Anna Pham Thi That: 17/07/1939 - 09/05/2008

My Aunt, Anna Pham Thi That, passed away last week. I rarely write about events in my life but I will make an exception this time. My heart goes out to my cousins (Bobby, Son, John), who always mentioned how much they loved my Mother every time we ran into each other. I lost my Mother almost 8 years ago around Thanksgiving. They lost their Mother this year around Mother's Day. The subtle irony in reality, at times, is more cruel and twisted than anything I will ever be able to write.

My Aunt is a great woman to have endured our escape from Vietnam in 1975 (our families escaped together), given birth to eleven kids, and live almost 20 more years since losing my Uncle. By the way, the date format above in the title is the correct way to show dates in Vietnamese. Day, month, year. Makes sense. Small to large. The American way is so mixed up sometimes.

That's not to say that the Vietnamese way always makes sense, either. I just realized that I call my Aunt, "Di Vinh." "Vinh" is my Uncle's name. That's like saying, "Aunt Vinnie." In Vietnamese tradition, we identify the Aunt and Uncle by the Uncle's first name. Never realized that until now. My wifey is going to be known as, "Aunt Pee-tah," to our whole army of nephews and nieces.

My cousins and I haven't really hung out since we were kids. We don't know why but we vowed to try much harder from now on. We would always occasionally run into each other at bars and other "dark places," as they like to describe it. We would buy each other drinks and then part ways. But we would never plan to hang out. I would like to from now on, but mainly because there were so many hot girls at the funeral. I'm kidding! (They all turned out to be related to me anyway.)