Father, I’m Not You

Personal Essay by Jack L.

Father, for 15 years I lived on the axiomatic principle that I was going to be you. I was going to build myself brick by brick as the product of your experiences. From your long strides to the air you breathe. They would pass down to me like language, like land. I wonder what you think of your son, an American-born boy who can barely speak your native tongue, who grew up under LED lights and wildfire warnings. I am not you.

You stand 5’9 to my modest 5’6. Neither of us exactly impressive, but you alone tower in our genetically height-disadvantaged Vietnamese family. And still, mother asks us to stand beside each other, convinced I’ve grown taller than you. I oblige, knowing that I haven’t grown since 8th grade. I wonder if I ever will. I hope so.

I learn about the Vietnam War through Google searches and YouTube documentaries, grasping at fragments of a home I never knew. My maternal grandfather fled imprisonment. My paternal side crossed 8,703 miles so you could chase your dream of medicine. Now my sister wants to be a cardiologist. I think she inherited that from you. I inherited your quiet sense of urgency—but mine isn’t about career. It’s about time. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” you ask, along with every other adult in my life. In those moments, your eyes obsessed me, begging me to say “doctor,” the dream you only nearly caught but failed in face of a language barrier. You became a pharmacist instead—stable, practical, good. I say I want to study psychology. And while mother still lists lawyer and doctor as the only acceptable options, you say you’ll support me in anything. But sometimes I feel like I disappoint you just by breathing a different air. One not sterilized by ambition, but thickened by anxiety—of melting ice, of burning seasons, of futures blurred by smoke. I am not you.

I live in a different world from you. This is not the 1980s Vietnam you knew. America is not full of the jungles and thick vegetation you knew. And somewhere in between all that, I noticed the world getting hotter. I’d scroll through articles about glaciers collapsing while you read Vietnamese news on your phone. You talked about our people. I stared at maps turning red. Climate change wasn’t a science class unit—it was a question: will I get to grow old the way you did? Will I get to pursue my dream like you did? 

Mom tells me she wishes I were 175 centimeters like you. Maybe it’d help with track and field. Maybe I’d feel more capable. But even when I can do 19 more pull-ups than you, you still beat me at arm wrestling. Maybe that’s dad strength. Or maybe it’s the strength of someone who’s already travelled an entire ocean to give his son a life, now unfazed that it's ablaze.

To the boy who wanted to be his father so badly—I don’t know what your life would have become. But in a world where 8,703 miles isn’t enough to outrun rising tides, where wildfire smoke lingers in the air like ancestral memory, it is safe to say he cannot simply inherit the past. He must survive the future. And when he stands tall, he will know the ground beneath his feet is cracked, but he learned how to walk anyway. In a world different from his father’s.