TADIOTO

A month for weddings. 
I wrote this story in the late 1980s, when I was living in San Francisco.
Things I thought about then are more true now. 

WEDDING TALES  

Weddings depress me.
It’s always in June, impossibly hot and humid. I’m not talking about any old wedding. I’m talking about Vietnamese weddings in America. Old rituals and ceremonies, improperly cobbled together. The traditional costumes that look so out of place in America. And the God-awful tuxedos and gowns. The dinner would always be at some Chinese restaurant: ten, twelve people packed around a table, elbows glued to their sides. The same suits from Ross Dress for Less, the same 7-course meal, served exactly the same way at a hundred other weddings.
It all just seems inauthentic and pitiful. Just thinking about it makes me uncomfortable. Everyone would have to act jovial: how are you, long time no see, you’ve lost weight, blah blah blah, and the band: always the same, loud, endless tango and cha-cha numbers. Then, of course, the impromptu singers who can’t hold a tune, or the same guy with the same ten bad jokes.
My problem is that these weddings are the only times my old friends and I get to see each other. I’m not talking about just any old friends. These are people I went to school with, way across the ocean, back in Viet Nam, when we were 9 or 10 years old, and later in our teen years.
How can you refuse seeing such friends again?  We’d gone through a war together. Escaped out of Viet Nam to come seek refuge in America.
As time goes past, we’ve each fashioned a life for ourselves here. We’re busy with our jobs, our daily demands. But when June comes around, how can you resist seeing Fat Tuan, or One-eyed-Vuong and Dao-From-The-Alley, Zit-faced Tuong-Vy, or old Vinh? (Such childhood nicknames we gave each other…)
Whichever way we’ve turned out in America, we share that adolescent past.
We could be a doctor or a welder but we’d all get together around a wedding table, hot and uncomfortable, shouting to each other over a bad meal. One more occasion when we could, for an evening, forget the stress of life in America, and turn into boys and girls again. And of course, we’d yak about “the good old days.”
By the time the third course arrives, honey-roasted duck with Chinese mushrooms, I’d again be into it. I’d be imitating how Vinh couldn’t say any word beginning with a D. A fine day would be a fine ay. Og, instead of dog. A concerto in D Minor would turn into a concerto in E Minor.
In America, Vinh’s gone to a speech therapist,and he can say “damn you” fine as I tell my stories. Not all my stories are bad. Maybe I’m blessed with an extraordinary memory: long ago my friends ceded to me the title of class historian.
I’ll remember the names of those who didn’t make it to America. I’ll remember the names of the tea shops, and bookstores my friends have forgotten. I can tell them the short cuts from the beach back to the school, and where the police booths were.
Perhaps it is because I was lucky enough to have been back visiting the old school and the old town, before it was even safe to do so. I’d tell the stories of my old classmates, at some triumphant soccer match, in a dramatic love triangle, fit for a made-for-TV movie, a rock concert when one of us played the drums, I swear, better than Ringo Starr. I won’t make up things, but to tell you the truth, I do embellish them.
My friends are now deep into their American dream: a job, a house, the two-car garage, all kinds of debts. Two weeks of vacation a year isn’t enough to fly all the way home to visit your past.
I’m it, baby.  I’ll tell you about your past. And I’ll make you out to be just a bit more than you were.
Vinh, despite his difficulty with any d-words, would be a basketball star. And what about the time One-eyed-Vuong saved Zit-Faced Tuong-Vy from a mad dog and she bought him a book of poetry and then held his hand? Dao-From-The-Alley would have a body guard for some reason, and even Fat Tuan would have the lead role in the school play some year.
Thing is, as I tell my stories of their past, Dao and Vinh and Tuong-Vy would all listen, enraptured, unable to correct me. They too believe such things about such a past. It is too glorious, too charming.
These are stories that can take away the sadness of life in exile.
They take away the wounding feeling of being without a home, a country.
They take away the loneliness, and explain our failures in America. If only life had continued that way.
No one could check my stories. It wasn’t like you could just get on an airplane and go visit that place and see yourself again at 10, or 12. It’s not like flying to Ohio or Virginia. Home is a long way from here. 
The last time I was at a wedding though, I noticed some things. Tung the lady killer is divorced, and so’s Boy-Scout Nghi. And also Pajama-Thuy. A couple of us are still unmarried. All in all, that gives us about four or five chances of getting together around a wedding table. And for me to tell my glorious stories.
Otherwise, we’re older now. We see each other not at weddings, but at funerals.
Our parents are dying.
Our uncles, and our aunts.
All those people who were grown ups, who knew that war more than us, who were sad already before they even got here to be even sadder refugees.
They are dying.
And they’re taking their memories with them, their stories are being buried.
And then, it occurred to me: the stories I’ve been telling have helped, but our lives here too will end. And there won’t be any more weddings.
The day will come when we would show up only to say a final goodbye, to bury each other.
In such moments, old and tired, I probably won’t want to tell any tall tales anymore.
And One-eyed-Vuong and Dao-From-The-Alley, or Zit-faced Tuong-Vy, if they’re among the survivors, would be bleary-eyed, frail, perhaps senile. We’ll mourn an old friend. And we’ll think about being closer to the earth, further from the sky.
What we will all want to hear is the truth about our past.
The real truth, unembellished, unadorned.
And then we will mourn that past, for by then the truth would have been so far away, childhood stories that have faded behind my own tales, a past reconstructed at a June wedding in a Chinese restaurant somewhere in a foreign land.