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 17th
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.
