The Viet Kieu in America

LSO BY

GHIA

M. V

O AND FROM

ARLAND

The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975–1992

(2006)

The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment

in Communist Vietnam (2004)

The Viet Kieu

in America

Personal Accounts of Postwar

Immigrants from Vietnam

DITED BY

GHIA

M. V

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

IBRARY OF

ONGRESS

ATALOGUING

-P

UBLICATION

ATA

The Viet Kieu in America : personal accounts of postwar

immigrants from Vietnam / edited by Nghia M. Vo.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7864-4470-0
softcover : 50# alkaline paper

1. Vietnamese Americans — Social conditions.

2. Vietnamese

Americans — Cultural assimilation.

3. Refugees — United States —

History — 20th century.

4. Vietnamese Americans — Biography.

5. Refugees — United States — Biography.

6. Refugees — Vietnam —

Biography.

I. Vo, Nghia M., 1947–

E184.V53V53

2009

973'.00495922 — dc22

2009029677

British Library cataloguing data are available

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640

www.mcfarlandpub.com

To the Vietnamese-Americans and

Allied Forces who have fought

for freedom in Vietnam and to the

Vietnamese who have suffered in

silence under the communist regime.

This page intentionally left blank

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. P

EACE AND

1. The Lotus Pond

Nghia M. Vo

2. Remembering Saigon

Nghia M. Vo

3. The Vietnam War: Snapshots

Chat V. Dang

4. A Pilgrim

Nghia M. Vo

II. O

PPRESSION AND

SCAPE

5. My Life as a Zombie

Thien M. Ngo

6. Anatomy of an Escape

Theresa C. Trask

7. The Guava Tree

Anh Hai

8. The So-Called Reeducation Camp

Trong T. Ngo

9. The Lady in Black

Dieu Hien

101

10. A Second Chance

Chau Dinh An

110

11. The Wish

Thanh Cuc

119

12. My April

Thach N. Truong

127

III. S

TRUGGLE

, H

EALING AND

EMEMBRANCE

13. Shadow of the Past

Mai Lien

133

14. A Refugee’s Life

Hien V. Ho

138

15. Guam, the Transit Island

Nghia M. Vo

157

16. I Left My Heart in ... Saigon

Nghia M. Vo

165

17. April 30th

Thach N. Truong

173

vii

IV. T

RESENT

18. A Love Affair

Christina Vo

179

19. Little Saigon, Westminster, California

Nghia M. Vo

183

20. The Journey Home

Hieu V. Ho

191

21. On Searching

Christina Vo

195

22. On Being a Viet Kieu

Nghia M. Vo

199

Epilogue

208

Chapter Notes

217

Suggested Reading

225

Index

227

viii

ABLE OF

ONTENTS

Introduction

The Viet Kieu, or overseas Vietnamese, came to the United States

shortly after the end of the Vietnam War (1975). Within three short
decades, they have acquired social visibility through their hard work and
business dealings. They form large ethnic commercial enclaves in major
U.S. cities with their distinctive pho restaurants, nail salons, realty agen-
cies, food and video stores, as well as other businesses. They also make
their presence felt in the computer and ﬁnancial industries. Nguyen,
Pham, Le, Tran and so on are ubiquitous names in telephone directo-
ries. While many hold doctoral degrees in sciences and medicine from
U.S. universities, some have entered the show business, political, and
sports arenas. Although a few Vietnamese-Americans have been elected
state representatives in California and Texas, Anh Cao on December 7,
2008, became the ﬁrst to be elected to the U.S. Congress by defeating
the nine-term incumbent William J. Jefferson in a district that is 60 per-
cent black.

The purpose of this book is to retrace the lives of some of these

immigrants — the second largest refugee group in the U.S.— from the
war-torn Vietnam to the peaceful U.S. with the goal of understanding
the reasons for their presence in this country. Although no two lives are
similar, they all share many representative features that will be discussed
throughout this book and especially in the chapter “On Being a Viet
Kieu.”

Although they arrived as war refugees — the largest diaspora in mod-

ern history — the fact that they came in different ways, by different routes
and at different periods gives their experiences a varied and complex

ﬂavor. Some arrived by sea and others by air; some in 1975 and others
in the 1990s. Some came straight from Vietnam right after the war while
others languished for years in concentration camps or Asian refugee
camps; some encountered minimal problems during their escapes while
others faced insurmountable ordeals before landing in the U.S. and other
western countries. Though the basic causes of their escapes — commu-
nist oppression, loss of human rights and religious freedom, economic
loss — were similar, each experience was unique.

In this book, the Viet Kieu describe their personal experiences of

the war, their old country, their escape, and their new American homes.
They share details of their lives — some intimate, others banal — as they
look back at the two decades of war in Vietnam and the three decades
they have spent in this country. Past remembrances differ from one per-
son to another. Some talk mostly about the past while others focus essen-
tially on the present. The common thread is the repercussions of the long
and tumultuous war on their lives up until now. They have either wit-
nessed or experienced different phases of the war and post-war years:
(1) peace and war in Vietnam; (2) oppression that led them to escape;
(3) laborious struggles in the new lands while trying to heal their wounds;
and (4) the present. The book is therefore divided into these four main
sections. Some overlap in the histories is inevitable.

Some of the people in this book were ofﬁcers in the Armed Forces

of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), some were artists and doctors who
went through the daunting post-war reeducation camps, while others
were housewives and middle-aged women who suffered throughout the
war and made new lives in the U.S. One was a midwife. One person was
born after the war (“A Love Affair”). The majority come from South and
central Vietnam. These are people from all walks of life. Their experi-
ences form a kaleidoscope through which we can analyze their views and
feelings about the society they lived in. Although their perspectives vary,
they offer a rare view of a cross section of the Viet Kieu population.
Their insights allow us to look at a group of immigrants who differ in
opinions and views, but have in common an attachment to the old coun-
try and their presence in the United States.

Although some books have described the Viet Kieu as a group, none

so far has dealt with particular individuals from the time they lived in
Vietnam until they have ﬁrmly settled in the United States. No one has

NTRODUCTION

previously looked at this group of people through the various stages of
their lives from the 1950s peacetime in South Vietnam to their present
life in the United States. The Viet Kieu in America is designed to ﬁll that
void. Who are they?

Viet Kieu is a term that began to be used by the Hanoi government

some three decades ago to label in a derisive way those who escaped
abroad. As the refugees gradually became academically and economi-
cally successful while the Hanoi government was mired in regional wars
with Cambodia and China, poverty, corruption, and isolation, percep-
tions began to change. The Viet Kieu have sent back medicine and money
(more than $3 billion in 2007) to their relatives in Vietnam and have
indirectly boosted the country’s economy. When they returned to Viet-
nam in the early 1990s, they brought with them knowledge and money.
They were envied by the local people who, in the meantime, had suf-
fered through two decades of economic crisis and political upheaval
under the communist system. From defeated people trying to get out of
the country in rickety boats, the Viet Kieu became “rich uncles, savvy
investors, entrepreneurs, or knowledgeable people.” From that time
onward, mainland Vietnamese desired to be associated with the Viet
Kieu, who became the mirror through which they saw the free world,
especially the United States.

These are the voices of some of these immigrants who within a short

period were transported from their war-torn land to peaceful countries.
Changes in their social conditions and needs during the past three decades
are also documented. If in the beginning they had to deal with the trauma
of the war and post-war years and reeducation camps, they now talk
about investment, empowerment, social issues and divorces.

After 1975, men (and some women) associated with the Saigon gov-

ernment (Republic of Vietnam) were sent to the so-called reeducation
camps. These were actually concentration camps designed to incarcer-
ate, brainwash, torture, and suppress this southern elite or ruling class
with the goal of completing on the social level the military conquest of
the rebellious South. These were communist Vietnam’s Auschwitz camps,
more than a thousand of them spread out from the South to the North.
There were more reeducation camps than schools: over 600 district reed-
ucation camps, more than 100 provincial camps and more than 20
national camps.

There were military and civilian camps depending on

whether they were run by the military or civilians. Military camps were

Introduction

especially designed for “political” inmates (army ofﬁcers, soldiers, gov-
ernment ofﬁcials, politicians) while the remaining people were channeled
through civilian camps.

Northern military camps were far worse than southern camps as far

as discipline or length of incarceration was concerned (“The Guava Tree,”
“A Second Chance”). Northern camp inmates were not allowed to meet
with their relatives until the third year of their incarceration. A few were
released after ﬁve years while the rest lingered in the camps from six to
25 years.

They included high-ranking military and civilian ofﬁcials:

ofﬁcers from captains or above and cabinet members, senators, politi-
cians, lawyers, and other professionals. Many inmates died in these camps
because of brutal mistreatment–torture, harsh conﬁnement, starvation,
and lack of medical care and medicine. Southern camps were reserved
for low-level ofﬁcers and soldiers who did not pose a direct threat to the
government (“The So-called Reeducation Camp,” “My Life as a Zom-
bie”). Although the exact number of inmates has yet to be released, it
ranges from a few hundred thousand to more than a million. If the major-
ity have released early on, about 343,000 people received the full harsh
concentration-type incarceration.

Treatment varied from camp to camp and ultimately was the deci-

sion of the camp commander or most likely the political cadre, the pow-
erful representative of the communist party. Therefore anyone caught
escaping could be shot to death in one camp but only severely punished
in another. Overall, the treatment was repressive and brutal: those who
did not comply with the rules were in a sense doomed. Their “disap-
pearance or death” for unknown reasons (“A Second Chance”) resulted
in many undocumented deaths in these camps. Their families were only
notiﬁed many years down the road or not all. This explains the thou-
sands of ofﬁcers still unaccounted for on the South Vietnamese side.
Sadly, no one cared about this fact for they were on the losing side.
Besides brainwashing and brutal labor-type work, inmates were also
starved to death.

Their food ration consisted in general of two bowls of

rice or its equivalent a day. They supplemented their diet with whatever
they could catch or grab: tree roots, berries, snakes, insects, lizards, rats,
worms and so on. This unusual and exotic diet caused many of them to
die from poisoning or intoxication.

During the incarceration period, women struggled to keep their

families aﬂoat and thus became the sole breadwinners. They peddled

NTRODUCTION

anything from food products to furniture, jewelry, and motorbikes in
order to survive. They tracked down their husbands, who were usually
incarcerated in remote areas, and visited with them in their jailed camps.
While many patiently waited for their return (“My Life as a Zombie,”
“The Guava Tree”), others, unable to handle the stressful situation,
moved on with their lives.

After their release, inmates were stripped of their citizenship and

watched closely by the local police to whom they had to report daily.
This was the ultimate blow to their pride for after suffering years of
incarceration and indoctrination, they felt they were discarded by the
wayside. Many developed mood changes, irritability, anger, nightmares,
and depression that follows them until this day. These were signs of Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that were noted in war combatants
or inmates incarcerated in communist jails (“The Guava Tree”). Many
immediately or soon afterwards planned their escape. Staying put meant
accepting in a fatalistic way whatever the repressive communist regime
imposed on them: loss of citizenship, jobs, homes, and even expulsion
to the new economic zones (NEZ).

Escaping abroad became one way

to deny the communists any control over their bodies and minds, to
regain their pride and to maintain their sanity.

Escaping was, however, neither easy nor without danger. That the

former prisoners were willing to face untold dangers to escape oppres-
sion spoke volumes about their yearning for freedom. “Give me freedom
or give me death” seemed to be their motto at the time. After more or
less harrowing trips, they landed in western countries and the U.S. after
staying for various lengths of time in substandard refugee camps in
Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and other southeastern Asian countries.

They left behind a few monuments to commemorate landing in these
host countries as well as to honor those who had died at sea during their
escapes. In a wicked move and with the goal of erasing all traces of the
diaspora, the Hanoi government in 2005 pressured the Indonesian and
Malaysian governments to destroy the commemorative monuments on
the islands of Galang and Bidong. So far, the Galang monument has been
destroyed.

Surviving the diaspora and becoming economically independent in

western countries has been the proudest achievement of the Viet Kieu.
They have done it in less than three decades. Their successes have pos-
itively impacted American society as well as communist Vietnam. They

Introduction

have sent about $3 billion each year to help their relatives back home
and to invest in Vietnam. They get involved not only in commercial
ventures but also in various humanitarian projects through cultural, reli-
gious and medical organizations. In the U.S., they pride themselves on
having among their ranks a National Football League player in Dallas,
a few Rhodes Scholars in England, a NASA astronaut, a college student
who has received seven degrees at MIT in ﬁve years, a CEO of a large
electronics ﬁrm in Silicon Valley, another CEO at a Fortune 500 ﬁnan-
cial company, a New York hotel owner who gave $1 million to the 9/11
victims and so on. They are also proud of a refugee who came to the
U.S. in 1980 and began selling Vietnamese sandwiches during lunchtime
from a converted truck in California in 1981. He became so successful
that he opened a Lee Sandwiches store that blossomed into a full-ﬂedged
company. He presently owns 25 sandwich stores and 500 sandwich
trucks in California and Arizona. He teamed up with his partner to
donate $1 million to Coastline Community College toward the goal of
building a college dedicated to teaching English and technology in West-
minster, California. And the list of achievers goes on and on. While
some are big-time achievers, others who have met with moderate suc-
cess have contributed their time, money, and effort to other Viet Kieu
less fortunate than they.

If they are successful ﬁnancially, they also have their personal prob-

lems: their lives began to unravel because of social issues like love, money,
rights, and gender equality. Problems that have been left sitting on the
back burner while they struggled for ﬁnancial stability re-emerge anew
and have to be dealt with. Rifts that were barely visible became huge
eyesores.

Women who have previously been homemakers tucked inside their

kitchens and told to serve their husbands and children have become wage
earners and emerge out of their houses asking for rights and gender
equality.

They crack open the emancipation door and run away in droves.

From taboo topics, divorces and remarriages have become mainstream
topics in the Vietnamese community abroad. Housewives who have usu-
ally been shy and reserved about sharing their private lives have become
more open and have volunteered their thoughts. Women who have never
witnessed divorces previously have gone through series of divorces and
remarriages themselves: one “Catholic” lady is presently going through
her third divorce, all of them in the U.S. Marital bonds that have been

NTRODUCTION

tight in the old country have loosened dramatically in the United States.
If in Vietnam men tend to be polygamous because of tradition, in the
U.S. women feel freer and either have boyfriends or remarry easily.
Employment outside the home has freed many of them: ﬁnancially sta-
ble, they divorce their mates on the ﬁrst occasion. Other problems — jobs,
money, social standings, and children — have also torn these marital
bonds apart. A woman who would never have thought about divorcing
her husband in the old country would now look down on him if he earns
less money, is less qualiﬁed, or is socially inferior to her. Having lost
their male attractiveness, husbands are easily discarded.

Faithfulness and

duty, which have been important virtues of women in Vietnam, have
been replaced by rights and divorce abroad.

This is not to say that virtues have been totally discarded by the

wayside. On the contrary, many spouses have remained faithful to their
mates. In this series, two women waited 12 and three years respectively
for their husbands to return from concentration camps: they continued
to live with and care for them long afterwards (“The Guava Tree,” “My
Life as a Zombie”). What needs to be stressed is that changes are under
way. The old Confucian values they have shared in the past have been
forcefully assaulted by the war, western values, greed, money, and so on.
The extent of damages caused by these forces will not be known until
the dust has ﬁnally settled. What is certain is that traditional values will
prevail to a certain degree, though to what extent is unknown at the
present time.

The social fabric of the Viet Kieu community tends to parallel the

society they live in. A recent study showed that 18 percent of U.S. men
ages 40 to 44 with less than four years of college have never been mar-
ried, up from 6 percent a quarter-century ago. This is thought to be
related to increasing female economic independence and the greater
acceptance of couples living together outside of marriage.

Many young

women Viet Kieu feel free to pursue their careers even after marriage
whereas they wouldn’t have three decades earlier. While Loan Chau’s
father escaped successfully from Vietnam in 1979 after spending four
years in reeducation camps, she, then six years of age, and her mother
were caught during another escape attempt. Her mother landed in jail
and she grew up in Vietnam. She moved to the U.S. in 1991, acquired a
degree in Information and Management Systems and became a singer
and entertainer. She continued her singing career after marrying a den-

Introduction

tist and fellow Viet Kieu.

Singer Tran Thu Ha, 22, born and raised in

Hanoi after the war, came to the U.S. in 2002 during an entertainment
tour, married a Viet Kieu born in the U.S. two years later and contin-
ued her singing career.

The end of the war was associated with a downhill slide for men

and women in South Vietnam, which basically became a large prison
camp. No country had ever enslaved its own citizens as ruthlessly and
shamelessly and on such a scale as North Vietnam did — except maybe
communist Russia, China, North Korea and Cuba. What the Viet Kieu
had endured was beyond belief: incarceration in concentration camps,
torture, starvation, forced indoctrination, strict police monitoring, loss
of citizenship and property, escape and retraining in western countries,
nightmares, stress disorders, and loss of self-esteem and self-worth for
men, and loss of material and moral support, rapes, beatings and mur-
ders by pirates, and sorrows and nightmares for women.

The road to freedom has been paved with torrents of tears, sea-

deep sorrows, and mountains of physical and moral hardships. The only
choice was to escape abroad in order to get away from the vindictive-
ness of the communists. Two million people ﬂed Vietnam during the
1975–1995 diaspora and many more would have taken a similar path had
they had the ﬁnancial or physical means. A joke at that time dramati-
cally described that pathologic experience: if lampposts had legs, they
too would have escaped from Ho’s paradise. It turned out to be the largest
sea diaspora ever recorded in world history.

The defeated, disillusioned and depressed Viet Kieu eventually

landed on western countries’ shores only to emerge three decades later
as a strong economic and political force that challenged the Hanoi com-
munist government. This book is about some of the people who have
survived death and despair in their country and built a new and brighter
life for themselves and their families on foreign soils. Being a Viet Kieu
is therefore synonymous to surviving the oppressive red tide regime and
to rising free, unbound, and successful like a phoenix.

Andrew Lam summarized it well when he wrote: “For though the

story of how you suffered, how you lost your home, your loved ones and
how you triumphed is not new, it must always be told.... It is the only
light we ever have against the overwhelming darkness.”

This collection of oral histories, although small, documents the lives

of a group of refugees from their homeland to their adoptive country.

NTRODUCTION

They have become wanderers of the world, having established them-
selves in more than 50 different countries. Were it not for the mother
tongue that remains the vital link between the Viet Kieu, they would
not have understood each other. This book also details the progressive
social changes these immigrants experienced in America. Although some
of them have shed their Confucian beliefs and embraced western ways,
others have remained fairly conservative. The fact that they have come
to the United States within a deﬁnite period of time from 1975 to 1995
makes it easy for researchers to study them as a fairly homogenous group
like no other immigrant group in the U.S. in the past.

Finally, I would like to thank all participants for sharing their per-

sonal experiences, joys, pains, failures, and successes. Their contribu-
tions to the study of the Vietnamese culture and society in general and
of the Viet Kieu in particular are invaluable.

The story “A Second Chance” has been adapted from the news of

the Voice of America.

Introduction

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I. P

EACE AND

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The Lotus Pond

Nghia M. Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: Life in the bucolic sea resort of Vung Tau evokes the

quiet times of the early 1950s when the Catholic and French colonial
culture intersected with the local Vietnamese Buddhist culture. This
was the time of peace and prosperity before the rumbles of war.

Ba Ria, my grandparents’ hometown, was in the 1950s a small tran-

sit town no one would have ever heard of had it not been situated in a
strategic position between Saigon, the bustling capital of South Vietnam,
and the seaside resort of Vung Tau. Buses loaded with passengers and
belongings that bulged from its backside and rooftop made many daily
trips between the two cities. They stopped every ten or ﬁfteen minutes
to pick up or drop off new passengers. Tilting heavily on one side or
another under its cumbersome load, they sputtered through the crowded
streets of downtown Ba Ria. In the process, they generated a lot of
noise — helpers yelled or banged on the bus door to signal the driver to
stop or move on — and left a trail of black diesel smoke behind them.
They frequently made a ten-minute stop at the transportation center
close to the market where they disgorged people, belongings, and at times
live poultry destined for sale at the local market.

The Vietnamese Smile

The ten-minute stop could, however, become a half-hour stop

depending upon the circumstances. In a land where rice and food had

always been plentiful and where peace had been present for some time,
the South Vietnamese tended to take it easy and enjoy life. They took
their time and dragged their feet because there was no pressure to com-
plete any task. Work, although necessary in life, was never intended to
be a goal in itself. Celebrations took precedent over other matters and
people competed against each other to throw parties to entertain their
guests. And there were plenty of reasons to celebrate: weddings, engage-
ments, births, deaths, promotions, and new acquisitions besides the reg-
ular holidays. Time in this environment became “elastic” and punctuality
is not a recognized Vietnamese virtue.

Passengers who were left sitting on the parked buses in one hundred-

degree heat without air conditioning might get angry and demand an
explanation. The driver’s assistant, while apologizing for the delay, would
state he was waiting for a few passengers or a shipment that had not yet
arrived. He would promise the bus would leave “soon.” That remark was
punctuated by either a big smile or a smirk. The Vietnamese smiled fre-
quently.

The smile, however, does not have any sarcastic meaning as else-

where in the world. Intended to deﬂect the attention away from any
embarrassing situation, it often inﬂamed the anger and irritation of west-
erners who perceived the inappropriate behavior as an insult. The Viet-
namese smiled not only when they were happy, but also when they were
sad or ambivalent about something. They smiled because as straightfor-
ward people they could not ﬁb very well and were often at a loss for words
to explain their complex feelings. They also smiled when they were caught
in an embarrassing situation. Unable to produce an adequate explana-
tion for what they had done right or wrong or to express the deep regret
they felt, they just awkwardly smiled. This is known as a “sorry-smile,”
a unique Vietnamese trait that has been misunderstood by westerners
and Vietnamese alike. On the other hand, if they did not smile, they
could become angry or answer in a blunt manner in order to protect the
deep emotions they experienced. For beneath this smile or bluntness ran
a wealth of often complex if not contradictory feelings or emotions.

My Grandparents’ Home

My grandparents, who moved to Vung Tau in the early 1940s,

bought a two-acre orchard planted with longan trees — Vung Tau’s lon-

I. P

EACE AND

gans are known in the country for their sweetness and texture. My grand-
father, however, passed away shortly after the purchase. The orchard
turned out to be a good investment for the future and stability of the
family, since my grandmother, a housewife with at most an elementary
education, did not work. Women were not allowed to go to school in
the 1920s and 1930s and without education, they could not get a decent
job. The orchard therefore provided the family with a steady source of
income, though it was not big enough to feed a large family year round.

They also bought a townhouse — a colonial import — with running

water and electricity, which was rather uncommon in the countryside at
the time. I still remember that house, which was located about a mile
away from the orchard. It was the ﬁrst of a row of seven one-story brick
houses. It was divided into three almost equal sections: a family room,
a bedroom, and a kitchen area with a bathroom. The front door opened
directly into the family room that contained a hutch and a dining table
as well as a ﬁve-foot tall altar made of ﬁne black wood and encrusted
with lacquered designs.

On top of the altar was the picture of a handsome man I wished I

knew: my grandfather. He passed away before I had the chance to meet
him. On the side of the picture were two brass candleholders, an incense
holder, a gong, and a brass plate with fruit offerings. Once a week my
grandmother brought bananas, mangoes, or other fruit depending on the
season, lit up a few incenses, beat the gong a few times, and mumbled
prayers after bowing many times in front of the picture. I understood
that this was “ancestor worship”

through which the living conveyed

their respects and debt to the deceased and kept the relatives’ soul happy
in the other world (ben kia the gioi). In return, the appeased soul would
protect the family from disaster or unhappy circumstances. It has been
said that if a soul was not cared for properly through that worship, it
could become an angry ghost and hurt the family.

The whole family slept in the middle room on three seven-by-

ﬁve-feet dark-brown, wooden divans. Instead of a mattress, a straw mat
was spread over the hard wooden surface that remained cool and was
therefore very inviting in the hot summer weather, but was deﬁnitely
cold and unfriendly during winter. At night each person was required
to hang up his or her own mosquito net, which would have to be folded
back and taken down each morning. Without exception, everyone went
through the same routine every day. Life thus became a monotonous

1. The Lotus Pond (Vo)

routine that was necessary in order to ﬁght against the buzzing and blood-
thirsty mosquitoes. They were so hungry that they would dart to any
unprotected skin and caused sharp and painful bites that swelled into
red raised lesions or could lead to severe chronic malaria or Dengue
fever.

The back room of the townhouse consisted of a bathroom, kitchen

and dining room and led to a small enclosed courtyard. Cooking was
done with charcoal or wood. Smoke would ﬁll up the kitchen area and
darken its walls. Since refrigeration was not frequently used at the time,
my grandmother, like other housewives, would go to the market every
day to get fresh food, meat and vegetables with cooking done daily.

The Confucian Family

According to Confucian rules

that were ingrained in the psyche of

the Vietnamese and were a relic of past Chinese inﬂuence (111

.–939

.), the society is patriarchal in nature. The wife should be obedient

to her husband. He provides for her needs and she faithfully serves him.
Should the husband die, his wife would faithfully raise the children,
especially her eldest son who in the absence or death of the father rep-
resented the authority in the family.

Family ties in a Confucian world

were vital to the stability of the society; back then, no one dared to chal-
lenge these two-millennia old rules unless he was willing to be ostra-
cized.

The family was a miniature society with its often unwritten rules,

regulations, and etiquettes. It is structured on many generations. As long
as they were alive, grandparents, parents, children, uncles, aunts, and
cousins were all part of the family. Everyone knew his or her own place
in this “extended family,” for respect for the elders was de rigueur in this
hierarchical society. They occupied the best place at the table and were
cared for until their death. They were often served ﬁrst and given the
best portions of the meals. The family concept took precedent over the
individual, as evidenced by the fact that the Vietnamese and Chinese
family names (contrary to western rules) came ﬁrst followed by the mid-
dle then the ﬁrst names. People therefore addressed themselves by their
titles and ﬁrst names, like Mr. Paul, Ms. Mary, or Dr. Bill rather than
by their last names.

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EACE AND

Life at the Farm

I spent a couple of years with my grandmother in the simple coun-

tryside and quiet atmosphere of Vung Tau. She ﬁrst lived at the town-
house but later moved to the house at the orchard and rented out the
townhouse to weekenders. The stay at the farm gave me a unique expe-
rience without which I would never have known what country life was
like. Since there was no running water at the farm, rainwater was col-
lected during the rainy season and stored in huge earthen jars that sat
on the side of the house. During the dry season, workers were hired to
carry water from the nearby well to ﬁll up the jars. Because the water sat
idle for a long time, it served as an ideal breeding ground for a swarm
of mosquitoes. Geckos — up to six or seven-inches long — used to crawl
on the walls and made their presence felt by making their characteristic
noises: Cac Ke ... Cac Ke ... Cac Ke.... Outside, hens warned us in the
morning they had laid their eggs with their Cu Tac ... Ca Tac ... Cu Tac
... calls. I knew it was time to run out and collect them.

The orchard had about 40 to 50 longan trees as well as a few papaya

and guava trees. The 20-to-30-foot-high trees produced ﬂowers in spring
then small longans that had to be covered until maturity. Ladders were
used to reach the outermost branches where the clusters were the most
difﬁcult to cover. Workers peeled back the proximal leaves and carefully
shoved the clusters of longans into straw bags. They then tied the neck
of the bags to prevent bats from coming in contact with the fruits. Bats
came out at dusk, made rapid circles above the trees, then dropped on
their targets. They loved the juicy longans and could wipe out a whole
tree in a couple of nights thereby greatly diminishing the harvest. Work-
ers had to work fast for two to three weeks to prevent the destructive
behavior of the hungry bats. Everyone would rest for the next two to
three months during which the fruits matured.

At the end of the summer, the air was ﬁlled with the fruity aroma

of ripe longans. Grandmother would check whether they were ready for
harvest. She would undo the straw tie and widen the neck of the bag
before carefully pulling it back, making sure not to pull on the fruits
themselves. At harvest time, workers broke the branches holding the
bags and carefully passed them down to grandma. She opened the heav-
ily loaded bags, pulled out the ripe longans and with great care set them
aside. I remember the excitement in her voice, the sound of “uh ... ah”

1. The Lotus Pond (Vo)

escaping from her lips as an expression of pleasure at the sight of the
golden and ripe longans. She handled them with extreme gentleness as
longans attached to their stalks were more valuable than loose ones. Ripe
fruits were covered with a thin yellow-pinkish skin, which once peeled,
let a sweet juicy liquid ﬂow out. The trick was to catch the juice before
it spilled all over one’s shirt. The fruit was then dropped into one’s mouth
while the tongue was used to separate the soft velvety meat from its
brown seed. It was time to spit out the seed and to enjoy the succulent
meat. I loved longans’ sweet and juicy taste and could never resist the
temptation to sample them, although over-sampling did result in indi-
gestion or stomach cramps.

Wholesale buyers came to the orchard to bargain. They bought

large quantities of fruits and took them to the market for resale. Within
two to three weeks, the harvest was completed and it was time for the
clean up. The straw bags were left to dry in the sun then stored away so
they could be reused next season.

Weekends at the Beach

Vung Tau exhibited the simple and quiet atmosphere and the charm

of a small town. It has two beaches: bai truoc (front) and bai sau (back).
The two-mile long bai truoc was bordered by row after row of hundred-
year-old palm and pine trees that gave it shade and protection from the
hot tropical sun and an atmosphere of year-round greenery. It was bor-
dered by a large mountain on the right side and a smaller one on the
left. It was always crowded, especially on weekends because it was part
of the town itself. The bai sau was remotely situated on the other side
of the smaller mountain. It was less crowded and cleaner than the bai
truoc. Without foliage, it did not provide any protection from the sun.

The countryside peacefulness was shattered every weekend by the

inﬂux of thousands of Saigonese who suddenly doubled or tripled the
town’s population. Demands for room, food, and entertainment sky-
rocketed and usually exceeded local capacity. Housewives — my grand-
mother included — put their houses up for rent. They went to the beach
every Friday afternoon to look for their own customers.

Visitors paraded their cars around town and drove aimlessly along

the usually deserted roads. Cars and motorcycles that were rarely seen

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EACE AND

during weekdays appeared out of nowhere. Bumper to bumper trafﬁc
was common especially on beach roads. Vroom... Vroom.... Drivers fought
for the right of way as they negotiated the narrow streets amidst heavy
trafﬁc. Yells, screams, laughs were heard everywhere. The beach sud-
denly became crowded, noisy, and bright with lights and sounds. Street
vendors descended in swarms on the beach peddling all kinds of food.
Spicy braised shrimp, boiled clams, and especially salty roasted crabs
were offered along with the ubiquitous roasted dried squids that were
consumed with hot hoisin sauce. Loud music could be heard hundreds
of yards away. After the lively Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday morn-
ing peace descended on the town as one by one the “strangers” packed
up and departed, leaving behind tons of garbage. It was time for grand-
mother to clean up the house, put everything back in order, and get ready
for next week’s guests.

My memories of my grandmother are still very strong. Like other

Vietnamese women, she enjoyed chewing betel leaves and areca nut
mixed with a little tobacco. During social gatherings, as guests chatted
about their families and businesses, she would offer them betel leaves and
areca nuts. The mixture was supposed to give them an “aphrodisiac”
feeling. They then spat the red liquid into a jar or sometimes onto the
ground, which when stepped on would stick to the soles of shoes like
gel.

The Shrine of the Whale

I also remember the time I went to the dinh, a large community

hall about two-and-a-half miles from the orchard. Four gilded dragons,
one in each corner, decorated the curved roofs of the dinh where all the
county’s activities took place. A whale that had beached and died the
night before gave the villagers an occasion to celebrate since it is unusu-
ally rare for a whale to beach close to the village. According to traditions
borrowed from the Chams centuries ago, villagers would pay their last
respects to the Ca Ong (King of the Fish) so that the spirits inhabiting
the ﬁsh would help ﬁshermen in their business. The Chams

were a Hin-

duized civilization that ﬂourished in present-day central Vietnam
between the 7th and 15th centuries

. The Vietnamese, being selec-

tive, had adapted this foreign tradition and made it their own. Not as

1. The Lotus Pond (Vo)

adept in seafaring as the Chams, they kept this tradition hoping whales
would protect their ﬁshermen from the perils of the sea.

Monks dressed in saffron robes presided over the unprecedented

ceremony. There were the usual offerings of fruits, ﬂowers, and food that
seemed to be more abundant than usual. I stood there in awe looking at
the large plates of plump grapefruits, tropical green oranges, juicy lon-
gans, purple mangosteens, and spiny and suspiciously smelly durians.
My eyes opened wide at the view of the graceful pink and white lotuses,
yellow-gold chrysanthemums, and deep-red gladioli that were carefully
arranged in gigantic earthen vases. A haze of lingering smoke emanated
from the hundreds of lit incense sticks and candles. The villagers had
brought home-made sticky rice cakes along with a variety of vegetarian
dishes as offerings to Buddha and the spirit of the Ca Ong. The food was
later served along with drinks to all the guests.

The whale looked so huge that I was afraid of getting close to it.

Although it was dead, it still looked frightening with its large, hazy eyes
and its massive weight resting on a row of tables set up in the middle of
the dinh. Never before had I seen such a large ﬁsh. I remember wonder-
ing how the villagers could have transported such a huge mammal from
the beach to this place, especially through narrow, winding countryside
roads. Nor did I know how they would dispose of it. The town must
have mobilized all the villagers just to lift the whale off the beach. I only
found out years later that they had disposed of the ﬂesh but kept its
skeleton stored in huge glass cases in the Lang Ca Ong (Shrine of the
Whale). Vung Tau could then boast of having one of the few shrines in
South Vietnam dedicated to the “cult of the whale” where visitors could
come and revere this ﬁshermen’s savior.

On another occasion, Hat Boi was also performed at the dinh. These

were traditional Vietnamese musical plays during which classic themes
were rehashed: good versus evil, sages versus demons. Characters with
given superhuman features engaged in fantastic adventures during which
they tried to prove their moral greatness against evil creatures or devi-
ous people. The actors and actresses dressed in traditional multicolored
costumes carried swords and spears with ﬂags sticking out of pockets sewn
to their backs. The heavy make-up they wore not only gave away the
role they played but also conveyed their own emotions. For example, a
strong and valiant prince always had his face painted in red with dark
black eyelashes and a long silky beard. To the rhythm of traditional musi-

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EACE AND

cal instruments such as cymbals, gongs, tambourines, and ﬂutes, the
actors would retell familiar stories while gesticulating and moving
around. Each gesture or facial expression was symbolic and full of his-
torical meaning. These musical plays were magical and grandiose and
drew audiences from near and far. I remember how fascinated I was by
the display of colorful costumes, the facial expressions, armaments, and
movements of actors and actresses. I especially loved the plays in which
the good characters always won over the evil ones and I would ask my
grandmother to take me to see the next play.

Colonial Education

I lived in two worlds: one of Vietnamese tradition and the other

made from remnants of French colonialism, which in the late 1950s coex-
isted uneasily before ﬁnally giving way to a predominant Vietnamese
society. The Europeans came to Southeast Asia looking for spices and
trade and for an access route to China as early as the 16th century. Oth-
ers used the occasion to proselyte and teach Catholicism. At ﬁrst, the
Vietnamese kings and emperors looked away and tolerated them with
some uneasiness. Believing they were sons of Heaven and in their man-
date as emperors, they did not feel threatened by the inﬁdels. However,
as the inﬂuence of the priests grew, uneasiness turned into suspicion, then
fear; at the urging of the mandarins (high court ofﬁcials), the kings shut
down all doors and contacts, trying to keep foreign inﬂuence at bay. The
self-imposed isolation kept them in their backwardness and away from
modern technological advances that could help improve the welfare of
the people. Economic and cultural stagnation soon led to the downfall
of the feudal monarchy in the face of foreign invasion.

While living in Vung Tau, I ﬁrst attended a grammar school man-

aged by a French schoolmistress — a relic of French colonization. Look-
ing back, I remember a rainy day in October when my grandmother
unexpectedly showed up at the school with a raincoat for me. The teacher
called me over to pick it up. Although thankful for her gesture, I was
embarrassed because of all the parents it had to be MY own grandmother
who showed up with a raincoat. I did not know how to deal with the
situation and mumbled something the teacher could not understand. A
big and loud “Thank you, Grandma” might have helped. The shy, soft,

1. The Lotus Pond (Vo)

and lacking-warmth words I uttered did not, however, satisfy the teacher
who sent me to the back room to sit in for the rest of the day. As I was
not very adventurous, I had not explored the back of the building. I
knew vaguely that there was a storage area but did not realize its real use.
There, to my big surprise, I found many other students who were also
“serving time” for various reasons. Amazingly, I wound up spending an
interesting day in the back room and never enjoyed school that much.
We made airplanes out of paper and threw them into the air. We were
free to do anything we wished except make noise. The teacher, who was
always in the front room busy taking care of the “good” students, rarely
set foot in the back room.

As I came home from school one day, I noticed a beautiful young

lady sitting in the living room of our townhouse polishing her nails.
Since I did not know what this stranger was doing in our house, I went
to the back and asked my grandmother. She told me the lady was vaca-
tioning while waiting for her husband to pick her up. For a few days, I
had a wonderful time with her. The lady, despite not being my mother,
took me to the market and bought me toys, the delight of any child.
There was nothing fancy, although I appreciated her care and warmth.
She took me to the beach and let me swim in its warm waters while she
read magazines. There was no question I missed her a lot when she left.
It was only later that I thought what I missed was a real mother like her.

I did not realize until years later that I was involved in a swap. My

uncle and one aunt went to live with my mother in Saigon to further
their schooling (there were no French high schools in Vung Tau), and
in order to cut down on her workload — she had ﬁve children — she sent
me to Vung Tau to stay with my grandmother. So for two school years,
I lived apart from my parents and siblings. It never came to my mind to
ask my mother why she singled me out for the swap because I knew she
did the right thing and I really enjoyed living in the countryside during
all this time. This period actually gave me another insight as to what life
was all about.

The following year, I went to study with the sisters at the St.

Bethany convent. As in any Catholic institution, the beginning and the
end of the day were devoted to prayers. Overall, the sisters were good
teachers and I enjoyed studying with them. But I always thought they
were best at making money. Since they knew very well that students
could not resist sweet temptations, they brought out all kinds of candies

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EACE AND

and cookies to sell to the students during recess times. We all rushed out
of classes to buy these candies and gorge ourselves. The sisters also sold
books, pencils, papers, and other school supplies. From my youthful
perspective, it looked as if the sisters were making a lot of money from
us.

The sisters were also great motivators. During the fall season

(although Vietnam actually has but two seasons — rainy and dry), leaves
would fall and cover the whole school ground. I did not know why they
did not hire workers to rake the leaves. Perhaps they could not afford it
or maybe they just did not want to. Whatever the case, the students were
asked to do the job and therefore had to show up earlier than usual for
that purpose. Later, we would be rewarded for our good deeds. After
class began, we would line up in front of the sister and in turn would
name our own prize: forty points for my friend Tam. And the sister duti-
fully would mark down the number in a big black register book — impres-
sive in its size. I thought I would deserve a higher mark since I did more
work than Tam. I settled for 80 points. And the sister dutifully wrote
down the number. We then returned to our seats happy about having
done a good deed while at the same time earning some extra points that
would be added to our marks and could raise our overall standing in the
class. And so every morning, we would come back and volunteer to work.
This may explain why the sisters’ schoolyard was always the cleanest in
the neighborhood.

During the lunch recess that took place between 12 noon and 2

., we walked home to take our lunch and to nap. Someone would

beat a gong around 2

. to advise children and employees to either

return to school or to their ofﬁces. The tropical weather was so hot in
Vietnam (air conditioning was not available at the time), that a long
siesta during which schools and ofﬁces were closed was necessary. I later
noticed that other countries like Mexico and Italy enjoy similar lunch
breaks. During these recesses, I sometimes stayed back, waded in a small
puddle of water in the back of the school or looked for crickets in the
bushes. There was nothing like the freedom to roam around and search
for the unknown. When I arrived home late for lunch, I would sustain
a barrage of questions from my grandmother with occasional spanks on
the butt if I did not give her the right answer.

At the end of the school year, each family had to contribute to the

commencement in order for us to obtain our reward. This came in the

1. The Lotus Pond (Vo)

forms of books, crayons, pens, and so on, which were presented at a spe-
cial ceremony. Students accompanied by their parents and relatives
crowded a gathering hall. Following the usual speeches, students whose
names were called came to the podium to receive their reward.

Buddhist Inﬂuence

In that provincial atmosphere, besides countryside life and French

education, I was also exposed to two major religions: Buddhism and
Catholicism. Had I been brought up in busy Saigon like my brothers,
that inﬂuence would not have been signiﬁcant. The simple and relaxed
life in Vung Tau brought people closer to religions. While Catholicism
was brought into Vietnam by the French fairly recently, Buddhism has
been present since the second century

. Buddhism permeated Asian

society the same way that Christianity was the main religion in Europe
and America. Coming from India and China, it spread into Vietnam
from the second to the sixth centuries and reached the height of its glory
between the seventh to fourteenth centuries

. Although not all Viet-

namese actually practiced strict Buddhism, they followed a Buddhist
code of living that explained why the South Vietnamese are benevolent,
compassionate, and paciﬁc. Contrary to their northern counterparts,
they did not like to engage in war or killing, except under extenuating
circumstances.

On one occasion, I went with grandmother to her hometown, Ba

Ria, to see her adviser, a hermit monk who lived on top of the Ba Ria
mountain. Since there was no asphalt road to the top, we had to climb
steep slopes through narrow mountain trails that accommodated only one
person at a time. These trails that were not designed for visitors, but only
for monks wanting to live in seclusion, were rugged and barely passable.
Some steps were as short as a child’s foot or as high as a foot and a half.
Others were missing or even non-existent. Time and trafﬁc had taken
its toll on these steps. By the time we reached the summit, I was so
exhausted that all I wanted to do was to sit down on the porch to rest
my cramped legs. I looked at the rugged but peaceful hills that spread
all the way to the horizon while grandmother talked to the monk. I was
impressed by the ascetic and simple life these monks led, far away from
the corrupting ways of modern society. Visitors came to ask monks’

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EACE AND

advice on all subjects including affairs of the heart and family problems,
as well as questions about religion and afterlife. In return, they offered
the monks either goods, fruits, or money. The monks functioned as spir-
itual guides, advisers, and occasionally fortunetellers. They were the
“learned” men who spent all their time studying, thinking, praying and
dispensing their wisdom to lay people.

Grandmother had a large prayer room at her orchard house with a

three-foot tall bronze Buddha sitting atop the altar. This was her “sacred”
area, and I used to walk into this place with awe, apprehension, and
respect. The bronze statue inspired not only peace with its eternal and
enigmatic smile, but also, for a youngster like me, a sense of power, mys-
tery, and force. One could feel that there was something more in the air
than just a simple statue. Grandmother insisted that everyone (usually
my two aunts and I) be present at the hour-long nightly prayer session.
It could take up to two hours, especially during certain Buddhist
occasions. No exceptions were allowed as Saturday and Sunday were
also prayer days. I used to dread these long prayer sessions. Worship-
pers donned brown gowns while saffron robes were reserved for monks.
The worst thing I remember about these nightly sessions was the need
to wear one of these brown robes. They were infrequently washed, and
the pungent acid odor of the sweat from all worshippers who had worn
them before clung to them. Only swarms of buzzing mosquitoes
were attracted to this odor. I almost became sick every time I had a robe
on.

Grandmother began her nightly session by lighting up candles and

incenses; slowly, in a very religious manner, she began reciting Nam Mo
A Di Da Phat ... Nam Mo A Di Da Phat ... while beating on the gong.
The rhythmic pounding of the wooden stick on the gong induced rapid
relaxation and peace in the quiet evening. Once in a while, she hit a
bronze bell that tolled a clear, sharp, and metallic sound: bong ... bong....
The sound disrupted the peacefulness of the night and marked the sig-
nal for everyone to bow down. Recitations would go on and on and were
interrupted only by another bell sound. Soothed by the monotonous
incantations, I fell asleep in the middle of the long and “challenging”
prayer sessions. Neither the incantations nor the bell sounds could dis-
turb my nap. My aunt would wake me up, but soon I fell asleep again
and had to be brought to bed.

While living in Vung Tau, during daytime, I had to say prayers to

1. The Lotus Pond (Vo)

Jesus and the Virgin Mary at the sisters’ school, but at night, I had to
don a brown robe to say prayers to Buddha. I keenly remember the rou-
tine: Praise the Lord or Ave Maria songs in the morning then Nam Mo
A Di Da Phat incantations at night. Melodious songs and hymns in the
morning were followed by the monotonous recitations of Buddhist texts
in the evenings. That was enough to give any youngster a split person-
ality, although I moved from one religion to another without difﬁculty.
I had no problem talking to a Buddhist nun one minute or to a Catholic
sister the next one: for me they were both good people. I was reciting
the verses like a bird because I really did not understand the meaning of
the Buddhist and Catholic texts at that time. I was therefore repulsed
by their stiffness and routine. I only realized years later that they were
the foundations of my upbringing and would help me in my search for
peace of mind and meaning of life. More than the reciting of incompre-
hensible texts and monotonous incantations, these hours of prayers forced
me to turn inward and look at another dimension of life. This was my
introduction to spirituality without which life could not reach its full
potential and meaning.

The local pagoda in Vung Tau housed many Buddhist monks,

apprentices, and nuns. It was a huge one-story spread-out complex with
lodgings, kitchens, working areas, and a large gathering hall located at
one end of a large lotus pond. The main hall was presided over by a 15-
foot-tall bronze Buddha statue along with numerous smaller statues of
all sizes from different countries. There were even a few Indian Buddha
statues with twelve arms, six on each side. Each Buddha had its own and
particular gaze: peaceful for some and stern for others. A soft and per-
manent smile graced the face of some statues while others remained
stone-faced and tight-lipped. An overall air of mystery, majesty and
power permeated the praying area and caused guests to enter the hall
with awe and respect. The poorly lit hall (due in part to the absence of
windows) increased the mystery of the environment. Hundred of incenses
and candles were lit during main celebrations. Swirls of dense incense
smoke gracefully ﬂoated around the statues suspended in limbo in mid-
air while emanating celestial aromas all over the area. Offerings of
bananas, oranges, pineapples, and durians were prominently displayed
on the altar along with a multitude of ﬂowers. Monks sang prayers while
hitting gongs and bells intermittently during these celebrations that could
last a long time.

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EACE AND

The Lotus Pond

I was too young, bored, and uninterested to participate in these

major celebrations. I therefore joined the young apprentice monks behind
the pagoda close to the lotus pond. We jumped into one of the canoes
anchored on the shoreline and paddled around the pond, admiring the
thousands of green lotus leaves that seemed to ﬂoat on the surface of the
water among beautiful pink lotus ﬂowers, some in full bloom. Nothing
instilled an image of peacefulness and permanency more than these green
lotus leaves sitting still, impervious and unsinkable on the surface of the
water. It was no wonder that people had always painted Buddha sitting
and meditating on a lotus leaf. The apprentice told me about how they
used lotus ﬂowers to decorate the altars, stems of the ﬂowers to cook side
dishes, and lotus seeds to eat. The lotus ﬂower thus had multiple uses
besides symbolizing the purity and freshness of the soul that even mud
could not stain. Then one of the apprentices would recite the famous
folk song:

Nothing is more beautiful than the lotus in the pond,
Green leaves, white ﬂowers, amidst yellow stamens,
Yellow stamens, white ﬂowers, green leaves,
Close to mud, yet does not smell muddy at all.

We paddled slowly, savoring every minute of freedom and peace-

fulness looking at the ﬁsh swimming just below the surface of the limpid
water while butterﬂies and dragonﬂies swirled around us in complete
silence. The barking of a dog in the distance or the chirping of the birds
occasionally interrupted this quietness. There was nothing more peace-
ful than taking a ride around this isolated lotus pond: no wind, no rip-
ples, and no noises. The overall atmosphere conveyed an image of serene
peacefulness that symbolized Vietnam just emerging from colonialism.
It also allowed me to let my thoughts wander in the quiet and deserted
countryside among the beautiful lotus ﬂowers, a time for recollection and
healing. That was the reason I always came back to take more rides
around this pond.

The full circle around the pond took us some time to cover. When

it was time to turn around, I would beg for another trip around the pond
to no avail. As the canoe reached the shore, I jumped into the water try-
ing to get to the ground ﬁrst. Once though, the bottom of the pond

1. The Lotus Pond (Vo)

turned out to be deeper than expected and I got all wet. I remember
how the apprentices started laughing, then brought me inside, took off
my clothes to dry, and gave me a snack while I was waiting for my clothes.

On another occasion as I was sitting in front of the boat, I leaned

forward and saw minnows swimming right under the still surface of the
water. I dropped the iron chain to see whether it would scare the ﬁsh.
When I turned around, to my surprise I found a minnow swimming in
a small puddle at the bottom of the boat. I tried to do it again, but this
time no new ﬁsh got trapped into the boat. I never found out whether
it was just a coincidence or whether the chain had forced the ﬁsh to get
in through a small hole at the bottom of the boat.

This was life in Vung Tau and South Vietnam in general as I knew

it in the early and mid–1950s. Life was bucolic, tranquil and simple, and
the people were happy and benevolent. Life unwound itself before us,
lovely and peaceful like the stillness of the pond with its lotus ﬂowers,
its minnows and its absence of ripples. There was no rumor about war
or killing. My countrymen and I were lulled by this peacefulness that in
retrospect left us unprepared for the fact that this idyllic life would not
last long and that worse things were about to fall on all of us.

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Remembering Saigon

Nghia M. Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: In “Remembering Saigon” a Viet Kieu remembers

the old Saigon with its ﬂower market, soccer games, autumn festival,
and lengthy preparations for the Tet festival. The Cho Cu market
where food was served outdoors, the French architecture, the inﬂuence
of the Americans and the languorous times spent at the Saigon pier
are recounted. It was a city with diverse backgrounds and strong Chi-
nese, French, American and Vietnamese inﬂuences. The women in
their tightly ﬁt ao dai with their free ends ﬂoating in the wind evoked
an image of yin in a yang environment. Saigon was and remains an
entrepreneurial, rebellious, and non-conformist city that personiﬁes the
South Vietnamese spirit.

The largest city in the country was a bustling commercial city. It

was a sleepy Cambodian (Khmer) ﬁshing settlement known as Prey
Nokor when the Vietnamese settled around it in 1624 and began to con-
trol it in 1698.

In the early 1970s at the height of the American inter-

vention, it boasted almost two million people, although that number
could be two to three times higher due to the large inﬂux of refugees
coming from the countryside. It was the economic center of South Viet-
nam, the eye, ear, and heart of the country. Rice harvested from the lush
paddy ﬁelds of the Mekong Delta, ﬁsh and shrimp farm-raised along the
banks of the river, rubber from the surrounding plantations, and tea and
coffee from the central highlands were all shipped to Saigon for trade.
Imported goods arrived at the port of Saigon. This was where commerce
began and ended in Vietnam.

Downtown Saigon

Remnants of French architecture were apparent in many sections

of the city, among them the Opera House (former Congressional Build-
ing), the City Hall, the Main Post Ofﬁce, and Notre Dame Cathedral.
Majestic boulevards lined with hundred-year-old trees and dotted with
high-rise buildings and chic villas coexisted with small winding alleys
lined with corrugated-steel covered shacks and crumbling houses. Saigon
was crowded, dirty, and disorganized in some areas, while it was serene,
upscale, and almost deserted in others. Beautiful women were seen wear-
ing exotic ao dai —Vietnamese tunics slit on both sides from the waist
down — or tailored European outﬁts, and mixed with poorly-dressed
people in multicolored shirts with black pants. Saigon was a city of wide
contrasts, a city for rich and poor that served at one time as a French
provincial city: It was once dubbed as the “Pearl of southeast Asia.”

Giant tamarind trees grew on both sides of certain streets. They

became so huge and had such dense foliage that they provided a perfect
shade from the sizzling summer sun. I once felt like I was biking under
a canopy of jungle trees each September when I returned to school.
Nowadays, the sight of a tamarind immediately brings back to me the
memories of these school years where I got my ﬁrst taste of freedom, met
my ﬁrst school friends, and played and competed against them in many
curricular and extra-curricular activities.

Close by stood the Gia Long School, where beautiful, shy and gig-

gling girls wearing their white ao dai could be encountered. I remember
fondly watching them walking on the sidewalks with one hand clutch-
ing their books and the other holding onto their non la (conical hat) as
the wind frequently displaced the hat off their heads. The free ends of
their ao dai undulated in the breeze and their thick, black, and silky hairs
fell like a nape all the way down their waists. The ao dai molded tightly
against the curvatures of their bodies exposing their beauty. It has been
said that they hid everything but also exposed everything. The girls wore
wooden guoc (clogs) that beat the pavement with rhythmic noises Coc
... coc ... coc. I used to marvel at how they could move with such ease
and precision in their slippery guoc while holding onto their non la, hair,
and ao dai that ﬂoated in the wind. The grace and gentleness with which
they moved, still strikes me to this day. They conveyed an image of the
frailty of the Vietnamese in the middle of political storms and war

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EACE AND

tragedies. This was the picture of yin in the middle of a yang environ-
ment.

I often biked down Cong Ly Avenue and the Presidential Palace

would appear on my right. If I turned left in front of the Palace, I ended
up on Thong Nhat Avenue. There stood the magniﬁcent Notre Dame
Cathedral, the main Post Ofﬁce, the American Embassy and at the end
of the avenue the Saigon Zoo and National Museum. Cong Ly Avenue
led me straight to the Intercontinental and Majestic hotels. During the
height of the war, these places became favorite gathering areas for Amer-
ican GIs, foreign journalists, and businessmen who exchanged tips or
traded news about the war and Saigon politics.

Further down the road ﬂowed the Saigon River, which brought an

array of foreign ships and with them merchandise, tales, and news from
abroad in exchange for rice, seafood, rubber, and the local charm of the
jewel of Southeast Asia. My parents used to take us to the Bach Dang
pier to watch the huge foreign ships load and unload their merchandise
and to look at sampans and rowboats gliding quietly on the dark waters
of the river. This was another image of yin (sampans) and yang (ships)
at work and Saigon was full of these contrasting images. The river, which
must have been clear at its source, had collected all the garbage humans
dumped into it throughout its journey to the sea. When the river waters
ﬁnally arrived in Saigon, they had acquired a dark and sad color that was
beyond recognition. They nonetheless made their way into the ocean
where they would dump their load and regain their fresh color by mix-
ing with ocean water. Once in a while, the noise of a motorized engine
ripped the air and disturbed the quiet peace. A few ducks waddled in
the cold waters and quacked relentlessly. We sat on the pier under a large
umbrella sipping cold drinks and savoring the light breeze that swept
the area while dreaming about a boat trip to a faraway island. Close by
was the My Canh ﬂoating restaurant where people could dine while
watching river activities. The exotic location attracted many customers —
mostly foreigners. The Viet Cong used the occasion to terrorize the pop-
ulation: They blew it up in June, 1965, killing 124 people including 28
Americans.

We were brought back to reality when sunset rays signaled the time

to go home. We then went to the Cho Cu (Old Market) to have dinner
together. There were many indoor restaurants along with excellent out-
door dining areas that served dishes from noodles with Peking duck to

2. Remembering Saigon (Vo)

pho.

Meals were washed down with delicious desserts of lychee drinks

and xam bo luong, Chinese fruity drinks that were claimed to be energy
boosters. As in many Asian cities, outdoor dining provided some of the
best food in the city in a casual and relaxed atmosphere.

On weekends, while ladies enjoyed shopping, their husbands went

to the stadium to enjoy soccer matches between Saigonese and foreign
teams. Soccer was the main sporting attraction in the country with the
two best teams being “Army” and “Customs.” I remember these times
when my father took us to the large Cong Hoa stadium in Cho Lon to
watch these games. A smaller downtown stadium had been torn down
because of its inability to accommodate large crowds. We had to arrive
early to the stadium otherwise there would be no good places left. We
pushed and shoved trying to squeeze through the small gates and sat
through rain and heat to watch our team play and cheer it up. We either
came home jubilant or depressed depending on whether our team won
or lost, although the experience was always entertaining.

Flower Market

Saigon would not be Saigon without its ﬂower market that gath-

ered a few weeks before the Tet festival. Tet fell between January 19 and
February 26, and marked the Oriental New Year as well as everyone’s
birthday. According to oriental customs, everyone was considered one
year older on Tet day no matter which month he was born in. This
explains why Tet was such a big holiday in Vietnam. Most people cele-
brated it for three days, while those who could afford it took the whole
month off.

Preparations began as early as two to three months prior to the date.

My parents would have new outﬁts custom-made. We went shopping
for new shoes. This was the busiest time of the year for the tailors who
worked overtime to complete their customers’ orders. Each customer
would have two to three new outﬁts made and brought in an array of
fabrics in all colors, in silk, brocade, or just plain but expensive fabric.
Houses were brushed up and sometimes repainted, broken doors and
windows were repaired, new curtains made, and chandeliers and silver-
ware polished. This was the time to settle all the debts, as they could
bring bad luck for the incoming year.

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There was fervor in the air. People were on the move. They bought

everything and merchants had their best time ever. Candles, incenses,
and ﬁrecrackers were sold along with grapefruits, watermelons, persim-
mons, oranges and so on. There were rice cakes ﬁlled with pork meat
called banh chung and banh tet as well as candies, cakes, sweet dried fruit,
soft drinks, and beer.

The ﬂower market took place on Nguyen Hue Avenue in down-

town Saigon. Ablaze with colors and ﬁlled with sweet fragrance, it
remained open daily until midnight and closed on lunar New Year’s Eve.
The spectacle was even more spectacular at night. A rich variety of ﬂowers
were found: dahlias, yellow chrysanthemums, red cockscombs, red and
white poinsettias, yellow “mai” (Prunus mume tree), orchids and kum-
quat trees. We went from one vendor to another to try to get the best
deal possible. Vendors, on the other hand, hawked their products extol-
ling the beauty and freshness of their ﬂowers and competed for cus-
tomers’ attention. My parents chose a mai, the ﬂower of Tet, and hoped
it would bloom during the length of the Tet festival: This would be a
sign of good luck for the incoming year. Vietnamese people lived more
with their feelings, predictions, and hopes than on actively seeking or
ﬁghting for something concrete. They spent a lot of money on for-
tunetellers trying to foresee the future — especially during the Tet period.
Teenagers dressed in their best outﬁts accompanied by their boy- or girl-
friends used the occasion to stroll around the marketplace to see and be
seen. Whole blocks of Nguyen Hue Avenue were blocked off to trafﬁc
so pedestrians could stroll at their leisure.

Family members traveled long distances in order to get home to cel-

ebrate Tet under the same roof, for the festival is a family affair. Viet-
namese, despite their rambunctious and divisive spirit, liked to be
together at least during the few Tet days. At the strike of midnight, peo-
ple moved to their front porch to light up ﬁrecrackers and watch them
blast into the darkness of the sky. Other families would do the same by
lighting up the longest and most expensive chain of ﬁrecrackers. The
explosions of ﬁrecrackers dominated the silence of the night and went
on for a long time while the smoke and smell generated by the explo-
sions ﬁlled up the air. We went to bed eagerly waiting for the next three
full days of celebration that commemorated the passing of the old year
and the welcoming of the new one.

We woke up the next morning, put on our new outﬁts, and set out

2. Remembering Saigon (Vo)

to greet our parents. We gathered in the main room while our parents
sat in chairs to preside over the ceremony. One by one we came around,
bowed, greeted them Chuc mung nam moi (Happy New Year), and wished
them good luck and excellent health for the incoming year. In return we
received our li xi (lucky money) in brand new and good-smelling ban-
knotes placed in tiny red envelopes. They were so new and crispy that
we dared not fold them, but held them gingerly in our hands. We then
sat down for breakfast. If the mai ﬂowers were blooming yellow gold, if
the watermelons were bright red on the inside and tasted juicy and sweet,
chances for a good and successful year would be great.

Members of the family went to pagodas to burn incense and pray

for good fortune and health. Others went to church for the same rea-
son. We visited relatives and received more li xi money that made us tem-
porarily “endowed” with material riches that rapidly disappeared in games
or movie tickets. We loved to watch the “dance of the dragon” performed
by groups of acrobats and dancers. One acrobat held a huge dragonhead
while others carried the dragon’s long and colorful tail. There was also
a dia, a mythical creature dressed as fat man with a moonlike face who
fanned himself with a paper fan. The acrobats would execute dances to
the rhythm and beats of drums and cymbals. The whole procession went
from house to house dancing, contorting and jumping to the sound of
music. They then formed a human pyramid in order to reach a prize or
money tied to a pole and placed at the level of the ﬁrst ﬂoor balcony.
More ﬁrecrackers were lit up.

We used to play bau cua ca cop, a dice game simple enough for

everybody to understand and play. A game mat with six printed animals
and objects such as a gourd, a crab, a ﬁsh, a shrimp, a rooster and a deer
was laid on the ﬂoor. We placed bets on one or more ﬁgures while the
dealer shook a container holding three dice. The sides of each die were
carved with pictures corresponding to the paintings on the mat. The
game went on until a few players lost all their money. The losers were
of course disappointed, while the winners grinned from ear to ear. Once
we tired of the games, we went to the movie theaters to enjoy the best
selections of the years.

All stores and ofﬁces were closed during this three-day period. Fam-

ily members spent time rekindling old friendships and enjoying them-
selves with playing cards and games. It was a special time when we put
our worries behind us and simply let it be. We talked and talked in an

I. P

EACE AND

atmosphere of peace and brotherhood. We tried to be nice and to com-
fort each other as yelling, screaming, and vulgarity were forbidden dur-
ing this period. Even enemies tried to make amends or avoided harming
each other. We really lived in a period of truce and I wondered at times
why we could not prolong that truce for a longer period. Once Tet was
over, everyone returned to their usual frame of mind and began yelling
and screaming again: The truce once again was broken.

The other major celebration was the mid-autumn or harvest festi-

val during which we enjoyed moon cakes and walked around the neigh-
borhood carrying candle-lit lanterns joyfully singing:

During the mid-autumn festival, I would stroll around

with my lit lantern,

Stroll around the neighborhood with my lit lantern...

Lanterns came in different sizes, shapes, and colors. Some were shaped
as ﬁsh, elephants, rabbits with furry ears, boats with chimneys, cars with
fancy tails, houses, gourds, birds, and so on. We were thrilled by the vari-
ety and colors of these lanterns and showed them off to our friends. The
ones with the fanciest decorations were the most expensive ones. We
returned home and enjoyed our moon cakes while our parents sipped
hot tea and watched the full moon.

These are the tender memories of my youth days in Saigon. They

are forever ingrained in my memory.

Southern Mentality

If Saigon is the South Vietnamese’s capital, it also reﬂects their

frame of mind and spirit. The Saigonese in particular and the South
Vietnamese in general are small merchants who usually work for them-
selves or their families. They are highly individualistic and have difﬁculty
working together: They therefore have never been able to form large
associations or capital ventures to compete head-to-head with the Chi-
nese. An old saying goes “Two Vietnamese usually work well together.
Add a third one and discord and disruption will follow.”

The hard lessons of history have taught them not to trust anyone

except themselves and they have absorbed the lessons very well. They
have fought off the many invasions of the Chinese, the Chams, the
Khmers, the French, and the Japanese.

On many occasions, they lost

2. Remembering Saigon (Vo)

their freedom but had always recovered it through their own will and
stubborn resistance to foreigners. Their pride, self-conﬁdence, and inner
strength play a major role in this attitude. The Vietnamese have pre-
served their unique brand of individualism, for conformity involved los-
ing a sense of self-worth. They do not know how to cooperate and then
still keep a mentality of warlords, not that of nationhood. Nothing
expresses that that attitude better than the following saying:

I’m going home to bathe in my pond.
Whether it is clean or dirty,
I like my pond better.

This individualist attitude, however, cut them off from the scientiﬁc

advances and technological know-how of the modern world. In the 19th
century, kings Gia Long (r. 1802–1820) and Minh Mang (r. 1820–1841),
when faced with the arrival of the Europeans and their new ideas, instead
of modernizing their country reverted to their old Confucian thinking.
They shut out modern ideas hoping to rule forever on their land in their
own ignorance. Vietnam, isolated and regressive, became powerless when
the French set foot on Vietnamese soil. Knives and spears were no match
for guns and canons. Fierce patriotism and national pride could not
stand tall against modern European military might. Arrows and stakes
could not compete against guns. Two thousand soldiers were thus enough
to take down a country of 6–10 million people. This was the Vietnamese
replica of the Cortez expedition against the Incas.

The bounties of the Mekong Delta have also shaped the mind and

spirit of the South Vietnamese. In a land where rice and food are plen-
tiful, they tend to mellow down and enjoy life. Anything can give rea-
son to celebrate and to have a good time. They invite friends and
neighbors over to eat and drink. These sessions could take a big part of
the day or night. And the next day, someone else would throw another
party. Not to be outdone, another would give another treat on another
occasion. Kamm once mentioned that the South Vietnamese are “unre-
strained to the point of indiscipline ... ready to laugh or to cry, quick to
ﬂare in anger and almost as quick to forgive and forget, easy of approach
and little given to pretense.”

The Viet Kieu had left Saigon for three decades during which many

had not returned home. They still longed to return to Saigon for a visit
and sadly sang:

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EACE AND

O Saigon,
I promise ye I will return,
My love, I will keep my promise...
I however will never forget you.

This is how I remember Saigon, a city where I was born and grew

up, a city of many memories good and bad, one that I lost and did not
see again for more than three decades, and one that exempliﬁes the “easy-
going-ness,” resilience, and combativeness of the South Vietnamese.
Saigon, Hue, and Hanoi are the three main and characteristic cities of
South, Central and North Vietnam. If Saigon is a frantic commercial cen-
ter that embraces modernism at its core, it also has its romantic side that
millions of Viet Kieu still long for. It is not like Hanoi, a colonial city
frozen in time with its century-old French buildings and its sedated com-
munist atmosphere or the imperial Hue that still resonates with a sweet
and decadent perfume of the last Vietnamese emperors. Saigon’s history
is anchored in the future. The day it stops experimenting and modern-
izing — that day would mark the end of Saigon.

Saigon has changed hands on many occasions throughout history:

Its masters have been the Khmers, the Nguyen lords, the Tay Son, the
late Nguyen emperors once again, the French, the Japanese, the Ngo’s
and Thieu, the Americans, and the North Vietnamese. Conquerors have
come and gone, but Saigon remains steady, unbowed and undeterred.
Although it fell to its knees in 1975, it rebounded economically a decade
later. It once more has become noisy, bustling, entrepreneurial, and
vibrant and has regained its former image. Like a rebellious child, it
writes its own story and charts its own course.

Although Saigon is now formally known as Ho Chi Minh City, a

lot of southerners still call it Saigon, a rebellious, resilient, and free spirit
kind of a town; a Mistress on the Mekong River that thrives on adver-
sity and re-emerges anew and vibrant after each defeat.

2. Remembering Saigon (Vo)

The Vietnam War: Snapshots

Chat V. Dang

DITOR

’

OTE

: The causes of the war loss are discussed in this chap-

ter.

The Mirage of the Media

Scholars studying the Vietnam War and American soldiers who

fought on the battleﬁelds, in the thick tropical jungles, in the forests of
the Central Vietnam Mountains, and in the Mekong Delta’s vast pad-
dies, intricate canals and treacherous swamps, easily agree on one con-
cept: The free world lost the war because the power of the media, which
brought all the gore of the ﬁghting to American living rooms every eve-
ning. What many did not know was that there was a two-way street in
the inﬂuence of the media. Dr. Norman Hoover related an almost com-
ical situation in the 1988 AMA project report. Dr. Nguyen Phuoc Dai
was the Director and Chief of Surgery at Saigon Hospital, located near
the Central Market. The hospital served as a blunt trauma center, receiv-
ing victims from trafﬁc accidents. Dr. Dai had a tough appearance and
personality, and distinguished himself during the Tet offensive with his
Rambo attitude,

accompanying ambulances evacuating injured civilians

from hotly contested neighborhoods around the Phu Tho racetrack. Dr.
Dai wanted to visit American surgical training programs. Arrangements
were made for him to tour some of the U.S. schools and do a short fel-
lowship. He was looking forward to his trip abroad and had been fre-
quently checking on the progress of the formalities. At the time, U.S.

Armed Forces television was showing the widespread protests and riots
on U.S. campuses and in U.S. cities. As his departure approached, Dr.
Dai suddenly told Dr. Hoover that he did not want to go anymore. After
a lot of prodding, he confessed he felt that the streets of America were
not safe for him! A passage from the AMA project report

will help under-

stand Dr. Dai: “Those (Americans) who were in Saigon were not nearly
as concerned about their safety as those who were watching American
television screens. Actually, although more than 2000 American support
personnel participated in the program, there was not a single case of
American death, injury, or capture related to the war in the nine years
of the AMA and American Dental Association (ADA) projects. The same
was true of the USAID–AMA Volunteer Physicians for Vietnam (VPVN)
Program, under which 774 physicians served 1,029 tours of duty from
1965–73.”

Healers as Heroes

Dr. Loran B. Morgan, an ophthalmologist and the son of a banker,

was one of the VPVN doctors. During his third tour in Vinh Long, he
improvised a device for ocular irrigation, which was the precursor of the
Morgan lens familiar to U.S. emergency physicians and ophthalmolo-
gists.

The device, now a standard instrument in U.S. emergency rooms,

allows for hands-free continuous irrigation of the eye with a sterile solu-
tion of balanced salt to get rid of bacteria, debris and chemicals, espe-
cially acids or alkalis that can lead to the loss of vision. Dr. Morgan felt
so fulﬁlled and unthreatened by the war that he volunteered a total of
four rotations of two months each. When interviewed by a reporter, he
said, “There is so much good to be done in 60 days. I don’t know of any
other place in the world you could do that much good in that short of
a time.... I realized at that time, and I always will that it is a great priv-
ilege to have done this.”

While in Vietnam, Dr. Morgan met Dr. Patricia Smith who had

worked since 1959 in Kontum Province in the Central Highlands,

car-

ing for the Montagnards,

whose primitive practices and beliefs were

similar to those found in indigenous Austro-Melanesian cultures. Super-
stitious and independent to the point of being rebellious, the Montag-
nards distrusted the “lowland” Vietnamese. Dr. Smith earned their

3. The Vietnam War: Snapshots (Dang)

conﬁdence after she saved the young daughter of a village chief. In pro-
found shock from severe vomiting and diarrhea, the 12-year-old child
was dying despite the efforts of sorcerers. Members of her family had
started to hollow a log to make a casket. However, the little girl quickly
recovered when Dr. Smith stayed up all night to give her intravenous
ﬂuids. The reputation of the “Big Grandmother of Medicine,” as she was
called, quickly spread and patients started to ﬂock to her small dispen-
sary. Dr. Smith then pressed for the building of Minh Quy Hospital,
which grew into an 87-bed facility, and which she helped maintain and
staff with funds raised in Seattle, her hometown, and from International
Catholic Relief. American units operating in the area frequently donated
medical supplies to the hospital. In March 1968, right after the Tet offen-
sive, she barely escaped death when North Vietnamese troops went
through the hospital, shooting up most of its facilities, looking for the
“Americans.” More than 30 Montagnard staff and patients had the pres-
ence of mind to act terriﬁed and lie on top of her, effectively hiding her.
Unshaken, she remained to rebuild the hospital and continued to work
there until 1972. With the Fiery Red Summer attacks on Kontum, she
was ordered to evacuate by American authorities and agreed to do so after
Msgr. Paul Seitz, the last French bishop left in Vietnam, told her, “You
must go; Kontum is lost. They will kill every American here. I am a
French citizen. It will be different for me.”

On the grounds of Cho Ray Hospital was a modern plastic and

reconstructive surgery center named after Dr. Arthur J. Barsky. He was
a Manhattan plastic surgeon who had operated on women disﬁgured at
Hiroshima and wrote Principles and Practice of Plastic Surgery (Williams
and Wilkins, 1950). He and lawyer Thomas R. Miller were so moved by
the war injuries that they founded Children’s Medical Relief International
in 1966, and set up the 54-bed Barsky Unit with USAID assistance. I
was a third year medical student when the unit opened in 1969. Mes-
merized by its modern construction and total air conditioning, some of
my classmates and I used to go there on our free time to try to learn
from its surgeons, as a formal rotation had not been established. One
plastic surgeon with a thick southern American accent, on ﬁnding that
we were medical students, was very eager to teach us. He wanted to meet
every day in a classroom at 1:00

., a time usually reserved for noon

break in tropical countries. However, besides sharing unconventional
concepts of surgical knowledge and technique, he was also trying to con-

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EACE AND

vert us to his Christian faith. He preached that believing in God would
automatically absolve us of all past, present and future sins. We rapidly
concluded that he was not a good surgeon, teacher or preacher, and dis-
appeared from his sight whenever we encountered him. In the end, our
education did not beneﬁt much from the Barsky’s international staff of
American, Canadian, British and Vietnamese surgeons who cared for
children victims of the war as well as of home accidents, congenital mal-
formations or a disﬁguring infection called noma. The center treated
about 100 children a month up to April, 1975. It was there that Phan
Thi Kim Phuc was treated. She was the 9-year-old naked girl captured
in a June 8, 1972, photo running in agony after having been burned by
napalm bomb dropped from a South Vietnamese plane. She was later
“paraded” by the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In
1992, while studying in Cuba, she was able to defect to Canada where
she works for UNESCO.

The End of the Vietnam War

In early 1975, Dr. Huynh Van Huon, a family friend and the Min-

ister of Health (Tong Truong Y Te), requested that I be reassigned to his
staff, ofﬁcially based on my status as one of the few Vietnamese physi-
cians holding the ECFMG certiﬁcate. Dr. Huon was the Medical Direc-
tor of Nguyen Van Hoc Medical Center in Gia Dinh, and personally
knew me when I was a surgery intern there. My role was to assist with
the translation and drafting of English documents or correspondence,
and to advise on medical issues that might be presented to the Ministry
of Health. Minister Huon jokingly told me that he had heard that I had
read Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine from cover to cover. Later,
I also participated in the drafting of security plans for the Minister while
he traveled to the countryside. This happened when his trusted security
detail discovered in casual discussions that I had many valuable tactical
suggestions based on my penchant for visualizing and addressing mul-
tiple scenarios with redundant solutions. I accompanied Minister Huon
on his numerous trips in the ﬁnal days of the war to help improve con-
ditions in the overcrowded camps for refugees ﬂeeing the war zones. We
traveled either by station wagon or by helicopter. My last major trip was
when we were ﬂown into Danang by Air Vietnam for a one-day fact-

3. The Vietnam War: Snapshots (Dang)

ﬁnding mission. We were briefed that the military situation was deteri-
orating without massive air support, and that American-made 155mm
howitzers available for the defense of Danang were far inferior in reach
to the enemy Soviet-made 122mm recoilless cannons, 15 km versus 23
km.

That afternoon, while I was waiting for my return ﬂight at the air-

port, I was startled by a holler, “Bac Si Chat!” An emaciated middle-
aged man of small stature was quickly trotting his way toward me. Set
in a deeply tanned face, his bloodshot eyes were blinking nervously.
Sporting a crew cut, but wearing a civilian white and green plaid shirt
and khaki shorts that appeared soiled from lying or rolling on the ground,
was my Corporal Nurse from Duy Tan Hospital. He grinned widely, still
blinking furiously, looking surprised but glad to see me. I brieﬂy thought
to myself that with his shufﬂing gait, he might not be sober. I wondered,
as he did recognize me, when was the last time he had a drink; or a
decent meal; or a bath. Did he look disheveled and dirty because he was
drunk and left to lie on the street the previous night? What was he up
to at the airport looking like a beggar? Had he deserted from his unit?
Feeling awkward, we exchanged greetings and banalities. I gave him some
money, and it dawned on me to ask him to take a message to my future
parents-in-law. I hastily scribbled on a piece of paper that I was in
Danang on ofﬁcial business only for the day, and that they should send
their youngest two sons to Saigon as soon as possible. I do not know
what happened to my former nurse, but the note was never delivered.
Three days after we left Danang, the town was cut off from the rest of
the country. Panic set in and people were seen desperately clinging to
the landing gears of the last few commercial DC-3 planes ﬂying out of
Danang, which was lost on March 30, 1975.

As South Vietnam was dissolving under the “Red Tide” like a sand

castle washed away by powerful waves, civilian doctors, pharmacists, and
nurses stafﬁng the Ministry of Health provincial hospitals were aban-
doning their jobs to run for their lives. One of the most dramatic events
occurred when barges jam-packed with refugees from the Hue-Danang
area were towed into Nha Trang harbor. Several dozen children onboard
were suffering from severe dehydration after many days at sea. They were
brought to the provincial hospital and attended to only by the dedicated
nursing staff remaining at the facility. Dr. Huon was in Nha Trang sur-
veying the public health capability. After an exhausting all-day-long fact

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EACE AND

ﬁnding trip, when informed of the tragic situation, he and his Ameri-
can physician adviser immediately went to the hospital and worked fever-
ishly to save the unfortunate children. Many children perished in front
of their eyes. The next day, April 3, Nha Trang was abandoned and Dr.
Huon was lucky to ﬁnd transportation for himself. Back in Saigon, Dr.
Huon gathered his staff to thank them and encouraged them to help
those children who required oversea medical treatment unavailable in
Vietnam. Then at the monthly cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Min-
ister Tran Thien Khiem, Dr. Huon reported on the Nha Trang situation
and tended his resignation.

From Quang Tri, which had been “liberated” since the Fiery Sum-

mer of 1972, town after town, province after province fell to the advanc-
ing North Vietnamese Army. How could the ARVN crumble so quickly
considering that the population of South Vietnam was seen on televi-
sion screens worldwide “voting with their feet,” running away from the
“liberated areas”? One fundamental explanation might be the difference
between the two ideologies. Communism was able to foster, according
to James Bruton,

a “disciplined single-mindedness of purpose ... to

ensure that the front organizations and military forces were achieving
their stated ends.... Communist victory in the war is a case study of man-
agement-by-objective.” North Vietnam was not outﬁghting the govern-
ment of South Vietnam so much as “out-administering” it.

Furthermore, there were two different battleﬁeld realities. Atheist

international communism launched offensive armies who fought while
soldiers’ families safely remained in North Vietnam (U.S. bombing had
ceased), while millennium-old Confucianism with its family-centered
cult of ancestors permeated the defensive psychologies of South Viet-
namese whether Catholic or Buddhist. The collapse started in the Cen-
tral Highlands at Ban Me Thuot where under pressure from the enemy,
ARVN troops were abandoning their positions and units to go home and
evacuate their families, using any means available including Jeeps and
helicopters. Thus began on March 15, the retreat toward Tuy Hoa on the
Central Coast known as the “Convoy of Tears” with horrendous mili-
tary and civilian losses. Clinton Granger,

a staff member at the U.S.

National Security Council, wrote that ARVN soldiers were more con-
cerned about the future of their families than the responsibilities to a gov-
ernment which might not be able to protect them. He believed that this
one factor, more than any other, explained the rout in MR I and II.

3. The Vietnam War: Snapshots (Dang)

A third major reason is what could be labeled as “programmed fail-

ure,” stemming from American strategists not trusting their South Viet-
namese allies from the beginning of the Vietnam War. Why was it that
North Vietnam was supplied with advanced surface-to-air missiles (capa-
ble of bringing down highﬂying B52 strategic bombers) and Mig 21 jet
ﬁghters by the Soviet Union while Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky had to
do a bombing run over North Vietnam on a propeller-driven Skyraider?
Why was it that the U.S. never developed the capacity of South Viet-
nam to produce its own military spare parts and ammunition, all of
which were sorely deﬁcient in the last year of the war? Were President
Richard Nixon and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the ﬁnal pro-
grammers with their Vietnamization and “Peace with honor” rhetoric
after they had concluded that China was no longer a strategic threat to
the U.S. and that therefore the domino theory

from President Dwight

Eisenhower’s and President John Kennedy’s times had become obsolete?
Even General Vo Nguyen Giap knew what Vietnamization meant when
he was quoted in a July 1970 Foreign Affairs article by Robert Johnson

“We do have the warning last December [1969] of General Giap, North
Vietnam’s Defense Minister, that Vietnamization will be a ‘tragedy’ for
U.S. and South Vietnamese forces and that these forces ‘which have taken
severe beatings will get yet harder ones.’” This is not to say that the U.S.
did not want South Vietnam to survive and succeed. It was just while
the communist bloc kept its unwavering support of North Vietnam,

the U.S. was “drawing down”

prematurely to fulﬁll an election prom-

ise to an increasingly tired and paciﬁst American people.

A fourth contributing factor might be the oil crisis of 1973,

which

resulted in drastically reduced interdiction ﬂights over the Ho Chi Minh
trail, which was by then functioning as a multiple-lane highway. Troops,
equipment, and provisions were easily amassed by the North Vietnamese
Army in preparation for the all-out invasion. In a now declassiﬁed secret
report to President Ford dated April 4, 1975, General Fred Weyand, then
Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, assessed: “As of 1 April, the predomi-
nantly North Vietnamese communist combat force in South Vietnam
outnumbers equivalent GVN

forces just under 3 to 1 in size.”

The ﬁfth element might be poor planning or rather poor leader-

ship. Apparently, there were conﬂicting orders coming from the South
Vietnamese Joint General Staff (Tong Tham Muu). Battle-hardened for-
ward units were given orders to resist followed by orders to retreat to

I. P

EACE AND

preserve their forces, to be again reordered to prepare for a glorious ﬁnal
stand. With conﬂicting orders, an orderly retreat could not be executed.

Sixth, there was most likely a very effective psychological war being

waged. Rumors were that negotiations at the highest levels had agreed
to a parallel further south to separate the two parts of the country instead
of the previous division line at the 17th parallel. This compelled people
and ARVN units north of that ﬁctitious parallel to try to make it south
as soon as possible. Who would want to ﬁght for land that had already
been conceded? And obviously, the dividing parallel was shifted every
few days further and further south.

A seventh possible explanation was a gamble from the South Viet-

namese political leaders based on wishful thinking and an erroneous
understanding of the U.S. Congress. After the loss of Quang Tri prov-
ince, President Richard Nixon had promised to commit U.S. forces again
if there was a full-scale invasion of South Vietnam. But President Nixon
was no longer in charge. He had resigned on August 8, 1974, in the wake
of the Watergate scandal. Wielding little clout, President Gerald Ford
was requesting emergency funds and assistance that were ignored by the
U.S. Congress. Conceivably, President Nguyen Van Thieu might have
allowed territorial loss without a struggle when he decided the so-called
“tactical redeployment,” hoping that faced with the ﬂagrant violations
of the Paris Peace Accords, U.S. forces would be reordered back into
South Vietnam, or at least massive American air support would be again
provided. There were rumors in Saigon that B-52 bombings had resumed
and were devastating to the communist advancing units. The rumors
were false and might have originated from the use of two CBU-55B
hyperbaric, oxygen-depriving air-fueled bombs in the last major battle
of the Vietnam War, the battle of Xuan Loc, less than 40 miles north-
east of Saigon.

3. The Vietnam War: Snapshots (Dang)

A Pilgrim

Nghia M. Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: The end of the war led to the escape to a foreign

land. Recollections about the last few years in the Mekong Delta are
recounted.

There I stood on June 25, 1975, in front of the New London, Con-

necticut, train station pondering the future while waiting for my friend
and his large family to gather their belongings. We had just arrived from
the Fort Indiantown Gap refugee camp in Pennsylvania where we had
stayed for about a month.

New England Town

Suddenly transplanted in America, we knew close to nothing about

the land and its culture and we barely spoke the language. Although
America was involved in the Vietnam War for more than a decade, the
American-Vietnamese relationship was about war, ﬁghting communism,
killings, wins and losses, but not about culture. As war refugees, we just
packed up and left at the end of a bloody and lengthy conﬂict looking
for freedom and survival and for a shelter from retribution from a vic-
torious communist regime without having the time to learn about the
host’s culture.

The sudden transition from war to peace weighed too heavily on

our minds to allow us to realize that ﬁnally we were standing on the
streets of a peaceful country. A peace that had eluded us for more than

two decades. Strangely enough, we found peace not in our palm-cov-
ered country dotted with golden rice ﬁelds, but in a foreign land called
America. Why America? Why 15,000 miles away from home? We were
too confused to formulate any adequate answer. But at least there would
be no more gunshots, artillery shelling, airplane bombings, grenade
explosions, disﬁgured bodies, or crying and wailing mothers, daughters
and relatives.

The tragic loss of our beloved country brought us unexpectedly to

this small, but peaceful New England town. Disconnected from our fam-
ilies and friends and still reeling from the biggest loss of all — the loss of
our motherland — with a lot of apprehension, we tentatively put our feet
on this new land.

The arrival marked the end of a two-month-long ordeal that began

in our war-torn and shattered South Vietnam. Once the safety issue had
been temporarily addressed, our thoughts turned to economic survival:
Could modern pilgrims from a small and defunct country (the size of
Washington State) forge a future in a foreign land? Issues such as polit-
ical safety, job training, families, language barrier, future and loss of
homeland and personal property popped up in no speciﬁc order and
clashed wildly in our worried minds. Peace seemed to bring with it a
ﬂurry of new issues and unique problems. It caused me to wonder where
we would have been had these strangers not opened their arms to wel-
come us.

A cool sea breeze that blew gently past us signaled the close prox-

imity of the seashore. It also brought me back to reality. Although it was
almost July, the weather was cool, if not cold for someone arriving straight
from the tropics. The town, with its beachfront and shoreline, reminded
me a lot of Vung Tau where my grandmother lived and where I spent
my childhood’s summer vacations. The only difference was that New
London, with its characteristic Cape Cod houses and its busy lifestyle,
lay in a temperate region while Vung Tau, with its palm trees and provin-
cial atmosphere, bathed in a sweltering tropical heat.

How I ended up in this place was nothing short of a miracle. I had

never imagined coming to the U.S. let alone standing on this eastern
shore where 355 years earlier and 150 miles further north, the ﬁrst pil-
grims had landed on this continent. History seems to work in cycles and
tends to repeat itself.

4. A Pilgrim (Vo)

Deadly Encounter

It all began when I was drafted into the South Vietnamese army to

begin my service to the country. We would remain in the army for the
duration of the war, not for one year like in the U.S.: The length of serv-
ice could thus last ﬁve or ten years or until we were disabled, died or
until the war ended. And the war, like tropical monsoons, never seemed
to end. Although it had been going on for almost two decades, it kept
going and going.

I was sent to the medical support team in the MRIV (Military

Region IV) in the Mekong Delta. The area was relatively calm compared
to the northern front close to the demilitarized zone. People attended to
their private businesses without any disruption and no night curfews
were imposed on Can Tho except in 1975. On our arrival at our unit,
my friend and I were assigned to do an autopsy on a ﬁrst lieutenant who
had passed away the night before. The macabre assignment was certainly
not what we had expected on our ﬁrst day of duty. From what we had
heard, the ofﬁcer was commanding a fortiﬁed camp sixty miles south of
town and was checking the perimeters of the camp when he accidentally
stepped on one of these naughty mines that blew him apart.

I stood silent in front of the victim not knowing what to do. No

autopsy was needed in this case. The cause of death was obvious: a shat-
tered right foot and leg along with hundreds of fragments of mine scat-
tered all over his body. He was a young ofﬁcer whose “baby” face and
healthy body did not seem to be touched or ravaged by the war tribu-
lations until then.

I signed his death certiﬁcate and we left. I could not avoid think-

ing that a lot of tears would be shed that night over this man. He was
young, most likely a few years out of a military academy but he was
already a war victim. His young wife and his parents would no doubt
be devastated. Yet, they could not do anything either, except weep until
their eyes became swollen shut or ran out of tears. And the widow would
ask herself why would such a tragedy happen to her? Why her? Why her?
Who would take care of their young children now? How would they sur-
vive? And she would start blaming herself for not taking good care of
him or not spending more time with him. And the parents would ask
themselves the same question: Out of the millions of parents, why did
this happen to them? For this family, he was a son and a husband, full

I. P

EACE AND

of energy, promises and destined for a bright future. But at that sad
moment, he was just a cold and disﬁgured body wrapped in a yellow ﬂag
adorned with three horizontal red stripes. A bright future cut short by
the meanness of war.

War was deﬁnitely brutal, senseless, and unforgiving.
The vision of this mutilated body followed me for sometime. Not

that I had not seen a dead body before: There were many of them in the
hospitals where we received our training. It was the degree of senseless
mutilation that this man had suffered and the fact that he was so young
and already dead. I could not sleep for many nights haunted by a vision
I had a hard time ridding myself of. It was like the odor of decaying
organs that persistently stuck to a surgeon’s hands for many days despite
repeated hand washes. As for this ofﬁcer, I knew that at least he was
ﬁnally at peace and was no longer suffering. It was his family’s turn to
go through the agonizing pain of the grieving period. This tragedy, how-
ever, was not unique. At that time thousands and thousands of soldiers
suffered from the same fate each month all over Vietnam. Each war vic-
tory seemed to be built on a mountain of dead brave soldiers. The only
victor was death itself.

I thought to myself that it could have been me or my friend instead

of him. Life and death were just a matter of luck or fate for all of us dur-
ing that period. This fact, reinforced by the daily escalating number of
casualties, rendered many of us philosophical or somewhat cynical. These
violent killings and the senseless murder of untold numbers of innocent
people scarred our young hearts to the point they were no longer able
to handle the suffering and pain. It was not that tears would no longer
ﬂow down our bony cheeks: They just ﬂowed more slowly and in lesser
amounts rather than in torrents like years before.

The tragic end of this ofﬁcer reminded me about one of my class-

mates, a sweet and good-hearted student, who died in 1967 when a mis-
sile shot by the Viet Cong into Saigon hit his home one night, killing
him and his whole family. I realized that we had lost a young and inno-
cent classmate only when the news spread all over the campus a few days
later. At that time, missiles landed on various parts of the city a few
times each month, forcing its inhabitants to lay sandbags right inside their
homes and to take cover when they heard the hissing sounds of ﬂying
rockets or siren sounds announcing incoming missiles.

4. A Pilgrim (Vo)

The Mekong Delta

I spent three months in Can Tho working out of a military clinic

about ten miles north of town, then rotated to the Chi Lang training
camp every fourth month. The four of us coming from the same class
were part of the newly-formed rapid-deployment medical unit stationed
at the headquarters of the MRIV. The thinking was that we would be
available for immediate assignment to any unit, hospital or dispensary
in the region should urgent medical need arise. When stationed in Can
Tho, however, the 9-to-5 mostly ofﬁce job at the clinic was simple and
straightforward: caring for sick soldiers and their families. We usually
ﬁnished our work by 3:30

. and spent the rest of the day reading or

playing volleyball in the compound court. On one occasion, I was
assigned to another unit for one month to substitute for a vacationing
physician.

Although I had never been to the Mekong Delta before, I knew the

region was South Vietnam’s rice basket. Can Tho, a provincial city on
the Mekong River, was quiet and bucolic with its laid-back people, its
golden rice ﬁelds and its multiple arroyos where sampans ﬁlled with fruits
and local products glided gracefully on the brackish waters of the river
on their way to the ﬂoating markets. The sampans were powered either
by motorized engines or by the strong arms of teenagers, usually girls
(boys were drafted by both insurgent and national armies), who worked
rhythmically on a pair of wooden oars. They occasionally sang those six-
sentence songs characteristic of the delta region that frequently dealt with
love and separation. Romance, music, simplicity or rusticity character-
ized the delta people. This was the image of my South Vietnam that to
this day sticks to my mind: a peace-loving people, poor but happy until
war came to them and destroyed their livelihood.

The waters of the Mekong River,

mostly limpid at its source,

became an indescribable dark color by the time they reached the city after
crossing ﬁve other southeast Asian states. They served as a dumping
ground for all the people living on its banks. These same waters, how-
ever, carried with them the rich silt that gave the delta its unique fertil-
ity. Fish and shrimp somehow managed to survive and even thrive in
that milieu to the delight of the delta inhabitants. Large catﬁsh up to
three hundred pounds had been ﬁshed out of the same brackish waters
forty miles upstream.

I. P

EACE AND

The Chi Lang camp, located on the southwestern corner of South

Vietnam near the Cambodian border, was a training center for new mil-
itary recruits from the MRIV region. Its clinic and ten-bed hospital were
run by a military physician assisted by three male nurses. Around that
time, an epidemic of Dengue hemorrhagic fever swept through the area,
hitting the recruits of the crowded training camp. Overwhelmed by the
sudden inﬂux of sick patients, the Chi Lang physician asked for help and
every month one of us was sent there to assist him with the care of the
patients.

The hamlet surrounding the camp was quiet to the verge of bore-

dom, especially in the evening. The area, which was arid and rocky with
minimal vegetation, looked like a lunar landscape rather than a tropical
paradise. Despite its lack of entertainment, the hamlet provided an out-
let to the rigors of the camp and survived thanks to the presence of mil-
itary recruits. The lone road leading to the camp was asphalted in some
areas before becoming a plain dirt road a few miles from the hamlet.
Access to the camp was so difﬁcult that even the military police would
not bother patrolling the roads. The local cockﬁghts set up on Sunday
afternoons provided the only excitement of the week. There was no
movie theater or entertainment show. The rare villagers entertained
themselves by sitting in surrounding straw-hut coffee shops, smoking and
drinking beer or coffee while listening to endless folk music — the melo-
dious voices of Khanh Ly and Le Thu, well-known singers at the time —
coming out of cassette tapes, which blared Trinh Cong Son’s and Pham
Duy’s “anti-heroic” and peace-loving songs.

I was lodged in a compound previously built for American military

advisers in one corner of the training camp. This was 1974, and they had
left South Vietnam a few years earlier. The lack of maintenance made
its presence felt on the deserted building. The large and empty rooms
appeared like cavernous hangars rather than homey sleeping areas. The
doors badly needed repairs; its woods, which had warped off under the
inclement weather, had separated from its frame at one corner and morn-
ing sunrays penetrating through these cracks lit up the windowless room.
Sunrays became our morning wake up signal each time we stayed in the
camp. The air conditioners and fans had been removed from the rooms
a long time before to outﬁt the local ofﬁcers’ mess on the other side of
the camp and a single light bulb dangled at that time from the ceiling
at the end of a foot-long cord. The walls were empty of any painting or

4. A Pilgrim (Vo)

decorations. In a compound that could accommodate at least eight peo-
ple, I was the lone guest. The mess with its pool table sat idle at the
front entrance. The tennis court, which was once busy, remained empty
and silent. The eerie feeling in the deserted compound reﬂected the over-
all mood of the nation at that time. Lights were turned off; the Ameri-
cans were gone. The Vietnamese had to struggle with less.

I remember being assigned to talk to a group of recruits one night

about Dengue hemorrhagic fever and the mosquitoes and virus that
brought on the disease. There had been a few deaths in the camp and
the commander thought it was important to advise recruits about the
illness. The job fell on me to inform them about the disease. I saw the
tired and worried faces of these teenage soldiers who sat on the ground
listening or pretending to listen to what I had to say. I could not help
thinking I was in their position a few years back when I took four weeks
of military training at the Thu Duc camp north of Saigon. Soon they
would be dispatched to their regiments to continue the ﬁght and be bap-
tized by encounters with the enemy. They became grown men hardened
by conﬂicts and destined to kill or to be casualties in the long war. I
thought the nation owed each of these young men the respect and admi-
ration they deserved. They were plucked out of their families to answer
to the call to defend the nation and should be given digniﬁed recogni-
tion no matter how the war had turned out.

Phu Quoc Island

I was stationed in Can Tho around April 20, 1975, after having

completed a month-long rotation at the Chi Lang camp. I was waiting
for the necessary papers to return to Saigon to visit my family, whom I
had not seen for quite some time. Then the unexpected news came: I
was ordered to report to the island of Phu Quoc in place of a colleague
who had recently “gotten married” and needed to go on a honeymoon.
Although I was irritated, to say the least, nothing I could do would
change the order. In retrospect, that last-minute order proved to be a
blessing in disguise, which I only realized weeks later.

Phu Quoc is an island in the southwestern end of Vietnam about

a hundred miles offshore from Rach Gia. The mission was designed to
provide medical assistance to the refugees from central Vietnam who

I. P

EACE AND

had been recently relocated to the island. I had never visited Phu Quoc
before, although I knew it was famous for its nuoc man (fermented ﬁsh
sauce). Despite its pungent odor, it added a special ﬂavor to the food
and deﬁned Vietnamese cooking. It is the “essence of Vietnamese food.”

I took the bus to Rach Gia, the last frontier of South Vietnam. The

town was located a few miles from Oc Eo, the famed capital of the Funan
Empire (1st to 6th century

.).

The Funanese, it appears, were actively

involved in trade and commerce with other Asian nations like Malaysia,
India, and China. A Roman coin had even been unearthed in the area
during an archeological search. The region was very active politically
and economically before being conquered by a neighboring country.

In Rach Gia, I was told the next and last boat to the island would

depart at 5

. To kill time, I sat in one of these cafés that dotted the

banks of the river to sip lemonade and watch workers loading a com-
mercial 90-foot, two-decked boat in preparation for departure. I ﬁnally
boarded the vessel and opted to remain on the top deck to savor the
breathtaking sunset and the calm waters of the gulf of Thailand. The
majority of the people chose to remain in the hull where they felt pro-
tected from the sun, winds and weather and where commodities were
available. A few people had even managed to string their hammocks up
in preparation for the long night.

I remember that Nguyen Anh, who later became King Gia Long

(r. 1802–1820), had made this same trip many times between 1784 and
1788 when he was harassed and hunted down by the Tay Son rebels.
Each time he lost a battle to the insurgents, he jumped on a boat and
sailed to safety to either Phu Quoc or Siam (Thailand). And each time
he came back to put up a new ﬁght. It took him 25 years of hard bat-
tles and persistent will to recover his throne.

Tired, I just lay down on

the deck and slept without bedding or cover. That was military life in
its most unsophisticated form. I did not know this was the precursor to
many more nights I would have to spend aboard a ship.

The cool sea breeze woke me up around 5

. the following morn-

ing. A new day had begun and the air was calm, the skies clear. The sun-
rise was as beautiful and serene as the sunset: The cloud-free sky offered
its most vivid and brightest colors. The boat anchored a few miles off-
shore waiting for permission to dock. It was breakfast time when we
landed on the local pier.

I quickly ate breakfast at one of the “frontier” cafés — small straw

4. A Pilgrim (Vo)

huts with worn out wooden tables and chairs placed right on an earthen
ﬂoor — and then inquired about the directions to the camp, which, I was
told, was located about two miles north. A local dirt road in which mon-
soon rains had carved huge and randomly placed potholes led to the
camp. Trafﬁc was scarce and cars were nowhere to be seen. I decided to
walk to the camp and followed the lead of the locals. At destination, I
found a mini-city where close to 40,000 people lived in tents in bare
minimum conditions. Members of my team had arrived earlier with their
equipment and vehicles and were waiting for my arrival.

My bed, a wooden divan covered with a mosquito net, was located

in a corner of a cavernous hangar. The storage area had recently been
converted into a housing unit. Although the doors were missing I could
not complain, since I had at least a nice corrugated roof covering my
head. I saw on the average forty patients a day at the clinic, the major-
ity of them suffering from cold, ﬂu, rashes, bruises, and cuts. Two other
military physicians from another unit also worked at the clinic. The
three of us covered the medical needs of about 40,000 refugees. As for
entertainment, there was neither newspaper nor television at this remote
camp. However, the beautiful white sandy beaches with their turquoise
blue waters still pristine and unspoiled by civilization, provided a
magniﬁcent alternative to the lack of amenities. The water temperature
was warm and the place ideal for swimming and sunbathing. I won-
dered why the local government had not thought about opening a resort
in this area: It would pump a lot of money into the local economy.

We were oblivious to what was happening in Saigon at the time.

Since no member of my team carried a radio, we had to hunt for news
by hanging around other people. Around noon local time on April 30,
General Minh went on the radio to announce the unconditional surren-
der of the Saigon government.

Reactions among the islanders ranged from utter disbelief and res-

ignation, to pain and anger. Tears were seen rolling down everyone’s
cheeks. The news, although somewhat expected, was stunning in its
impact. No one had dared to predict that such an unconditional and
immediate surrender would occur. For us, this was the end of 21 years
of bloody ﬁghting. Then silence fell and the mood suddenly turned
somber and grave. The Republic of Vietnam had been wiped off the
map. The land we and our ancestors had lived on since 1600 was no
longer ours. What we had fought so long and so hard for these 21 years

I. P

EACE AND

had been lost forever. More than 250,000 brave men who had dedicated
their lives to this cause had thus died in vain. Torrents of tears had been
shed during this war, untold numbers of families had been uprooted and
displaced, and thousands of towns and villages torn down, shelled or
bombed: All that had been wasted. The sacriﬁce of so many people had
ended in smoke. The long, bloody, and arduous ﬁght had been for noth-
ing.

Escape

Each of us was devastated by the news. The horror of the loss was

staggering as the minutes passed by. There was nothing else to do but
... ESCAPE ... ESCAPE ... away, far away from the communists and look
for freedom somewhere else.

The two other physicians had already packed their belongings on a

Jeep and were ready to take off. I later realized they were well prepared
in advance and had just waited for the announcement to leave. I quickly
gathered my men and gave them the option of coming with me or stay-
ing back. Since all of them had families in the delta, they decided to stay
put. I dismissed them, joined the two physicians and their families and
headed toward the pier. The navy compound was still guarded by a lone
soldier at its gate as we negotiated our entrance into the base. Every-
thing was quiet. We went straight to the dock and saw many patrol
boats — 30-foot-long speedboats that used to protect the shoreline —
with their engines running. We noticed one that was about to take off.
My friend immediately asked the captain whether we could join him.
Once he agreed, we all jumped aboard and the boat rapidly took off. A
few families stranded on the pier yelled and screamed, begging the cap-
tain to take them in. He did not even slow down but just pointed toward
the remaining anchored boats.

From the boat, I could see the public pier where I had landed a

week earlier. The area was now crowded and bustling with activity. The
islanders were trying to get onto any kind of boat they could get their
hands on in order to escape. On the other end of the island next to the
navy compound sat the military airbase. In the sky, all kinds of military
airplanes circled over the base. It looked like an air show was about to
begin or, from a distance, a swarm of locusts ready to land on a ﬁeld.

4. A Pilgrim (Vo)

Pilots from all the South Vietnamese airbases, after hearing the uncon-
ditional surrender, had ﬂown their planes to this island carrying with
them coworkers or families while others ﬂew directly to Thailand or Malay-
sia. The majority tried to land on the island’s lone runway. The base must
have been full since planes were noted to park awkwardly on the seashore.
A few helicopter pilots even tried to land on the beach itself creating a
swirl of sand dust around them. This was surreal: I had never seen that
many planes trying to land at the same time on such a tiny airport.

Twenty-one years had passed since Vietnam had been partitioned

into two countries. During all that time, I had lived, grown up, studied,
and worked in a war-ravaged country. All I knew was war. Signs of war
were everywhere: on the walls, in newspapers, on television, in movies
and songs, and especially on all human faces. There was a feeling of sad-
ness, despair and fatigue on each face although it was hidden behind this
Asian mask of serene acceptance. Once the surface was scratched off, one
would be able to see the pain, disappointments, suffering, and the agony
of defeat. Talk to them and one would see tears welling up in their eyes
and ﬂowing down their bony cheeks.

I did not know where I was going and what my future would be. I

did not even know where this boat was heading to. All I knew was that
I wanted to get out of the country, out of this sadistically unending frat-
ricidal war and especially out of reach of the communists. I was attached
to my country as long as it was free from communism. Now that the
land I had called home for almost three decades was taken away from
me, I had no more sacred land to ﬁght for. But I knew I would always
ﬁght for freedom. My choices at that moment were to accept the com-
munists or to escape. Having known the communists and what they
could do, I chose to escape without a second thought.

For the ﬁrst time in our lives, we were without a country. A very

strange and indescribable feeling hit us for the ﬁrst time in our lives. An
hour ago, everyone on the patrol boat was connected and linked to a land
called South Vietnam. Then suddenly there was no more South Viet-
nam. What we had called Motherland or Fatherland no longer existed.
What we had cherished the most was lost. We were all ORPHANS. We
never thought we could be without a country. The suddenness of the
disconnection stunned us all. I then realized what Phan Boi Chau, one
of the country’s greatest revolutionaries, meant when he wrote in 1907
that there was no greater loss than that of losing one’s country.

I. P

EACE AND

The boat kept powering ahead. The roaring of the engine did not

even distract us from our deep thoughts. No one was talking or even
paying attention to anything else. There was total silence besides the
engine noise and the sounds of waves crashing on the sides of the boat.
The island soon became a dot on the horizon. The captain proceeded to
disarm us to prevent a potential mutiny. He told us we were heading to
Malaysia or Thailand. We did not care because they were foreign lands
to most of us who had never set foot outside Vietnam before. We sailed
for half-an-hour or an hour when suddenly in the horizon stood a four
or ﬁve-story high transatlantic ship around which swarmed three or four
dozen boats of all sizes and shapes. I only found out later that with the
imminent collapse of South Vietnam, the U.S. government had ordered
all available ocean liners, including the U.S. Seventh Fleet, to anchor out-
side Vietnam’s territorial waters in order to pick up potential refugees.
That was why the Pioneer Contender was anchored right there in the
middle of the ocean. The ship, as a matter of fact, had been lurking
within Vietnamese waters since March. It was that ship that brought
refugees from central Vietnam to Vung Tau on various occasions. It was
the same ship that carried other refugees to Phu Quoc Island. It was her
turn again this time to transport many of her previous passengers abroad.
We were lucky to bump into her, otherwise we would have to head all
the way to Malaysia or Thailand with its unforeseen problems. None of
us was prepared for the trip because in our rush to get out of the island,
we carried neither food nor water.

The boat headed toward the ship and docked against rows of boats.

We waited for our turn to climb aboard the big ship. Elderly people and
children were allowed to get up ﬁrst. They slowly moved up the steep
and swinging stairs. Scared women had to be led or even carried aboard.
The transfer of people from native boats to the ship therefore proceeded
at a very slow pace. We were lucky not to be in the middle of a stormy
day, otherwise many would not have made it. Refugees then spread
around either on the deck or in the cargo hold. At the end of the day,
we were offered sandwiches and fell asleep stressed and depressed by the
turn of events.

What a day it had been! The night before, we had slept in a warm

bed in our homeland. That night, we were for the ﬁrst time “homeless”
and sleeping on a hard and cold deck somewhere on the vast ocean. The
only thing we could claim was the starry sky as roof: a dark sky dotted

4. A Pilgrim (Vo)

with scintillating stars contrasted with our deep sorrow and anguish. In
spite of the unusual situation, we slept pretty well that ﬁrst night because
we were all tired. We awoke the following morning wondering about our
location on the big ocean. Neighbors advised us that the ship had hugged
the Vietnamese coastline all night long and headed north. At one time,
we passed close to the Con Son Island where political prisoners and cap-
tured Viet Cong were held. We could not understand why the ship
headed north rather than east. A northward direction meant Saigon while
an eastward course signiﬁed the Philippines and therefore freedom. The
only thing we worried about was being returned to the new Saigon gov-
ernment against our will. That would mean a sure imprisonment.

By the end of the second day, we were anchored in front of Vung

Tau at the mouth of the Mekong Delta close to half a dozen large U.S.
Seventh Fleet ships and a myriad of smaller ones. The area turned out
to be the meeting place of all the rescue ships before they headed toward
their ﬁnal destination. The rescue operation continued for a while as
ﬂotillas of refugee boats from Vung Tau and its surroundings converged
again toward the anchored ships. Boats of all sizes and shapes, some civil-
ian and others military, ﬁlled with refugees, young and old, headed
toward the ships. They looked like tiny toys among the big ships. There
were ﬁshing boats, trawlers, ferries, tugboats, and military vessels: Any-
thing that could ﬂoat had been rapidly resuscitated and put to use. The
Pioneer Contender, after picking up many of these people, sailed again
heading east this time with more than ten thousand refugees on board.
A heavy weight ﬁnally had been lifted off our chests because an eastward
course meant freedom.

I had never seen that many people crowding a ship before: anxious

women holding onto their children, elderly people walking slowly, sad-
looking soldiers still in uniform, and people clutching their meager
belongings in their arms. They huddled in groups or lay on the deck scat-
tered here and there submerged in their thoughts and barely speaking to
each other, their minds hundreds of miles away from that place and
focused on the past, future, families and survival. This was the image of
extreme despair and anguish: a group of defeated people who had lost
everything from jobs, houses, belongings, and country trying to assess
the damage and to ﬁgure out the future. Who could ever have imagined
they left everything behind for a bleak and uncertain future? The 1620
pilgrims were better prepared than them for they knew where they were

I. P

EACE AND

going. They planned ahead and brought provisions with them. The new
refugees just ran away with their clothes on them.

That night we slept well again, certain we were not going back to

Vietnam. The following day, the ship sailed between a series of islands,
which we believed to be the Philippines. The view was certainly beau-
tiful with tropical islands on both sides of the ship. A few ﬁshing boats
were seen close to the islands while dolphins frolicked in the sparkling
blue waters. Here and there another ocean liner passed us by. We soon
settled into a boring routine broken only by mealtimes. Days were hot
as the bright and shining tropical sun cooked us like meat in an oven.
There was no place to hide from it. Luckily, the cool ocean breeze helped
somewhat. Those who could not stand the heat hid in the cargo bay that
was almost packed during noontime. Others migrated back to the deck
as the temperature cooled down in the evening. Nights were tolerable
and beautiful under the starry sky. The weather was gorgeous during the
trip: The absence of storms prevented many of us from falling sick under
the combined effect of heat and dampness. Toward the end of the trip,
due to the closeness of the quarters, an epidemic of conjunctivitis rap-
idly spread among the refugees, who woke up with swollen, teary, red
eyes. Luckily, it was short-lived because the crowd was rapidly dispersed
following their arrival.

Guam, the Gate to Freedom

Around midnight on the seventh day of the trip while the skies were

still dark, part of the horizon suddenly lit up. A few people woke up sur-
prised by the brightness of the sky. Their excitement in turn woke up
the remaining people. A feeling of joy lifted our hearts up. We knew land
was there on the horizon, although we could not put a name on the
place. The seven-day-long trip was about to conclude. The same excite-
ment probably ran through Columbus’s crew when they ﬁrst saw land
after a seemingly unending voyage. Although it was past midnight, no
one could go back to sleep and we were all standing there, chests lean-
ing against the ship rails, looking at the bright lights that were coming
closer with every single minute.

The magic place turned out to be the island of Guam (32 miles

long by four to twelve miles wide and home to 80,000 inhabitants) some-

4. A Pilgrim (Vo)

where in the middle of the Paciﬁc Ocean. It was the place of origin of
the B-52 bombers that had seen action in Vietnam a few years earlier.
The ship ﬁnally docked at the pier. Exhausted, we did not pay attention
to the size of the island or the neatness of the place. We slowly dragged
our feet down the stairs and were bused to huge hangars for identiﬁcation.
The process was long due to the sheer number of refugees and to fatigue
and lack of sleep. We were then transported to a nearby campsite on the
island and arrived at our destination around 4 or 5

. We were each

assigned to a military cot, with four to ﬁve placed under a large tent.
This was the ﬁrst time in a week that we were able to rest above ground
and in something private that closely resembled a bed. Worn out, we
immediately fell asleep.

In the morning, noises and voices around the tents woke us up. We

peeked out and saw a long line of refugees snaking around a huge tent.
One of the refugees advised us to get up and fetch food — otherwise we
would go hungry. Sleepiness had completely overridden our hunger.
After taking a quick wash, I scrambled to get in line and was deeply sur-
prised to see all the refugees standing neatly in lines, one behind the other,
a fact that was rarely observed within the Vietnamese community. They
sure did learn things fast. Construction was going full speed in the camp.
Bulldozers were parked close by and uprooted tree roots still lay on the
sides of the roads. The ground was unearthed and uneven. Other con-
struction materials and machinery were scattered here and there. On the
far end of the camp, new tents were erected every day. Eventually, the
camp was ﬁlled with tents housing tens of thousands of refugees, caus-
ing ofﬁcials to call it the Tent City at Orote Point, Guam.

The fast food was hot, delicious, and much better than what had

been provided on the ship. We ate hamburgers, chicken, mashed pota-
toes and green beans — the staple of American food — for the ﬁrst time
in our lives. This was also our ofﬁcial introduction to American society
and way of life. Fruit cocktail, which was rarely seen in Vietnam, was
provided abundantly in the camp along with apples and yellow-skinned
oranges. In our tropical Vietnam, oranges tend to come with green skins;
these were small differences that piqued our curiosity and reminded us
we were in a different country. After lunch, we went back to our tents
for a quick nap to recover from the ordeal of the night before. Then it
was again time to line up for supper.

The idleness on the island gave us a lot of time to think about our

I. P

EACE AND

lives, families, and country. No information came out of the hermeti-
cally closed Vietnam as all news was blacked out. We did not know what
had happened to our families who were trapped there. We remained in
total darkness communication-wise in the bright and sunny tropical
island. The loss of our country still stunned us. We did not know what
to think about the sudden collapse of Vietnam. Like drunkards, we all
seemed to be in a mood of denial.

What were we doing on this island? How could we have lost the whole

country? This must have been a bad dream. How could a country of 20
million people surrender to the enemy and collapse almost overnight? Why
did the U.S. not help us during this tragic moment? Were our leaders inept
to the point of losing the war? Had we done our share in this ﬁght? Should
we have done more?

Days and nights went by without any answer. After spending sleep-

less nights tossing, turning, and torturing ourselves with these unsolv-
able questions, we just gave up. This maddening intellectual exercise led
to nowhere except more self-recriminations, anguish and pain. By that
time, we had lost track of time and dates. We also lost our freedom tem-
porarily. Our schedule revolved around meals, without which we would
go hungry; times for breakfast, lunch and supper were dictated by the
mess and deviation from the rules meant a hungry stomach later on. We
lived among ourselves conﬁned in camps and separated from our bene-
factors by camp walls and language barriers. We realized we did not even
speak the language of our new country. The future seemed to be daunt-
ing for had we been thrown outside among the islanders, we would not
be able to survive or be self-sufﬁcient economically.

Approximately two weeks later, we were told to pack up and get

ready for departure. We were driven to another camp where we stayed
for another two weeks in sturdy barracks. Amenities were much better
than in the tent city. There was even a beach on site, although no one
was in the mood to take a dip in the ocean. Too many things weighed
heavily on our minds at that time.

We were driven to the airport one early morning and advised to rest

and wait in barracks within the conﬁnes of the airport. The area was
comfortable with mattresses on bunk beds and air conditioning. At the
end of the day, we were transported to the airﬁeld and boarded a 747
Boeing jet large enough to accommodate more than 200 people. The
plane landed in Honolulu, Hawaii, at night and we were allowed to

4. A Pilgrim (Vo)

stretch out in the empty gate-reception area. The plane took off and
made another stop in Portland, Oregon, before landing at Harrisburg
International Airport. We boarded buses that took us to another mili-
tary camp. Along the road local people waived at us as our buses passed
by. They seemed to be very friendly and must have been aware of our
arrival.

It was late when we arrived at the Fort Indiantown Gap camp in

Pennsylvania. We were directed to a large hall where other refugees who
had arrived earlier were gathered. After a short introduction, we were
assigned to different barracks. When we came out of the meeting hall,
volunteers from the Salvation Army greeted us and provided us with
food. That was the greatest moment of the day. The warm smiles and
lovely voices of these middle-aged ladies rapidly soothed our dispirited
hearts and washed away fatigue and loneliness. We felt invigorated and
rapidly headed towards the barracks and the assigned beds. A few weeks
later, my friend and I were sponsored by a small hospital in Connecti-
cut. We took the train from Harrisburg to New London and landed on
this northeastern shoreline on June 25, 1975.

There I stood on a foreign land like the pilgrims from four cen-

turies ago with an uncertain future but with a lot of hope in my heart.
I did not know what the future had in store for me; all I knew was that
I had to forge ahead no matter what happened. There was no way to
back out. The dice had been rolled. I needed to pick them up and keep
them rolling. Although saddened by the loss of my country and the lack
of news from my family, I decided to forge ahead and to become a new
pilgrim like many others who came centuries before me.

This is what makes America a great country: A land that gave pil-

grims the chance to re-make their lives.

I. P

EACE AND

II. O

PPRESSION AND

SCAPE

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My Life as a Zombie

Thien M. Ngo

DITOR

’

OTE

: In this chapter, the author reveals his intimate feel-

ings toward the communist regime that imprisoned him after the war
and forced him to escape aboard a boat.

After graduating from medical school, I was assigned to the med-

ical liaison team of the II Corps, which was located in Pleiku in the cen-
tral highlands. The central highlands were one of the gateways through
which northern communists coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail
inﬁltrated South Vietnam. I worked at the II Corps headquarters for
about 15 months during which I rotated between Pleiku and various
medical ﬁeld units.

In late March 1975, ARVN units were ordered to retreat from the

highlands and to move to the coastal city of Tuy Hoa. Since the evacu-
ation was not well planned ahead, it turned out to be disorganized and
chaotic right from the beginning. Being assigned to the headquarters of
the II Corps meant I had the chance to get out with General Tat by hel-
icopter. As we ﬂew over the military convoy, we were called in to evac-
uate an ofﬁcer who was injured during the evacuation. While I was
talking to people in the convoy, the helicopter took off without warn-
ing and left me behind. I therefore had to follow the convoy on Route
7B on foot for a day before being picked up by another helicopter.

From above I could see a long and sad military convoy, which curved

like a snake through the densely forested hills stretching over miles and
miles. Civilians followed the convoy in a disorderly manner in cars and

carts, and on motorcycles and even on foot. Many of these vehicles were
soon abandoned because of their inconvenience and lack of fuel. I was
lucky to get out on a plane because the convoy was soon attacked by
communist forces, which indiscriminately shelled it and gunned down
military personnel as well as civilians. No one was spared, not even chil-
dren or women. By the time the convoy arrived in Tuy Hoa, only a third
of the civilians and soldiers had survived the ghastly trip.

Reeducation

From Tuy Hoa, I ﬂew back to Saigon. After Saigon fell, I reported

to the local revolutionary committee that had set up an ofﬁce at a local
school. A few weeks later, I was sent to the Trang Lon reeducation camp
after being told to bring enough food for three days. In my mind, I kept
repeating the words three days and I asked myself if I had heard them
correctly. I was thrilled to death for having to do only three days of reed-
ucation. I made big plans for returning from the camp and opening a
private ofﬁce for I envisioned a bright new future now that the war was
ﬁnally over.

Alas, when the three days ended, I found myself still conﬁned in

the camp. Three days became three weeks. I had not lost any hope yet,
although I became suspicious of the communist propaganda. I asked
myself why repair the barracks, weed the periphery of the camps and do
manual labor unless we had to stay in there for a longer time. Time
passed by and three weeks became three months. By that time, I had lost
all my conﬁdence in the new government. I knew they had lied to us. I
even lost hope of ever getting out of the camp alive. Three months
became three years before they ﬁnally released me. The longer I thought
about it, the more furious I became.

The bo doi

tricked us — gullible people — into believing in a three-

day course and once we stepped inside the camps, they whipped us with
the full force of a ruthless organization designed to crush us. We were
no longer considered to be humans, only trash. They belittled, threat-
ened, coerced, beat, shackled, starved, and forced us to do manual labor
and even killed many of us. There was no compassion, no leniency from
them, only pure hate accumulated over years of hardship in the jungles
and ruthless political indoctrination. A real nightmare. To this day, I am
still shaken at the simple thought of these dark years.

II. O

PPRESSION AND

SCAPE

After a few months at Trang Lon, they shipped us to another camp

in the middle of the night. They told us in grandiose terms that since
we had done such good work, we would be transferred to a much nicer
camp — an improvement over the last camp. This turned out to be
another big lie. The new camp was simply a hard labor camp designed
to make us work and sweat. The bo doi then told us that the harder we
worked, the sooner we would be released. This was another of their lies.
Although we worked harder and harder, we never saw the release order
coming.

These three years were a nightmare for me. I therefore blocked them

out as much as I could. From the time I entered into the Trang Lon
camp until I got out of Vietnam, I lived the life of a zombie trying to
survive its horrors. I made myself small, trying to remain under the radar
of the bo doi. I thought that the less I resisted them, the less punishment
I would receive.

Post-Reeducation Ordeal

After my release from the camp, I reported to the chief of the local

ward every day for more than a month. He told me all “reeducated” peo-
ple had to perform civic duty that consisted of sweeping the streets
around my neighborhood from 8

. until noon every day ﬁve days a

week. And there I was with a broom trying to keep the streets clean
every morning for three months. I could not believe that a medical doc-
tor would be sent out to sweep the streets while patients were dying in
the hospitals because no one cared for them. Only such a thing could
happen in communist Vietnam — political creed prevailing over people’s
lives and health. To think about it, the victorious northerners just wanted
to crush us until we no longer could ﬁght or resist them. They were
deceitful instead of being magnanimous in victory. I knew I could offer
a lot to my country but banishing me to sweep the streets could only do
a great disservice to society. I thought they would be lenient after I had
completed my jail time, but I was wrong. They forgot nothing and they
had systematically planned to dehumanize us. Although feeling deeply
depressed, I took it in stride for I had no other choice. Arguing against
a dictatorial government could only lead me into hotter waters as I was
still in a probationary period. I could have been banned to a new eco-

5. My Life as a Zombie (Ngo)

nomic zone (NEZ) or sent back to the camp, which in fact were worse
options than sweeping the streets and remaining in Saigon with my fam-
ily. During the same period, I also applied for a medical position in var-
ious hospitals but was turned down because of my anti-revolutionary
past. I was at turns upset and depressed. Upset at one moment, depressed
at the other. Eight years of medical and college training just led me to
a dead end street in a communist regime.

In fact, I felt better than some of my colleagues who had been

released before me. They had to leave Saigon and move to one of the
NEZ that were set up in the middle of nowhere. They had to build their
own lodgings — basic straw huts without electricity and running water —
since there was nothing else for miles away except forests. They had to
carve out the lands by taking down bushes and trees before planting veg-
etables and rice to support their basic needs. The work was not only hard
but difﬁcult because they did not have access to appropriate tools or
heavy equipment. There was no hospital or grocery store in the area.
They even had to haul in their own water one ten-gallon container at a
time. They received rice and food for a few months before being left on
their own. The miserable life in the NEZ led people to run away and to
return to their original homes.

I, however, felt worse than those who were released after me because

they were allowed to remain in Saigon and apply for work in the hospi-
tals. Realizing that the country was short of qualiﬁed doctors, govern-
ment ofﬁcials had a change of heart and decided to use a few physicians
from the old regime. I realized that although my future was worse than
those who were released after me, it was certainly better than those who
were sent to the NEZ. I felt that no one could escape his fate and we
would just have to accept it.

Then one day I was called to the local district and told of my assign-

ment to the Hoc Mon dispensary. Hoc Mon was a suburb — about twenty
miles south of Saigon — that blended into the countryside. I was sur-
prised and overjoyed on hearing the news. I thought to myself that ﬁnally
I would be able to practice medicine after spending four years doing
manual labor. I woke up from my zombie life and for the ﬁrst time felt
warm blood rushing throughout my body.

I then realized I had to commute every morning and return home

at night. Twenty miles does not seem a big deal in today’s world, but it
was a long way for a society that had decided to turn the clock back-

II. O

PPRESSION AND

SCAPE

ward four or ﬁve decades. In Ho’s world, gas was expensive and cars were
reserved for ofﬁcials only. In a city that once was ﬂooded with honking
cars and speeding scooters, the spectacle was certainly a sad one. The
streets were almost deserted or barely ﬁlled with slow moving bicycles.
One could feel a thick shroud of despair and desolation had descended
on the former Pearl of the Orient.

I decided to ride the three-wheeled xe ba banh to work — a motor-

cycle attached to a four-by-six foot seating area — where six or seven small
Vietnamese could squeeze in. As the main and cheapest means of pub-
lic transportation, it hauled everything from passengers to merchandise
destined for the market. Laborers, housewives, merchants, soldiers, and
people from all walks of life used them. The xe ba banh stopped every
three minutes to pick up or drop off passengers making any short ride
a lengthy one. Between the stop-and-go movements, the overcrowding,
the jumps over potholes, the ride was less than thrilling — especially dur-
ing rainy days or in sweltering summer heat. I felt exhausted at the end
of each ride, which could last more than an hour. The other option was
to ride a bike to work, which was not an interesting choice either.

In Ho’s world, the four physicians at the Hoc Mon dispensary

worked under the direction and guidance of a communist nurse: the less
educated people leading the better educated ones. This only made sense
in a communist country. I treated patients as best as I could in view of
the shortage of supplies, medications, and tools available. A lot of poor
people somehow showed up and required my attention and care: That
realization broke my heart. I had never seen that many poor people in my
life. They did not have anything and could not even afford to buy med-
ication or medical supplies. Heartbroken one day, I just gave one of them
my meager monthly salary so that he could buy the medications he really
needed. It was not because I was rich — everyone was poor at that time
except for the bo doi— but because he was more needy than I.

I thus did my civic duty for over nine months without complaint

but with a lot of bitterness in my heart. I ﬁnally realized I had to escape.
Even though I had completed my jail time for being associated with the
Saigon government, I was still subjected to the whimsical assessments
and judgments of any policeman or ofﬁcial of the Hanoi-led government.
Anyone of them could have sent me back to jail at any time by simply
accusing me of any real or imagined deed. Any accusation carried the
strength of words carved in stone. In Ho’s country, anyone was guilty

5. My Life as a Zombie (Ngo)

because he was accused of something and not because he had done any-
thing wrong. There was no way I could defend myself because the gov-
ernment dogmatically believed it was right all the times. There could be
no justice because it had abolished the system of lawyer representation.
I did not really live, in the loose sense of the term, under this oppres-
sive regime. What I did was to try to stay out of trouble and to survive.
I was simply a prisoner within the system. I felt I could not live like an
animal forever, without dreams, hope, only servitude. Although I was
physically in Saigon, my mind was somewhere else. There was no future
for my family and me in Vietnam. I just shook my head and thought to
myself: “Oh Ho, what have you done to your country?”

Sea Escape

My wife took care of all the escape arrangements. We had decided

to use the semi-ofﬁcial pathway. Semi-ofﬁcial meant that we ofﬁcially
paid the corrupt government to get out of the country. Only the Chi-
nese were allowed to leave at that time. The main problem for everyone
was to look for a decent dealer. There were many of them around, some
real and others fake. There was no way of distinguishing between the
two: They all promised to get us out. But whom could you trust? The
dealer had to apply on our behalf to the police department for emigra-
tion and to provide for the boat and the captain. This was an expensive
proposition because we not only had to pay the dealer, but also the secret
police through the dealer. However, that approach was safer than try-
ing to get out by ourselves. The price was twelve taels

of gold each for

the trip and the false Chinese documents although I did not speak any
Chinese at all. Not only was I a Chinese on paper, but also the husband
of a real Chinese lady. At the appropriate time, I took one day off from
work and went all the way to Rach Gia, the southernmost town in Viet-
nam some two hundred miles away to catch the boat.

Prior to departure my wife, a superstitious and puzzling lady, went

to see a fortune teller who unfortunately told her we were in fact three
people instead of two. I did not understand what he meant until I real-
ized that my wife was pregnant. After agonizing debates, she decided not
to come with me although all the paperwork had been cleared. She
believed that a pregnant woman could only harm or bring bad luck to

II. O

PPRESSION AND

SCAPE

her husband in any trip. Since nothing I did could change her beliefs, I
forged ahead and took the trip by myself. In the Rach Gia port, we —
one hundred people — crammed into what was a 30-foot boat as far as
I could tell. There was no room to lie down or stretch out. We were forced
to sit close to one another for hours and hours like proverbial sardines
in a can. I only carried with me a small bag containing clothes and a few
other things. Many Chinese brought with them gold bracelets, rings,
money that they tried to hide behind any recess of the boat right in view
of everyone. It was really funny to watch how people managed to hide
away their jewelry. I heaved a sigh of relief when the boat slowly moved
away from the pier.

I felt since the beginning there was something wrong with the boat.

The engine was not running smoothly. I might have been superstitious,
but this appeared to be a bad omen. Half an hour into the trip, my boat
somehow bumped into another one causing it to shake violently. Stuffed
in the hold of the boat, we did not see it coming and wondered what
had happened. We asked ourselves how a collision could occur in the
wide open sea. Was the captain drunk? Was he sleeping on the job? The
stalling of the engine made us nervous and jittery. The captain soon told
us that as a result of the accident, he needed to return to Rach Gia to
have the boat ﬁxed before taking off again in a few days. Each of us got
upset because we worried about not being allowed to get out of the coun-
try again. The boat ﬁnally docked in Rach Gia and I returned to Saigon.
My wife was surprised to see me returning home and wondered what
had happened. I told her an accident had delayed our departure and we
would take off again in a few days.

Five days later, the boat sailed again. On the second day of the trip,

we were attacked by pirates, mostly Thai ﬁshermen who preyed on inno-
cent seafarers instead of ﬁsh. They boarded our boat and ordered all
males to move to their boat. They took my wedding ring and other valu-
ables from the other men. What they did to the women on our boat, I
did not know, but I noticed many of them crying afterwards. Traveling
by myself, I was not privy to all the information. I, however, noticed on
my return to the boat that they had ransacked it pretty well: It looked
as if a big tornado had driven through it. Holes — made with a sharp
object or hammer — were seen everywhere and clothing and bags were
strewn all over the ﬂoor. The pirates apparently created holes to look for
hidden jewelries or valuables. They also took everything they wanted,

5. My Life as a Zombie (Ngo)

including my personal belongings. I was therefore left with the clothes
I had on me. The planks that covered the engine area had been smashed
revealing what I had suspected all along: an old engine. It was no won-
der the boat had stalled that often during the trip. I wondered whether
we would ever arrive at destination with such a rusty and worn out
engine. I could only pray. The boat, like an old man, slowly departed
again, limping along the way. It, however, held its own despite being
attacked twice more by pirates. Three attacks in three days. There was
nothing else to steal because the ﬁrst pirates had stripped us of almost
everything.

Pulau Bidong

To my greatest surprise, the boat ﬁnally pulled into Pulau Bidong,

an island twenty miles east of the Malaysian coastline. Bidong was a
deserted island until the refugees arriving to Malaysia were sent there to
live in 1978. At the time of my arrival, it was refuge to about 40,000
people who survived in shoddy huts built with their own hands — an
unsightly wooden frame to which were tied pieces of cardboard, wood
or scrap metal, plastic lining, and leaves. If there was a prize for inge-
nuity, we would have won it outright. Five to six people shared a ten-
by-ten-foot space, but as long as the shacks kept the rain and sun out,
they served their purposes as far as we were concerned. I was assigned
to live with a family in a small hut and used an empty rice bag to cover
myself at night. My worst encounter was with the bedbugs — as big as
the tip of the little ﬁnger — that seemed to be everywhere and could sting
badly.

I worked at the local dispensary as a physician although most of the

work was done by a technician. Since I had lost everything including
my bag and ring, I had nothing left except the shorts I had on me. I
went to the beach every day to dip into its warm water and to wash my
shorts. I went home with wet shorts, which luckily dried up a few hours
later under the tropical heat. For a year on this island, my only belong-
ing was these shorts. I had thrown away my shirt a long time ago because
it could not withstand the daily use and the heat. I listened with sad-
ness to the daily news, which was broadcast over the loudspeakers. Every
day, I heard something like “Boat KG2016 arriving at Bidong Island with

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121 refugees aboard and 40 lost at sea.” It struck me that a lot of people
had perished at sea at the hands of pirates or during storms. Many boats
were never heard from again and were presumed to have sunk into the
depth of the sea. Without a family on this island, I shared the sadness
and misery that clung to all those who arrived without money.

Groups of young entrepreneurial males went into the forest to look

for good tree trunks, which they cut down and took back to the camp.
They then built solid huts, which they sold to the highest bidders. There
were always lucky people who somehow managed to bring out a lot of
money that allowed them to lead a “luxurious” life anywhere, even in
the most sordid camp. They could buy the best that was available on the
island: ﬁsh freshly caught from the ocean, fresh products brought in as
contraband and so on. Life was certainly good to a few people.

I lived on the island for over a year before being sponsored by my

younger brother who was living in the United States at that time. One
day, I was taken to the airport and ﬂown to the Washington, D.C., area
where I have lived until now. My wife rejoined me a few years later.

Life in the U.S. was humbling in the beginning, to say the least. I

did not know anything about social and professional lives in this coun-
try and did not have any mentor to guide me through the various steps
and regulations I needed to take in order to get back into my profession.
I applied to 60 or 70 positions before being accepted in a rotating intern-
ship in surgery. Later I switched to a three-year training program in
medicine at Howard University before going into private practice in the
area.

The road has been long and difﬁcult but gratifying in the end. I

would like to thank all the people who have helped me along the way.

5. My Life as a Zombie (Ngo)

Anatomy of an Escape

Theresa C. Trask

DITOR

’

OTE

: A former midwife retold her childhood and life under

the Republican government and the communist regime. Her planned
escape is described in detail.

I was born in Rach Gia in the southwestern part of Vietnam close

to the Cambodian border. My father was a school headmaster in a nearby
village. As a man who loved his country, he once joined the Viet Minh,

a precursor of the Viet Cong, to ﬁght against the French. In the 1940s,
many local patriots joined that revolutionary group for lack of alterna-
tives and because the Viet Minh had carefully hidden their communist
agenda. It was only after 1954 that the communists got rid of the non-
communist patriots from their organization and took the name of Viet
Cong.

Country Life

My life as a country girl was fairly unremarkable except for a cer-

tain night during my youth when we heard hissing sounds coming out
from under our bed. That sound was quite unusual and rare in our area.
We lived in a hut adjacent to the school building and the ground was a
plain dirt ﬂoor. Scared, we lit up a few oil lamps since there was no elec-
tricity in the countryside. We looked around and found a large cobra
standing under the bed with its head pointing toward us. Having never
seen a snake that close, I shrieked out of fear. How this snake came to

stay under our bed was unknown. It must have sneaked into the house
from under the sidewalls that didn’t completely touch the ground. This
common practice not only allowed fresh air to circulate into the house,
but also allowed unwelcome visitors to sneak in. Villagers ran over to
our dwelling as they heard our cries for help. They looked for the cobra
and ﬁnally killed it. We hung the snake by its head from the ceiling and
the following morning my mother dutifully skinned it, cut it into pieces,
and cooked it. I was amazed by the way she did it and watched with a
mixture of horror and surprise at the ease with which she completed the
task. The snake obviously did not mean anything to her while I still had
not completely recovered from the event of the night before. To thank
the villagers for their help, we invited them to eat rice soup with snake
meat. They eagerly came for this rare and very special treat. They also
brought wine to the party. This was the ﬁrst and only time I ate snake
in my life. I looked at the meat with horror and ventured to take a small
bite. A chill went through my whole body when I swallowed it. It was
not bad and tasted like chicken. It is fair to say that I did ﬁnish the soup
but not the meat. I also heard that villagers would eat no snake other
than cobras.

One day, one of the Viet Minh accused my father of some misdeed

he did not commit. My father was angry and thought he could not prove
or vindicate himself in front of the group committee; he therefore decided
to move to town and to put himself under police protection. There was
no way he could physically resist a group of ﬁve or ten people jumping
on him. He knew how the Viet Minh treated their prisoners and did not
want to go through such a treatment. After taking whatever belongings
we had, we jumped into our sampan and paddled rapidly on the small
river that directly led to town. We did not care about the house for it
belonged to the school. The French, who also had my father under sur-
veillance, caught and jailed him on arrival. This was the problem that
faced many patriots at the time: Hiding from one group landed them in
the claws of another. He was, however, not badly treated in jail because
he was educated and spoke French ﬂuently. He was only given minor
jail duties to fulﬁll while other prisoners had to do hard labor. His jail-
ers soon released him because they were unable to substantiate any charge
against him. Following his release, he was given a job at one of the town
schools but the Viet Minh soon caught up with him. They beat and
accused him of embezzling funds from the revolutionary army. Brought

6. Anatomy of an Escape (Trask)

before the committee, he gave its members his side of the story. He told
them he did not do anything wrong: An envious comrade had made false
accusations about him in order to discredit him. Luckily, one the men
on the jury stood up for him and the Viet Minh cleared him and never
bothered him again. Following this incident, he vowed never to get
involved in politics again.

My father raised me according to thousand-year-old Confucian tra-

ditions that dictated that women should be subservient to men in a male-
dominated society. A woman had to obey her father when single, her
husband when married, and her eldest son if widowed. These were the
tam tong rules (three rules) a woman should follow in a Confucian soci-
ety. And the sooner she learned her role, the better it would be for her.
During my teen years, he sat me down every morning and taught me
about the tu duc or four basic Confucian virtues: cong, dung, ngon, hanh.
A woman should know how to cook and sew (cong) and be presentable
(dung); she should converse nicely (ngon) and be virtuous (hanh). He told
me that higher education was not necessary for a girl as long as she was
ready for marriage when she turned eighteen. I therefore paid more atten-
tion to cooking and sewing than to sciences and excelled in these sub-
jects in my senior year. I also won the ﬁrst prize for sewing the best ao
dai during a school contest. The ao dai was auctioned off and the money
was used to fund other school activities. There was no need to mention
I was proud of myself. I also spent a lot of time with my mother in the
kitchen where I learned the basics of Vietnamese cooking.

Life Under the Southern Republic

After graduating from school and since no one had asked me for

marriage, my uncle advised me to go to Saigon to further my studies.
This sounded like a great idea because unlike other girls who just stayed
around home waiting to get married, I liked to expand my knowledge.
I was also glad my father was liberal enough to allow me to go to Saigon,
for country girls usually did not leave home for any reason except mar-
riage. I applied and was accepted as a midwife student at Tu Du’s women’s
hospital in Saigon. It was with joy that I packed my belongings and
moved to the city where I resided at my uncle’s house. I really enjoyed
the education as well as Saigon’s lifestyle. The experience was an eye

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opener for any country girl. A few months later, I received an order to
return home the following summer because a businessman and his par-
ents from the nearby town of Soc Trang would like to meet with me. It
was a pre-arranged session that allowed the other family to take the ﬁrst
and last look at the future bride before agreeing to a marriage.

The ceremony was also the ﬁrst face-to-face meeting between the

two families, although negotiations had been going on for some time
through an intermediary. Since I did not know the suitor and his fam-
ily and did not like the idea of getting married at that time, I felt trapped
in an event I could not get out of. Backing out would be seen not only
as insensitive, but also ungrateful to my parents who had planned a long
time for this ceremony and beamed at the prospect of becoming the
future in-laws of a well-to-do family. Although unhappy, I decided to
go ahead with the challenge. I returned home before the meeting date
and helped my mother to get the house in order, for the main thing the
groom’s side would look at was the kitchen. A clean kitchen would help
me pass the test even though it was not even my kitchen and I had not
spent much time there. As per customs, I dressed up in a beautiful pink
ao dai I had recently custom-made and peeked at the visitors from behind
the curtain. The two sides were happily conversing in the living room.
At the opportune time, I brought tea and dessert for the guests. I was
so shaken up by the event that I spilled tea all over the tray. I uttered a
few awkward excuses while ﬁelding other questions that were thrown at
me. I tried to answer them in a polite manner while I was sized up from
head to toe. The whole face-to-face meeting lasted no more than ten
minutes although the two families talked for a long time. Despite the
incident, the groom’s side wanted to proceed with the marriage: That
was a foregone conclusion, for it was based more on the matching of
horoscope signs than on my overall demeanor. Despite seeing my suitor
for just a few minutes, I was not interested in him; he had the look of a
country boy rather than that of a well-rounded businessman. Besides, I
did not feel ready to commit myself to someone I did not even know. I
returned to Saigon and took time to give an answer to my father. With
time passing by and sensing reluctance on my part, my parents, who were
very understanding, canceled the marriage negotiations. I was rather
happy to hear the news for I had no inclination to get bogged down in
a marriage at this time.

I continued my studies, graduated from school and returned to

6. Anatomy of an Escape (Trask)

Rach Gia to practice midwifery. During that period I delivered a lot of
babies whose mothers were happy with my care. Each time they were
ready for another delivery, they called on me to help. They gave my name
to their neighbors who also asked for me. They came to the hospital and
told the nurses they were my “relatives” and requested me. When I came
down to see them, many turned out to be complete strangers. After hav-
ing conﬁrmed they were referred to me by a former friend or relative, I
usually accepted them as my patients. The guards at the hospital gate
always chided me about all the relatives I had in town. I lived a happy
life there. I had long dark hair that came down to my waist, which I was
very proud of. When I returned home from work and passed by a high
school, a few men used to follow me although I paid attention to no
one.

By that time, my father had moved to Chuong Thien to start his

private business: He had bought some land and a rice mill to sort out
rice. His business was growing rapidly. By 1970, I decided to go back to
Saigon to become a nurse instructor. Following graduation, I stayed at
Tu Du’s hospital as an instructor. Although I had a few friends, I was
not interested in men at that time. My eldest sister had warned me that
men were not trustworthy: She had to constantly watch her husband
who, despite being married, still had many girlfriends on the side. The
sight of her chasing after him and ﬁghting with him made me squeam-
ish and reluctant to engage in any relationship. One day, a doctor I knew
back in Rach Gia called me to his ofﬁce in Saigon. He was a very hand-
some man and a womanizer. He had many girlfriends among the high-
class society in Rach Gia. He somehow had made someone upset at
him and acid was thrown in his face. The perpetrator was never caught
and the doctor required treatment and reconstruction of his left ear in
Saigon. He was still a handsome man although the left side of his face
was scarred. He told me he heard about me working at the hospital and
decided to talk to me. He wanted me to work for him and I told him I
needed to think it over. I went back to my hospital and never called him
back.

Surviving Under the Communist Regime

On April 30, 1975, while everyone looked for ways to get out of

Saigon, I missed the chance to get on the boat that would have taken

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me abroad. I was supposed to get out with my sister and her family, but
due to last minute mishaps, we had to stay back. My parents went out
easily with my other sister who had worked for USAID (U.S. Agency
for International Development). Those who worked for American com-
panies were safely ﬂown out before the fall of Saigon. Depressed, I went
back to work as usual at the hospital. Reality was grim as the commu-
nists took over control of the government. Food and basic necessities
became rationed and could only be purchased at government ofﬁces or
stores. Being single, I did not have to hunt for food as much as other
people with a large family in tow. However, life was still stressful. A new
hospital director came straight from Hanoi to take over the hospital
along with a few northern physicians. One female housekeeper, an
underground Viet Cong, was promoted to the position of doctor in
charge of delivery. How a housekeeper without any training could
become a doctor seemed unreal to me: That decision could only hap-
pen in a communist world. As a midwife, I even had to go through years
of training before being allowed to practice. Being uneducated, she was
very rude to patients and talked to them in vulgar terms. Although she
shouted and yelled at all the southern nurses and midwives, no one dared
to oppose her because she was on the side of the “administration.” South-
ern physicians were either downgraded or sent to reeducation camps.
Characteristic of the steely communist approach, the Tu Du’s hospital
became the “Birthing Factory.” To equate a hospital, the role of which
should be to deliver care and empathy, to a factory, was insulting to all
the women who went through great pain, sacriﬁce, and suffering to carry
and eventually deliver babies.

As food was provided only by government agencies, hospital

employees were called at scheduled dates to the main ofﬁce to receive
their monthly allocations. Each family was given a pound of sugar and
a pound of animal fat to be used as cooking oil. I also received a small
amount of rice and ﬁsh, which we immediately took to the back room
of the hospital to remove the scales. The ﬁsh were small in size and of
poor quality. They had to be cooked right away to prevent them from
spoiling in the hot weather. All the top quality ﬁsh, shrimp, and rice had
to be shipped north, then exported to China as payment for debts
incurred during the war. At the end of the day, although we had not
done much except scale and prepare ﬁsh, we pompously reported to our
superiors that we had spent a hectic day and executed a great deal of work.

6. Anatomy of an Escape (Trask)

We made up all the work we had not done such as cleaning the rooms,
the instruments, providing counseling to the patients, and so on.

People’s economic status deteriorated. With men in concentration

camps and with all the factories closed, women received no income.
Without money to spend and without the availability of new fabric, they
resorted to converting their ao dai into long-sleeve shirts in order to solve
their clothing needs. It was a painful sacriﬁce for many of them for their
ao dai were expensive to tailor. On the other hand, there was no occa-
sion to show off their lovely ao dai again, for all entertainments, meet-
ings, and reunions had been canceled. With my tailoring skills, I showed
the other nurses how to cut off the lower ends of the ao dai and trans-
form the upper end into a shirt. I also did some tailoring business on
the side to earn extra cash.

I spent time speaking in secrecy with a few southern physicians and

friends about ways to get out of the country. I followed as many leads
as I could and gradually disposed of my jewelry and belongings to put
down payments on various escape attempts. I was so eager to get out
that I did not pay enough attention to the handlers. Each transaction
sadly turned out to be as bogus as the other. At one time I was referred
to a Muslim handler who told my sister and me about his deal. He took
us to his mosque and prayed there for a long time for the success of his
venture. We thought he was a religious man and trusted him with our
money. He simply disappeared with it and we found out later on that
he performed similar scams on other people. He ended up in jail months
later. Deep down inside I cringed as I watched my small savings evap-
orate into thin air. Had I reported the scams to the police, I would have
been jailed for having attempted to escape. Down to my last ounce of
gold, I became desperate and decided to trade away my scooter, but the
lady I dealt with had closed a deal the day before and did not want to
buy from me. I cried, for I was confused and did not know what to do
next. The world seemed to crash under me. I thought I never would be
able to get out of the country to rejoin my parents. A friend of mine
who saw my despair referred me to a priest. Although I was a Buddhist,
I decided to explore this new religion out of despair. The priest coun-
seled me and after a while converted me to Catholicism. As times were
unstable and uncertain, the number of desperate people like me who
turned to religion for help grew rapidly. During that period, I saw a lot
of women and men praying in churches and pagodas. As my religion gave

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me comfort and peace, I returned to work with zeal. It was at that time
my parents, who had migrated to the States, sent me $U.S. 2,000. I
thought it was a blessing from God for it came at the right time. Over-
joyed, I gave most of it to my brother to outﬁt a boat for an escape.

Escape Planning

Brother Five

had also decided to escape and asked me to come and

live with his family to speed up the preparation. He got acquainted with
a few Viet Cong who gave him road passes to go to Rach Gia. Move-
ment from one region to another was strictly regulated for the purpose
of controlling the whereabouts of citizens. If road passes made the gov-
ernment feel in control, they also corrupted the system. Those who had
money or connections could bribe the ofﬁcials and easily obtain the
passes, thereby bypassing the control system. Using his scooter and the
passes, brother Five drove ﬁrst to Bac Lieu about 90 miles southwest of
Saigon. Driving by himself gave him the freedom he could not enjoy
had he used public transportation, which was crowded, noisy, and rarely
on time. Besides, the mobility of his scooter allowed him to sneak around
without being detected or followed. He could go anywhere whenever he
wanted. He could avoid delays at the various police stations strewn along
the highways to control passengers. Once in Bac Lieu, he got in touch
with a friend who had previously owned a boat. The boat was used for
ﬁshing trips in the past but once the engine failed it was left idle and
useless on the water like an amputee without a prosthetic leg. As he was
good with deals, he made a proposition the boat owner could not refuse.
Who would refuse if someone offered him the chance to get out of the
country at that time?

He then drove to Rach Gia to look for a boat engine. Since the boat-

ing industry was heavily regulated and controlled by the police, brother
Five cautiously went around the boating stores to look for a good engine.
He ﬁnally found what he liked: a used Japanese engine that was in fairly
good condition. He ﬁlled out the forms, paid for the engine, and had it
shipped to his address in Saigon. He returned to Saigon and went about
his daily business as a pharmacist at the state hospital. Once in posses-
sion of the engine, he brought it to a well-known repair shop in town
and asked the owner to ﬁx it according to his speciﬁcations. He later real-

6. Anatomy of an Escape (Trask)

ized through friends that the shop was a storefront for the local police.
Too late to cancel the order, he decided to sell the engine to another
friend to avoid attracting police’s attention. Through a complex deal he
got his engine back from another person.

He decided to work on the engine by himself as he was very gifted

with his hands: Had he not been a pharmacist, he would have become
an engineer. He used all his spare time to tinker with the engine after
building a shed behind his house to work at his leisure. Local policemen
came by a couple of times to enquire about his work. He told them he
was building an engine to make sugar out of sugarcane. The police left
him alone although he was sure they kept a close eye on him. Although
it took him a long time, he was able to double the power of the engine
and connect it to a propeller. The next step was to test it and make sure
it worked properly. Cranking it up in the shed would surely attract the
attraction of the police, which he did not want to do. He thought about
trying the machine indoors as this would deﬁnitely cut down on the
noise. He brought the machine indoors and realized that the smoke gen-
erated during the testing might also attract the attention of the police.
He decided to connect the exhaust pipe to a plastic tubing, which he
plugged into the sewer system. He thought the smoke would follow the
sewer system and be carried away somewhere else and no one would
ﬁgure out where it was coming from. He cranked up the engine, which
sputtered in the beginning. After a few tries, it began to work and to
generate a small amount of smoke inside the house. The rest had been
dissipated through the sewer as expected. He was happy with the way
the engine worked, although he thought it needed some reﬁnement. We
both beamed for joy at the thought of ﬁnally being able to escape.

Suddenly, rapid knocks at the front door caused us to freeze with

fear. The police, we thought, even if contacted ten minutes earlier could
not arrive that fast. I ran to the door, looked through the keyhole and
saw my next door neighbor. I rapidly opened the door and greeted her
as if nothing had happened. She was my boss at Tu Du hospital: a north-
ern obstetrician who came from Hanoi to assume direction of the biggest
women’s hospital in town. Having no place to live, the government had
assigned to her the house next door. Its previous owner was a general
who had left the country in the last days of April 1975. She started enquir-
ing about the noisy engine brother Five was working on and about the
smoke that had seeped into her house. Her question sent an electric

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shock into my spine: We would be in dire trouble had she reported us
to the police. I quickly expressed my regrets about sending smoke into
her house and assured her we would stop working on an engine that was
designed to produce sugar out of sugar cane. Again I profusely apolo-
gized to her. As she knew me, she accepted the apology and went back
into her house. I was still shaking when I closed my door. My brother
nervous and uptight from the incident had turned off the engine. For
all his fancy plans, he failed to realize that the smoke, after going into
the sewer, would back up into each connecting house. We lived in a row
of townhouses that were connected to each other, a relic of French archi-
tecture. I was glad no other neighbor had complained about the smoke.
He wiped the sweat off his face, took the engine into his shed and did
not work on it for about a week.

During that period, he made frequent trips to Bac Lieu to work on

refurbishing the riverboat. He asked his friend to gut out the whole boat,
to make it more aerodynamic and suitable for seafaring, to put a new
coat of tar on the keel and to rebuild the inside of the boat. Two sepa-
rate holding areas were fashioned with two new entrances doors.
Although designed to serve as hiding areas, they could be used for stor-
ing ﬁsh or shrimp. The work took some time, for the boat owner had to
be careful not to attract the attention of the police. Besides time, money
and luck were also important. Boat building was one of the businesses
that were closely watched by the government and the owner had been
wise to register his vessel as a ﬁshing boat. Brother Five shipped the
engine to Bac Lieu sometime later. Once the refurbishing was completed
and the engine installed, the owner took it for a maiden voyage up and
down the river. For many months, he and brother Five went ﬁshing on
many occasions and had dutifully returned home after each trip. They
also made sure the police knew about each of their trips and would not
become suspicious of their whereabouts.

Eighteen months had passed since the planning stages of the proj-

ect: 18 months during which I daily enquired about its progress. Every-
one had anxiously waited for D-day, which had been pushed back many
times. I too was tired of waiting; 18 months represented almost an eter-
nity for those who yearned to get out of the country. I thought I would
never see the day when I could enjoy freedom. But after living ﬁve years
under the communist system, I was somewhat used to it. As a woman,
I did not feel as politically and socially threatened as a man. With my

6. Anatomy of an Escape (Trask)

new faith, I felt at peace with myself and did not doubt I could easily
survive under the regime for a long time. My brother had been working
hard on the project all along: He had dedicated all his energy and strength
to it and when he announced the date of departure, I was happy the pres-
sure on him was lightened.

We went to the rendezvous through various routes. I put in a request

for a week of vacation with the purpose of visiting my relatives in the
countryside. I took only the necessary things in order not to attract
undue attention. I went to Bac Lieu about 90 miles southwest of Saigon
where I boarded the boat. A total of 46 people took part in the trip. They
were picked up in groups at various places. We stayed in the two hold-
ing areas and the doors were closed on us. Blocks of ice were laid on top
of the doors to make the whole area look like a large icebox from the
outside. It was dark on the inside although we had ﬂashlights we could
use if need arose. The area was cramped and we tried to minimize all
noises. Children were given sleeping medicines. Although it became
stuffy after a while, we told ourselves that it would not be too long before
we could get back on the deck.

As the boat sailed down the river, we could feel it moving and could

hear the engine rumbling. We were thrilled that at least we had departed
from a land of oppression, although we knew it was just the beginning.
The trip appeared to be smooth until we arrived at the last police sta-
tion before hitting the high seas. A policeman came on board and began
inspecting everything. We heard his footsteps above us. Despite seeing
the blocks of ice, he curiously enquired about what was behind the ice.
I heard my brother telling him in a straightforward voice it was an ice-
box. We shook like leaves at the thought of the policeman wanting to
take a look at the area. Had he asked, he would have discovered us and
we would have all ended up in jail. Those few minutes weighed heavily
on us. Luckily, he turned around and looked elsewhere. We all let out a
big sigh of relief. Before getting off the boat, he requested a block of ice
for the men at the station: My brother, glad to get rid of him, gave him
half a block, arguing we needed all the ice to freeze the catch.

We realized we once more lucked out. The boat reached the sea

shortly thereafter and we were let out of the ice box. The trip turned
out to be uneventful and we reached a Malaysian oil rig three days later.
There were no storm or pirates to ﬁght against and we were all happy
the trip did not take that long. My brother bored a few holes at the bot-

II. O

PPRESSION AND

SCAPE

tom of the boat in order to sink it. The rig manager would not let us
get on the rig if the boat was not sunk. Once the boat took on water,
we were rescued and transported to Pulau Bidong camp the following
day. My parents later sponsored me to the U.S.

6. Anatomy of an Escape (Trask)

The Guava Tree

Anh Hai

DITOR

’

OTE

: Living conditions were oppressive for the southern

inmates. The communists used food as a tool to control, to punish
them, and to wear them down physically and mentally. Hunger was
so pervasive inmates only thought about food.

Depressed, dispirited and malnourished, a colonel who had been

imprisoned in a northern camp for more than six years was ready to
give up and to kill himself. On his way to work one morning, he fell
on the ground exhausted. When he woke up he heard birds singing
and saw a guava tree full of ripe fruit overshadowing him. He thought
he was dreaming... This is the story of how an encounter with a fruit
tree saved his life.

I was an ARVN colonel who had the chance to get out of Vietnam

on April 29, 1975. Delayed by the funeral of a general who had com-
mitted suicide on the last day of the war, I missed the plane that would
have taken my family and me out of the country. I therefore remained
in Saigon when the city fell. I did not know what to do as I became
imprisoned in my own country. I followed the news on the radio and
reported to the new government two weeks later for what was termed
“one month of reeducation” for ofﬁcers of my rank. The “one month”
reeducation turned out to be fourteen long years of incarceration, six in
the south and eight more in various camps in the north. When I look
back at these years, the famous phrase President Thieu once uttered
immediately jumps to my mind: “Don’t listen to what the communists
say, but just watch what they do.” Had everyone listened to him, South
Vietnam would probably not have been lost.

Life in the Northern Camps

I was incarcerated at the Long Giao camp for about one year, dur-

ing which I had to write my biography over and over again and to learn
about socialism and uncle Ho. I no longer remember how many biog-
raphies I wrote during that period and how many hours of political lec-
tures and discussions I endured, listening while sitting on the hard and
cold dirt ﬂoor. And that was just the brainwashing part, the breakfast
before the big meal. Some of us blocked out these messages outright
while others just ignored them. I decided to let the words ﬂy by me with-
out registering them. The Buddha once said something like “rain drops
will not harm anyone if we let them run down our skin.” We were sent
to the Suoi Mau camp where we languished for about a month while
waiting for the “big treatment.” We knew the communists would not let
us off the hook that easily.

We were then told we would be going to “nicer” places than the

one we were in: This was a euphemism for “hell.” Somehow the com-
munists always said the reverse of what they were thinking. One night
in 1976, around midnight, we were shoved into the backs of trucks dark-
ened for having their tarpaulins rolled down and driven to an unknown
destination. Communist drivers always drove slowly, making the trip
longer than expected. The destination was Tan Son Nhut airport where
we were conﬁned to a securely guarded hangar. We were taken to an
American-made C130 cargo airplane, our hands and feet shackled, and
ﬂown to Yen Bai airport in the north.

We were then transported to the Lao Kai camp close to the Chi-

nese border. Never had we imagined that we, high-level ofﬁcers, would
be shackled like common thieves. Along the way, people lined up along
the streets, cursed and threw rocks at us. Whether this was a sponta-
neous or incited manifestation of anger was never known, although we
suspected that everything in the communist state was planned ahead of
time. There was no way for common people to know who was riding in
the trucks unless someone had tipped them off. A general greeted us and
told us point blank that we would be doing hard labor: The camp was
neither a rest or recreation area. From then on, we worked six days a
week and were placed on a starvation diet: two bowls of rice a day — one
at lunch and the other at supper. We barely survived under that harsh
treatment.

7. The Guava Tree (Hai)

In 1977, because of the impending war with China, we were moved

to the Ha Tay camp where we were given axes to take down lo o trees.
These giant trees were then chopped into pieces, the good ones set aside
for making furniture and the rest sold to villagers as ﬁrewood for cash.
All this work was done with backbreaking effort using regular axes as
there were no electric saws. One just has to ﬁgure how long it would
take to chop a large tree into chunks of wood. Lifting and transporting
these heavy pieces of wood was also done by hand as no forklift was
available. The fruit of our work of course was kept by our jailers. Dur-
ing the process, a few prisoners became so hungry they ate the roots of
the trees: They died as a consequence because the roots turned out to
be very toxic. Light-duty labor reserved for recovering inmates consisted
of planting vegetables in the garden plot; more than half of the harvest
was set aside for sale and the rest used for local consumption.

Civilian Life

The communist system introduced in South Vietnam after 1975

completely overhauled the whole society. Men associated with the for-
mer regime lost their jobs and therefore their incomes. The fact they were
conﬁned in concentration camps forced their wives to work to put food
on the table. Housewives were thus thrown into society to become wage
earners. Having no previous skills, they were forced to become peddlers:
They sold their furniture, television and radio sets, motorcycles, bikes,
and basically whatever they could put their hands on. Others sold food
products, fruits, vegetables, rice, and so on. If they could not sell they
traded products among themselves. Southern money had been conﬁscated
and each family was allowed to keep 500 dong at most: This was a one-
time deal. The southern capitalist economy stalled for lack of money
and products. A new primitive economy slowly emerged of trading and
bartering.

My wife, in the meantime, had to look for means to feed our nine

children. She put the eldest, a ten-year-old boy, in charge of a coffee
stand she set up in front of the house. A small table, a few chairs, pow-
dered coffee, hot water and cups were all that was needed. Assisted by
his brothers, he sold coffee to passersby and collected whatever money
he could earn. My wife set up another stand at the black market to sell

II. O

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diamonds and bracelets. Since she was knowledgeable about gold and
jewelry prior to the end of the war, she continued along that line of work
and served as an intermediary between sellers and buyers. While south-
ern women tried to dispose of their jewelries and diamonds, northern
women who then had the money bought all these fancy objects they had
never owned. There was thus a transfer of southern goods to northern-
ers.

The police watched my house and its inhabitants closely at all times.

They harassed my family by planting false stories with neighbors. On
many occasions they told neighbors but not my family that my house,
the puppet’s house, would be taken over by the government. The neigh-
bors in turn notiﬁed my family of the bad news. This caused my wife
to become very upset and she made arrangements to get out of the house
in case there was a need. She became more aggressive in her dealings in
order to have enough money to move out. On another occasion, the
police came by to search the house for money, gold, or contraband items.
They went through all the drawers, racks, and rooms only to ﬁnd in one
of the boys’ rooms a copy of Playboy magazine. The magazine was con-
sidered to be a “decadent” and therefore illegal item, and its owner was
subject to arrest. To prevent my son being jailed, my sister-in-law stepped
in and claimed to have bought the magazine to use as wrapping paper.
The young policemen looked through the magazine with delight,
conﬁscated it and took it home with them.

The Guava Tree

Despite working in the ﬁelds as usual for eight to ten hours a day,

our jailers placed us on starvation rations. They gave us two meals a day:
one bowl of gruel at lunch and two bowls of rice with some lettuce at
supper. A few morsels of ﬁsh or meat would be a luxury in our camp.
Under this regimen, we all felt weaker and weaker as time went by. We
wobbled and our gaits became unsteady. Some of us developed leg and
ankle edema from lack of nutrition — a sign of lack of thiamine or vita-
min B1. Jailers did not have to beat us: They just underfed us and like
autumn leaves we just withered away. Many, as a matter of fact, just
dropped dead because of inanition.

On many occasions, we were assigned to work in a ﬁeld planted

7. The Guava Tree (Hai)

with manioc. We seeded all these plants, which could grow as tall as ﬁve
or six feet. We dug out the roots when they matured and stored and con-
sumed them after boiling these roots. The latter could measure up to
one foot in length and two to three inches in thickness. They were soft
when consumed soon after harvest. But once they were stored for some
time, they would become as hard as any other root. Chewing on them
became a problem because malnutrition had caused our teeth to be in
poor condition. After returning to the camp following a full day’s work
in the manioc ﬁeld one day, we realized that three of us were missing
from the daily roll call. We simply thought they had tried to escape. The
jailers sent some of us to look for them — under supervision of course.
When we returned to the ﬁeld, we noticed all three of them lying dead
on the ground. Close by were remnants of manioc roots. They appar-
ently were so hungry they ate the roots raw without even peeling the
skin and cooking them. Manioc skin was noted to be very toxic; it could
cause instant death on swallowing.

A few inmates had on another occasion gorged themselves to death

by eating berries. Whether the wild berries were toxic or whether their
stomachs could not tolerate the rapid ingestion of berries was not known.
It was possible that the infriable, unused stomachs could have burst
open like any over-distended organ. The state of starvation induced
by our jailers in the camps made us so hungry that we ate whatever we
could put our hands on: lizards, crickets, frogs, rats, and snakes. These
indiscriminate eating habits had something to do with our high death
rate.

On my way to work one day, I felt so weak that I dragged behind

the rest of the group. I fell to the ground although I had almost reached
the worksite. No one heard the noise and no one paid attention to me
because they were just as weak as I was. As I could barely move, I became
desperate and just wanted to die. I felt the ground with my ﬁngers look-
ing for a sharp object with which I could kill myself. I grabbed a sharp
branch and pulled it close to me. But I was too weak to even kill myself.
Then I lost consciousness. I do not know how long I stayed on the ground
but for me it was an eternity. I was suddenly awakened by the chirping
of birds. They were so happy that they sang and sang. Everything was
so peaceful that I thought I was in heaven. There was no guard around
me and no one was yelling or screaming at me. I felt relaxed and much
stronger than before. I slowly opened my eyes to make sure I was still

II. O

PPRESSION AND

SCAPE

alive and not dreaming. The sun was shining on me. I blinked my eyes
and reopened them slowly.

What I saw was unbelievable. I must be dreaming, I mumbled to

myself. Above me was a guava tree full of ripe guavas, some green and
others yellow. Of all the trees, it had to be a guava tree. And I could even
smell the aroma of ripe guavas from the ground. I have had a weakness
for bitter fruits like guavas or star fruits since I was young. When I was
in the army, I used to come home during lunchtime and eat a few guavas
with mam ruoc (fermented shrimp sauce) before returning to work. And
there it was: I just fell asleep underneath my favorite tree. I was so weak
I did not even recognize it before I fell down. I slowly got up, still dizzy
from the overall weakness. I reached up, picked the ripest fruit, and started
munching on it. This was the most delicious guava I had ever tasted.
Since I had not eaten any guava for at least six years, I ﬁnished it in no
time although it was slow according to my normal standard. I then
grabbed another one and another one and ate them all. I felt full and
charged with a new joy of living. I then rejoined my fellow inmates who
wondered where I had been hiding. From that time onward, I no longer
wanted to die: Life suddenly took on a special meaning for me. I did
not know what had happened but I felt like someone had placed a guava
tree and singing birds on my road to tell me life was worth living.

We were not allowed any visitation during the ﬁrst two years in the

north. Slowly rules were relaxed. My wife came and visited with me on
ﬁve occasions during my eight years in the north. She came more often
when I was moved south for the remaining six years. She brought food —
usually dry products like rice that would last longer than fresh ones —
medicines, candies, sugar, salt, and so on. These items were delicious
for any inmate who subsisted on gruel and rice year in year out. Gnaw-
ing on pieces of shredded pork, beef jerky, or dry squid made me feel
good and euphoric. The medicines and vitamins gave me extra strength.
She also slipped money to me which I used to bribe my guards or buy
a few needed items. I anxiously waited for each of her visits for it was
like light in the middle of darkness. I was indebted to her for remain-
ing faithful to me all these years. She had the chance to stray, though
she did not. From my roommates, I knew of a few women who left their
husbands during this difﬁcult time, although I did not blame them. If
life was tough for us in the concentration camps, it was even tougher for
young wives who were left home alone without any support.

7. The Guava Tree (Hai)

Years passed by slowly and one day I was called to the ofﬁce and

told I would be transferred to the south. Although the south meant closer
to home, I was not free yet. But this was a beginning. I did not know I
would be incarcerated for another ﬁve years. Eight years in a northern
camp were enough to wear out the strongest man. The incarceration
time in the south was much better for me because my wife was able to
see me more often and provide me with food and all the necessary items.
I no longer had to worry about starvation.

One day, I was told about my release. Returning home after a four-

teen-year incarceration was a difﬁcult adaptation process. Nothing was
the same any longer. My wife and children who had grown up and lived
apart from me for a decade and a half had changed. Without realizing
it, my personality also had changed. My wife told me I became a
demanding person while I used to be a nice person to live with before.
Anything would irritate me: things that were out of place, the shoes I
could not ﬁnd, and the food that did not taste good. I probably had lost
my taste because anything she prepared for me was inedible. While I
could not complain about the rice and gruel I received in the camp, at
home I would complain about the food she took time to prepare for me.
Everything was grounds for complaint or I would argue with everything
she said. At night, I suffered from recurrent nightmares that woke up
the whole family. Fights and arguments became frequent between us at
the time. I was a totally different man. My wife told me that the ﬁrst
two years after I came home were hell for her. She had wanted to divorce
me many times although she stuck with me. I am thankful to her for
this. Even today I cannot explain what was going on with me at the time.
It could be related to a combination of stress and anger from the years
of incarceration and the realization she was an independent and some-
what successful housewife.

We applied for the Organized Departure Program which was

designed to help former Saigon government ofﬁcials and soldiers who
had spent more than three years in concentration camps immigrate to
the U.S. As I had spent more than fourteen years in various concentra-
tion camps, I was eligible for the program. We ﬁnally immigrated to the
U.S. a few years later and are still married despite our differences. Like
older Vietnamese, we live in separate rooms despite sharing the same
house. She cooks for me and I do small things in the house for her.
Instead of having a divorce, we have physical separation. We are still

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friends and care for each other. This is the Vietnamese way: After pas-
sion or physical attraction has dissipated, the attachment between the
two individuals still persists through nghia or duty. We feel like we have
a duty to stick together for good or bad.

7. The Guava Tree (Hai)

The So-Called

Reeducation Camp

Trong T. Ngo

DITOR

’

OTE

: The author recounts his experience with southern

reeducation camps — a total of ﬁve. After his release, he was sent to
a NEZ before he ﬁnally decided to escape from the country.

First of all, I have to note that the communists are good handlers

of words. We should be very careful with and meticulous about the way
they use words and especially any dealings with them that involve writ-
ten agreements. Here is an example: Their decree ordered, “All puppet
ofﬁcers (i.e., ofﬁcers of the Thi

u regime) should present themselves for

reeducation courses bringing along with them ten days of food along with
mosquito nets, blankets, etc....” The decree implied that this so-called
“reeducation course” would last for ten days or a little longer but not indeﬁ-
nitely nor even one or two years. Unfortunately, however, it did mean
indeﬁnitely! After the cataclysm of April 1975, the Viet Cong takeover
of South Vietnam, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)
went into chaos. Most of the military personnel were disheartened and
depressed and could only wait to see what would happen to them.

Hoc Mon Reeducation Camp

On June 1, 1975, the ﬁrst decree ordered all enlisted men and non-

commissioned ofﬁcers (NCOs) to attend three-day reeducation courses

at various locations both in the cities and in towns and villages. After
three days of the so-called reeducation courses, each enlisted man and
NCO was given a reeducation certiﬁcate. On June 10, 1975, the second
decree ordered that all civil servants and ﬁeld rank ofﬁcers (major and
above) assemble for reeducation courses. I myself was targeted in the
third decree that called for a 10-day reeducation course.

Nevertheless, I was suspicious. I prepared everything for a mini-

mum stay of three months. I presented myself on June 25, 1975, at the
Faculty of Architecture at the corner of Pasteur and Phan –ình Phùng
streets in Saigon. On arrival, we were placed under the control of the
North Vietnamese Army (NVA) personnel, the “B

–

i”; they were, of

course, armed. Then we had to ﬁll out all kinds of paper work and hand
over our personal documents. We could no longer leave the compound.
It seemed as if military life began for us again after our long and des-
perate experience, which ended in April 1975. We remained in this loca-
tion for two and a half days living on a regimen of boiled convolvulus,
canned ﬁsh and rice. I would like to emphasize here that every day a van
bearing the sign of a very famous restaurant in Saigon — for example, the
famous “Á –ông” Chinese restaurant — brought us these foods. Citizens
outside the compound, seeing that we were catered by restaurants,
thought that we were very well treated; in fact, it was quite the contrary.

On June 28, 1975, at 11

., we were ordered to move to the reed-

ucation camp. At 00:30

., we all climbed onto covered “Molotova”

trucks (40 per truck) with two Viet Cong “b

i” guards armed with

AK riﬂes. The convoy, consisting of about 20 covered Molotova trucks,
departed at 1

. for an unknown destination. The canvas-covered

trucks, loaded with 40 people and their luggage, were crowded and the
air was suffocating. After an hour of travel, some of us began shouting
and yelling, but the b

i put an end to these complaints by threaten-

ing to shoot anyone who continued to create disorder in the packed
truck. The guards who sat at the rear of the truck could in no way envi-
sion the terrible situation we had been enduring inside. Even if they real-
ized it, they didn’t care!

Suddenly, one of us fell unconscious. We decided to make holes into

the cover of the truck to let air ﬂow in — not only to help the uncon-
scious fellow, but also to allow us to see where we were going. All of us
realized the hardships that were waiting for us. At 3:00

., we arrived

at Don Ong Nam, Hóc Môn District, Gia d-i.nh Province, a former Engi-

8. The So-Called Reeducation Camp (Ngo)

neering Corps base. We had to wait in the suffocating truck for at least
half an hour more for the b

i of this camp to wake up. The situation

became worse as air could not get into the parked truck. Whispers and
laments began. Everyone fell into deep thought. Finally, unloading took
place. We felt as if we had been released from a long and hard impris-
onment, but that was just the beginning. After a long head-count and
roll call, we were taken to the warehouses and huts of the former mili-
tary compound, which would house about 800 people (75 persons in
each hut). We were very tired and quickly fell asleep, even though the
ward was ﬁlthy! After two hours of sleep, the breaking of the dawn
allowed us to see our surroundings. Some of us were able to locate the
camp. We were encircled by barbed wire and watched closely by the b

i. There was no way to get out!

The census began. We were organized into squads, platoons, and

companies. The ﬁrst thing we had to do was to cook our own food of rice,
convolvulus as vegetables, and soybean. Each platoon, which consisted
of four squads, organized its own cooking under the supervision of one
communist second lieutenant, one sergeant and two corporals.

We had to dig wells, latrines, refuse pits, etc. With such long-range

goals of setting up utilities and facilities, our hope for a ten-day reedu-
cation evaporated like a cloud of steam. I told myself my foresight was
not bad. The most ironic thing was that we had to reinforce the perime-
ter with barbed wire to keep ourselves from escaping. It was the ﬁrst les-
son of the reeducation. Furthermore, on top of the two storage buildings,
in front of our camp, we were able to see through the barbed wire the
famous communist slogan in big letters: “There is nothing more pre-
cious than Independence and Liberty.”

Besides these duties, we spent time studying the regulations of the

camp; they prohibited us from contacting our friends in other reeduca-
tion battalions who lived in the same compound not far from the barbed
wire. Statement after statement had to be made detailing our life from
childhood to the cataclysm of 1975; all relatives had to be included from
brothers to sisters to parents and grandparents on both sides.

Needless to say, self-criticism was also included and unavoidable.

Not only did we have to criticize ourselves, but we were also judged and
criticized by our friends in the same squad and platoon. Everyone must
ﬁnd a reason to criticize one another. This matter turned out to be very
troublesome or even ugly at times. Three months of unrelenting criti-

II. O

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cism went by slowly. Beriberi, malaria, anemia, and pellagra, which
afﬂicted nearly 75 percent of the camp inmates, were mainly caused by
lack of vitamin B1 and nicotinic acid in the diet. I myself was very
depressed, although I was resistant to all these diseases. My estimate for
a maximum incarceration time of three months in the so-called commu-
nist reeducation system was no longer correct, but I still hoped that it
wouldn’t last too long anyway. A human being could not live too long
without hope.

Then the big day arrived. The real reeducation lectures took place.

The auditorium was the former garage of the base. We had to attend
lectures for one or two days consecutively; the subjects were “American
imperialism,” its cruelties, its exploitation of the workers in the former
South Vietnam and in the under-developed countries, its false, harsh sys-
tem; imperialism’s international world strategy; the sale by the puppet
regime of Thieu-Ky-Khiem of the Vietnamese people to American impe-
rialism; the revolution; the inevitable defeat of American imperialism and
the inevitable overthrow of the puppet regime of Thieu-Ky-Khiem; the
complete and successful campaign of our Army and people guided clev-
erly by the Communist Party and Uncle Ho; and our beautiful and rich
country, the example for the world and the guiding light of the present
times.

Each lesson lasted at least one week or ten days. After one or two

days of lectures, we had to discuss and give our opinions over a period
of ﬁve days or one week: four hours in the morning, four hours in the
afternoon, and under the close supervision of the political cadres. It was
very boring, tiring, and troublesome. Besides, we had to make a resume
of each lesson. More than three months passed with this brain-washing
and we thought the reeducation would be over soon. But it was not. I
ended up in this camp for seven months.

Other Reeducation Camps

On January 21, 1976, I was told along with 150 other men in the

camp to get ready in ten minutes for a new trip — at midnight. We
were assembled at the gate of the base with other men from different
reeducation battalions. At 00:30

., ﬁfty covered trucks took us to

Saigon New Port on Highway No 1 to embark for the new destination.

8. The So-Called Reeducation Camp (Ngo)

At 2:00

. we were on the former ARVN naval ship 401. It was very

crowded. Could you imagine how many people were on this 401 naval
ship? About 2,000 people. Fortunately, we were in the open air, for there
was no canvas cover. Therefore, we could avoid a repeat of our earlier
suffocation episode. After two days and two nights we arrived at Phú
Qu

c Island.

We had to wait until 8:30

. to be taken in former ARVN GMC

trucks to the new reeducation camp. Tired and exhausted, we were driven
to the prison formerly used during the war for POWs. We called it a
concentration camp because the communists hated and feared a com-
parison with the Nazis. Seventy-ﬁve of us had to sleep together in one
room; each man had only 14 inches to lie on. The same procedure and
the same formalities were repeated again. But in this camp we had to
use our hands more than our brains. The political lectures were few, but
from time to time we had to review the crazy lessons we had learned in
the ﬁrst camp in Hóc Môn. We also had to march into the jungle and
carry at least 35 kilos of wood back to the camp — a 10–15 kilometer dis-
tance. We were closely guarded, of course, by the b

i, who were armed

with AK-47s. Besides this duty, we had to clear the jungle, to dig a large
pond about 50 meters long by 25 meters wide and three meters deep to
raise ﬁsh. We worked very hard, we dug and hoed the earth to plant veg-
etables — convolvulus, maize, and manioc which would have been
enough for us, but the plants needed time to grow. In the meantime, we
lived in misery and starvation! Once we got a sufﬁcient amount of veg-
etables, our full ration of rice, although insufﬁcient, was cut back. I spent
six months in this camp.

On June 16, we were moved back to Tr

‰

ng L

n, my third camp,

near Tây Ninh. I did not have to endure the hardships of the previous
boat ride. That time we were on the former ARVN Naval ship 501 instead
of the 401. In this new camp there were more lectures than hard work.
The same above-mentioned subjects had to be gone through again. Our
rice ration was cut down. Everyone had lost a lot of weight. Beriberi,
pellagra, anemia, and malaria were the most common diseases, but there
was no medicine at all! Three months later, we got permission to send
letters to our families. Family visits and food parcels began. After 18 long
months, we were allowed to meet our beloved ones, but only two peo-
ple. We couldn’t talk much, since we were watched closely by the b

i. On December 9, 1976, I was transferred again to a fourth camp far-

II. O

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SCAPE

ther into the jungle at Dong Bang. But this time we traveled in an open
Molotova, which had been made in China. On this journey I saw that
the people were still sympathetic to us: Along the road they threw us bread,
cigarettes, cookies, etc., in front of the b

i, even though the latter were

very angry with the fact that we still had the understanding and com-
passion of the population. At this new camp, our main job was to clear
the jungle trees. We each had to cut down an area of 60 meters long by
10 meters wide daily. We worked only with knives, which we had to forge
ourselves. We had become blacksmiths in spite of ourselves because the
communists only gave us ﬁve knives for every twelve people. The process
of self-criticism and squad and platoon criticism was repeated again and
again indeﬁnitely. They made us eat maize ﬁt only for animals and man-
ioc instead of a full ration of rice. Maize was very, very hard for our brit-
tle teeth. Finally, they gave us some ﬂour. We made little ﬂour balls in
our hands with some water, boiled and ate them with salt. Later, they
let us bake bread. We had to organize the making of this bread by our-
selves, but some men, whose family had a bakery before, knew how to
make and bake bread. I was told that the ﬂour came from the USA.

You never knew how much longer you had to stay in the camp. They

had told us ten days at ﬁrst and they had never mentioned anything dif-
ferent. If you asked, they always responded: “If you study well, you will
go back home.” When we asked: “How well?” they always answered: “If
you study well, you need not ask. If you ask, you have not studied well.”
In the face of this bizarre dialectic, escape was an unavoidable path since
we had been conﬁned in the concentration camps for more than two
years now.

The ﬁrst escape occurred on July 5, 1977, from my platoon. It

involved ten men whose organizers were the chief and deputy chief of
my platoon. We had to criticize and criticize ourselves again and again.
The communist political cadre reprimanded us and gave us long lectures
about patriotism, about the generous and magnanimous policy of the
communist party and of uncle Ho. He told us: “More than two years
have passed and you still have in your head the idea of escaping. You
then deserve the death penalty!” And so on... The next day, 40 more
escaped, but I couldn’t ﬁnd out what had happened to them. I thought
they had very little chance of survival, for there was only dense jungle
and more jungle all around us. Moreover, there was ﬁghting near the
Cambodian-Vietnamese border.

8. The So-Called Reeducation Camp (Ngo)

On July 25, 1977, the camp was split up among other camps. I was

transferred to Bùi Gia Phúc camp, 17 kilometers farther into the jungle
of Phu.

c Long Province. The same job and the lecture-criticism hap-

pened again. There were still some escapes. Some escapees were caught
and detained in a “conex”

under the hot sun and drenching rain. They

were fed a below-subsistence ration (one bowl of rice daily) and had
both hands and feet manacled to a wooden pole. The communist cadres
formed a kind of tribunal. We had to gather, criticize, and give judg-
ment on the escapees’ acts; of course, we had to pronounce them guilty
of treason to the people, harm to the revolution, the fatherland, and par-
ticularly treason to the famous, generous and magnanimous policy of the
communist party and Uncle Ho!.... Everyone had to shout : “Death
penalty!” Finally, in November 1977, the ﬁrst temporary releases began
and were followed by a second in February–March 1978.

On May 27, 1978, I was released for a third vacation and then my

time in reeducation camp was completed. Unwillingly, with no option,
I had to sign papers promising to work with my hands in the so-called
“New Economic Zones” (NEZ) as compensation for “harm to the peo-
ple and the revolution under the rebellious Thi

u regime.” I came back

to Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, and lived under the commu-
nists’ strict control and close supervision. On October 1, they sent me
to the Su

i Giây 2 NEZ, near the Cambodian border. I thought I might

have a chance to get across the border. But after one and half months, I
could see that it was hopeless. There was no way to get out. It was too
dangerous. The Vietnamese were also attacking Cambodia, so even if I
made it into Cambodia, I could see that the Cambodians could kill me.
Also, it would have been impossible to live in that jungle.

On November 15, 1978, I broke the rules and never went back.

That was my escape! Adieu, my so-called reeducation camp! Adieu, the
New Economic Zones!

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The Lady in Black

Dieu Hien

DITOR

’

OTE

: A family’s life fell apart when the head of the house-

hold failed to escape from Saigon at the end of the war. Arrest, death,
report to a reeducation camp, and the conﬁscation of property led to
family dissolution. Post-war events forever changed people’s lives.

My father had at least two chances to get out of Saigon during the

last days of April 1975. The company he worked for had two boats that
were used to ferry foreign merchandise back to Vietnam. He declined
to use one of the boats, preferring instead to get out by plane. Unfor-
tunately, the April 27 shelling of the airport forced its closure and doomed
his ﬂight departure. On April 29, when he went to the Bach Dang pier
to get on another boat, the crowded area became unsafe because of ran-
dom shooting. Once he decided to return home, his fate was sealed.

The Arrest

A couple of months later, the Cong An (security police) came to our

house well armed. They were youngsters armed with AK machine guns.
They banged at the door and rushed in. They asked for my father then
went around searching the house from front to back. I got scared and
did not know what they were looking for. This was the ﬁrst time I had
seen the dreaded Cong An up close. We were stunned and did not know
how to react. What had we done wrong?

After completing their search, they took father with them. They told

101

us that since he had dealt with Americans while he was in the hotel busi-
ness, he was a spy and therefore deserved to go to jail. There was no
ofﬁcial charge, no warrant. Father just threw at me one of these long and
sad looks. He shook his head, did not say anything and then thrust his
chin in my direction. Then they whisked him away. Father did not offer
any resistance. I could not believe it. Because he had dealt with Amer-
icans in the past, he was branded as a spy. The day before, he was a
wealthy and respected citizen, and that day, he was led away like a com-
mon criminal. He had only the clothes he wore that day. They did not
let him take anything — not even his toothbrush.

By thrusting his chin in my direction, he made me responsible for

the household in his absence. I knew it. He had always wanted me to
study business so I could later work for him. As a matter of fact, he
wanted my sister and me to follow his path. I was, however, closer to
him than my sister was. He thought that Japan was a good place to learn
business and made up his mind to send me there to study. He made me
learn Japanese, which was a tricky language to study. It did cost him some
money to put me through a language school because there were not too
many Japanese teachers in Saigon at that time. He enrolled me in a Japa-
nese business school and I received the visa and paperwork for the trip.
He even exchanged money to be used for traveling expenses.

Due to a last minute problem, I decided to cancel the trip. When

I told him I did not want to go but wanted to get married instead,
he got very upset. He did not yell at me at all. He just shook his head
and walked away. Mother told me I was still young and could go to
school for a couple of years before being engaged. Somehow, I refused
to listen to them. I was not really sure why I changed my mind. Maybe
I cared too much about another person’s suffering. That was my prob-
lem.

I met this fellow Thang when I was sixteen. He was a friend of my

sister’s friend. One day, he asked me through my sister whether he could
stop by and see me. I told him he was welcome. He came by with three
of his friends and we chatted. The relationship carried on and off for
two years. I was still young at the time and did not know what love
meant. I was ready to go abroad to study when my physician detected a
small growth on my neck. My parents opted for surgery while I was still
in Saigon. The operation went all right; it was just a benign growth. My
friend somehow heard about my operation and my trip abroad. I did

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not know how he did it. He visited me at the hospital and a week later
came to my home.

He took me to the side of a road and asked me why I did not tell

him about the trip. He told me he was very upset with me for hiding
important things from him. He asked me whether I was fooling around
with him. I told him I was going to school and I would be back. He did
not want to hear about it. Four years is a long time, especially in Viet-
nam where he could be drafted at any time. He told me he was one of
the oldest students in the class and that if he failed at the exam, he would
be drafted with all its dreaded consequences. Although I reassured him
that I would be back, he did not want to listen to me. I got scared but
also felt that he was right. If he got drafted, I would bear a heavy bur-
den in my soul. I told him to talk to my parents and I would go from
there.

He talked to my parents who thought it over. He brought me to

his parents who told me he was the ﬁrst son in the family and had to
carry the burden of the tradition. They asked me to love him and to con-
sider his offer seriously. I was in a quandary. I did not know what to
think. I was not in love with him, although I did not want to cause him
problems. Since I was naturally endowed, I had a few admirers, although
I did not like anyone especially. I found another very interesting fellow —
one that I felt I could fall in love with. The problem was that socially
he ranked lower than Thang. After a lot of internal debate — how much
could I debate at that age?— I decided to marry Thang and we proceeded
forward.

I thus got married — a marriage of reason, more than of heart. Look-

ing back, I still do not know why I agreed. What did I know about love?
About married life? In the Vietnam of the late 1960s, sexual education
was never mentioned at school or at home. The topic was carefully tossed
aside like a thorny rose: We admired it but never touched it. We were
supposed to know it only by practicing it.

My husband did his military service and did not come back until

the end of March 1975. In the meantime, Saigon was boiling. We did
not know what to do. Father, who had a large business venture, was
looking at all the options. When April 30 came, we were still stuck in
Saigon. Then Father got arrested. We went to the police department to
try to locate him. They told us they did not know where he was. A few
weeks later, my husband and my two brothers reported for reeducation.

9. The Lady in Black (Hien)

103

By the end of June, there were no more men in my family. My mother
did the best she could to run the business or, rather, to turn the busi-
nesses to the new regime. All the work and struggle my father put into
the business went up in smoke. We received not a single dime for com-
pensation. No one had any energy left to do or to plan anything, espe-
cially when all their private property had been conﬁscated from them.
We were all distraught.

Disarray

I looked out from my window and saw my younger brother — he

was twelve at the time — standing at the corner of the street, smoking
cigarettes, and looking at cars, bicycles, and people going by. He did it
day in and day out. Stung by father’s arrest, he too did not know what
to do and had picked up that bad habit. Had father been there, he would
have been heavily spanked. Mother had too much on her mind to run
a family. I too was distraught and deeply depressed. Nothing seemed to
be right, nothing was working. Why work if everything could be taken
away from you in the blink of an eye? Everything appeared gloomy
and shrouded in a dark veil. There was no future for us as far as I could
tell.

My father was jailed; I did not even know where. The police advised

us a year later that Father had died in a northern camp. We did not even
know his burial place and had never received any of his belongings. My
husband and two brothers were also interned in reeducation camps. I
was depressed and emotionally lost. During one of these depressive
moods, I took an overdose of medications and lay asleep in my house.
My eldest brother, who did not see me, came looking for me. Since no
one was answering the bell, he knocked the door down and found me
unconscious in my bed. He took me to Nguyen Van Hoc Hospital Emer-
gency Room where they drained my stomach. I was lucky to recover rap-
idly.

Everything changed in me after this incident. I realized I had been

selﬁsh by trying to take my own life. I still had my brothers, sisters and
my mom to care for. I still had work to do before I could rest, as some-
one once said. That idea struck with force. I felt empowered and decided
to dedicate my life to members of my family. I took my younger brother

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under my wing. I put him through high school after which he led a more
regular life. He told me on many occasions I was like his second mom.
Without me, he would not have graduated from high school let alone
college. I, however, could not help him get rid of his smoking habit. I
told him to do it but to no avail. Thirty-two years later, I could sadly
see the result of this chronic smoking. It caused him to develop two
spots — one on each lung — that looked bad.

I went back to school; the law school was converted into a business

school. The communists simply did not need lawyers or want anyone to
study law. Since I had two years of economics at the law school, all I needed
was to complete two more years of business before getting a degree. I
therefore enrolled in the accounting and statistics department.

During all this time, I managed my family’s business or whatever

was left to the best of my ability. I wore a ba ba, a long sleeved shirt —
dark in color — instead of the ﬂowing and colorful ao dai. I rode my bicy-
cle to school although I still had my Honda motorbike because I did not
want to attract undue attention from the Cong An. I moved all our expen-
sive furniture and our piano here and there, mostly to our relatives’
houses, so that my parents’ home no longer appeared to be richly fur-
nished. I changed paper money into gold as much as I could because I
suspected the communists would change the monetary system. They did
change it but I lost less money than I would have, had I traded later on.
As they organized the community into districts and sections to better
control the population, I volunteered to work and to attend the meet-
ings. I talked about working with zeal for the better good of the gov-
ernment and the country. The locally imbedded Viet Cong was won over
and named me section chief. I then organized all the meetings and told
people to do this and that. Those who did not have a job in the city or
did not participate in the section meetings were simply sent to the new
economic zones (NEZ).

The Viet Cong told me to volunteer to do dike work if I wanted

my husband to come home early from the reeducation camp. Like other
housewives, I dutifully listened to them. I did not know it was a lie until
I found out about it later on. Although I volunteered a lot, my husband
did not come home any earlier. We had to get up early every morning,
take our own broom and sweep the streets around our neighborhood.
And almost every weekend for many months in a row, I had to work on
building dikes. We would gather at the local school around 4

. A truck

9. The Lady in Black (Hien)

105

picked us up and drove us for about three hours to the countryside. We
were then given small tools to dig up dirt along a small riverbed to rein-
force the dikes. Since we stood in water up to our waists, our clothes got
wet all the time and stuck to our bodies exposing our natural curves.
The Viet Cong sat on the riverbank and ogled us with dark and satisﬁed
smiles. They tried to talk to us, to befriend us or to get a date. We were
ashamed of having to expose ourselves but could not do anything else.
We felt the humiliation as well as the pain of the hard labor.

After a long and tiring ﬁeld day, I got home, took a quick shower

and ran to my in-laws’ house to cook for them. As a daughter-in-law, I
was expected to cook, to prepare meals for them every day although they
had their own daughters to help them with their daily needs. Only after
they had ﬁnished eating and the dishes were washed could I return home
to cook for myself. Most of the time I was so tired that I ate leftovers
and went straight to bed. On one occasion, I was so tired that I went
straight to bed after returning from the trip. I could not even move let
alone do anything. I was sound asleep and did not even realize my sis-
ter-in-law came by to look for a quiet place to study — it was noisy at
her house that evening. Although she rang the bell many times, I did
not hear anything. After I woke up, I realized I had overslept and ran
to my in-laws. My father-in-law greeted me at the door: He was upset
that I did not even open the door to his daughter. He told me to go
home although I had explained to him I was exhausted and did not hear
the bell ring. I cried on my way home but did not even complain to my
own mother because that would unnecessarily create animosity between
the two parties. For many weeks in a row my in-laws did not even talk
to me although I kept preparing their meals as usual. I felt depressed,
abused, and mistreated, though not in this order, but I just went ahead
and dutifully did my role as a daughter-in-law.

I guessed all daughters-in-law faced the same problem I was hav-

ing. I became keenly aware of the folk song:

My body toils at a hundred different tasks
In the morning, I’m out in the rice ﬁelds,
In the evening, I’m working the daughter-in-law patch.

During all these years, I held myself up and played my role as best

as I could, although at times I felt life was not fair at all. These people
were perpetuating a tradition that was not healthy: They had paid their

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dues by serving their parents-in-law, now they wanted their daughters-
in-law to pay them back. This was a vicious cycle, I thought, although
I took it in stride and went on with my life. Although resentment did
accumulate over the years, I was too proud to feel sorry for myself. I felt
I had to do my work and that was all. I also cared for people to the point
of thinking my own pains and tribulations were nothing compared to
theirs. I gave my in-laws the best service I could offer and did not expect
anything in return. I did talk to my husband later but it did not help.
He never stood up for me and therefore, after a few times, I never men-
tioned it to him again. I did not even dare to mention it to my own
mother because I knew her too well. The worries I would cause could
in turn aggravate her medical conditions. All I did was cry and cry. After
I unloaded myself in this way, I went back to work.

My husband came back after two years of reeducation. He was almost

sent to the NEZ as part of the new government’s effort to get rid of peo-
ple from the old regime. But, because I had established myself as a “worker”
in the eyes of the new regime, he was spared. He ﬁnally found himself
a job in the outskirts of Saigon, which qualiﬁed him to stay in the city.
By that time, I had graduated from college and through the help of a
relative, I got a job from the government. When the interviewer asked
me why I wanted to work for the state, I told him in an emphatic voice
that I loved to work to help the people and the country. I had learned
all this dialectic while working as the section chief. I did it so well that he
thought I should be an actress instead of a government ofﬁcial. I told him
that I did not know anything about acting, but I knew how to work.

I was assigned to the accounting section of the Commerce Depart-

ment. My job was to supervise the take-over of hotels and restaurants.
Since all these industries had to be nationalized, I had to account for the
buildings, properties and equipment. I tried to help the owners as much
as I could to decrease their losses by either giving them extra days before
turning their businesses over or by allowing them to keep certain things.
After the take-over, the properties were turned over to government agents
to administer. Each time we came by for an inspection, the new man-
agers would prepare splendid dishes to fete us so that we would write
them good reports. In this business, I worked with many high-level
ofﬁcials from various departments. They liked me a lot and I played the
inter-ofﬁce rivalry to keep my job. One boss thought I was the protégée
of another boss and therefore did not want to cause me problems and

9. The Lady in Black (Hien)

107

vice versa. I managed not to go too far out of town to inspect restau-
rants and hotels. I left these assignments for my assistants.

I was still looking for ways for both of us to get out of the coun-

try. Although I had many contacts, the best approach would be to buy
false Chinese papers and escape as Chinese citizens. I contacted one
group and gave them a down payment until I found out I was three
months pregnant. Since a pregnant woman could bring harm to her hus-
band during any trip, I decided to stay back and let my husband go ﬁrst.
This was a tough decision because I might lose him by letting him go
alone. On the other hand, I could not hold him back: He could be sent
to the NEZ or back to the reeducation camp anytime. The justice sys-
tem — if there was such a thing in a communist country — was arbitrary
and people could easily get arrested for trumped up reasons. I worked
out his papers and let him go. He did not succeed the ﬁrst time but ﬁnally
arrived to Malaysia. I felt relieved because I knew he was free.

I also helped one of my brothers to escape by boat. I brought him

a compass he needed to reach his target. By law, the sensitive device
should not get into public hands. Anyone found in possession of one
would be jailed. No one therefore dared to keep one, except me. I car-
ried it in my bag during one of the trips I took with the Cong An ofﬁcial.
When he asked me what I was carrying, I told him “ladies’ accessories.”
His car was waved through all the checkpoints without being stopped
and no one looked at my bag. However, my brother was not successful
in his attempt for I never heard from him again. I ﬁnally accepted the
idea he was lost at sea. That was a big shock for me. First my father was
found dead in one reeducation camp then one of my brothers also died
in another camp. The third one perished at sea, I don’t know where.
These losses were staggering: three in two years. They were all gone with-
out bidding farewell or saying a word. I did not know how to deal with
all these losses. I cried and wrote these verses for myself to remember
them: three men dying in the aftermath of the war. Life appeared to me
like a dark and impenetrable forest that never let go of its grasp. It seems
to me that peace had brought more sorrows than war itself.

My dad lost his life in a reeducation camp
My mom struggled hard despite her fading health
My brother lay in the cold lands of the North
My younger brother perished during a sea escape.

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In my dreams, I often relived a new and bright life with my father

and two brothers. But these were only dreams. The reality was much
different. I was without a father and two siblings — without direction and
goals. And I had to assume a role model for the remaining ones.

One month after delivery, I brought my baby to show it to my in-

laws as part of a millennium-old custom that required daughters to show
their newborns to their in-laws. They did not even acknowledge him or
me because I — a single mother — was felt to be a burden to the family.
The fact that they rejected me hurt me deeply. Luckily, an aunt who came
from the North greeted us with warm embraces. I felt so good and I
thanked her a lot. From that time onward, my child became the center
of my life.

People from the outside thought I was a tough individual. They

did not know that deep inside, I did not know what to do nor where to
go. I was a single mother who had to handle everything. I did not know
where my husband was or what he was doing in the U.S. I felt that deep
despair many feel when they have to do everything themselves. As I
climbed the stairs to my room with my baby in tow, I just stopped right
there. It was not because the baby was too heavy but because I felt no
strength to continue alone any longer. All my strength had somehow dis-
appeared. I stayed there for a while before I could drag myself up to my
bed.

The world just collapsed around me...

9. The Lady in Black (Hien)

109

A Second Chance

Chau Dinh An

DITOR

’

OTE

: This is the fascinating account of an ARVN soldier

who was sent to reeducation camps after the war for having incited
highlanders to revolt against the Hanoi government. He describes his
perilous escape from an internment camp and ﬁnally from Vietnam.
He also details his tumultuous experience in America.

I was born in central Vietnam, a beautiful but arid part of the coun-

try. This was formerly the land of the Chams — a civilization that bore
strong Indian (Hindu) inﬂuence and peaked between the 7th and 15th
centuries

. The Chams were ﬁshermen, seafarers and aggressive war-

riors who at various times attacked their Vietnamese neighbors in the
North and pillaged their capital, Thang Long (Hanoi). If they were brave
sea merchants who sailed as far as present-day Malaysia and Indonesia,
they were also known to be ruthless pirates who plied their trade on the
South China Sea coastline. With time, they were progressively displaced
by the advancing Vietnamese who in their southern expansion took over
Cham land and called it central Vietnam. Ruins of Cham temples are
still present in this region today.

The Nguyen lords settled in this rugged land as early as 1600. They

founded Phu Xuan on the Huong River (Perfume River), which was
named after the fragrant scent of blooming lotuses. That city was renamed
Hue, the capital of the Nguyen dynasty that lasted until 1945. The majes-
tic mountain range on the west side that formed Vietnam’s spine almost
vertically dropped down to the ground, leaving only a small area of arable
land sandwiched between the sea and the mountains. Monsoon rains

110

that rushed down the slopes created ﬂash ﬂoods that destroyed every-
thing in their path and inundated valleys as well as villages. The rocky
terrain, raging monsoon storms, and ﬂash ﬂoods created a group of
resilient, hard-working, but generally poor, people.

Street Education

I came from a long line of government ofﬁcials and politicians. My

great grandfather was once a minister at the Hue court. My father, a local
politician, was assassinated by an opposing party member when I was
nine. My widowed mother, on whom the burden fell to care for her ﬁve
children, passed away four years later leaving all of us orphans. Despite
having nine children and their two parents to care for, my uncle and his
wife opened their heart and welcomed the ﬁve new orphans to their fam-
ily, which grew to eighteen people. Food was therefore strictly rationed
and despite my uncle’s good heart, he could only give each of us for
dessert a thin slice of banana instead of a whole one. I had never had
the chance to fully enjoy a whole banana during that period. The chil-
dren pitched in, helped him farm his land, and did other chores to help
the large family live. Life, however, was tough.

I left the house at the age of fourteen to lessen the ﬁnancial bur-

den on my uncle. From then on, I led a bohemian life and hoped to ﬁnd
better days at the beach resort of Nha Trang. I hooked up with other
street children and sold newspapers, brushed shoes and did odd jobs for
a living. A friend of my father happened to notice me wandering in the
streets and took pity on me; he took me in and sent me to the local school
to continue my education. Without that schooling, I would have been
a homeless person like thousands of others who were left behind by soci-
ety. A few years later, he was kind enough to send me to a Dalat board-
ing school in the highlands, which was a luxurious investment at the time.
Why would a stranger care that much about me? Why would he waste
time and money on an orphan he had collected on the street? Was there
anything unusual he had noticed in me? I could not tell, but I was for-
ever indebted to him. He essentially changed my life and gave me a sec-
ond chance. The year in Dalat was an idyllic one: I not only learned
basic school curriculum but also music. That year gave me the founda-
tion on which to build my future. It also deeply inﬂuenced my music
for I found the misty and hilly countryside lovely and romantic.

10. A Second Chance (An)

111

My artistic instinct and disregard for conformity, however, nudged

me toward the wild and the unknown. I found it difﬁcult to be restricted
by rules and regulations no matter how mild or educational they were.
For that reason, I dropped out of school at the end of the junior year,
enrolled in a South Vietnamese Army school and became a paratrooper.
I participated in a few skirmishes during the war, got wounded and
ended up in a military hospital. Following discharge, I decided to use
the two-week pass to return home and visit my brothers whom I had
not seen for many years. During my stay in the village, I fell deeply in
love with a local girl and decided to take an extra week off to be close
to her. The years of hardship in the streets and the rigors of military life
caused me to simply melt away in front of a sweet and sensitive human
being. I lost my reason and failed to return to my unit in time. The mil-
itary police arrested me during a regular roundup, charged me for deser-
tion and the court sentenced me to two years in jail. There I met all the
gang leaders and “cowboys”

who were sent to jail for “reformation.”

They found me likable not only because I was an orphan, but also because
I entertained them by telling jokes and playing guitar. I was close to being
sent to the front to clean up battleﬁelds as part of the sentence when
Danang fell under the advance of communist troops. All the prisoners
escaped during this transitional period.

Song Cai Reeducation Camp

I attempted to go to Nha Trang but was caught between the advanc-

ing communists and the South Vietnamese soldiers who shelled the com-
munist troops and their tanks. Unable to go north or south, I decided
to return to my hometown to be with my family only to ﬁnd it deserted.
Villagers had ﬂed the area at the news of the incoming communists. Des-
perate and hungry, I looked for food in my uncle’s house but only found
a few yams, which I cooked and ate to ﬁll up my gnawing stomach. As
I wandered around the deserted streets looking for friends and neigh-
bors to talk to, I caught the attention of communist troops who had
taken over the village. They brought me to the new village chief who
happened to be a former villager. He had worked as an underground
communist agent during the war and immediately recognized me. He
told me people knew I was sent to the front and thought I had died

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there. Since he saw me as a victim instead of a participant in the old
regime, he enrolled me as a member of the village administration to help
him re-organize the village under communist control. The villagers who
had not been able to escape abroad strolled back to the village. They
became surprised to see me wearing a pith helmet and working for the
Viet Cong: They thought I must have been an underground Viet Cong
agent for some time. One of them, however, told me that helping the
Viet Cong was not a good idea for soon or later they would send me, a
former ARVN soldier, to jail once my assignment had been completed.
After reﬂecting on his words, I realized he was correct and one day
decided to run away from the village and the communists.

I ran from village to village in an attempt to get out of this area

that turned out to be too “hot” for me. I ﬁnally ended up in the high-
lands where local tribes were mounting an insurrection against the com-
munist government. These minorities who had always wanted to live
free and apart from the Vietnamese society did not like the new com-
munist rules. I was caught along with these freedom ﬁghters when the
village ﬁnally surrendered to stronger communist forces.

I was sent to a northern reeducation camp because the Viet Cong

thought I had incited these tribes to revolt against the government. This
was a severe sentence for someone who was just caught in the middle of
a brewing conﬂict. But the communists did not want to hear anything
and shipped me right away to the Song Cai camp in the North. The pun-
ishment under the communist system was far worse than that under the
Saigon government. While I had fun in the Saigon-controlled jail where
I entertained gangsters and “cowboys,” I had to work hard in the north-
ern camp just to keep my head above water. I was assigned to clean up
the latrines, the worst possible punishment for my “crimes.” North Viet-
namese latrines at the camp dated from the French occupation era. Like
most of the commodities in a socialist country, they were as ancient as
history itself and consisted of elevated stalls with small openings on the
ﬂoor and wooden buckets down below serving as receptacles. My job
was to remove daily the buckets ﬁlled with waste materials and to use
them as fertilizers for our vegetable patch. Working conditions were ter-
rible because of the stench, the creepy moving worms, and the huge blue
ﬂies that swarmed around the unsanitary area. To this day, I still harbor
nightmares about the buzzing ﬂies that starred insolently at me with
their large round eyes, refusing to leave the buckets. They also buzzed

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113

around me emitting strident noises as if to scare me away. The horrible
stench made me nauseous all the time. It stuck to my worn out clothes,
which I also wore to bed since most of us did not have a spare outﬁt.
The smell followed me everywhere to the point I became used to it. It
seemed like I had completely lost my sense of smell at that time. Besides
the punishment, the scarce food our jailers fed us caused us to become
malnourished and to lose weight rapidly. We were hungry all the time
and became weak as a result. Over a period of time, inmates rolled over
dead right and left. Some caught malarial fever, stayed bedridden, threw
up blood, and were taken to the dispensary where they died the next day.
Others developed swollen feet and died a week later.

The fact that I remained healthy during that period caused me to

turn to praying to Jesus with the hope of remaining sane and alive.
Although my parents were Catholic, I was far from being a fervent prac-
titioner. But having witnessed life and death daily in the camp made me
think about these issues more than at any other period of my life. I
thought about how transient life could be and even wrote a song about
that topic. While others put their experiences in writing, I expressed my
feelings through songs, which I composed in my spare time. I also real-
ized how transient human love could be. Lovers came together until their
feelings waned and caused them to split apart. This characteristic is con-
sistent with nature itself and I felt that lovers should also take time off
from one another once in a while to recharge their emotions. I presently
wish my wife would leave me alone once in a while so that I too could
reorient myself.

Escape

I decided to get out of that creepy camp on the ﬁrst occasion to

avoid becoming its next victim. I knew that sooner or later, my luck
would run out and like many other inmates I too would succumb to dis-
eases or hunger. To think about it, it was a crazy decision on my part to
try to escape from a northern communist camp for it was far from being
easy. The choices were, however, limited: Either stay in the camp and
die slowly or try to escape with the possibility of earning freedom. I
crossed out of my mind the word “impossible” for I had been through
a lot since I was fourteen. So far I had been successful each time I fol-

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lowed my instinct. And my instinct at that time told me to escape.
Because I sang and played a few musical instruments, I was allowed to
join the camp’s entertainment group. During a rare concert given at the
camp in celebration of the northern Military Day and while the band
played loudly and attracted everyone’s attention, including the guards’,
I and another friend escaped through a small tunnel we had managed to
dig out under the barbed wire a few days earlier. It was not a real tun-
nel — just a hole large enough to allow a hundred-pound person to crawl
through. We were all reduced to about that size after a few months in
the camp. I later thought the camp was an ideal place for overweight
people who wanted to shed a few hundred pounds. A search team was
sent after us but I managed to evade my pursuers by hiding atop a tree.
Had I stayed on the ground, I would have been immediately caught. And
that would have meant facing the ﬁring squad after being savagely beaten
by the jailors. I knew the routine for I had witnessed that severe treat-
ment in the camp. I stayed in the area overnight and crossed the two
branches of the Song Cai River in the morning before arriving to Ninh
Binh province.

I had decided against returning to my hometown where the police

already knew me and chose Saigon as my next destination. The safest
way to get back to Saigon was to take the reuniﬁcation train that linked
Hanoi to Saigon and ended at the Pham Ngu Lao train station. Trains
were not as thoroughly and frequently checked as buses. Trains with
their hundreds of passengers and bulky loads lent themselves more eas-
ily to hiding than buses. I climbed into one of the cars as the train slowed
down close to a village and hid there. I had to play hide and seek with
the soldiers who patrolled the train by climbing on the roof when they
searched inside the car and by staying in the car when they shone their
ﬂashlights on the roof. This was a thrilling and dangerous game for they
would shoot at any presumed escapee or draft dodger without warning.
I survived the trip by eating raw yams stored in the last car. When I
arrived in Saigon, I made my way to the Mekong Delta where I once
had a friend. He was instrumental in helping me obtain a false identiﬁ-
cation card with which I again was able to freely roam around. I had
become sort of a Vietnamese “Papillon.” That name that meant butterﬂy
was coined to refer to a Frenchman who was able to escape from the infa-
mous French penitentiary (equivalent to the American Sing Sing) located
at the Guyana Island in the Atlantic Ocean miles away from the Brazil-

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115

ian coastline. No one had ever escaped from the island for the waters
were infested by hungry sharks.

I returned to Phan Rang, a city on the central coastal area and the

former capital of the Chams and the 19th century Tay Son. The city
boasted a beautiful fort that protected its bay area. The region was the
site of historic sea and land battles between the southern Nguyen and
the Tay Son lords. Its large ﬁshing ﬂeet, coupled with my knowledge of
the people and the area, without doubt helped me plan my escape eas-
ier than at any other place in Vietnam. I worked there as ﬁsherman then
slowly gained the conﬁdence of key people who asked me to assist them
in planning their escape. The critical and most dangerous job was to
store adequate amounts of gasoline without which no escape could be
possible. Left over gasoline carefully saved from any trip and additional
fuel bought on the black market were gathered from various places. My
job was to transport and to bury these gasoline cans on a deserted sandy
beach in preparation for the trip. When the time came, they were
unearthed and brought aboard the boat: Storing gasoline at home was
not only dangerous because of frequent police searches, but also presented
logistical problems when the time came to move it aboard the boat.
Transporting ﬁve or ten gasoline cans during day or nighttime would
immediately catch the attention of the police. Burying gasoline cans on
the beach was also nerve-breaking nighttime work: People caught doing
the work were presumed to be escapees and were therefore severely pun-
ished and often shot at without warning. That thrilling job fell on me
for it was the only way I could pay off my ticket to freedom. This led
me to write a song to highlight this challenging work at the time. My
ﬁrst attempted escape ended in failure because the boat left early due to
changing weather conditions. Feeling frustrated and cheated, I returned
to my hiding place and survived day by day until another group planned
another escape attempt. A few more attempts similarly failed for one
reason or another.

It was during one of the failed attempts in Phan Rang that I met

and fell in love with one of the escapees. She was a lovely young woman
from Nha Trang who was then accompanied by her parents and her
brother. She returned to her hometown disappointed but was already
planning for another escape. She promised she would send me a telegram
advising me that “marriage was ready and I should come home right
away” when escape was imminent. In the meantime, I continued my

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nighttime work. When I received the signal, I could not believe it and
jumped for joy. I left everything and immediately took a bus to Nha
Trang. When the day arrived, however, for some unknown reason she
and her parents arrived late to the rendezvous and again missed the boat.
I, her brother and the other passengers left the area in a hurry to avoid
the police. I was so upset that I yelled at the boat captain for his unwill-
ingness to wait half an hour longer for her. This time, however, the trip
ran smoothly and we did not have to sail very far. About a hundred miles
from shore, we were fortunately picked up by a German ship that
dropped us to a Hong Kong refugee camp where I stayed for six months
before immigrating to the U.S.

Bohemian Life

Years later, I returned to Vietnam to the same beach where I

launched my escape to the unknown. I hired a boat similar to the one I
had escaped on and went up and down the area to retrace the various
steps of the trip and reconnect with the past. To this day I still cannot
believe that I escaped on a small boat and ended up thousands of miles
away on another shore. At the time, like Christopher Columbus cen-
turies before, I didn’t have the faintest idea about the length or destina-
tion of the trip. I only cared about getting out of the country. It was only
when I looked back that I realized I had performed an almost impossi-
ble feat. Impossible only meant something in the eyes of the beholder.
Had I told myself that the trip was an impossible feat, I would not have
tried anything and would have stayed back and vegetated in the old
country. As always I had tried to push back the limits of what I consid-
ered impossible to achieve. It was during that return trip that I wrote a
song about missing and leaving my lover on this beach. Despite look-
ing for her for some time, I was never able to ﬁnd her anywhere. She
could have perished during one of the escapes. My goal was to commit
to my memory the woman, the stranger who opened her heart and helped
me get out of the country. Without her, I would have been stuck in
Vietnam. This woman in the song also referred to my country, Vietnam,
which I was forced to leave behind in order to look for freedom else-
where. By leaving Vietnam, in my heart I felt I had lost the two most
precious women on earth.

10. A Second Chance (An)

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I was sponsored to Wisconsin where for the next seven years I

hopped from job to job and spent a rather erratic life. Similar to my
bohemian life in Vietnam, I traveled a lot in the U.S. trying to search
for a direction in life. It seemed like something was missing in my life:
I continued to run around without purpose or goal. I, however, contin-
ued to study and learn about music: I composed many songs and gave
many recitals. I then met my future wife who was an established busi-
nesswoman in Orange County, California. She became my anchor and
gave my life a clear and unequivocal direction. I settled down and became
a musician and publisher of a news magazine that also dealt with music.
Although we were successful in California, we felt the state was too rest-
less a place for us to grow and expand. We moved to Florida where we
pursued our publishing business and musical life. We gave entertainment
shows year round in Florida and presently have a hundred people work-
ing for us in our publishing business. My ﬁnancial situation has much
improved compared to the past. I am particularly happy to be given a
second chance to restart my life in the U.S. and to do whatever I love
the most: music publishing, singing and entertaining. I set aside some
money to send back to orphans in Vietnam for I need to help these
underprivileged youngsters achieve their goals in life like someone helped
me in the past.

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The Wish

Thanh Cuc

DITOR

’

OTE

: “The Wish” is the story of a housewife’s fulﬁlled

childhood dream of visiting or living in a western country. Her ordeals
were as varied as those of Kieu,

the heroine of a Vietnamese master-

piece who went through countless painful and tragic misadventures
before settling down. After spending many years under the commu-
nist regime, she was able to immigrate to California where she enjoyed
a second life in her dream country.

I was the eldest of seven siblings. My parents, who moved to Vung

Tau, saw a large family as a heavenly blessing. They were also aware of
the high infant mortality in the tropics: Two of their children had died
at an early age. My father passed away in his early ﬁfties and my mother
was supposed to pick up where he had left off, but her limited educa-
tion prevented her from fulﬁlling her role. I was suddenly thrust into
the limelight and had to play the role of chi ca (big sister). This meant
helping to raise my siblings in addition to assisting my mother with
household chores. As a teenager, I became confused at that time and did
not realize the full implications of this new role. Although my dream
was to grow up and to ﬁnish high school like any other country girl, a
different fate was in store for me. I put my own dream aside, choked off
my aspirations, and accepted the new role in stride.

119

Family Life

After marrying a military man who was stationed in Vung Tau, I

moved with him to Saigon where I had two children within a three-year
span. As I was the ﬁrst in the family to go from the countryside to the
city, my siblings congratulated me on the move. Materially, I had every-
thing a country girl could have dreamed about: a house and children in
Vietnam’s largest city. My younger brother, the only boy in the family,
was my mother’s spoiled favorite. He called me one day and asked if he
could stay with me and ﬁnish his schooling in Saigon. He told me that
if he graduated from the village high school, he would remain a low-
level ofﬁcial for the rest of his life. I advised him that I could place him
in tuition-free public schools if he was interested in them. He, however,
insisted on going to private schools where French curriculum was taught.
The problem was these schools were expensive and with two children in
tow, I would not be able to support him. I told him I needed to think
it over and would let him know later on.

I was torn between the desire to help him out and the reality of

getting my life and ﬁnances in order. As the cost of living in the city was
not small, I needed to think about the future and save money for rainy
days. Besides, I had to spend time caring for my husband and my chil-
dren. These were difﬁcult decisions for a twenty-ﬁve-year-old young
woman. But in the end, duty and big heart prevailed and I opened my
door to my brother and sister as well. Duty was the word I often used:
I learned it from my father who was a high-level government ofﬁcial. I
enrolled him at Tabert, a private Catholic school in Saigon where he grad-
uated with a high school diploma. He was beaming with joy when he
earned it for he was the ﬁrst in the family to get it. He enrolled himself
at the Dalat cadet school where he earned a college degree. Two other
sisters stayed with me for a few years before returning to Vung Tau, each
with a high school degree. My job done, I delved into my children’s edu-
cation.

I did not know why I had always dreamed about going abroad. This

was one of these wild dreams youngsters carry with them in the depth
of their hearts. Some aspire to be rich and well-known, others dream of
having a nice family: I dreamed of traveling to other countries in the
world. I dreamed about seeing other people’s lifestyles, landscapes and
historical monuments. My father had instilled that dream in me. He told

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me about what lay beyond our shoreline and advised me about keeping
my mind open. If I did not fulﬁll that wish, an inner voice would always
tug me on the side and whisper: “What if ?” I had a chance in 1954 when
the French, who were withdrawing from Vietnam, allowed their citizens
to return to France. My husband’s grandfather, who was a high-level
ofﬁcial, was a naturalized French citizen and left this legacy to his grand-
son. But by switching his nationality from French to Vietnamese, my
husband choked off my aspiration. Gone was the chance to go abroad.
I went back to my routine and prayed for another chance.

I worked hard to take care of my ﬁve children: My duty consisted

of cooking, sewing, cleaning, feeding and caring for their health. Like
any Vietnamese woman, I was the in-house general who dealt with all
the household work while my husband’s duty was to bring money home.
Putting children through private schools required a lot of sacriﬁce. These
were difﬁcult times ﬁnancially because I had to budget everything oth-
erwise we would come up short toward the end of the month. Cutting
expenses became an art and a headache for us women who later became
good in wheeling and dealing. I believed Vietnam’s economy would have
gone south a long time ago had we not been able to negotiate and deal.
Without money, we bartered and traded one thing for another. If we had
nothing to trade, we worked in exchange for food or money. Two decades
of war were enough to send all families to bankruptcy court, except there
was no such a thing as bankruptcy law in Vietnam. We had to move on
although we were bankrupt and did not own much. The effect of women
on their families’ ﬁnances was obvious after the war. With the commu-
nists controlling and rationing everything and freezing all bank accounts
and assets, with most men gone to reeducation camps, women by default
became income earners and kept their families aﬂoat ﬁnancially. With-
out women working around the system, many South Vietnamese fami-
lies would have died of hunger under the communist system. These were
the most difﬁcult but also the most thrilling times for us, women who
proved we could survive on our own.

Tired of juggling around with the budget, I put myself through

school and became a nurse who brought additional income to the fam-
ily. By the early 1970s, I had my own business: I opened a small mom-
and-pop store in the front end of my house and sold basic goods such
as rice, oil, and non-perishable food. My neighbors supported me by
becoming my clients while I provided them with their basic needs.

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121

Socialist Life

When the communists took over Saigon, I lay low for a while not

knowing what the invaders had in mind. They told everyone that mer-
chants were bloodsuckers who stole from poor people. Merchants were
deemed useless and deserved to be sent to the NEZ. I asked myself what
did city dwellers know about clearing and cultivating lands. They were
not even good at taking care of their own ﬂower gardens. The NEZ
warning sent chills up my spine for weeks and months because I had wit-
nessed the deaths of many civilians who had been sent there. They were
simply not used to do any backbreaking type of labor.

I then realized Viet Cong ofﬁcials too were humans who craved

basic comfort and riches. Having lived in the jungles for quite some time
or having worked in low-paying jobs in the cities, they just wanted to
catch up with the capitalists they just knocked down. They sent people
to the NEZ so that they could inherit their houses and belongings. This
was how the communists slowly became capitalists: They just craved
money, property and power like any other individuals. I befriended them
and ﬂooded them with gifts and rice. Over a period of time, they
responded in kind and allowed me to continue my small business as
usual.

In the late 1970s, communist Vietnam controlled Cambodia and

needed troops to shore up the government they had installed in Phnom
Penh and to keep the country secure from the remnants of the Khmer
Rouge. I still had three youngsters within draft age and was worried they
would be called to duty one of these days. Southerners did not want to
serve in the Northern (invading) army, especially in a war of aggression
against Cambodia. The country was essentially broke after two decades
of war with thousands of invalids roaming the streets and we found it
strange that the communists wanted to wage another war in a foreign
country. As a housewife, I then believed that we had to put our house
in order ﬁrst before wasting blood and money in another country. Many
other parents shared my conviction although it was impossible to
inﬂuence the self-centered and autocratic communist government. As
youths were required to attend bi-monthly meetings to listen to and dis-
cuss party directives, I told local ofﬁcials they were busy studying and
working on government projects during their after-hours. I, however,
would attend these meetings for them. When youths were required to

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watch the neighborhoods at night, I volunteered to perform that duty
for them. The less ofﬁcials paid attention to them, the better it would
be for them. I also thought to myself, “Why would the neighborhood
need to be watched?” There was enough police force to cordon off the
whole city if needed. As far as youngsters, they were so scared of house
searches and midnight round-ups that they would rather hide than dis-
turb the neighborhood. However, since orders needed to be carried out,
I pulled my chair to the front porch at night, and sat and watched the
neighborhood in place of my youngsters.

I patiently worked on obtaining exit visas for the whole family.

Although the task was lengthy and difﬁcult because my children were
within draft age, I forged ahead. I felt that if we did not leave the coun-
try at that time, we would never have another chance again. I contacted
my eldest son, who then lived in California, and he agreed to sponsor
me. I patiently waited for the green light. It came all of a sudden: I was
given two weeks to pack up and get out of the country otherwise the
permit would be invalidated. I had to buy plane tickets, pay all the taxes,
and deed my house and belongings to the government. I basically had
to “give” them away, although it caused me deep sorrow to get rid of
them because I had worked so hard to build them up. I decided freedom
was worth more than any worldly belongings.

A neighbor who was envious of my luck brought up ﬂimsy charges

against me to prevent me from leaving. Luckily the local ofﬁcial, who
was a friend of mine, tossed the charge out and allowed me to proceed
with my departure. My husband did not want to go abroad, arguing he
was happy to remain in Vietnam. I talked to him lengthily into coming
with me and in the end he agreed to accompany us. I had never encoun-
tered that many vexing problems in my life. I did not know to whom
to turn, and therefore I prayed and prayed. Although I shared my par-
ents’ Buddhist faith I was married to a Catholic but had never converted
to that faith. During the difﬁcult communist years, I had slowly turned
to praying to the Virgin Mary. She was the one who gave me courage
during all this time.

Life in America

We ﬁnally ﬂew to Thailand and then to the U.S. I breathed with

relief when I landed on U.S. soil. This was the ﬁrst time I went abroad.

11. The Wish (Cuc)

123

It was the same feeling I had experienced when I ﬁrst moved from Baria
to Saigon: a feeling of euphoria and freedom. I felt new vigor and energy
surging in me. The world suddenly appeared brighter than ever. I ﬁnally
realized my childhood dream: moving from Saigon to America and from
a communist to a capitalist country. I took me almost four decades to
make that leap, but it was well worth it. I knew all along that I would
live in a western country, not that I did not like Vietnam. On the con-
trary, I remained in spirit a Vietnamese who just happened to love free-
dom and the chance of traveling here and there without being restricted
or controlled at every single minute.

We settled down in California and went through difﬁcult adjust-

ment periods. Everything was new and different in this country, from
paperwork to shopping and behaving in public. To go from a repressive
society to a free country within a few-day span was like moving from
darkness to daylight. I no longer had to worry about midnight roundups,
curfews, military draft for my children, graft, and shifting government
policies. I had to forge ahead and reminded my youngsters about the
need to study in order to become self-sufﬁcient.

I took English classes with other foreigners and enjoyed the chance

to meet new friends and learn from different cultures. There were Span-
ish-speaking people, Asians, and Eastern Europeans. We were under no
pressure to perform. Those who enjoyed the classes could stay on for-
ever. A birthday was a time for celebration rather than for studying. We
brought in food and cakes for everyone to enjoy. It was a meeting as well
as a learning place. One Buddhist monk once enrolled in the class. He
told the teacher from the beginning his religion would not allow him to
mix with members of the opposite sex. The teacher let him sit by him-
self on one of the benches. The monk gradually “opened” up. He joined
in all the discussions, sat around with other male students and by the
end of the year even sat close to female classmates.

I separated from my husband to give him freedom of choice for I

believed it was the best choice for both of us. We remained friends and
he joined us for any big family reunion. After moving out, he shared a
room with a friend in order to save money, with which he ﬁnanced his
trip to Vietnam to visit his relatives. I later befriended a European man,
a widower who took English classes with me. I enjoyed talking to him
and he took me out to dinner a couple of times. Although we remained
friends, I told him we would not move beyond friendship. One day, he

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gave me a stack of cash and told me he did not need it at his age and
that I could use it to buy whatever I liked.

Since I wanted to be self-sufﬁcient, I took up driving. I felt I could

not forever depend on my son to take me to the store or the mall. After
failing the driving test a few times, I took lessons to have a better chance
of passing. I ﬁnally passed the test after amassing close to ﬁfty hours of
driving lessons, which I paid for with my own money. The examiners,
who probably tired of seeing me coming back all the time, gave me a
passing grade. That was my biggest most recent accomplishment. I, how-
ever, drove only a few times before quitting because the trafﬁc made me
dizzy. All these young and impatient drivers tailgating me constantly
made me really nervous.

One of my sons took me on pilgrimage tours to Spain, France, and

Italy. Now that my wish has been fulﬁlled, I wanted to pay homage and
express thanks to God for having helped me in my hours of despair. I
went not once but twice and really enjoyed these trips, which have opened
my eyes. I took a lot of pictures so I could remember all these places. I
also prayed so that my son could ﬁnd himself a mate. One day he almost
found a perfect mate and the relationship was blossoming. She also got
along well with me and there was talk about marriage. One evening my
son received a phone call advising him that the caller — a boyfriend —
intended to marry the lady he was dating. My son told him he would
straighten out the problem soon. He was disappointed she not only did
not tell him about her past relationship, but also gave out his phone
number. A few days later, the lady called and I picked up the phone since
I was home. She told me she was sorry about her former boyfriend’s
actions. They had broken up a long time ago and he had moved to
another state only to reappear recently. He asked her to marry him but
she refused. He became angry and pulled on her purse, which fell on the
ﬂoor exposing the card and phone number. My son, however, felt burned
and did not want to contact her any longer. He later found another lady
who cared for him and married her.

By November 1998, I developed a chronic cough doctors took for

ﬂu symptoms. I then developed abdominal pain and experienced gase-
ousness and distension. They put me in the hospital and found I was
jaundiced. They ran more tests on me. I was tired, worried about my
overall condition, and did not want further testing done. They found I
had a tumor on my pancreas. What that meant was unknown to me.

11. The Wish (Cuc)

125

They put a tube into my stomach and sent me home. I slowly went
downhill.

I have enjoyed a good life, although it was far from being perfect.

I have a big family and my children are successful in their ﬁelds. I have
been able to fulﬁll my dream and am thankful to God for it. There is
nothing else I wish for.

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SCAPE

My April

Thach N. Truong

DITOR

’

OTE

: The author revisits the last months of the war dur-

ing which he traveled from Danang back to Saigon in the midst of
disorder, gunshots, and mortar shelling.

One day,
End of March 1975,
I was working at Duy Tan General Hospital
When waves of communist attacks roared into Danang.
Our front commanders had ﬂown straight to their escape ships.
With the tumultuous crowd
My friend and I we rushed our way.
The dauntless naval vessel HQ504 was still waiting,
With hundreds of people on its deck.
Clinging to my rope ladder, I climbed up in.

A few hours later, not a tiny space was left,
Thousands of people standing and moving like waves.
Weigh anchor,
Still, going around in the bay
Waiting for order to leave.

Soldiers with red hats, blue hats,
Sick people, healthy people,
Young women, old people,

127

Fighting for their space on this strange boat.
Children crying,
People cursing,
Apprehensive faces,
Complaining and sighing
About their lost houses,
Their jobs and salaries gone,
Their children going astray
Their future unknown.

My boat landed in Cam Ranh Bay
I boarded a bus and quickly went to Phan Thiet.
For once a ﬁshing boat I would try,
With thug-faced people I barely got by,
They yelled, asking for their tolls
Then jumped over to another boat.

The ﬁshing boat was bobbing, shaking,
Hundreds of people nodding, swaying,
The tropical sun parched our skin and dried our mouths.
Exhausted children silently cried,
Old people mumbled their prayers,
A young guy quietly pondering.

We went straight to Vung Tau.
Right away, I went to a friend’s house;
His wife ran out to greet me,
Overjoyed, she shouted:
“You’ve just escaped the war,
How happy my husband will be!
He talks about you every day,
I will call your wife to tell her you’re safe.”
End of April, my friend died,
Cruel enemy mortar ended his life.

In Saigon, I hugged wife and children,
My eyes brimming with tears of joy.
The next day, reporting to the Medical Corps,

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SCAPE

To Cong Hoa Military Hospital I was deployed.
The year before I trained there,
Now patients were everywhere,
Few came out; the newly wounded kept coming in.

The tumult got worse every day
Evacuation ships were covered with people,
Desperately, they clung to the helicopters’ landing gears
Mothers carrying their children ﬁlled the streets,
Mortars falling relentlessly,
People died on the roadside, on rice ﬁeld dikes.
Ignoring others in search for their loved ones,
Everyone was on his own.
Refugees were ﬁlling up the cities.

News of: disastrous tragic losses
From the front came back in droves.
The ﬁrst military region was abandoned
To reinforce the second one.
They left the third one, and pulled back
For a last ditch defense of the capital zone.
Every day, there came more bad news
Of communist closing on the capital.
They had cannons, AK’s,
With tanks from China and Russia
Rockets rained over the city day and night,
Their shrieking sounds tore your eardrums.
Many innocent lives were destroyed.
Then small ﬁrearm sounds got closer to home.

In the hospital, groups huddled to discuss:
“Should we go or should we stay?”
Every few days, a few of them got away,
I treated my patients but my mind was elsewhere.
Looking at my patients, I worried so much,
Looking for my friends, so few were still there.

They played “White Christmas”
In the mid of summer.

12. My April (Truong)

129

Jets screaming high above,
Helicopters scuttled down under.
The last Americans packed up to leave,
The Republic’s days were soon over.

., April 30th

As Commander in Chief,
The President in his last minute power
With his digniﬁed voice on the radio ordered:
“Armed forces at every level put down your arms.
To the other side, to our brothers
Please come for a government transfer.”

Many soldiers, still in arms,
Took off their uniforms, quickly
They threw up their hats, their boots.
Knapsacks, riﬂes covered the streets.
In panic and without even their shirts,
They forged ahead aimlessly.

I looked over the street,
A car with a Liberation Front’s ﬂag passed by,
I recognized immediately, sitting there,
One of my seniors, a ﬁeld ofﬁcer.
I hoped my eyes were fooled by the sun glare.

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Shadow of the Past

Mai Lien

DITOR

’

OTE

: Not everyone was able to escape from communist

Vietnam: As a matter of fact, only ﬁve per cent did. What happened
to the rest of them, especially ARVN soldiers? They often became the
“shadows of the past,” forgotten ghosts of a tragic war which they lost.
In this essay, a Viet Kieu recounts her journey to look for her father,
an ARVN captain who was ordered to stay at his post in 1975 because
of duty.

I was born in the capital city of Saigon although my grandparents

came from the town of Bien Hoa, twenty miles away. Bien Hoa served
as a weekend getaway for the Saigonese who were tired of the hustling
and bustling life of a modern city. A quaint and bucolic town in a sea
of changes, Bien Hoa was also known for its mouthwatering and sweet
grapefruits as well as its rustic but ﬁne diners.

Family Life

When I turned ﬁve, my father, who was an Air Force ofﬁcer, moved

his family to Nha Trang where he was stationed until April 1975. Located
about one hundred and forty miles northeast of Saigon, Nha Trang
hosted the National Air Force, Army, and Navy academies where young
men were trained into seasoned ofﬁcers. Each weekend, the face of this
seaside town was transformed by the presence of multi-rank cadets in
their crisp, sharp uniforms going out on dates with their girlfriends. For
one night, almost all young women dressed themselves in beautiful white

133

ao dai looking like fairies out of the old Cham Empire. Suddenly the
sleepy resort town was revitalized like desert cacti after the ﬁrst rains of
the year. The pageantry and enchantment of the party imprinted an
indelible memory on visitors and participants alike. The city was also
an exotic seaside resort known for its beautiful, sandy, and palm-tree-
lined beaches as well as its various sea products. One can ﬁnd the best
and biggest lobsters around the Paciﬁc Ocean.

I enjoyed the beach a lot and loved to jump in its waves and to swim

in its warm waters every morning before school. I stayed in the sun so
much that my skin turned dark. This led my father to lovingly nick-
name me, the ﬁrst-born and dearest daughter, Mai Lien — the “Cambo-
dian princess.” Mai Lien in Vietnamese euphonized with Mien Lai (dark
like a Cambodian). Actually, Nha Trang was once the capital of the
Chams, a proud Hinduized civilization that thrived in the region from
the seventh to the ﬁfteenth centuries. The ruined but once magniﬁcent
Cham temples that have lasted for more than ten centuries still dot the
landscape. They emerge out of nowhere like sandstone castles amidst the
arid countryside under the hot, shining sun. They now seem to be out
of place among the completely Vietnamese population. Life in Nha Trang
thus appeared to be a fairy tale for me with its Cham monuments of yes-
teryears, the Saturday night pageantry, and the beautiful beaches.

Alas, that fairy tale did not last long. By early April 1975, the com-

munists began moving southwards along National Route 1, which linked
Hanoi to Saigon. All kinds of rumors ﬂew all over town forcing people
to migrate further south. Father could not leave his post because the city
was still in the hands of the Saigon government. He, however, thought
we needed to be evacuated for safety reasons. He put Mother and all of
us on a military plane to Saigon. The plan for us was to temporarily stay
with Auntie Seven

and her family in Saigon until matters settled down.

On April 28, he sent us off again on another military airplane to Phu
Quoc to be with thousands of other refugees who were evacuated aboard
an American ship, the Pioneer Contender. On that island, we were quar-
tered in a camp that soon housed 40,000 people. We lost contact with
Father from that time onward. On the night of April 29, we were ordered
to proceed to the island beach and to get back on the Pioneer Contender,
which still lurked around the waters of Vietnam. The ship picked up the
remaining refugees the following day before heading toward the island
of Guam, an American territory in the Paciﬁc Ocean.

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After an uneventful seven-day journey across a calm ocean — we

were lucky it neither rained nor stormed during the trip — the boat
docked at the Guam Island pier. We were transferred to the Tent City,
a nickname that stuck to a sea of tents that grew overnight out of nowhere
and where refugees found comfort in row after row of tents. This was
paradise after the week-long sunbathing on the hard ﬂoor of the ship
deck. Despite looking everywhere and listening closely to all the news,
we found no trace of Father. As time passed by, we became more and
more desperate. Our household lost a breadwinner and a guide. We
became directionless and did not know what to do. We delayed our
departure as much as we could and became one of the last groups of peo-
ple to leave the Tent City. From there, we ﬂew on Northwest Airlines to
the refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. I could not
contain my tears as we left the island.

We spent three months in the camp hoping and praying that we

would be reunited with our father. On my youngest sister’s birthday, our
family was sponsored by a Lutheran church in Trenton, New Jersey,
where we stayed for many years. In 1978, I moved to Houston, where I
remained for the next twenty years.

Reunion

By 1990 after a lot of searching and contacting, we heard that Father

was still alive and living with a cousin in Vietnam. For safety reasons,
Mother and I ﬂew to Saigon on the same ﬂight but as different parties
to visit him. Vietnam had just opened up diplomatically and economi-
cally to the rest of the world and relations between the U.S. and this
country were lukewarm at best. We went with fear in our hearts and did
not know how well we would be received. After an arduous twenty-hour
ﬂight and ﬁve hours on the ground, we ﬁnally landed at the old Tan Son
Nhut airport, which had not changed much after a decade and a half
under the new regime. The whole trip seemed to be an eternity as I
eagerly and anxiously anticipated my ﬁrst meeting with Father in 15
years. We went through customs patiently and cautiously. When we
walked out of the airport, we were struck by an oppressive mid-summer
heat wave. A large crowd of people waited for their relatives or friends
who were still being processed by customs. Taxi, cyclo, and bus drivers

13. Shadow of the Past (Lien)

135

eagerly asked for our patronage. Street vendors hawked their chilled water
bottles and traditional snacks. The mixture of heat, motorcycle and car
noise, exhaust fumes, and wafting smells of oriental food from nearby
restaurants brought up a deep feeling of nostalgia that made us home-
sick on the spot.

A taxi driver approached us with his gentle voice and offered his

service. I chose him over the rest because of his resemblance to Father.
After 45 minutes trying to breeze through Saigon’s congested trafﬁc, he
ﬁnally headed toward the newly constructed freeway to Bien Hoa, my
father’s hometown. The car felt like an oven under the tropical sun as
its air-conditioner took a long time to work.

Father was much smaller and in worse shape than years ago. All his

muscles had atrophied due to disuse and he looked older than his actual
age. He was able to walk around, though with some difﬁculty. Gone
were the bravado and gusto of yesteryears. The ﬁt Air Force ofﬁcer who
trained thousands of cadets in the academy was just a shadow of the
past. Tears overﬂowed my eyes when I ﬁrst saw him after a decade-and-
a-half-long absence. His short curly hair was thinner on his forehead. A
pale complexion had replaced his attractive dark skin. As a result of a
stroke, his face was slightly deformed when he tried to speak. I kept star-
ing at him to make sure I was not dreaming and that he would not dis-
appear again.

He explained to us he was jailed for a total of six years in northern

camps. No one came to visit or bring food to him because we were all
abroad and no one took care of him when he got out. As he tried to pull
himself out of this dreaded nightmare, he became more depressed because
he could not ﬁnd any work. All government positions were reserved for
northerners and communist-leaning people. ARVN (southern) soldiers
were excluded from any government position. He did odd jobs to pull
himself through. To ease his loneliness and despair, he took refuge in
drinking. Depression and destitution drove him to consume one of these
cheap rice wine products that people brew in their backyards and to
smoke homemade tobacco. Later a stroke paralyzed the left side of his
body. We comforted him as much as we could although love alone could
not erase years of mistreatment, forlornness, and hopelessness in the con-
centration camps.

In order to sponsor him, we began applying for all the necessary

paperwork once we returned to the United States. The process was slow.

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He was considered for immigration and went for his physical examina-
tion. It was then that he was diagnosed with a serious case of hepatitis B
and tuberculosis, diseases that a battered immune system and severe mal-
nutrition had unmasked in him. These health conditions held him back.
To make matters worse, his identiﬁcation papers kept getting stolen,
allowing thieves and city ofﬁcials to earn money at his expense as they
issued one duplicate after another. This problem further depressed him
and caused him to drink more. I ﬂew to Bien Hoa in 1992 to see him again.
As his medical condition worsened, he felt weaker and weaker. I felt
there was no chance for him to get out of the country. I returned to the
U.S. with a deep sense of hopelessness. I wonder whether I should have
done more for him earlier. On January 30, 1993, as I returned from a
visit to my sister in Seattle, Washington, I found on my fax machine a
three-day-old notice of his death. Although I sort of expected it, the news
caught me by surprise and caused me to become numb for days.

Father had been a good and responsible man. Without his inter-

ventions twice in April 1975, who knows what would have happened to
all of us? We would have vegetated under a communist regime or been
sent to the new economic zone where some of us would have died. We
would not have had the chance to be educated like we were on U.S. soil.
He stayed back to serve his country. And for having faithfully executed
his part of the deal with the Southern government, he was caught and
sent to the reeducation camps. At no time, however, had I heard him
utter anything negative against the old or new government. He felt like
a tool being crushed by big machinery. It crushed me to realize he had
been incarcerated during all those years without having anyone to take
care of him. This was part of the war’s tragedy. It split up whole fami-
lies and some people had to fend for themselves and by themselves.

I lost interest in traveling but often took guilt trips every time I

thought of him. My mother said she forgave him but never forgot that
he left her to raise six children by herself. All my younger brothers and
sisters missed him although they only had a vague memory of him. His
absence also created a big void and an emotional imbalance in my life.
With or without tears rolling down my cheeks, I cried silently during
countless nights for him. I wonder if I had ever let my past love for him
overshadow my present life. He is the shadow of the past that will never
fade away in the hearts of his loved ones.

13. Shadow of the Past (Lien)

137

A Refugee’s Life

Hien V. Ho

DITOR

’

OTE

: The author describes in vivid detail his life from the

fall of Saigon to his departure to the United States, via a few camps
in Malaysia and the Philippines. He also describes his life as a social-
ist doctor and his boat escape to Malaysia.

Life After April 30, 1975

After the communists took over Vietnam, I had to spend almost

two years in their concentration camps, and after that I had to go to a
New Economic Zone for a year. I probably would have spent my whole
life in that remote, primitive area working manually in the rice ﬁeld if
it were not for the exodus of people trying by all means to escape from
the communists. Waves of people were deserting the country on boats
of all sizes to reach freedom in neighboring countries, or to die in the
South China Sea when their fragile boats wrecked in the mighty ocean
waves. They left empty almost all the essential professional and techni-
cal jobs in the cities, particularly in the former capital of Saigon. Even
when the new regime did not care much about the deaths of a few thou-
sand, or even tens of thousands of people, an appearance of decency
required that the government pull out the doctors, dentists, and nurses
who were rotting in the concentration camps or languishing in the new
economic zones. They brought them home and gave them back their jobs
at the hospitals and clinics in the city.

138

My Life as a Socialist Doctor

At the end of 1977, I was allowed back to the city to work as a pedi-

atrician in one of the new hospitals. It had been a seminary formerly
owned by Catholic friars. Those poor men had been accused of illegal
possession of arms, their institution conﬁscated by the “people,” and
their place was converted to a makeshift hospital.

I was responsible for creating the new department of pediatrics at

the hospital now called Hospital of Thu Duc. To tell the truth, it was a
very challenging but very satisfying experience. Any doctor would be
more than happy to practice medicine again after so many years in
conﬁnement or doing manual labor, regardless of the size of the salary
or perks that might come with the job. It was really moving to be use-
ful treating the unfortunate kids who were born at the wrong place and
at the wrong moment in history. Diagnostic and therapeutic facilities
were very limited due to the national policy of the new government that
treated the South of Vietnam as conquered territory and therefore com-
mandeered most valuable equipment to serve and strengthen the North.
Also, the country was under an embargo imposed by the United States
and its allies and penury was the rule. Another cause for frustration was
the political climate in which we had to work. Even if we had to risk
our own lives, we had to leave the country.

Our Preparation for Escape

By my wife’s account, we paid money or gold about twenty times

before we boarded our boat trying to get out of the country. Each time
we lost from ten to thirty taels of gold to con artists who had turned the
process of taking people out of the country into a cottage industry. This
time, it was our last hope. We had already run out of money or gold; if
I failed again and got caught, I would have to stay in prison forever. How-
ever, to use the term by Rudyard Kipling, we had to risk everything in
a single “pitch and toss,” without the chance “to lose and start again
with worn tools.” That would be it, the end, if it failed.

However, there was one consolation. There was a very good for-

tuneteller. My wife, like a lot of people trying to leave the country, came
to see him regularly since the time I was put in the concentration camp.

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

139

To be fair to him, most of his predictions about the fate of the people
who consulted him turned out to be correct. A relative of my wife wanted
to join a group that was planning to escape in a boat. The astrologer
predicted that there would be three different outcomes for the group:
One group would die drowning in the sea, a second group would be cap-
tured by the communists, a third group would make it to the high seas
and reach the free shores. That prediction did materialize and unfortu-
nately my wife’s relative and his son belonged to the ﬁrst group. Things
like that amazed me and challenged my inherent skepticism. The
astrologer used to reassure me: “Doctor, you will get out of the coun-
try, but it will take time. You will go further in your studies and in your
profession, you will have to deal with women.” (This last part is inter-
esting in that, instead of becoming a gynecologist as I simplistically inter-
preted, I later trained in pediatrics and now have to talk to kids’ mothers
all day long.)

So, on that December night when I had to be on call at the hospi-

tal, that fortuneteller told my wife that a good opportunity was coming
by and referred the owner of the boat to us.

There was a tough decision to be made: We had to pay 10 taels of

gold per adult; we were ﬁve, two adults and three children, so it took
about 35 taels of gold, about 30,000 dollars now. The worst thing was
that, if the plan failed from the beginning, there was no refunding pos-
sible and our last resources would be annihilated. The astrologer pre-
dicted that it would be a very fortuitous trip however; the boat would
not meet any pirates, and by the fourth day at sea, it would be rescued
by Americans and brought to safety. We did not dare to take the gam-
ble and the prediction turned out to be totally correct. I learned my les-
son. Remember Einstein who allegedly hung a horseshoe on his door and
replied when asked about his being superstitious: “It works even when
you don’t believe in it.”

A few days later, the same boat owner organized the next trip; this

time she would take her own family with her on that boat, with the
blessing of the same fortuneteller. He even trusted his stepdaughter to
the woman. It was predicted that this trip would be a little more stren-
uous than the previous one, but hopefully we would escape the pirates
if we prayed fervently enough to Quan The Am Bo Tac (Kwan Yin, our
Asian Lady of Mercy) or, for Catholics among us, to the Virgin Mary.
Also, by now my mother-in-law had already been on another boat on

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her way out of the country, and we thought she had already made it to
Thailand. (In fact, she was captured and held in a concentration camp
in Cambodia, but we did not know that until all decisions about our
own plan were already made.)

The Day We Left Vietnam

On December 16, 1980, my wife, my children and I left my mother-

in-law’s home in Gia Dinh (a Saigon suburb). We were nicely dressed
because we were supposed to be part of a wedding procession from Cho
Lon (“Grand Market,” a kind of gigantic Vietnamese Chinatown) to Cai
Lay, a river port. There, we would get to small sampans that would take
us to a large boat waiting for us in Vinh Long, a larger port nearer to
the sea.

I was 33, my wife was 26, my oldest son Hoa, 7, Hieu, 6 and Hiep,

the youngest one, only 5. My wife was wearing a nice Vietnamese ao dai.
I had my jacket on — it was the only one that I had ever gotten until
then. It was the remaining part of a suit, custom-made for the ceremony
of graduation from medical school, and I had worn it at my wedding. I
had already given the slacks to my younger brother in 1975 when he was
running away from the incoming communist wave, having lost every-
thing he had.

We rode our Honda motorbike to a place near Cau Bong (the Bridge

of Flowers linking Saigon and Gia Dinh). We left our motorbike for our
aunt to take home, then boarded a very old bus — a converted truck that
was a very common, cheap but noisy means of public transportation in
Vietnam at that time. It took us to a restaurant in Cholon where we were
supposed to join the wedding procession. Small groups of a dozen peo-
ple each, from different areas, would descend in small boats and con-
verge to a meeting point. There, a total of about 120–130 people would
get into a larger ﬁshing boat, about 30 miles away. Because it was a fake
wedding, we had with us some nice food that we ate during our short
trip in those small riverboats. I still remember the choux creme, a kind
of French pastry very popular in Vietnam, which had become a little stale
because of the hot weather. I really held my breath when we passed the
checking stations on the river. Somehow we did look innocent enough
to them.

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

141

By the day’s end, we arrived at our meeting point in Cai Lay where

we boarded our main boat. I do not remember much about the place. I
only remember my wife and my children rushing with me to the boat,
barefooted. My wife was carrying our youngest son under her arm, Hieu
was with me and Hoa was on his own, carrying a black nylon bag of
clothing and everyone else’s shoes and sandals, trying hard not to drop
them when jumping down the boat’s deck.

The boat’s number of registration was MH 3273, with MH stand-

ing for Minh Hai, the province at the southmost part of Vietnam, where
the coastline takes the shape of a parrot’s beak. It was a ﬁshing boat,
intended only for shallow waters along the coastline and its normal load
should have been a family of 5 or 6. So there were people everywhere
over the boat, more than a hundred of them. There were paying pas-
sengers and certainly last minute non-paying members also. The latter
were forced on us by local authorities who wanted to send their own
people overseas too. It turned out to be about 130 people on that small
boat.

As we left the port, most of us had to go into hiding under the deck

in a ﬁsh storage area of less than 40 square feet. There was a small wood
cover that had to be tightly closed to prevent any noise from coming
outside. A small light bulb was eventually turned off. It was suffocation
plus total darkness. Hieu started to complain that he could not breathe
anymore and was going to die. His mother was so desperate that she tried
to pry open the heavy wooden cover with her ﬁngers and left them there
almost crushed under its weight to let some air in. Hiep started to scream
too. People were so scared of being detected by the river patrol boats.
Someone tried to silence him by threatening to throw him overboard
into the sea. That was the worst thing one could ever say to someone
else in such a situation.

Everybody who went to sea avoided saying anything related to

drowning or pirates because those were things we feared the most. I
myself was in even worse shape. I had severe seasickness and felt as if I
was going to die. Someone called me for help because they knew that I
was one of the two doctors on board. Of course, there was nothing I
could do to help, except wait until the boat reached the international sea
boundaries. The next morning we got out of the cramped space below
deck and were able to breathe fresh air. Most women and children pre-
ferred to stay under the deck however. Down there it was warmer, drier

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and they were out of view of the pirates who were looking for women,
among other things.

I was lying or sitting on the deck, having a very small space for

myself at mid-ship, next to the opening of the ﬁsh storage haul. One of
my duties was transferring food (rice and coffee) that the organizers sent
down from their cabin. Another job was to empty into the sea contain-
ers of urine and other detritus passed up to me by people staying below.

Pirates

We spent three days and four nights at sea. It was only after board-

ing the main boat that we knew our captain could not come. Fortunately,
the owner of the boat was well prepared for the worst and had acquired
some cursory but vital knowledge about seafaring. We headed west in
the good direction toward Malaysia, because it was the shortest way to
reach land. The weather was propitious and the only potential threat was
the pirates from Thailand and Malaysia. Most of them were regular
ﬁshermen moonlighting as pirates so their respective governments were
unable to detect and stop them completely. Also, most of their victims
did not survive, and even if they did, there was very little effort to pros-
ecute their persecutors.

Once we were chased by another boat during most of the night.

Luckily, our engine did not break down and we outsped our pursuers.
We saw only a bright light that chased us through the night and every-
one on board was praying to the Virgin or Kwan Yin for protection. I
stayed on the deck. It was very cold at night after the burning sun dur-
ing daytime and my legs felt like they were frozen. I found out that by
keeping my bare, sun-burned legs together with their skins touching
each other, I got a warm sensation going along them and did not feel
the cold anymore. We spotted many ships that passed by, but nobody
tried to slow down or even waved back to us. Large ﬁsh followed our
boat. Some of us thought that they were whales, sacred to Vietnamese
seafarers. I thought they were smart seals that we now see so often on
television.

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

143

Mersing, Malaysia

At last, we saw land the morning of December 20, 1980. It was an

island of Malaysia called Tioman. That evening, we arrived to the island
of Pulau Tengah, off the eastern shore of the Malay Peninsula. We were
not allowed on the island, which was the site of a small refugee camp
with about 200 people from Vietnam. We were instead directed to Mers-
ing, a small Malaysian town across the straight between Pulau Tengah
and the coastline.

It was late in the evening of December 20, and from the dark sea

where we were, we saw the lights of the city beckoning from afar. Reg-
ular green and red trafﬁc lights appeared to us like twinkling stars from
the Promised Land. But as we came closer to the shore, waves became
taller and taller, stronger and stronger, probably due to shallower waters
and stronger tides. Our boat was terribly shaken, and for the ﬁrst time
during that trip, I had the feeling that all of us were going to die right
at the moment when we reached our port of destination. I started to feel
the irony of the situation.

All lifesavers were taken. My oldest son could ﬁnd only a wooden

plank that he held on to. I did not have anything to cling to. In my arms,
I was squeezing my other two boys. If the boat sank, we would be going
down together. I did not know what my wife was doing at that moment;
she had not come out of that ﬁsh storage space since we left Vietnam.
After a while, the crew succeeded in stabilizing the boat. We decided to
wait until morning to try to approach Mersing again. We successfully
reached the pier without incident. Members of the Malaysian Red Cres-
cent Society (the Red Cross equivalent in Islamic countries) came for-
ward to receive us. They were very happy to ﬁnd out that there were two
doctors among the refugees. Dr. Lê Phu.

c Quân and I were classmates

at the Saigon Medical School. We also used to work together at the mil-
itary Cam Ranh Rehabilitation Center, before we moved to Saigon upon
the arrival of the communists.

In Mersing, we lived in makeshift tents in a park by the sea. My

children got their ﬁrst bath at a stream nearby. They played and fought
happily on the sandy bank when Hiep suddenly fell with a splash into
the water. Fortunately, I reacted quickly enough and saved him. Remem-
ber that someone threatened to throw him into the sea at the beginning
of the trip.

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After three days, we were moved by boat to the island of Pulau Ten-

gah, about an hour from Mersing.

My Two Months in Pulau Tengah

On Christmas Eve, 1980, all of us, about 130 people, were trans-

ferred from Mersing on the East coast of Malaysia (population about
20,000) to the island of Pulau Tengah, 16 miles away, now an uninhab-
ited marine park where tourists can watch leatherback turtles coming
ashore to lay their eggs. It was a short trip by boat. The island was about
two miles long north–south and much narrower east–west. There were
two refugee camps, North Island (B

c –

‰

o) and South Island (Nam –

‰

o).

The reception buildings were in the center of the island, facing the pier,
across the dirt road that joined the two camps together. All new arrivals
were registered and photographed. Each of us had an ID picture taken,
with the number of our boat and our name written in white chalk on a
small blackboard on our chest. We were issued ID cards from the Inter-
national Commission for Migration (ICM). The staff interviewed us in
Vietnamese. Refugee volunteers were organized into a committee that
worked quite effectively in cooperation with Malaysian authorities and
charity organizations. Even between people from the same country, there
were a lot of language barriers among refugees who spoke different Viet-
namese minority dialects, in particular Chinese Vietnamese. Each refugee
had to declare his or her past history, the members of his nuclear and
extended family still in Vietnam and their current locations or activi-
ties. Malaysia was a country on the “free world” side and certainly needed
to screen out unwanted elements that communist Vietnam might want
to insert into the boatpeople community. After all that paperwork, we
became “illegal residents under detention” in Malaysia, waiting for reset-
tlement in a “third country,” hopefully the United States. It was Christ-
mas and Catholics were getting ready for a special mass at the community
hall that night. The priest was French and because, like most Vietnamese
doctors, I was ﬂuent in French, someone asked me to serve as an inter-
preter for him during the mass. It was an honor, though I was really
exhausted and needed time to ﬁnd some place for the children to spend
the night. Also, my knowledge of French terms used in a mass was rudi-
mentary at best. I had never attended a mass in full length, in Viet-

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

145

namese or in French, so I felt relieved when someone took over the job.
Then, my surgeon friend Lê Phu.

c Quân and I were immediately offered

the honor of running the small hospital of the island, the only structure
with air conditioning and that looked like a real building. We would
operate an outpatient clinic, admit to our small ward the more severe
cases and send the worst cases to a hospital in Mersing or Kuala Lumpur,
the capital of Malaysia. We would also review the chest X-rays of all
refugees, taken by a cursorily trained refugee technician. We would clear
the normal X-rays, and send the suspicious ones for reading by radiol-
ogists in Kuala Lumpur.

We were led to the North Island camp where we found a few

wooden cot beds in makeshift huts with thatch roofs. Some from our
boat also stayed there for the night. We had some food, settled down a
little with our few possessions and put the children to bed. Then, my
wife and I went to the church at the center of the island to attend mid-
night mass. As we walked down the small dirt path along the seashore,
waves came almost to our feet and moisture from afar, maybe from our
native land, came to wet our faces and awoke us to reality. At the mass,
the choir was singing, accompanied by a guitar. Tears came to my eyes
and I could not help sobbing forcefully. It was the end of our life as we
had ever known it. This was the painful birth of a new life in a new lan-
guage, a new society, and a very uncertain future.

After a while we moved into a communal building. It was a large

and hollow hall built with light material and a corrugated steel roof.
Large cots made of wood planks were used as living and sleeping quar-
ters for a dozen families. Our family of ﬁve was allowed the space of about
a king-sized bed. It was next to Dr. Quân and his family. I remember
this detail because I still can visualize him sitting on his mat reading med-
ical textbooks available from the hospital. Both of us tried to catch up
on our English and our medical knowledge. We knew that we had a lot
to learn, as we wanted to go back to our medical careers eventually after
our resettlement in a third country.

Good things and bad things happened here. It was an idyllic place,

with perfect beaches, coconut palm trees and a blue sea that would ﬁt
perfectly in any Caribbean Sea travel catalogue, except for a few oddi-
ties that would remind a visitor that this was not a paradise island. There
were no latrines but large outhouses built over the ocean where human
waste was recycled by the sea’s fauna. Our clothing was colorful and

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diverse: Donated items from different places of the world reﬂected a vari-
ety of fashions and tastes. From jeans to blue Filipino traditional shirts,
we valued everything we got and happily wore it. There were times when
they sorted out big bags containing everything from pants to underwear,
and the best-connected people had the privilege to pick up the most
sought-after items. My second son Hieu was missing his aunt Thuy very
much because she had been very close to him when we were still in Viet-
nam. Once, looking at all those jeans, he told us: “Let’s keep some of
those blue jeans for Di Thuy.” That remark from our six-year-old child
reminded us how despondent we had become.

My children had no school to go to except some youth activities at

the camp’s library at the seaside. There, for a few hours a day, a refugee
would volunteer to play with or read to the kids. My ﬁve-year-old Hiep
was very reluctant to go there. He agreed to stay with the other children
only after Mr. H

u, one of our escape boat’s owners who used to pam-

per him a lot, bribed him with a little bowl of hu. ti

™

u (Southern Viet-

nam’s rice noodle soup), a very precious fare at the time bought from
one of the makeshift cafés operated by refugees; even then I had to prom-
ise to stay within his sight all the time.

The brightest moment for me was when I was able to contact the

American Medical Association (AMA) in Illinois. I could not bring any
ofﬁcial documents with me during our escape and my name and ECFMG
(Educational Council For Foreign Graduates) ID number (which I had
taken care to memorize when we left) were my only proofs of identity.
I wrote a letter to the ECFMG ofﬁce in Illinois that Ms. Chen, a Chi-
nese nurse, volunteered to mail from the Mersing (inland) post ofﬁce.
Only a few weeks later, to my great surprise, I received a very nice let-
ter from the AMA welcoming me to the Free World and explaining that
it still had all my documents submitted to them ten years before when
I applied for the exam in 1971, and that they were sending the originals
back to me after having made a copy of everything. I had passed the
ECFMG exam in 1972. In fact, when I took the exam, I never thought
of any possibility of ever getting my training in the U.S. I just did it
from curiosity and for fun, as a few of my friends did at that time. A
few of us just tried to see how we, from a local, “third world” medical
school, would fare on an international exam. We didn’t even have to pay
exam fees beforehand; if we passed, they were waived until the day we
reached the U.S. and actually made use of the certiﬁcate. Now, I felt really

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

147

grateful to the friends who made me do something of no apparent impor-
tance then, but that turned out to be of monumental consequence to
my family and myself ten years later. The ECFMG gave us back our iden-
tity, and even earned me some respect from the Filipino nurses who were
also looking for an opportunity to work in the U.S. Later, in America,
the fact that I was already qualiﬁed for an intern position spared me years
of intensive preparation without a salary.

As I said before, bad things happened too. Within the ﬁrst few days

after our arrival, people from the North Island camp were rushing toward
the hospital, carrying a livid and ﬂaccid boy of one or two years of age.
He had somehow fallen into one of the wells there. Somebody inadver-
tently had left the cover open or maybe the boy had somehow managed
to open it by himself. “Ghosts led his way, the devil showed it to him,”
as we like to say in Vietnamese (Ma d

n l

i, qu

d-u.a d-u.

∂

ng). I tried to

resuscitate him, mouth-to-mouth and everything, to no avail. His fam-
ily owned the boat that had brought us to the island. A few among us
thought of the accident as a sinister fee of passage. Soon afterwards, a
very athletic and well-built man from the same family suddenly devel-
oped abdominal cramps and became comatose. He had drunk some mix-
ture of coconut milk and a certain solvent found in an abandoned can.
It was a very toxic compound. After a few days at our hospital, he died
a very painful death. There was very little Dr. L. P. Quân and I could
do for him at the little hospital. In fact, coming from a country where
medical care had regressed to the most rudimentary level under years of
communist regime and American embargo, our expectations had gone
very low. We did not even have any idea of what could be done else-
where (in Kuala Lumpur for example) for such a case, and how to pro-
ceed to refer and transfer our patient to some other place where he could
have a better chance for survival. This tragic case heightened our aware-
ness about poisoning and alcohol abuse that were very prevalent among
the refugees. Another memorable case involved a teenager who tried to
do some ﬁshing to improve his family’s meals. In its ﬂight the hook acci-
dentally perforated his eyeball. He never reported to the hospital and
when we found out about the accident it was too late. Idleness coupled
with extremely crowded living conditions created an environment favor-
able to many sins that would not have thrived otherwise, like drunken-
ness, gambling, violence and recklessness. Anyway, nobody cared much
about anything besides their own survival. Occasionally, right before our

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eyes, whole boatfuls of people who were refused permission to land by
local authorities were chased away and disappeared into the horizon.

Looking for an Adoptive Country

In Pulau Tengah, we had the ﬁrst chance to contact delegations

from the third countries. We were refugees from Vietnam, so Vietnam
was our ﬁrst country. The second country was Malaysia, where we were
illegal immigrants, and were tolerated temporarily until another coun-
try would voluntarily accept us for political asylum. That last country
where we would eventually go to live was called the third country. Because
of past political and military ties with South Vietnam, the United States
had been the most willing to accept us. In fact, in the previous years,
most Vietnamese who made it to refugee camps had been readily accepted
for resettlement in the United States. Exceptions were people who were
rescued at sea by another country’s ships. By international convention,
they were automatically accepted for resettlement in that respective coun-
try, like Germany, Sweden, even Israel.

By 1981, so many Vietnamese had settled in the United States that

there were signs of “fatigue” in their open-arm policy. Also, there was
economic hardship in the U.S., something that I was not aware of then.
The Americans changed their immigration policy and did not automat-
ically accept even former military ofﬁcers of South Vietnam who had
fought on their side during the war. My credentials, like having a pro-
fessional degree recognized in America (my ECFMG certiﬁcate would
allow me to ﬁnd a paying position in a hospital in the U.S.) and having
spent time in a communist concentration camp, did not help either. The
Americans required us to apply to two other countries and to be rejected
by them before they would even open a ﬁle for us and consider our appli-
cations. Therefore, I had to apply with the Australian delegation ﬁrst.
Australia wanted only very young, single applicants at the time; I guessed
that they wanted a mostly young, cheap labor force that didn’t have the
burden of a large family. Many uneducated, non–English-speaking men
in their twenties were accepted to Australia without signiﬁcant delay.
We felt a lot of bitterness then, but in retrospect and in a philosophical
sense, I think that it was probably fair. Someone else sometimes needs
his own dose of good luck, and we cannot expect to keep our own socioe-
conomic advantage all the time.

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

149

We had the same misfortune with the Canadian delegation. I still

remember the Asian Canadian who courteously told me that doctors
were not encouraged to come to Canada. Again, it became a pattern
here. The communists hated us because we were educated and therefore
belonged to the privileged, exploiting class on the side of capitalists. Now
that we were begging the capitalists for help, they were rejecting us
because we were too educated for their use. Laughing at this catch-22
situation was probably a good coping strategy for us. Later, I thought
of it as another example of the Law of the Frontier Man who lost his
horse. The story of the frontier man (tái ông th

t mã) is a cliché in Chi-

nese popular philosophy. That man lost his beautiful horse and his friends
felt sorry for him. He said, “I am not sure it is not a good thing.” One
month later the horse returned home and his friends congratulated him
for his luck. He said, “I am not sure it is not a bad thing.” His son rode
the horse and broke his leg. Bad luck? Maybe not. There came the war,
and every ﬁt person was drafted into the military. People died in the war,
the son survived. You have got the pattern now. So, later, when I became
well established and comfortable in the United States, and looked across
the Canadian borders at my friends who fought the freezing climate for
most of the year, tái ông th

t mã came back to my mind. But, I know,

as part of the rule still, who knows?

Sungei Besi in Kuala Lumpur

Two months after our arrival in Pulau Tengah, they decided to close

the camp because it was too small and planned to evacuate all refugees
to the island of Pulau Bidong, more to the north. Pulau Bidong was the
largest, most crowded refugee community in Malaysia with a popula-
tion of more than 30,000 refugees at a time. It was not as peaceful as
our place, and had a reputation for unruliness and unsanitary health
conditions.

They offered me an exception however. On March 3, 1981, the two

of us physicians were allowed to go with our families to Kuala Lumpur.
We were assigned to work at a small sickbay (hospital), helping two
American doctors there. One was a young, single internist who took a
year off his fellowship to volunteer to work for a charity organization
there with the refugees. “Who do you think you are?” his friends asked

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him when he made the decision to go to Malaysia. The other doctor, Dr.
Laura Brandt, was a pediatrician of my age, from Indiana. I enjoyed
working with her very much. Later she wrote many letters of recommen-
dation on my behalf when I applied for a residency position. Because of
my transfer to Sungei Besi in Kuala Lumpur, I had to stay another year
in the refugee camps. Sungei Besi was supposed to be a transit camp, where
refugees spent only a few weeks before boarding an airplane to the States.
They did not open new ﬁles for refugees there, or did so rarely, because
there was no pressure to make places for newcomers as at crowded Pulau
Bidong. Also, they probably were not very eager to lose a good doctor work-
ing day and night, always available for emergencies, baby deliveries, and
transfer to the hospital emergency room in Kuala Lumpur downtown.

Sungei Besi, despite its location next to a capital city and its secu-

rity, was one of the worst experiences of my life. Extreme conﬁnement
in a very small place, uncertainty about my future, lack of any educa-
tional experience for the children, its perpetual noise, daily farewell par-
ties, melancholic songs reminding us about our old country on the public
address system, nonstop day and night. It was hell for me, at moments
even worse than the communist concentration camps, from a psycho-
logical point of view. Then at last, after many recriminations and protests
sent to the American delegation, we were considered at last for resettle-
ment in the United States. Our sponsor would be my wife’s cousin who
was living in Newport News, Virginia. Her husband had a painting job
at a bus company and was moonlighting ﬁxing old cars at night and
reselling them. They had two girls and one boy, and lived in a rather
modest house across the street from a Catholic church. When we were
in Vietnam, we saw them in a picture in front of their house and it appeared
to us like a dream of peace and happiness, very difﬁcult to reach.

When we were in the refugee camp, they sent us some money and

a few letters. Probably much of that mail was lost before it reached our
makeshift local post ofﬁce. Required paper work from our sponsor in
America was slow to come by. Another problem was that neither of us
on each side of the Paciﬁc really understood what kind of situation the
other side had to deal with. There were a lot of unmet expectations,
frustrations. At one point, I was lucky enough to have Dr. Brandt make
a very long distance phone call for me. She made a ﬁfty dollar call to
our relatives in America to remind them to send us very important doc-
uments called “reassurance letters” written by our sponsors. In retro-

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

151

spect, I guess these were afﬁdavits whereby our sponsors promised to
take care of us once we were admitted to the U.S. so that we would not
be a burden on the welfare system. The costly phone call did not help
much however, because in America, they did not know what we were
referring to.

After more than six months in the camp, most of the paperwork

was done. We went to the American embassy in Kuala Lumpur for our
ﬁnal interview. Our airline tickets to America were ready. When we
thought that our ordeal was over, there was a sudden major change in
the policy towards the refugees coming to America. The Reagan admin-
istration made the new requirement that every refugee should have had
a half a year course in orientation and English as a second language in
the Philippines before coming to the U.S.

My wife was shocked at the news; she developed acute stomach

pain and threw up blood because of gastric bleeding. She had been
preparing for months for our departure to America. She had spent long
nights sitting outside under a street light to knit sweaters for her chil-
dren to get them ready for the cold climate. She donated them to a few
teenage children who traveled alone or whose parents had died during
their escape and even earned some money with orders from leaving
refugees. With that money she was able to buy some extra food for our
children. All her dreams collapsed all of a sudden. I still remember the
help of Ms. Lorna Lutley, a British nurse volunteer who came to our liv-
ing quarters, talked to my wife about the biblical story of Job, tried to
comfort her and hugged her emotionally. She later “lent” us some money
and gave me her only stethoscope just in case I might need it to take
care of my family. Dr. Brandt had a farewell party for me. She asked me
what I wanted as a gift. She gave me the heavy Nelson’s Textbook of Pedi-
atrics that I wanted, the only one that she brought along for consulta-
tion. I still treasure it and keep it in my library. So it was with a heavy
heart and a lot of uncertainty about our own future and the future of
our children that we left Kuala Lumpur.

Our Move to Bataan in the Philippines

On November 3, 1981, we had to leave the camp furtively by night

in large trucks to enter the airport by its rear entrance. We were allowed

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to use the airport lobby only when everybody had left at midnight, and
only then did we board the plane for another destination.

We arrived in Manila in the Philippines at night. A long caravan

of buses took us to Bataan, a remote area, on the west coastline of the
country. When we went through the streets of a Manila suburb, I was
unable to see anything besides the lighted stores and the streetlights that
reminded me of downtown Cholon, the giant Chinatown next to Saigon.
After we left the city, the road wound uphill, through the mountainous
landscape. It was the ﬁrst time in many years that I saw such a long line
of lights on the road. Since 1975 most trafﬁc that we had in Vietnam
consisted of bicycles and military trucks, so any indication of modern
life, like the colors of trafﬁc lights in Mersing, a taxi in Kuala Lumpur,
a drinking water fountain at the airport, a neon store sign in Manila,
were encouraging signs meaning to me that we were making small steps
toward civilization. My dream of coming back to the urban life ended
when we arrived at the Bataan Philippines Refugee Processing Center
(PRPC). It was really late and we were sent to a small house with the
family of a friend. She was a former teacher whose husband, a lieuten-
ant colonel in the South Vietnamese Parachutist Force, was still spend-
ing time in a communist concentration camp in North Vietnam. She
traveled with two sons and two daughters.

Life at the Philippines Refugees

Processing Center in Bataan

The morning after, we were taken to our permanent living quar-

ters. The PRPC was a village built from scratch with American money,
just for the purpose of processing and preparing refugees who were head-
ing for the United States. It had schools for children and adults, a com-
munity center where movies were shown on weekends and facilities for
its staff.

Adult education consisted mostly of basic English at slightly dif-

ferent levels and orientation to the American lifestyle. The faculty was
mostly Filipino, not surprising as the country was a former colony of the
United States. People spoke English very ﬂuently, with a slight peculiar
accent. A Catholic Sister, Sister Eugenia, was in charge of the orienta-
tion part. Refugees who had spent some time in the U.S. were recruited

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

153

to the faculty and underwent 100 hours of training in the techniques of
teaching.

Before my escape I myself never went outside Vietnam but, because

I was a doctor and spoke rather decent English, I was drafted to be part
of the faculty. I taught the other teachers about basic medical knowl-
edge, the health care delivery system and preventive medicine. It was done
in English and it seemed to me that the Sister appreciated it a lot. I never
attended the orientation classes themselves, which were conducted in
Vietnamese for the majority of the refugee students. They learned how
to use an American bathroom, run a vacuum cleaner, and cook on a gas
or electric range. There was even a small model house (a tiny one by our
current standards) with everything from an American bed to a carpeted
ﬂoor. From our point of view at that time, it was like a dream house.

After the initial paper work we moved into a small apartment about

3 meters by 4 meters in size, with a total surface area of around 120–130
square feet. An attic added some extra living space for our two families,
10 people in all, three adults and 7 children. My wife and I shared the
large cot bed with our three children at night. Hoa, though only 9 years
old, helped with some of the housekeeping and babysitting for his
mother.

The ﬁrst disheartening sight we had was the apartment itself. The

building was made of light material; walls were of thin concrete and the
roof of corrugated steel. There was a yard without trees in front. In the
back there was a shallow moat full of black foul-smelling water that
probably was draining from some sewage nearby. As we entered the apart-
ment we were overwhelmed by a strong smell of human feces. The
cement ﬂoor was littered with trash from the previous tenants and under
the cot bed there were many remnants of the products of bodily func-
tions. We spent the whole day cleaning that mess. The condition of the
communal outhouses, about ten yards away, later gave us an explanation
as to why some people had elected not to use them. They were small
buildings made of concrete, divided into narrow booths. Instead of toi-
let seats there were small gutters where people were supposed to relieve
themselves without any sense of privacy. Above the gutters ran a water
pipe with occasional copper faucets. Only a small stream of dripping
water came out and it failed the purpose of ﬂushing the gutters. Besides,
those faucets also provided us with the only source of running water that
we had. Every member of our family group had to take turns, spending

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15 minutes to half an hour waiting for that water to trickle down and
ﬁll up a small bucket. Add to that the impatience in the waiting line and
the strong stench from the gutters. That was how we got our washing,
cooking and drinking water.

Fortunately, there were streams about half a mile from the camp.

We followed a narrow, tortuous path leading to the valley and took baths
there. The scenery surrounding the streams was idyllic, with green, exu-
berant tropical vegetation. The water was clear and turbulent in places.
Sometimes it gave us the impression of being immersed in a Jacuzzi tub
with its cool and singing stream, soothing our pain and worries. There
was a place where water was deeper and overlooked by a shaded promon-
tory. Some children could not resist the thrill of diving there and a few
lost their lives doing so. However those streams of water were one of the
few bright spots of my memory about Bataan.

Another ﬁne moment was the celebration of the Vietnamese New

Year. We had a fair where fake ﬁre-crackers were hung from fake Viet-
namese cherry trees. The pagoda was decorated with look-alike Chinese
characters welcoming Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. For us, it was a day
of painful nostalgia that marked another year in exile; at the same time
Tet, as always, brought us some amount of hope for the future. That
night, we had a large bonﬁre that burned until the wee hours. I remem-
bered that ﬁre well because I was able to get a warm bath for the ﬁrst
time in years, from a bucket of hot water.

Another memorable event was our trip to Olongapo, a nearby Fil-

ipino city of about one hundred thousand inhabitants. The people there
thrived on service provided to American servicemen stationed at the
nearby military base of Bataan. We sneaked out of our camp because in
theory we were not allowed outside. We boarded a small Filipino boat
that took us to the city. We shopped for a few cheap items. I bought my
ﬁrst Sony boom box and a little uni-focus, Instamatic Kodak camera
that cost about 16–20 dollars. I was eager to spend that precious money
because I wanted to have the pictures that would later become witnesses
of the most memorable days of our lives. One of my favorite pictures
shows my wife in front of our apartment. Above her hangs a ﬁve-pointed,
star-shaped paper lantern that I made myself from bamboo rods and
paper for my children. It is a Vietnamese tradition to hang that kind of
paper lantern during holidays like Christmas or Mid-Autumn Festival.
Another picture shows my youngest son dancing with his daycare friends;

14. A Refugee’s Life (Ho)

155

another one has our children at a welcoming party when Mrs. Marcos,
First Lady of the Philippines, came to visit us in her helicopter. I also
remember my ﬁrst ice cream in years that we had at a small restaurant
where one of the Filipino teachers, Ms. Ninfa Alderette, took us. At
night, we also had some entertainment at a few makeshift cafés at some
refugees’ apartments.

On March 27, 1982, we left Bataan and boarded our charter plane

in Manila, headed for Newport News, Virginia, via San Francisco.

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Guam, the Transit Island

Nghia M. Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: For six months in 1975, Guam, an island in the

Paciﬁc Ocean, became the screening area for all the refugees coming
out of Vietnam. The dynamics of Operation New Life are described.
Eventually, more than one thousand people returned home via the ill-
fated Vietnam Thuong Tin I boat.

The ﬁrst 130,000 refugees who escaped from Vietnam after the fall

of Saigon arrived in Guam for processing before heading to the U.S.
mainland and other countries worldwide.

Operation New Life

Operation New Life was launched on April 23, 1975 (and ended

on October 16, 1975), with the goal of resettling the refugees. The ﬁrst
refugees arriving by plane in the last week of April were bused to the
ﬁrst staging area where they could take a rest and complete their paper-
work. They received “K” rations, consisting of ham, crackers, jelly
and peanut butter as well as sanitary kits. Once rested and fed, they
went through a brief physical examination before being sent to the cus-
toms service. They were then given refuge in the galvanized Quonset
huts

at the “Tin City” on the grounds of Anderson AFB (Air Force

Base).

In Saigon, during the last days of the war, some Vietnamese had

offered bribes to Americans ranging from $600 to as much as $7,000 to

157

help them escape. Evacuees were reported to have brought gold plates
sewn into coat linings through customs. Others who tripped the airport
metal detector were found to have gold bullion shaped into cylinders hid-
den in their rectums.

Guam was an island 32 miles long by four to 12 miles wide popu-

lated by 80,000 islanders. In the north was the Anderson AFB, home to
the largest ﬂeet of B52 bombers which played a major role in bombing
Vietnam and Cambodia during the war. About 225 tons of food and
supplies arrived by air every day from the Travis AFB in California. Some
of the supplies arrived through the Apra Harbor in the southwest part
of the island. They were then transported on ﬂatbed trucks that trav-
eled along the western and main two-lane highway that linked the har-
bor to the Anderson AFB, forcing the islanders to share the road with
military trucks and buses carrying the evacuees. The highway that went
through the capital, Agana, and two other small towns, was crowded dur-
ing the war and Operation New Life.

With the refugees arriving following the fall of Saigon, the State

Department looked for assistance in the resettlement effort. Australia at
that time said it would accept only a few hundred young and single
refugees. Singapore and Thailand closed their doors, although Thailand
had accepted 60,000 Vietnamese when the French pulled out of Viet-
nam in 1955. West Germany would accept a few thousand refugees. The
U.S. mainland was not very enthusiastic either. California said it would
throw roadblocks into any plan to relocate the refugees in that state.
Representative White of Texas argued the refugees should be resettled
only in the Trust Territory.

In effect, nobody wanted the refugees.

Guam thus became the transit area, the Asian Ellis Island for the thou-
sands of incoming refugees.

Civilian employees of the military establishment and their military

counterparts began working twelve hours a day to get the tents up and
ready for service. They erected at breakneck speed 350 tents per day
with a housing capability of 6,000 people, but it was not enough. On
April 27, evacuee ﬂights were redirected to Wake Island, 1,500 miles
northwest of Guam for 48 hours so Guam could catch up. The “Tent
City” capable of housing 50,000 people was completed in just ten days:
It rose on Guam’s northern plateau at Orote Point at the Naval Air Sta-
tion. As of April 27, there were 20,000 evacuees on the island. After a
lull, the real phase of Operation New Life began with the announce-

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ment on May 3 that following the fall of Saigon, over 100,000 Viet-
namese had escaped the country and headed for Guam.

The biggest health risk was the possibility of an outbreak of infec-

tious disease related to the massive inﬂux of people. In the past, Guam
had experienced mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, yaws, Dengue,
and ﬁlariasis.

Trash and junk cars are the perfect breeding ground for

the Aedes mosquitoes — carrier of the Dengue virus — that are very com-
mon on the island. At the time the evacuees left Saigon, there was an
epidemic of Dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) in the city. A 9-year-old
Vietnamese became the ﬁrst casualty on the island. Brought to the hos-
pital with fever, rash and shock in the morning, he died in the after-
noon. Only one in 1,000 cases of Dengue developed into the fatal form
of DHF.

On May 6, three cargo ships carrying 16,000 evacuees appeared in

Apra Harbor. Most of them were confused, tired and hungry; many were
ragged and barefoot. Others had medical problems, some of which had
been acquired during the trip, like conjunctivitis. The following day,
three other cargo ships brought an additional 15,000 evacuees. Another
15,000 people were expected on May 8. These were not people who ﬂew
in a week earlier after a three to four hour ﬂight; the latest evacuees
arrived after six-to-eight-day trips aboard ships that had minimal sani-
tary and bathroom facilities. Most carried a small bundle or basket con-
taining all their earthly possessions.

Sorrow

Days at the camps were slow. There were the usual three meals

when people got the chance to gather in line and discuss the news. There
was not a lot of news ﬂoating around. The compound was isolated and
there was no TV or newspaper. There was the beach, although no one,
except the young ones, was interested in suntanning or bathing.

The rest lived in their own world. These were days and nights of

soul searching, recriminations, anxiety, despair, and sorrow. They asked
themselves how they could have lost the war, what went wrong, and how
they could have done better. What could they have done? They did not
have enough soldiers, armaments, ammunitions. They ran a defensive
war while the enemy was on the offensive all the time. They never car-

15. Guam, the Transit Island (Vo)

159

ried any attack on the North. They waged a war while trying to rebuild
the country, while the enemy just concentrated on waging the war despite
a ruined economy. Had they had better leaders, they could have done
something different. If ... if ... if... there were so many ifs.... In their
minds, they retraced the whole war and found mistakes and errors every-
where. Like candidates who had lost an election, they just blamed them-
selves for everything.

Some, like Mai Lien, worried about their families. She and her sib-

lings were sent to safety in Saigon then Phu Quoc while their father, an
ARVN pilot, had to stay back because of his job. They did not know
whether he was able to make it or not. They wandered around asking
anyone if they had seen their father. They stayed back and were the last
ones to leave the Guam camp. Despite the long wait, they still did not
see their father.

Some worried about the future, which seemed so uncertain. How

would they learn the language, get a job, earn money and so on? How
would they take care of their children and to which schools would they
send them? Others worried about the food. They were certainly not used
to the American food, although it was delicious. They missed their nuoc
mam (ﬁsh sauce), pho, mi, and so on. Would they be able to get enough
ingredients to prepare these dishes?

Some worried about the weather. Although they had not seen snow,

they already dreaded it. How would they stand the cold weather? Oth-
ers were just bored and frustrated from being locked up in the camps.
What they worried about the most was their impotence in the face of
new events. After losing the war, they were then being fed and housed
and were not able to do anything positive.

The refugees were ﬁnally able to publish a newspaper, which was

heavily censored by the Navy. It served as a tool for the latter to com-
municate with the refugees. They learned of the battle raging at the
United Nations that planned to recognize the new communist govern-
ment in South Vietnam. Australia had already recognized it. Many other
countries planned to follow. It was the U.S. against the world.

The paper also informed readers that 46 South Vietnamese Navy

ships carrying 7,000 refugees had stopped in Singapore for food and
water before heading for Guam. President Ford was asking for 507 mil-
lion dollars in resettlement funds. By May 7, the ofﬁcial count of the
refugees reaching Guam had reached 64,076.

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The Thuong Tinh I Odyssey

Conﬁned on huge freighters for a week and then in camps for

months, some refugees began having second thoughts. They had plenty
of time to think about the overall situation. Many were missing home
or their families, others found it difﬁcult to adapt to the new land, food,
and environment, and others simply had enough. Conﬁnement, idle-
ness, depression, and overcrowding further sapped their morale. They
talked to each other and many voiced the opinion of returning home.
Their restlessness increased day by day.

On the evening of August 31 and September 3, 1975, repatriates

burned two buildings, damaged several vehicles and sent to the hospi-
tal four of the U.S. Marshals who had been assigned to contain them.
Demonstrations were followed by hunger strikes, head shavings and other
forms of passive resistance. Finally, they were given the green light.

The ship departed on October 16, 1975, with 1,546 repatriates.

News was hard to come by. No one ever heard of the 1,546 people again
until many years later when news trickled out with each successive wave
of boat people.

Our friend would board the Thuong Tin and go home
to praise the Party, struggle for its line.
Now we have heard he’s buried at Yen Bai —
Stop scorning him and let him rest in peace.

Cao Tan

Navy ofﬁcer and poet Truong Sa escaped to Guam after 1975. There,

he had a change of heart thinking that the communists, also being Viet-
namese, would welcome him back. He decided to go home on the ill-
fated Vietnam Thuong Tin I (Vietnam Commercial Bank), the boat many
of them took to come to Guam. This was after many months of nego-
tiation with the new government. They landed, not in Saigon, but at
the port of Nha Trang in central Vietnam as ordered by the authorities.
Instead of receiving a warm welcome, they were arrested and conﬁned
in the former Korean Army installation at the Ru Ry pass north of Nha
Trang. The ship captain was tried as a spy and shot to death. Commu-
nist “justice” was fast and deadly. A few weeks earlier, he was a free man
at Guam, but he decided to meet his fate by returning to the commu-
nist land.

15. Guam, the Transit Island (Vo)

161

All the men were sent to the A-20 reeducation camp, about 100

miles northwest of Nha Trang.

Women and children were sent home

after a short incarceration period. Truong Sa was interned in various
concentration camps for a total of ten years before being released. He
later escaped by boat and relocated to Canada. He could only comment
that returning to Vietnam in 1975 was his biggest mistake.

The passengers of the Thuong Tin thus became some of the earli-

est victims of the communists. Repression would continue for years until
today.

The Gate to Freedom

Days at the camp were long because we had nothing to do. One

day, we were told to pack for we would leave the camp the next day. To
where, they did not know. We had no clue about the future either. Amer-
ica, the magic land, was a big unknown to us.

We knew about American culture — or part of it — through our

dealings with the U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, although we had never dis-
cussed or learned about American culture. Our knowledge of it was at
most cursory. We knew less about American than French history, less
about American than French civilization. We knew the U.S. had an
impressive army, we knew about their dealings, but not about how their
people lived and behaved.

We stood there in awe of the country, the land, but also confused.

Confused about the turn of events, about the future, about the Ameri-
cans, and about almost everything.

We did not know what the future entailed for us. We were apatrid;

we had no country to depend on, no country to live for. This is difﬁcult
to explain to anyone who has never been in that situation. It is like hav-
ing no identity, nothing. One is suddenly nobody ... neither American,
French, Thai, or Vietnamese. As an apatrid, one has lost one’s identity.
For the second time in our lives, we lost our umbilical cords and did not
have time to grow new ones: It was as if we were ﬂoating in space with-
out any attachment to anywhere.

Some refugees asked themselves why they should go to America if

the Americans were directly or indirectly the cause of their downfall.
This led them to apply for asylum in France, Canada, England, or Aus-
tralia in an attempt to bypass the U.S.

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We ran away looking for freedom, but at the gate of Freedom, we

suddenly became confused.

Too confused to understand its full meaning and too confused to

savor it. How could we savor it if our feet were still embedded in the
past and not ready to embrace the future?

Behind our back, an unﬁnished tragedy,
In front of us, an uncertain future.
The present was rather unsteady: We did not know on whom to

lean and what to do next.

As we walked on the tarmac of Anderson AFB on that bright and

sunny May day from our bus to the Boeing 747 that was waiting for us,
we did not know where we were heading. No one had told us about our
“secret” destination.

We slowly climbed the stairs deep in our thoughts.
The past was murky.
The future foggy.
The present hazy.
It looked like South Vietnam again.
However, this time we moved on because at least we had FREE-

DOM and PEACE.

And because America is the land of “extraordinary opportunity and

possibility, where miracles happen.”

Statistics

Refugee Arrivals

Refugee Departures

Anderson Air Force Base 39,310

Andersen Air Force Base 109,553

Naval Air Station Agana 31,610

Naval Air Station Agana 1,756

By ship 40,999

Guam community 455
Deaths 25

Total 111,919

Total 111,789

Transport

Aircraft 443
Ships 21

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163

Quick Glance

4 miles of chain-link fence erected
6 miles of power lines
10 miles of communication lines
20 miles of drains and water lines
280 power poles installed
1,300 acres of land cleared and graded
3,664 tents erected
2,500 tons of rice used
3,442 ounces of disinfectant
5,241 tons of material and food issued within the ﬁrst ten days
14,109 U.S. military and DOD civilians participated
80,000 gallons of detergent
92,000 toilet paper rolls
327,000 plastic bags
403,104 square feet of plywood used during the ﬁrst three weeks of Operation

New Life

3.9 million paper towels
9.5 million paper plates
19 million paper cups
17.5 million sets of plastic ﬂatware

Crisostomo DV. Operation New Life: http://www.guampdn.com/guampublishing/special-sec

tiond/operation_newlife05/01_overview

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I Left My Heart

in ... Saigon

Nghia M. Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: What makes Saigon so difﬁcult to understand

although so endearing? The author gives seven different reasons.

Oh Saigon! I lost thee, like ye lost your name,
Like a river with its meandering and sad waters,
Like an emotionally distant lover who ran away.
I whisper: “Do you remember?”

So goes a song that was composed after 1975. Like millions of oth-

ers, I ﬂed Saigon at the conclusion of the war. Although it was a long
time ago, it seems like it was yesterday. I still can imagine myself strolling
down Nguyen Hue Avenue, sitting on the Bach Dang pier to watch the
meandering Saigon river ﬂow lazily through the city, dashing through
her narrow and busy streets on my Honda motorcycle trying to avoid
her reckless drivers, and eating pho noodle soup in many of her pho
restaurants. Although it is a cliché, it is true. Do I remember Saigon?
The question is, how I could forget the seductress on the Mekong River?

Saigon in 1975 was a vibrant city with a rich and complicated past

that trapped her citizens like a woman holding her lover captive with
her charms. From a small village among the swamps, she grew into a large
cosmopolitan city whose name was recognized worldwide. However, not
a lot of people seem to known her convoluted past.

165

Saigon was a multinational city:

Saigon had seen many masters

come and go. The Chams were the ﬁrst settlers followed by the Khmers
then the Vietnamese.

The Chinese Ming and Huong, defeated by their

enemies in China, sailed to Vietnam and found refuge in Saigon and its
vicinity.

During their southward expansion the Vietnamese settled around

the area in 1623 although they only gained control of the region in 1698
and renamed it the prefecture of Gia Dinh-Bien Hoa. When the Nguyen
lords lost their throne in Hue, central Vietnam, in 1777, they took refuge
in Saigon and made the town their headquarters. Saigon ended up
becoming the major battleﬁeld between the Nguyen (Nguyen Anh) and
the Tay Son rebels on four different occasions. Beaten, Nguyen Anh
retreated to Ha Tien, Phu Quoc then Siam. With great pain he rebuilt
his army and with the help of Le Van Duyet took back Saigon in 1790.
For the next 12 years, he relentlessly marched northward all the way to
Hanoi and re-conquered his capital of Hue. Saigon was renamed Gia
Dinh Thanh and was placed under the control of General and Viceroy
Le Van Duyet while the King settled and ruled from Hue.

The French took Gia Dinh Thanh in 1859 and later switched her

name back to Saigon. They lay down the foundations of a European-
style city which they used as the economic capital of their colonial
empire. During World War II, the Japanese came and used Saigon as
their base for expansion into Southeast Asia. The British and the Amer-
icans came later.

Unlike her sister-cities of Hanoi and Hue, Saigon’s ﬂavor was due

to her multi-ethnicity that created a unique freshness and a warm open-
ness to modernity, foreign cultures, religion and commerce. Raised on
a bend of the river, Saigon looks across the Paciﬁc Ocean and longed for
modernity and commerce with Southeast Asian countries; Hue, on the
other hand, remained anchored in a monarchic past, and Hanoi to a
martial and military past.

A city with many names:

She was born as the Cham village of

Baigaur before becoming the Khmer Prey Nokor, the village hidden in
the forests (from Prey: forest, and Nokor: village, land). For a long time,
she remained a small, sleepy ﬁshing Khmer village on the river. She was
also known as Sai-Con or Sai-Gon from the ﬁelds of cotton (Gon) that
surrounded the village. How and when Prey Nokor became Sai-Gon

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remains unknown to this date. When the Siamese fought against the
Khmers and threatened the Khmer port of Mang Kham (Ha Tien) on
the Gulf of Siam, all maritime activity was diverted to Prey Nokor. And
the village grew to be a major commercial center with links to China,
Malaysia, and India.

Nguyen Anh made the town his headquarters after the Nguyen lost

their throne in Hue. From that town, he waged a 25-year-war that ended
with the recovery of his throne. Saigon became Gia Dinh Thanh to be
governed by a viceroy. The French, who took over the town in 1862,
renamed her Saigon and made her their colonial city, a home away from
home. The name stuck to the city until the end of the Vietnam War.
Saigon was also known as the Pearl of the Orient or the Mistress of the
Mekong.

Saigon was about images:

During the war, with the city ﬁlled with

foreign correspondents, her image was ﬂashed around the globe, mak-
ing this city in the swamps recognizable worldwide. It was the image of
Ngo Dinh Diem triumphant over the rebels Binh Xuyen that catapulted
him into the role of “America’s Miracle Man” in Asia (1955). The image
of the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc brought down the Ngo
regime (1963). The image of the Viet Cong who inﬁltrated into Saigon
all the way to the American Embassy caused America to turn her back
on the war (1968). The picture of the Hue Massacre turned the popu-
lation away from the Viet Cong (1968). The picture of Americans and
Saigonese climbing the stairs leading to the helipad signaled the end of
American power in Asia (1975). The picture of a Viet Cong tank smash-
ing through the gates of the Independence Palace marked the enslave-
ment of the Saigonese by the Hanoi government (1975). And there are
many more.

A city of many heroes:

Most of them were unknown civilians who

propped her up unselﬁshly over many centuries. First, the Chams and
Khmers built her from the ground up in the insalubrious marshes of the
river. Then came the Vietnamese who marched hundreds or thousands
of miles to settle in and around the village. They drained the marshes
and brought with them improved rice culture technology, which even-
tually boosted the delta’s rice production. The Chinese arrived with their
commercial know-how and ship-building knowledge.

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167

Nguyen Anh (r. 1802–1820), the scion of the Nguyen lords, began

with nothing. Dispossessed from his throne, broke and beaten by the
Tay Son, he was on many occasions close to being captured by his ene-
mies. He led a rough life, hiding from his constant pursuers in the
marshes of the delta, then under a priest’s bed and later in the forests of
Ha Tien before escaping to Siam. He doggedly survived all these ordeals
and for 25 years relentlessly worked on regaining his empire. He mobi-
lized the delta’s agricultural and manpower resources, coordinated the
various political, military, and religious factions, and rebuilt the Saigon
shipyard to make it one of the most competitive in Asia in the late 18th
and 19th centuries. He systematically marched northward, beating his
enemies one by one and ﬁnally recovered his throne in Hue.

Le Van Duyet was the commander who led Nguyen Anh’s army to

victory. After 1802, he was rewarded with the title of Governor and
Viceroy of the six southern provinces (present day South Vietnam). He
opened Saigon to regional commerce with other Southeast Asian states
and practiced religious tolerance (toward Catholicism) against the orders
of the Hue regime. King Minh Mang was obviously upset but could not
do anything against his father’s benefactor and his own tutor. Upon
Duyet’s death, Minh Mang revoked all his titles and ordered his tomb
razed. Duyet’s adopted son, Le Van Khoi, upset at this injustice, raised
an army and led a southern insurrection against the Hue regime. He
died three years later defending the Saigon citadel against the Hue army.
Two thousand rebels, men, women and children, were executed and their
bodies thrown into a mass grave, the Plain of Tombs, midway between
Saigon proper and Cholon.

Phan Thanh Gian, the compassionate viceroy and great southern

commander, under Tu Duc’s orders negotiated the 1862 treaty of Saigon
relinquishing Saigon and the three eastern provinces to France. He knew
too well his soldiers armed with spears and daggers would be no match
against the French soldiers’ guns, and took the blame in place of the
emperor and committed suicide by taking poison. His body was exhumed
and beheaded on the court’s orders.

Another patriot was Nguyen An Ninh, who was born in Saigon in

1900 and graduated from Lycee Chasseloup Laubat (later renamed Jean
Jacques Rousseau) in 1917. After graduating from a Paris law school, the
revolutionary spearheaded the ﬁght for freedom from colonial rule in
Saigon. The French governor repeatedly warned him against writing and

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distributing subversive material but to no avail. Ninh was ﬁnally sent to
Con Son to serve a life sentence. He continued his ﬁght in jail before
being liquidated by his jailer right before the arrival of the Japanese.
Who knows what this young and idealistic man could have brought to
the country, had he remained alive.

He left behind many famous words,

including the following:

To live in such a way one has no shame of living
To die in such a way to avoid sarcasms
To live for posterity,
and to die for one’s country without complaining of imprisonment.

The capital of political intrigues:

It has been suggested that when

the U.S. Ambassador in Saigon sneezed, the Presidential Palace shook.
In a city full of intrigues where almost anyone might plot against any-
one else: generals against generals, Buddhists and Catholics against gen-
erals, Buddhists against Catholics, politicians against each other,
peaceniks against Americans, the U.S. Ambassador maintained contact
with all parties while underground Viet Cong kept stirring the pot.
Northern spies inﬁltrated many governmental ofﬁces, the army, and of
course the Buddhist organization. It had been estimated that Hanoi had
20,000 spies in the South. Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, an ARVN ofﬁcer,
was a double agent and a friend of the reporter Stanley Karnow. His
remains were transferred to a patriot’s cemetery near Saigon after the
war.

But who would believe that the Perfect Spy did indeed live in Sai-

gon? Working for Caltex in 1954, he was sent for a two-year training in
California and upon his return to Saigon worked as a correspondent for
the U.S. Military Advisory Group. He seemed to know everything about
the war as well as Saigon’s political intrigues and his reports were thought
by his American employers to be correct and insightful. He was trusted
and given glowing reports before going to work for major foreign news
organizations. He used to spend time with foreign correspondents at
Givral, a chic drinking place and relic of the old French culture, doling
out information about the South Vietnamese army and its allies, the
Vietcong and the war in general. Foreign correspondents, however, never
asked themselves how someone could know that much about the war

16. I Left My Heart in ... Saigon (Vo)

169

without holding any ofﬁcial position in the government. After 1975, he
revealed himself as Colonel Pham Xuan An, a Viet Cong spy imbedded
within the Americans in Saigon. He apparently enrolled himself as a Viet
Cong in 1947 and seven years later became their intelligence chief in
Saigon. He fed Hanoi with the positions of Saigon’s troops, their morale
as well as the Palace’s policies and goals while giving the Americans no
important clues. He played his game so perfectly that no American or
Vietnamese ofﬁcial ever suspected him of being a spy. He even befriended
Tran Kim Tuyen, Saigon’s intelligence chief. He helped Tuyen escape to
the U.S. on the last day of the war knowing full well that Tuyen would
have been tortured to death had he remained in Saigon. It is ironic that
Saigon’s intelligence chief could not even save himself and had to use
the help of Hanoi’s chief spy.

After the war, he was recalled to Hanoi where he underwent polit-

ical “training” for being seen as too independent-minded. He was given
a position in the army but decided to retire instead in Saigon at the rank
of General. For the next three decades, he remained an enigmatic and
almost invisible ﬁgure in the city. He never gave out any interviews: His
statements to former American co-workers were rare and few. He wrote
not a single book although some U.S. publishers would have loved to
have printed his story. His one and only request: to attend a conference
in the U.S., was denied. He lived a life that was akin to a house arrest:
Rarely venturing outside his house, he enjoyed raising birds and betting
on cockﬁghting. His visitors were pre-screened by the police who decided
which one would be allowed to see him. He knew too much for Hanoi
to let him go free. He died peacefully in Saigon in September 2006 as
a consummate spy who was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Who
knows what the Perfect Spy has reserved for us in the future? A new book
about An was published in 2007.

A city of contrasts:

Where riches coexisted with extreme poverty,

where tree-lined boulevards dotted with European-style villas stood in
sharp contrast with slums, where expensive foreign cars fought for the
right-of-way with two-wheeled motorbikes loaded to the sky with wares,
pigs, chicken destined for the market. This was a city where fortunes
changed hands fast and where people lived for the present without think-
ing about the future because the future looked too grim to them.

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A city of eternal change:

Having witnessed many masters come

and go, she remains the ultimate survivor that grew stronger, better, and
more beautiful with time. Left alone by the Nguyen who ruled the coun-
try from Hue in the 17th century, she thrived under military rule with
her diverse population of Khmers, Vietnamese and Chinese. It was only
when Hue fell that the Nguyen made her their exile capital. Once they
regained control of Hue in 1802, Saigon was turned over to another war-
rior, General Le Van Duyet, who luckily was an open-minded viceroy.
The general let commerce ﬂourish and protected missionaries and reli-
gious freedom. Brought back under strict Hue control in 1832, she dete-
riorated until the French took over, modernized and made her their
“Pearl of the Orient.” The Japanese liberated her from the French. The
British then freed her from the claws of the Japanese. The Americans
brought Ngo Dinh Diem who ﬂushed the unruly Binh Xuyen out of
town. She then became the generals’ residence before succumbing to the
North Vietnamese who enslaved her and rendered her destitute. In the
end, they slowly released their grip on her.

Although she fell on her knees many times, she was the reed that

bent to all winds but never broke. Although mistreated, mishandled,
and relegated to the back burner on many occasions, she re-emerged
anew each time to make headlines on her own.

This is a short story of Saigon, once known as the “Pearl of the Ori-

ent,”

where I took my ﬁrst steps in life,
where I biked to go to school under the canopy of tamarind trees

each early September,

where I skipped out during intermissions to play ball with class-

mates,

where the image of nervously giggling schoolgirls holding onto their

non la and dressed in their elegant, white ao dai the lower ends of which
ﬂoated in the winds is forever imprinted in my mind,

where I made friends and met competitors,
where I was exposed to Vietnamese, then French then American cul-

tures that widened my horizon,

where I saw the war up close and personal with its endless killing

and mutilating processes, and destruction of land and properties,

where man could be wolf to man,

16. I Left My Heart in ... Saigon (Vo)

171

where a person could be there one day and gone the following day,
where tragic events, difﬁculties, tribulations were as common as day

and night,

where people accepted suffering as part of their daily lot,
where women bravely struggled to raise their children alone while

their men went to war,

where everyone hoped and looked for peace each spring without

ever seeing it,

where tears were as common as raindrops,
where endless suffering and poverty opened my heart to the world.

This was the city that shaped me and made me into the person I

am today.

I am indebted to her for all the experiences she has bestowed on

me.

Although the old Saigon is an ocean and decades away, I’m still

holding her dear and near my heart.

172

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TRUGGLE

, H

EALING AND

EMEMBRANCE

April 30th

Thach N. Truong

DITOR

’

OTE

: The author recalls some of the April 30s he has spent

in Vietnam and abroad since 1950.

April 30th, 1950,

I am a little boy astray

From my mother in the street,

Hesitant,

I cross the street to Hàng Ngang,

I’m lost in Hàng –ào,

I enter Hàng Bông,

I look all over

Searching for my mother,

An older kid leads me to Hàng Tr

ng,

I rush back home,

My Mom runs to me

Hugging her, I burst into tears.

April 30th, 1975

Lying at home

Capitulation news spreading

My eyes dazzled

My head tipsy

Tumultuous city

Military uniforms, knapsacks,

173

Firearms, bullets,

All over the streets.

Familiar faces

Now bragging red arm bands

Prison cells are open

Criminals, big and small, out errant.

Many stores are looted

Radio music strident

The day after

Back to my job

Old friends not showing.

April 30th, 1976

In reeducation camp

They celebrate “liberation”

A day off from labor

I enjoy my bowl of rice mixed with gravel

Few grams of sliced meat

Few twigs of potato plants

To celebrate the Revolution

Which gives us enough

Food and warm linen

Remembering my hungry wife

And starved children.

April 30th, 1978

Holding my parole paper

Overjoyed I walk to the gate

They hold me back:

“Wait a few more days,

Only after we change the currency.”

A few days later, back to my city,

The cyclo driver looks at the former prisoner

And scolds:

“No more ofﬁcers’ wives,

Corrupted, women are gone to the cadres’ side.”

I enter my home,

My wife brimming with tears

Welcoming me back from the dead.

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III. S

TRUGGLE

, H

EALING AND

EMEMBRANCE

April 30th, 1980

Refugee camp

With thousands of people

Who have braved death and seas
Leaving behind their native land

Their ancestral tombs

Their spouses, their properties

Just to breath

The air of liberty.

April 30th, 2007

I land in Noi Bai airport

I am back in my old town

Thousands of red ﬂags

I look for my narrow streets

My church, my old school still there

Decrepit everywhere.

Cars and people jam the streets

Next to them all splendid

High rise hotels and villas,

People Army’s barracks,

People Committees headquarters,

Showing off their opulence

With arrogance.

I go back to my old village

Poverty is rampant

With a seven day work week

Peasants sell their labor abroad

Sacriﬁce for their children.

April 30th, 2008

In the country of the star spangled banner

Freedom is in the air I breathe

Looking at big and small yellow ﬂags

I understand now the true meaning

Of social well being

Of liberty and happiness

Independence and uniﬁcation

The true value of my beloved country.

17. April 30th (Truong)

175

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A Love Affair

Christina Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: A Viet Kieu writes about her love and deep attrac-

tion to the people of Vietnam after she visited and worked there for
more than two years. She traveled around the country from north to
south where she became fascinated with its natural beauty and faced
ﬁrst-hand its warm and welcoming people who treated her like one
of their own.

I always knew that I needed to go to Vietnam but for what reason

and under what circumstances was unclear and uncertain. Perhaps rea-
son wasn’t my guide, perhaps it was something greater than my rational
mind could comprehend, and perhaps it was love that was my guide; the
love for the country bestowed upon me by my Vietnamese parents or
the latent love for the country that would soon develop. This desire to
travel across the world and to leave my comfortable surroundings was
strong.

And all I knew was that soon enough I would go to live in Hanoi.

Prior to my departure I read and re-read a memoir by Dana Sachs, an
American journalist who spent some time in Hanoi, and I would under-
line certain sentences without knowing why or when or if those words
would ever be more than mere words on a page. She wrote: “Staring
across the rice ﬁelds toward that unknown mountain, I’d felt alone and quite
terriﬁed. My plan to come here, which had once sounded like a great adven-
ture, now seemed foolish, like a game of pretend that I had taken too far. I
had nothing except a backpack and a wavering determination to build a life
for myself in this place.”

179

When I arrived in Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport, I thought of her words

and how they so strikingly mirrored my own. I had no idea how this
adventure would unfold and whether or not I had made the right deci-
sion in moving to Vietnam. I only knew to make the most of the expe-
rience.

Perhaps because I view my life through a lens of love, I often com-

pared my experience with Vietnam to a love affair of sorts, for it was
certainly a country that I feel in love with over and over again. Eric
Fromm deﬁnes love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of
nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

I believe Vietnam contributed to my personal growth, for in many

ways I was able to face myself, see myself more clearly in this familiar
yet unfamiliar context. I was able to pose questions I perhaps didn’t pon-
der while living in the States.

I fell in love with the natural beauty of the country — from the

northernmost tip bordering China all the way south where the country
meets the Gulf of Thailand. I loved and embraced every region, every
variation of this country — the green rice paddies of the countryside to
the cluttered and bustling Mekong Delta to the beautiful, rocky islands
of Nha Trang to the fresh and verdant Central Highlands.

And, of course, I loved the human extension of the country — the

people whom I was eventually able to see as my own people. I was often
asked by my friends at home whether Vietnamese people harbor resent-
ment toward Americans. Perhaps they do. Perhaps they mask it well
underneath their open, loving and gracious demeanor. But, in my opin-
ion, they have truly mastered the art of forgiveness. They consider it a
compliment that foreigners, especially Americans, are now coming to
Vietnam to live and work. They want to teach you about the rich his-
tory of their country, they want to demonstrate by example what it really
means to be hospitable, they want you to understand and embrace what
it means to be Vietnamese. Their desire to open their country and their
hearts is in essence what it means to be Vietnamese. You show a mod-
icum of interest, they give you their world.

One evening my roommates and I threw a housewarming party. We

anticipated this would be a large gathering so we hired some of the street
children, who we would frequently encounter as we were walking around
Hoan Kiem Lake, to watch the guests’ motorbikes. These were children
who were sent from tiny, remote villages in Vietnam to work in the big

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city of Hanoi selling postcards or other handicrafts to support their fam-
ilies — children who are usually found meandering around the Old Quar-
ter and the famous Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi. Children who have
learned to speak ﬂuent English not because of any formal schooling but
because of their interactions with foreigners. Children who knew me
and all my friends by name and who would warmly greet us at every
possible encounter. Children with so much potential, but so little hope
to move beyond their current situation.

As I was cleaning up outside of our house, I saw a light in the house

across the alley. A house so small compared to our own, yet with its own
simple beauty and charm. I saw the ﬁgure of a young girl moving around
the house. She came outside carrying large pots and hot water in order
to set up her family’s pho stall, which would open at 6:00

. every

morning. Pho, a traditional Vietnamese beef noodle soup served with
thin rice noodles and fresh herbs, is the most common breakfast food.
A twelve-year-old girl should not be up at 3:00

. prepping a food

stall. She should be resting and prepping herself for a long leisurely day
with other 12-year-old girls, during which they would get ice creams
and ride their bikes around the streets of Hanoi. Or she should be rest-
ing and prepping herself for a long day at school to learn wonderful
things that would stimulate her mind and brighten her future. What we
spent on alcohol for the party was more than this family would make in
a month from the pho stall. The contrast between her life and mine was
so visible and sad, but I saw in her and the street children a quality which
extended to most Vietnamese people — the ability to make the most of
her situation, her lot in life. I loved and admired them for possessing
that ability.

I loved their openness. They were so completely honest and unin-

hibited when it came to their emotions. “Are you sad today, Christina?”
My coworkers would often ask me that question. And if I said I was in
fact sad, it was not something I should withhold. I was allowed and
enabled to unleash my feelings.

I bought a 1969 Vespa simply because it was beautiful. But there

was only one tiny problem — I didn’t know how to drive a Vespa.
Although I had never driven a motorbike, the Vespa seemed to operate
easier than the Honda Dream motorbikes, which were so ubiquitous in
Hanoi. Little did I know that the antique Vespas are difﬁcult bikes to
drive. I just didn’t have the dexterity and balance to maneuver this bike

18. A Love Affair (Vo)

181

through the streets of Hanoi, clogged with fruit vendors carrying bam-
boo baskets on their heads, people walking around selling balloons or
any other gadget that would appeal to foreigners, crazy young people
speeding on their Hondas and motorbikes, old men on bicycles, men
transporting pigs, chicken, glass, TVs, everything on their motorbikes.
I couldn’t do it.

At my most courageous moments, I would bravely venture around

my neighborhood block. The day that I successfully made it around the
block four times, the whole neighborhood was standing outside their var-
ious small businesses that were run out of their homes to watch this crazy
foreigner try to drive her pretty bike. And when I did, they cheered and
smiled and laughed and clapped. They were more than my neighbors,
they were my family. They watched me closely, partly because they were
suspicious and curious, but I took it positively and embraced it. They
always knew where I was going. They always knew what I liked to eat.
They always had a cup of coffee waiting for me. Perhaps because they
have so much less than people in developed countries, they don’t focus
on all the material items since that is something so unknown and
unreachable to them. Instead they must focus on what is real in their
lives — people.

Their smiles, their faces remain so vivid in my memory. Vietnam

placed them there. She taught me so much about people, about life,
about how I should value each and every individual and love the same-
ness in all of us despite our different socioeconomic, ethnic, religious
backgrounds. She extended herself to expand my understanding of peo-
ple and teach me the subtle beauty of humanity.

As I left Noi Bai Airport there was no fear inside me, I was over-

whelmed with a great satisfaction and was proud of the life I had cre-
ated in Vietnam. I felt I did live to the fullest, seizing every opportunity
possible to make this the most amazing adventure, but I owe everything
to Vietnam. I cried for seven hours until I arrived in Tokyo’s Narita Air-
port; I cried because of the beauty of my experience in Vietnam. My
friend told me that my experience in Vietnam could be encapsulated by
a quote from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: “For do not direct the course
of love, for love, if it ﬁnds you worthy, directs your course.”

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IV. T

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Little Saigon,

Westminster, California

Nghia M. Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: The dedication of a memorial in Orange County,

California, to the fallen American and South Vietnamese soldiers dur-
ing the war, highlights Little Saigon, California, as the home and cap-
ital of the exiled Viet Kieu. Built on the lands of orange groves and
strawberry farms, it has become a vibrant ethnic community with its
restaurants, shopping malls, stores, and ofﬁces catering to the needs of
the refugees. The best Vietnamese food outside Vietnam is served in
Little Saigon. It is also the economic and cultural center of the Viet
Kieu, with its own political voice; it is a free city, a vibrant echo of
the old Saigon.

Three decades ago Orange County, California, was mostly farm-

land or orange groves close to Los Angeles. It had a few Korean stores
alongside large empty boulevards. Slowly, the refugees coming out of
Camp Pendleton near San Diego began settling in the area. They found
the virgin area an ideal place to rebuild their lives.

Difﬁcult Beginnings

The refugees could barely ﬁnd what they needed in the nearby local

stores. There was no rice (except for Uncle Ben’s rice, which was too
mushy for their taste), and no fresh or frozen seafood, oriental noodles,
egg roll wraps, ﬁsh sauce, hoisin sauce, mint leaves, oriental vegetables,
or other herbs necessary to the function of a good Vietnamese cuisine.

183

Someone then opened up the ﬁrst few oriental shops and grocery stores
that catered to the particular needs of the new immigrants. Many more
would crop up to meet the growing demands.

Life was difﬁcult for the new immigrants in the late 1970s. Besides

the language barrier, difﬁculty ﬁnding a good-paying job, lack of native
Asian food, and the American culture itself presented challenging prob-
lems for the refugees. Nothing was more different to their eyes than
Western culture itself. If the American culture was young, vibrant, noisy
and unabashed, the Vietnamese culture was rigid, old, and structured
according to Confucian principles. If American youngsters could be
unruly and argumentative, Vietnamese youngsters were taught to respect
their elders under any circumstance. If the Americans loved fast food,
noisy music, loud and friendly discussions, and unabashed exhibition of
wealth, pride, and self-congratulation, the Vietnamese on the other hand
appeared shy, introverted, low-key, and passive. They also indulged in
classical music and home-cooking. The two cultures, like Yin and Yang,
were bound to clash in the minds and lives of the refugees.

The sudden and unplanned departure from their native country left

them unprepared for all these changes. As they stacked up in boats to
leave their homeland at a moment’s notice to escape the communists,
the thought of living in a foreign land hardly crossed their minds. They
did not have the faintest idea about their ultimate destinations and had
no time to study the languages and foreign cultures they were about to
face. Their native country was not as complex and its rules and regula-
tions were not as complicated as those of the U.S. As by-products of the
Vietnam War, they left their country completely unprepared to live in
foreign countries. Their priority was to get out of their country. The rest
could be dealt with later on.

As soon as they got out of the refugee camps, they had to work hard

to earn a living and to be self-sufﬁcient in the new country. They labored
day and night and took over the dirty and low-paying jobs no one
wanted. Hau Dien once wrote:

We’ll spurn no job, however low or mean.
Hired to clean toilets, we don’t wince or ﬂinch;
Told to dump garbage, we agree — Okay!

As they became successful with time, they were viewed as an eco-

nomic threat to many natives. On the Gulf of Texas, they had to com-

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pete against local ﬁshermen who saw their catches decrease with time.
They became targets of the Ku Klux Klan and were called names. Oth-
ers, despite obtaining U.S. degrees from top universities, faced a glass
ceiling and were unable to move up the ladders. And even if they did,
they just remained marginal players in a world that tried to keep them
out with invisible rules. This explains why in the beginning they felt
“lost” in a country they did not fully understand and that in turn did
not understand them. They felt trapped in a jail, one from which they
desperately tried to get out. Many cried and wished they had never left
home. Feeling “disconnected,” Bui Khoi despaired:

His tears of woe ﬂooded on his eyes.
He sobbed for homeless life,
The uncertainty of to morrow....

Unlike immigrants from other countries, they could not return to

their homeland, especially before the 1990s, unless they wanted to land
in a communist jail. As they had no place they could call home, they
could truly be labeled “homeless.” They went to work to build a new place
they could call home. The beginnings were humble and difﬁcult because
of lack of capital, language problems and culture differences. What they
could not ﬁnd, they would improvise. A Chinese Vietnamese realized
there was not enough hot sauce to meet the demands of Vietnamese pal-
ates. He also noticed that peppers and chili were available right across the
border from Southern California. He set up a shop, bought Mexican chili
and peppers, designed a way to make hot chili paste, and packaged it in
plastic bottles. The product was a hit among the refugees and made him
an instant millionaire. Finding that French pastries were expensive and
available only in specialty shops, a few people opened their own bakeries
to produce them: Soon French bread and pastries ﬂooded the market.

Over the years, Vietnamese supermarkets and strip malls had opened

their doors along Westminster and Bolsa Avenues in Orange County to
supply the new immigrants with goods, groceries and services. A town
that breathed a Vietnamese ambiance and where signs, colors, smells, and
sounds were reminiscent of the native Saigon, took shape: a Little Saigon
transplanted in the middle of America. Everything people were looking
for from groceries, restaurants, and jewelry and clothing stores to physi-
cians and lawyers’ ofﬁces was available. Within two decades Little Saigon
became the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam.

19. Little Saigon, Westminster, California (Vo)

185

Pho

Food was plentifully available and the best Vietnamese food out-

side Vietnam was served in Little Saigon. Rows of cooked dishes from
pork, beef, and ﬁsh to soup and vegetables were available for immedi-
ate consumption. Workers and busy moms who were too tired to cook
at the end of the day came by to purchase some of these already pre-
pared dishes. All they needed was to heat them up and meals would be
ready. They did not even have to open any can or scale any ﬁsh or pre-
pare any meat. All kinds of restaurants were also available: Some spe-
cialized in certain dishes while others offered a garden variety of dishes
customers could choose from. I especially love to taste the seven-dish
beef where beef is prepared in seven different ways: This has always been
a rare treat for me.

Pho is a typical Vietnamese noodle soup that is served with either

beef, chicken, or seafood. The beef is either half-cooked or well-done
according to the customer’s wish; it can come with tendons, fat and
stripes or neither. Pho can be a delicacy if appropriately cooked and
served the right way with thick hoisin sauce,

hot sauce, bean sprouts,

and oriental herbs. The hotter and the spicier it is consumed, the better
it tastes. Pho derives its name from the French feu or pot-au-feu. In the
early 1920s, some Vietnamese cooks, apparently after making soup for
their French guests in a pot-au-feu, noticed the soup tasted particularly
good in the cool northern weather. They modiﬁed the recipe of the bouil-
lon to include bones and vegetables instead of meat and potatoes, which
they could not afford. They brought the dish home and their families
loved it. Thus was born Vietnamese pho.

The dish arrived in South

Vietnam with northerners who ﬂed the communists in 1954. Southern-
ers gradually embraced the soup, which became prevalent in Saigon by
the late 1960s. The Northern pho, bland, with rare morsels of meat, was
rapidly transformed in the rich Mekong Delta into a tasty, well-seasoned
Southern pho with large portions of meat, chicken or seafood and served
with plenty of herbs. Pho has also displaced southern brands of soups:
banh canh and hu tieu My Tho, a modiﬁcation of the Chinese hu tieu.

Vietnamese have a love affair with their pho, their national food that

can be consumed at any time during the day. This fact has surprised many
Americans, who often marvel at the fact that Vietnamese can enjoy soup
at breakfast, lunch, or supper. Pho can ﬁll up a person’s stomach and

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replace a whole meal. It is the soup that makes or breaks the dish. The
best pho comes with the most delicious soup, which they savor avidly
and make a lot of gurgling noise while gulping it down their throats.
Even Emeril Lagasse, the famous New Orleans chef, showcased his own
version of pho on the Food Network a few years ago. If Emeril features
pho on his show, the product has most likely taken root on American
soil. Americans who have tasted the soup have begun to like it. Many
have become frequent customers of Vietnamese restaurants. The Chi-
nese also enjoy pho, which is similar to their mi and hu tieu, both of which
are very tasteful.

There are plenty of pho restaurants in Little Saigon, but the best

ones are usually crowded and serve nothing else but pho. They are rec-
ognizable by the signs exhibited in front of the restaurants: There are the
pho 79, pho 77, pho 99, pho Tau Bay, and so on. The restaurant owners
use the numbers 77, 79, 99 to attract the attention of the customers and
to remind them of the once famous Pho 79 restaurant in Saigon. I remem-
ber going to that restaurant very often when I was young. Pho restau-
rants have rapidly mushroomed in major cities around the world thanks
to the Vietnamese diaspora. General Nguyen Khanh, a former South
Vietnamese Head of State, has even opened his own pho restaurant in
Paris. In a small town in Virginia about twenty miles west of Washing-
ton, D.C., are located two pho restaurants in two shopping malls within
two miles of each other. Since pho is a simple, tasteful, and delicious
dish to prepare, many restaurants on the West coast are now offering it
as part of their menu. I have visited two restaurants in San Francisco
that carry Vietnamese signs in front of their buildings. The waitresses
are Chinese and cannot even speak Vietnamese. The pho served there
has a very distinct Chinese ﬂavor and cannot be compared with that
served in Little Saigon.

Little Saigon, California:

Viet Kieu’s Exile Capital

Little Saigon has grown so big it has its own senior community and

parks frequented mostly by Asians. Fountain Valley Hospital, as well as
other local hospitals, caters to the Vietnamese’s medical needs. Its med-
ical staff is composed mostly of Vietnamese physicians and nurses.

19. Little Saigon, Westminster, California (Vo)

187

Patients are even served ethnic food. A funeral home and a cemetery cater
to the needs of the Vietnamese community. Little Saigon previously
boasted one mall, Phuoc Loc Tho, with its numerous stores and a food
court serving ethnic food. New malls that have sprung up everywhere
are rapidly changing the landscape. The community has begun to invade
adjacent streets and to spread to nearby neighborhoods.

Shops with Vietnamese signs abound. There are three different

stores of the same grocery chain within Little Saigon itself. Fabric stores
carry different brands in a multitude of colors. Shoppers can choose the
fabric of their choice and have their ao dai custom-made right in the
store. Seafood restaurants offer a variety of menus including steamed
dungeon crabs, sautéed lobster, fried shrimp, fried or steamed ﬁsh, and
so on. Many Vietnamese medical, dental, and law ofﬁces have opened
their doors to keep pace with local demands. Little Saigon makes them
feel right at home in the middle of America. With growths come new
pains like parking problems. People ﬁght tooth and nail over empty
parking spaces. They dive in as soon as a driver pulls out, ignoring
another driver who has been patiently waiting for that spot for some
time. Tempers ﬂare up and vulgar words are exchanged leading to occa-
sional ﬁstﬁghts.

Over the years, Little Saigon has become a vibrant city. It is home

to many South Vietnamese who have escaped the communists in their
search for freedom. Once they have seen the area, they tend to gravitate
toward it. They are attracted to its crowds, shops, restaurants and way
of life. The warm ethnic atmosphere reminds them of the old Saigon,
the city most of them were born in or lived in for some time and the
place they had forever lost.

Little Saigon has become the cultural and economic center for the

Viet Kieu. It is the rallying point and the common link for these dis-
placed people, a place where they can freely mingle and feel at home. It
also represents the ﬁghting spirit and the resilience of these people: It is
the place where they can display their intelligence, hard work, dynamism,
economic aggressiveness, and scientiﬁc and cultural know-how.

Although they have lost Saigon and South Vietnam, they have

rebuilt a new city in which they can freely express themselves, a city where
freedom is respected and one in which their talents can blossom instead
of being constrained by communist ideology. The result is a fascinating

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and vibrant Little Saigon that continues to grow and to serve as a bea-
con for the free Vietnamese people. Three decades earlier, they were
chased out of their homeland for cherishing freedom of choice, politics,
religion and commerce. They fought for their lives hanging onto any kind
of ﬂoating vessel just to get out of the country. Today they have built a
new city in a new land out of nowhere so that they can exercise their
freedom once more. “No other people have born so much adversity and
yet contained their pain or anger so much within themselves.”

They do not forget the time when they were ﬂoating aimlessly in

the South China Sea ﬁghting for survival and waiting anxiously for ships
to pluck them out of the cold and unforgiving sea. They do not forget
when they sat idle, bored, and desperate in refugee camps waiting for a
country or sponsor to step forward and to give them a second chance in
life. They do not forget the time when helping hands led them through
a maze of regulations to get a job or an apartment and to wire them to
this society. Now economically stable, they can afford to be generous and
return the favor. A refugee who subsequently became a hotel owner in
the state of New York did not mind giving two million dollars to the
funds for the 9-11 victims. According to CNN, Magdalena Lai was so
grateful to get a second life in the U.S. that she decided to build a ﬂoat
to express her thanks to America. Once her idea was accepted, she sold
her house in order to raise the $100,000 required for the project. Her
dream was ﬁnally realized when her ﬂoat, symbolized by a boat braving
the seas decorated with ﬂowers and adorned with a “Thank You Amer-
ica” sign, made it to the 2002 Tournament of Roses in Pasadena, Cali-
fornia.

It is ironic to note that the Viet Kieu have become an important

economic power that has contributed three billion dollars yearly to the
native Vietnamese economy. Most of this money has been sent home to
relatives still residing in Vietnam, invested in the local economy or used
for renovation of churches and pagodas. Without that money, the eco-
nomic outlook would have been worse than it is now.

Hanoi, however, has never been “magnanimous in victory; instead

it determinedly tried to erase the very existence of South Vietnam.”

requires Viet Kieu to provide proof they are of sound mind if they ever
want to set foot on Vietnamese soil. This is just a demeaning formality,
for the Hanoi government does not require any such thing from any
other foreign visitor. The fact that Hanoi does not accept dual citizen-

19. Little Saigon, Westminster, California (Vo)

189

ship leaves the Viet Kieu with minimal consular protection if they run
into trouble: A middle-age Vietnamese-Canadian lady was charged with
drug possession and shot to death a few years ago despite objections from
the Canadian embassy. Viet Kieu, however, are subject to a dual pric-
ing system under which foreigners have to pay double the price for trans-
port and hotels. It seems they are “Vietnamese when it suits the
government and foreigners when it does not.”

Recently changes have

been made to allow the Viet Kieu to enter Vietnam without needing a
visa.

But the Viet Kieu would not let the communists take over Little

Saigon, this island of freedom which they have fought so hard to build
and maintain. A few years ago, one merchant had the wrong idea of plas-
tering pictures of Uncle Ho and the communist ﬂag on the window of
his shop in Little Saigon. The Viet Kieu reacted strongly and angrily.
They boycotted his store until he took down the pictures and went out
of business.

Since that time, every store in Little Saigon ﬂies the South Viet-

namese ﬂag: three horizontal stripes against a yellow background. The
red stripes stand for the blood shed in defense of the country by people
originating from the northern, central, and southern regions of Viet-
nam. The yellow color represents their skin color. Orange County and
a few other U.S. cities where Viet Kieu predominantly live have also
passed ordinances recognizing the South Vietnamese ﬂag as the ofﬁcial
ﬂag of the Vietnamese. A bronze monument depicting an American GI
and a South Vietnamese soldier in army gear have recently been unveiled
in a park in Orange County. It serves as a memorial to the 58,000 U.S.
and the 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers killed during the Vietnam
War. It is also a tribute to their courage and dedication, which will not
be forgotten as long as the Viet Kieu live in the area.

Little Saigon, California, a stepchild of the old Saigon, has emerged

over the years to represent the exile homeland of the Viet Kieu, many of
whom have spent more time abroad than in their native land.

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The Journey Home

Hieu V. Ho

DITOR

’

OTE

: A young Vietnamese-born doctor came back to his

ancestral home, hoping to treat people in need and to bring home new
scientiﬁc ideas. It turned out he was on the receiving end; the moth-
erland brought back old memories and gave him a new vision of med-
icine and new hope in human nature.

After more than a quarter of a century, the long-awaited trip back

to my birth home was ﬁlled with excitement and expectations. Ever since
I can remember, it has been my goal and dream to return home. The land
where I was born and the place from which my family had to ﬂee for a
better life. With my backpack ﬁlled with medicines, a ﬁrst aid kit, med-
ical books and a stethoscope, I was ready to go. Hundreds of thoughts
ran through my mind. After years of hard work, preparation and plenty
of luck, I was now a medical doctor. How many people can I treat and
how many lives can I alter? How much can I do for all the orphanages
I have read about? The intentions were good and the plans were endless.

Unfortunately, there were hurricanes and ﬂoods in Danang the

moment I arrived in Saigon. It was unsafe for me to go to the area. I was
unable to ﬁnd a hospital in Saigon to volunteer in, but I was fortunate
enough to ﬁnd an Acupressure Medicine Master who was willing to take
me under his wing and share with me what he could during our limited
time. This was not evidence-based medicine and did not have any sta-
tistical data support. But, I did witness its ability to treat difﬁcult med-
ical issues that we deal with on a regular basis like migraines and chronic
pain. I met people that traveled from Hue and Hanoi to be treated by

191

him. Speaking to them, I found that they had tried everything else (West-
ern medicine and acupuncture) and this was the only thing that gave
them relief. It was fascinating to see that a majority of the patients
responded very well to the treatment. I am used to fumbling over mul-
tiple medications with very limited response in similar cases. The foun-
dation of this practice is based on the use of pressure, heat, vibration
and blood ﬂow. The pressure point patterns were as or more complicated
than anything I have learned in medical school. There is no use of med-
icine or needles; therefore side effects are essentially nonexistent. I am
not 100 percent convinced, but I am very impressed and will continue
to study this form of practice.

I have traveled to many places in my life and have met many dif-

ferent people from all over the world. There were two kinds of people I
met in Vietnam, the rich and the poor. The rich lived very, very well.
But the majority of the people were poor and those were the hardest-
working people I had ever seen in my life. I had thought working 80 to
100 hours a week during medical residency was difﬁcult until I met these
people. The majority of the working class worked seven days a week,
twelve hours a day, and 365 days a year. There were a few days off to
visit their families during the year, but otherwise there were no week-
ends and holidays for them. They didn’t have much of an option; if they
were not happy, there were still hundreds of other people waiting right
behind them to take their jobs.

On one of my tour days, I decided to go to Cho Lon, the ethnic

Chinese “grand market.” The place was ﬁlled with thousands of people
trying to make literally a few pennies. The minute I stepped into the
area, I was solicited by hundreds of people trying to sell me everything
from food and clothing to souvenirs. I sat down and had a nice bowl of
soup for lunch that cost less than one dollar. Then I started walking
through the crowds of people. Some had a stand to put their stuff on
and others only had a simple blanket on the ﬂoor. I pictured in my head
my pregnant mother with two sons, approximately 30 years ago, sitting
in the same spot trying to make a few dollars. It was extremely difﬁcult
for me to walk through these areas without stopping and buying some-
thing. It was not that I wanted any of these things, but it was rather
because I wanted to ﬁnd a reason to buy some of them. I kept these emo-
tions inside and my traveling colleagues were not aware of my mental
distress. I myself did not fully realize what was going on.

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That afternoon, I met two teenagers who were ﬂeeing the ﬂood up

north and were trying to shine shoes for some food money in Saigon. I
offered to buy them lunch, and they were ecstatic. Both of them looked
emaciated, soiled and lost. To my surprise, they offered to show me a
much cheaper place to eat, a ten-minute walk away. It was on a side street
where people cooked and sold meals out of small pots, using whatever
utensils they could carry on their backs. I would have easily paid for
whatever meals they wanted. But they did not want to abuse my gen-
erosity and waste my money. I asked myself what I would have done
if I were in their shoes. If my parents had not risked their lives so
many years ago to bring me to the United States, I could have been in
their position. Would I have had the integrity that they had or would I
have tried to take as much as I could? I was so touched that I prepaid
their meals and gave them some money for the road. I left them with
some encouragement to try and study hard in school to ﬁnd a better
future, knowing very well that attending school without money for
books and food was almost impossible when they were happy enough
with just having something to eat for the day and a place to sleep at night.
There are still a lot of poor children in Vietnam. I don’t think there
is an ofﬁcial curfew. Therefore, they are always wandering around try-
ing to make a dollar. The law prohibits them from soliciting, but
they are allowed to sell things for a dollar or two (lottery tickets, fruits,
roses, candy).

Some full-time laborers only make a dollar a day and this allows

for another source of income for a poor family. A large number of these
children don’t have a home to go to or they share a small room with ﬁve
to six other children. The money they save, they send home to their fam-
ilies in the countryside.

On my walk home to the hotel that evening at approximately 1 or

., a little nine-year-old girl selling roses approached me. Each rose

cost less than 60 cents. I asked her why she was out so late and what her
parents were doing.

She was helping her parents work to support the family. She worked

every single day until 2 to 3

. and went home, fed herself with what-

ever was available and slept until the next day. She stated that her par-
ents both worked until 4

. every morning. I assume they worked for

the city picking up trash or they must be one of those people going
through the trashcans looking for whatever they could reuse. The little

20. The Journey Home (Vo)

193

girl also informed me that her siblings were still in Hue (my father’s
hometown) and that she was the eldest.

She and her parents rented a little place to sleep in while they were

trying to make money to send home. I was used to seeing girls her age
playing with dolls, attending school, and worrying about what to wear
to school the next day, not walking around in a city by themselves at 2
o’clock in the morning trying to make less than a dollar. I gave her some
money and asked her to just keep her roses to sell them the next day.
She gracefully accepted the money, but insisted that I take the rose.
Again, I was shocked by this little girl’s sense of pride, integrity and lack
of greed. How was it possible that someone with so little carried herself
so well? I was so touched I took a large amount of what was in my pocket
and gave it to her. She walked away with a beautiful smile and I turned
into the dark corner of the hotel and broke down and cried. The amaz-
ing strength that those people showed in handling such hardship so well
throughout the whole day brought tears to my eyes. This time, I did not
have to ask myself if I could do what she did if I were in her shoes, I
know I could not.

My motherland, the land where I was born, the land that gave me

life. When I ﬁrst came, I was hoping to give back after more than a quar-
ter of a century, but instead I received. In my short time there, I learned
about a new form of medicine, the true nature of hard work, and an
unexpected kind of honesty and integrity. The people of Vietnam have
taught me much more than I could have ever imagined, the true appre-
ciation of money, food, humanity and life in general.

My motherland, like my loving mother and my caring father, after

decades continues to give and help mold me into a better person. It nur-
tured and fed me when I was born and continues to feed my mind, soul,
and body. Hopefully, one day I will be able to give back to my fascinat-
ing homeland and the amazing people that live there.

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On Searching

Christina Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: The journey in search of meaning and love is a cir-

cuitous path that leads us to our inner selves, for we cannot love if we
do not understand ourselves.

I sit here nearly one month before planning to leave Vietnam (at

least temporarily) in my favorite coffee shop in Hanoi — a coffee shop
where I have often found refuge by being in a social space, yet alone in
my thoughts. I consider what I have learned over the past years during
which I have traveled back and forth to Vietnam, how I have changed
and how my ongoing relationship with Vietnam has changed me. What
I ﬁnd to be the root of my journey is an ongoing search for myself, for
meaning, for happiness, for life.

It has been a long search, it seems — arduous and at times exhaust-

ing. But, actually it is only a mere segment of the long journey ahead of
me, the long journey of life, the roller coaster that we are all riding. For
some, however, the emotional ride isn’t as turbulent, isn’t as volatile. By
nature, I am ruled by my emotions, which certainly add a lot of
dynamism to this ongoing adventure.

The journey, I must admit, has been blissful and painful, peaceful

and turbulent, enriching and thought-provoking. Moments of clarity
woven with periods of brooding. It has been my journey in and out of
Vietnam over the past few years. Underlying this adventure has been the
search for myself, my family, my understanding of life and love in a con-
text that is both familiar and unfamiliar at once.

195

I have always believed, since I ﬁrst arrived in Vietnam as a naïve

22-year-old, that this was a heart’s journey pulling me aimlessly in one
direction then another, dynamically shifting, never stabilizing and con-
stantly yearning for deeper and richer experiences. It was a certain ori-
entation in life, an orientation of the heart in which I chose to live my
life.

The ﬁrst time I arrived in Vietnam, as a recent college graduate, I

had grand ambitions of participating in social change, of working for
the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS in Vietnam, of being a voice
for people who are often marginalized. At this time I believed that the
only way to really contribute to social change was by working for a devel-
opment organization, by attaching myself to a larger vision.

Five years later, after moving from Hanoi to Saigon to London to

San Francisco, I received another opportunity to work in Vietnam. Again,
I somehow felt that I had to attach myself to the vision of an organiza-
tion. This time this mandate was to support the rights of women and
children in Vietnam. I wanted to believe in the organization, the grand
vision, the work that I was embarking upon. I wanted to believe in some-
thing bigger than myself.

I was mistaken in my theories, in my ideas of changing the world.

I had not adequately worked on my own foundation, my own inner well-
being. And ultimately, in my heart, I knew that before one tries to save
the world, one must understand and ultimately save oneself.

I believe that the kernels of truth, the elements of life that are the

most mystical and magical are found in the human heart. I learn that
by knowing yourself you can know the world. And giving the world a
glimpse of who you are as a complete person is the best you can give the
world.

You change the world through your every interaction by embrac-

ing humanity, treating people fairly and living with an open and giving
heart.

But living with an open heart is a difﬁcult lesson, particularly when

you start to feel yourself growing. You continue to harness your strength
and know what is good for you, but still you continue to put yourself
through painful experiences. And you see how people grow disillusioned,
disheartened and ultimately become cynical. And with every experience,
every heartache, every night that you’ve shed tears, you have to remind
yourself that hurting is part of the process, an unavoidable part of the

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process. And then you realize that the greater your capacity to feel the
pain, the more space for love in your heart.

Five years ago, I naïvely believed that love was about someone lov-

ing me. That love was object-oriented, that if I only found the right
object that I could ﬁnd love. And I believed that my heart and my hap-
piness were someone else’s responsibility.

In a similar way to my work, I wanted to attach myself to someone

else’s grand vision rather than take my own grasp on the world. I was
too frightened, fearful that I would never accomplish my dreams, never
be strong enough to be the person who I wanted to be in this world.

I never understood the implications of my actions and that it was

my responsibility to take care of my heart. Yet I didn’t know the ways
of my heart, nor did I know the depth of certain wounds.

I still wanted love. But not to give love. I wanted to be loved. And

I wanted this to be someone else’s responsibility, someone else’s burden.
As I began to unearth the facades and to peel away the layers of the self
that I presented to the world, I realized what I had been telling myself
for so long — to be strong, to be independent. This independence came
to deﬁne me and I believed it. Only to later discover that it was some-
what of an act or a massive front to cover up my deepest insecurities and
probably the most real facets of myself. I found myself vulnerable and
fragile.

And then I started to understand how all of these feelings relate to

love and this idea of “falling” in love, the breaking down of boundaries,
these walls that separate us as individuals and then ﬁnding a connection
and breaking down these walls.

And then in moments you ﬁnd yourself. You ﬁnd what is broken

and incomplete. At ﬁrst you feel despair and even a bit of wonderment
of this person you face, this real person that you’ve started to see truly.
And you begin to see that vulnerability can also be a strength.

Underneath these lessons emerges a new skill of giving and of lov-

ing. Your vulnerabilities surface and you see the vulnerabilities of oth-
ers. And you see this as simply being human.

I started to see my story in other’s stories. I started to see the human

search for answers, the need to navigate their own emotional mazes. I
started to see the potential of how we could help each other grow, who
we could become under each other’s inﬂuence, how we could grow
together, resonate on a certain level and give and share.

21. On Searching (Vo)

197

And you realize that the questions and the search don’t end in the

moments you believe you’ve found yourself, and mostly those moments
may be ﬂeeting. But you realize that this process is simply called living.
And you learn to love the questions as much as the answers themselves.

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On Being a Viet Kieu

Nghia M. Vo

DITOR

’

OTE

: This chapter explores the deep meanings of being a

Viet Kieu. It is not merely the fact of living abroad, driving a Honda,
eating Pho, wearing an ao dai, or consuming nuoc man (ﬁsh sauce),
although these are prerequisite conditions. It is rather a state of mind.

What makes a Vietnamese a Viet Kieu? Of course, living overseas

instead of in Saigon, Hue, or Can Tho, for example, would qualify some-
one as a Viet Kieu. But does the length of overseas stay or the timing of
arrival have any bearing on that designation? Could temporary migrants —
those who went overseas for a period of time and then returned to Viet-
nam for good for some reason or another — be treated as Viet Kieu? Do
recent arrivals — after spending their youth or whole life in a commu-
nist country — qualify as Viet Kieu? How about children of communist
ofﬁcials — plenty of them around today — who came to western coun-
tries to study, did not experience the ordeals other Viet Kieu went
through, but in the end decided to remain abroad?

The more we delve into the subject, the more complex it becomes.

For not all Viet Kieu — even those who arrived in 1975 — shared the same
feelings and opinions or went through the same experiences. They formed
the most diverse group of people who had ever landed on foreign soils.
There were generals and soldiers, professionals and ﬁshermen, old and
young, rich and poor Catholics and Buddhists, those who arrived on the
heels of the 1975 debacle and those who suffered under the new regime
for many years before escaping abroad. And then, there are second-

199

generation Vietnamese-Americans — born and bred in western coun-
tries — who behave and feel differently than ﬁrst generation-immigrants.
But what deﬁned and linked them together were their South Vietnamese
heritage and their common aspiration for freedom.

It is interesting to note how being an ocean apart can color our per-

ceptions of the world in different ways. Andrew Lam wrote in his Per-
fume Dreams that one Vietnamese in Saigon would categorize the Viet
Kieu into four groups. There are the fake Viet Kieu — plenty of them in
Saigon — who “pretend to be returning Vietnamese Americans to either
cheat people out of their money or seduce young women.” They are Viet
Kieu who only stayed abroad for a short time, but not long enough to
absorb the culture. They come home and “look and act like peasants in
nice clothes.” Then come the real Viet Kieu — elegant, worldly — who
are quiet and don’t show off. The “thank you” they tell the waiters who
bring them drinks or food betrays them right away because native peo-
ple never ever say thank you to waiters. There are also the so-called
“patriotic” Viet Kieu who came home for whatever the reason.

Overseas Vietnamese, however, would object to that last character-

ization. The majority, especially the over–50 generation, despite their
deep love for their country, vowed not to return to Vietnam unless com-
munism makes way for democracy. It has a lot to do with freedom, trans-
parency and safety. Young Viet Kieu, on the other hand, born and bred
abroad, are politically blind and thus more “history-ignorant” than their
elders. Unbiased, they return home in droves, explore the country, see a
new world and became the bridge between older generations, those who
remained in Vietnam and those who had departed. Women, who are
either ﬂexible, or forgiving or simply practical, tend to return to Viet-
nam earlier or more often than men.

The war and its brutality — killing, maiming, oppression, reeduca-

tion camps, and new economic zones — continue to affect men in a deeper
and broader way than women. Going to war, being exclusively a male
experience, leaves most of its unwelcome residues to this group. The
main problem is not only the defeat — no matter how painful it was —
but also the loss of the homeland, rights, belongings and mostly the loss
of “self.” It often destroys the losers physically, ﬁnancially, and emotion-
ally and reduces them to a state of “nobodiness” unless they can channel
their negative emotions into a more constructive direction. Overcoming
that ordeal has been difﬁcult for many men, especially those who deeply

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loved their country but are now separated from it by a vast ocean. The
divide is not only physical but also — and mainly — psychological. Over-
coming that psychological burden, on the other hand, characterizes many
refugees and has made them into a new breed of Viet Kieu, the pioneers
or new pilgrims who landed on foreign soils and remade themselves
anew.

For these and other reasons, being a Viet Kieu appears to be more

of a state of mind than being physically present on foreign soil. Each of
these characteristics will be reviewed and typical examples provided.

1. It is about carrying a lot of luggage.

The Viet Kieu have gone

through many “mini-lives” during which they have experienced peace,
war, killing, uprising, shelling, bombing, escape, reeducation camps,
new economic zones and refugee camps. They have suffered from incar-
ceration, poverty, oppression, abandonment and discrimination. They
have dealt with foreigners: Chinese, French, Americans, and citizens of
other countries. All these experiences that have contributed to their
national heritage have made them unique and therefore complex.

Monique Truong, in her essay My Father’s Vietnam Syndrome, stated

she misspoke when she labeled her father “a complicated man who had
lived a complicated life.”

Like many Viet Kieu who were born during

the war, he sure had experienced a complicated life: Not only had he
seen the best, but also the worst of times. Born in Vietnam, he was
schooled in England and France. He married a Swiss woman with whom
he had a daughter before returning to Vietnam. After a few years, he
divorced his ﬁrst wife and married a Vietnamese woman. He served in
the ARVN before getting a job with a Dutch-owned oil company in
Saigon. He escaped to the U.S. at the end of the war and lived as an
expatriate in North Carolina and then in Houston, Texas. After getting
an MBA from an American university, he went to work for an Ameri-
can counterpart of his former employer in Saigon. Being forced to retire
early, he went to work in Saudi Arabia “too proud to sit still and too
ﬁnancially unsteady to stop bringing home a paycheck.” Somewhere in
between, he married and separated for a third time before passing away
in 2002. His third wife sent him off with a bouquet of red roses — the
color of luck for having lived a long life. His ﬁrst daughter, who ﬂew in
from Switzerland, greeted the mourners in French and his youngest
daughter in English. As for Monique, in a rusty Vietnamese expression

22. On Being a Viet Kieu (Vo)

201

she meant to call her father a lucky man who had lived a long life. Instead,
she said he was “a complicated man who had lived a complicated life.”

Le Thi Diem Thuy, in her book The Gangster We Are All Looking

For, called her father a “gangster” because of his dark past. An ARVN
soldier trained by the Americans, he used to jump out of airplanes and
to disappear for weeks in the jungles and hill towns to hunt down the
Viet Cong in various search and destroy missions. After returning from
these expeditions, he cruised after girls and sold American cigarettes on
the black market. His friends fell around him one after another, during
and also after the war. Following the fall of Saigon, he was sent to com-
munist reeducation camps for a few years but “doggedly managed to
crawl back into life.” He escaped to the U.S. where he successively became
a house painter, a factory-welder and then a self-employed gardener. No
one really knew the real person who behind the mask sometimes cried
and sobbed at night without reason. Sipping beer, he talked with his
friend about the war, how it was their youth and how when it ended it
was like waking from a long dream or a long nightmare. He became
prone to bursts of anger and rage, smashing television sets, VCRs and
chasing friends and family down the street. Some nights, he would drive
up to the seaside, park, sit and stare at the black water trying to look
across the ocean toward his native country.

The nightmares of yester-

year had apparently been brought over and transplanted onto American
soil.

Elderly male Viet Kieu rarely talked about their past. They would

like to: Many had tried in the past although no one had tried to under-
stand them. Slowly they clammed themselves into a closed world no one
was allowed to enter until they took their hard-won and painful experi-
ences with them to their graves.

2. It is about grieving.

“There is no greater loss than that of los-

ing one’s country,” Phan Boi Chau — one of Vietnam greatest non-com-
munist revolutionaries — declared in 1907. He meant he lost his country
to the French who ruled it as part of a colonial empire. Chau did not
live to see that seven decades later millions of Vietnamese did indeed
lose their country to their communist counterparts and ended up becom-
ing expatriates. This is insane, but true. And the stronger their attach-
ment to their homeland, the worse the loss is felt. And no matter where
they reside at this moment, they still feel attached to the land they called

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Vietnam. The bondage turns out to be unbreakable no matter how much
they would like to dissociate from it. The pain from the loss somehow
resurfaces anew and often catches them at their weakest moment.

Nguyen Thi Thu Lam, in her Fallen Leaves, described how success-

ful a businesswoman she was in Vietnam in the 1960s. She opened the
ﬁrst laundry service at the Cu Chi U.S. Army base and had a dozen
employees working for her. She divorced her Vietnamese husband to
marry a lawyer and U.S. Army major. She too escaped to the U.S. after
the war. In spite of her extensive dealings with Americans in Vietnam
and in the U.S., she had difﬁculties divorcing her past:

As for me and the Vietnamese of my generation, there will always be

memories of another time and place, another life. I will forever remain
an immigrant here. And even when I am happiest, I will remember my
beloved Vietnam and the fate of its people.

I am a child of war. I am a child of Vietnam.

3. It is about taking risks.

The Viet Kieu could not take much

with them when they left their country. They only thought about reach-
ing safety ﬁrst. They jumped on a boat or plane and off they went. To
where they did not know — they did not care — as long as they got out
of Vietnam.

It is the same risk-taking spirit that drove Phuong Anh Nguyen all

around the world and back to Vietnam. She is not a household name.
She is neither a model nor an artist. Simply an entrepreneur with a cer-
tain mystique, a radiant inner strength. A picture of her holding a mar-
tini and sitting in her Saigon’s famous Q bar graced the cover of the New
York Times Magazine a few years ago. She was the one in Passage to Viet-
nam “wearing a bra and sunglasses astride her silver Vespa holding a live
chicken by its neck — a picture that made her forever infamous in Viet-
nam.” The natives often remarked that “no Vietnamese would ever hold
a live chicken by its neck.”

She escaped from Vietnam in 1979 along with a hundred other pas-

sengers. She had to bury her sister on an Indonesian island after she died
from injuries resulting from a violent rape by Thai pirates. Her brother
was murdered while trying to protect his sister. Her mother became
depressed and her father fell silent for a long time following that inci-
dent, although both recovered to some extent. Witnessing the violent

22. On Being a Viet Kieu (Vo)

203

deaths of two of their children proved to be too much for them. Phuong
Anh studied in the U.S. for ten years before becoming restless and going
back to Vietnam with her American photographer boyfriend to open Q
bar. Since that time she has remade herself by traveling all over the world,
playing elephant polo in Nepal, trekking in Peru, and attending a wed-
ding in Morocco. She has counted among her friends writers, lawyers,
millionaires, chefs, artists, NGO workers, and even movie stars. She has
revitalized Saigon’s high-end pubs and redeﬁned Vietnam’s sense of style.
Her clothes — the bra as streetwear — have been copied by the daring in
Saigon. Her wardrobe earned her a reprimand from the communist com-
mittee. She has houses in the U.S. as well as in Saigon and travels back
and forth between the two countries.

4. It is about embarking on the most amazing journey on earth.

Despite all the risks and dangers involved — think about the tens of thou-
sands who lay unmourned at the bottom of the oceans — the Viet Kieu
kept coming in steady streams, year after year, from 1975 to 1995. Had
all the nations not stopped this diaspora, they would still be coming.
They came to the West to search for a freedom they could not ﬁnd under
a communist regime. As a result, many found peace and prosperity in
new lands. With success came a soothing of the many wounds they have
experienced over the years. Not all wounds have completely healed yet,
but some more than others.

The change turned out to be so dramatic that many still could not

believe they had achieved the American dream. Who could imagine a
rice farmer’s son who only brought “seven oranges with him onto a
crowded boat thinking they should last him the whole journey across
the Paciﬁc” is now an architect who helps design high-rise buildings all
over the globe? Who could imagine a jackfruit vendor’s daughter from
the Mekong Delta becoming a Wall Street ﬁnancier who negotiates her
deals across time zones, oceans, continents?

Geographic translocation somehow expanded their brains ﬁvefold,

their hearts tenfold, and their energy twenty-fold. Many Viet Kieu have
realized they have found their heaven on earth. They only wish their
countrymen could share the same freedoms they are enjoying. Their
counterparts in Vietnam view them as having “big brains and deep pock-
ets.” They look at them in awe but also with contempt.

The journey in search for freedom and independence was also a

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voyage against hopelessness. While Ho — the father of Vietnamese com-
munism — preached freedom and independence but never delivered it,
the Viet Kieu found real freedom in the lands of the West away from
Ho’s hell.

5. It is about resiliency, hope and healing.

Surviving the reedu-

cation camps and the new economic zones was for many a major phys-
ical as well as moral victory — a victory over their captors but also over
their own selves. It has made them more human, courageous, and
resilient. Surviving the sea escape and the Asian refugee camps was
another major ordeal. Surviving the culture clash, the new language bar-
rier, the long hours of retraining in their new country was no less difﬁcult.
During the ﬁrst few years in the U.S., they spurned no job and sunk to
new lows in their lives. A general earned his living doing dishwashing
in a restaurant. A former senator and ex-minister sold fried chicken for
a grocery store in New Orleans. A former justice became a door watch-
man. A physician cleaned hospital ﬂoors. They were in the beginning
“overqualiﬁed” for their jobs. If it was painful to lose one’s country, it
felt terrible to have to swallow one’s pride in order to survive. They
somehow survived, made ends meet and built new lives for themselves
and their families although the downhill slide seemed endless in the
beginning.

There is no worse disgrace than for a three-star general to stare back

at a lost war and not be able to do anything except ﬁght with his own
demons. He learned a long time ago that wars cannot be re-fought. And
to hear his wife — who has become a short order cook — nag him con-
stantly as to why he would not want to do anything to help his starving
children. The hero of a hundred battles who once spat ﬁre, now talks
only in a nostalgic voice full of regrets despite its bravado. He sat silent
submerged in his thoughts and past and realized his children had to bear
the burden of his loss. The solution was neither easy nor simple: “If one
cannot escape history one ought to embrace it fully” in order to tran-
scend one’s own biographical limitations.

Healing could only come after

acceptance of the painful fact. The general just did that, managed to leave
his past alone, went back to school and got an MBA degree.

In the end, the Viet Kieu not only survived but also thrived. It was

not, however, a continuous ascent to success, but a rough ride with a lot
of upturns and downturns — more downward spirals in the beginning

22. On Being a Viet Kieu (Vo)

205

than upward moves. Years later, their resiliency and hard work ﬁnally
paid off and led them to ﬁnancial well-being and status.

6. It is about contributing to the new society.

The penniless new

immigrants were frequently relegated to low income housing in the late
1970s and mid–1980s. Uptown Chicago was one such place, a neighbor-
hood ridden with drug pushers and pimps. People would not dare to
venture outside after dark. By 1980, 48 percent of the uptown residents
lived below the poverty line compared to 37 percent for the city as a whole.
The 10,000 Viet Kieu who arrived there in the mid–1980s gradually
opened one shop after another and, after a lot of struggle, transformed
the whole neighborhood into a vibrant community with stores, shops,
restaurants, and a car dealership and so on.

Little Saigon in Westmin-

ster, California, was once a collection of orange groves and vegetable
farms outside Los Angeles until the Viet Kieu from the nearby Pendle-
ton camp arrived. With time, they transformed it into a new commu-
nity with hundreds of stores, shops, restaurants and businesses. A
cemetery and a hospital were opened to serve their needs. Little Saigon
soon became the largest gathering of Viet Kieu outside Vietnam: It rep-
resents the capital of the transplanted Vietnamese in the U.S. They intro-
duced pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup served with beef, chicken,
seafood and vegetables, which became well-known in major U.S. cities.
Many other places were similarly impacted by the Viet Kieu like Hous-
ton, Dallas, New Orleans East Side, Arlington, Virginia, San Jose and
so on.

Academically, Viet Kieu children were also achievers. They had

higher overall math and science scores than language and reading.
Although the refugee population made up less than 20 percent of the
school population in 1985, 12 out of 14 valedictorians were of Indochi-
nese background.

The list of successful Viet Kieu includes, to name a

few, a National Football League player in Dallas, a couple of Vietnamese
Rhodes Scholars in England, a Vietnamese astronaut at NASA, a “boat
person” who received seven degrees at MIT in ﬁve years, many CEOs of
large electronic ﬁrms in Silicon Valley, another CEO at a Fortune 500
ﬁnancial company. The list goes on and on.

Three decades have passed since the Viet Kieu landed on foreign

soil. From the few thousand souls scattered worldwide outside Vietnam

206

IV. T

RESENT

in the pre–1975 years, the group has grown to three million people who
seem to have established ﬁrm roots in many western countries. In the
U.S., that colony of refugees has grown to become the second largest
refugee group behind the Cubans. That exponential population growth,
with its huge economic impact, could be traced not only to the 1975
diaspora, but also to the hard work and ingenuity of the members of
that colony. That vibrant economic and cultural growth could only be
sustained by a continuing effort by all its members. Membership does
have its privileges and responsibilities.

Being a Viet Kieu thus does not simply mean living abroad,

although it is one of the criteria. It is foremost a state of mind. It is being
resilient, hopeful, willing to take risks despite all odds, being able to rein-
vent oneself and being dedicated to freedom and independence.

It is about acquiring the spirit of the 1620 Mayﬂower pilgrims that

opened America to the world.

22. On Being a Viet Kieu (Vo)

207

Epilogue

The beauty and the glory of a people are based neither on war nor

revolution nor on ideologists or emperors.

— Nguyen Huy Thiep, Fired Gold

More than three decades after the end of the war, its repercussions

still deeply affect the Vietnamese back home and abroad (Viet Kieu). The
purpose of this discussion is to evaluate its effects on the society and the
people it has forever changed.

1. Origins and nature of the Vietnam War
The North-South conﬂict began in the 1930s when Ho Chi Minh

convinced himself that Vietnam’s road to independence could only be
communist,

while other nationalists used different and less violent polit-

ical approaches. Ho’s forces stole power in North Vietnam in 1945 and
set about creating a conventional state on the Soviet model: a “gigantic
steel mill rather than [a state that produces] more of the goods that make
the life of people in a poor agrarian country somewhat easier.”

This was

followed by a land reform on the Chinese Maoist model that caused
more than one hundred thousand painful and tragic deaths.

In 1955 and onward, the communists brought the war to South

Vietnam trying to conquer it by force. The fratricidal war between North
(communist) and South (nationalist) Vietnam — supported by foreign
powers — represents a ﬁght over the nature of Vietnamese society.

Viet-

namese fought over whether the country should become a western dem-
ocratic society or a totalitarian communist country. The war ended in
1975 with the fall of Saigon and the diaspora of millions of people.

The fact that the South Vietnamese lost the war does not mean that

their cause — freedom and independence from the communists — was
wrong. It simply means they have been outmaneuvered.

Their cause

will stand and be picked up by other people for democracy, the rule of
the people, which will prevail.

208

Three million Viet Kieu presently live in over more than 50 coun-

tries worldwide.

They can be differentiated into two groups: those who

came as the result of the war (the boat people or political refugees) and
those who were sent by Hanoi to Russia and former eastern communist
countries as migrant workers. Throughout these pages, we are dealing
with the ﬁrst group.

2. Was the war worth it?
If the Americans called it the Vietnam War (it was fought in Viet-

nam), the communists knew it as the American War, or the “War of Lib-
eration” or the “Anti-U.S. War of National Salvation.”

The South

Vietnamese labeled it as the “War against Communist Aggression” or
simply the Anti-Communist War (it was fought against the communists).

The war has thus been fought through different perspectives and

lenses

“not simply to reunify the country but to reunify in such a way

that all opposition to the party [would be] destroyed.”

Saigon fell to a

“more brutal tyranny that was more effective, in part, because it was more
brutal.

The end-result has been the largest sea diaspora in the world.

The truth of this war “lies buried with its victims, with those who died,
and with those who are consigned to live in an oppressed silence for now
and for the coming generations — a silence the world called peace.”

It is regrettable that the South Vietnamese and the U.S. lost the war

by halfheartedly ﬁghting it.

Had they won, they would have avoided:

• the communization of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
• the killing of more than 60,000 South Vietnamese after the war

through repression, revenge, or other reasons

• the suffering of more than one million South Vietnamese ofﬁcials

and soldiers who were sent to reeducation camps to rot

• the suffering of two million civilians who were sent to the NEZ
• the “dark years” of 1975–85 where southerners suffered through

misery, lack of food, and war in Cambodia

• the “rape of Saigon” through the blatant conﬁscation of private

and state property in South Vietnam, the control of Saigon and South
Vietnam, and the enslavement of southerners.

• the forcing out of Vietnam of two million of boat people, half of

them having drowned at sea

• the war in Cambodia where 60,000 Vietnamese soldiers lost their

lives along with untold civilian Cambodians

Epilogue

209

• the killing of two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge
• the establishment of a corrupt and oppressive regime in Vietnam,

which is much worse than the Diem or Thieu regime

• the continuing lack of freedom and the worsening of corruption

in Vietnam

• the untold suffering and lack of freedom that persist to this day.

The pre–1975 southerners are still shunned in their own land and denied
top positions. If they are lucky enough to hold governmental positions,
they are lowly or unimportant ones.

And the list goes on and on.
We have failed the people of South Vietnam and by extension the

people of the world by not acting aggressively and decisively during the war.
Although the American effort was valiant and commendable, in the end
it was not enough to protect peace and autonomy in South Vietnam.

The war was not a ﬁght for independence

because the pre–1975

South Vietnamese had more freedom and independence under the Diem
and Thieu regimes than under the present communist government. They
could argue, protest, organize demonstrations, and form opposition par-
ties. This is not the case in present-day Vietnam. Socialist Vietnam for
the last three decades has had a one party-system and anyone who dares
to challenge it is jailed, condemned, branded as a criminal, and often-
time executed. Prisoners of conscience ﬁll the jails of the communist
state.

The South Vietnamese’s ﬁght for freedom against communism was

therefore worth it. It was a ﬁght for FREEDOM. The American sup-
port and involvement were not only important, but also crucial to that
ﬁght. South Vietnamese thank their allies for the help they gave in these
crucial times, although they would like to see it more as a relationship
between allies than masters/servants.

The ﬁght for freedom is a ﬁght that ennobled its ﬁghters. If war

loss was a tragedy, the “manipulative and callous manner with which the
American administration and the American Congress dealt toward South
Vietnam during the last years of the war (was not) one of America’s ﬁnest
hours.”

3. Was the revolution worth it?
The war espoused by the communists was a war of brutal aggres-

sion and outright conquest of the South. It was ethically wrong because

210

PILOGUE

the real goal of the communist party was the political and economic con-
trol of the whole country, regardless of the wishes of the people.

Southern nationalists espoused a Confucian approach to the conﬂict

as well as respect for law. They were forced to ﬁght against a commu-
nist invasion, although they were paciﬁst in nature. They realized that
war was a painful and tragic event especially when it was fought on their
own land, the South.

The characteristics of communism and southern nationalism are

listed below.

Table I. Characteristics of Confucianism and Communism

Confucianism

Communism

1. Duration (years)

2,000+

100-

2. System

Socio-religio-political

Socio-politico-military

Can be authoritarian

Totalitarian

3. Goal

Social harmony

Overthrow governments
Class struggle

4. Organization

Altruistic

Illicit or criminal

Based on

Rules of law

Fear, terror

Thien Menh

Might makes right

(Mandate of Heaven)

5. Religious morals

Morals

Good of Party

Humanity (Golden Rule) Yes

Individual

Respect

To be crushed underfoot

Everyone is

A brother

A communist or an enemy

Family

Respect parents

Respect party only

Laws

Respect natural laws

Communist rules only

Tam cuong, ngu thuong Communist dictates

Freedom

Yes

Private property

Respect

State property

6. Means

Persuasion

Brute force, coercion

Techniques

Suggestion

Re-education, oppression

7. Work ethics

Just milieu

Oppressive labor

8. Deaths

100 million

9. Drawbacks

Oppression of women Oppression is the norm
Corruption (possible)

Corruption is the norm

The party has never cared about the people in general. They ﬁred

at and killed civilians without empathy or regret. They detonated bombs
under the My Canh ﬂoating restaurant on the Saigon River, killing one
hundred civilians. They shelled Saigon randomly during the war, hitting

Epilogue

211

civilians and hospitals. They shelled and ﬁred at the “Convoy of Tears”
in 1975, killing more than 200,000 civilians and 20,000 soldiers.

After sacriﬁcing more than one million soldiers, they did not even

take care of the wounded “who [were] left to survive in destitution” while
building large houses for themselves.

Once in power, they oppressed the people, denied them freedom

of press and religion and established a corrupt style of government for
the beneﬁt of a small group: the Party members.

Dr. Duong Quynh Hoa, a pediatrician, one of the founders of the

NLF (National Liberation Front) and PRG’s (Provisional Revolutionary
Government) Minister of Health from 1969 to 1976, criticized Hanoi
for failing to provide good health care to the people, especially chil-
dren.

She resigned from the party in 1976. She once asked Hanoi, “What

is your ﬁnal goal — the ﬁnal goal of the revolution? Is it the happiness of
the people or power?” Then I answered the question. “I think it is power,”
for absolute power breeds corruption.

Duong Thu Huong worked for seven years as part of a singing

brigade on the front during the war. She became a party member before
“expelling” herself from the group.

This regime “obliges people to live

in lies and shame. The lie is that we are made to say that this regime is
a thousand times more democratic than the “bourgeois” regimes. The
lie debases the human being.”

She wrote The Paradise of the Blind to

criticize the corrupt power of the party hacks and the ruthless brutality
of North Vietnam’s 1950 land reform. She was arrested and imprisoned
in 1991, and was released seven months later under French pressure.

Her books are banned in Vietnam. She has recently relocated to France
to free herself from Hanoi’s censorship.

Bao Ninh, a soldier in the Communist Army (PAVN), wrote in The

Sorrows of War that North Vietnamese soldiers were not all heroic; many
did not understand why they were ﬁghting. For them, the highlands
were a world of phantoms and damp nocturnal terror. “Here when it is
dark, trees and plants moan in awful harmony.”

He mentioned that

ﬁfteen years after the war “what we (Hanoi) have achieved was the
poverty of the whole nation.”

Bui Tin was a PAVN Colonel who accepted the capitulation of

General Minh in Saigon in 1975. In September 1990, he left for France
where he has remained in exile. He mentioned in his book that thou-
sands of people were victimized and detained in a whole network of pris-

212

PILOGUE

ons.

He even called for an “end to the conservative, despotic and

authoritarian Hanoi regime.”

Truong Nhu Tang, the PRG Minister of Justice, noted that by July

1975, the leadership of the NLF and PRG were no longer “operative.”
They had been folded into the northern Politburo.

Northerners invaded

the South like a “swarm of locusts” and fought among themselves over
“houses, cars, prostitutes, and bribes.” Tang, feeling undercut by the
Hanoi regime, escaped as a boat person on August 25, 1977, and relo-
cated to France.

By the end of the 1970s, many members of the NLF had escaped

abroad or been jailed. Although they had fought on the winning side,
Hanoi had treated them little better than the “puppets.” Having ﬁnally
realized that they had been duped, southern revolutionaries like General
Tran Van Tra, Tran Van Giau, Tran Bach Dang had formed the Associ-
ation of Former Resistance Members to voice their concerns, although
to no avail. By 2000, all the rank and ﬁle of the NLF either had been
quietly jailed or executed.

This was a sad conclusion for all those who

had sacriﬁced for the revolution.

The goal of the revolution was to establish the control of the com-

munist party over the whole country. As such, the movement was ruth-
less and unethical because it forced millions of people to give up their
lives in order to topple the legitimate but weak government of Saigon
and to serve its own purposes. The party has become “a wild menagerie
of personal ﬁefdoms, provincial power bases, ideological blocs and com-
peting ﬁnancial interests.

The revolution has been a dividing instead of a unifying force: It

tore the nation in half and kept the Vietnamese apart. It has failed to
empower and to serve its people.

4. Effect of the war on the people
“The people were neutral”

during the war, although some were

more sympathetic to one side than the other. Southerners voted with their
feet, running away from the Viet Cong–controlled areas. After the war,
they voted with their leaking boats. They had a morbid fear of commu-
nists

and of their brutality and ruthlessness. The exodus constituted

the severest judgment of the Vietnamese against those who governed
them.

They have a tradition of resistance to foreign aggression, but none

Epilogue

213

to internal aggression. They (northerners and southerners) are “extremely
cowardly toward this regime” (Hanoi),

by failing to stand up alone and

to express their disagreements. Many did: They ended up in jails or for-
ever disappeared.

The communists ruled the South as conquerors over the con-

quered.

They descended in great numbers to take over everything from

the principal political posts to the running of branch post ofﬁces, clinics,
schools, food supply, and transport services. Their redundant bureau-
cracy leads to a lot of corruption. They are not professional administra-
tors, just party hacks who are difﬁcult to dismiss.

After doi moi (renovation), the big state enterprises have been

divided up, not among the public but among state organisms; party and
government ofﬁcials have the inside track in turning them into proﬁt-
making enterprises and enriching themselves.

Party members occupy

the top positions in the state, in ministry jobs, trading companies, the
economic police, customs, and transportation businesses and are
extremely wealthy,

while the rest live below the poverty line. The per

capita GDP is $828 (140th in the world).

Vietnam is a country of imbalances, with enormous regional and

local differences. All the surplus comes from the south; not a grain comes
from the north. In the late 1990s Vietnam produced 75 million shirts a
year, the south contributes 50 million. All the marine products come
from the south. The economy in the north is weak because of the Stal-
inist infrastructure established since 1954.

There is only superﬁcial pros-

perity due to smuggling and rampant corruption, but it is of little beneﬁt
to the overall majority. In this socialist country, people now have to pay
to see the doctor or send their kids to school,

social conditions that are

much worse than under the former Saigon government.

The revolution has not helped the people: It is a fraud. The real-

ity is troubling. A young girl, after watching the Christmas displays in
downtown Saigon in December 2008, states, “Everything here is fake,
even Santa and the snow. What is real is to grow up and to get married
to a Korean or Chinese from Taipei. Then you could send real money
home to help your family.”

It is sad to think that people are so poor

that they can only see marriages to foreigners — who often exploit them
as sex workers, slaves, cheap labor — as a way out of poverty. This is the
tragedy of Vietnam today.

214

PILOGUE

5. The world is round
Two events in the last few months of 2008 show that the world is

small and round. Things that would have been thought impossible
thirty-four years ago are taking place right in front of our eyes.

The ﬁrst is the wedding of the daughter of the prime minister of

the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to a Viet Kieu, Nguyen Bao Hoang,
in November 2008 in Saigon, aka HCMC. Despite all the communists’
rhetoric about the Viet Kieu being “traitors” to the nation (who in his
right mind would want to stay in Vietnam after 1975 only to be sent to
concentration camps?), the union may represent a sign of “thawing”
between the two sides. Hanoi and the Viet Kieu usually do not see eye-
to-eye, let alone get involved in a marriage. Only time can tell whether
this marriage between old-time foes can last.

Nguyen Bao Hoang was a 22-month-old when his parents arrived

in the U.S. in 1975 as refugees. He received his undergraduate from Har-
vard (1995) and graduated with M.D. and MBA degrees from North-
western in 2000. He later worked for an investment bank in Vietnam
and tried some medical work before becoming the CEO of IDG Ven-
tures, a U.S. investing company in Vietnam in 2003. So far, he has been
able to raise $100 million for his venture.

The other event is the election of Anh Cao as the ﬁrst Vietnamese

American in the U.S. Congress on December 7, 2008. The district is sixty
percent African American and the election was delayed because of Hur-
ricane Gustav. The result shows a political maturation and integration
of the Vietnamese community within the U.S. political landscape.

Anh Cao came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975 at the age of eight

with his mother. His father, who was a South Vietnamese army ofﬁcer,
was sent to various concentration camps for the next sixteen years. From
his prison, he advised his son to “study hard and give back to the com-
munity.”

Anh Cao gathered degrees in physics at Baylor, philosophy at Ford-

ham, and law at Loyola in New Orleans. He left the Jesuits and settled
as a lawyer for the small Vietnamese community in East New Orleans.
His life was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which ﬂooded his
house with eight feet of water. He and the community rebounded after-
wards.

These events, although minor, show that while some Viet Kieu —

the young ones — may be interested in working/investing in their native

Epilogue

215

Vietnam as outsiders, others forge ahead and become more involved in
the American world of which they are a part. If some have forgotten the
ghost of the war, others still remember it vividly and refuse to have any-
thing to do with Hanoi.

The chasm between North and South Vietnam, which has been

present for the last four centuries,

has been aggravated by the intro-

duction of communism in North Vietnam in the 1950s and made worse
by the 1975 fall of Saigon. Vietnam is now reuniﬁed by name only, for
behind this fragile unity, lies a country that could “balkanize” into two
or three states.

What tenuously holds everything together is the repres-

sive communist rule, which in no way can replace the recognition of basic
human rights and respect for common laws. Only the latter two ele-
ments could cement the country together for good.

The long-term legacy of the war and of the communists’ assault on

the South Vietnamese budding democracy has not been good socially,
politically, or economically for Vietnam. It has also deepened the chasm
between the poor Vietnamese suffering under a repressive communist
regime and the better educated, generally richer, and more cosmopoli-
tan Viet Kieu. That division is likely to remain as the Viet Kieu become
more and more integrated into their adopted countries.

216

PILOGUE

Chapter Notes

Introduction

1. A. Nossiter, “History and Amazement in House Race Outcome,” New York

Times, Dec. 8, 2008.

2. R.S. McKelvey, A Gift of Barbed Wire (Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 2002), 86.

3. Ibid., pp. 71, 77.
4. Nguyen Van Canh, Vietnam Under Communism, 1975–1982 (Stanford, CA:

Hoover Institution Press, 1983), 197–198.

5. Nghia M. Vo, The Bamboo Gulag ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 117–

142.

6. The NEZ (new economic zones) were the civilian equivalent of concentra-

tion camps where inhabitants were forced to do agricultural labor in previously deserted
and arid areas. Civilians were shuttled to these regions and told to build their huts
and to transform forests into arable lands. The government did not even check to see
whether the land was suitable for agriculture or not.

7. Nghia M. Vo, The Vietnamese Boat People: 1954 and 1975–1992 ( Jefferson,

NC: McFarland, 2006), 130–162.

8. N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V. Ho, The Women of Vietnam (Parker, CO: Out-

skirts Press, 2008), 1–15, 27–41.

9. R.S. McKelvey, A Gift of Barbed Wire (Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 2002), 27–29.

10. E. Porter, M. O’Donnell, “Facing Middle Age with No Degree and No Wife,”

New York Times, August 6, 2006.

11. http://www.voanews.com/vietnamese/archive/2006-07/2006-07-24-voa15.cfm.
12. http://www.voanews.com/vietnamese/archive/2006-06/2006-06-26-voa35.cfm

(part 1). http://www.voanews.com/vietnamese/archive/2006-07/2006-07-05-voa14.cfm
(part 2).

13. W.C. Robinson, Terms of Refuge (London: Zed Books, 1998), 61; B. Grant,

The Boat People (New York: Penguin, 1979), 66; B. Wain, The Refused (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1981), 70–73. Female victims were taken to the Kra Island where
they were repeatedly raped. One hundred and sixty refugees died on the island and
1,250 others were rescued over a twelve month period.

14. A. Lam, Perfume Dreams (Berkeley: HeyDay Books, 2005), 22.

217

Chapter 1

1. Europeans who came to Vietnam ﬁrst wrote about that smile in the eighteenth

century. Nguyen Van Vinh, in the Dong Duong Tap Chi (1914), commented: “The
Vietnamese have the strange habit of smiling under any circumstance. They smile
whether they are congratulated or yelled at, whether they are good or bad, whether
they are right or wrong… There is nothing more frustrating than having to deal with
a smile which is a response to your questioning or yelling at a person….”

2. Since ancestors are considered to be a part of the extended Asian (especially

Confucian) family, they need to be revered and appeased through prayers and offer-
ings. They, in turn, can protect the family from “bad” spirits.

3. Malaria is caused by protozoan parasites like Plasmodium falciparum, while

Dengue fever is due to the Dengue virus of the genus Flavivirus. Both diseases are
caused by mosquitoes and occur in rural and urban areas.

4. Confucius (551–479

.) was a Chinese sage who left teachings that form the

moral and political backbone of Chinese society for the last two millennia. Through
conquest and osmosis, these Confucian ideals spread to neighboring Korea, Japan and
Vietnam. With China, these countries form the “chopstick civilization:” they use chop-
sticks during meals and follow Confucian teachings.

5. N.M. Vo, “Confucian Women” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V. Ho, The Women

of Vietnam (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 1–15.

6. The Chams lived in present-day central Vietnam. They were seafarers, ﬁsher-

men, great warriors, and part-time pirates. They had a darker complexion than native
Vietnamese. Their civilization peaked from the 7th to 15th centuries

. They con-

stantly fought against the Vietnamese who lived in present-day North Vietnam, and
on various occasions occupied the Vietnamese capital, Thang Long (Hanoi). In its
southward move, Vietnam took over the lands of the Chams in the 17th and 18th
centuries. The Chams were heavily inﬂuenced by the Indian (Hindu) civilization.
Ignorant of world geography, Europeans at the time of Columbus called the native
people of America “Indians.” They also called the people from India Indians. This led
to the confusion between Indian-Americans and Indians from India who are mainly
Hindus.

7. N.M. Vo, “The Duality of the Vietnamese Mind” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang,

H.V. Ho, The Sorrows of War and Peace (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 111–122.

Chapter 2

1. Saigon began as the Cham village of Baigaur, then became the Khmer Prey

Nokor before being taken over by the Vietnamese and renamed Gia Dinh Thanh and
then Saigon. See N.M. Vo, “The Origins of Saigon” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V.
Ho, The Women of Vietnam (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008). 223–232.

2. Pho is the national Vietnamese beef noodle soup. N.M. Vo, “A Short History

of Pho” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V. Ho, The Sorrows of War and Peace (Parker, CO:
Outskirts Press, 2008), 129–133.

3. N.M. Vo, “Roots of Southern Nationalism” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V. Ho,

The Sorrows of War and Peace (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 35–73.

4. H. Kamm, Dragon Ascending (New York: Arcade, 1996), 58.

218

HAPTER

OTES

Chapter 3

1. Hero character of the 1982 ﬁlm First Blood, starring Sylvester Stallone.

Wikipedia: “a person demonstrating heroism through extreme violence, especially
when outnumbered” (accessed 11/29/2007).

2. C.H.W. Ruhe, N.W. Hoover, I. Singer, Saigon Medical School: An Experi-

ment in International Medical Education: An Account of the American Medical Associ-
ation’s Medical Education Project in South Vietnam, 1966–1975 (Chicago: AMA, 1988),
52, 208.

3. http://www.morgalens.com/vietnam.html (accessed 11/21/2007).
4. http://www.thebattleof kontum.com/stars/smith_orbit.html (accessed 11/1/2007).
5. Montagnards are members of about 30 tribes living in the mountains and

highlands of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia).

6. D. Chong, The Girl in the Picture: The Kim Phuc Story (Toronto: Viking,

1999).

7. J.K. Bruton, “Analyzing Vietnamese Culture” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V.

Ho, The Women of Vietnam (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 141.

8. B. Fall, Last Reﬂections on a War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1969),

220.

9. Memo dated April 5, 1975, to General Brent Scowcroft assessing General Fred

Weyand’s special report to President Gerald Ford (Gerald Ford Presidential Library).

10. MR: Military Region. South Vietnam was organized into MR I, II, III, and

IV from north to south.

11. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/COLDdomino.html (accessed 2/3/2008).
12. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/24176/robert-h-johnson/vietnamization-

can-it-work.html (accessed 2/3/2008).

13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamization#Vietnamization.2C_1969.E2.80.

931974 (accessed 2/3/2008).

14. Terminology used in 2007 in relation to the Iraq War to designate the pulling

out of U.S. forces from Iraq.

15. In October 1973, Arab members of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum

Exporting Countries) imposed an oil embargo on the U.S. and its allies, Western
Europe and Japan for supporting Israel in its ongoing armed conﬂict with Egypt and
Syria, known as the Yom Kippur War.

16. GVN: Government of Vietnam.
17. http://www.frd.utexas.edu/library/exhibits/vietnam/750404g.htm (accessed

8/21/2008).

Chapter 4

1. The Mekong River is the eleventh longest river in the world (2,703 miles).

It runs through China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia and forms a delta at
its mouth in southern Vietnam.

2. Funan was a Hinduized country that ﬂourished in southern Vietnam between

the ﬁrst and sixth centuries

. It was replaced by the Khmer empire from the eighth

to the thirteenth centuries.

3. N.M. Vo, “Roots of South Vietnamese Nationalism” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang,

H.V. Ho, The Sorrows of War and Peace (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 38–41.

Chapter Notes

219

Chapter 5

1. Nghia M. Vo, The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Viet-

nam ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 11–13.

2. Bo doi: North Vietnamese soldier.
3. Name given to Saigon by the French.
4. Tael: slightly more than an ounce.

Chapter 6

1. Viet Minh (abbreviated from Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi or League of

the Independence of Vietnam) was a communist liberation movement. It hid its com-
munist agenda so well that many non-communist nationalists were unaware of its com-
munist connection and joined the group. After 1954, the Viet Minh got rid of the
non-communist patriots to form the Viet Cong or Cong San Vietnam (Vietnamese
communists).

2. In Vietnam, especially in the countryside, people often use a numeral (start-

ing with number two) to designate their children according to the order of their birth.
They never use the number one, which is ofﬁcially reserved for the household head.
Brother Five means the fourth born in the family.

Chapter 8

1. Conex: a large steel box formerly used for shipping merchandise overseas.

Chapter 10

1. Name derisively assigned at that time to wild or hardheaded youngsters.
2. Based on the Voice of America interview with Chau Dinh An in August 2005.

http://www.voanews.com/vietnamese/archive/2005-08/2005-07-20-voa10.cfm (part 1).

http://www.voanews.com/vietnamese/archive/2005-08/2005-08-05-voa23.cfm (part

2).

Chapter 11

1. Kieu is the heroine in Nguyen Du’s early nineteenth-century masterpiece.

Born into a higher class and betrothed to a Mandarin’s son, Kieu was expected to lead
a life of riches and comfort. Her father was jailed for suspicious reasons. After selling
herself to free him, she went through a series of tragic and painful misadventures. She
tried to kill herself by jumping into a river but was saved by a ﬁsherman. In the end,
she was reunited with her former husband. See Huynh Sanh Thong, The Tale of Kieu
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

Chapter 13

1. See Chapter 6, note 2, above. Auntie Seven means the sixth child born in the

household.

220

HAPTER

OTES

Chapter 19

1. Huynh Sanh Thong, Antholog y of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh to the

Twentieth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 199.

2. Bui Tien Khoi, “The Refugee,” Houston Post, Jan. 8, 1985.
3. A creamy black sauce available in any Vietnamese restaurant.
4. N.M. Vo, “A Short History of Pho” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V. Ho, The

Sorrows of War and Peace (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 129–133.

5. H. Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese (New York: Arcade,

1996), 290.

6. R. Templer, Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam (New York: Pen-

guin, 1999), 324.

7. Ibid., 313.

Chapter 22

1. Monique Truong, “My Father’s Vietnam Syndrome,” New York Times, June 18,

2006.

2. Le Thi Diem Thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (New York: Knopf,

2003), 103.

3. Nguyen Thi Thu Lam, Fallen Leaves (New Haven: Yale SEAS, 1989), 23–24,

65–67.

4. A. Lam, Perfume Dreams (Berkeley: HeyDays Books, 2005), 119–123.
5. Ibid., 13.
6. Ibid., 27–29, 45.
7. N.M. Vo, The Vietnamese Boat People: 1954 and 1975–1992 ( Jefferson, NC:

McFarland, 2006), 174–175.

8. Nathan Caplan, Children of the Boat People (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-

gan Press, 1991), 156.

Epilogue

1. H. Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese (New York: Arcade,

1996), 95.

2. Ibid., 105.
3. N.L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1993), ix.

4. B.B. Fall, Last Reﬂections on a War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books,

2000), 220. Fall wrote: “When a country is being subverted it is not being outfought; it
is being out administered.” Italics are in the text.

5. According to Wikipedia (accessed 9/22/2008), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Viet_kieu, the worldwide breakdown of Viet Kieu is as follows:

• U.S. 1,599,394 (2006)
• France 250,000
• Australia 159,848
• Canada 151,410
• Germany 83,526
• UK 70,000
• Japan 26,018

Chapter Notes

221

• Taiwan 150,000
• Russia 150,000
• Others 600,000

6. M.A. Lawrence, The Vietnam War (New York: Oxford, 2008), 1.
7. N.M. Vo, “Confucianism and Communism” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V.

Ho, The Men of Vietnam (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 111–137. Saigon and the
South Vietnamese have always maintained that the war was about the repulsion of the
communist invasion. The 1975 fall of Saigon and the brutal repressive techniques used
by the communists during and after the war conﬁrm Saigon’s assertion and in a sense
justify the American involvement in Vietnam. Had the war been fought differently, it
could have been won (see note 9).

8. A.J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1003. The goal of the communists was
and is the complete elimination of political opponents and the State of South Viet-
nam so that they can rule supreme in the country. It is interesting to note that they
have borrowed that strategy from old monarchs of the past, whom they despise and
vigorously criticize.

9. M. Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War (New York: Free Press, 1999), 245.

10. Bui Diem, In the Jaws of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1987), 343.

11. J. Record, “America’s own military performance in Vietnam aided and abet-

ted the ‘North’s’ Victory” in M.J. Gilbert, Why the North Won the War (New York:
Palgrave, 2002), 117–136. The author suggests a fragmentation of command author-
ity, a dead end ground strategy, mistaken conﬁdence in air power, a wrong style of
warfare, and moral cowardice at the top of the list of the main causes of military fail-
ure in Vietnam.

12. A.J. Dommen The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1004–1005. The communists took over
South Vietnam physically, politically, and economically in 1975. The result was an
economic shift from southerners to northerners who now control all top governmen-
tal positions and own all industries and businesses in the South. Party members who
did not have a dime while ﬁghting the war have become the wealthiest people in Viet-
nam. Southerners dispossessed of their belongings, factories, businesses, and proper-
ties can barely make ends meet.

13. Vietnam is ranked 142/157 for economic freedom, 155/167 for press freedom

and 111/163 in terms of corruption worldwide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam
(accessed 9/22/2008).

14. N.M. Vo, “Roots of South Vietnamese Nationalism” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang,

H.V. Ho, The Sorrows of War and Peace (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 67–71.
The roots of South Vietnamese nationalism date back to the foundation of the coun-
try.

15. Bui Diem, In the Jaws of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1999), 341.

16. N.M. Vo, “Confucianism and Communism” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V.

Ho, The Men of Vietnam (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 120–131. Differences
between Confucianism, which respects natural law and order and communism, which
does not, are astounding. Many U.S. writers (Halberstam, Fitzgerald, Duiker, among
others), fooled by communists’ intransigence and ruthlessness, have thought the two
theories are comparable without going beyond the appearances.

17. A.J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the Americans and the French

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 903.

222

HAPTER

OTES

18. Bui Tin, Following Ho Chi Minh (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,

1995), 131.

19. H. Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese (New York: Arcade,

1996), 225. NLF or National Liberation Front or the Viet Cong organization was set
up by Hanoi in 1960 to destabilize the government of the Republic of Vietnam (Saigon).
PRG or Provisional Revolutionary Government was the political face of the NLF. It
took ofﬁce on April 30, 1975 (fall of Saigon), and was dismissed in July 1976
(reuniﬁcation of Vietnam).

20. A.J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 950.

21. In her cell, ﬁve people voted to dismiss her, and ﬁve voted against dismiss-

ing her. She cast the decisive vote to remove herself from the party.

22. H. Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese (New York: Arcade,

1996), 145.

23. Ibid., 159–161.
24. R. Templer, Shadows and Wind (New York: Penguin, 1998), 20.
25. H. Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese (New York: Arcade,

1996), 184–185.

26. Bui Tin, Following Ho Chi Minh (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,

1995), 172, 174.

27. Ibid., 192.
28. Truong Nhu Tang, A Viet Cong Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 269.
29. Ibid., 289, 297, 303.
30. A.J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 950.

31. R. Templer, Shadows and Wind (New York: Penguin, 1998), 90.
32. H. Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese (New York: Arcade,

1996), 5.

33. Ibid., 173.
34. Ibid., 179.
35. Ibid., 142.
36. Ibid., 174–176.
37. Ibid., 215.
38. Ibid., 54, 66–67.
39. R. Templer, Shadows and Wind (New York: Penguin, 1998), 143.
40. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam (accessed 12/31/2008).
41. H. Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese (New York: Arcade,

1996), 217–219.

42. Ibid., 44.
43. Private communication.
44. A. Nossiter, “History and Amazement in House Race Outcome,” New York

Times, Dec. 8, 2008.

45. N.M. Vo, “Vietnam and the Vietnamese” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang, H.V. Ho,

The Men of Vietnam (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 7–13. The tragedy of the
Vietnamese is that they have been at war with themselves and surrounding countries
for the last four millennia.

46. N.M. Vo, “The Duality of the Vietnamese Mind” in N.M. Vo, C.V. Dang,

H.V. Ho, The Sorrows of War and Peace (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2008), 111–122.
Southerners and Northerners have evolved differently in the social, economic, cul-
tural, and political ﬁelds during the last four centuries. This difference has increased
following the communist takeover of the North in 1945.

Chapter Notes

223

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Document Outline

Table of Contents
Introduction
I. Peace and War
II. Oppression and Escape
III. Struggle, Healing and Remembrance
Epilogue
Chapter Notes
Suggested Reading
Index

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