1970: Simon & Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water

By Lam Thuy Vo

When I was a kid, my father would regularly have two albums on blast: the Terminator soundtrack and Simon and Garfunkel's “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” While I know for a fact that my dad stumbled upon the dramatic theme song of the Terminator watching Sarah Connor get chased by a time-traveling metal-glazed Arnold Schwarzenegger, I was a bit perplexed as to how “Bridge Over Troubled Water” became a staple in our household. How in the hell did the delightful tunes from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel infiltrate our little immigrant home? 

Much like many other Vietnamese families in Germany, my parents had always lived in a carefully crafted bubble of Vietnamese culture that existed independent from their German surroundings in Frankfurt. At home, we mostly ate Vietnamese food, spoke Vietnamese, and watched direct-to-VHS Vietnamese variety shows. But something about this album gripped my father, a gentle and generally quiet man. Watching this man, who ordinarily revealed so little about himself, bop his head and slap his thighs to the tune of "Cecilia" was both shocking and thrilling. 

Just like the stories of many other immigrant fathers, the story of my father’s love for Simon and Garfunkel was a hidden one, shrouded in much mystery. That’s likely because my dad was just a poor boy and like Simon and Garfunkel’s proverbial protagonist in their song “The Boxer,” his stories seldom told or heard. 

But once I sat him down and bombarded him with questions I realized just how circuitous and odd a chain of events it took to get “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to my fathers’ ears.  

The first time he heard the song, dad was a dangly 17-year-old. He was the oldest son of 13 kids. My grandmother worked as a maid for French colonial lords and met her husband, a worker on the same rubber tree plantation, at the onset of one of several wars that would embroil Vietnam. Growing up in a working class family in a conflict-riddled country, my father didn’t exactly have money to buy himself music records. 

And so the only way for my dad to catch the latest tunes was to sit his butt down at a small coffee shop and to listen intently to what was being blared through a crackly speaker system. Dad recalls the coffee place was “in a poorer neighborhood near the prison,” and served as his regular spot for deep and meaningful contemplation. Whatever money he could scrape together went towards one cup of Vietnamese coffee, the kind that is brewed by pouring hot water into a phin filter and watching the dark brown liquid slowly drip into a glass of ice and condensed milk. 

“You know, it takes like half an hour sometimes for one of those cups to be ready for you to drink them,” he tells me, grinning. While sitting on a little stool, my father would listen to Vietnamese folk songs, but every once in a while the coffee shop owner would play a bootlegged recording of an American tune, my dad perking up each time but not really remembering any of them all that much. 

So many things had to happen for him to fall in love with this specific song — “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Something must have moved an American soldier to bring a recording of the song to Vietnam. They must have played the song in bars catering to GIs, so that a local Vietnamese guy would like it enough to make a copy of it, my dad figured. From there it must have been brought to the Vietnamese coffee spot where the owner was part server and part DJ, bringing his favorite tunes to an audience of broody, ca phe drinking boys like my dad. All this, just so my dad would discover this wistful melody that he couldn’t name, let alone understand. 

“Simon and Garfunkel must have been very famous to make it all the way to Saigon,” dad marveled as he traced the journey that the song took to him. 

“I didn’t have money and didn’t really know how to get access to culture. We were just able to soak up what we could soak up in our environment.” 

He must have listened to dozens of American songs while sitting there in the sweltering moist heat of Saigon, but “Bridge over Troubled Water” was the one song that stuck. 

“He didn’t sing like a professional. His voice wasn’t the best in the world, but he brought his emotions, thoughts and feelings,” dad explained. “He is no Whitney Houston but he sings for himself.”

My days are filled with music — a carefully curated soundtrack emulates, amplifies, and, at times, counteracts my mood at any given point. To imagine a time when someone had to commit notes and bars to memory in order to savor them makes caring about any kind of music a declaration of the most romantic and truest of loves. 

It’s also made me wonder about the kind of spells that music can cast on you — I grew up swaying back and forth to songs in languages I didn’t know and somehow I was filled with feelings. Was it the echoey piano chords of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that enveloped my dad into submission? Was it the shaky falsetto that conveyed the kind of emotions only a 17-year-old emo boy could relate to? Was it the slow crescendo of the song, weeping violins joining in as the drums increased the melodrama? 

It’s odd to try and guess the song’s particular je-ne-sais-quoi that infiltrated the undeveloped musical taste of Vietnamese boy living in a war zone. As I sat my father down on Zoom, he could only get so far as a patchy understanding of what made this song so special and even then, he shrugged. 

“I don’t know what it was. It just spoke to me.” 

It wasn’t until a decade or two later that he’d hear and recognize the song again. A whole lotta life happened in between. 

My father left Vietnam to be a student in Germany because “there was no battlefield, just war from all sides,” which was somehow better. Then, during his student years, he swore off all things Western culture after learning about the “American atrocities” committed against the Vietnamese, including the My Lai massacre. He became an activist and nationalist, embracing communism as a patriotic anti-colonial act. Music became a form of protest for him — he learned how to play the guitar, somehow convinced his friends in Vietnam to send him anti-war songs, and belted them at Vietnamese student gatherings in Hannover.  

My dad, third from the left, playing the guitar during a student activism event in Hannover, Germany.

Meanwhile, he penned weekly letters to a girl in Saigon he barely knew. Eventually, dad won her over during this 9-year-long exchange, and brought her over to Germany as a refugee. 

Only after my dad had secured his family’s future could he even think about purchasing anything like a technicolor TV. It was through that television set that he finally heard the song again in 1981, enraptured by truth of seeing Paul Simon’s face. It seemed to meet the mediocre quality and yet emotional intensity of his voice. 

It took until the early 1990s and a third brush with Simon and Garfunkel on a slightly larger television screen for their full names to stick in dad’s head long enough for him to make it to the record store and purchase the album. 

My father never let me forget that his only wealth when he first started a family life in Germany was a bicycle, one that fit him, my mother on the back and my brother, a baby at the time, strapped to her chest. 

Twenty years after leaving Vietnam, dad had enough disposable income for things that didn’t fulfill any immediate, carnal needs, like CD players — the ultimate unlocking of the immigrant dream. After rummaging through some racks in a German CD store, he found it. Bridge Over Troubled Water.

“When we had a bit more money and a stable house, only then we could think about culture,” my father told me.  

Upon discovering the entire album, dad didn’t care much for most of the songs, a process I take for granted when I find a single I love and opt out of listening to the rest of the album – artists should be granted the right to produce some ‘mehs’ alongside bangers. Except for “The Boxer,” which inspired him with hope and reminded him of his days as a student in Germany, without family and only a few friends. And of course there’s “Cecilia,” which still brings him back to his crush on my mom, an impractical and yet unbreakable emotional tether that stretched between two continents.  

I marvel at the ebbs and flows of a love story stretched throughout years, especially when it is between a person and that song. Technology has really accelerated this journey for us. You go from listening to a song at a bar or club, to ‘liking’ it on Spotify in mere seconds. In one day you wade through the album and add 12 more songs to your internal jukebox, now an overflowing cabinet that requires search bars and algorithmic aids to navigate. 

But my father’s relationship to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is so distilled and drawn out it makes me nostalgic of moments from my teenagedom when I first learned about the emotional liberation that music can provide. 

There’s that song in your life — my father’s, yours, mine — that yanks you back to the moment it most manifested itself into a memory. You end up revisiting it with a new lens, each time it re-enters your periphery. A new you, looking upon an older version of you with a different understanding and, hopefully, kindness.  

“When I can really just focus on this alone… we go along with the musician. And the time when we listened to this music,” dad muses. “You are all alone with the music, it rewinds everything, the past, the happy, the good, the hard times.” 

Lam Thuy Vo is a journalist who writes about inequality, technology and society. She's reported for BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America and NPR's Planet Money and told economic and political stories across the U.S. and across Asia. @lamthuyvo