We Are Here (4 page)

That same year, my young introspective father joined the military as a lieutenant in the Transportation Artillery Unit. Though my mother’s family was not very well off, her family was well connected. Her uncle was deputy director of prosecutions in the South Vietnamese justice system. Another uncle was a colonel who travelled in his own helicopter and was never without an
entourage of guards. Thanks to these connections, my mother’s brothers were made captains and lieutenants in the police force, postings that kept them safe from the front line, far from the deafening booms of gunfire and bombs. The insignia on their uniforms indicated their rank. Women looked yearningly upon them with adulation as the men walked the streets with glowing pride, collecting pockets of admiration.

Meanwhile, the North was faring well in the war of propaganda, inspiring a loyal following among poor peasants in the South who were disillusioned with their own poverty and drawn in by Communist ideals of classlessness and shared ownership of land. In an effort to recapture the devotion of the peasantry, in 1970 President Thi
u announced a land reform initiative. Under the program, the government would purchase unused or abandoned private property and use existing state holdings to grant land to peasants. Low-interest loans would be issued to these new landowners to start their agricultural businesses. The program required capable and knowledgeable people to assist in its administration. In 1973, my father passed the required exam to become one of two officers in the Mekong Delta province of C
n Thơ to assess and approve these microfinance loans. He was then permitted to leave his position in the military.

For two years, until the fall of Saigon, my father visited small villages and spoke to peasants about their business plans. He talked to them about rice seeds, fertiliser, animals and machinery. At the time, there was a new breed of rice that was ready for harvest only three months after planting. It was known as the
rice from the heavens. The land reform program was successful and brought prosperity to many. Amid a persistent war, my father provided hope for countless poverty-stricken families to carve out a better life. He understood how a simple official signature could radically shift the fate of weather-beaten men and women who lived in unremarkable mud huts. Desperation came in the form of bribes and while others were tempted, my father never took a single cent. He embraced his responsibility with objective fairness: signs of a principled and courageous man who frequently witnessed how lives were transformed before his very eyes.

And still the war kept on. It was a time of uplifting war songs, when girls fell in love with uniformed men, and American products and lifestyles were imported into South Vietnam. Concurrently, images of the horror and bloodiness of the war and the bodies of American soldiers were beamed into the living rooms of American families. Anti-war protests ensued around the world. Diplomats met, bombs dropped, journalists wrote and people continued to die.

My mother had moved to Saigon to study law. She lived in a small haunted house in District 4. At night, as she climbed into the wooden loft to sleep, she would hear the scraping of furniture as the souls of agitated dead soldiers meandered below. Not far from the house was a small canal where occasionally bodies would be found drifting.

The screams of destruction and the scent of death continued for a few more years until North Vietnamese forces stormed into
Saigon to capture the city on 30 April 1975. North Vietnamese tanks rolled down the main boulevards, past the lounge bars the American GIs had frequented. Vi
t C
ng soldiers, previously in hiding in the South, appeared suddenly in full public view, marching through the streets. My mother watched as people, driven by panic, began to run. She didn’t know where they were going but they just ran in a wave of deranged and violent hysteria. South Vietnamese soldiers dumped their weapons in the canal near my mother’s house and stripped themselves of evidence that they were associated with the fallen regime, for fear of the coming retribution. Some decided it was smarter to immediately join the North Vietnamese forces on the day of the fall of Saigon. These became known as 30 April soldiers. But for many, this act and any other futile attempts to hide their poisoned history would not save them.

My father was at work when Saigon fell. In the office, his colleagues were overwhelmed with fear as they began to understand the ramifications. They were right to be afraid; in the months and years following the fall of Saigon, those associated with the former regime were punished and persecuted. Decorated soldiers, diplomats and government officials of the South were decried as enemies and traitors of the new Vietnam. People’s courts tried class enemies. Land and assets were seized and redistributed. The rise of the proletariat crystallised. Farmers became landowners and gardeners became governors. Vi
t C
ng who had lived secretly in and around the Americans and the soldiers of the South emerged brazen and bold. They were
neighbours, school teachers and family members. Government and private offices were taken over.

My father’s sister’s rice-husking mill was appropriated by newly appointed Communist officials who had until recently been uneducated peasants. They moved into her house and publicly denounced her as a rotten capitalist in a type of people’s ‘court’ at a gathering of local villagers. Although she was known to be kind and fair in her business dealings, those who did not denounce her as a traitor were viewed with suspicion. If she had mistreated anyone she ever dealt with, this became a trial of revenge. At the insistence of the officials overseeing the hearing, some villagers reluctantly came forward to condemn her. But despite the possible retribution, others came to her defence. Similar scenes played out around the country, though the former workers and farmers who became powerful government officers were not always as forgiving as those who had previously been powerless and now revelled in a new world order.

My father was ordered to continue to work. He sat there idly as the Vi
t C
ng tried to implement tasks in the transition to Communism. Immediately, the old unacceptable money bearing the Southern Republic’s imprints had to be changed. My father watched as people came in and out of the office to change their money. He was constantly harassed and interrogated by his new bosses, seeking intelligence about people he knew.
Where are they? What are they doing? Who are they related to
? The harassment escalated as the Communist officers became increasingly paranoid about secret assemblies of resistance.
Eventually my father was sent to a re-education camp; the higher the rank, the longer the sentence. My father was imprisoned for two years, while my uncles who had been captains were held for ten years. The camps were designed to punish, humiliate and decisively break men who were seen as traitors for siding with foreign oppressors. Their purpose was to introduce the men to the notions of Communism and assimilate them. On a few occasions my maternal grandfather made the long trek north to visit my uncles at the camp near the Chinese border. They were barely skin and bone, forced to eat only what they could catch: rats, cockroaches and lizards. They were
ng
y
, filthy people who had betrayed their country.