I was born April 2, 1970. 5 years later on April 30th, Saigon fell to the communists. We lived on the outskirts of Saigon and it was a terrible time in Vietnam. In the years that followed, the communists from the north were cruel in the exacting of their revenge. They put hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese citizens in re-education camps. Executions, torture and brutality were common but hidden from world view.
Thousands more were executed. A report by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley estimated that 65,000 people were executed in the eight years after the communist victory in 1975. It is believed that as many as 500,000 people were sent to stay in camps. At one time there were as many as 300 camps throughout Vietnam, most of them near Hanoi or Saigon.
Of course I was young enough not to understand all that went on. I only knew how frightening it was when communist soldiers would come into our home and take whatever they wanted. As many Vietnamese families did, my parents and our family lived together with our extended family. Our family lived with my father’s parents and my aunt in two small houses that were side by side.
My mother owned and ran a couple of small businesses; a bakery, and a sandwich stand where she also made smoothies. These were not stores or shops like we have today, they were stands or carts along the street. When I was eight, she put me to work selling the food she made and cleaning dishes. After a while, I was also making sandwiches.
My father had been a nurse in the South Vietnamese army and after the war ended he was held for a short time then released because he wasn’t a combatant, but provided medical aide. He started his own business buying and selling food products. Communists don’t reward independent thinking. They wanted to control everything and everyone. They said my father was making too much money. In 1978, they shut his business down and arrested him. He remained in prison for 8 years.
It was hard to live without fear. In America, we live free. But during that time in Vietnam we knew nothing of freedom. Unfortunately, that struggle went unnoticed by much of the world. The communist leadership in Hanoi held tight control over information and access to what was going on in my country. Even journalists from other friendly communist nations were allowed to visit only after re-education camps and other prisons were transformed into showpieces where guards sometimes masqueraded as prisoners and props were brought in to create a brighter, but false, impression of what was really going on.
For me, even at my young age, I knew there had to be a better life. A life I couldn’t have in Vietnam. When I was 12, I made up my mind to escape.
