans can have a moderate positive impact on healthcare costs, the experiment is in its infancy and challenges remain: many individuals reported confusion navigating the different networks and narrower choices of providers, and after 2 years, the voluntary participation in the public option is still low (11%). 

 In Colorado, which started its reform in 2019, only 15% of option plans met the premium reduction target by 2023. These findings are reported in a health forum published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (March 28) and offer cautionary tales about the overall effectiveness of public option plans in changing the current chaotic and fragmented system.

 Healthcare reform is complicated and politically challenging because it requires trade-offs that may be unacceptable to specific interest groups: private insurance corporations mostly driven by profit; providers concerned about reimbursements; patients are now consumers in a less than transparent market. The practice of medicine seems no longer an art or a science, but is now defined as a business, especially predatory now that equity firms are stepping in to buy out financially failing clinical practices. 

In this Land of the Free, we pride ourselves that Americans are able to “make choices” in healthcare, just like we would shop for goodies at a supermarket. The reality: choices, very limited; confusion, widely spread. Introducing a public option plan to “compete” with other health insurance plans may sound good, but it may not have a fighting chance: there is no guarantee that our politicians will continue to support it when the private health industry are the top lobbying spenders, and when its competitors can cherry-pick healthier members and put obstacles to medical services to minimize their own costs. 

Simply put, I’d much rather go with a single payer system: everybody is covered, with basic essential benefits, and with equal dignity. If the term “single payer” puzzles you, think of Medicare benefits funded by fair taxes and offered not just to seniors, but to everyone. If you hear that Medicare will go bankrupt in an x number of years, don’t panic. Any program, public or private, is always a work in progress, and we can adjust revenues and expenses, benefits and resources to make the program stay cost-effective and sustainable. Most of all, a Medicare-for-All will be simpler and less expensive to deliver than current health insurance plans that spend up to 15% of their revenues on administrative and advertising costs. It will also be more equitable – not a Cadillac treat for the rich and powerful, but leaving no one behind without preventive or essential medical services either. Some may call this “Socialist Medicine”, but with the majority of Americans believing that providing healthcare coverage for all is a government responsibility (according to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey) I call it democracy at its core. Although implementing a single payer program faces many challenges, let’s keep our eyes on the prize, for we cannot achieve the American pursuit of happiness without good and equitable health services for all.

  (Published in the Gazette Times, Corvallis, on April 25, 2024)

On immigration

Recently, immigration has dominated the news headlines, and I suspect it will be a divisive issue throughout this presidential season. TV screens and newspapers flash repeated images of thousands of migrants crossing rivers, walking along tall steel walls and barbed-wired fences at our Southern border - seemingly more to evoke fear of chaos among their viewers and readers than to offer concrete solutions. Voices supporting immigrants for humanitarian reasons and for their potential societal contributions are being drowned by sound bites that demonize them as criminals and blood poisons. The reality is that immigrants will melt into all the social layers and assimilate, for better or for worse, the values and predicaments that are already present in our society. Some barely surviving on welfare, many working hard at low paying jobs, and some eventually attending elite universities and climbing corporate ladders.

President JFK, Jr. reminded us that “we are a country of immigrants”, a mosaic quilt that binds us together in beautiful colors and with strong stitches. It has been so since the birth of our nation, and will continue to be so. Global migration is as old as our human species. 

 I am not suggesting that we should have open borders to illegal immigration. Yes, we need a more orderly system than what we have now. But we should not let the discussion be driven by politicians who appeal to our tribal instincts, dividing us by skin colors and calling cultural diversity a threat to our national security.

                                                                    (Published in the Gazette Times, Corvallis, March 9, 2024)

The Three Kings, then and now

Christmas is over. The Three Kings statues, packed away in their boxes, have returned to the family attic.  But hold on — there reappear on the world stage two other characters, and one trying to jump back on. 

Putin: A master fabricator of myths and lies, hiding behind an enigmatic face. He started a war that now has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of peaceful  people, and saturated a once-fertile land with thousands of bombshells and missile fragments that could take decades to clear once peace returns. 

Xi Jinping: Underneath his debonair smile and calm disposition, the dark side of paranoia lurks. He is out to re-impose the global role of China to its imperial glory of past centuries, first with economic incentives, now by building up and flexing its military muscle. 

And on our backstage at home, who else but our own Donald Trump: a businessman being investigated for many shady deals; a TV reality showman, part charismatic jester (“bouffon”), part bully-playing-victim, and part demagogue who delights himself and his fans with name-calling and shooting simple answers to complex problems. 

These three deeply paranoid, insecure, self-proclaimed kings long to hold the world in their hands, and spin it along their triangular axis; they command their own packs of oligarchs and populist supporters, and can start a regional or global war when they feel like it; three un- scrupulous “strong men” with fragile egos and itchy trigger fingers. 

Scary, unless we all unify to resist them. 

(Published in the GT Feb 6, 2024)