I Killed My Vietnamese Parents

by Mark Erickson, adopted from Vietnam to the USA.

Sharing this to process feelings about my birth family, trying to write down some difficult things.

I have a confession to make: I killed my Vietnamese parents. I donโ€™t know when I did it or how I did it, but I did. Actually, what I did was worse. In order to kill them, I would have actually had to know them, acknowledge their existence, and forget them. Instead, I fully erased them: no names, no memories, no feelings.

No one specifically told me to do it, but the message was loud and clear. Letโ€™s play pretend. Your Vietnamese parents are never to be acknowledged or mentioned. We are your real parents. You were born in our hearts.

If there was a part of my young self that ever believed that my Vietnamese parents were still alive, then the burden of carrying that hope was too much for me. So I stopped. I was not Oliver Twist. I was not Little Orphan Annie. Instead, I became a twisted three-headed Scarecrow-Tin Man-Lion: unable to question my experience, disconnected from my feelings, and non-confrontational to a fault.

What I didnโ€™t count on was that this matricide-patricide was actually a double homicide-suicide. In order to erase them, I also had to erase a part of myself. I self-medicated. But instead of self-medicating with substances like others in my immediate circle, I became a compulsive over-achiever.

This worked for many years. But my Vietnamese parents wouldnโ€™t play along and stay erased. Instead, they haunted my nightmares and later my day dreams. When I looked in the mirror, was I looking at the image of my creators?

Check out Mark’s photography and book of Vietnam or follow him on Instagram.

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