They call me Ted where I work and they`ve called me that for over a decade now and it still bothers me, though I`m not very happy about my real name being the same as the former president of the former Republic of Vietnam. Theiu 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, La., I am Ted. I guess the other Mr. Thieu 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. Thieu.
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 18 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 each other, even though English I speak as fast as they do.
My son is beginning to speak like the others here in Louisiana. He is 10, 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 goodbye 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 10 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 Thieu 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 10-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 match boxes. 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 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
”So who would win?” my son said.
”Sometimes one and sometimes the other. The fights were 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 enthusiam 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.
”Isn`t that enough?” my son demanded. ”How many do we need?”
I sat with my back against the house and put the shoe box on my lap, and my boy sat beside me, his head stretching this way so he could look into the box. There was no more vagueness to my feeling. I was actually weak with disappointment because all six of these were charcoal crickets, big and inert and just looking around like they didn`t even know anything was wrong.
”Oh, no,” my son said with real force, and for a second I thought he had read my mind and shared my feeling, but I looked at him and he was pointing at the toes of his white sneakers. ”My Reeboks are ruined!” he cried, and on the toe of each sneaker was a smudge of grass.
I glanced back into the box and the crickets had not moved and I looked at my son and he was still staring at his sneakers. ”Listen,” I said,
”this was a big mistake. You can go on and do something else.”
He jumped up at once. ”Do you think Mom can clean these?” he said.
”Sure,” I said. ”Sure.”
He was gone at once and the side door slammed and I put the box on the grass. But I didn`t go in. I got back on my hands and knees and I circled the entire house and then I turned over every stone in the yard and dug all around all the trees. I found probably two dozen more crickets, but they were all the same. In Louisiana, there are rice paddies and some of the bayous look like the Delta, but many of the birds are different and why shouldn`t insects be different, too? This is another country, after all. It was just funny about the fire crickets. All of us kids rooted for them, even if we were fighting with one of our own charcoal crickets. A fire cricket was a very precious and admirable thing.
The next morning my son stood before me as I finished my breakfast, and once he had my attention, he looked down at his feet, drawing my eyes down as well. ”See?” he said. ”Mom got them clean.”
Then he was out the door, and I called after him, ”See you later, Bill.”
