Sex Ruined Our Surnames

I often get the question about my origins. Many have mistaken me for Korean and it's understandable because I love golf, beer, red meat, and kim chi. A day in which all four can be shared with friends is considered complete and paradisaical. To save myself from explaining the situation that led to me being a Tran, I simply tell people I'm Vietnamese and they'll usually accept it because it is my mother tongue after all. But the inquisitive ones will often unravel the intricate strings of my past and come to the somber truth that my surname is completely fiction and does not belong to any of the many Tran's there are in this world. According to Wiki, it is the second most common Vietnamese last name. About one in ten Vietnamese people you encounter is a Tran. Nearly four in ten are Nguyen's!


Sok Veng Sunn was born in Cambodia to parents of Chinese descent (surnames customarily preceded middle and first names). Before he left the country to attend school in China, he changed his name to Mau Tran in order to bypass their forbidding system - students from certain countries were barred from their educational institutions. This was also the name he assumed when he met my mother and when I came into the world in 1977. After the Vietnam War, my father transferred himself from Cambodia to Vietnam in 1979. On the applications, he documented himself as Mau Sok but due to his penmanship or the Viet Cong transcriber or both, they entered him into their faulty system as Mau Sek. In America, he would encounter repeated ridicule because his k's looked like x's and for years it would embarrass him whenever people addressed him as Mr. Sex. Over a decade would go by before he became a naturalized US citizen in 1991 and legally added rice to his first name and reinstated his original surname. From then on, he went by Maurice Sok and that was his final claim. Recently, I learned that his three children from a previous marriage still go by Sek and they too have been scarred by juvenile jesters. I guess they have it even worse than I do.


So there you have it. None of my father's children are bearers of his family name. In a figurative sense, we were all detached from his roots and planted elsewhere. We experienced different upbringings but the one thing we sadly have in common were the 20 years of separation. I was fortunate to have what little memories I had of him until I was five and few visits until I reunited with him at 25. His youngest son born in 1972, however, did not meet dad until 1992. I do not have relationships with his older children. Maybe some day the missing pieces will come together to form a more complete picture of our absent father.