Hearing from Jamie Tester, a great coach and proud volleyball parent, and Chau Le, another Vietnamese ex-pat got me to thinking about my own parents, who it’s fair to say were the first people to have introduced me to Volleyball. Volleyball meant something different to them. It was all pretty idealistic and related to their activism against Communism in the 70s.
That’s my mum, Zung, and sister, Tam on the left (circa 1979), and me on the right (Circa 1983). Since as long as we can remember, we’ve been dragged out to watch Dad play volleyball, so there are no shortage of photos like these. It’s actually pretty hard to find any photos of my family between 1975 and 1985 that isn’t inside a gymnasium.
The old country
My Dad, Luu Nguyen grew up in Saigon (now “Ho Chi Ming City”), Vietnam in the 60s, where volleyball was a popular sport. There was an outdoor court nearby his house where most of the kids would play before and after school. Half of the surface was bitumen, and the other half was dirt. Luckily this incongruency applied to both sides of the court. The older kids would take the courts earlier in the day when it was cooler and the light was better, and the younger kids would just have to try their luck.
Even though it was a pretty well-off area (Dad’s father was a deputy minister in Diem’s government before the CIA backed Junta assassinated him and took over, and later got a job for Exxon Mobil), the setup and the kids all looked pretty shabby. Dad remembers a Black American G.I. stationed nearby who used to watch them play and gave them a brand new net one day.
Dad reckons they never rotated so when he was younger he always got stuck in the backcourt passing. Until he grew to 6′1 – unusually tall for a Vietnamese kid back in those days. [It's funny, there's this old Vietnamese proverb that says "blessed is the house whose son is taller than the father" - about progress i guess. We always joke that because i'm a bit shorter than dad, that our family is clearly in decline]. He also played for his high school team, and told me a story about how they played a final against a South Vietnamese Army team in a base full of soldiers. One of the kids in Dad’s team made the national team, and tried to defect to Thailand on a tour. We don’t know what became of him.
Both sides of my family were pretty well off and did what they could to get their kids out of the war. They were able to send most of their kids to France to study. Unfortunately my mum’s oldest brother got drafted and saw some nasty stuff. I think he might have even been involved in dropping Agent Orange out of the plane. He became an alcoholic and died of leukemia in 93. I only got to meet him once when i was 7, but by all accounts he was a very kind man. Mum and dad were both pretty smart so they skipped years in high school and got accepted into French Universities – as the youngest in their families they already had siblings established over there. Dad left in ‘69 after the Tet Offensive, and Mum left in ‘73 as Nixon and Whitlam were pulling out troops.
France
That’s dad in the daggy olive green trackpants. I’m guessing this was taken in the early 80s. Presumably his team is playing in some sort of weekend/holiday tournament in a track and field oval.
Dad was pretty smart and got into the most exclusive university in France, Ecole Polytechnique [in case being shorter than him wasn't enough to prove that our family was in decline, there's the academic proof too!]. Mum went to Sorbonne, the oldest university in France. Eventually they met, fell in love, got hitched and had Tam and me. During all this they got very active with the Vietnamese student associations.
[Mum circa 1975. Tam reckons this might have been taken the day Dad met Mum. Good thing she's in a gym and and an anti-communist. Otherwise they probably would never have met].
The Vietnamese student associations were divided into 2 groups – those that were communists, and those that were anti-communist. My folks belonged to the latter. It’s easy to forget, but France was historically a hotbed of communism. Many of the first generation of Chinese communist leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were educated there, and Ho Chi Minh holed out there in exile. Both camps would work tirelessly to lure the Vietnamese student population over to their influence through their activities, with sport and social events being the big ones.
Dad spent a lot of time driving the many newspapers they had and the sports club, ASVN (Association Sportive VietNam), which included a lot of volleyball. I imagine the games they played against the communist students got pretty heated. To make things more interesting, 2 of mum’s brothers were communist sympathisers. For Dad, he loved volleyball, but a lot of his passion to play and coach was fueled by the idealism he had to fight the red influence. Mum played too. She was ok, but I suspect she did it more because dad spent so much time playing/coaching.
Dad also played div 2 or 3 in the French league. He reckons a scout found him playing at in his university’s gym and then picked him up the following week for training and the club gave him a uniform and a pair of new shoes. It was amateur, but clubs over there all seem to be well resourced. Dad also played for his university and told me about this five set match they played where he got his hand cut blocking against a guy wearing a ring and he had to go back to serve out the game.
The pictures above are the Vietnamese student games in Copenhagen. I guess they were pretty social and always held in a different European City. Like uni-games here i suppose. This photo is dated July 82, so literally a month after I was born. They must have either taken me with them, or left me with someone in Paris. Dad’s standing in the back of the queue in the photo on the left, and standing second from the right on the photo on the right. They look like they’re having a lot of fun.
Although they graduated, Mum and Dad stayed active with all this stuff right until we left for Australia. Tam and I were literally born into it all. They must have felt like they lost a big part of their lives when they moved here. I never really appreciated what their life was like, how much fun it was and how idealistic it all was, till i visited my family in France when i was 17 and spent a day with one of the guys my dad used to coach and he and his wife told me all the stories.
Down Under
In Australia, Mum and Dad got us into volleyball – Dad moreso, Mum just happened to be home more to practice with us in the backyard. She still kicks arse when we put a net up at the park. But i guess it was different. They were involved a bit with Australian branch of the Free Vietnam movement until family commitments became too much. But dad was still involved with anything remotely to do with improving the lives of the Vietnamese community here.
Dad played a bit here and there, mainly social stuff, work teams etc. He took a lot of interest in watching and reading about Australian volleyball. I remember he gave Tony Schofield his first engineering job at the Australian Submarine Corp after seeing on his CV that he had been the vice captain of the U16 state Volleyball Team. Dad also spent a lot of time teaching Tam and I how to play. Which took a lot of patience and repetition since we were both really uncoordinated.
[Our Thursday night social team - one of the last times Dad played any sort of volleyball circa 2001. Back Row: Dad, Victor Fule, Matt Sypek, Me . Front Row: Jono "Funky" Dragt, Tam & Alexei Fei]
Dad always had strong Confucian values and believed it was his calling to return to Vietnam and help rebuild it when the Communists were finally overthrown. It was like he waited years for this to happen. He confided to me a few years ago that he reached an epiphany that this was never going to happen, and that he had spent years of his life chasing this goal at the expense of his family life. It was around then that he stopped taking interest in my volleyball and stopped coming out to see my State League matches. It only occurred to me recently that he probably associated all this with a part of his life that he could finally move on from. When Dad didn’t care anymore, I didn’t feel like i had anything left to prove anymore and so I stopped playing.
I was born into this sport through unusual circumstances. For a long time it was inseparable from my family’s multi-generational struggle against tyranny. It was never just about a game with a ball. Playing was always about living up to the expectations of my Father, and to me represented one of the last things we clung to from our old life. Coaching was always different, and more about passing on what i learnt about living in the now to others. I think when I gave up playing and embraced coaching, I was able to move on in more ways than one.
