Sometime in the summer of 1990, I was devastated by the news that
Jeannie Mai, a beautiful Eurasian French-Vietnamese singer, had just died. I really couldn't believe it. She was so young and so beautiful. Only 33 years of age, yet she was taken from us just like that.
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| Jeannie Mai (1957-1990) |
Many people don't know this, but the fact is Jeannie Mai for a time was actually my aunt. She was once my uncle Louie's wife. While in Vietnam, when she was still teenager, Jeannie Mai sang at my grandmother's nightclub, Au Ma Cabane. Supposedly, this was when Jeannie Mai and my Uncle Louie first met and developed a puppy love relationship between one another. I remember as a little kid I would constantly hear my mother and the rest of my aunts raving about what a beautiful and sweet girl Jeannie Mai was and how she would just light up the stage each night she sang at my grandmother's nightclub. I was just too young then to remember much. My mother would every now and then ask me if I remember how Jeannie Mai would always carry me around and people would ask if I was in fact her son. Perhaps that was because of the fact that both Jeannie Mai and myself had naturally curly hair and European facial features, Vietnamese people felt that we looked alike. But how could I remember her from back then? I must have been just two years old when all of that was happening. She left Vietnam in 1974 while she was just 17 years old for France. I remained in Vietnam until 1978.
It wasn't until 1982 that I would be reunited with Jeannie Mai again. It was at my grandmother's house in Westminster, California during a Christmas party. By this time, Jeannie Mai had resettled in the United States from France and she and my uncle Louie were then living together as a couple. Although they never had gotten officially married, they referred to each other as husband and wife and Auntie Mai, which was what I called her, addressed my grandmother as mom. It seemed as if everyone had already welcomed her into the family since they had known her for so long and that the day of their wedding inevitably would take place in only a matter of time. But that day never did come, as a few year later these two beautiful people whom I thought had made the most beautiful couple would break up. At that family Christmas party, when my mother and I first arrived Jeannie Mai was already there with my uncle. It was obvious she was really anxious to see what I looked like after all those years. I thought that was really sweet. When we were introduced, she threw her arms around me and said, "You've gotten really big. Pretty soon, you're going to be taller than me." It took me a few seconds to realize what she was saying because I kept staring at her. I just couldn't get over just how beautiful she was and how French she looked, yet Vietnamese was coming out of her mouth. I remember Jeannie Mai telling my mother just how I had gotten to look more and more like my father and that I didn't look at all Vietnamese. I thought to myself, "You're telling me."
Through the years that followed, I would see Auntie Mai every once in a while at one of our family's parties. Even though she and my uncle were no longer together, she still kept in touch with my family. On one particular occasion, Auntie Mai entertained the family playing the piano and singing to everyone. That would mark the first time I ever sang in front of an audience. She encouraged me to get up and sing with her while she played the piano to one of her signature songs,
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? I guess you can say that it was my Auntie Mai that was the first person who really put the thoughts into my head about one day becoming a singer.
The very last time I saw Auntie Mai was sometime in the summer of 1987. By then she was living in San Jose, married to an engineer with a baby boy. She had just gotten back from a successful tour in Australia with
Le Thu and
Huong Lan and had stopped by my grandmother's house to visit before catching a flight back to San Jose the next day. That was where she bumped into me and invited me to go to the mall with her. We spent the entire day at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California. We talked about a lot of things. I really enjoyed being around her. She was hip, very in touch with American culture, and spoke both English and French without an accent. I adored her. In fact, I'd have to say she was my favorite aunt. And then the next thing I knew, in 1990 she was dead.
Her premature death came as quite a shock to the Vietnamese community and her adoring fans. I had loved and known her on a personal level. Needless to say, her passing was a huge blow to me. There had been all kinds of vicious rumors about her death that ranged from her being murdered by her husband with the intentions of inheriting some enormous amount of life insurance money to her dying on the operating table during a liposuction procedure, when the truth was she had died after complications from some simple cosmetic surgery procedures she had done while she was in Hawaii. All it was was that she had gone in to get some minor work done on her eyes and nose and somehow the anesthesia was just too much for her to handle, therefor she died. I don't know why she would ever even think about getting cosmetic surgery because she was already naturally gorgeous. But for whatever reason, she did make that decision which unfortunately costed her her life. I can't help but to think, what if she hadn't, from time to time. I still miss her very much to this day.
Growing up without any brothers or sisters, I was fortunate to have found an adoptive family when I became a Vietnamese singer. This family consisted of brothers and sisters who were also singers and, of course, Amerasian as well. Jenny Trang was the first to welcome me into this family and to this day I still consider her as my sister. Others included Dai Trang, Luu Quoc Viet, Ngoc Anh, Randy, Thanh Ha, Lam Minh, Lilian, Cathy Dung, Y Linh and Hoang Dung, who actually could pass as a biological brother to me. 
