My father's story.
One dark night in 1968, the Vietnamese communist party, for reasons unknown to my family, spirited my father from our home and made him a prisoner deep in the jungle, along with dozens of other uprooted men. The men were to be converted into freedom fighters or they would be killed.
My father was a jeweler not a fighter. He refused to either kill or to be killed. Instead, he demonstrated his usefulness as a craftsman by making bomb shells into spoons, cups and bowls for his captors, rather than carry a gun. Because my father was a good metal smith and a likable man, one of the prison guard, Thanh, took a liking to him and the two became close friends. A year later my father was still in prison, but he was also still alive.
One day the American solders came, recused my father, and brought him back home to our family. A few years later, in 1975, South Vietnam fell. This same prison guard, Thanh, came to visit my father so they could share in their friendship once again. I was 10 years old and I would listen as they drank and shared stories of that time together in the prison. They spoke of how Thanh had helped to keep my father alive because of his art and their friendship.
In 2001, I went back to Vietnam to bury my father’s ashes according to his wishes. Thanh joined me for the burial ceremony, and after, I wanted to know more of my father’s story, about his time in prison, and how he and Thanh became friends.
Thanh told me the same story I had heard from my father but in crisper detail and with additional stories I had not yet heard. He told me that of all the things my father made, there was one thing had cherished the most: A Moon Lute made from a bomb shell. “It was my sanity during the war. When I wasn’t using a gun, I played music,” he confided. I was shocked and eagerly asked him where he kept it.
Thanh fetched it from his home where he kept it under his bed. He explained that it was too old to work, but that he kept it because it had meant so much to him. He unfolded it from a dusty grey cloth and presented me with his Moon Lute, made from my father’s own hands. I could recognize his work immediately; his style and personality in the engravings of the cherry blossom. The signature was marked with the year 1968- the year of my birth, the same year he had been taken from us which had left my mother to raise eight children all by herself. Emotion overwhelmed me and I was speechless. I imagined him carefully molding it from a bomb shell, an instrument of destruction, and lovingly working it into an object of music… of beauty.
Thanh could see my attachment to it and, with kindness in his eyes, told me “this instrument brought me peace in a time of war, and has meant a lot to me as gift from your father, but I am very old now and will not live much longer. I want you to keep it. I think it belongs to you anyway.” I looked him in the eye and thanked him from my soul. I took the Moon Lute back the States and hung it on my wall.
Three months later I was back in Vietnam and called on Thanh to have a drink. I was told that he had passed away the previous month. I knew right then why he wanted me to have it.
Every time I see my Father’s Moon Lute on the wall, I remember my father and Thanh and their story. Everyday I meditate on it’s meaning, and there’s one thing I cannot help but consider.
In the year 2024, humans have come along way. We have been to the moon multiple times. We have built great monuments. We have invented technology that lets us speak to each other wirelessly, but still, we have not learned to actually communicate with each other, so we go to war and kill each other. We have traveled great distances in space but have gotten no closer to our own hearts and our fellow companions. We have broken down the tiniest structures of life, our DNA, and how it works, but we know little of love and more of hatred. We have created faster transportation, faster Internet, but also faster ways to kill one another. It’s amazing the things we have learned, but also the things we have not.
I look at the Moon Lute on my wall and I realize that it was made by two people… people that were once enemies. This same instrument was once designed to kill and as a tool of destruction, but in the right hands, and with the right mind it was transformed in to art, music, beauty and love.
Let this Moon Lute remind us that we can turn our enemy, our hatred, our greed, and selfishness into kindness and love. Let it remind us that there is hope in the world. This Moon Lute proves that we have the choice to create sounds of hatred and destruction that will bleed our hearts or the sounds of music and love that wil bring us closer to one another. I believe we human wants to be love and we all searching for happiness on earth, but we have lost our path along the way. I believe the sound of hope, the sound of love is in this moon lute and I believe we can find our way back home in our heart.
Chi Huynh.