Family in Phan Thiet

I CAN’T SEEM TO FALL ASLEEP. I’M A LITTLE NERVOUS ABOUT MEETING MY HALF SIBLINGS TOMORROW: TWO OLDER SISTERS AND AN OLDER BROTHER. I DON’T EVEN KNOW THEIR NAMES, SO I GUESS I’LL CALL THEM BROTHER TWO, SISTER THREE AND SISTER FOUR.

I’m meeting them only because my father asked me when we were in Saigon if I wanted to meet them, but I really wasn’t that interested then. He hinted at it again a few days ago, so I agreed.

When I first learned that my father had another family, I was angry and upset and I didn’t speak to him for nearly half a year. I couldn’t understand how he could have two wives, and how he could have kept his other wife and their three children a secret for so long. But the more time I spend in Vietnam, discovering more about my culture and family, the more I have come to understand how things operate here. I was raised in Australia and I have a different set of values, but in Vietnam I have found it is common for men to have two or three wives. The first wife is known as the ‘big’ wife and the second is the ‘small wife’, and both parties seem to accept each other.