A Vietnamese American

Speaking of jobs... I was sitting at the one of the gates at the O'Hare airport, anxiously waiting for my flight, when this knocked out dude beside me stirred to consciousness and started talking to me.

He may have asked where I was going, and if I was from there. I told him that I was from Singapore. He told me he was born in Vietnam, and had come to the States on a boat. I said, "A boat? Wouldn't that take very long?!" "About a year," was his reply. At that time I knew very little about the war.

So it turned out that he had just gone for a job interview in Chicago, and was on his way back to Sacramento, where he lived. I had to leave soon after, because my plane had arrived. It was a bit of an abrupt goodbye, but I didn't have time to think about it. I had missed one flight from Chicago to LA, and I didn't want to miss the next one from LA to Santa Barbara.

He was pretty dark-skinned for an Asian. Now that I've traveled in Indochina, I can recognize some of his facial characteristics which echoed that of many of the people I met there.

Someone has said that once a person leaves one place for another, one can never really return. This chestnut-skinned Vietnamese American, with his gruff voice, and a slight hesitancy in his demeanor, was not unlike many Americans I had met. He spoke with a crisp accent, used the appropriate slang, and was thinking about his new job. I think of the way he described Vietnam, and he spoke of it as a distant past, probably not to be revisited anytime soon. I don't know why he told me his story, but that it's a story I don't want to forget.