Legacy Peeks Out From Behind Messy Desk

I think I need to hire a maid. Not for my studio apartment, but for my desk here in the newsroom.

There are newspapers and computer printouts of old articles everywhere, barely leaving space for the phone, my telephone log and the scanner that is so important to a police reporter.

The mess has been accumulating since June, when I arrived here at The Times Orange County from the Greenwich Time in Connecticut. Lately, I’ve been trying to clear away some of it so I can prop up a picture frame holding my late father’s old press passes from Vietnam. But I can never manage to find the time, and I don’t think Dad would appreciate being part of the mess, though his own desk had not exactly been orderly.

Actually, he was not very appreciative when in 1985 I announced that I was switching my major from engineering to journalism at Arizona State University. I think he was trying to avoid thinking of his then-18-year-old daughter, still living at home under his protection, as dealing with the sort of unsavory characters he ran across while working for an English-language weekly in Saigon.

In fact, I didn’t even find out until later that he had been a journalist. But then, Dad was never really eager to talk about his past, which had brought him so much heartache. And I was only 8 when we left Vietnam and had never been curious about where he went every morning. I only knew he went to work.

In America, I paid more attention. I saw an electronics assembly-line worker, broken as many Vietnamese men of his generation--not only from having to hold a lesser job than what he was used to but also from carrying the guilt of losing his country.

He was never happy to go to work until he became the executive director of the refugee center in Phoenix several years ago, Mom tells me. It was a more challenging job befitting his language and administrative skills, and he felt he was really helping people.

It wasn’t until some months after I switched majors did Mom casually mention my journalism heritage.

She told me of a great-uncle who had started an underground Vietnamese newspaper in the 1940s to advocate rebelling against the French occupation of Vietnam.

Unfortunately, all she could remember was that my great-uncle was obsessive about his newspaper and looted what he needed--ink, paper--from the family’s store to operate it. He also borrowed heavily from relatives but seldom returned the money.

Dad was managing editor of the Vietnam Sun during the final years of the civil war. All he would tell me was that the weekly was just one of many publications trying to record the chaos, and then he vaguely advised me to try to avoid interviews in seedy bars and to respect the Associated Press.

Mom added that because of his job dealing with information, Dad was able to assess the situation leading to the fall of Saigon in 1975 and convinced her we had to get out before April 30.

I had meant to ask him more about his memories to learn from them for my future newspaper jobs, but I became more involved with school activities and lost interest in that part of my heritage. I moved out of Arizona after college.

Finally, the chance to learn more ended when Dad died July 1, two weeks after I started work here and a day after my 25th birthday.

He left behind a desk of a pack rat at my family’s home in Phoenix. But, as he used to say whenever Mom bugged him about throwing away stuff, “it’s in perfect order. I know where everything is, and everything is needed.”

I had tried the same tactic whenever Mom nagged me about my messy desk in my equally messy room.

“Daddy’s girl,” she would say as she scolded me.

After the funeral, Mom and we children sorted through that “perfect order” of his. As we had suspected, most of it was disposable junk, decade-old bill receipts and the like. The treasures were there, too, though. The hundreds of letters from relatives in Vietnam and our baby photographs, which Mom stored in plastic bags.

But those three precious press passes, each with a black-and-white mug shot of a younger version of my father, left that house with me. And now they’re sitting in a drawer next to my bed.

They’ll make it to my desk someday, maybe, if I ever clean it up.