Beautiful Eulogy from Anh Quoc

Peter Nghien Huu Nguyen
19 January 2009

I’d like to pay tribute to my father whom many of us knew and loved. Some knew him only as the gentlest person; while others knew him only as a strict disciplinarian. But when we love him, it’s important to know and love him with all of his faults as well as with all of his strengths.

To give a glimpse of his gentle heart, I want to start out this tribute with a poem by the Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee about the gentleness of a father.

***

The Gift

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
My father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
The iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
But hear his voice still, a well
Of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
Two measures of tenderness
He laid against my face,
The flames of discipline
He raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
You would have thought you saw a man
Planting something in a boy’s palm,
A silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
You would have arrived here,
Where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
So carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
Took my hand like this,
And I did not hold that shard
Between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
Christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
When he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

-- Li-Young Lee, 1986

***

I rely on this poem in the same way that so many of us have done within recent weeks upon the strength of each other in order to better understand and express our love for this complex man who was my father. My father was gentle in a way that is better understood from afar. My father was like the rain that soaks you to the bone, yet nourishes you with endless sacrifice.

My father loved.
He loved his family with an intensity of fire that cloaked the tenderness of his gentle heart. His love for us kept us secure throughout the time of that bitter exodus from Viet-Nam. His love for us guided us through the uncertainties of growing up in a new country. And his love consumed him when it seemed that we had strayed hopelessly from the teachings of our cultural upbringing.

My father was not a perfect man. Neither was he a perfect father.
He disciplined with the same intensity that he loved and had little tolerance for dishonesty. However in all of his love for us, and in the many ways and times that he had learned to swallow his pride and yielded for the benefit of his family, he demonstrated an inner strength far greater than I had imagined possible.

My father was a proud man.
His determination shaped us. He was a handsome man who had married a beautiful wife and was blessed with nearly a dozen children. He took great pride in his family and children and in their accomplishments. Rarely had I seen my father cry, and then only it was when he had been denied of his beloved family.


I grew up knowing a father whose love I did not fully understand. The distant memories of a much loved childhood had been replaced by a rapidly changing world wherein my father’s struggle to regain for his children the discipline of our proud heritage proved to be futile. Had we been as generous in our understanding of him as my father had been in his own sacrifice for us, we would have known and understood his tremendous love for us. We were young and foolish, and we didn’t know. And it was only later in life that many of us came to understand.

In the past weeks, I’ve been tremendously blessed to have had the opportunity to spend with my father his final days. In this time, I have continuously been amazed by the many stories of my father’s gentleness and understanding toward our cousins and their devotion to him. Clearly, they had come to know a whole other side of the man than we had. I came to understand that my father’s love for us had been far complex than I had imagined. And I came to a better understanding of my love for him.

Within his final weeks, my father had given me so much in the many quiet moments that we shared together. However, perhaps the greatest gift that he had given me was his unspoken permission to cry. I watched him cry for the love of his children as I held back. Over and over again he would bring up one after another and anguished over their strained relationship. My once proud father no longer allowed his love expression to be inhibited. I was moved to see exposed, the gentle heart within the highly disciplined exterior of the man that I knew as father, and I cried. I did not know it at the time, but my father had given me the most gentlest and generous gift that I had known; it was the gift of his tears. And in his final days, my father had pulled me to him and kissed me; and in this act he blessed me. And in this act my imperfect father became godlike.

Even in rapidly declining health and with faulty memory, my father would repeatedly concern himself with my own health and well being. Even in his final days, he thought only of others. In all of his imperfection, and in his godliness, that is my father. That is the father that I love.