Life in Exile - 40 years after the fall of Saigon

Over the last ten years, as my dad got progressively sicker, I wondered when he came to terms with the fact that he would die in America. Up until the age of 10, I had always heard him speak of Vietnam as a place he would return to one day. It was with all certainty that this life in exile was only temporary.

He and his friends, political expats and journalists, would stay up to wee hours of the morning talking about returning home as liberators. No way would they ever go back with it still under Communist rule. On top of humiliation, they did not wish to risk imprisonment. My mom came close once when her mother, whom she had not seen since she left Vietnam, was dying. She booked a flight and made all the preparations only to have her pass away the week before. The trip was canceled. In junior high, I remember wearing a "Democracy for Vietnam" shirt, likely inspired by China's Tianenmen Square movement. But at some point, after his first set of strokes, my mom and dad bought neighboring plots at the nearby cemetery. At some point, those conversations of returning home must have ended. He had watched President Clinton re establish diplomatic and trade relations with Vietnam and I remember him saying that it was a short term win for the people of Vietnam but a long term win for the Communist government. Why fight for freedom when capitalism has come to town?

While I grew up surrounded by these conversations, this fight could not have been more foreign to me. Their story of how they lost the country and made their way to the States usually starts and ends with their successful push past the embassy gates (captured in a famous photograph and film that eventually made the cover of Newsweek). They had arrived and were pressed up against them by the hordes of panic-stricken Vietnamese, trying to get out using every connection they could. And thanks to the generosity and love of embassy staff and Marines, many had gained access within the walls and some had already been airlifted out. But my parents were late to the party. They had waited for a phone call from an official that never came so on their own, they headed to the embassy with my dad's mom and his younger sister. My dad's childhood best friend and his wife rounded out the group. No one at that point was gaining access to the embassy. But by chance (Viet Catholics attribute many things to fortune and divine intervention), a South Vietnamese General and CIA liaison arrived and was escorted through. At this point, the hordes surged forward and suddenly my dad, aunt, mom and grandma were inside the embassy gates. When they looked back, they saw that my dad's best friend and wife were on the wrong side (later imprisoned in "re-education camps" for years before finally emigrating to Canada). Here's where they usually end it. "We were lucky to get through those gates," they'd say. But it was at this point that my dad was approached by a soldier with a bullhorn who inquired if he spoke English. He said, "yes," and was thrust the bullhorn, asked to translate instructions and gather a group of sixty. My dad did as he was told, craftily counting his own entourage as the first people in the group. As he approached sixty, he handed the bullhorn back to the soldier and joined the group. They were led to a bus, which then took a most circuitous route through Saigon to the harbor where they disembarked. There they waited for what seemed like an eternity, certain that they had been abandoned to die by the hands of the incoming Viet Cong. But then at night fall, a barge approached them and instructed them to board. That group of sixty was joined by hundreds more. And on that barge they floated down the river and into the Pacific for days. No food. No water. No certainties. It was on the fourth day that an American ship pulled up alongside them and hoisted the refugees aboard. They were fed and sprayed down and cleaned. They were taken to Guam and then shortly after to a church-sponsored refugee camp in Arkansas where they stayed for a week. Then they relocated to Virginia where my aunt and her GI husband resided. The rest is history, as they say.

What is left out of this story is that thousands of Vietnamese gained refuge that day. There were really no solid evacuation plans, especially ones that involved the rescuing of thousands of South Vietnamese. And yet, somehow they made their way into the U.S. Embassy without any formal communication, gained access, boarded helicopters meant for embassy personnel and the ambassador and taken to safe havens in places like the Philippines and Guam before restarting in America. They were amongst angels that day -- military and diplomats -- who risked their lives, going against protocol to grant as many Vietnamese asylum as possible. The soldiers at the gate that turned the other way or waved people through without necessary paperwork. The Navy personnel on the war ships that allowed South Vietnamese Huey helicopters to land and unload hundreds of frightened refugees (giving them blankets and clothes as they huddled aboard). The special ops and Marines who guided caravans down rivers, skies and streets to get people to safety. The Marines who stayed behind atop the embassy, awaiting that last helicopter, hearts heavy that they could not take the remaining 400 Vietnamese inside the embassy.

The choices they made in these last hours. The fear they must have had throughout this ordeal. The courage they had to risk their lives with no certain outcomes. When they were waiting for this barge for hours, only to get on and float for days in the Pacific - What did they do to steel themselves, to remain sane in the face of insanity? Did they ever doubt themselves and want to run home? What conversations did they have to comfort one another when they gathered in foreign places like Guam and Arkansas?

Forty years after the fall of Saigon, I realize how much of my very American life came at the sacrifice of my parents' Vietnamese life. He maintained that we were Vietnamese. Us children were to speak Vietnamese in the house, use chopsticks, eat rice every night, take our shoes off and never be lazy like the Americans around us. And of course, all us children wanted to do was be more American. I wanted to change my name to something like Rick or Peter, become a cop and eat meatloaf. I had no Vietnamese accent, having been born in D.C. I never learned how to read Vietnamese, much to my parents' chagrin. I listened to Nirvana and Bob Dylan, majored in film instead of medicine or law and lived far from home in cities like Boston and Philadelphia. My wife is a girl from the mountains of Pennsylvania, of German and French-Canadian descent, and we eloped to Vegas, royally pissing off my traditionalist dad who threw a reception anyways because he was not to be cheated out of an opportunity to be celebrated. I work in one of the most important classical theatres in the country, in our nation's capital -- instead of practicing accounting or something more respectable. Imagine the disappointment. I can't fathom what it is like to live your life, dreaming a future the way young, passionate people do, training and going to school, investing --- only to have that entire future vanish overnight. One year, you're getting married and you're the talk of the town - driving a company car and having lavish Mad Men-like nights on the town. The next, you're scrambling through the crowded streets of Saigon with no plan but to survive - ending up in America, something that they never aspired to.

And here my dad died, after living in exile for 39 years. I hope that when he accepted the fact that he was going to spend the rest of his life here, never being able to revisit his homeland, that he embraced  America for all that it had given us. But I also hope that he took pride in his and my mom's sacrifice. I hope that he acknowledged the immense courage it took to start anew in a strange land with customs and traditions so foreign to him. I hope he understands how proud and humbled I am by the fact that this philosophy major, a revered student leader in Vietnam with a bright future in government ahead, pumped gas while my mom made sandwiches to raise their newborn boy. I hope he realized how amazing it was that he eventually re-established himself as a Vietnamese journalist in the nation's capital, broadcasting un-censored news back to his homeland. I hope that he came to celebrate that his very American children with their poor Vietnamese, their love of bacon cheeseburgers, their bohemian careers, their WASP significant others and adorable American-named grandchildren were his greatest legacy. And I hope that tonight, he knows that his son is thinking of him and how much he appreciates him for the fortunate life he now leads.