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@evelyn – That first story of your friend was chillingly relatable because…I’m half Vietnamese. My mother tells me amazing stories that my grandparents told her about surviving through both the Japanese invasion and French invasion, wars that not many of us Americans know about because we often focus on our war with Vietnam. I love visiting family and listening to my grand-uncles talk about their adventures.

I remember one that appealed to the writer in me. My grandfather was a soldier fighting against the French, and there was this story about a man from the city who wanted to visit his parents in the country. So he set off, wearing a white shirt, blue jeans, and a red handkerchief in his pocket. But when Vietnamese soldiers saw him, they thought he was a spy for the French because he was unknowingly wearing France’s colors. So they killed him.

Moral of the story: fashion choices really do matter. 😛

Then there was one during our war with Vietnam, when my mother was a toddler. She remembers the bomb alarms going off telling everyone to go to the shelters because the Americans were coming. So my grandfather ushered everyone to the basement, but he himself always refused to go. He would stay in their apartment, saying that if they got bombed the shelter wouldn’t do much good and they would all die anyway.

That’s my grandfather for you. xD

But thank God he was never proven wrong or right, because they never got bombed directly.