Siblings of Michael Wyn - The earliest memories

II. The earliest memories.

I was born in Ha Noi, Vietnam in 1952. My family is large with 11 children and I was the third child with an older sister, Teresa and a brother, Tri. My father is a second generation Chinese-Vietnamese. His father died very young while studying medicine in Ha Noi. His mother was a Vietnamese housewife and a habitual gambler. When my grandfather died, my father had to quit school at 16 and went to work since his mother abandoned her children to spend time gambling. I was told that my father’s household fell into disrepair and abject poverty. He had to take care of his sister and 2 younger brothers. They ate left-over cooked rice and simple broth, and their food was sometimes covered with ants and insects.

Eventually, my father gained more experience and was able to get a job with some Chinese landowner whose daughter married one of my father’s younger brother, uncle Thanh. My father met and married my mother, a Vietnamese woman through the wealthy landowner. They worked, saved and were able to own a successful department store in early 1950s.

In 1941 the Japanese landed in Hai Phong harbor and marched into Ha Noi accepting the French colonial power surrender. My father was a young man watching the surrender. A young Vietnamese boy was pointing and laughing at the Japanese. A Japanese officer stepped out and in a sudden and violent sweep lopped off the young boy’s head then without a word returned back to the march.

At the end of World War II, the French colonists returned to power after the Japanese surrender. The Vietnamese Communist Party under Ho chi Minh failed to gain traction with the US administration to gain independence. However, they won the decisive victory against the French at “Dien Bien Phu” allowing them to demand the demarcation of Vietnam at the 17^th parallel with the North under Ho Chi Minh who was supported by Russia and China, and the South under Ngo Dinh Diem supported by the French and subsequently by the Americans.

My parents left Ha Noi with me and my two older siblings, Teresa and Tri to Gia Dinh, a neighborhood in Saigon, South Vietnam. The evacuation was legal but all their assets were either confiscated or lost. They re-started their lives in South Vietnam with nothing. This was 1954 and I was two years old.

The house we lived in South Vietnam was very small. It had packed dirt floor. The walls were unpainted. My mother converted a small shipping carton box into the family altar. The streets were unpaved. There was a common restroom several hundred feet away for several homes to share. There were quite a number of insects, mosquitoes and rats in and around the house. My father started out at the bottom driving bus and taxi. More kids arrived. My father was enterprising getting jobs with airline companies and eventually for Air America in Saigon for the last several dozen of years before the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975.

Siblings of Michael Wyn - The Escape

I. The escape.

Memories are like jumbled jigsaw puzzle pieces. Some fit perfectly. Some are so strange that you can’t figure out where they belong. I just found a stash of old photos my dad gave me before he died. Several photos of me spanning back more than sixty years: an infant on his mother lap, a young lad in Boy Scout uniform, a first year college teenager student arriving in Los Angeles airport. The “me” in the photos seemed to be a stranger, but also had the vague familiarity of memories long faded.

Since I had some English ability more than anyone else, during the 1968 Lunar New Year Communist offensive, my oldest sister Teresa and I were assigned to stay at our meager home to protect it. The village was infiltrated by the Viet Cong. I was there to explain that we were civilian, not communists if the American soldiers were to assault house by house. I still remember the awesome sight and frightening sounds of the gunship fire demolishing a nearby home where the Viet Cong were hiding.

I passed the two consecutive years Baccalaureate I and II with highest honors and was selected to leave Vietnam for college in the US. The war was raging on in Vietnam in 1970 when I was granted this very rare privilege. We were very poor and without any connection hence the approval allowing me to leave was an exceptional opportunity. My parents told me and their relatives many times about their joy and pride of their son’s early achievement.

My financial situation during my undergraduate years was pitiful. I arrived with eleven US dollars in my pocket. I was granted the monthly amount of $150 (US dollars) at the official exchange rate. Of the 150 dollars, I set aside 50 dollars for my family. The black market value of the US dollar was several times higher than that of the official exchange rate. One of my mother’s distant relative by marriage,  Uncle Xoi  was very wealthy in Vietnam. It was not legal for Vietnamese to stash money - of which some or most were ill-gotten gains - in foreign banks. The uncle already having a Chase account, illegal at the time in Vietnam, allowed me to deposit the 50 dollars monthly to it. In return, he gave my parents inflated Vietnamese piasters, helping my family with a little more money due to this exchange.

Life was quite tough. I still remember the good smell and rare treat while visiting the apartment of well-off Vietnamese students from wealthy families and was invited to share some of their sumptuous home cooked steaks. I struggled to balance school, and my night and weekend jobs: housekeeper at Long Beach Memorial hospital cleaning toilets, floors, removing trash as well as the operating rooms’ hazardous waste; also working at Jack-in-the-Box and as a student assistant at the University library. These under-the-table cash payments – since I was not allowed to work openly and legally – and the monthly $100 allowed me a very meager existence at the same time paying for school tuition and fees. (My scholarship was only partial.) The university fees were maxed out over 12 semester units. Most Vietnamese students took very high number of semester units to save money.

I had a small 125cc Honda motorcycle for commuting to school. During the second year, I had an accident which broke my right leg and left me bed-ridden for the whole several months. Thanks to the kindness of friends and neighbors I was able to get food and water for the duration.

In early 1975 I spent several months explaining to my father that the situation in Vietnam was very desperate and the final collapse was near. My father was a low level employee of Air America which was the airline subcontracted to the CIA in Vietnam (see Figure 1). I contacted the CIA in Virginia to plead for my family’s evacuation. I threatened to talk to the Long Beach Independent and the Los Angeles Times newspaper. I wrote letters to California Senator Alan Cranston, Dr. Henry Kissinger to ask for their intervention. I also met with Dr. Stephen Horn and his wife, Nina who also wrote letters to Senator Alan Cranston to support my plea.  Dean Willard Reeds of the University Civil Engineering department loaned me the keys and allowed me to use his office telephone to call Vietnam. This was the rare time that I earned C’s in classes, due to time spent waiting for the Agency calls, calling, pleading, threatening the Agency, and calling my father at night in Vietnam. These activities took most of my day time and energy. I had to return to campus in the middle of the night to phone my brother-in-law’s office, so they could call my father to the phone. Imagine a 22-years old foreign student with limited English proficiency determined to use whatever channels necessary to rescue his family. Some have said that not 1 in a million could have done this.

Figure 1

Siblings of Michael Wyn - FOREWORD

FOREWORD

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has forced the social distancing and lock-down restriction on many around the globe. Here at home, millions faced this disease with disbelief as if their life has been turned upside down and cast inside a horror science fiction movie. This brings out some of the best in us and also for many, the worst. Restricted in their home, feeling more restless each day and realizing the uncomfortable fact of living with the less-than-optimum others, my siblings grew anxious, onerous, difficult and eventually hostile to each other via phone calls, texts or email.

My siblings, who are mostly over fifty years old, started with perfunctory niceties but gradually descended into the sanctimonious abyss of discussions, debates, mocking, guilt-tripping, and then open hostilities and hypocrisy. The tenor became unbearable. I tried not to get involved in their squabbles or take the bait of their criticism, even as I was targeted as the unresponsive, the callous and "wealthy" older brother not offering much help to needy family members.  Their worldviews including those of family relationships, responsibilities, gratitude and money (mortgage, expenses, loans and debts, …) are naïve and downright ignorant.  There were innuendos, pontificates, half-truths and lies. Speculative events or presumed facts without any proof, evidence nor documentation which happened more than thirty years ago were dredged up and wrapped in nonsense and fallacious argument. Inside their need to find a villain, they called up innocent actions from long ago, embellished them with speculation and drivel, and wove them into an outlandish and nasty narrative in which they assigned guilt and blame.

My purpose in writing this is to bring forth the factual records in hope of reducing or better yet end the speculation of malfeasance. If this makes the other siblings to slow down and re-examine their own lives and their own moral sanctimony it would be a greater success I can hope for. 

MW