Flashback _ 51 Years Later
For Nguyễn Trùng Khánh
And then came what had been expected. The day of returning to Vietnam had definitely arrived. A few weeks ago several people had advised that I stay on. They said that if I wanted they would even help me escape to Canada. I had wavered ambivalently between two alternatives. On the one hand stood the appeal of a new way of life, free and comfortable; on the other, lay the deep longing for my grey-haired mother, for the breeze rustling through a bamboo grove, and for the delicately pungent smell of a bowl of pho, beef noodle soup – an indescribable, tender emotion. And above all, I was reminded of an utterance from the short dialogue between Doctor Rieux and Rambert in Camus' work The Plague: "There is no shame in preferring happiness, but there may be shame in choosing happiness for oneself alone.”
Ton Kan, The First-Lieutenant Marine M.D., an autobiography (Journal of Vietnamese Physicians in Canada, 1993), pp. 94-9
Seen against a misty background imprinted with the distant Golden Gate Bridge, tourist-packed and passengers spilling over its sides, the cable car announced itself with clinking sounds as it descended a steep hill. That sight seemed to Phan the hallmark of San Francisco, a sight which had not changed from its image on the postcard sent many years earlier from this refined and beautiful city. Fifteen years after mailing that postcard, Phan could not believe he had returned to this scenery. It all felt unreal to him, the unreality having its origins in evoked images of a journey taken during that time long past.
