Now, I am a confident pessimist

Many of my friends have noticed a recent change in me. With this change I can call myself a confident pessimist. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think I’m ready to unravel it.

You ever notice how if you try to pull a loose string off your sweater, it’s always longer than you think it is? My meditation on this matter has been exactly like that.

I realize now that before I went to that conference in Washington this summer, I was just a pessimist. Afterwards, without ever being able to pinpoint when it exactly happened, I had become a confident pessimist.

Part of this is undoubtedly due to my rodent sensei’s help in making me more true to myself in my writing.

But I would have never turned the corner so soon without going to that conference. Why did I even go to that conference?

At first, I didn’t want to go to that conference, which I will refer to from now on as Dai Hoi (I won’t bother putting the inflection in for you English speaking folk). I had been planning to go to Glorieta for quite some time. Glorieta is this awesome Christian retreat in New Mexico that the BSU invites people to go to recharge for the school year. I went my freshman summer and wanted to go back my sophomore summer because I met so many cool people.

I have to digress to explain something about Dai Hoi. It has two parts, one of which was for Vietnamese youth like me. The other was for people who had graduated from the Vietnamese National Military Academy (VNMA, think of it like the West Point of South Vietnam). I received my membership into the second generation group, Thanh Thieu Nien Da Hieu (TTNDH), by virtue of being the child of my Dad, class twenty-nine of VNMA.

When I was younger, I was forced to go with my Dad to a Dai Hoi (I think it was 1992 in Houston). Back then, though, I was very young and there wasn’t any second generation group yet. I concluded that old people liked to be excruciatingly boring. Why wouldn’t I think the same of Dai Hoi XIV?

But my parents know me very well. They know how to get me to do things that I’m pretty headstrong about. All they had to do to get me to go to this Dai Hoi was say that I owed someone. I owed Chi Thu (Thu is her name, Chi is a Vietnamese honorific denoting that she is an older sister to me even though she is certainly no blood relation).

Back during my freshman summer, I took part in the Tulsa Undergraduate Research Challenge. TURC was the program that the genius Dr. Rahe put me in to study the Vietnam War. Now I didn’t expect much to come out of it. I was simply a college sophomore reading up on my past. I’d write some ten page paper and that would be the end of it.

But that summer I got a random email.

Hey, your parents told me that you were doing some research on the Vietnam War. It’s rare for such a young person to be interested in that kind of stuff. Are you even twenty-one yet (I was eighteen at the time)? I just wanted to let you know that there’s an opportunity to share your research at the Ngo Diem Conference at the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech in Lubbock. The subject will be “The Rise and Fall of Ngo Dinh Diem and its Implications for the United States and South Vietnam.”

The person who sent the email referred to herself as “Chi Anh Thu”. Do you know what my first thought was?

WHO THE HECK IS THIS PERSON AND HOW DOES SHE KNOW MY EMAIL ADDRESS?!?

I asked my parents about her, and it turns out she’s sort of a celebrity among the Vietnamese refugee community. That’s because she fought for the South Vietnamese flag (it’s yellow with three red stripes) to have equal rights with the North Vietnamese (communist) flag in Virginia. And she won.

You have to understand that flying the communist flag: South Vietnamese refugee communities is equivalent to flying the Confederate flag: Southern black communities.

The VNMA has a yahoo group. In this group, they’re bound to talk about a lot of things…including their children. Undoubtedly, my parents were proud that their son was interested in his past. They wanted everyone to help. In talking about me too much, this Chi Thu character heard about me.

An aside, when I call someone Chi I don’t think themselves as more than ten years older than me. After hearing how she fought for our flag, I thought she might be thirty-five. Nope, she’s only five years younger than my parents (who are at the half century mark). Five years younger. Bozhe moy, she’s old enough to be my mother and I’m calling her “older sister”.

Weird.

To make a long story short, I modified the subject of my research to fit the theme of the conference. Then I went to Lubbock, a nervous and wide-eyed nineteen year old. I presented my research, whereupon I impressed a bunch of old people (technophiles who are easily impressed by PowerPoint). It helped that I have decent speaking ability. I gained a little confidence then, but I was still a brooding pessimist at that point.

My research paper and PowerPoint slides were given out to the VNMA group. Again, old people are all too glad to see young people interested in something they took part in, especially something like war. For some reason, people kept thinking I was older than twenty. I suspect that my name came to be bandied about due in large part to my parents incessantly boasting about me.

That should have been the end of the story. I had tried something out, and though it was fun I had to make money as an engineer. Though it gains you a little fame, writing usually doesn’t pay well.

For some reason though, I signed up to do TURC again last summer. To do research on the Vietnam War no less. I should be taking classes to make up ground on my dual major, or learning another language for the business side of being an engineer. At the very least, I should have been doing research on the engineering side. But the past of my people is more interesting to study than some haphazard collection of circuits.

I’ve digressed enough (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has one of the longest flashbacks in movie history). The point is that my parents guilt tripped me into going to the conference. Fortunately, my parents were paying for the whole trip so it’s not like I was at a loss. So, grudgingly, I went to Dai Hoi with the intention of paying back a debt. We drove to DC, probably in a scheme to small talk me to death.

Then I met some pretty girls and forgot about all that.

Okay, so my parents promised me that I wouldn’t have a bad time with so many good- looking Vietnamese ladies to cheer me up. I can’t say that they were wrong.

Naturally, I gave people the impression that I did not want to be at Dai Hoi. I was a quiet person who says a bunch of negative things, much like I was in high school. Sure, I talked to people about random things and I managed to inquire of a few people where they were going in life. I told people I wanted to be a professor, which they found to be respectable.

They had no idea of the dragon waiting to be unleashed.

I was in DC for five days. Wednesday night Chi Thu put together a little get together for us, and I’m not quite sure what her opinion of me was then. I observed that she knew how to handle all sorts of characters. Chi Thu spoke Vietnamese, English, and French. She could be somber or goofy depending on who she was talking to. I spoke politely to her, but I made it obvious that I didn’t want to be there.

Thursday we visited the Fairfax County center. Did you know that Fairfax is one of the wealthiest counties in America? Their spacious county center positively reflects that fact. I learned from a Virginian Senator that she got involved in politics because her county commissioner told her that cows caused more pollution than factories did. If someone that misinformed can become the head of a county, why couldn’t she do it? She was lucky to have the blessing of her family.

Friday we went touring. We were supposed to go to the White House and Pentagon, but the terror alert messed up our plans. I did get to see the new World War II memorial, which is definitely worth a look if you ever visit our nation’s capital. But that wasn’t the most memorable part of that day for me.

We ate lunch at the McDonald’s in the National Air and Space Museum. In the time afterwards, Chi Thu started reading people’s palms. I was highly doubtful, since I know that palm readers are just good liars. They guess at who you are by observing what you do and say. Nonetheless, I let her look at my left palm.

Hmmm, Daniel, your lines are well-defined. I think this means that you are a simple and straightforward person. For you, everything in life is simple. Let’s see here, your education line says that what you will study will not be what you do later in life. You will study a lot, but you will be doing something else for a job. Ah, your love line says that you will be very faithful to whomever you marry. The lucky girl who marries you will be a very fortunate person.

Holy randomness, Batman! Her insight is ninety-nine!

Saturday was our general session with the VNMA. I have enough trouble keeping up with flowery Vietnamese speakers, but these old guys put me to sleep faster than any Valium tablet ever could.

Sunday was the final day, and it would be on this day that I would share my experiences on doing history research. Over the previous three days, I had been piecing my speech together. I realized that I couldn’t be a boring speaker. Instead, I had to tell them stories. Fortunately, my xanga came through at that point with the story of why I chose to become a dual major (you won’t find very many Vietnamese kids going into the liberal arts). Then I added on some funny stuff about Chi Thu and the Diem conference.

I looked into my audience’s eyes, and their young eyes reflected genuine interest. I recognize why now. Before, the only people who would tell them stories about the Vietnam War were their parents or their teachers. Yet, here was one of their peers talking about such a crucial event of their past, and this guy actually seemed to know what he was talking about. Is this the same quiet, somber guy we’ve been hanging out with all this time?

Not exactly.

They asked me some tough questions, but I was ready to give my honest opinions. I think I managed to convince them that I wasn’t a fake, that I was someone who truly cared about our history. Not only that, I was willing to take a stand on issues that weren’t so clear. For example, would South Vietnam been better off if Diem had not been assassinated by his own generals? I didn’t think so and I let them know it.

Five minutes after my speech, the President of TTNDH asked someone to be the moderator for the discussion session. After an awkward silence of twenty or so seconds, I volunteered. Vietnamese people are so timid. All I had to do was to decide which question we would discuss, point to who go to speak, and control the time. It was easy and funny to see. I would direct everything in English, but most people spoke Vietnamese. For all intents and purposes, I would say it would be like watching C3PO talk to a bunch of R2D2’s.

After the discussion session, it was time to vote for a new President. The first phase was to have people who volunteered themselves to stand up. Again, the shyness of Vietnamese people came through. The person next to me, though, kept motioning for me to stand up. Meh, why not? A person who didn’t know Vietnamese like me couldn’t possibly win. At least if I stood up, someone would have to get up to preserve the dignity of TTNDH.

I lost horribly. It’s not good when people ask you questions in Vietnamese and you’re only answering in English. I did give it my best effort, but I was also way too young to be presiding over older and more mature people.

The most surprising thing I found out was that I learned that the person who motioned me to stand up did not vote for me, instead choosing to turn in a blank vote.

At the banquet that night, I was surprised when Chi Thu came over to the table where I was sitting. She leaned into my ear and thanked me for speaking at Dai Hoi. I told her it was nothing. Then she surprised me by telling me that she was one of the three votes for me. She thought that I certainly had leadership qualities, but I definitely needed to age a little and work on my Vietnamese a lot. Then she said:

Whenever you become the President of TTNDH, TTNDH would be lucky to have you as its leader.

In psychology, there’s something called insight. You can have insight into people, like Chi Thu. But there’s a phenomenon referred to as “a click of insight”. This is when your thoughts align just right, allowing you to see things that you’ve never seen before. Even things right in front of your eyes.

Plenty of people have told me that I would be a good leader, but I always denied that quality in myself. I’m too pessimistic to be a leader. But when Chi Thu spoke to me at the banquet that night, it all made sense to me.

People may say they don’t like pessimism, but if you properly package it with a little humor they might actually enjoy it.

So I became confident in my pessimism.

Scarily enough, my good friends, I’ve only told you half the story.

You can find the other half here.