Viet Nam Haiku V13

Aunt Thuy – former family
Beauty now divorced –
Cursed for pickiness

03.07.15 – 03.15.15

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Copyright by Minh Tan on listed dated of completion.

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Notes to this poem…

Please click here for the background to this haiku collection if you want to know more about it.

This is the first of about a dozen haiku character snapshots of my Paternal relatives I met for the first time, or first time I would be able to remember with some of them. Basically, these character snapshots were either built around the most striking thing about them to me, or a summary of things that seem to be dominant in their lives. It’s a bit like a haiku version of a clerihew, except there’s no requirement to be funny, and often I’m not trying to be!

Aunt Thuy is the oldest of the Aunts I have on Dad’s side of the family. Technically, she is a half-Aunt like the rest of the Aunts, but that story was told in the previous poem of the collection.

She was a beautiful woman in her youth and had her pick of men to date and marry. She also had legendary stories about how one came to claim her with a gun in front of the house when he heard she might have been dating some guy in the military who was coming over, and who would far better know how to use a gun than he would! That’d I have LOVE to have seen!

However, she was supposedly picky about who she was going to marry. I say supposedly because according to some of her siblings and half-siblings, it was more her Mother who was behind the marriages of all of the Aunts, many of which had not turned out too well even though that doesn’t mean they were all divorced. I didn’t want to ask Aunt Thuy on this, and she had no comments when the comment was made by one of her sisters. Whatever the truth was, though, she had married a wife beater and left him for it.

Good for her that she did. Still tragic that she had the pick of so many and ended up with one at the bottom half or lower of the scale had their destinies all been compared. That was what stuck with me about Aunt Thuy, though I have lots of wonderful memories about our interactions in Viet Nam I wouldn’t forget any time soon. This was just what I chose to summarize her with in this haiku character snapshot.

Please click here to see all the haiku in this collection about Viet Nam.

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