Freedom and math equations
As a kid, I was always jealous of families going on fun summer vacations — warm nights that sparkle, lighting firecrackers across the Tennessee sunset, chasing fireflies around lake campfires, or road trips up the Smokey Mountains. Instead, my sister and I spent many summers at home working through math problems. Rather than buying us books of fantasy and wonder, my dad bought us math books. He was very strict about education. I remember being mad that I had to spend summers crunching numbers instead of being a kid.
In retrospect, it’s not surprising math was so important to him. My father was a high school math teacher many years before he was recruited to join the South Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War. He had to stop doing what he loved, fighting for the success of his students, to fight something bigger than himself, the survival of his country.
Forty years ago this past April, the Vietnam War finally ended, and with it the fall of Saigon and its people. It’s estimated that 2–3 million people died — almost half were civilians. But that wasn’t the end of the killings. Nearly 65,000 were executed after the end of the war with one million being sent to prison and re-education camps where another 165,000 died. My dad was one of these people. He was sent to prison and went through a rigorous re-education training, or “brainwashing” as he puts it. It’s reported that over a million military officers and government workers were forced to enter prison camps as a means of revenge and indoctrination — many were tortured, abused, and even died.
In 1975, almost a year later, my dad was released due in-part to a growing need for teachers. Though he was sent back to the high school he once taught at, the world around him was no longer the same, it was a world he didn’t know any more. The country that he loved, still in aftershock, became the country he hated. The country that promised a better life became the country that struggled to keep its people fed. Many starved. And after years of living this new reality, he had had enough. My dad knew that in order to even have the slightest chance for a better life, he had to do something very brave and dangerous. He had to escape.
It’s estimated that over 130,000 South Vietnamese people fled the country — many didn’t make it. According to my father, they were pretty lucky considering how risky it was to attempt an escape from the country. They left in a tiny boat in the middle of the night, rowing through the crashing waves towards a larger hidden ship in the dark waters of the South China Sea. With young kids, there was no room for error. If caught, they could have been imprisoned or executed. But for my dad, there really was no other option.
Despite how many hundreds of people the asylum boat could carry, fear of discovery necessitated that the boat take off as soon as possible, taking only the 50 refugees who made it that night. Two days later they arrived in the Philippines and there they waited another year before they were permitted to enter the U.S. On April 30, 1982 they flew to San Francisco with just the clothing on our backs. After a couple of days of paperwork, they made their way to the place I would call home: Knoxville, Tennessee. This would be the place where we could start a new life, the place where two working parents would try to make ends meet — even if it meant being a janitor mopping floors at our church, the place where my sister and I would stay home every summer doing long division and memorizing multiplication tables.
For a long time, I was embarrassed to tell people that my family and I immigrated here because of the social stigma associated with immigrants. It saddens me to see the stigma still alive today. This Independence Day, I’m reminded of the many sacrifices my father made for my sister and I during the many hours we spent home alone while he worked at all the jobs he had to take, no matter how painful or menial, just to put food on the table. And like a math equation, the sum of all the hard work, sacrifice and summers studying at home is the person I am today: someone who knows freedom is earned through the same ambition and strong determination my father wielded in his final fight, the fight for our independence. And for that I am both proud and grateful.
So when I think of summer, its fantasy and wonder, I think of math. And it puts a smile on my face.
