Bi Hùng Ca Thành Texas – Tác giả: Vô Danh
THE TRAGIC EPIC OF THE FALL OF TEXAS
On the night of Tuesday, November 3, in Houston, an elderly man lit incense twice.
The first time was at dusk, as he did every evening. On the altar stood a photograph of his parents beside a neatly folded yellow flag. Next to it was a black-and-white photograph of a soldier, perhaps twenty years old. That soldier was him, more than fifty years ago. His children and grandchildren had all gone upstairs to bed. Downstairs, only he remained, listening to the election results being announced on television.
The second time was close to midnight, when the color of Texas changed on the television screen.
I will not give this man a name, because that night, there were far too many people like him throughout Texas.
He had witnessed this scene once before. In late 1974, after the U.S. Congress had cut off aid, he was issued only 85 rounds of ammunition each month—not even three bullets a day. In April 1975, he stood at Bạch Đằng Wharf, watching the last ships sail down the Saigon River toward the open sea. He knew that he had just lost a fortress he would never be able to reclaim.
Then came several years in a Communist prison camp, then a small fishing boat, then the sea, and finally Texas.
Half a century later, on the land that had given him a place to rebuild his home, he sat watching the second fortress of his life fall. The first time, he was young, and there was still an ocean through which he could escape. This time, he was over seventy, and beyond Texas, he did not know where else he could go.
Some among us have just lost a fortress for the second time in a single lifetime.
The people of Texas have also lost a fortress before.
In the winter of 1836, approximately 200 men defended the stone mission known as the Alamo in San Antonio for thirteen days against several thousand Mexican troops. Lieutenant Colonel William Travis wrote a letter to the people of Texas and to all Americans throughout the world, vowing never to surrender and never to retreat. He signed it with a few unforgettable words:
Victory or Death.
At dawn on March 6, the fort fell. All 189 men whose names were on the defenders’ roster died there. Forty-six days later, on the banks of the San Jacinto River, Texas soldiers charged forward shouting, "Remember the Alamo!" Eighteen minutes after the battle began, it was over, and the Republic of Texas stood firm beneath a flag bearing a single star.
The people of Texas lost a fort, but gained an entire nation.
We Vietnamese have another fortress of our own. When we lost it, we lost our country for more than a thousand years.
It was Cổ Loa.
According to legend, An Dương Vương, king of Âu Lạc, the kingdom that succeeded Văn Lang under the Hùng Kings, built the spiral-shaped Cổ Loa Citadel. During the day, the walls were built, but at night they repeatedly collapsed. This continued until the Golden Turtle God appeared and helped him. When the citadel was completed, the god left behind one of his claws to serve as the trigger for a magical crossbow. When the army of Triệu Đà invaded, it was defeated by the power of this divine weapon and forced to retreat.
During the four years of the Biden administration in the White House, the fortress of Texas also seemed to be built by day and crumble by night.
From 2021 through 2024, border agents recorded more than 8.7 million encounters along the southern border. Texas soldiers laid coils of razor wire along the Rio Grande River, only to have federal agents arrive with wire cutters and remove them. Texas filed a lawsuit. In January 2024, the Supreme Court allowed federal agents to continue cutting the wire, in a 5–4 decision.
The old man in Houston watched those reports on television and felt a familiar sense of déjà vu.
The first time, Washington cut off the ammunition.
This time, Washington cut the razor wire.
I do not blame the poor people who wade across the Rio Grande. Anyone who has ever sat in a small fishing boat in the middle of the South China Sea understands why people risk their lives to escape.
Vietnamese boat people faced pirates in the Gulf of Thailand. Those crossing the Rio Grande face criminal gangs that collect money from each person they smuggle, trafficking human beings like merchandise. The U.S. government has designated these groups as terrorist organizations.
They are the real enemies.
When the gates of a fortress are left open, it is the land-based pirates who become rich first.
And yet, the fortress still stood.
In 2024, Starr County, right along the river and populated overwhelmingly by people of Mexican descent, voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time since 1892. Those living right at the fortress gate had already fired their arrows. The following year, the number of people apprehended crossing the border fell to its lowest level.
The divine crossbow had fired, and the invaders were forced to retreat.
Legend tells us that when Triệu Đà realized he could not defeat Âu Lạc by force, he proposed a marriage between his son, Trọng Thủy, and Mỵ Châu, the daughter of King An Dương Vương.
The young bridegroom moved into Cổ Loa Citadel. He persuaded his wife to show him the magical crossbow and secretly replaced its turtle-claw trigger with a counterfeit one.
When the couple parted, Trọng Thủy asked Mỵ Châu how they would find each other if war ever broke out. She promised to pluck feathers from her goose-feather cloak and scatter them along the road as she fled.
Mỵ Châu loved her country, but she loved her husband even more.
That was enough to bring down the fortress.
The fortress of Texas fell from within.
Inside its walls were many Mỵ Châus, each of whom loved Texas, but loved her own political faction even more.
In late May 2023, the Texas House of Representatives, where Republicans held a majority, voted 121 to 23 to impeach Ken Paxton, the Republican Attorney General of Texas. In September of that year, the state Senate acquitted him.
Members of the same household accused one another before the public, then pardoned one another—and from that point on, they remembered each other’s faces.
This year, the two factions took their battle to the battlefield of money.
Paxton challenged John Cornyn, who had held his U.S. Senate seat for four terms. President Trump stood behind Paxton. Senator Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, stood behind Cornyn.
Including the subsequent runoff election, more than $165 million in advertising money poured into the primary race—the most expensive Senate primary in American history. Most of that money was spent on a battle between Republicans themselves.
For months, whenever Texas voters turned on their televisions, they heard Republicans accusing other Republicans.
Paxton won, and Cornyn became the first Republican U.S. senator from Texas to be rejected by voters of his own party.
Then came the Bush family.
In 1994, George W. Bush defeated Democratic Governor Ann Richards, beginning a 32-year era of Republican control of the Texas governor’s mansion.
In 2022, Paxton promised to end the Bush dynasty and went on to defeat the grandson of the elder President Bush.
The Bush family remembered the family feud.
On the evening of September 21, in Dallas, Cornyn held a fundraising event featuring George W. Bush as a special guest. The event raised money for six Republican Senate candidates in six other states.
The Republican candidate in their own state of Texas was nowhere to be seen.
Two days later, George W. Bush’s daughter donated money to a Democratic support committee backing Talarico. In October, his younger brother announced on Facebook that he had voted for Talarico, breaking a lifelong habit of never posting anything political.
A few goose feathers are very light.
The daughter’s $2,500 donation and the younger brother’s Facebook post could not, by themselves, overturn Texas.
But goose feathers are dangerous because they show the way. They tell those who are still hesitant that crossing over to the other side is nothing to be ashamed of.
Goose feathers do not capture a fortress.
They destroy the trust of the people guarding it.
The first to abandon the fortress were those standing guard right at its gates.
Starr County, which had fired its arrows for Texas just two years earlier, gave the Democratic candidate 77 percent of its votes this year.
Ask what worried those voters, and the polls repeatedly revealed the same answer: the cost of living.
I do not blame them, either. The people guarding the gate will walk away when those inside the fortress are too busy fighting one another and have forgotten the price of rice.
On the night of November 3, the Associated Press announced that Talarico had won.
For the first time since 1988, Texas had elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate.
Governor Abbott, who had deployed razor wire along the Rio Grande, lost to Gina Hinojosa.
For 32 years, Democrats had failed to win a single statewide office in Texas.
That night, they took them all.
Legend tells us that An Dương Vương placed his daughter behind him on horseback and fled southward. Goose feathers were scattered all along the road, allowing the enemy to follow their trail.
When they reached the seashore, there was nowhere left to go. The king called upon the Golden Turtle God. The god appeared amid the waves and spoke only one sentence:
"The enemy is sitting right behind you, Your Majesty."
I have always thought that this was the most heartbreaking line in our nation’s ancient stories.
The old king turned around and looked at his only daughter.
Mỵ Châu knelt and prayed: If she had betrayed her father, may her body turn to dust when she died. But if she had remained faithful and been deceived by another, may her blood turn into precious pearls.
The king drew his sword.
Then he took a seven-inch rhinoceros horn and walked straight into the sea.
The ancients told how Mỵ Châu’s blood spread through the water, and every pearl oyster that swallowed it turned into a precious gem.
The sea had answered her prayer.
When a fortress is lost to an external enemy, people mourn for their country.
When a fortress is lost because of those within, people mourn for both their country and their own household.
On Wednesday morning, the Texas Republican Party went looking for the enemy across the Rio Grande.
The enemy was sitting right behind them.
When a fortress falls to an outside enemy, people still have a rallying cry.
"Remember the Alamo!" brought the Texas army together at San Jacinto in just 46 days.
But when a fortress falls because of those within, there is no rallying cry.
No one can charge forward shouting, "Remember Mỵ Châu!"
People can only lower their heads and wait.
We Vietnamese waited for more than a thousand years.
During those thousand years, the years when foreign invaders killed our people were relatively few. The longer years were those in which our people paid taxes to foreign rulers and gradually grew accustomed to living under their rule.
The Vietnamese language survived through the lullabies sung by mothers, passed down from one generation to the next, until the day Ngô Quyền planted stakes in the Bạch Đằng River in 938 and regained our independence.
More than ten centuries later, in April 1975, ships carrying people fleeing their homeland departed Saigon along the river that flowed past Bạch Đằng Wharf.
The name of the battle that restored our nation’s independence had become the name of the wharf from which our people fled after losing their country.
The Texas Republicans also once had to wait.
After 1874, they had to wait 105 years before they regained a Republican governor.
Four generations.
California, where Ronald Reagan once served as governor, last voted Republican in a presidential election in 1988. It has yet to return.
The Texas wall, built with Texas’s own money, is still there. Only the people standing guard have changed.
Beginning in January, the commander overseeing the Texas National Guard will be Hinojosa, who once called the border-security operation a political stunt.
The border became quiet in 2025 because Washington closed it.
The day the signature at the White House changes hands, the southern gates of the fortress will open again, and the criminal gangs will resume collecting money from every person they smuggle.
This time, there will be no Texas soldiers laying razor wire along the Rio Grande.
If this dark night lasts as long as the previous one, the old man in Houston may not live long enough to see Texas change color again.
Perhaps his son will not, either.
His young grandson, sleeping upstairs, will grow up hearing stories about his grandfather’s two republics.
One had a yellow flag.
The other had a flag with a single star.
He will hear these stories just as his grandfather once heard the legend of Cổ Loa.
Whether the wait lasts a thousand years or a hundred depends on whether the people inside the fortress remember in time.
An Dương Vương understood the god’s warning only when his horse had already reached the seashore.
The people of Texas understood it while the horse was still on the road. There was still time to turn back.
Today, at Cổ Loa, there remains a small shrine dedicated to Mỵ Châu.
Inside the shrine is a naturally formed stone resembling a headless woman sitting with her hands resting on her knees.
For more than two thousand years, people have continued to come and burn incense before a headless princess.
The Vietnamese have never forgiven Mỵ Châu, yet neither can they bring themselves to forget her.
We preserve her story so that our descendants will understand why the fortress fell.
In 1835, in Gonzales, several Texas women painted a cannon on a white flag, along with the words:
COME AND TAKE IT.
Nearly 200 years later, no one had to come and take Texas.
Those inside the fortress were too busy fighting over the keys to notice when the gates had been left open.
That night, as the second incense stick burned almost to its end, the old man went upstairs.
His grandson was fast asleep, still clutching his teddy bear.
The old man sat down on the edge of the bed and softly sang the lullaby his own mother had sung to him when he was little:
"Chiều chiều ra đứng ngõ sau,
Trông về quê mẹ ruột đau chín chiều."
(At dusk, I stand by the back gate,
Looking toward my mother’s homeland, my heart aching with endless sorrow.)
He knew the child could not yet understand.
During a thousand years of Chinese domination, the Vietnamese people preserved their language through lullabies like these—songs sung by mothers to children who were still too young to understand their meaning.
Tomorrow morning, he would teach his grandson two more lines.
One would be an American saying from Texas:
"Remember the Alamo."
The other would be a Vietnamese saying from our ancestors, the words spoken by the Golden Turtle God at the seashore:
"The enemy is sitting right behind you."
Remember the Alamo, so that we may know how we once won.
Remember Cổ Loa, so that we may understand whom we lost it to.
AnhMinh Nguyen(813) 570-0122
(VACA)