IT ISN’T CLEAR WHO FIRST DECIDED THAT MY FAMILY should leave Vietnam. It may have been Grandmother Chung, when she realized that her “farming empire” was never going to amount to more than ten acres or when she recognized that her hidden gold and diamonds would have no value in the new Vietnam. As long as the communists prevented her from spending them, they were worthless.
It may have been my uncle who first decided we should leave because he didn’t even have ten acres where he could stretch his legs. He was confined to a small house with his wife and six kids and no business enterprise to give him an excuse to leave each morning. Even worse, he was trapped in a small house with my grandmother, and at close range flying objects seldom miss.
Or it might have been my mother. By the end of 1977, she had borne eight children, including newborn twin boys. She breast-fed each of us as long as she possibly could—a necessity on a small farm with barely enough food to go around—but her own restricted diet made it difficult for her to produce enough milk to feed two hungry boys. The possibility of starvation was beginning to loom large, not just for her babies but for all of us. Almost as terrible to her was the stark realization that her children had no future in Vietnam. Our education would be severely limited, and she knew from her own hard experience that limited education meant limited opportunity. Her greatest fear was that her children would be forced to accept what she considered the lowest of all jobs: herders of water buffalo. To my mother that was the worst possible fate, and she was determined that her children would do better.
It definitely was not my father who decided to leave, and it wasn’t because he disagreed with his wife or didn’t care about us. My father grew up in an unpredictable environment where circumstances and even life itself could change overnight. That kind of unstable environment can affect different people in different ways; the effect it had on my father was to cause him to fear change—any change, even if it brought the possibility of improving his lot in life. There is an old Chinese proverb that says, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” and that captures perfectly my father’s fearful mind-set. It wasn’t that he wanted to stay in Vietnam; he just didn’t want to leave.
In a sense, the decision to leave Vietnam was made for us. My ancestors were part of more than a million Chinese who migrated to Vietnam from the southern provinces of China in the late nineteenth century. The Chinese are a very cohesive people, which is why in cities all over the world there are large communities of Chinese living and working together. In New York and San Francisco, they are called Chinatown; in Saigon it’s known as Cholon. The Chinese place a high value on discipline and hard work and as a result tend to be very successful in business. The Chinese who chose to settle in North Vietnam became farmers, fishermen, coal miners, and small merchants; but in South Vietnam they were more ambitious and quickly came to control the rice trade, transportation, banking, and insurance. My family was extremely successful in business, but among the Chinese we were not the exception.
When the communists took over South Vietnam, their anger was directed at everyone who had been rich or powerful in the former regime, regardless of ethnic group. Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian, Thai—it didn’t matter. If you were rich, you were part of the property-owning bourgeoisie, who had been oppressing the poor working class, and you were about to feel the wrath of the proletariat.
In the late 1970s, my parents began to sense that the government’s attitude toward the Chinese was changing. Vietnam shares a northern border with China, and there was a growing conflict between the two nations that became so hostile they briefly went to war. As hostility increased with China, Vietnam grew more and more suspicious of its own Chinese citizens because they feared the Chinese might be more loyal to their ancestral homeland than they were to Vietnam. Fear began to erupt into violence, and in Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown, houses were searched, money and property seized, and businesses shut down. The Chinese living in northern Vietnam sensed the growing hostility, and so many of them began to flee into China that the government was forced to close its borders to its own people.
Because my parents had been exiled to a small farm, they were more or less insulated from the growing hostility, but we could see the handwriting on the wall. We had been spared the wrath of the proletariat, but we understood our sentence was more of a parole than a pardon. When we began to sense that public sentiment was about to turn against us, we decided to leave before it happened. There was a saying among the Chinese in those days: “If streetlamps had legs, they would have tried to escape as well.”
And the government was willing to let us go—for a price. Since the fall of South Vietnam, more than 130,000 refugees had fled to other countries, which made the refugee business extremely profitable for the government. With so many people wanting to flee the country, the government realized they had only two options: they could try to prevent everyone from leaving, which would have been a violent and expensive business, or they could allow them to leave but administrate the process—and bureaucracy is something communists do very well.
When the Chung family first gathered to discuss the idea of leaving Vietnam, my uncle suggested the most practical option would be for some of us to leave while some remained behind; a smaller party would make planning easier and reduce the overall cost. His suggestion might sound a bit cold and calculating, but splitting up was a common practice among Vietnamese refugees since leaving the country was extremely expensive and always dangerous. Instead of an entire family leaving together, someone, usually a father or an oldest son, would leave first and find a job; when he had earned enough money, he would send for the rest of his family to join him. That was the theory anyway, but it often didn’t work that way. Many families were often separated for years, and because of the dangers involved, many of those fathers and sons were never heard from again.
Since my immediate family was the largest, it was suggested we should be the ones to split up, leaving the younger children behind—especially the twins. The journey might be too rough for them, it was suggested, and a pair of eighteen-month-old boys would be too much of an annoyance and possibly even a danger to the rest of the group. When that suggestion was made, my mother put her foot down. She made it very clear to everyone involved that there were two non-negotiables: our whole family was going to stay together, and our whole family was going to leave Vietnam—end of discussion.
Once it was understood that everyone in our family would be leaving, planning could begin in earnest. My uncle, along with another man, named Mr. Hong, spearheaded the effort. It was a role that suited my uncle well because his prior job as director of sales for Peace, Unity, Profit had made him very good at making connections and negotiating deals.
There were two basic ways my family could leave the country—by land or by sea—and each had its benefits and risks. At first glance a land route seemed easier and safer because no one in my family had ever been on a boat or had even seen the ocean. But the northern border into China was closed, and land routes to the west would force us to pass through the killing fields of Cambodia or the minefields of Laos. Even if a safe land route could be found, the distance we would have had to travel would have been staggering, and most of it would have had to be done on foot—not a pleasant prospect for a family with eight children under the age of twelve.
It was quickly decided our best option was to leave by sea, but that meant we would have to obtain a boat, and in Vietnam boats were in short supply because almost every seaworthy vessel in the south had already been taken by earlier refugees. It would have been much too expensive and time-consuming to construct a boat, so an existing boat would have to be found that could be patched up and made seaworthy.
My uncle and Mr. Hong made contact with the Public Security Bureau, a department of the Ministry of the Interior that was responsible for overseeing all would-be refugees. The two men quickly discovered that the process of leaving Vietnam was going to be complicated and extremely expensive; and like many things run by the government, it was also corrupt. Even to begin the process there was a “registration fee” of two taels of gold per person, the equivalent of about $2,700 per person in today’s dollars. (The tael is an Asian unit of measure equivalent to about 1.2 ounces.) The total fee would amount to eight taels of gold per adult, four per child between the ages of five and fifteen, and children under five traveled free—what a bargain. The government even controlled the sale of all boats and gasoline; at every step of the departure process, the government had figured a way to take a cut.
My uncle did the math and realized that the cost for my extended family to legally leave Vietnam would be almost a quarter of a million dollars. Half the money would go directly to the government, 40 percent would cover the cost of the boat and fuel, and the remaining 10 percent traditionally went to a professional organizer or to pay bribes—and everyone had a hand out.
The government had a final requirement: at the time of departure, all refugees had to sign a document turning over all their property and possessions to the government, waiving any future claim. That made leaving an irreversible decision; it meant my family would not be able to rent out the farm, just in case we had second thoughts or if the voyage turned out to be too difficult. When we left Vietnam, we would be leaving for good, and if we changed our minds, there would be nothing to return to.
My uncle decided that if we included more people in our party, we would be able to afford a larger boat. That was more than a financial decision; a larger boat would be safer because a small boat had a much greater chance of being capsized or swallowed by rough seas. He began to search for other refugees who might be willing to join us by making discreet inquiries through trusted family connections like distant cousins, family acquaintances, and friends of friends. By the time he was finished, our little family outing had expanded to an exodus of 290 people and included sixteen different families.
At any point in the departure process, some government official could ask for a bribe, and if he did, we would have no recourse but to pay him whatever he demanded. Professional organizers were notoriously corrupt. Every additional refugee meant more profit, so at the last moment before a boat’s departure, an organizer often showed up on the dock with several additional passengers, and the current passengers would have no choice but to take them aboard, even when additional passengers overloaded the boat and made it dangerous for travel. The refugee was never in control of his fate, and potential dangers were at every step of the journey. Old and unreliable boat engines could break down at any moment, inexperienced captains had never steered anything larger than a river barge, and incompetent navigators had nothing but a compass to navigate by.
Finding a salvageable boat, repairing it, and making all the other necessary arrangements should have required at least six to eight months to complete, but two events occurred that shifted the project into high gear: in the middle of 1978, devastating storms and floods made the struggling Vietnamese economy even worse than it already was, and in February 1979, Vietnam went to war with China. When that happened, Vietnam’s Chinese citizens became Vietnam’s enemies, and the government began an organized campaign to eject as many ethnic Chinese from the country as possible. That was when my family knew it was really time to go.
The soonest we could be ready to leave was June, and we didn’t dare leave later. June marked the beginning of the typhoon season in the South China Sea, and even the big commercial ships didn’t risk crossing in a typhoon. A departure date was chosen—June 12—and we hurried to make all the final arrangements.
It was around that time my mother had a dream.
In the West we’re too sophisticated to pay much attention to dreams anymore; psychiatrists are about the only people left who seriously entertain the idea that a dream could have a deeper meaning. But in the rest of the world it’s different: people take dreams very seriously, and they are willing to consider the possibility that sometimes a dream could be more than a dream—it might be a message.
One night my mother dreamed she was in the marketplace in Soc Trang along with our entire family. Grandmother Chung wasn’t there—it was a dream, not a nightmare—nor was my uncle or his family. It was just the ten of us: my mother, my father, and the eight children. The market was noisy and crowded with people from all over town, talking, haggling with vendors, calling to one another across the square.
Suddenly everyone fell over dead.
My father and all eight of us children—we were dead too. Even my mother was dead; though in the manner of dreams, she was still conscious, and her eyes were open. At the far corner of the market, she saw a solitary standing figure: a man dressed in a white robe, with long brown hair and a beard to match. As my mother watched, unable to move a muscle, the man began to make his way across the market toward her, stopping from time to time to point down at one of the reclining bodies—and whoever he pointed to, that person came back to life and stood up.
My mother began to fervently pray that the man would point to her, too, and sure enough, when the man finally stood over her, he pointed to her, and my mother rose to her feet. She was ecstatic—until she remembered that her husband and children were still lying dead. She didn’t dare speak to the man, but she began to pray again, this time that he would extend the same kindness to her entire family and bring them back to life too.
And he did. As he pointed to each of us, we rose to our feet until our whole family stood alive and well again.
But my mother wanted to know what the dream meant. For some reason this dream seemed different to her—so vivid, so powerful, so suggestive of some deeper meaning. She began to ask her friends to help her understand the dream, and they offered different interpretations.
“That was the Buddha,” one of them said. “He was appearing to you, trying to tell you something.”
“The Buddha is bald and fat,” my mother replied. “This man looked nothing like that.”
“It was one of your ancestors trying to communicate with you,” another friend suggested.
But my mother shook her head. “None of my ancestors ever looked like that.”
And that was where it ended. No one was able to interpret her dream, so my mother simply filed it away as one of those unexplained mysteries of life.
Besides, she had more important things to worry about.
Leaving the land of their birth was no longer just an intriguing idea that our family discussed in whispers behind closed doors—it would soon be a reality. We were actually leaving Vietnam, and there would be no turning back. My mother remembered that dark day of despair, when she almost threw herself into the Bay Sao River with Jenny in her arms; now she was about to cast her entire family into an ocean, and the prospect terrified her. She had heard the radio broadcasts from the Voice of America, Voice of Australia, and the BBC warning potential refugees about the extreme peril; she had heard the stories about the refugees who didn’t make it, the ones who died of thirst or sank into the sea or just disappeared without a trace. Would her family be among them? Was it really better to die than to live in communist Vietnam? Would her family have enough food, enough water for the voyage? And if they survived the voyage, where in the world would they live?
Little did my mother know, half a world away, someone else was asking the very same questions.