Small Bamboo (5 page)

Uncle Thirteen made several attempts to escape Vietnam. The second time he and his friends travelled to Mui Ne, about 220 kilometres east of Saigon. They got onto a Taiwanese fishing boat and, as they were heading out to sea, they were caught by Communist officials. Uncle Thirteen was thrown into a re-education camp in the North where he spent the next three months. When he arrived home, he was starved, with cuts and bruises all over his body. He described how he was forced into hard labour, and how there was little food and no medication if anyone got sick. Uncle Thirteen’s cruel experience in the re-education camp gave him even more reason to escape the country.

On his third attempt, although he was scared of being caught again by the Communists and sent back to the camp, Uncle Thirteen again travelled with some friends to the coastal town of Mui Ne. In the middle of the night, they headed out to sea on a small crowded fishing boat. Everyone on the boat was dead silent. All they could hear was the sound of the water lapping against the boat and some of the women whispering prayers that the journey would be safe. No one slept a wink. Uncle Thirteen was paranoid he would be caught again: the Communist officials would be on the lookout for escapees at night. Daybreak seemed to take a long time to come. Finally, the sun rose and it was a good sign—they had made it through the night.

They spent the next couple of days drifting on the ocean. They had no destination, no plans to sail anywhere. They just wanted to get out of Vietnamese waters. The ocean was calm and Uncle Thirteen gazed out at the open sea and thought about the rest of his family, wishing they were on the boat with him. Then a large ship from Denmark spotted the small fishing boat, picked up the refugees and took them to Japan. Uncle Thirteen couldn’t believe his luck. He was finally out of danger. He stayed in a resettlement centre in Yokohama for four months, working out what he would do next, before he managed to make contact with a friend in the United States who eventually sponsored him to immigrate. Uncle Thirteen then flew to Illinois where he lived in a refugee camp for several months.

Uncle Thirteen had desperately tried to track down my Uncle Three; no one had heard from him since his escape months earlier. Before Uncle Thirteen left Saigon, he wrote down a few addresses on a small piece of paper in case he ever made it out. Uncle Three’s sister-in-law, who lived in France, was one of these. Uncle Thirteen wrote to her, asking her to tell his brother that he’d managed to flee Vietnam and was in the refugee camp in Illinois. Back then it took weeks for a letter to reach France so it was a frustrating wait for Uncle Thirteen, but finally a reply arrived—and in it were Uncle Three’s contact details in Virginia.

Uncle Thirteen rushed straight to the phones that were provided for the refugees in the camp; he was so excited he could barely dial the numbers.

‘Hello?’ Uncle Three answered.

‘Brother Three, it’s Tan!’

At first Uncle Three couldn’t speak. He could barely believe that his brother was calling him, and then he was overwhelmed with happiness. He had thought it would be a very long time before he saw any of his family again. As soon as he found out where Uncle Thirteen was, Uncle Three got straight on a plane to Illinois.

When Uncle Three arrived at the camp and saw his younger brother, skinny and exhausted, he wept. As Uncle Thirteen told Uncle Three how he escaped, he also started crying.

Uncle Three put his arm around him and said, ‘Come, Brother. I’m going to take care of you now. Let’s go home.’

4
SAIGON CHANGED FOREVER

Uncle Thirteen lived with Uncle Three for about four years until he met his wife and decided to move to California. The brothers, Uncle Three and Uncle Twelve, who were living in Virginia, and Uncle Thirteen, who had moved to California, constantly spoke of their worry for the rest of the family back home. They wondered how they were, if they’d managed to hold on to their house, if they had enough money, and if they could help their loved ones get out of Vietnam. Communication between family members had stopped as soon as the Communist government took over. Uncle Five had a telephone in Saigon but the lines were cut off. In the days, months and years following the Fall of Saigon, the South Vietnamese were paranoid. They didn’t know if their phone lines were secure or if their letters would be opened and read by Communist officials. Most made the tough choice to cut off all communication until they knew it was completely safe. But it left my three uncles in America with many heartbreaking questions that would remain unanswered for several years.

The brothers who escaped were very fortunate indeed. Of the ones who were left behind after the war, two would endure the worst treatment and suffering when they were forced into re-education camps by the Communist government.

First, the story of Uncle Eleven, who joined the South Vietnamese Air Force in 1969. Uncle Eleven says that when he thinks about the eight years he spent in those re-education camps, he feels lucky—lucky to be alive, that is. Some days he still can’t believe he made it.

As a helicopter pilot, Uncle Eleven came under attack several times but there is one incident he will never forget. One morning, Uncle Eleven was called into the middle of the jungles to evacuate an injured soldier. It was a highly dangerous rescue mission as the area was crawling with the enemy, but he had two gunners on board, as well as his co-pilot, and there were ground troops at the landing zone. As he flew closer to their destination, his helicopter came under fire. He was close to landing when a rocket got him from above. The helicopter crashed. Uncle Eleven blacked out.

As Uncle Eleven started to regain consciousness about fifteen minutes later, he thought he could hear muffled voices. He looked over at his co-pilot. He was dead. One of the gunners had also been killed. He looked out his window and saw the other gunner running deliriously in circles, blood streaming from his head. He soon collapsed and died. Uncle Eleven didn’t know if he himself was alive or dead or if this was just a terrible dream.

Then the voices slowly became louder and clearer. It was the ground troops calling out to him, ‘Lieutenant?! Are you okay? Lieutenant, can you hear me?’ Uncle Eleven snapped out of his dreamlike state. ‘Lieutenant! We need to get you out of here!’

They were still being fired upon as the ground troops cut him loose from his seat and dragged him from the helicopter to a nearby bunker. Another helicopter eventually arrived and evacuated the injured soldier and Uncle Eleven, the sole survivor of the crash. My uncle thought he might have had a few broken bones, but doctors at the army hospital found only cuts and bruises. No broken bones, no internal damage, no head injury. Uncle Eleven says, ‘The day I survived that crash was a bloody miracle.’

Uncle Four was the only brother who joined the South Vietnamese Army. He knew from a young age that his future was with the army. He enrolled in 1951 at the age of seventeen, rising to the rank of major during the Vietnam War. He was also a paratrooper, and he would parachute into the most dangerous areas, trekking through the jungles and crawling through tiny tunnels as he fought the enemy. His journeys would take him right across Vietnam, from the South to the North. About a month before the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, Uncle Four was stranded with many of his fellow soldiers in the middle of a remote jungle in North Vietnam. He knew that if he was captured after the Communists took over, he would be killed. So he stayed hidden and avoided the enemy as they advanced towards Saigon.

Dad’s family hadn’t heard from Uncle Four during that entire month. They were sure he wouldn’t return home alive. Then, the day after Saigon was taken, on 1 May, there was a knock on Uncle Five’s door.

‘Brother! You’re home!’ Uncle Five was overjoyed to see him.

Uncle Four collapsed with relief as his brother-in-law hugged him. He was exhausted and dirty, and his bare feet were bleeding. The family fussed over Uncle Four as they fed him and gave him some clean clothes. He explained that he had desperately tried to make it to Saigon faster but the North Vietnamese soldiers were everywhere. He still couldn’t believe he was home. And finally safe, or so he thought.

Uncle Four and Uncle Eleven were ordered to report for re-education at the same time as my father, in June 1975, but their experiences could not have been more different. While my father sat in a classroom for three days and was lectured on the Communists’ regime, his brothers were forced to live it.

Uncle Four and Uncle Eleven were told to bring enough belongings for a month. Uncle Eleven was relieved, having thought they would be away for much longer, but Uncle Four had his suspicions.

‘Let’s see if they keep to the schedule,’ he said.

By this stage, Uncle Four had four children and Uncle Eleven had two, but the men had been away fighting the war for many years, so their families were also relieved that they would be home, permanently, in a month. They were hopeful that their lives would resume some kind of normalcy then.

Uncle Four and Uncle Eleven said their goodbyes to their wives and family then headed to different locations in Saigon to report for their re-education camps. Both believed that for a month or so they would be educated in the ways of the new regime and perhaps do some manual labour. But they were wrong. It was night-time. My uncles were unaware of the fact that all movements of prisoners were done at night. They were loaded onto old army trucks which were completely covered so no one could see in and the prisoners would have no idea where they were going. There were dozens of camps around the country, with those in the North reserved for the previously high-ranking soldiers or officials of the South Vietnamese military.

When my uncles arrived at their respective camps, they found the conditions appalling beyond anything they could have imagined. Day in, day out, they were subjected to the new regime’s propaganda—the same lines, the same rules and the same negative slogans against the United States and the South Vietnamese. They were forced into hard labour, from planting crops and building wells to clearing jungles and sweeping minefields. They worked all day, six days a week, and were frequently whipped with bamboo sticks until their skin was bleeding and raw. If they didn’t complete their tasks for the day, they were beaten; some were beaten to death. A month passed and my uncles realised they weren’t going home any time soon.

Uncle Eleven spent a total of eight years in different re-education camps in South Vietnam. Five of those years were at the Suoi Mau camp in Bien Hoa. The English translation of Suoi Mau is fitting—it means River Blood, though the camp was also known as Bloody Stream. Uncle Eleven was released from that prison in 1982; he then tried to escape Vietnam, but was caught and thrown into another re-education camp in Ben Gia, Tra Vinh.

When I asked Uncle Eleven about his time in the camps, his voice was still full of pain and bitterness. It was tough for him to recall such horrific memories. It broke my heart when I heard his story:

Every day we only had two little handfuls of rice to eat. We were given only a small amount of water to drink. Can you imagine in that hot tropical sun, working and digging holes all day, and you can’t even have a big gulp of water? And, how did we survive on such a small amount of food? We relied on our families, who would sneak in homecooked meals for us. But those visits were quite rare and there was never a guarantee that our families could get the food into the camps. Sometimes they were caught and the food was taken away. We had to conserve every bit we had.