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C H A P T E R N I N E T E E N The Pain in My Heart This is a rare account of an ethnic Chinese family that lived in a village in rural North Vietnam and escaped to the People’s Republic of China in early 1979 when the author was eight years old. The existing literature to date has failed to include the approximately quarter million people who sought sanctuary in China, rather than in the countries of first asylum in Southeast Asia, as part of the refugee exodus from Vietnam. Another revealing detail is that the author’s family spoke only Cantonese, unlike the Sino-Vietnamese in South Vietnam who usually knew both the Chinese and Vietnamese languages. This is perhaps a reflection of the differences between North Vietnam’s and South Vietnam’s policies regarding citizenship and assimilation vis-à-vis the ethnic Chinese. Though life was relatively easy in China, the narrator’s mother (his father had died by then) thought her children would have a better future in another country. So, the family fled a second time, from China to Hong Kong, in October 1979. Though the refugee camp in Hong Kong is seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy, the account suggests that in the early years of the exodus at least, refuge-seekers had more “freedom” in Hong Kong’s “open camps” than those housed in the camps in Southeast Asian countries. This memoir was written in 1991. None of my friends knows much about my family history. Sure, they know where I am originally from, how many siblings I have, what language I speak at home, and how long I have been in the United States. But beyond that, few know any of the events I am about to tell you. I am one of the so-called boat people from Vietnam. Nearly every refugee has a story to tell and I am no different. I came from a pretty rich family, compared with other families in the village in North Vietnam where I was born. In those days, few families could afford to eat chicken and duck because they were quite expensive. However, my family ate chicken or duck at least once a week. At other times, we ate seafood and vegetables. We could afford seafood because my grandparents were fishermen. My father was a businessman who also 182 Chapter Nineteen worked on a ship. He had business friends who asked him to sell their goods for them. Thus, he earned a profit by taking goods from the village to the city and selling them there at higher prices. With the profit he made, he bought goods in the city and sold them in the village, also for a profit. While my father was away doing business, my mother took care of us children and did some trading in the village herself. We children had no responsibilities except to have fun. The village was like a big family because we knew everyone who lived there. There were rocks, sand, and water at the back of my house and people, young and old, swam there. Overall, my life in the village was good. Who would have imagined that those happy days would soon be gone forever? One day in December 1978, we received news that my father had died. My mother, who was pregnant at the time, was shocked half to death. She gathered her five children together and told us that our father was going to someplace far away and would never return. I could not figure out what my mother was saying but I sensed something unpleasant had happened from the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes. Two days later, some family friends brought my father’s dead body back to the village. My entire family burst into tears. We five helpless brothers and sister sobbed as our mother went crazy. She was crying and yelling, “My dead husband, why do you have to leave us so soon? Our sons and daughter, who is going to take care of them? Why? Why do you have to be the one who died?” Only years later did I learn that my father had been electrocuted as he ran out of his cabin to lower the ship’s anchor as it reached the harbor. A metal pole crossed a wire above and electricity flowed through the pole to...

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