CHAPTER 25

SCARBOROUGH, ONTARIO

HE MAKES A WAY

SUMMERTIME 1996

Around the same time that the Lord was helping me to relinquish long-carried fears and showing me how to minister to my expanding family, we became more deeply involved with our church community and were growing spiritually in rapid fashion. Toan had begun taking the Bible at its word, believing it was not fantasy but trustworthy truth, which was no small thing given the Marxist, evolutionist cloth from which my husband was cut. In addition, Toan had secured and was thriving in a paid position at the University of Toronto as a filing clerk in the admissions office. There he made a new friend, a fellow Christian who was saving money to return to his native Hong Kong and share the gospel with his countrymen. Weeks later, at a missions conference at our church, Toan was so moved by the missionaries’ radical testimonies that he wondered if he, too, felt a prompting from God.

“Kim,” he said, “this Christian approach to life would benefit so many of my family and friends back in North Vietnam. I think I am supposed to become a missionary so that I can go tell them the Good News about grace.”

I shook my head in amazement over all that God had done in Toan’s life. The changes were so drastic and happened so fast!

Toan knew the first step in fulfilling that dream was to go to Bible college. It would cost eight thousand dollars for one year. We did not have eight thousand dollars—we barely had eight dollars. But I knew that extra zeroes are not obstacles to God. And so, as you might now guess, I prayed. With great fervency, I prayed to God. “Lord, we need money!” I said to him, as though this would come as breaking news. “Toan wishes to attend Bible college, Father, but he cannot go unless he can pay the dues!”

The money wasn’t the only issue that seemed to stand in our way. We were still living in Chinatown, located a good hour’s drive away from the school Toan had chosen—Faithway Baptist College of Canada—and the only thing we had for transportation was a beat-up 1984 Honda Accord that did not always like to run.

“Father, we need money, and we need a reliable car.” I laid our needs before God, their full weight thudding to the floor beneath me. “Lord? You see our needs here, yes?”

Evidently God did see our need, for in a creative collision of events that only he could orchestrate, he combined my decision to stop living in fear with Toan’s decision to stop living for himself, and emerged with a truly magnificent plan. This plan involved the media in Canada, an irony that amused both Toan and me.

I had told Mom Nancy that I wanted to work, to help support my family while Toan went to school. “Kim,” Mom Nancy had said in reply, “if you want to do anything ‘out there,’ you will have to embrace the picture you have been trying so hard to run from. You will have to endure an onslaught of publicity if you wish to help Toan.”

I told Mom Nancy that I had already resolved in my heart to stop living ashamed of my past, of my pain. “I can do this,” I said to her. “You arrange everything for me.”

Mom Nancy looked at me for a moment, weighing my seriousness. “All right, Kim,” she said at last, “if you’re sure, then I can help.”

Within a matter of days, Mom Nancy had arranged a meeting for Toan and me with entertainment lawyer Michael Levine, who quickly set up a whole series of interviews and opportunities for me. One television reporter who interviewed me subsequently established a trust fund for us, funded by readers’ donations. The producer on that story, a brilliant Scottish woman named Anne Bayin, befriended me. We talked each week by phone, and whenever Toan was unable to travel with me to media events, Anne would accompany me. As she and I spent more and more time together, I realized Anne was an answer to my prayer for a friend as close as my childhood friend Hanh.

“How you say w in English?” I would ask Auntie Anne.

“It is wuh, Kim . . . water, wiggle, wonderful,” she would patiently coach me.

On a speaking trip to Barcelona, my pain came to me so unexpectedly and with such force before a lavish dinner that I feared I would not be able to make the keynote speech. I looked at Anne, seated at the table next to me and said, “Oh, Auntie Anne, the pain. . . . It is too much for me tonight. I cannot sit still over dinner. I must get up and move.”

Auntie Anne rushed over to the event coordinator, whispered a few sentences, motioned for me to get up, and then escorted me into the night air. “Come, Kim,” she said with a gentle smile. “Let’s walk.”

Auntie Anne and I must have circled the center sixteen times that night. After what had to have been a full hour, I stopped, exhaled, and said, “Better. I am ready to go back now.”

As we made our way to the head table, I had a few minutes to gather myself before taking the stage. How lucky I am to have a friend such as this. Some twenty-plus years later, she is still my dearest friend.

That initial burst of publicity led to another offer, this time from a publishing house that was interested in “my book.”

“But I do not have a book,” I remember saying to them, to which they replied, “We would like to help you change that.”

Would you like to venture a guess as to how much money they wanted to pay me for telling my tale?

Eight thousand dollars, on the nose. Oh, Father, you are so good.

As soon as that check for eight thousand dollars arrived, Toan wasted no time in registering for Bible college, and we moved once again, finding housing closer to the college. Toan would not have to worry about a long commute with an unreliable car.

The publisher connected me with a writer, Ms. Denise Chong. The book-writing process was equal parts rigorous and satisfying. The rigor was twofold. First, the only way that Ms. Chong and I could communicate was in English, and I was still pitifully poor on that front. I recall those interview sessions being long and laborious as she and I searched for ways to align intention with words.

The second, and more consequential, challenge I faced was forcing my flagging memory to recall countless details of the life I had lived. What had I thought as I was running up Route 1 just after the napalm bombs had dropped? Who did come to see me while I was recovering at the Barsky, and what did they say to me? When did communist minders start forcing me to sit for staged interviews? How did I cope with my pain? So many questions Ms. Chong had for me; so few answers readily available. But then, a sliver of remembrance would surface. And like a fragment of light from a cracked door that illuminates an entire room, that sliver would open up my memory in ways I did not think were possible. I would double check my facts with Uncle Ut, or with Mister Kretz, or with news clippings I had compiled, and before long, I cobbled together an entire scene—yes, yes, this is how things unfolded that day.

I was grateful that the memories returned, but for me the greater satisfaction in the process of piecing together my past was realizing that I was no longer bitter about the trauma I had experienced. Yes, I still had my terrible, stubborn scars, but the anger I had carried for so many years was gone, left behind. A few of the photographs included in The Girl in the Picture, published in 1999, were images I had never seen before. One in particular that Mister Kretz had taken showed me showering outside in Trang Bang. I looked at the photo and thought, That poor, poor little girl. It was as though God had distanced me from the agony. I was no longer facing the pain I had endured.

While I was busy on the book, Toan studied hard, preparing himself for the multiple trips he would take to North Vietnam during midterm breaks from school. Emboldened by the protections afforded us as Canadian citizens to travel to our homeland, he visited his family on these trips, holding secret house church services and leading hundreds of people to Christ, including his uncle, a devout communist. Toan’s uncle had been gravely ill and did not express any interest in “Toan’s God” until my husband’s final day of his first trip. When Toan went to bid him farewell, that uncle dissolved into waves of tears and said, “Toan, I wish to be saved! I agree to accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior!” Six months later, Toan’s uncle passed away.

During Toan’s second trip to the North, he visited his father, who had fallen ill and was hospitalized. “My father is the firstborn in his family,” Toan said to me prior to his departure. “To choose to believe in God would be a terrible betrayal in the eyes of his family. You must pray for me each day I am gone, Kim.”

I prayed like I had never prayed before while Toan was at his father’s side, and yet the news I received from Toan only worsened day by day. His father was no longer taking food and appeared skinny and frail. The family, assuming the end was near, prepared a coffin and sat quietly, waiting for his death. And yet there knelt Toan beside his father’s bed, pleading with heaven for healing, trusting for a miracle to unfold.

On Toan’s third day in his father’s hospital room, his father opened his eyes, which had been shut for more than twenty-four hours. Then he cupped Toan’s chin with his feeble hand and whispered, “Son, I accept Jesus Christ.” Toan’s father not only righted himself with God, but also made a complete recovery. He is alive and well as I write these words.

Toan and I both counted ourselves among the millions of Christ followers down through the ages who have witnessed God’s miraculous faithfulness firsthand. Of course, what I did not know at the time was that God was just getting started—a tsunami of blessings was headed our way.