Though he already had three daughters, dad loved me—the youngest—in a way that felt obviously, strangely different.

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He was a difficult man, hot-tempered, rough around the edges, angry at the whole world for reasons we all knew but never learned how to name. His irritation could spill over, land on anyone who stood too close. But with me, he saved his gentlest part. He indulged me like a little princess. And by that same strange logic, I loved him, without limit.

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Mom said that when I was still tiny, still lying in a cradle, on nights when dad had to travel for work, I cried endlessly. Not from hunger, not from pain, but from the absence of a familiar scent. It took her a long time to understand how to lull me to sleep: she laid dad’s shirts—still carrying his scent—over me. Only then did I stop crying.

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She said I was woven from his scent.

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When dad was home, I refused to leave his side. He walked ahead; I crawled after him. Then I learned to walk, to run, and followed him everywhere—like a small shadow, quiet but determined.

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Even long after the war had ended, dad still lived like a soldier: principled, disciplined, fully present in every minute of the day. He woke very early—five in the morning, unfailingly, whether it was sunny, rainy, or storming outside.

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On sunny days, he went out to the garden when the sun still had yet to set out.
On rainy days, he stayed inside and brought out an old wooden box—filled with tools he had carried back from the battlefield. He patiently ground motorcycle springs into fishing hooks. His hooks were always beautiful, razor-sharp.

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He could sit like that for hours.
And I sat beside him for hours too.

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Sometimes he said nothing, fully absorbed in each strike of the hammer, each careful cut of the saw. Other times, he worked and told stories at the same time. Names rose like legends: Route 9 in Southern Laos. Hanoi—twelve days and nights. The Citadel of Quảng Trị. He spoke of soldiers who fought bare-handed, of comrades, of people he had met only once—sometimes only long enough to exchange a greeting.

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He described everything in detail—a tree, a well, a ferryman. I listened and painted it all in my head with my childish imagination. His eyes sank deep into distant memories while I filled in the picture with invisible lines. Perhaps that was why I grew to love history, and to love—naturally—the yellow-skinned Vietnamese blood running through my body.

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In the evenings, dad never missed the news. At seven o’clock, the television belonged to the two of us. He brewed a pot of hot tea. I sat in his lap, listening without understanding, and fell asleep without knowing when. Sometimes I woke because he turned up the volume, feeling my tiny, warm hand held tightly in his.

 

Mom walked back and forth, shaking her head and muttering:
“It’s funny how we are eating fermented shrimp with rice and you two love talking about the world all day.”
Dad ignored her, as if he heard nothing.

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He loved poetry, loved music, loved Hanoi, and was passionate about roads and journeys.

To him, Hanoi was not only the heart of the nation, it holds a special place in his heart as a thousand years of culture, sunsets over West Lake, Thanh Niên Road shaded by trees, houses with red-tiled roofs, the season of young green sticky rice that made strangers ache with longing each visit.

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When he was drunk, he sang the same old song over and over:

Hanoi this season is missing the rain,
early winter cold, your scarf fluttering lightly in the chill,
milk flowers no longer falling, you beside me one afternoon after class,
along old Cổ Ngư Road, we walk slowly home.

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He hummed, immersed in wine, as if living inside a distant dream—another life, a love he had never had.

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Wherever he went, he let me sit in front of the motorbike. The two of us rode past coffee gardens, eucalyptus groves, pine forests, rubber trees shedding their leaves. Wind lashed our faces, sun burned our cheeks red but we were too busy talking to notice. I asked all the childish questions, he answered them all.

He told me the world was vast. That if I wanted to go far, to fly high, to escape this circling poverty, I had to study hard.

Every trip—near or far, rain or shine—he took only me with him. Each journey was a story. And I was always a little and eager passenger.

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At home, dad’s hands never rested. He planted trees, dug ponds to raise fish, tended flowers, experimented with crossbreeding roses—pink with white, red with orange. He asked me, What color do you think they’ll bloom? We waited together, breath held, for the day the flowers opened. Every day I ran out to the garden to check.

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He taught us how to fix everything in the house. Whatever he didn’t know, he read books to learn. He said: if people can invent bombs, airplanes, and cars, then why couldn’t we manage these simple things? He cooked like a professional chef. His joy was a full meal for the whole family. And for me—if there was a chicken, the thigh was mine, if there was snakehead fish, the cheek was mine. Once, after a trip, he brought me home a whole bag of coconut candy. I was tiny, hugging the bag in my arms. My sisters sat around, looking but not daring to take any. That was the rule: the special gift belonged to the youngest. My sisters only asked for a piece. They only dared to eat half. The other half they wrapped carefully, saving it for the next day.​

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His room was always tidy. The blanket he folded was squared and neat, like a bánh chưng pressed into a mold. Everything had its place. He said that even in the dark, with eyes closed, he should be able to find anything. Time was precious—too precious to waste searching. A shirt could be old because we were poor, he told us, but if it was dirty or wrinkled—then it was our carelessness. If the dishes were washed but still smelled of grease, that was not poverty either, but irresponsibility. Poverty, to him, was circumstance. Carelessness was a choice.

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He raised and taught us with a soldier’s discipline.
But he loved us with the crushed soul of a man whose childhood was never whole.

 

He grew up deprived, rejected. He struggled his entire life to escape poverty, yet poverty clung to him. He could not accept that truth.

He drank almost every day. Alcohol was like a demon—it sometimes turned him into a violent husband, a violent father, turning bitterness into blows against mom and my siblings.

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Except me.
Only me.
He never once raised his hand.

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Dad had no patience, no tolerance, one wrong word and he would shout so loud that even the neibough could hear him, with fear. But no matter how angry he was, all it took was for me to hug his leg and tug gently at his shirt hem, and the anger dissolved. He had smoked for years and never quit. But when I was three, the smoke made me cough and struggle to breathe. I told him. From that day on, he never held another cigarette.

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His love for me ran so deep it could pull him back even when he was drunk. He said I was born so fragile that he was afraid even the slightest touch would shatter me.

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Mom said I was brave enough to dare hug him when he was furious.
My siblings said I was lucky—because he had poured all his anger out on them already, and what remained was love, he gave it all to me.

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As for me, I never wondered why. Then one winter day, in October 2025, sitting in Amsterdam and telling Megan about my dad, I broke down and cried like a child. I suddenly understood: he loved me most because I was the only one, who sat quietly and patiently, listened to the dreams he never got to live.

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And perhaps he believed— that I, one day, would live those dreams for him.

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And I did, indeed.​