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ESCAPE
FROM VIETNAM Background:
April 1975
to May 1978 In April 1978, the future appeared very ominous for me. My father, a former military officer in the Army of Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN), had been captured and sent to re-education camp for three years by the North Vietnamese soldiers. Just a few weeks after the fall of South Vietnam in April 30, 1975, the Communists summarily confiscated our house and property. With my father in jail, my mother suddenly found herself and her children homeless. Fortunately, a friend of our family offered us refuge in a small hut a few days later. The events that happened in the following years were to transform our lives forever. In the years from 1975 to 1978, 1 faced the constant struggles to survive and to maintain my sanity. My mother, now without my father's monthly income, had to do all kinds of odd jobs to support the family and my father in jail. She worked as a street vendor on the black market, selling goods such as cigarettes, military boots, binoculars, etc.. The Communist government, determined to bring South Vietnam into a centralized, planned economy, started to crack down on the black market in 1976. The state security agents stalked all over the open market places, ready to seize the goods of any vendors whom they considered were doing business illegally. Every day, when my mother went to sell her goods in the market place, she ran the risks of getting caught by these security agents. If she got caught, not only that her goods would be seized, but she also would be sent to prison for an indefinite period. My mother had had many very close calls. Many times, she was just quick enough to keep herself from getting captured, but lose all her goods in the process. Whenever she came to the market, she always was on the look out for undercover security agents, ready to run at the first sign of dangers. I don't know what would have happened to us had my mother been captured. With my father now in jail, if my mother were caught, what could I, a 12 year old kid at that time, do to feed myself and my three younger brothers. The prospects were too frightening for me to ever think about. Each night when my mother came home, we had won another victory, we had survived another day! Why couldn't my mother get a regular job with some companies to earn a living? The answer is simple and brutal: she couldn't because she would never be allowed to. My family was considered by the new regime as "anti-revolutionary", "reactionary", "enemy of the people", and so on. My parents were North Vietnamese who had immigrated to South Vietnam in 1954, when the Communist took control of North Vietnam. Since my father was also a soldier in the South Vietnam Army, the Communists immediately classified us as "dangerous elements". We found ourselves being watched by neighbors and security agents. (Actually, almost everyone in South Vietnam suddenly found themselves being watched by the state enormous security machine.) In addition, the new regime also systematically seized control of all private companies and businesses. All businesses were being nationalized. To work for these companies, one must be considered by the Communist Party to be "sympathetic to the revolution and to the party", and one must not have "committed any crimes against the party and the people". My mother would never have a chance. She would never get the "security clearance" needed to work in these companies. The list of the "crimes" that my family had committed against "the party and the people" was so long and so incredible that I never was able to understand nor remember all of them. Somehow, my mom saved enough money to buy a piece of land in a mountain near our hut. We farmed this piece of land to provide ourselves with the much needed extra foods. After 1975, all the basic necessities of life had to be rationed and bought from the state's stores. The quantity of foods that people were allowed to buy from these stores were ridiculously low (Any one who has seen the lines of people forming to buy goods in the Soviet Union or any Eastern European nations in a few years before will understand what I mean.) I still remembered that each person in our family was allowed to buy only 4 kilograms of rice per month. If we ate as little as we could, our ration would still last us only two weeks. The prices of the foods that one could buy on the black market were prohibitively high. Without the bananas and yam that we produced from our piece of mountain land, we would have either starved or suffered severe malnutrition. During
all this time, my mother still managed to keep all of us in school.
Being the oldest son in the
family, I had to help my mom take care of my brothers and farm the land after
school hours. Everyday, I would go
to school in the morning and return home at noon to prepare lunch and dinner for
the family. After lunch, I took off
to the mountain to work on our land until dark.
At night, exhausted from the
hard physical labor, I
finally had time to study and do my homework under candle light (Electricity
was considered a luxury and was cut often.)
Till today, I still don't understand why I didn't become near-sighted. In
school, I and many of my friends often received unpleasant treatments from
school officials (After 1975, almost all high schools in
South Vietnam were brought under the control of the Communist party. The North Vietnamese sent their own party members and many teachers from North Vietnam to run these
schools. Though some South Vietnam
teachers were retained, many quit and many were laid off.
Schools became another tool of the party to exercise control over
people). Every other
weeks, we had to write and submit our biographies, telling what everybody
in our family, from our siblings to great grandfathers, did before and after
1975. Each one of
us came up with many different theories as to why the school officials
made us do this. Some of us
believed that the purpose was to
check for inconsistencies, to see if any of
us had falsified information about our past.
Some believed that the purpose was to separate the students into
"good elements" and "bad elements".
All of us whose parents were
former soldiers or officials of South Vietnam could expect ourselves to be classified as "bad elements". I believed that this exercise also had a more sinister
purpose: to instill fear into all of us, to tell us to watch out because
our every move is being watched. Home Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
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