So many of us live inside our own pasts. More aptly, we re-live events, relationships, experiences both great and small, distinguish the beatific from the blasted. Some recollections are tinted with gold, but others carry curses long-affixed.
There is a danger in lingering for too long in the realm of memory. Some of us - and I am often one - prefer the company of the old friends and kin who still wait for us there, who knew us when we were young and blessed with charm and affability. But be careful; they are illusions speaking to us from the vaults of the past as real life pulses around us, carrying us too quickly toward the only certainty we have.
For me, social media has convoluted our general perception of the past. There is no way in heaven or on earth that the bald, sixty-something year old fellow who has ‘friended’ me on Facebook is the same one with whom I labored in the trenches of glory on a high-school football field. In the same way, he looks at me, sees the wrinkles and thinning gray hair, and says to himself, “It cannot be.” But here is the thing: when we think of ourselves, neither of us sees the aging man or woman who really is. We see the boys and girls that we were. Have you ever caught sight of your reflection in a storefront window and thought, “Who is that old fart?” If so, then you know what I am getting at.
I experienced this jarring collision of past and present again three years ago when a friend from college days, Quynh Ngo, reached me through those ubiquitous, invisible filaments. Of course, it is always the face that first gives us pause. Could that really be Quynh, the 18 year old kid with the easy smile and the quick, dark eyes that missed nothing? And then, after a moment or two, I saw him: the boy was in there, looking back at me, and I heard him saying, “Trippe! Whatchu doing?”
I first met Quynh in 1983 in Gainesville, Florida, when I wandered (almost on whim) into the Cuong Nhu Center for Oriental Arts on University Avenue. I was a graduate student at UF, working hard most of the time and drinking too much the rest of the time, and I felt myself falling into poor physical condition for the first time in my life. Quynh was a young black-belt instructor from Vietnam, and after just a few minutes talking with him, I knew that I would become an unlikely student of karate and that Quynh and I would become good friends.
His family - his parents, two brothers, and a sister - were from the city of Hue in Central Vietnam. His father, Ngo Dong, had been an officer in the People’s Defense Force of Hue and spent time in a “re-education camp” after the war. In 1977, in a daring effort that has been well-documented in the Gainesville Sun and other publications, Dong formulated a plan that would drastically alter the future that had seemingly been laid out for them by the new ruling communist party. On a dark night in June, all six family members secretly boarded a small fishing boat and left Saigon behind. Many days later, they were picked up by an Indonesian freighter in the South China Sea and eventually made land at Djakarta on June 27th.
Somehow, months later, through the same tenacity and resolve that have long been characteristic of immigrants to the U.S., the Ngo family was well-established in Gainesville. The children were doing well in school, and Dong was a doctoral professor of etymology at the university. He was also the founder and creator of the Congo Nhu style of martial arts, which has ultimately grown to include more than seventy-five schools worldwide. He became somewhat of a legend in Gainesville and beyond, a man who had seen combat and yet professed peace, a philosopher with the spirit of an ancient warrior. When he died in 2000, his second son, Grandmaster Quynh, was named the head of style for Cuong Nhu.
At this point, I should inform the reader that Quynh Ngo died from the COVID 19 virus on September 1st, 2021, at the age of 56. Many of those who knew him best, including his younger brother Anh, himself an accomplished practitioner and instructor of martial arts, have said they knew of no one who was in better physical condition, of any age, than Quynh. A lifetime of training had also made him mentally tough and resilient in the extreme. As a child, he had survived not only a bloody war in his homeland but also a dangerous bout with malaria. Without question, his death was tragic, unjust, unnecessary, and infuriating; but I do not intend this piece as a lament or elegy, or even simply as a sad, true story, which it certainly is.
I have two purposes here really. One is to say that, although life as it occurs is certainly not much like any of the best stories I’ve ever heard or read, in that much of it seems random, accidental, meandering, senseless - there are stories that we can discern only long after their context has expired. The meaninglessness of the present and recent past gains clarity with time’s passage. We may only learn years after an event what has really happened to us. Stories, like any worthwhile craft or art form, must be told only when they are fully formed in the mind, and this process can take decades. To reiterate, then: we must not live too much in the past. To do so means that we miss too much of the raw material that is all around us at any given moment. We must not let the portal of memory become a trap door. To my second, perhaps even more cryptic point: those who inhabit our memories are static; they cannot - they must not change. But to be fair to their humanity, when we meet our friends again after many years, we must accept the people they have become, the ones who dwell in the present.
I am not shouting “Carpe diem!” This is no rehashing of the “Live for the Moment” mantra that comes and goes with various generations of young Bohemians. Memories of ourselves and of others as we may once have been are well and good (except when they become nationalized nostalgia and thus potential fuel for political agendas, as though simply moving backwards through time will make us all “great again”). Quynh the boy was an alluring figure. He gleams in my thoughts, and the things he had endured as a child - war, malaria, a long journey to freedom - made the spark all the brighter. But Quỳnh the man also exuded the kind of love that defies the bonds of time as we know them.
If you were to ask me whether I would go back, would return to those salad days, that academic life of reading and writing and discussion and then afterward the warm intensity of the dojo on University Avenue, the camaraderie of young people strong in body and mind, all in our white gis, snapping obediently to attention at the barking of Quynh’s voice: “Left side! Left-hand block! Right-hand punch!”, when my only responsibilities were to myself and to my friends and I had no other real ambition because I had opportunity and ability and things seemed to come to me easily, I would probably say…yes. I would go. But…what would I stand to lose? What of the wisdom that really does come with time, and the long arc of joys and sorrows mingled more poignantly than the best of artists might conceive?
Ultimately, when I had earned my master’s degree at UF, I had risen to the rank of brown belt, but I soon left Gainesville and drifted away from Cuong Nhu and the Ngo family. Yet when Quynh contacted me online, I truly felt that I was speaking to a member of my own family. When I learned of all that he had achieved both in the business world and as a master and instructor of martial arts, I felt the pride that one might feel for his own brother. Past and present, memory and awareness, were no longer divided.
I am lucky to have known Quynh and his family, even though when I was around them all, which was nearly every day during the early eighties, I was oblivious to my own good fortune, of course. How could I have known that the Vietnamese meal that Quynh’s mother, Chau Thanh, made for me when I visited their home, would stand the test of time and rank against the finest meals I’ve had in Paris and New York City? How could I know that Dong’s calm voice would return to me in times of personal turmoil? And how might I have guessed that any meager understanding I may now possess of human relationships in the context of time, as it shoves the days and weeks and months and years between us, would one day be changed and deepened by a friend named Quynh?
Quỳnh Ngo (image from cuongnhu.com)