The Cemetery of Pham Quoc Cuong

I mentioned in a previous blog that I discovered that my Grandfather had a child named Pham Quoc Cuong with his second wife. This half-uncle was born May 1979, only five months before me, but only survived up to 1 month. I am not certain what caused his death, but I may have heard the word Tuberculosis a few times from my half-family in Da Nang. When my parents named me, they never knew that my half-uncle existed and never knew that my grandfather had also chosen the name Pham Quoc Cuong.

I visited his burial plot as well as my great-grandfather’s and great-grandmother’s plot in Quang Ngai. The cemetery sat next to an enormous shrimp farm. I could hear the waves crashing the shoreline and hint of salt water as I tipped-toed through the cemetery. The sky was gray and cloudy as if the sky was prepared for a cemetery type of day. Countless unmarked grass mounds or dirt mounds scattered erratically; each mound represented the remains of a once vibrant soul and known to their loved ones. Old dried-out and burnt-out sticks of incense litter across the mounds. Over time, some of the mounds have standing simple tombstones or transformed into massive decorated concrete plots.

Cemeteries in Viet Nam are parallel in decorations and flamboyance to the cemeteries in New Orleans. These concrete masses become a mini house for the souls of the afterlife. The over the ground burials maybe made of marble or cement and painted ostentatiously with pinks or bright blues. But the Quang Ngai Cemetery did not have this lavishness. This is the run-of-the-mill rural town where most people still lives on mini-farms and microwaves seem useless.

So I stood in the cemetery with semi-strangers looking at the burials of semi-strangers. Yet all these semi-strangers shared my blood and DNA. Eeriness crept up my back when I stared at the tombstone of Uncle Pham Quoc Cuong. My uncle quietly lies in the hardened dirt of our homeland while I stand above as a foreigner learning about my esoteric past. I think in many ways my past will always remain a mystery because the answers were and will remain buried deep below my feet.