" Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! " Henry David Thoreau
When we finally arrived at the Fort Chaffee Relocation Center at Fort Smith, Arkansas in the late spring of 1975, we had no idea how much our lives will change and how difficult it will be to go home again.
The Vietnamese are a dramatic and melancholic bunch; needless to say to be uprooted from their homes and families and transplanted to a whole new country because of war, they were very sad. Sad to leave their lives behind, and very apprehensive of their future in America.
Over 140,000 Vietnamese fled South Vietnam after April 30, 1975; they were either air-lifted or transported by US military cargo ships to Guam, Thailand, Wake Island, Hawaii, or the Phillipines. My mother, sister, brother, nanny and me were whisked away on one of the ships and were deported to Guam where we spent a couple of days recuperating from the shock of being torn away from our homeland and our families-awaiting our flight to Hawaii and then to the continental United States.
There was no time for thoughts or regrets; no time to think of what lay ahead. We floated miserably at sea for days with neither the feeling of relief to be heading to America, nor dread. Hundreds, thousands of civilians lined the decks, ship quarters and berths of our ship; we stayed huddled in our little corner praying. My mother probably prayed that we'd be reunited with our father; the nanny probably prayed that she would be able to stay by our side, and I prayed for air-conditioning. I cried and cried with complaints of being too hot. My sister and brother, who were four and three respectively at the time, just held on to each of my mother's ankle and wept themselves to sleep. At least we were together, I remember thinking!
The flight to Honolulu was arranged quick enough and soon we were on our way. From there, we were documented and put on another flight to Arkansas (or At-khan-sat as we vietnamese pronounced it then) I just remember having a really bad time with motion sickness on the plane; throwing up violently as we landed.
We descended the plane to a scorching hot Arkansas sun (which the vietnamese don't actually mind given our own climate)..the ground dried and cracked like the surface of just-baked brownies. We were neither excited nor scared; just feeling very blank and slumpy with the weight of the world on our shoulders. I stared up into the sky squinting and frowning, and that is all I remembered of the day we first arrived in the United States over 31 years ago.
I would like to go back there one day because it was a very significant turning point in all of our lives. It was there that we were admitted and processed. Under the Indochina Migration and refugee Act of 1975, the Ford administration happily approved domestic resettlement assistance for those who fled Cambodia or Vietnam (I read later on that it wasn't so popular with some 62% of Americans who feared the new wave of immigrants into their country) It was there that we were given medical exams, finger-printed by the INS, and issued social security cards; alien registration cards soon followed. Most of the adults were given english proficiency tests and tested for job skills. Then we were interviewed with translators for our compatibility in order for a sponsor to be matched (since you couldn't leave the camp without a sponsor) It was a sponsor's moral responsibility to help find lodging and jobs for a Vietnamese family in their community; help the assimilation process, and introduce us into the way of life that we would soon lead.
Looking back, it must have been very well-organized on the part of all the agencies that were dispatched to the four relocation centers to help with the flood of people that seemed to have arrived overnight. Although we all bunked together in large dormitories or huts and makeshift tents, we never felt neglected or hungry. The cafeteria semed to be opened all the time; the food, although foreign, was delicious, hot and plenty. The chicken noodle soup was so hot that when we were on line to fetch our lunch, the nanny dropped a ladle full of soup onto my sister's arm and burned her pretty badly; her skin shriveled and peeled on contact. She screamed and screamed the most awful wail and was immediately taken to the nurses' station to be treated and bandaged. To this day, there is still a faint shadow on my sister's left arm with the reminder of that day centuries ago.
It was also at Fort Chaffee that I contracted lice for the first time in my life. Our mother had kept us very well-protected and lice-free in Saigon; something she couldn't do in this new country. Good thing she knew just exactly how to approach it. She went to each of us kids and took out every single nit and lice with her bare hands; dividing and sectioning our hairs; pulling and snapping; taking care of our little visitors under the flourescent light in our dorm room. This is a memory that stayed with me; my mom nit-picking for the first time in America!
We were there less than a week before I spotted my father as we were heading back to our dorm. He was just standing there looking at us. It was as simple as that! I ran to him with my mother on my tail. My parents didn't have a thing to say to each other. They just stood there for the longest time in disbelief; with over a hundred thousand people dispatched to camps in California, Indianna, Florida, and Arkansas, my father was just standing there looking at us!
My father had so many last minute details to cover and close before he was able to flee Saigon. Although he was a very important person, war had reduced him to merely another civilian. He did, however, used his connections with the US Governement to be among one tof the last few people air-lifted off the roof of the American Embassy two days after the fall of Saigon; taking with him two female staffers who managed to escape with him. After he arrived in the Phillipines, he was able to cut through all of the red tapes and had us located; he was on the next flight to Arkansas.
You can never go home again. Home as you know it, or as we knew it, seemed surreal and from a very distant past. Six hundred and fifty thousand Cubans fled after Castro took over in 1959 and relocated to the Miami area, and in 1956, 38,000 Hungarians immigrated to the United States after the Hungarian revolution. The Vietnamese were just another statistic for the Department of Immigration. My father loves America! "America was the only country who opened their arms..Singapore didn't let us in, France wasn't so happy, nobody wanted us!" He is a very grateful American.
My father has no desire to return to the land where he was born and raised. "Too dangerous for me!" he would say. My mother always ditto everything he says and would never even want to think of us kids going back there. Their lives are here now, as disconnected and eccentric as they are, they have embraced everything that has been offered to them in this new country they have called home since 1975. Home is New York City; home is Times Square; home is where they have worked hard for 24/7 for the last three decades.
I would like to return to Vietnam in six or seven years..when our children will be a bit older and can understand better what it means to have to pick up and leave for political reasons; how to appreciate the freedom that is their birth-right; and how to value life for all its worth; how not to take anything for granted, and how to always do the best that they can in any given situation.
Someday, I will take my own family to the place where I was born and spent the first seven years of my life. I'd really like to do that. I would really like to go back home again...someday!
