REFUGEES and PAROLEES
REFUGEES
After the C-130 transport plane landed in Guam, we were loaded onto a military truck and taken to the Orote Point refugee camp. We were led to a big canvas tent and assigned to several cots already folded out in one corner of the tent.
Exhausted, I went to sleep soundly without realizing that this was May 5, 1975, Danielle’s forty-second birthday, and that we were to spend a six-week unscheduled vacation at two refugee camps, thanks to the generosity of the American people. She and I were about to start a new life, truly our second life, with eight children ranging in age from two to fifteen.
The next morning, after an early breakfast of diced ham, scrambled eggs and toast, our eldest son Jim and I started exploring the camp. It consisted of rows and rows of olive drab canvas tents erected on a large stretch of sand called Orote Point, not far from the seashore. We went to the centrally located tent that served as the camp administrative headquarters and received a copy of a sketchy map of the camp. Thus we were able to locate our own tent by its assigned code number, D-12. We scanned hundreds of messages pinned on bulletin boards set up in this administrative tent, and we were happily surprised to read a hand-written note from the Asia Foundation’s Andy Andrews. On this note addressed to his friends and acquaintances, he wrote his name, his Guam hotel address, telephone and room number, with the request for messages if he did not answer the phone personally. I asked a member of the camp administrative staff for the use of one of the phones set up for this purpose and was able to reach Andy on my first try. Bursts of relieved laughter at both ends of the telephone.
Andy asked me about our needs. I told him that we had been wearing the same clothes since leaving Saigon exactly one week ago and, after our one-week-delayed shower that morning of Tuesday, May 6, we had to wear again those same clothes. He asked for our tent number and said that he would come to see us soon.
Late that same morning Andy came in a rented Ford Pinto loaded with shirts, jeans, underwear, and sandals of various sizes. Also two books, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Peter Benchley’s Jaws, and a bag of Sunkist oranges. Those were the most delicious oranges I ever tasted. Danielle and I thanked him profusely for being so quick, so considerate.
After exchanging news about our various mutual friends and acquaintances, he informed Danielle that the bag of jewelry she entrusted to him three weeks earlier was already in the safe hands of his wife Eve, who had been Danielle’s 1974-75 business partner in the Tudo Street antique and souvenir boutique named AVA (an acronym for Arts of Vietnam, Associates). We would see Andy a few more times before his departure to San Francisco, where the Asia Foundation’s main office was located, and to Menlo Park, where Eve and their two children resided.
For the next two weeks at the Guam’s Orote Point refugee camp, we had plenty of time on our hands. We lined up three times a day for meals. We took daily showers. We went up to the administrative tent to scan messages, read newspapers and magazines, hear gossip and rumor, and exchange viewpoints with friends and strangers. On the third day I chanced upon a personal message pinned on the bulletin board by Ed Ketcham, general manager of Esso-Standard Oil Vietnam-Cambodia Division, whom I had last met as a VAA Director at the April 24 board meeting in Saigon. Just as with Andy, I exchanged with Ed information about mutual friends and acquaintances.
Unexpectedly I came upon the wife of a business acquaintance, an exclusive agent of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company in Vietnam. She was with some of their children, but not with her husband, who had either left Vietnam earlier or been separated from the family during the evacuation, I don’t remember which was the case. Speaking almost no English, she drafted a letter in Vietnamese addressed to the Pfizer company headquarters in the United States and asked me to translate it into English. Later when we had settled in Oregon, we received a long letter from them, expressing thanks and informing us that they had been happily reunited and he was again working for Pfizer.
I also ran into two former students of Dalat University’s School of Government and Business. During those idle days at camp I often reminisced with them of the good old days at our university campus.
On the few occasions we were allowed to go to the seashore, we walked into the water and gently touched the crabs lying on the rocks. These creatures did not scurry away as did the crustaceans native to Vietnam. Instead, they crawled into our hands and nestled there trustingly. What a contrast!
The news of Vietnam we read in the magazines and newspapers was not good. I had naively hoped for a peaceful reunification of Vietnam under the communist regime. I was wrong. The communists coined the term “nguy” (pseudo, false, sham) to label all those millions of Vietnamese closely or remotely associated with the former regime. All these “pseudo-Vietnamese” were required to present themselves to the communists and were placed in concentration camps to be “reeducated.” We later learned that tens of thousands of these prisoners, condemned to hard labor, languished for years in captivity and some finally died in these reformation camps. For many of them this slow death of hunger and mental suffering must have been worse than a quick execution in a blood bath. I learned from one of my brothers, who escaped by boat in 1979 with his family, that our youngest brother, a captain in the South Vietnamese Army, was taken away in May 1975. That was right at the time we were vacationing idly at the Orote Point refugee camp. He was released in 1988 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1995.
Our Guam rest and recreation time came to an end on Wednesday morning, May 21, when we were carried by truck to the Guam Airport where we boarded a U.S.-bound commercial jet airplane. It was a non-stop flight, and the airplane landed in the afternoon at the Los Angeles International Airport. We welcomed the chance to be resettled somewhere in California. But no. We were not to deplane.
After refueling and taking on a new flight crew, the airplane took off. We heard talk of Seattle, Washington. Somebody mentioned Denver, Colorado. At dusk we landed. To our surprise, we had been taken to Arkansas. A trip half-the-world-around in less than half a day. And we had gained a day on this trip. How nice!
We were to spend almost four weeks at the Fort Chaffee refugee camp. While awaiting to be processed out, we would read the camp bulletin entitled Doi Song Moi (New Life) to acclimatize ourselves and start the slow social integration process to a new life in a new land. Land of the free, hopefully.
PAROLEES
Since April 29, 1975, we had been moved from tight seats on helicopters to compressed living quarters on ships, to folding cots in canvas tents at Subic Bay and Guam refugee camps, and finally to bunk beds in permanent barracks at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. I felt that we had moved on and moved up in the world.
On the morning of May 22, the first thing we did after breakfast was to line up at the camp administration building to complete the registration process that had started at the Guam refugee camp. Our eight children were issued social security numbers, whereas Danielle and I retained the numbers assigned to us when we were foreign students in the fifties. Among various identity papers in Danielle’s bag, I retrieved my yellowing social security card issued in 1950 and presented it to the processing officers. In interviews with these officers, I gathered that the U.S. policy concerning this sudden and massive influx of people was to spread us as thinly as possible throughout the fifty states, and also to encourage the refugees to resettle in countries other than the United States.
Upon returning to our barracks, I was happy to recognize two men among the refugees assigned to the same building. The first person was Nguyen van Chuc, a lawyer and former senator about my age and an erstwhile schoolmate in the thirties during our elementary education years at Phatdiem, our birthplace. He and his wife and children had living quarters next to ours. The other person was Vinh Loc, a former general who was appointed on April 28 by the two-day government as Chief of the Joint General Staff of the Republic of South Vietnam Armed Forces (SVAF). Loc and I had first met in the summer of 1954 when he came with two other persons to the annual meeting of the Association of Vietnamese Students in North America. All three were SVAF majors and the first Vietnamese officers to receive training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at the U.S. Command and General Staff College. He and his wife had living quarters a few families away. Though I had seen the two men on several occasions over the last twenty years, this was the first time that I had set eyes on their wives. After sharing quarters in the same barracks for three weeks, I was glad we went our separate ways to different corners of the United States.
During the three-week stay at this refugee camp, I ran into several other friends and acquaintances. Knowing that I had spent my college years in France and in the United States, they sought my opinion on the pros and cons of resettling in France, French Canada, or the United States. In no uncertain terms, I told them that I opted for the U.S. so that Danielle and I could improve our American English -- I am tempted to say Anglish -- and that our children would be immersed in this universal language.
With so much time on my hands, I tried to kill some of it by reading the few books I borrowed from the camp library, written on the past experience of U.S. immigrants coming from various parts of the world, especially from China and Japan. From these readings, it dawned on me that, in spite of its many shortcomings in social integration, this was an inclusive society that had engulfed waves and waves of immigrants, then turned them and their offspring into Americans of different shades and hues, whether they wanted to be hyphenated Americans or not. This new society with a highly developed economy had only about two hundred years of history. The advanced American civilization and new culture seemed to me the reverse of the arrested Vietnamese civilization and old culture: the turbulence and impatience of the wealthy in contrast to the serenity and resignation of the deprived. Quite a challenge for us to adapt to this adoptive land.
Meanwhile through friends at the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation, we finally obtained the address of Betty Adams, a former nurse at Reed College befriended by Danielle during her student years. In early 1961, on their way to Indonesia, Betty and a friend of hers had stopped by Saigon and spent about two weeks with us. Since then after infrequent correspondence, we had lost track of each other. Danielle wrote to her about our wish to resettle in Portland, Oregon, where we both had spent a few years in the fifties as foreign students. In her reply, Betty gave us her telephone number and informed us that she and her brother would help us settle in Hillsboro, a suburb west of Portland.
We informed the camp officers of our wish to resettle in Oregon. In order to be processed out, we had raised our right hands and sworn to obey the laws of the land. Now the procedure was done. We received our Resident Alien Cards and were told that, on our parole, we would soon be released from Fort Chaffee. Thus for the last six weeks, we had been fortuitously labeled as escapees, evacuees, refugees, and now parolees. How lucky we were to be thus branded. Indeed, Danielle and I were also returnees.
On the morning of Sunday, June 15, we were released from the refugee camp to board a regular commercial airliner. Flying on the least expensive fare, we made a few stops before landing at the Portland Airport late in the afternoon. Betty and her brother, John Adams, met us at the gate. All ten of us piled up in the back of his station wagon.
We were a bunch of happy resident aliens. Parolees indeed.
1. Bio-Sketch, Evacuees - February 1997
2. Refugees, Parolees - March 1997 3. Names, Goals - April 1997 4. Homes, Addresses - April 1997 5. Birthdays, Angels - May 1997 6. Tongues, Spirits - May 1997 7. Scoops, Phoenix - September 1997 * Encounter of a kind 8. Charmer, Anthill - September 1997 9. Sand Crabs, Children, Sons-in-law - October 1997 10. Careers, Idealism, Titles - October 1997 11. Calendars, Customs - November 1997 12. Notables, Jobs, Missions - December 1997 |
13. [University of Dalat] Politics, Professors, Group Study… - December 1997
14 - Family, Parents - Sibling, Roots 15. Money, Cars, Drivers 16 - Controls - Grand-Children, Generations - Bananas 17 - Ancestors, Turtledoves - Transients, Ashes, Immortals - Migrants, Nature, Colors 18 - Nuts, Guts, Offices, Stones - November, Talents, Journeys 19. Eulogy to Yvonne |