THE TWO-STORY HOUSE IN SOC TRANG HAD A FLAT roof that my family could access and use as a balcony to look down on the surrounding neighborhood. My sister Yen remembers staring down from the rooftop at the neighborhood children, who always seemed to be having so much fun despite their shabby clothes and relative poverty. Yen envied them. She wished she could play with them, but other children were afraid to play with her because they were from poorer families and they feared what might happen to their parents if they ever dared to get into a fight with one of the privileged Chung children.
Family wealth permitted the purchase of luxury items no one else in town could afford. My grandmother bought the family a refrigerator, but because electricity was unreliable, she never plugged it in, and it sat in the corner like a chrome-trimmed storage cabinet. But it was a storage cabinet that impressed all the neighbors, and for Grandmother Chung that was its chief purpose. My family also owned a television, and though there were very few programs to watch in rural Vietnam, the neighbors still pressed their faces against the windows to try to catch a glimpse. My brothers and sisters had their own little luxuries; Nikki had a special cabinet that she kept under lock and key and filled with cookies and candies that Grandmother Truong used to bring to her on her visits from Bac Lieu. We even had grapes to eat, and grapes were a luxury almost unheard of in Vietnam.
By the end of 1973, there were five children in my family: Jenny, Bruce, and Yen, followed by my sister Nikki and brother Thai. Grandmother Chung was in command of a growing army, and times were good for my family. Jenny and Bruce were old enough to begin their education, and they attended a private school my family helped fund, which meant, for all practical purposes, my family owned the school. A teacher once made the mistake of speaking harshly to one of my cousins, which caused my cousin to throw a tantrum; the following day my cousin attended school as usual but the teacher was absent. Unlike most of the students, the Chung children didn’t walk to school; they were driven in a Mercedes, and my sisters were always dressed in crisp blue or white skirts with white socks and shoes to match.
While my family was enjoying all the benefits of wealth, there was a brutal war raging in the north, and it was growing closer every day. By March 1973, the last of a half million American soldiers had departed from South Vietnam, and fewer than ten thousand military personnel remained behind, mostly to help maintain the vast array of military equipment the United States had turned over to the South Vietnamese government. In retrospect the fall of South Vietnam to the communists was inevitable, but at the time no one was certain what would happen after the Americans left. The American departure strategy was called “Vietnamization,” which basically meant the Americans planned to go home and let the South Vietnamese fight their own war—with the promise of continued funding and more weapons from the United States. But it didn’t turn out that way.
Vietnam had been an extremely divisive event for the American people, and when the last of their boys returned home safely, they wanted nothing more to do with a distant Asian war. The United States Congress drastically reduced funding to South Vietnam, leaving the South Vietnamese military with an impressive collection of weaponry they could no longer afford to maintain and forcing them to fight what one historian called “a rich man’s war on a pauper’s budget.”
When the last of the US troops had departed, the North Vietnamese army began to cautiously advance southward, fearing that their move might trigger an American reentry into the war in defense of her former ally. That didn’t happen, and the moment the North Vietnamese army realized the Americans were gone for good, they began to rush south like a devouring fire.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail—the legendary communist supply line that for the previous ten years had been little more than a broken string of bombed-out dirt roads and jungle trails—was now widened and paved to allow six-ton Soviet trucks to rapidly reinforce the North Vietnamese army as it raced south. Cities began to fall one after another, then entire provinces, and by April 1975, two-thirds of South Vietnam was under communist control. Within two weeks nine divisions of communist forces had converged on the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon while the opposing South Vietnamese army crumbled in front of them. South Vietnamese soldiers were deserting at a rate of twenty-four thousand per month while officers with better connections and larger bank accounts began fleeing the country on anything that moved.
South Vietnam was doomed, and everyone knew it. It was no longer a matter of months or years; it was only a matter of days.
My family did almost nothing to prepare for the fall of their nation. They were aware of the war, of course, and they were surrounded by constant reminders. At night they could hear the sound of distant gunfire and occasionally caught a glimpse of a passing helicopter silhouetted against a glowing red horizon; in 1968, the corrugated roof of one of their rice mills had even been ripped apart by shrapnel. They knew that when the last of the American forces had withdrawn from the south, the North Vietnamese army had begun to advance on Saigon; but for Peace, Unity, Profit, business went on as usual—right up to the very day the first Soviet tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon.
You may wonder why my family didn’t follow the example of so many army officers and government officials, who stuffed a few belongings into a duffel bag and fled before the communist advance. The chief reason my family didn’t leave is that they had a lot more to leave behind. It was one thing to give up a government position or a military assignment, but it was something else entirely to abandon an empire—especially one that you scratched from the dirt with your own sweat and blood.
But why didn’t my family at least shut down the rice mills, send the employees home, and take off on a timely vacation? As the Vietnamese wisely point out, “It is no disgrace to move out of the way of the elephant.” Why would they keep doing business as though nothing was going to happen?
The reason is they weren’t sure anything was going to happen. My family had been caught in the middle of political upheaval all their lives. First it was the Vietnamese, then the French, then the Japanese, then the Vietnamese again. This time it was the communists—so what? At first their country was a kingdom, then a colony, then a vassal state, then a democracy. This time it would become a socialist republic—did it really matter? For decades my family had been bending with the prevailing wind, and they had no reason to believe that the current wind would be any more powerful or permanent.
This time they were greatly mistaken.
Saigon fell to the communists on April 30, 1975. In Soc Trang word spread that communist forces could arrive en masse at any moment, and everyone scrambled to display any scrap of red cloth and yellow star they could find to proclaim their loyalty to the new regime—and hopefully avoid destruction.
But the North Vietnamese army never came. A week later one lone personnel carrier with a handful of uniformed troops and a megaphone mounted on top rolled into town to announce the new government. That was it—there were no mortar blasts, no rumbling tanks, no battalions of vengeful soldiers breaking into homes and dragging weeping people into the streets. The residents of Soc Trang had braced themselves for attack by an invading army, but the army never showed up.
They didn’t need to.
There were two enemies that had been working for decades to overthrow the government of South Vietnam—an enemy from without and an enemy within. The enemy from without was the People’s Army of Vietnam that marched on Saigon from the faraway north, but the enemy within did not have to march south because they already lived there—they were the Viet Cong.
When word reached Soc Trang of the fall of Saigon, the Viet Cong began to come out of the woodwork like cockroaches. My family was astonished to discover how many neighbors had been Viet Cong sympathizers all along. Poor farmers who had brought their rice to the mills; one of the teachers from the private school; even rice mill employees, people with whom my father had associated for years—they were all Viet Cong.
And they were now in charge.
It was predicted that when the communists came to power, the changeover to a socialist system would be immediate, but in areas like the Mekong Delta the new way of doing things was introduced gradually to reduce resistance. First, a series of town meetings was held to reassure the residents they had nothing to fear from their new government and little would change in their daily routines. Everyone would go to work as usual and do what they had always done; only now they would be working for the government. The government would take its share, the residents were told, but it would only take what was fair, and it promised not to abuse its authority. “If there are ten roads,” one of the new administrators announced, “the government will take only nine and leave one for you to walk.” That sounded reassuring at the time.
It was also announced that the new Vietnamese government had no intention of interfering with the ethnic Chinese who lived in Vietnam—the government even promised to punish anyone who made a threat against the Chinese. That came as a huge relief, and it served to reinforce my family’s belief that the changeover to the new regime would probably prove to be a temporary nuisance but otherwise have little effect.
Over the next five months, however, things began to change. Government administrators began to visit my family’s rice mills to take “inventories” of the assets. They took a similar inventory of the house, though at the time it wasn’t made clear why the government would need a list of personal possessions. Each inventory became more and more invasive until it finally became obvious that the government’s intention was much more than inventory—it was seizure. After repeated inventories of the house, the family began to find potted plants dug up and ceramic tiles pried from the floor in search of any hidden wealth.
At the rice mills it was becoming more and more difficult for my father to do business. The business still generated lots of cash, but now the government claimed it and hauled it all away. Then the government claimed the exclusive right to sell gasoline and oil, and strict limitations were enforced. But milling machines need gas and oil to run, and with dwindling fuel supplies, the family rice mills began to process less and less rice.
The Chung family empire was in a graveyard spiral.
In September the new socialist government made its ultimate intentions clear: there would be no more inventories. Instead, my family was informed its rice mills were being permanently “borrowed” by the government and the government’s own employees would be brought in to work them. My family was left with no alternative but to walk away and leave behind everything they had worked for.
Now it was Grandmother Chung’s turn for despair. She had spent the last twenty-five years of her life building a successful business, and it was all being taken from her—without excuse, without apology, and without remuneration. It was the same devastating loss that had helped drive her husband to an early grave. When her husband had succumbed to despair twenty-five years earlier, she had remained strong, but now she was sixty-seven, and the thought of starting over was almost more than she could bear. She even talked about throwing herself off the bridge near our house and drowning her grief in the deep water of the Bay Sao River—but it was only talk. My grandmother was a woman who opened Pepsi bottles with her teeth, and she still had a lot of fight left in her.
My grandmother and uncle began to skim off large amounts of cash from the rice mills before the government could take it away. Past profits that had been converted to gold bars were carefully hidden to avoid possible inventory, and my grandmother quickly removed her coffee can of diamonds from the house. The communists who conducted the household inventories were sometimes neighbors or former employees, and it was no secret to them that the Chung family possessed wealth. My grandmother knew they would eventually tear the house apart in their search for hidden treasure, and that meant there was only one safe place to conceal her diamonds.
The bottom floor of the house was the throne room from which my grandmother ruled her kingdom. The front entrance was covered by a pair of wooden doors that hung side by side like the doors of a barn. Every morning those doors were rolled apart to open for business, and whenever the doors opened, my grandmother would be found seated in the center of the doorway on her throne—a tall, round-backed rattan chair that framed her like a shield. Her thick arms rested on the wicker armchair, and her large hands dangled loosely, with her long fingernails pointing at the ground like daggers. The house had no need of a security system because anyone wishing to enter had to make it past Grandmother Chung.
When the communists arrived for their final inventory of the house, they found my grandmother seated as always on her throne. To the right of her throne was a table that held a tray and a small knife, and on the floor to her left sat a brass spittoon. My grandmother had the delicate habit of chewing betel nut, an ancient Asian habit that remains especially popular among truck drivers and construction workers in Taiwan. The green-husked areca nut, known to the Vietnamese as cau, is chopped into small pieces and wrapped in a betel leaf along with a pink calcium powder and spices like clove and cardamom for flavoring. The concoction is chewed like tobacco and has a similar stimulating effect, and the pink lime has the attractive side effect of turning the teeth bloodred. Empress Chung’s glare alone was enough to start fires and make strong men cower; imagine the added effect when she bared her red teeth and ejected a spurt of blood into her spittoon. My brother Bruce assures me that at least one of those men lost bladder control.
My grandmother could not prevent the men from entering our house, but she could stare each one down as he passed. The men did what they came to do, but each time they passed through that doorway, they gave my grandmother a wide berth. Their inventory included carrying off most of our possessions, but no matter how hard they searched, they were never able to find the diamonds. My grandmother had hidden them in the one place she knew none of them would ever dare to look.
She was sitting on them.
The communists eventually confiscated my family’s house to use as a civic building for the new local government. The eviction notice allowed the family only a few hours to gather what they could and leave, but by that time there was very little left to take anyway. Everyone packed a few personal belongings and household items and literally walked away. Walking was the only option because all the cars had been confiscated.
The loss of the business and home was devastating, but it could have been worse. When the war ended, more than a million South Vietnamese government officials and military officers were sent to reeducation camps to be taught the error of their capitalist ways and punished for their participation in the war. Some were sentenced for years, and many never returned.
New Economic Zones were also created to help stimulate the economy and increase food production. These were areas of previously uncultivated land, some of which were located in remote and densely wooded areas. Those sentenced to New Economic Zones were handed primitive hand tools and left to survive off the land, though many of them were highly educated and skilled professionals who had no previous farming experience. The zones did nothing to help the economy, but they did an excellent job of punishing the formerly rich and powerful.
In the Mekong Delta the local communist committee decided who would be sent to a reeducation camp or New Economic Zone and who would be allowed to remain. The authorities who decided my family’s fate were local rice farmers and former employees, many of whom had been helped by the kindness and generosity of my family. It was a classic example of “cast your bread upon the waters.” Though wealthy, my family had given generously to the poor; though powerful, the Chungs had shown compassion to those in need. Now that bread was returning.
My family’s kindness may have saved everyone’s lives, but it did not provide for the future. The house was gone, the source of income was gone, and my mother and father had five hungry children to feed.
And my mother was once again pregnant—this time with me.