My Ancestry: The War in Vietnam to Life in the States

I interviewed my grandfather for this story to discover more about my ancestral past; he narrates the tale of war in Vietnam and his life experiences from a war-torn country to immigration into the United States. This is the story from his perspective…

My father was born in China, back when Mao Tse-Tung took power. He left the country for Vietnam, where I was born. In order to maintain ancestry, he married Chinese. So our family is full Chinese. His oldest son, my brother, went back to China to also marry Chinese, to continue his Chinese heritage and roots. It was always tradition for the first son to marry Chinese. When the war broke out and the North invaded the South, two of my brothers got drafted.

I remember my aunt, who was killed during the French-Indochina War. The French had invaded Vietnam, and there were soldiers all over the country. The soldiers came by one day and broke your grandmother’s prized fishing rod. She always loved fishing for fun. Then my aunt, who was caring for her daughter at the time of the war, got killed by a shell grenade while hanging up clothes in the backyard. The grenade killed my aunt, and her daughter, who was only an infant, had to be cared for.

I settled and grew up in Rach Gia, where I got married to your grandmother. Then we moved to Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, afterwards. I was just a student at the time, I could only afford one uniform to attend school. After school, I became a teacher. It was a socialist society; we were given limited rations of rice, soy sauce, etc. I remember when the war broke out, we were in Saigon. Flashes of bright orange light everywhere, the noises from the bombings were just unforgettable. The sky was completely dark, and the noises were constant. Just imagine the bombings in movies magnified by 100. Every single day there were bombings, and American soldiers used to buy dry goods from a store nearby. People used to shoot spitballs at soldiers in our neighborhood.

We wanted a better life for a children, to escape the war. At the time, only Chinese could emigrate from Vietnam. The fee to leave the country was about $10,000. We packed dried meat for the boat trip and left in the early morning. The boat stopped to pick up other wealthy Chinese who were emigrating due to the war. Then Thai pirates came aboard and destroyed our engine, so we were left for 30 days stranded in the ocean.

After floating in the open ocean, we arrived in Malaysia, where all we had to eat was ramen. The boat then pulled into a refugee camp in Indonesia. There were wait lists for all these different destinations. Australia, Germany, and Canada had the shortest wait lists. For the whole family to immigrate to America, we had to wait over a year. A Wisconsin church sponsored our family and we flew United Airlines all the way to Milwaukee.

I remember the snow was freezing when we got there, and we stayed at the church. We walked DOWN into the basement where we slept, and I remember thinking “why are we walking down?” We didn’t have any basements in Vietnam. The breakfast was unfamiliar, especially sausage and bacon. We lived in the church awhile, then rented a house. I studied English at technical college, and your grandmother worked at a cafeteria. We moved to Los Angeles some time later to warmer weather.