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We are Here
By Cat Thao Nguyen Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2015 Thao Nguyen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-731-5
CHAPTER 1
Ten taels of gold
I was born, two months premature, in a former prison. Sikhiu refugee camp was on the Thai side of the Thai — Cambodian border. At the time, the world only knew of people fleeing Vietnam by boat. My family had travelled by foot.
In 1969 President Nixon began the first modest withdrawal of US forces which had been fighting to prevent South Vietnam from takeover by the Communist North. The South struggled on with depleted resources while the North Vietnamese advanced steadily over the next few years towards the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. Through March and April 1975 remaining American military and civilian personnel were evacuated. On 30 April 1975, Saigon finally fell. The iconic images of a North Vietnamese tank storming the gates of the revered Presidential Palace demonstrated unequivocal defeat. A mass exodus of South Vietnamese refugees through the late 1970s and early 1980s followed. The world watched the images of countless crammed boats perilously leaving the shores of Vietnam, drifting haphazardly throughout the South China Sea. For some of the escapees, destiny led them to islands like Pulau Bidong off the Malaysian peninsula and to refugee camps in Thailand. Some would make it as far as America, Canada and Europe; others, crammed like animals into boats that were barely seaworthy, falling victim to pirates, disease or starvation, wouldn't make it at all. Within four years of the end of the war, my own family would embark upon an exodus from Vietnam — a similarly treacherous journey.
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My family is from the rural district of Gò Dau in the southeast province of Tây Ninh, approximately sixty kilometres northwest of Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City). The district is only ten kilometres from the Moc Bài border crossing between Vietnam and Cambodia. The province is bordered by Cambodia on three sides.
My father's father was a successful businessman and his family was one of the first in Tây Ninh province to own an automobile — an imported European car. He was a solemn, hard-working man with a deep sense of pride. Many people in Gò Dau still recall his integrity and work ethic. He passed away when my father was just a young man. I have only ever seen one photo of him. It sits on the ancestral altar in my parents' house. I can recognise my father's enquiring eyes in the black and white image of my grandfather.
My mother's family was much poorer than my father's. They lived in a small hamlet on land that had been in my maternal grandmother's family for generations. On this land, large clusters of bamboo grew and children played in safety among the burial places of ancestors surrounded by coconut and durian trees.
In the 1950s, during the French colonial rule of Vietnam, several forces emerged. Cao Ðài is a religion born of Tây Ninh province and blends Buddhist, Christian and Confucian thought. At the time, it had its own army of soldiers headquartered in the Cao Ðài Holy See in Tây Ninh. They were known as French sympathisers. The Viet Minh was an anti-French group fighting for independence that later, after the withdrawal of the French, evolved into what became the anti-American, pro-Communist Viet Cong. The Cao Ðài and Viet Minh soldiers were the only Vietnamese forces in the South who were armed with guns and other weaponry. During the day, my mother's family, like many others, were terrorised by the French, who accused the villagers of harbouring anti-colonists. It was not uncommon for rogue soldiers from either the Viet Minh or Cao Ðài army to rob and beat them at night. The family would hide their money in the treetops using tall bamboo stalks and routinely survey the premises. But despite their efforts, they consistently fell victim to abuse and exploitation. Like many others, they were humble civilians governed by fear.
My maternal grandfather was angered by the visible injustices of being ruled by white men. He became a passionate French resistance activist, leading a group of young revolutionaries. As an unusually tall man with a fierce commanding presence, he was a natural leader. But his activities increased the family's adversity. He was repeatedly arrested and tortured. With each arrest, my grandmother had to procure loans in order to pay bribes to secure her husband's release. Such consistent disruption was the reason why my mother's family was less well off than my father's. The family was in constant debt yet, despite this, my mother's parents ensured that all their children were educated. They believed freedom and independence could not be achieved without literacy. Opportunity could not blossom without education.
According to my mother, my father was known as a man with a high level of self-respect. Others called it arrogance, accusing him of being an intellectual snob. He kept to himself, immersed in the study of literature, history and French. He was particularly fond of the play Les Misérables. As a teenager, he moved to the central highland province of Lâm Ðong, four hundred kilometres from Tây Ninh, to attend a special agricultural high school. As a young student he cherished the few international colour periodicals the school was able to obtain. He fondly remembers sitting in the library as the periodicals were removed from glass cabinets. Under strict supervision, he gently turned and caressed each page of text and each image, indulging in his deep affection for literature. He was a reflective young man, always deep in thought, in marked contrast to his confident and extroverted younger brother. Though my father studied agricultural production, he had a strong inclination for scholarship, particularly arts and literature. After graduating from high school in 1966, my father moved to Saigon to do an extra year of study in agricultural production before enrolment at university. He specialised in forest management and went on internships throughout Southern Vietnam, studying the effects of mangrove and acacia plantations on soil erosion.
Throughout this time, the Vietnam War was raging. In 1968, both sides agreed to a two-day ceasefire during the sacred Lunar New Year celebrations of Tet. Nonetheless, the Northern Communist forces launched a surprise attack on 30 January 1968, the first day of Tet. The bloody attacks on military and civilian command centres were subsequently known as the Tet Offensive. In the aftermath of the attack, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu imposed conscription to increase the resources of the South. Most able-bodied men were required to participate in the war efforts. All those who were uneducated or couldn't bribe their way into higher, safer positions were sent to the front line. Many did not return.
That same year, my young introspective father joined the military as a lieutenant in the Transportation Artillery Unit. Though my mother's family was not very well off, her family was well connected. Her uncle was deputy director of prosecutions in the South Vietnamese justice system. Another uncle was a colonel who travelled in his own helicopter and was never without an entourage of guards. Thanks to these connections, my mother's brothers were made captains and lieutenants in the police force, postings that kept them safe from the front line, far from the deafening booms of gunfire and bombs. The insignia on their uniforms indicated their rank. Women looked yearningly upon them with adulation as the men walked the streets with glowing pride, collecting pockets of admiration.
Meanwhile, the North was faring well in the war of propaganda, inspiring a loyal following among poor peasants in the South who were disillusioned with their own poverty and drawn in by Communist ideals of classlessness and shared ownership of land. In an effort to recapture the devotion of the peasantry, in 1970 President Thieu announced a land reform initiative. Under the program, the government would purchase unused or abandoned private property and use existing state holdings to grant land to peasants. Low -interest loans would be issued to these new landowners to start their agricultural businesses. The program required capable and knowledgeable people to assist in its administration. In 1973, my father passed the required exam to become one of two officers in the Mekong Delta province of Can Tho assess and approve these microfinance loans. He was then permitted to leave his position in the military.
For two years, until the fall of Saigon, my father visited small villages and spoke to peasants about their business plans. He talked to them about rice seeds, fertiliser, animals and machinery. At the time, there was a new breed of rice that was ready for harvest only three months after planting. It was known as the rice from the heavens. The land reform program was successful and brought prosperity to many. Amid a persistent war, my father provided hope for countless poverty-stricken families to carve out a better life. He understood how a simple official signature could radically shift the fate of weather-beaten men and women who lived in unremarkable mud huts. Desperation came in the form of bribes and while others were tempted, my father never took a single cent. He embraced his responsibility with objective fairness: signs of a principled and courageous man who frequently witnessed how lives were transformed before his very eyes.
And still the war kept on. It was a time of uplifting war songs, when girls fell in love with uniformed men, and American products and lifestyles were imported into South Vietnam. Concurrently, images of the horror and bloodiness of the war and the bodies of American soldiers were beamed into the living rooms of American families. Anti-war protests ensued around the world. Diplomats met, bombs dropped, journalists wrote and people continued to die.
My mother had moved to Saigon to study law. She lived in a small haunted house in District 4. At night, as she climbed into the wooden loft to sleep, she would hear the scraping of furniture as the souls of agitated dead soldiers meandered below. Not far from the house was a small canal where occasionally bodies would be found drifting.
The screams of destruction and the scent of death continued for a few more years until North Vietnamese forces stormed into Saigon to capture the city on 30 April 1975. North Vietnamese tanks rolled down the main boulevards, past the lounge bars the American GIs had frequented. Viet Cong soldiers, previously in hiding in the South, appeared suddenly in full public view, marching through the streets. My mother watched as people, driven by panic, began to run. She didn't know where they were going but they just ran in a wave of deranged and violent hysteria. South Vietnamese soldiers dumped their weapons in the canal near my mother's house and stripped themselves of evidence that they were associated with the fallen regime, for fear of the coming retribution. Some decided it was smarter to immediately join the North Vietnamese forces on the day of the fall of Saigon. These became known as 30 April soldiers. But for many, this act and any other futile attempts to hide their poisoned history would not save them.
My father was at work when Saigon fell. In the office, his colleagues were overwhelmed with fear as they began to understand the ramifications. They were right to be afraid; in the months and years following the fall of Saigon, those associated with the former regime were punished and persecuted. Decorated soldiers, diplomats and government officials of the South were decried as enemies and traitors of the new Vietnam. People's courts tried class enemies. Land and assets were seized and redistributed. The rise of the proletariat crystallised. Farmers became landowners and gardeners became governors. Viet Cong who had lived secretly in and around the Americans and the soldiers of the South emerged brazen and bold. They were neighbours, school teachers and family members. Government and private offices were taken over.
My father's sister's rice-husking mill was appropriated by newly appointed Communist officials who had until recently been uneducated peasants. They moved into her house and publicly denounced her as a rotten capitalist in a type of people's 'court' at a gathering of local villagers. Although she was known to be kind and fair in her business dealings, those who did not denounce her as a traitor were viewed with suspicion. If she had mistreated anyone she ever dealt with, this became a trial of revenge. At the insistence of the officials overseeing the hearing, some villagers reluctantly came forward to condemn her. But despite the possible retribution, others came to her defence. Similar scenes played out around the country, though the former workers and farmers who became powerful government officers were not always as forgiving as those who had previously been powerless and now revelled in a new world order.
My father was ordered to continue to work. He sat there idly as the Viet Cong tried to implement tasks in the transition to Communism. Immediately, the old unacceptable money bearing the Southern Republic's imprints had to be changed. My father watched as people came in and out of the office to change their money. He was constantly harassed and interrogated by his new bosses, seeking intelligence about people he knew. Where are they? What are they doing? Who are they related to? The harassment escalated as the Communist officers became increasingly paranoid about secret assemblies of resistance. Eventually my father was sent to a re-education camp; the higher the rank, the longer the sentence. My father was imprisoned for two years, while my uncles who had been captains were held for ten years. The camps were designed to punish, humiliate and decisively break men who were seen as traitors for siding with foreign oppressors. Their purpose was to introduce the men to the notions of Communism and assimilate them. On a few occasions my maternal grandfather made the long trek north to visit my uncles at the camp near the Chinese border. They were barely skin and bone, forced to eat only what they could catch: rats, cockroaches and lizards. They were nguy, filthy people who had betrayed their country.
At the time, my father's family still had hidden wealth. They pulled together sufficient money to bribe officials to release him. While physically he'd survived his two years of imprisonment, the horrific experience would forever change him. I have never learned the details of what happened to him during that time, and I have understood never to ask.
Meanwhile, all the males in my mother's family except for her father and her youngest brother, who was only fourteen years old, were imprisoned in re-education camps. Their lineage meant harsh persecution by the new authorities. Within a short period of time, the four remaining children — the three eldest of whom were daughters — were charged with the family's survival. The hardships they experienced in the early years after the war are almost unfathomable. For example, the three sisters shared one pair of pants between them and therefore only one of them could leave the house at a time. This sole pair of pants was patched again and again and again in a ridiculous ensemble of brokenness.
As the implementation of Communist reforms gathered momentum, almost everything was controlled and rationed by the government. The production, supply and movement of commodities were strictly monitored. Official government outlets were set up to trade approved goods. Trade outside government channels was prohibited given that, now in the new Vietnam, private enterprise was illegal. Each individual was permitted to purchase rations of essentials. Registered households with proper documentation accounting for each individual in the residence were permitted to pool their rations. Every month, families, clutching their residence registration documents, would line up outside government warehouses to purchase small quotas of essentials, such as sugar, salt, rice and MSG. There were severe shortages and often after lining up for hours there were no products left to purchase. Naturally, a black market emerged.
My mother, with her entrepreneurial and audacious spirit, decided to trade in unrationed produce. Goods could not be transported outside a delineated area of production. What was produced in Gò Da had to remain in Gò Da. This included meat and rice. With unrationed raw pork tied to her belly underneath her clothes, she would ride the buses that ran between Gò Da and Saigon, where she sold the meat to black market vendors in the city at higher prices than those set by the government. She became known to the drivers and the bus inspectors on key routes, and they offered her sympathy and protection. (According to my aunt, being a pretty unmarried girl in her early twenties didn't hurt; that rule is the same everywhere!) After she handed over the meat trade to her sisters, my mother moved into operating an illegal rice trade. At night, the rice farmers would hide in the darkness in small boats on the river. From the back of her house along the riverbank, my mother would keep a lookout. When it seemed safe, she would light a lamp as a signal. The boat would quickly emerge from the darkness, and head towards the shore to deliver the rice to her for distribution. It was a risky exercise, each and every time, an uncertain dance of luck and danger, as capture would have meant imprisonment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We are Here by Cat Thao Nguyen. Copyright © 2015 Thao Nguyen. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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