u is not an uncommon name in my homeland and my mother had nothing more in mind than a long-dead uncle when she gave it to me. But in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I am Ted. I guess the other Mr. Thiu has enough of my former country’s former gold bullion tucked away so that in London, where he probably wears a bowler and carries a rolled umbrella, nobody’s calling him anything but Mr. Thiu.
I hear myself sometimes and I sound pretty bitter, I guess. But I don’t let that out at the refinery, where I’m the best chemical engineer they’ve got and they even admit it once in a while. They’re good-hearted people, really. I’ve done enough fighting in my life. I was eighteen when Saigon fell and I was only recently mustered into the Army, and when my unit dissolved and everybody ran, I stripped off my uniform and put on my civilian clothes again and I threw rocks at the North’s tanks when they rolled through the streets. Very few of my people did likewise. I stayed in the mouths of alleys so I could run and then return and throw more rocks, but because what I did seemed so isolated and so pathetic a gesture, the gunners in the tanks didn’t even take notice. But I didn’t care about their scorn. At least my right arm had said no to them.
And then there were Thai Pirates in the South China Sea and idiots running the refugee centers and more idiots running the agencies in the U.S. to find a place for me and my new bride, who braved with me the midnight escape by boat and the terrible sea and all the rest. We ended up here in the flat bayou land of Louisiana, where there are rice paddies and where the water and the land are in the most delicate balance with each other, very much like the Mekong Delta, where I grew up. These people who work around me are good people and maybe they call me Ted because they want to think of me as one of them, though sometimes it bothers me that these men are so much bigger than me. I am the size of a woman in this country and these American men are all massive and they speak so slowly, even to one another, even though English is their native language. I’ve heard New Yorkers on television and I speak as fast as they do.
My son is beginning to speak like the others here in Louisiana. He is ten, the product of the first night my wife and I spent in Lake Charles, in a cheap motel with the sky outside red from the refineries. He is proud to have been born in America, and when he leaves us in the morning to walk to the Catholic school, he says, “Have a good day, y’all.” Sometimes I say good-bye to him in Vietnamese and he wrinkles his nose at me and says, “Aw, Pop,” like I’d just cracked a corny joke. He doesn’t speak Vietnamese at all and my wife says not to worry about that. He’s an American.
But I do worry about that, though I understand why I should be content. I even understood ten years ago, so much so that I agreed with my wife and gave my son an American name. Bill. Bill and his father Ted. But this past summer I found my son hanging around the house bored in the middle of vacation and I was suddenly his father Thiu with a wonderful idea for him. It was an idea that had come to me in the first week of every February we’d been in Lake Charles, because that’s when the crickets always begin to crow here. This place is rich in crickets, which always make me think of my own childhood in Vietnam. But I never said anything to my son until last summer.
I came to him after watching him slouch around the yard one Sunday pulling the Spanish moss off the lowest branches of our big oak tree and then throwing rocks against the stop sign on our corner. “Do you want to do something fun?” I said to him.
“Sure, Pop,” he said, though there was a certain suspicion in his voice, like he didn’t trust me on the subject of fun. He threw all the rocks at once that were left in his hand and the stop sign shivered at their impact.
I said, “If you keep that up, they will arrest me for the destruction of city property and then they will deport us all.”
My son laughed at this. I, of course, knew that he would know I was bluffing. I didn’t want to be too hard on him for the boyish impulses that I myself had found to be so satisfying when I was young, especially since I was about to share something of my own childhood with him.
“So what’ve you got, Pop?” my son asked me.
“Fighting crickets,” I said.
“What?”
Now, my son was like any of his fellow ten-year-olds, devoted to superheroes and the mighty clash of good and evil in all of its high-tech forms in the Saturday-morning cartoons. Just to make sure he was in the right frame of mind, I explained it to him with one word, “Cricketmen,” and I thought this was a pretty good ploy. He cocked his head in interest at this and I took him to the side porch and sat him down and I explained.
I told him how, when I was a boy, my friends and I would prowl the undergrowth and capture crickets and keep them in matchboxes. We would feed them leaves and bits of watermelon and bean sprouts, and we’d train them to fight by keeping them in a constant state of agitation by blowing on them and gently flicking the ends of their antennas with a sliver of wood. So each of us would have a stable of fighting crickets, and there were two kinds.
At this point my son was squirming a little bit and his eyes were shifting away into the yard and I knew that my Cricketman trick had run its course. I fought back the urge to challenge his set of interests. Why should the stiff and foolish fights of his cartoon characters absorb him and the real clash — real life and death — that went on in the natural world bore him? But I realized that I hadn’t cut to the chase yet, as they say on the TV. “They fight to the death,” I said with as much gravity as I could put into my voice, like I was James Earl Jones.
The announcement won me a glance and a brief lift of his eyebrows. This gave me a little scrabble of panic, because I still hadn’t told him about the two types of crickets and I suddenly knew that was a real important part for me. I tried not to despair at his understanding and I put my hands on his shoulders and turned him around to face me. “Listen,” I said. “You need to understand this if you are to have fighting crickets. There are two types, and all of us had some of each. One type we called the charcoal crickets. These were very large and strong, but they were slow and they could become confused. The other type was small and’ brown and we called them fire crickets. They weren’t as strong, but they were very smart and quick.”
“So who would win?” my son said.
“Sometimes one and sometimes the other. The fights were very long and full of hard struggle. We’d have a little tunnel made of paper and we’d slip a sliver of wood under the cowling of our cricket’s head to make him mad and we’d twirl him by his antenna, and then we’d each put our cricket into the tunnel at opposite ends. Inside, they’d approach each other and begin to fight and then we’d lift the paper tunnel and watch.”
“Sounds neat,” my son said, though his enthusiasm was at best moderate, and I knew I had to act quickly.
So we got a shoe box and we started looking for crickets. It’s better at night, but I knew for sure his interest wouldn’t last that long. Our house is up on blocks because of the high water table in town and we crawled along the edge, pulling back the bigger tufts of grass and turning over rocks. It was one of the rocks that gave us our first crickets, and my son saw them and cried in my ear, “There, there,” but he waited for me to grab them. I cupped first one and then the other and dropped them into the shoe box and I felt a vague disappointment, not so much because it was clear that my boy did not want to touch the insects, but that they were both the big black ones, the charcoal crickets. We crawled on and we found another one in the grass and another sitting in the muddy shadow of the house behind the hose faucet and then we caught two more under an azalea bush.