Lan Cao and her daughter Harlan discuss their memoir, ‘Family in Six Tones,’ and open up about the complexities of their relationship
In 1975, Lan Cao left her country of Vietnam to seek refuge in the United States. At the age of 13, she had already faced the atrocities of war and now had to embark on a new journey: assimilating into a different culture. Specifically, a culture that was, at times, hostile toward Vietnamese people.
Despite the painful impact of the war and the discrimination she faced, Lan became a successful lawyer and novelist. But one of her greatest challenges was yet to come: raising a teenager.
In “Family in Six Tones,” Lan and her daughter Harlan share the intimate details of life as a refugee, being raised by a refugee, and the challenges they faced to understand each other.
Lan Cao is also the author of “Monkey Bridge” and “The Lotus and the Storm.” She is a professor of law at the Chapman University Fowler School of Law. Harlan Margaret Van Cao is a freshman at UCLA and aspires to be a producer, director and screenplay writer.
Speaking from Huntington Beach, the two authors told Street Roots about their book, which hit the shelves in September.
Alexandra Mosher: Within the book, Harlan offers raw perspectives of you (Lan) which can sometimes be less than flattering, one of the most obvious being when your “shadows selves” would come forward and speak threats to Harlan. What was it like to read about yourself in that way?
Lan Cao: Yes, you’re right that it does involve feeling a little bit exposed, and reading about it was not that easy. But I felt like the most difficult part was the part before there was even any writing, because Harlan decided as the book progressed that she wanted to go beyond what we had originally told our publisher that we wanted to include. So, basically the publisher approached us to do the book, and we did do a chapter-by-chapter, broad outline of what we would write in the book. In none of those segments did she mention anything about wanting to include her own experience witnessing certain events like the selves, the shadow selves. And then halfway through the book, she wanted to do it, so that felt almost like an ambush to me. So, once we got that part worked out, the particular descriptions, or how she wrote them, were not as difficult for me as the initial decision that she wanted to write about that.
Mosher: How did motherhood in the United States unearth deeper questions in you about assimilating into this culture, even almost 30 years after you began your life in the U.S.?
Lan: Let’s say if I hadn’t left Virginia, where most of my family continued to live, I think that I would have mothered differently, and I feel like the way our relationship turns out is very much a quasi-assimilation into American culture. Even very small examples, like the parent overriding the child’s preference. That would be no issue in Vietnam. The parent would just say the child doesn’t have a long enough horizon to understand that certain things the child wants to do now, the child may regret later. So, if I were to have stayed in a Vietnamese enclave, even in America, I would have had more external support from people around me because they’d all be Vietnamese. Whereas, when I detach myself from the Vietnamese community, I may want to implement a certain culturally based approach, but I feel like I’m just doing it as an individual. So, even though the act is culturally based, from Harlan’s perspective it could be, “Oh it’s just my mother’s weird predilection,” because she’s not getting the signal of affirmation from the cultural context. So, in many ways because I’m so assimilated to a certain degree, depending on what the issue is, I feel like my mothering is also very assimilated.
Mosher: Your story is profound in the way that it interweaves something almost unimaginable, being a civilian in the Vietnam War, and something as seemingly mundane as raising a teenager. How would you compare the challenges of these?
Lan: In many ways, I feel like there is a sense of not being able to control either scenario. It’s not possible to capture the essence of raising a child. Raising a child is not as stable as it might sound. It depends on how the child reacts. Is it worth it if you’re going to try and create this harmony by insisting it has to go the way of the parent? In both settings, there is almost a sense that at some point you have to let go, because it’s not about having your way. If you have your way but the kid hates you and you have a terrible relationship, then what good is it?
There are things, especially in guerilla warfare which is what Vietnam was — it’s not a traditional conventional World War II kind of warfare where the fighting took place in battlefields. There were just things happening all the time and you never know when something is going to happen in your very own neighborhood. So, I guess it’s the sort of element of surprise and not being able to control everything. And obviously there are big differences as you pointed out, one is a war and one is raising a child, so I don’t want to conflate too much the similarities. But in terms of not being able to dictate an outcome, not being able to map things out and think that what you map out will be the way things are implemented, I think that’s very similar.
Mosher: In what ways do you feel like the dynamics of your relationship are not connected to Lan escaping from Vietnam, and in what ways are they affected by this?
Harlan Cao: The stuff of basic work before play, which I don’t do, straight A’s nothing less, those are from her culture. Things like what I see as an inability for her to relate to other people probably comes from never having a normal teenage experience. Understanding other people’s point of view is difficult for her. I think that’s normal when you’ve suffered through something so horrible. I think what isn’t because of the war is my own personality which causes a lot of problems for us, which I’ll take responsibility for that, the dynamic. My dad was white and the way he raised me more was more like a grandfather. Put up against my mother, he kind of looked like the hero when I was little. And I think when my mom tells me that I’m just like my dad, and I see it as a good thing, but she’ll say it as a bad thing, that creates a lot of resentment.
Lan: I think that almost everything that I’ve turned out to become, including being a mother, is probably all based on the consequences of suddenly having to leave Vietnam. I know myself before I arrived, and I can tell you my personality when I was in Vietnam is drastically different from the personality I have now. For example, I was very lazy in Vietnam and totally focused on having fun. I never got good grades in Vietnam. My days were very spontaneous and filled with magic. And when I came here my personality was absolutely 360 degrees different. I was focused. I was going to get straight A’s. I was going to be totally disciplined. I really believe that my personality now is formed much more by the events of leaving Vietnam.
Harlan: There’s stuff that adds to our dynamic that has nothing to do with the fact that she escaped the war. Like stuff that happened to me in school that changed my own personality or stuff that she’s done to the family that I don’t think is about the war, or decisions that she’s made. The relationship that she had with my father might affect our dynamic now. I don’t think that all of them you can blame on a huge traumatic incident because a lot of things are caused by things that happen in the present that we have no control over.
Mosher: With this added dimension of the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship, what are you hoping to add to the narrative of refugees and children of refugees in the U.S.?
Harlan: Trauma can be inherited, and I don’t mean it’s totally genetic. But there are a lot of — people call it a disorder even though I don’t think that it is — disorders and coping mechanisms that can be given to the next generation. It could either be from, based on my own experience, from the environment of being around it and seeing the effects and mimicking a parent. Or, I do think there is something to be said for being in a mother’s womb for nine months and eating the same stuff and being made of literally the exact same material. So, I don’t want to say it’s genetic, but I think there’s definitely something to be said for that. Also, it’s very interesting because obviously based on my experience, the two ways it can go for the refugee is that either they become incredibly high-functioning like my mom, or they never recover and they kind of hide in a small bubble and they don’t really try to understand the world. But the kids all turn out to be pretty ambitious no matter which kind of parent they have.
Lan: I think what I hope for, for this book, is also I would say mental health. I think that in a lot of refugee communities, and probably especially Asian communities where how your face appears to others is really important, it can really create a lot of pressure for those inside this community who feel that they cannot show any kind of gloom or doom or fracture at all. I think that’s not an authentic picture. There’s a lot of fear that if you expose the crevices they will look like failures. But you can have a crevice, a gloomy spot on you, and not necessarily be a failure. They want the child to have a very marketable career, they don’t want the child to show any weakness. In this book we show that’s not the case. We have gloom, we have mental health issues that are treated in a great way, and if you ask Harlan, she doesn’t even believe it’s a disorder, she thinks it’s quite magical.
Mosher: In the chapter about your time with U.S. District Judge Constance Baker Motley, you continue in your understanding of Black history in the United States and share an optimism with Judge Motley about the future of the U.S. Can you elaborate on this section more?
Lan: Judge Motley was a remarkable person — historically and personally remarkable. And I talk a lot to her about Black history and also about her being an immigrant. Her parents are from Nevis. And she saw so much of the 1950s America and early 1960s. So, I did ask her things like, “Are you hopeful about this country? Do you think it’s really a good country despite all the things that you’ve fought against?” And she said, “Yes,” because she saw how law could change things. I mean, the thing that is amazing, at least in the United States, when you have Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, it’s not just a ruling. Judge Motley and I both agreed that law can be a catalyst not just for political change but changes in social relationships in America more so than in other countries.
That’s the point — that we have a belief in the power of law and a belief in the receptivity of America to absorb a ruling of law and comply with the ruling not just because it’s the law, but because the law eventually causes a change in social outlooks.
Mosher: A lot of the book is about the difficulties in you and your mom’s relationship that seem to seep into the anxieties you had with life. And yet you also note how your mom is your best friend. How do these two attributes reconcile?
Harlan: At some point because of the anxiety, probably when I was like 12, 13, 14, that’s when I had the hardest time making friends. So, even though I obviously love her, in a way it wasn’t much of a choice because I needed to tell someone how I was feeling. And also going through my dad dying, maybe like a year and a half ago, that is one thing that we could not deny that we have in common. It’s the simplest yet the most drastic thing to bring us together. The way that I saw the world completely came from her, even though I’ve changed it and altered it to fit myself.
You know those Russian nesting dolls that have the different layers of people? She’s one of those for me. She’s still inside of me. And a lot of the things I resent her for, like choices that she’s made, I resent her because the choices caused me to struggle, but we struggled through them together. So even if in my head she caused the struggle we still had to navigate through them together which caused me to see her as a best friend.
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