Kieu Thi Tu Trang
November 13, 1954 - July 14, 2024
Born in Ha Noi, Vietnam
Passed in Huntington Beach, California
This body is not me. I am not limited by this body.
I am life without boundaries.
I have never been born,
And I have never died.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Prelude
As she approached the first driveway, she slid off her tricycle and gingerly walked with the three-wheeled frame across the asphalt.
She made sure to look both ways, as she had always done before.
After arriving at the sidewalk curb ramp across the way, she positioned herself back on the tricycle and leisurely pedaled to the next driveway.
Within seconds as she entered into the street, steel grated steel in the barbaric dance that ends in catastrophe.
Would mere moments avoid this terrifying scene, or was her life fated by the tectonic forces that rend us from our flesh?
We cannot know; we only wonder.
She would have heard the booming crash of a Ford colliding with a Dodge Durango. In a split second, the Dodge Durango spun out of control and slammed into her tricycle, sending her several feet into the air.
She landed head first onto the asphalt, with her minute form eventually resting sideways, embracing the curb with the last of its momentum.
One hour later, she was transported to the nearest trauma center.
There, she would be pronounced deceased.
The time was 2:37pm on July 14th, 2024.
It was a Sunday.
Obituary
Kieu Thi Tu Trang was born in Ha Noi, Vietnam on November 13th, 1954 as the fifth of six children, and the youngest girl. As a young child, her favorite treats were Vietnamese desserts (ché), coconut water (nước dừa), fresh fruit (trái cây), and fruit smoothies (sinh tố). Her fondest memories were helping her family at the pharmacy that her mother owned and operated, where she began learning the early lessons of entrepreneurship.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Trang and her family escaped from Vietnam to Malaysia, as one of the many Vietnamese refugee boat people. From there, they would finally resettle in the United States in 1979. With the support of her family, Trang returned to school and received her B.S. in Civil Engineering from California State University, Long Beach.
During that time, Trang met her future husband, Dr. Le Quoc Khanh, through an introduction through her brother-in-law, Dr. Tran Van Cao. The two later married in 1983, and in 1984, their first child, Dorothy, was born. Trang supported her young family while her husband completed his medical re-training and U.S. residency at the University of California, Los Angeles.
At that point, Trang decided to pursue an opportunity to open a medical practice with her husband to serve the Spanish-speaking and Vietnamese community in Lawndale, California. After learning to speak Spanish, and once Dr. Le obtained his medical license, they opened their medical practice.
Trang and her husband purchased their first home in Huntington Beach, California, amongst the large Vietnamese-American community in Orange County. They welcomed their second child, Bryan, in 1989.
In 1990, Trang and Dr. Le decided to live closer to their clinic, by purchasing a home in Manhattan Beach, California. It was there that they raised their two children, who went to local elementary, middle and high schools. Over the many years, the medical practice grew successfully and evolved to offer no-cost and low-cost medical care to underserved populations, a collaborative partnership between Dr. Le’s compassionate and high-quality medical care and Trang’s business, marketing, and relationship-building with the clinic’s patients and the community.
Trang’s husband suffered a stroke in 1996, which left him paralyzed on his right side. Faced with financial hardship and needing to support her family, she decided to start a retail business. With determination, hard work, and entrepreneurial skills, she successfully opened a boutique shop using her family’s remaining savings, which brought in steady revenue to pay for the family’s expenses.
At the same time, Trang also partnered with her husband’s medical colleagues to continue keeping the medical practice open while he recovered. She worked hard with her husband to support his efforts to rehabilitate, and after three years, Dr. Le was able to return to the medical clinic to continue practicing medicine while Trang closed the boutique and restarted the clinic’s management and operations. Trang and Dr. Le would go on serving their community’s medical needs for the next 10 years while laying the foundation for their children’s future.
In 2010, Dr. Le passed away from a second stroke. Again, confronted with the challenge of supporting herself and her family financially without her husband, Trang partnered with one of her husband’s colleagues to manage both the Lawndale medical practice and her business partner’s practice in Westminster. At that point, she decided to invest in real estate to build the base for her future retirement and her family’s legacy.
Eventually, she sold the Manhattan Beach house in 2013 and purchased her last home in Huntington Beach, to be closer to her family, her real estate properties, and the beach. After a few years of long daily commutes to both her medical clinic and her business partner’s medical practice, Trang decided to retire, and focus her attention on managing and growing her real estate portfolio. In 2017, she became a grandmother after the birth of her first grandchild, Beatrice. And in 2022, she warmly welcomed her second grandchild, Daniel. She would go on to be a major and consistent presence in their lives, with the vision that she would impart her experience, knowledge, and wisdom to her beloved grandchildren.
Trang spent her remaining years pursuing activities she loved with youthful vigor - staying active by walking, biking, and strength training, spending time with immediate and extended family, caring for and cuddling her grandchildren, and visiting the ocean.
Kieu Thi Tu Trang passed away on July 14th, 2024. Her entrepreneurial spirit, unfaltering courage, and kind joyfulness will be forever cherished. Her legacy endures through her grandchildren, children, sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, and her greater extended family and community around her.
Aftermath
She heard a voice call out to her.
"Cô Trang! Cô Trang!"
She realized by the way the voice was addressing her that it must be one of her nieces or nephews.
"Where am I? What happened?" Her head ached and the surroundings were so murky, it was hard to focus. But the voice was strong and the pain atop her crown started to subside.
"Cô Trang, I'm so sorry, but you were in an accident. Two cars collided and you were hit by one while you were on your tricycle."
Really? She couldn't believe it. She was always so careful walking her tricycle across the street. Maybe her eldest sister was right to reprimand her for riding her tricycle on the sidewalks of such busy streets.
"So am I in the hospital? Oh no, I hope I'm not paralyzed! Where are my kids and the grandkids?"
The voice hesitated for a moment.
"Cô Trang, you passed away."
She was in shock. Why now? She went through her mental checklist of all the things that needed to get done that day -
grocery shopping, buying flowers, withdrawing money, calling her tenants. She even forgot to put the fermented cabbage back in the fridge. What about Dorothy and Bryan?
What would happen to all of that?
She hadn't even gotten a chance to say goodbye.
She wondered if she could go back into her body. But a brief vision showed that her body was already cold and lifeless in the coroner's office. She wasn't sure if she was ready.
"It's going to be okay. Here, let me help you."
The voice held out its ethereal hand. She gripped it hard, not knowing what was coming next.
"It's time. You don't want to stay here, Cô Trang."
The two paced forward. The hand briefly let go to point to a light. In the distance, she could see her brother-in-law, who had just passed a few months earlier.
"Oh! I suppose I truly am gone if he's here. Hello, Anh Cao. I guess I was wrong to say goodbye forever at your funeral."
She laughed. He smiled and waved back with one hand, the other arm behind his back.
As she approached the brilliant threshold, she saw her husband standing further back.
"Anh Khánh!"
She let go of the hand and ran to her husband.
"Hello, Em Trang, it's been a while. Almost fourteen years. I've been waiting."
The two embraced.
"Thank you for taking care of the kids in the meantime. It must have been hard for you."
She was glad to be able to keep that promise to her husband. And she had done everything she ever wanted to in life. Her affairs had been settled years earlier, so all was well.
She missed her husband dearly. She was back home.
"Before I go, there's one more thing I need to get done."
She held a vision of her children in her heart, asleep with their spouses. She called to them, whispering her secrets that she had held tight for so many years. She asked for their forgiveness, not so much for her sake, but for their own, so that they would not harbor a lifetime of pain for the human follies inevitable in every relationship between mother and child.
She told them how much she and her husband loved them with all their heart. They were so, so proud of the two of them. She explained that her children were everything and there was never a day that felt like a sacrifice as their mother. It was such an honor to raise two wonderful human beings and to have a chance to be with her grandchildren.
Later that day, she watched as the crematorial inferno lapped the casket, holding the body that had faithfully housed her vitality for nearly seven decades. Slowly, the wooden encasement yielded to the heat of the fire. The fabric of her áo dài wept in the flames, the conflagration searing flesh until the vapors departed, leaving blackened sinew. Soon, the char was enveloped in the blaze to give a skeletal form.
Eventually, even bone fell to the flame, becoming mere ash.
Before leaving one last time, she gave her children one last gift for their troubles. It would make a good story for them to tell the family.
She then grabbed her husband's hand. She looked back briefly to see the peace wash over her children, her nieces and nephews, her brothers and sisters, and her friends and community. And with that, she was at peace.
Together, they walked on through a lit doorway. Her brother-in-law, Bác Cao, closed the door behind them.
"Goodbye, forever."
Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn,
A bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp,
A phantom and a dream,
So is this fleeting world.
- Siddartha Gautama, The Buddha
