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Robert Olen Butler

1945

About the Author

Robert Olen Butler grew up in Granite City, them. The Vietnamese
Illinois, majored in theatre at Northwestern people as a group are the
University, and then studied playwriting at the most open and generous-
University of Iowa. In 1971, he went to Vietnam spirited people in the
as a counter-intelligence special agent and later world. Invariably they
as a translator; he was fluent in Vietnamese would invite me into their homes, their culture,
because the Army had sent him to language and their lives.”
school the year before. Although Butler is known primarily for writ-
During an interview at Powells City of ing about Vietnam, he has written on a variety of
Books in Portland, Oregon, in 1996, he said that topics, publishing nine novels and two volumes of
while serving in Vietnam,“My favorite thing in the short fiction, as well as screenplays and teleplays,
world to do was to wander out into the back since 1981. In 1993 his collection of short sto-
alleys of Saigon, where nobody seemed to sleep. ries, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, was
I did this almost every night. In those back alleys awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is a professor at
I would crouch with the people and talk with Florida State University.

★★★★★★★★★★★

The Author’s Style

Butler served as an army linguist during the veterans for outstanding contributions to
Vietnam War. His command of the language of American culture by a Vietnam veteran.
Vietnam and his familiarity with its climate, His work makes clear many fascinating and
geography, and people are central to much of appealing aspects of Vietnamese life. It also shows
his fiction. Butler’s stories are concerned with how frustratingly different that life can be from life
individuals whose lives continue to be affected in the United States. His characters’ struggles with
by their experiences in the war and by the sharp one or another aspect of American culture reveal
differences between American and Vietnamese why their post-war lives are characterized by both
culture. He is remarkably adept at conveying the new opportunities and painful betrayals. The last-
language, tone, and points of view of both male ing emotional and physical wounds suffered by
and female characters and both Americans and both civilians and former soldiers help explain the
Vietnamese. He has won an award from fellow urgency behind the first-person stories they tell.

LITERARY LENS Look for the symbols in this story.

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LETTERS
FROM
MY FATHER
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

look through the letters my father sent to me in Saigon and I

find this: “Dear Fran. How are you? I wish you and your mother
were here with me. The weather here is pretty cold this time of
year. I bet you would like the cold weather.” At the time, I
wondered how he would know such a thing. Cold weather
sounded very bad. It was freezing, he said, so I touched the tip
of my finger to a piece of ice and I held it there for as long as
I could. It hurt very bad and that was after only about a minute. I
thought, How could you spend hours and days in weather like that?
It makes no difference that I had misunderstood the cold weath-
er. By the time he finally got me and my mother out of Vietnam, he
had moved to a place where it almost never got very cold. The point
is that in his letters to me he often said this and that about the

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weather. It is cold today. It is hot today. Today there are clouds in the sky.
Today there are no clouds. What did that have to do with me?
He said, “Dear Fran” because my name is Fran. That’s short for Francine
and the sound of Fran is something like a Vietnamese name, but it isn’t really.
So I told my friends in Saigon that my name was Trán, which was short for
Hôn Trán, which means “a kiss on the forehead.” My American father lived
in America but my Vietnamese mother and me lived in Saigon, so I was still
a Saigon girl. My mother called me Francine, too. She was happy for me to
have this name. She said it was not just American, it was also French. But I
wanted a name for Saigon and Trán was it.
I was a child of dust. When the American fathers all went home, includ-
ing my father, and the communists took over, that’s what we were called,
those of us who had faces like those drawings you see in some of the book-
stalls on Nguyen Huê Street. You look once and you see a beautiful woman
sitting at her mirror, but then you look again and you see the skull of a dead
person, no skin on the face, just the wide eyes of the skull and the bared
teeth. We were like that, the children of dust in Saigon. At one look we were
Vietnamese and at another look we were American and after that you couldn’t
get your eyes to stay still when they turned to us, they kept seeing first one
thing and then another.
Last night I found a package of letters in a footlocker that belongs to my
father. It is in the storage shack at the back of our house here in America. I
am living now in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and I found this package of letters
outside—many packages, hundreds of letters—and I opened one, and these
are all copies he kept of letters he sent trying to get us out of Vietnam. I look
through these letters my father wrote and I find this: “What is this crap that
you’re trying to give me now? It has been nine years, seven months, and fif-
teen days since I last saw my daughter, my own flesh-and-blood daughter.”
This is an angry voice, a voice with feeling. I have been in this place now
for a year. I am seventeen and it took even longer than nine years, seven
months, fifteen days to get me out of Vietnam. I wish I could say something
about that, because I know anyone who listens to my story would expect me
right now to say how I felt. My mother and me were left behind in Saigon.
My father went on ahead to America and he thought he could get some
paperwork done and prepare a place for us, then my mother and me would
be leaving for America very soon. But things happened. A different footlocker
was lost and some important papers with it, like their marriage license and

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my birth certificate. Then the country of South

Vietnam fell to the communists, and even
those who thought it might happen thought it I look at a letter he sent
happened pretty fast, really. Who knew? My
father didn’t.
me in Saigon after it fell and
I look at a letter he sent me in Saigon after the letter says: “You can
it fell and the letter says: “You can imagine how
I feel. The whole world is let down by what imagine how I feel. The
happened.” But I could not imagine that, if you whole world is let down by
want to know the truth, how my father felt.
And I knew nothing of the world except what happened.”
Saigon, and even that wasn’t the way the world
was, because when I was very little they gave it
a different name, calling it Hô´Chí Minh City. Now, those words are a man’s
name, you know, but the same words have several other meanings, too, and
I took the name like everyone took the face of a child of dust: I looked at it
one way and it meant one thing and then I looked at it a different way and
it meant something else. Hô´Chí Minh also can mean “very intelligent
starch-paste,” and that’s what we thought of the new name, me and some
friends of mine who also had American fathers. We would meet at the French
cemetery on Phan Thanh Gian´ Street and talk about our city—Hô´, for short;
starch-paste. We would talk about our lives in Starch-Paste City and we had
this game where we’d hide in the cemetery, each in a separate place, and then
we’d keep low and move slowly and see how many of our friends we would
find. If you saw the other person first, you would get a point. And if nobody
ever saw you, if it was like you were invisible, you’d win.
The cemetery made me sad, but it felt very comfortable there somehow.
We all thought that, me and my friends. It was a ragged place and many of
the names were like Couchet, Picard, Vernet, Believeau, and these graves
never had any flowers on them. Everybody who loved these dead people had
gone home to France long ago. Then there was a part of the cemetery that
had Vietnamese dead. There were some flowers over there, but not very
many. The grave markers had photos, little oval frames built into the stone,
and these were faces of the dead, mostly old people, men and women, the
wealthy Vietnamese, but there were some young people, too, many of them
dead in 1968 when there was much killing in Saigon. I would always hide
over in this section and there was one boy, very cute, in sunglasses, leaning

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on a motorcycle, his hand on his hip.

He died in February of 1968, and I
I found her when I was about ten probably wouldn’t have liked him
anyway. He looked cute but very con-
or so and she was very beautiful, ceited. And there was a girl nearby. The
with long black hair and dark eyes marker said she was fifteen. I found
her when I was about ten or so and
and a round face. I would always she was very beautiful, with long black
go to her grave and I wanted to be hair and dark eyes and a round face. I
would always go to her grave and I
just like her, though I knew my wanted to be just like her, though I
knew my face was different from hers.
face was different from hers. Then I went one day—I was almost
her age at last—and the rain had got-
ten into the little picture frame and her face was nearly gone. I could see her
hair, but the features of her face had faded until you could not see them,
there were only dark streaks of water and the picture was curling at the edges,
and I cried over that. It was like she had died.
Sometimes my father sent me pictures with his letters. “Dear Fran,” he
would say. “Here is a picture of me. Please send me a picture of you.” A friend
of mine, when she was about seven years old, got a pen pal in Russia. They
wrote to each other very simple letters in French. Her pen pal said, “Please
send me a picture of you and I will send you one of me.” My friend put on
1
her white aó dài and went downtown and had her picture taken before the
big banyan tree in the park on Le´ Thánh Tôn. She sent it off and in return
she got a picture of a fat girl who hadn’t combed her hair, standing by a cow
on a collective farm.
My mother’s father was some government man, I think. And the com-
munists said my mother was an agitator or collaborator. Something like that.
It was all mostly before I was born or when I was just a little girl, and when-
ever my mother tried to explain what all this was about, this father across the
sea and us not seeming to ever go there, I just didn’t like to listen very much
and my mother realized that, and after a while she didn’t say any more. I put
his picture up on my mirror and he was smiling, I guess. He was outside
somewhere and there was a lake or something in the background and he had
a T-shirt on and I guess he was really more squinting than smiling. There

1 aó dài: a traditional Vietnamese dress

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were several of these photographs of him on my mirror. They were always

outdoors and he was always squinting in the sun. He said in one of his let-
ters to me: “Dear Fran, I got your photo. You are very pretty, like your moth-
er. I have not forgotten you.” And I thought: I am not like my mother. I am
a child of dust. Has he forgotten that?
One of the girls I used to hang around with at the cemetery told me a
story that she knew was true because it happened to her sister’s best friend.
The best friend was just a very little girl when it began. Her father was a sol-
dier in the South Vietnam Army and he was away fighting somewhere
secret, Cambodia or somewhere. It was very secret, so her mother never
heard from him and the little girl was so small when he went away that she
didn’t even remember him, what he looked like or anything. But she knew
she was supposed to have a daddy, so every evening, when the mother
would put her daughter to bed, the little girl would ask where her father
was. She asked with such a sad heart that one night the mother made some-
thing up.
There was a terrible storm and the electricity went out in Saigon. So the
mother went to the table with the little girl clinging in fright to her, and she
lit an oil lamp. When she did, her shadow suddenly was thrown upon the
wall and it was very big, and she said, “Don’t cry, my baby, see there?” She
pointed to the shadow. “There’s your daddy. He’ll protect you.” This made
the little girl very happy. She stopped shaking from fright immediately and
the mother sang the girl to sleep.
The next evening before going to bed, the little girl asked to see her
father. When the mother tried to say no, the little girl was so upset that the
mother gave in and lit the oil lamp and cast her shadow on the wall. The lit-
tle girl went to the wall and held her hands before her with the palms togeth-
er and she bowed low to the shadow. “Good night, Daddy,” she said, and she
went to sleep. This happened the next evening and the next and it went on
for more than a year.
Then one evening, just before bedtime, the father finally came home. The
mother, of course, was very happy. She wept and she kissed him and she said
to him, “We will prepare a thanksgiving feast to honor our ancestors. You go
in to our daughter. She is almost ready for bed. I will go out to the market
and get some food for our celebration.”
So the father went in to the little girl and he said to her, “My pretty girl,
I am home. I am your father and I have not forgotten you.”

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But the little girl said, “You’re not my daddy. I know my daddy. He’ll be
here soon. He comes every night to say good night to me before I go to bed.”
The man was shocked at his wife’s faithlessness, but he was very proud,
and he did not say anything to her about it when she got home. He did not
say anything at all, but prayed briefly before the shrine of their ancestors and
picked up his bag and left. The weeks passed and the mother grieved so badly
that one day she threw herself into the Saigon River and drowned.
The father heard news of this and thought that she had killed herself
from shame. He returned home to be a father to his daughter, but on the first
night, there was a storm and the lights went out and the man lit the oil lamp,
throwing his shadow on the wall. His little girl laughed in delight and went
and bowed low to the shadow and said, “Good night, Daddy.” When the
man saw this, he took his little girl to his own mother’s house, left her, and
threw himself into the Saigon River to join his wife in death.
My friend says this story is true. Everyone in the neighborhood of her sis-
ter’s friend knows about it. But I don’t think it’s true. I never did say that to
my friend, but for me, it doesn’t make sense. I can’t believe that the little girl
would be satisfied with the shadow father. There was this darkness on the
wall, just a flatness, and she loved it. I can see how she wouldn’t take up with
this man who suddenly walks in one
night and says, “I’m your father, let me
tell you good night.” But the other guy,
W hen my father met my mother the shadow—he was no father either.
When my father met my mother
and me at the airport, there were and me at the airport, there were people
people with cameras and micro- with cameras and microphones and my
father grabbed my mother with this
phones and my father grabbed my enormous hug and this sound like a
mother with this enormous hug shout and he kissed her hard and all the
people with microphones and cameras
and this sound like a shout smiled and nodded. Then he let go of
my mother and he looked at me and
and he kissed her hard and all the suddenly he was making this little
people with microphones and choking sound, a kind of gacking in the
back of his throat like a rabbit makes
cameras smiled and nodded. when you pick him up and he doesn’t
like it. And my father’s hands just flut-

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S EPARATION , Larry Yung

tered before him and he got stiff-legged coming over to me and the hug he
gave me was like I was soaking wet and he had on his Sunday clothes, though
he was just wearing some silly T-shirt.
All the letters from my father, the ones I got in Saigon, and the photos,
they’re in a box in the back of the closet of my room. My closet smells of my

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perfume, is full of nice clothes so that I can fit in at school. Not everyone can
say what they feel in words, especially words on paper. Not everyone can
look at a camera and make their face do what it has to do to show a feeling.
But years of flat words, grimaces at the sun, these are hard things to forget.
So I’ve been sitting all morning today in the shack behind our house, out
here with the tree roaches and the carpenter ants and the smell of mildew
and rotting wood and I am sweating so hard that it’s dripping off my nose and
chin. There are many letters in my lap. In one of them to the U.S. government
my father says: “If this was a goddamn white woman, a Russian ballet dancer
and her daughter, you people would have them on a plane in twenty-four
hours. This is my wife and my daughter. My daughter is so beautiful you can
put her face on your dimes and quarters and no one could ever make change
again in your goddamn country without stopping and saying, Oh my God,
what a beautiful face.”
I read this now while I’m hidden in the storage shack, invisible, soaked
with sweat like it’s that time in Saigon between the dry season and the rainy
season, and I know my father will be here soon. The lawn mower is over
there in the corner and this morning he got up and said that it was going to
be hot today, that there were no clouds in the sky and he was going to have
to mow the lawn. When he opens the door, I will let him see me here, and I
will ask him to talk to me like in these letters, like when he was so angry with
some stranger that he knew what to say.

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Responding to the Story

1. LITERARY LENS Consider the unusual analogies and comparisons

the narrator uses in telling her story.With a chart like the one below,
examine several of these comparisons and what they mean to
Fran.Then write a short description of Fran based on the analogies
she uses.

Comparison Meaning to Fran

Hô´ Chí Minh can mean The name of the city could be taken the same way that
“very intelligent starch-paste.” some people take the faces of the children of dust.

2. What are some of the ways you see Fran struggling for her identity
in this story?

3. What do you think is the significance of the game the children play at
the cemetery in Vietnam?

4. Why do you think Fran became so attached to the girl whose

photograph was framed on the headstone in the cemetery?

5. Do you think Butler, an American adult male, is convincing when

writing in the voice of a young Vietnamese girl? Explain your reaction.

6. THE AUTHOR’S STYLE In telling Fran’s story, Butler uses bits and
pieces of her past such as photos, paintings, letters, memories,
and even an urban legend. Which of these do you think best
defines Fran’s character?

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