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Wendy Cappelano, The Grass Is Greener.. Or Is It? It is April and May of 1975, and I see images on the news of people hanging from helicopters and trying to climb over fences and walls of the American Embassy in Saigon, desperately seeking to escape their country. I read the newspaper and see pictures of “Operation Babylift,” the thousands of Vietnamese orphans airlifted to the United States. I learn the first plane filled with orphans has crashed on takeoff, killing most of the children. I hear on the news another boat is found floating adrift in the South China Sea, filled with starving and frightened Vietnamese refugees. Twenty-eight years later, it is April 2003, and I have not forgotten.
The Vietnam War was not discussed in my high school classes or in my household. In 1975, in my home state of California, what I did see and hear of the war dealt mainly with the hippies and their “peace and love” catchphrase, and of course, the thirty minutes of the news with Walter Cronkite on television. I knew there had been a war in Vietnam, but I didn’t understand what the politics were at the time in our country, or in Vietnam. And to tell the truth, I really wasn’t too concerned with world politics at that time in my life. What did trouble me was why so many thousands of Vietnamese were trying to escape and dying in the process. If we lost the war and Vietnam was now united, why were so many Vietnamese fleeing their country? What came of Ho Chi Minh’s vision expressed in his words, “We are ready to unite with whomever from north to south approves peace, unity, independence and democracy, regardless of with whom they collaborated in the past?” (Duiker, 465). I traveled for one week in Vietnam, and interviewed Vietnamese immigrants living in Ohio, in search of answers to my questions. Why did thousands of Vietnamese, who were so attached to their homeland, desperately seek to escape Vietnam when Ho had promised peace, unity, independence, and democracy? The answers became clearer through the accounts of some of those who lived through the war and the transition that followed. Fear of political persecution and loss of basic human rights and freedoms appear clearly in Tran Ngoc An’s (Ann) story of her efforts to escape Vietnam. Similarly, in Cong Nguyen’s account as a boat refugee and leaving his wife and two daughters behind in South Vietnam, his motivation to flee was rooted in the economic struggle of collectivization and foreseen hardships of forced labor in the New Economic Zones. He was willing to endure the hardship of family separation in the near term to establish a sound and secure future for his family in the long term. ***** It was a sultry, beautiful evening in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam on March 14, 2003. I was enjoying our final Vietnamese dinner at a local restaurant with my fourteen classmates, three professors, and our tour guides. For me, and others in the class, it was an emotion-filled evening, as we realized it was our last night in this amazing country whose people had shared their genuine warmth and friendliness. But we weren’t at the restaurant just to satisfy our new-found love for the cuisine we enjoyed so much over the past week, we were also there to listen to the story of Ann and her family’s separation and ultimate reunion as told by her oldest son, Tony Nong. As I listened to Tony telling his family’s story, I could almost feel the heartache and loss endured by his mother, Ann. Ann’s story is one of hope over despair, which began when her husband, a South Vietnamese officer, died in 1974. Ann worked in the American embassy in Saigon as a clerk for the U.S. Agency for International Development. This job provided her with the means to raise her three children; Tony, Tim, and Mimi (PBS, 1). Chaos, however, arrived on April 30, 1975, when the North Vietnamese Army advanced on Saigon, terrifying those who had been loyal to the South Vietnamese government and the Americans. Ann was able to make evacuation arrangements for herself and the children, but her sense of duty to her mother and father, who were to remain in Saigon, was overwhelming. In a brief moment, Ann made what was likely the hardest decision of her life. Faced with a dilemma, she decided to leave her two boys at the airport and return to the city with her daughter in a desperate attempt to bring her parents back to the airport for evacuation from what was sure to be a life of persecution and hardship under the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP). When Ann and her parents returned and tried to enter the embassy compound, it was impossible to get in. Ann says, “When I returned to the embassy, the crowds trying to enter were tremendous. My father tried to climb over the wall, but he couldn’t. I went to the docks to inquire about a boat, but they wanted $5000 and I didn’t have the money. I came home and told my father there was no way out. The whole house cried. Everyone huddled together and cried” (PBS, 2). The days following were dark and no one knew what would happen to people who had supported the Americans and South Vietnamese government. The answer became clear in the summer of 1975. ***** In July 1975, the VCP established “re-education centers” to indoctrinate all people to the ideology of the party. Approximately 400,000 former South Vietnamese were sent to forty re-education centers the communist party set up throughout the country (Lamb, 77). The most vulnerable people for re-education included those who had connections with the United States and former South Vietnamese governments, the well educated, and those in private business. In some cases re-education was for a short time period, but imprisonment could last up to seventeen years. Some detainees were never seen again. In the course of re-educating its prisoners, the VPC designed a program of political indoctrination called “The Five Steps of Aggression of the American Imperialists.” The indoctrination program had five lessons, each designed to analyze and classify the American involvement in Vietnam. The first was titled, “The American Imperialists are the Number One Enemy of Our People and the People of the Entire World” and argued that the Americans had designs on Vietnam since 1945. The second lesson said the Americans had pushed the French out of Vietnam. The third and fourth lessons declared the Americans had created the “civil war” and then the “war of aggression.” Finally, the fifth lesson said the Americans had created the “special war.” Each lesson had its special distinctiveness, but they all followed the same rule:“the whole capitalist bloc was regarded as the enemy of the communists, but the United States was always given the rank of enemy number one” (Hawthorne, 142). After each lesson, prisoners were required to write a summary of their own impressions or take examinations. The prisoners’ impressions and examination results determined the effectiveness of the lessons. If the results did not reflect the VCP’s policies and ideology, other re-education methods were used including hard labor, starvation, sleep deprivation, humiliation, and torture, all designed to destroy prisoners’ will to resist (Dinh, Chapter II, 1).
Ha Thuc Sinh, a Vietnamese poet now living in the United States was a prisoner in a re-education camp from 1975-1980. He writes,
***** Ann survived eighteen months in a re-education center. After her release, she sought ways to support herself, her daughter, and her parents within communist Vietnam. There were few jobs for people previously employed by either the American diplomatic community or the South Vietnamese government. She was but one of the jobless refugees who moved in from the countryside during the war. Using a refrigerator she had purchased at the American Post Exchange, she sold ice on the streets of Saigon for pennies a day. With each passing day, Ann hoped for news of her sons, Tony and Tim. No news came. After the war, the United States established a trade embargo against Vietnam. The embargo not only devastated the country economically, but cut off nearly all communications between the United States and Vietnam. Trying to locate her sons in the United States, Ann recalled, “I had no word from my children. I gave letters to friends going to France and Norway to send. But there was no answer” (PBS, 2). Finally in 1991, after Ann opened a successful travel agency, an American businessman located Tony and Tim in California. Tony told us, “It was in the middle of the night when I heard a voice on the other end saying it was my mother. At first I didn’t believe it, but I will never forget that day.” After sixteen years of separation, Tony returned to live in Vietnam helping his mother run her tour company and relearning his culture and language (PBS, 3). Ann’s fear of political persecution and loss of freedoms drove her to attempt to escape Vietnam with her family. For thousands more Vietnamese, the exodus continued. ***** Throughout the late 1970’s and 1980’s, refugees continued to flee because of the VCP’s population relocation to New Economic Zones. The South China Sea turned into a graveyard for hundreds of thousands of refugees who tried to reach refugee camps located in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong (SEARAC, 1). As Nguyen Ngoc Phach noted, Over the past forty centuries of Vietnamese history there has never been anything like this. However bad the situation was in the country, we have always stayed home. The call of the country for many Vietnamese people is something so incredibly strong, so it must be something really bad for the Vietnamese to go out like this. We have never been famous for things like traveling across the sea, and if we have done that kind of thing lately, it is because life in Vietnam has become unlivable. You remember we have been having war for the past forty years, but you didn’t get any exodus before 1975. How come we’ve got it now? (Hawthorne, 236). The floundering economy was only part of the motivation behind creating New Economic Zones. When the VCP formed the New Economic Zones in 1975, its main purpose was to break up the existing social structure, increase food production, and alleviate the overwhelming number of people in urban areas, especially Ho Chi Minh City (Library of Congress, 3). Much of Vietnam was devastated during the war from bombing and use of chemical defoliation agents, such as Agent Orange. Many undetonated bombs are still buried in the ground. Other areas were unsuitable for crops because of poor soil, large trees, and overgrown vegetation. The New Economic Zones were supervised by the VCP, who used various re-education and communication programs to raise class-consciousness. This awareness promoted class struggle against the middle and upper classes of Vietnamese, ostracizing them as social outcasts. This social exclusion was one of the several reasons many Vietnamese middle class left Vietnam as “boat people.” Cong Nguyen was one such outcast in search of a route to freedom and a better life. ***** In the years between 1975 and 1979, Cong Nguyen endured many hardships to ensure the safe and secure future for his family. Before the VCP implemented its policy of population relocation in New Economic Zones, Cong and his wife Anh were owners of a successful clothing shop in Saigon and parents to two daughters, Ngan and Nguyet. In the fall of 1975, VCP officials came to the shop and seized the building and its inventory. Cong was ordered to work on a collective farm near Cholon—he had never farmed one day in his life. With little knowledge of farming and inferior tools to work the soil, Cong spent two years trying to make a living farming infertile, war-torn land. In addition to the usual problems of drought, floods, and plagues of insects, the VCP’s forced collectivization of agriculture led to disastrous harvests and forced the country --one of the greatest rice-producing areas on Earth -- to import rice to feed its people. Cong, separated from his family, who were then living with Anh’s parents in Saigon, made the decision to escape the collective farm and secretly return to Saigon. Cong remarked, I knew I could no longer take care of my family in my country. I had to find a way for us to survive. The only way for me to do that was to leave the country. My problem was I had little money to pay for all of us and the girls were too young. So Anh and I decided I would be the one to leave and try to get to the United States. My mother and sister were already living there and I knew I could get a job and then help my family get out. But it was a very difficult decision to leave my family (Nguyen, Personal Interview). Cong had many friends still living in Saigon, and with their help in 1978, he made contact with the owner of a boat who negotiated an acceptable price to take a small number of refugees to Malaysia. Cong was told he should bring enough water for two weeks and food would be provided for the journey. The tide was low when they left in the middle of the night and when the boat reached the South China Sea they felt free for the first time in years. But freedom had its price, and when the sun rose the second day, he found the boat owner had not provided food for the refugees. The group of approximately twenty-five people sailed for thirteen days with only water to drink. Exhausted and weak from hunger, they reached Malaysia’s shores. According to Cong, “We were very lucky there were so few of us. It was a happy day for us when we were taken to a camp on an island. The Red Cross helped us get food, shelter, and complete the paperwork we needed to get to the United States. Now I had to get the rest of my family out of Vietnam” (Nguyen). ***** Cong’s voyage to Malaysia had a happy ending, but many escape attempts ended in tragedy. Approximately one million South Vietnamese, five percent of the South’s population, fled Vietnam by boat (Lamb, 78). Of those one million, over half of the boat refugees are estimated to have perished in the South China Sea (Cargill and Huynh, 4). In July 1979, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) met with the United Nations to report on the plight of the boat people from Indochina. The UNHCR reported, “Many thousands of boat cases have been rescued on the high seas by passing vessels. The craft used by the boat cases are often overloaded and unseaworthy. Boat cases have also reported that passing vessels have ignored distress signals. Regrettably, therefore, persons have been lost at sea not only when rescue was not at hand, but also as a result of disregard of distress signal” (UNHCR, Annex I, Item 19). The UNHCR also reported that some boats, even after reaching land, were towed back out to sea, some over-crowded ships were held offshore for many months, and Thai pirates were attacking refugee boats and abducting, raping and killing the refugees. In 1979, in response to these problems, the UNHCR granted over 43 million U.S. dollars in assistance to the countries settling the refugees and taking firm action to resolve the problems on the sea (UNHCR, Annex I, Item 16). In 1997, the UNHCR released statistics of Vietnamese refugees. During the period between mid-1975 and mid-1996, a total of 839,228 Vietnamese were registered and assigned to refugee camps assisted by the UNHCR, located mainly located in Southeast and East Asia. In this same time frame, 755,670 refugees were relocated in third countries such as the United States, England, Australia, and Canada (Cargill, 183).
***** Cong Nguyen was one of those relocated refugees. In the fall of 1979, Cong arrived in the United States, greeted by his mother and sister who live in Cincinnati, Ohio. When talking about his journey and eight-year separation from his wife and two daughters, Cong says, “I was one of the lucky ones who survived. So many Vietnamese who were good people did not. The hardest thing for me was waiting so long to get my wife and daughters into the United States. When the United States started the Orderly Departure Program it became much easier, but the next time I saw my little girls, they were not so little anymore” (Nguyen). Eight years after Cong arrived in the United States, his wife and daughters were accepted into the Orderly Departure Program, ending the family’s hardship of separation and beginning a new life of freedom. ***** In 1979, as a direct result of the mistreatment of boat refugees’ and the hundreds of thousands who perished in the South China Sea, the UNHCR and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, in cooperation with countries providing refuge, created the Orderly Departure Program. According to the UNHCR, “ a Memorandum of Understanding was concluded on 30 May 1979 between the Government and that Office regarding a seven-point programme for the orderly departure from Viet Nam of “family reunion and other humanitarian cases” (UNHCR, Agenda Item IIIC, 27). The Orderly Departure Program marked a new phase in international policies showing the world many nations were capable -- with some prodding -- of working together to save lives and provide a safe haven for refugees. In response to the United Nations Orderly Departure Program, the United States Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980, defining a refugee as “a person outside his or her country with a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” (Cerquone, 5). The Refugee Act continues to provide legal admission into the United States and also provides immediate essential services. Continued services through government and humanitarian agencies include establishment of refugees into housing, contribution of clothing, English-language tutoring, orientation to community services, and cash and medical assistance (Office of Refugee Resettlement, 1). In 1975, the Vietnam Communist Party’s ideology was to quickly achieve a classless society, thereby eliminating the old "ruling and dominating" classes. As noted earlier, the VCP established re-education centers and New Economic Zones throughout the country in an attempt to achieve socialist policies. These policies never achieved their goals. Several million Vietnamese would attempt to escape their homeland in fear of political persecution and in search of the basic human rights and freedoms denied by the VCP. Ironically, on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh had said, All men are created equal. They are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This immortal statement appeared in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, it means: All peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free (Duiker, 323). Unfortunately, refugees believed the only way to achieve these basic freedoms, human rights, and happiness, was to flee their country, leaving behind their living immediate families and the generations of their dead. ***** Tony’s Nong’s evacuation from Vietnam and subsequent separation from his mother, Cong Nguyen’s personal account of his and so many other boat people’s exodus from Vietnam, and his anguish over separation from his family and homeland, and my own personal motivation to fill a long standing void in my memory of the Vietnam War, have compelled me to write about the tragedies and triumphs Vietnamese refugees experienced at the conclusion of the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, Ann survived a re-education camp and hardships, making a good life out of basically nothing. After sixteen years of separation from her sons, her oldest son Tony lives in Vietnam working with her and helping to expand the family business. Tony’s desire to return to his homeland is not unusual. Many refugees would return if opportunities in Vietnam were afforded them. In the United States, Cong Nguyen and his wife have good jobs, a beautiful home, and the opportunity to educate their daughters. But while talking with him about Vietnam, I sensed a deep sadness within. I asked him if he missed his country. He replied, “I will always miss Vietnam. It is where my heart is, and my father is buried there. If things ever change with the government, we will return to live. Here in the United States I have a good job and can take care of my family, but sometimes it is hard when you’re missing a part of yourself” (Nguyen). For the vast majority of refugees, including Tony Nong and Cong Nguyen, the idea of returning to Vietnam lives in their hearts and minds. After my own brief visit to Vietnam and my experiences with the genuine warmth and friendliness of the Vietnamese people, Vietnam lives in my heart and mind, as well. Based on my research of Vietnamese refugees, including the personal accounts of two families who lived through the Vietnam post-war transition, the grass outside Vietnam was temporarily greener given the choices. Yet, the peace where the heart and mind is drawn to, truly offer the greener pastures. WORKS CITED Cargill, Mary and Huynh, Jade, Eds. Voices of Vietnamese Boat People. McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers. Jefferson, North Carolina. 2000. Cerquone, Joseph. Issue Paper. Uncertain Harbors: The Plight of Vietnamese Boat People. U. S. Committee for Refugees.1987. Dalgish, Carol. Refugees from Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press. New York, New York. 1989. Dinh, Ngoc Que . The Memoirs of a Priest Imprisoned by Communists . 2002. March 30, 2003. www.geocities.com/dnqbook/en/intro_1.htm Duiker, William J. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. Hyperion Publishing. New York, New York. 2000. Hawthorne, Lesleyanne. The Vietnamese Experience. Oxford University Press, Hong Kong. 1982. Lamb, David. Vietnam Now, A Reporter Returns. Perseus Books Group, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2002. Library of Congress. Glossary of Vietnam. 2002. March 20, 2003. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/vietnam/vn_glos.html Nguyen, Cong. Personal Interview. March 30, 2003. Office of Refugee Resettlement. U.S. Resettlement Program-An Overview. June 6, 2002. April 2003. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/programs/overviewrp.htm PBS. Public Broadcasting System. Vietnam Passage. The Stories: Ann. Wind & Stars Production Group. 2002. March 29, 2003. www.pbs.org/vietnampassage/Stories/stories.ann.02.html SEARAC. Southeast Asia Resource Action Center. Vietnam Refugees. 2003. March 29, www.searac.org/vietref.html Sinh, Thuc Ha. The Devoted Friend: Literature. 2002. March 23, 2003. www.geocities.com/suthatcsvn/hts/devoted friend.html Trudeau, Gary. Doonesbury. Comic Strips from 1975. www.doonesbury.com United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Protecting Refugees . Meeting on Refugees and Displaced Persons in South-East Asia , convened by the Secretary-General of the United Nations at Geneva, on 20 and 21 July 1979. March 25, 2003. http://www.unhcr.org |
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