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| ISBN-13: | 9781938416538 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | River Grove Books |
| Publication date: | 11/14/2013 |
| Pages: | 298 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.67(d) |
Read an Excerpt
A JOURNEY of BODY & SOUL
a memoir
By TRACH BA VU
River Grove Books
Copyright © 2013 Trach Ba VuAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-938416-53-8
CHAPTER 1
JOURNEY INTO THE WORLD
I
It began in a small country between China and India, a tiny nation compared to these two giants. The people of this country had lived with wars for several centuries, either fighting for their independence or with each other. As with other small countries, the lives of this nation's people were mostly at the mercy of the most powerful nations. This small country was unknown to almost everyone until one special war—called the Vietnam War, a war that nobody enjoys talking about.
This war was neither civil nor patriotic. It was the war between two ideologies, communism and democracy, both of which the Vietnamese people were pushed into. Living in this country during this war, one had to fight either for one side or the other; there was no place between. On either side, most men were busy killing the enemy and their compatriots, leaving their wives to take care of themselves and raise their kids at home.
One rainy, dark evening, inside an apartment at a naval barracks in a small town deep in the southernmost part of South Vietnam, a pregnant woman, Lan Vu, began experiencing contractions. She looked worriedly at her nineteen-month-old daughter sleeping on the bunk bed and wondered who would be taking care of this child when she had to go to the hospital. She wished her husband, Trach Vu, a naval lieutenant, were at home at this very moment. He had been away in a joint operation for more than a week, and no one knew when the operation would end.
In the darkness outside, rain poured down. The war was raging, and the sound of gunfire and explosions seemed much closer tonight. Her husband said he was in this war to defend the freedom of South Vietnam. He was away most of the time, but never did she complain about being left alone at home. Tonight, however, was different. She felt so lonely and wished there were no war so that her husband would be with her at the moment of her baby's delivery. As the contractions came stronger and more frequently, she hurried to her neighbor's door, knocking and asking the lady who answered to take in her sleeping daughter. She went back to her room, grabbed the necessities that she had prepared, then walked into the night.
At the gate of the barracks, the guard realized her situation. It was close to curfew, but he hurriedly summoned someone to take her in the sentry's vehicle to the hospital, about a half mile away.
Inside the waiting room of a military hospital, there were nine other expectant ladies without their husbands with them, in line and waiting for their names to be called. Their men might be away at a battle, as her husband was. She remembered how many times he had been close to death: missed by a sniper's bullet four times, mines exploding next to his boat three times, five or six ambushes and attacks when patrolling, and many other times of exchanged fire with the enemy along the riverbanks. Amid the pain of her labor, she silently prayed for her husband's return and for her smooth delivery. She knew there had been many times when wives were expecting their husbands' return to see their newborn children—but the fathers never came. After praying, she tried to remember what she had to do in case her husband's life was sacrificed to the war. She recalled that each time, before going out for the dangerous operation, he never forgot to repeat again and again that his soul would be with her and their children if he got killed. She felt a jolt of fear and loneliness, and tears silently fell from her eyes.
Her fear was precisely justified, because at that very moment the task force of riverboats on which her husband served was under attack. The mission of the task force was to patrol a section of a narrow river to protect a group of salvage workers who were retrieving a naval boat sunk by guerillas. It had been planned as a thirty-hour job, but a strong current and limited space to maneuver made it hard to bring the boat up from deep water. Both sides of the riverbanks were covered with dense foliage, and when the tide ebbed, the boats of the naval task force were fifteen feet below the banks. Crawling in to dig holes behind the thick bushes along the banks, the enemy waited for the lowest tide to launch a daring attack during the first night of the operation.
Having the advantage of high ground, the attackers shot at every boat, instantly killing four crew members and wounding five more. At the very first moment of gunfire, the left side of the man on Trach Vu's right was shredded into gore and splintered bone. The surviving crew members returned fire with sidearms and machine guns, but the enemy withdrew only after a counterattacking group went ashore, fought with them on land, and chased them away.
2
It was at the exact moment of the enemy attack that the little girl was born. It was in October of 1966 at Can Tho in what was then known as South Vietnam. She came into this world two hours and fifteen minutes after the curfew time. She arrived on the earth as a replacement for the man standing next to her father, who at that same instant had his entire heart obliterated by a blast from a B-57 bomber. Her father only had a light wound on his right leg and returned home four days later. She was born during the highest peak of the war and was given the baptized name Anna, along with her family name, Vu.
The Vu family had come from a small village in North Vietnam situated in rich, alluvial soil carried south by the Red River from China during centuries of rainy seasons. The Vu clan must have lived very close to the coastal area of the southern part of North Vietnam where many European Christian missionaries landed as early as 1503. Most of them were from Spain, passing through to the Philippines.
No one knows how the two groups understood one another during the first contacts. What kind of communication did they use that enabled thousands of Vietnamese to be converted to Christianity during the early days of the sixteenth century? Most of those converted were poor peasants or fishermen, and the members of the Vu clan would be among the earliest converted. Before the European missionaries' arrival, the foundations of Vietnamese culture and value had been built upon the model of China. Religions and philosophies from China dating from 500 BC were introduced into Vietnam during the second century AD, but Buddhism was the dominant religion by the seventh century, during the Ly dynasty. It came to South Vietnam through Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos six centuries later, when the Vietnamese kingdoms expanded into the south.
Until the sixteenth century, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and ancestor worship were prevalent. Some of these were not really religions but political philosophies, such as Confucianism, which set up a desired social order for a monarchial society. All religions in Vietnam at the time, though different in name, had many things in common. The majority of Vietnamese people were ancestor worshippers. They generally did not understand the concepts of the various religions, but only followed the rituals that were passed down from generation to generation.
Christianity brought to Vietnam a completely different way of life and of worshipping God. The new faith spread and flourished, which threatened the rulers of Vietnam, who believed that they were actual sons of heaven sent to this world to rule people. Anything that elevated the people's worship to something other than the rulers was seen as a threat against heaven. Christianity taught its followers that the only son of God was Jesus Christ, he alone and no one else, and the kings and their court would not tolerate that. Neither could they accept the fact that their citizens abandoned the traditional religions to acquire a new foreign belief.
During the sixteenth century, the number of Christians was considered small enough to not pose a real threat to the regime at the time. However, there were persecutions of Christians on and off during the seventeenth century and following the first half of the eighteenth century. These persecutions were not severe because the country was experiencing a great turmoil among factions vying for rule. Each regime was trying to consolidate support around itself and was less concerned about the growth of this new faith. It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that persecution became severe. Ministers and Christians were accused of being associated with the king's enemies.
The king decreed that all ministers and Christians be arrested and incarcerated. Detainees were brought to a trial presided over by a local mandarin. Each Christian was led to a crucifix placed on the ground in front of him. Those who openly walked over the crucifix and renounced Christianity were released immediately. Those who refused to do so were executed. The executions were conducted during the night. Each Christian was dropped into the sea with a big, heavy stone hanging from his or her neck.
It was during this time that the Vu clan faced the persecution. Most of the Vu family's members were captured and killed. By the mysterious disposition of fate and thanks to the protection of a knowledge of medicine, one man escaped and enabled the Vu line to continue on to the present. The Vu family remained devout Christians, and in honor of their ancestor, medical careers and Christianity were encouraged in each generation after that. After surviving persecution, the Vu clan chose to live peacefully and happily in the lovely village that it planned to call home for all time. However, the family would be uprooted and carried away by even more historic events and wars.
The French began colonizing Vietnam in 1858, but the Vietnamese people staged many uprisings in the effort to claim their independence. For more than eighty years they resisted foreign rule, until World War II, when most Vu family members volunteered with Ho Chi Minh to fight for the independence of the country.
Anna's grandfather, Chan Vu, was among the first of those who rushed after Ho Chi Minh to fight for independence. He was also one of the first to discover that Ho Chi Minh was a pawn of the communist Soviets, who only used Vietnamese independence as a means toward communism's goal of conquering the whole of Southeast Asia.
Chan Vu abandoned Ho Chi Minh and secretly joined in an anticommunist group in the area but was soon discovered. He was arrested and imprisoned five different times. After his final release and escape to the French quarter of Nam Dinh, the town where he lived, he left some important papers at the village church inside a statue. He took his family to South Vietnam in 1954 to avoid the communist regime. Here his son, Anna's father, met and married Anna's mother.
The story of Anna's mother's family is completely different. Anna's maternal grandfather, a teacher and also a nurse, was originally an atheist. His belief was that death ends everything: no soul, no God, neither heaven nor hell. His wife, Anna's grandmother, was a Buddhist. After they met and became engaged, she fell into a kind of mental illness. As a nurse, he came to take care of her very often.
One day, when talking to him, she suddenly stopped, stared in the direction of the gate, and uttered aloud, "We have company. A strange man, a European, is coming."
"Who is coming?" he asked, looking in the direction she was pointing and seeing no one. "There is nobody coming."
"It is not a strange man. He is Jesus Christ," she said.
She then knelt down silently at the door with her eyes rolling up in her head and her hands clasped under her chin. After about two minutes she regained consciousness and told him, "Jesus already left. Before leaving, he promised to come back in five days to take me on a tour." She was surly and angry when perceiving that he seemed not to believe one word of what she had said.
Though he didn't believe her seemingly weird and demented words, he came five days later to see what would happen. What he witnessed that day would change his faith completely. His fiancée had woken early and was busy preparing for the appointment with Jesus. She took a shower, put on all white clothes, and at the indicated time, lay face up on the bed, her arms along her body and her legs straight. A wet handkerchief covered her eyes; she looked like a corpse on a gurney. Presently, as he watched, her heartbeat stopped. About ten minutes later, her body was gently raised up from the bed and lowered to the ground. He placed her on the bed again.
In some minutes, she woke up and looked around, puzzled. She then smiled at him and announced, "Sir, I am not your fiancée. I am a female saint that God sent to protect the body of your friend from disturbance by devils." She then walked around the house, like a visitor who wanted to see what the house looked like. Then she lay down in the same position as previously and stayed completely immobile.
He sat waiting anxiously without knowing what to do.
About four hours later, she woke up again and, speaking in the tone of his fiancée, began narrating her "tour."
"First, Jesus immersed my soul in a well to clean me from any vestige of sin. After cleaning, I became light and floated high on the sky, flying after him all around the world."
She then cited the names and described the details of each place she was brought to. She had sensed the heat of the sun when she and Jesus came close to it. She had been in Africa, Asia, and Europe. On the way back she was foretold of her future poor and short life of drudgery, the number of children she would have, and even her age at her death.
After mulling over these experiences of his fiancée, he abandoned atheism and became a devout Catholic. His fiancée was baptized as a Catholic, her sickness was cured, and they were married and had a dozen children together. Anna's mother was their second daughter; she has five brothers and six sisters.
Through these circumstances, the wars in Vietnam brought a longtime Christian family, the Vus, from North Vietnam to meet the newly Catholic one, the Nguyens, in the South. This was how the marriage of Anna's parents came about. They met and built up a Christian family in which children were born during different times and wars. Anna's father was born at the onset of World War II, her mother at the peak of that war, and Anna at the peak of another one, the Vietnam War. Together, her parents lived almost their whole lives in various wars while raising Anna and her siblings.
3
About two months after Anna's baptism, the war came closer and closer to the residence, and their city was frequently hit by missiles and artillery fire from the enemy. Her father decided to send her mother, Anna, and her older sister to Saigon to live with her paternal grandparents, where she stayed for about five years. Anna's grandparents were very traditional and, probably because they had lived almost constantly in war, they were also very religious. Her grandmother strongly believed in the power of prayers. She asked Anna to pray to God and the Virgin Mary every night before bedtime for the safety of each member of the family, especially for her father.
Two brothers came after Anna, born between 1968 and 1970 During this period, they all lived together: grandparents, mother, and four children. Anna was very close to her grandma. Sharing the same room, her grandma often massaged and scratched Anna's back and lulled her into sleep with religious stories. Anna was very scared of the dark when being left alone even though her grandma assured her that there was no such thing as a ghost. She told Anna that devils came from hell, pretending to be ghosts to weaken her faith, but she assured Anna that when a person dies, the soul would either go straight to heaven if righteous, to purgatory if some light sins were committed, or to hell if guilty of grave sins. No soul was permitted to wander around the earth, she told Anna.
Anna and her sister were sent to Catholic school to strengthen their faith, to prepare for their first confession, and most of all to learn that they were born with sins: original sin and everyday sin. That's why when beginning her prayers, Anna always started with the words, "Oh God, I am a sinner...."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A JOURNEY of BODY & SOUL by TRACH BA VU. Copyright © 2013 Trach Ba Vu. Excerpted by permission of River Grove Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, vii,1. Journey into the World, 1,
2. Unpredictable Journey, 19,
3. Journeys of Remorse, Journeys of Healing, 49,
4. Journey to the Past, 79,
5. A Journey of Spiritual Encounters, 115,
6. Journeys into Mystery, Love, and Divinity, 131,
7. Back to the Lonely Journey, 187,
8. Journey to Destiny, 239,
Acknowledgments, 275,
About the Author, 277,