Stories from Vietnam: Local Philanthropist Pens Touching Memoir

 Rosemary Lauer is a local philanthropist and founder of the non-profit Devotion to Children. She recently penned a book with Scott Beller titled Beggars or Angels about her unique experience arriving to the United States from her war-torn country, Vietnam. Below is an excerpt from her book:

Chapter 1    Everything Happens for a Reason

Growing up in Vietnam, I knew exactly what was expected of me. In the Asian culture, it’s believed the ideal life for a woman is to grow up proper, get married, raise children, and then live happily ever after. And that’s just what I planned to do. I didn’t know that such fairytales are routinely interrupted by the conflicts, heartbreaks and unexpected detours of real life. I know this now.

Because I was raised in a Buddhist culture, I was taught to believe that people who lead challenged lives or fall upon hard times must have negative karma. In other words, bad things happen for a reason, and the reason is that you must have done something wrong in a past life. I’ve never been able to accept this philosophy. Two lifetimes of experience have taught me differently.

To be clear, I’m not talking about reincarnation. The first lifetime that changed how I see the world was not my own; it was my grandmother’s.

My grandmother Tüöng Phố was beloved throughout Vietnam for her poetry. Her poems invoked breathtaking imagery to express the most profound, heartrending and romantic sentiments. In her art and in her life, she embodied the avant-garde. And in the oppressive Vietnamese society of the early 20th century, she courageously followed her own path.

She married my grandfather when she was quite young and was soon with child. While she was pregnant, my grandfather was called away to practice medicine in France. But after several months abroad, he fell ill with tuberculosis and returned home to his family. A few months later, my grandfather passed away—leaving my grandmother alone with her son.

As a way to express and perhaps release some of the paralyzing anguish of losing her husband of only two years, my grandmother wrote “Autumn Tears” in 1923. She was a teacher at the time and not yet a full-time poet. This work brought her almost instant recognition throughout Vietnam. She was young, beautiful and suddenly famous.

In that time and culture, however, peering public eyes coldly chose to focus on something else: she was now a single mother. The situation didn’t sit well with people. Even though my grandmother was a widow, many of those in her community believed a “good” woman with children must have a husband in order to maintain her honor and dignity. So her parents quickly arranged for her to wed a man who was wealthy, powerful, and extremely influential in the local community.

Money and status didn’t matter to my grandmother, but her will to resist was weakened by her grief and love for my grandfather. She gave into societal pressure and her parents’ wishes. She remarried to appease them all, but she never again allowed herself to love another man.

If not for her son, my grandmother might have given up on the life she now considered broken and out of her control. My father became her will to live, and her poetry became her escape. Together her child and creative writing nourished her. In him she found renewed reason to strive for a fulfilling life, while her painful circumstances provided unlimited fuel for her poems. Each and every line she wrote radiated with sorrow.

Just after I was born, my grandmother read my star chart, which revealed to her that my life would also be complicated. To Buddhists, “complicated” is often synonymous with “difficult”—which means bad karma, something for which many believe there can be no forgiveness. My grandmother worried I might someday endure a life as difficult as hers—maybe worse. To change my destiny, she suggested to my parents that I pursue ordination as a Buddhist nun, even though doing so would divert me from the ideal married-with-children, happily-ever-after Vietnamese experience.

I didn’t become a nun. And despite my life’s many twists and turns and highs and lows, I still believe my decision was the right one for me.

Although I never made it to the safety of a monastery, my grandmother was always there to serve as my guardian. I was the seventh of 14 children and even lower in the pecking order because I was small. I became tough out of necessity. My older and younger brothers routinely beat me up and called it “playing.” They also told me, “You’re ugly, and nobody will ever want to marry you. You’ll be an old maid!” Rough as they were, I considered their abuse the price of being included.

My grandmother gave me refuge from my brothers. I don’t know why she seemed to favor me over my siblings. Maybe because of my unsettling star chart, she felt we shared a deeper connection than she had with any of her other grandchildren. Whatever her reasons, and no matter how strict she could be, I always took solace in knowing my grandmother deemed herself my protector from the very beginning.

She was also my first teacher. I was just 3 years old when she began drilling me daily on my multiplication tables. This was not shocking because I was a toddler, but because I was a girl. Within that repressed society, it mattered more that Vietnamese girls be able to cook, embroider, display good manners, and please people than it did for them to get an education. And above all, it mattered whether they were pretty enough to marry rich. But my grandmother was different, so she insisted I be different too. She wanted more for me—and expected more from me—than to be just another pretty object, ready and willing to serve a wealthy husband. She wanted me to shine from the inside out.

So I joined my grandmother each day in her tiny, tin-roofed kitchen. The little hut, screened in with bamboo and situated across from the main house, was her private “workshop.” While she sat hunched over on her stool, tending clay pots bubbling on two coal-burning stoves, I would sit in the corner, practicing my math skills. And I would sweat. My seemingly-endless recitations of “two by two equals four … two by three equals six …” and so on, cut through 100-degree air thick with humidity and the sugary, sharp aroma of omai, her famed candied plum and pickle treats. If I said them all correctly, I got to eat. Those treats were a great incentive for me to become a quick study and a constant threat to spoil my concentration …and my dinner!

On the hottest days, when it seemed my brain was searing faster than the food on my grandmother’s stove, her rigorous teaching methods and attention didn’t feel very loving. They felt more like punishment. I didn’t yet understand that as she prepared her heavenly confections, she was also preparing me to appreciate the value of an education and instilling in me a lifelong hunger for knowledge.

Despite my efforts to attain one, I never actually received a college degree. Instead I earned a diploma from cosmetology school. When I remember the way my grandmother disapproved of me wearing too much makeup as a teenager, I can’t help but smile. Pointing at my painted eyes, she would say, “Little one, you don’t need all that.” The funny thing is that without “all that,” I might not have made it very far in America.

For that journey, one I would not make until many years later, I did not need my grandmother’s math lessons. But I did need her courage, strength and independent spirit … and a whole lot of faith.

Beggars or Angels is available on www.amazon.com