A Lucky Man

A Lucky Man

I don't know about you, but I consider myself a very lucky man over
all. Not a clever and smart man, but definetely lucky. Like I was
supposed to die of pneumonia when I was 13 months old. There was no
medicine available where I grew up then. The war for independence
against France was going in full swing. My mother gave birth to me in
a hut, not in a hospital, with some help of a self-taught midwife in
the village. I came out skinny and crying like a banshee, with a big
head full of hair, hungry and determined to live. Mom was weak and
sick and didn't produce much milk. I was fed mostly liquid drained
from rice gruel, with sugar and salt added. I was born skinny and I
stayed skinny and often got sick. Like I said, when I was 13 months
old, pneumonia supposed to finish me off. I had high fever. I wheezed.
I coughed when I was not crying. In desperation, Mom went to a healer
in the nearby village. He gave her a pouch containing dried biles of
snakes and some instructions. Mom put the biles in boiling water,
waited for the concoction to cool off and then forced me to drink. I
then promptly threw up and along with the foul liquid out came a huge
amount of phlegm. But strangely, soon after that the fever broke, the
wheezing and the coughing ceased, and I was on my way to recovery. Two
weeks later, the French Legionnaires troops arrived at the village. We
fled from them. Six of us, my parents and my brother (aged 13) and
sisters (11 and 3) and I hid in an irrigation canal thick with aquatic
coconut groves. My mom was holding me. She said I was wild-eyed and
clung tightly to her and somehow did not cry. We all watched the
French troops torching the houses in the village, including my
family's hut. That incident must have buried itself deep into my
subconsciousness because how else I could account for my intense
hatred for any invaders of the land of my birth, be they French,
American, and now Chinese and how else I could explain the nauseating
feeling I feel whenever I see houses burning.

When I was twelve years old, I came down hard with typhoid for
drinking contaminated water. This time I lived in Saigon and had
access to Western medicine. I still remember to this day the illness.
I had very high fever and I panted. My breathing was belabored. My
brother put ice in a towel and placed the towel on my forehead
throughout the night while crying and saying, don't die, don't die.
Once more I cheated death. The fever broke and I subsisted on a liquid
diet for a week before I could take in solid food. The doctor said the
solid food would cause my intestines to burst as they were weak and
fragile as a consequence of the marauding actions of the bacteria or
something like that. He warned my father and sternly lectured me that
a lot of recovering patients died from unknowingly consuming solid
food too soon. As I insinuated earlier, I was not too smart, but not
too dumb either. I didn't want to die. I was constantly hungry and did
have intense cravings for meat and cooked rice, but I called upon my
will to put up with the hunger. To this day, I could go without food
for four days without suffering undue discomfort. My body was
trained. After the typhoid episode, I have had an inkling I will live
to ripe old age if don't give in to the urge of self-destruction and
shoot myself in the head, along with the foot (I have not yet decided
the right one or the left).

As I said earlier, I have been incredibly lucky. All my problems and
troubles were self-inflicted, but they all turned out okay in the end.
The fact that I made it to America was a prime example of karma in
action. How I met a woman, who later became my wife, two days before
my birthday was a remarkable story by itself. Tonight was another
example of how good luck has followed me.

(to be continued elsewhere)