I’ve long been fascinated by our ability to make marks that convey meaning. Take a piece of charcoal or a stick, scrape a few lines onto any given surface—paper, concrete, a sandy beach—and thousands of people from all walks of life will recognize the symbols you created and the meaning behind them.
When you make enough marks, it becomes language and is the very fabric of society and the world we live in.
I am struck today by how language
~its silences, obfuscations, truths, lies, and hopes~
shapes our world.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letter from an American, January 19, 2023
If you address your many marks to a person or a group of people, it becomes a letter.
Oddly enough, it just struck me that a collection of words—which are made up of letters—can, when collected in a missive, become a “letter.” Fascinating.
Without my mother’s letters, my stories of Vietnam would be a ghostly shadow of what they are with her words behind me.
I quote from them with abandon and so thought I would give you a glimpse of their breadth and depth.
From my inherited cache, it appears that my mother, Nancy L. Rabdau, began her life of correspondence in 1954, the year she turned 19.
Many years later, in 1974-75, she wrote monthly letters capturing snapshots of family life in Saigon.
In July 1974 she began with an enthusiastic and optimistic description of our scheduled year (it turned out to be nine months), which holds no hint of what was to come as the “war-in-peace” in Vietnam wound toward its inevitable end.
Writing wasn’t always easy! The panel below shows her battle with my father’s typewriter (hers was still en route from Taiwan). She concluded with a handwritten note: I give up—Jim’s typewriter is obviously a letter destroyer!
She wrote less and less over the years. I have only a few letters written in the 1980s and she all but stopped in 1993 after she lost my dad and her father within a year’s time.
Her plucky nature still shines through, however, in this 1998 Christmas letter. Note her reference to Clement Clarke Moore’s Night Before Christmas and #9 in the rundown of where everyone is living. Or not, in the case of the mouse.
In addition to my gratitude for her writing habit, I am grateful that my brother Mike (May 19, 1962-September 21, 2014), scanned all of my mother’s ephemera into digital files.
I cannot imagine what my life would be like without these treasures. It’s quite possible that “Stories of Vietnam” would not even exist.
Full images of July 22, 1974 for your reading pleasure, if you wish. [Note: My older sister Marina’s childhood name was Michelle. My childhood name was Carla.]
As always Kat a fine walk down memory lane. At some point I will have to take the plunge and go through the archive myself. Until that point keep the hits coming. They are just gems that bring a smile. Thanks for all of the work that you do! Aloha, Chris
What a gift your mother left for your family and for you… to share with the world. ❤️