Guitar brother

I woke up by the alarm: my brother called back. He tested negative (for the coronavirus.) Good news! He is my big and only brother. When I started school at age 4, he was 21 – at the School of Pharmacology (he fainted at the sight of blood, hence, no Medical School option!).

Growing up in the shadows of two college siblings was playing catch-up: from language acquisition to musical taste, from ballroom dance to social development – while outside world was a gumbo of French Colonial, Traditional Vietnamese – much influenced by Chinese – and the emerging irreverent GI’s ethos: spent all your army pay before deployed back to the jungle.

Had my brother been tested positive yesterday, today would have been a sad time; time to make “arrangement”, pack up dark clothes – if travel were an option at all.

God spares me another trip back East, which I did last month when his wife passed away. According to known statistics, he is more at risks as an 81-year old first-year widower with some underlying conditions.

My brother is no angel. Part of him was made of those “soft genes” i.e. love for women, music and parties. But he also works hard, and nobody questions his undying love for the less-fortunate. He has donated a large chunk of change to orphanages and wounded-vet associations.

In between classes, this pharmacy student had to pick up his younger brother from Kindergarten (my sister had her share of dropping me off) on his Velo Solex.

On one occasion, my left foot got stuck in the rear wheel. That grind hurt a lot, even at 20-miles per hour.

My brother had wide connections among his medical peers: doctor friends to check out my tiny willy – “oh, it’s not worth a circumcision…just keep pulling it back every night”….” Or his dentist friends:” oh, your brother got a cavity. Let me help”.

Not once I saw money change hand. It’s war time. Thuy “Mexico”, as my brother was known – and still is – is always ready for parties: his violin, his amplifier, his guitar and microphone. He never touched the Chinese greasy lobsters VA restaurants put out on those occasions (instead, he taught me to squeeze down our throats a few drops of lemon juices).

“On va chantez les Parisiennes”et…”Mexico, Mexi…………………………….co” (the audience gasps at mid air, turn-heads to make sure there were no incidence on stage).

His attachment to Romanticism lagged the actual movement for about 10 years, same as mine with the 60’s. But what he inherited, he embraced.

The dancing, the singing and the camaraderie. He buried his first daughter on the front during one of his tours in Central Vietnam (Quy Nhon)

Then on April 29, 1975 he went about town, per my brother-in-law’s request to seek help/search for a way out. Both had been refugees of the country’s 1954 partition. 21 years in South Vietnam, with births and burials. These two Northern refugee boys-turned-men: decent yet hardened men who would stop at nothing to provide for and protect their loved ones.

But fate dealt them a curve ball. Despite their training in the US, they had no one to turn to for a passage to the US on Saigon last days.

Eventually, they managed to “flee without forwarding” ( see my other blog).

If his were a positive covid-19 test result, I’d probably cry for the turn of event. I would put on those music he used to sing all those years while the rain poured and pounded on our tin roof (those monsoon seasons found him shirtless, in front of a mirror, and practice moving his chest muscle from left to right and back). I would put on some of the stuff in my closet which he sent (heck, even our blanket was his – well-put-to-use during Texas Deep Freeze last year).

Nowadays, my brother still flips through some French instructional books (we’re both teacher’s kids, with natural affinity to French culture and language.) He has never returned to Vietnam, but he had visited Paris. Perhaps to validate his dreams, his longing for something better. Humanity got this urge to flee, a wanderlust to seek out a better place, a more permanent one.

Perhaps our time on Earth is to sit, with boarding passes in hand, waiting for sudden departure (the Terminal).

COVID-19 or not, positive or negative test result, we already know our fated outline: birth, life, death and burial. In between, I shared some good years with my brother – when he was stuck at home before getting drafted and married, like when we siblings painted the house on the days leading up to Tet.

Growing up in his shadow has been hard and honoring.

To reproduce their ethos, you would need to combine those 1917 movies, 1945 movies and 1975 movies. In them, my brother and sister – young kids then – ran around like “napalm girl” starving to death (1945) then ballroom- danced like there were no tomorrow (the US involvement 65-73 bought them some time), before fleeing again as refugees on one of those USS battle ships (whose sailors recently tested positive for the virus) to gladly start at bottom-rung jobs in remote New Jersey town, like one would in Brooklyn, the movie.

To get to where he is today, my brother has paid a dear price (working until he is 77 year-old at an all-Black all-shift D.C. hospital). God spared him yesterday despite dry cough and slight fever.

I sure am glad for him. When gone, he will no longer be there to serve as a reminder of where and what we have been through, and how worthy it has been to experience our own version of the “stations of the Cross”. Stuff that makes humanity what it is: the power to remember, to reflect and to reciprocate.

Last month, upon returning from his wife funeral, after saying goodbye to both my sister and brother, I had a feeling I had seen my parents – despite dead and buried – who have left behind their gene sequencing, hence their images living through my siblings, so I wouldn’t be alone.

We are both copies and copy machines. We make copies of ourselves who are copies of others ( 70+ DNA sequences plus a few of our own, both demons and achievement).

I figure I am not much different from Thuy Mexico. Perhaps more in English than he French. Perhaps more rock and roll than he with Slow Rock. Perhaps a notch wilder just as he when compared to my father’s. But we are all lucky S.O.B’s having survived so much thrown at us, from the turn of the 20th century to the next. Take aways: stay alive, stay positive and test “negative”.

I wouldn’t say I love my brother, in a sentimental way. But I know I wouldn’t want to entertain the opposite – of him testing positive. Back then, I was just glad he show up on time in his Velo Solex and short-sleeves, leaving behind jeers from peers “hey, Thuy Mexico….you’re gonna pick up your “baby” from all those random encounters with girls? hahaha”.