How I Escaped Vietnam

When I was about 5, my sister and I rode a bike to flee a bombing. The dirt road, left, trembled from the explosions and bright fireballs flashed in the distance. Our dog trotted close behind. The bombing continued through the night. Credit Minh Uong/The New York Times 

How I Escaped Vietnam 

A family vacation revives thoughts

about fleeing South Vietnam as a child.

By MINH UONG / International New York Times | DEC. 16, 2015 

The images accompanying this article are a combination of drawings from memory and the new artwork based on our recent trip back to my homeland. 

This year, my wife suggested that we take a family vacation to Vietnam. Our daughters are growing up — Lein was 19 years old and Tai was 16, and she pointed out that they won’t want to be dragged along with their parents much longer. Plus, she said. “We’re not getting any younger.”

Still, I thought she was crazy. I know a lot of Westerners are discovering Vietnam (“world-class cuisine,” “breathtaking natural beauty” and “Asia’s most resilient peoples” are a few descriptions you will find on travel sites), but it wasn’t at the top of my list as a vacation destination. Maybe that’s because I was born there. It has been more than 40 years since I left and, to this day, I still feel some trepidation at the sound of exploding fireworks. To me, they reverberate vividly in my memory like those turbulent last days of the war.

SCOOTERS AND MOTORBIKES, OH MY! Our biggest culture shock was the stream of motorbikes, scooters mixed in with cars and trucks. The biggest challenge was crossing the street, to throw caution to the wind and take that first step off the curb. Credit Minh Uong/The New York Times

It was April 30, 1975, and Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was under siege. I was 10, the youngest of eight children. I was living with my parents and four of my siblings in a one-room house. The Vietcong were making their way toward the capitol building. The sound of bombs exploded nearby. My parents, hoping to get us away from the chaos, told my brothers and sister to get on our bikes and ride away. When things calmed down, they said, we should come back.

It was the last time I would see them for 14 years.

That is what happens when you flee your homeland. You don’t know that you are going to become part of a flood of refugees. I later would learn that I was one of the nearly 130,000 people who fled Saigon that day and one of the estimated two million “boat people” who fled Vietnam by boat and other means over the next two decades. But I didn’t set out to come to America; I left my house when my parents said I should.

SAIGON, APRIL 29, 1975, My parents were the custodians of a Catholic school, left, where an American helicopter landed on the roof.

NHA THO BA CHUONG (THREE BELLS CHURCH), My parents were devout Roman Catholics. I received my first holy communion here and served Mass as an altar boy. Credit Minh Uong/The New York Times

The war was already a constant of my childhood, but it had never felt as immediate as it did that day.

Thinh, my oldest brother, climbed on his motorcycle with his pregnant wife and their two children and sped ahead. Cuong, my other brother, was on his moped. Strapped to the back seat was my bag of clothes and his. He followed closely behind Thinh. I was with Phu, a third brother. I sat in the back of his bicycle as we rode through the crowded streets. On my lap was a bag of sticky rice, still warm from the morning when my Mom cooked it. I saw people breaking into buildings. Others were carrying large appliances and office furniture on their motorbikes.

We arrived late that afternoon at Nha Be, a small fishing village 10 miles from Saigon. We spotted my brother’s moped, but he was nowhere to be found. My oldest brother told us that Cuong jumped on a small vessel as it was pulling away.

We rested awhile. And, not knowing what else to do, we ate the sticky rice for lunch along with some fresh-squeezed limeade we bought from a nearby stand. Someone there had the radio blaring. We heard that the Vietcong had taken over the capital. Saigon was now under the Communists’ rule. We saw some locals begin to take down the South Vietnamese flag from the front of their houses and replace it with the Communist one.

Others began showing up at the harbor with all their possessions. At a distance, we saw a small South Vietnamese navy ship slowly moving out of the bay toward the ocean. My brothers and the heads of the other families decided to pool our money together and charter a boat to catch up with the ship. We only knew that it was going somewhere. Away.

About 25 of us boarded the small fishing boat, including four of my brothers and my sister, and headed to sea. We caught up to the navy ship and were allowed aboard. Their course was to get to the international waters and to be picked up by an American aircraft carrier. As we made our way, we came upon vessels abandoned by those who had been rescued. Those boats became our saviors. When our own boat’s engine had problems, we would latch onto an empty boat, transfer everyone onboard and continue on our journey. (Altogether, we did this four times.)

FAMILIES FEND FOR THEMSELVES, 1975 Those who brought food tended to their families. My sister saw how weak I was. She asked someone for any morsel of food. No one was willing to share. Credit Minh Uong/The New York Times

One day we encountered a fishing boat that had been at sea for a month. The crew had no idea what has been happening to our country. They invited us aboard and gave us a hot meal of rice and freshly caught seafood. Afterward, we parted ways. They wanted to get back to their fishing village to tend to their families.

About a week after we left Nha Be, our group of 59 people were crammed onto a military landing craft. It was the fourth abandoned boat that we had boarded. We managed to travel for a long distance before the engine died. After that, we were adrift at sea without food. Fortunately, this boat was designed to carry fresh water in its side hulls. Meanwhile, we heard on the radio that the American ships had gone home. Our hopes were crushed.

After floating ocean for three days, we were rescued by a Singaporean merchant ship headed to Taiwan. When they picked us up, I remember feeling extremely hungry, dizzy and nauseous from seasickness.

But I was one of the lucky ones. Anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 people who tried to flee Vietnam by boat never made it to safety.

Surrounding the writer’s parents are, clockwise from bottom left, Minh at age 6; Hoan, 19, one of three sisters; Cuong, 17, the second eldest brother; Phu, 14; and Binh, 12. Credit Courtesy of the Uong family

I had my first solid meal after three days of drinking just water. The crew made us a noodle dish. This ship was so big that it didn’t rock. The seasickness left me. The worst, physically, was over.

We stayed at an army base high in the mountains of Taiwan. After a month, we all were flown to a camp in Guam. There, we joined hundreds of Vietnamese refugees. It was here that I ran into Cuong, the brother who had abandoned his moped, in the lunch line. I asked him what happened to my bag of clothes. He explained that when he arrived at the harbor and saw a boat pulling away from the dock, he threw both of our bags and jumped onboard. My bag hit the back of the boat and fell in the water. We also reunited with my other sister and her family as well.

We stayed a week in Guam. On the Fourth of July, we were transferred to Fort Chaffee, Ark., an Army base so big you had to take a bus to travel around to all the barracks. The Red Cross was helping families to find sponsors, and asked us to pick the top three states we’d want to live in. My siblings decided on Massachusetts, because they’d heard of the famous colleges — Harvard, M.I.T., Boston University — there.

The five of us arrived in Upton, a picturesque New England town, on a chilly September day. A church, Holy Angels Parrish, provided us with a furnished apartment, including a 13-inch black and white television. We watched many episodes of “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company” to learn English. Even though it was a cold winter, we loved our new life in America.

I didn’t think about that time often, but during my last year at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, I felt compelled to draw my memories of the war and our journey to America. When I began to plan our trip back to Vietnam, I thought about those images and wondered if I would recognize some of these places I was about to see.

BIKING, FARMING AND FISHING IN HOI AN Outside of Hoi An, an ancient trading port in central Vietnam, we leisurely biked through fields of rice, passing water buffalos and local farms. To get a taste of the lives of farmers and fishermen, we toured a farm and tried to plant and maintain the vegetable gardens. We went out on the water in a “thung chai” basket boat and learned to throw the nets to catch sardines. Doing all this in 104 degree heat. We went back to the hotel exhausted and thankful we don’t have to work the land to make a living. Credit Minh Uong/The New York Times