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C H A P T E R E L E V E N A Tragedy: From Vietnam to America The author, a thoughtful and observant young man, and his family left Saigon on April 25, 1975, on a U.S. military transport plane when he was seventeen years old. He wrote this account in 1980 based on the notes he took during his journey. Like the narrator’s family, many of the people who fled just before Saigon fell had originally come from North Vietnam. Almost a million people, a large percentage of whom were Catholics or landowners, had left the North for the South in 1954–55 as permitted by the 1954 Geneva Agreements. These second-time refuge-seekers had a deeply ingrained fear of and hatred for Communism based on their earlier experiences. The author reveals how American and South Vietnamese officials at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport took matters into their own hands to enable a significant number of people to be evacuated in the week before Saigon fell despite the red tape and indecision of the American and South Vietnamese governments. The narrator’s mother, the breadwinner in the family, managed to get the requisite papers because she had worked for an American oil company. This account also provides a close look at life in the reception centers at Wake Island and Camp Pendleton. In 1938, my grandfather graduated from junior high school and received a diploma that was at that time, so far as I know, the highest degree that a Vietnamese could obtain under the strict French colonial educational policy. The French considered “less educated Vietnamese” to be more amenable to their control. After his graduation, my grandfather taught in the superior primary school in Hanoi. He was well respected by other people. He married my grandmother who became a housewife. Shortly afterwards, my mother was born. My grandfather could not accept the fact that the French had colonized his country in the nineteenth century, so he left his teaching position to join the guerrilla forces, the Viet Minh, who were resisting the French colonial administration in Vietnam. After a number of years, however, he became disillusioned as he observed the bloody confrontations 100 Chapter Eleven between those Vietnamese who had become Communists and those who thought of themselves as nationalists. So, he left the Viet Minh and returned to teaching. In terms of socioeconomic standing, my family’s status was average. After the Viet Minh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Geneva Agreements divided Vietnam into two parts—North and South. In the North, the Communists began a campaign to execute individuals who were accused of having committed social crimes (for example, for being “rich”). My grandmother was forced to watch many so-called people’s trials that were conducted without giving the accused any defense counsel and to attend Communist demonstrations. Also, religious people were prevented from attending church. Since the 1954 Geneva Agreements allowed people from both regions to migrate at will during a three-hundred-day transitional period, my family left for the South along with about a million other people. As refugees, they had no property and little money. After reaching South Vietnam, my grandmother sold miscellaneous groceries and my grandfather became a government official. My mother and uncle attended high school while holding concurrent part-time jobs to cope with the difficult living conditions. Shortly after, my mother met my father, whom she knew through hisfamouspoetrypublishedinSaigon.Theymarriedwhenmymother wasinseniorhighschool.Mybrotherwasbornayearlater.Thefamily moved to another town in 1958, where I was born. A few years after that, we returned to Saigon. Due in large part to the volatile and unstable social climate, my father fell into a pattern of gambling and drinking while continuing to write poetry. His excesses eventually resulted in a heartbreaking divorce, a rare phenomenon regarded as undesirable in Vietnamese society where everyone was supposed to observe strict moral and cultural traditions. My mother then moved to another city where she worked as a clerk in an American oil company. I continued to live with my grandmother in Saigon in order to attend a good school there. As a result, I got to know my grandmother extremely well. I was born into a family whose status rose from middle class in 1954 to a much higher position in subsequent years despite my parents’ divorce. Fortunately, I was still too young to be affected by the divorce psychologically, especially...

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