Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  And they were looking directly at him.

  He wanted to run, but his legs would not obey him. The men had the eyes of tigers—that mythical, paralyzing stare said to be able to hold a boy frozen in place until the beast devoured him. He couldn’t move; there was nothing he could do but stand and wait to be torn apart.

  The men gathered around my father and stared down at him. One of the men took a step closer and said something, but my father could not understand the man’s words and said nothing in reply. The man cocked his head to one side and studied him for a moment, then raised his machete and pointed to my father’s head. My father held his breath and wondered what it was going to feel like to have his head chopped off. Will I still be able to see? he wondered. Will I feel it when my head drops to the ground like a coconut?

  The man made a comment to one of his companions, then pointed his machete at my father’s left arm and drew an imaginary line from his shoulder to his hand. Is he going to hack off my arm instead? Would it be better to lose my arm or my head? Which one hurts more? He squeezed his eyes tight and waited for the stinging blow.

  Then he heard the door to his house squeak open behind him, and when he turned, he saw his father hurry from the house and call out to the men in a frightened voice that didn’t sound like his father at all. Then, to my father’s amazement, my grandfather stepped aside and pointed to the door.

  The men nodded and entered the house one by one, and as each one entered, he bent down and leaned his bloodstained machete against the wall.

  My father entered last of all and watched as the men seated themselves around the small room. His older brother and sisters pressed themselves against the far wall and stared, wide-eyed, as my grandmother nervously ladled out bowls of rice and pho and passed them to her husband to distribute to the hungry men.

  Half an hour later the meal was finished, and the men departed. As they left, each man retrieved his machete from the side of the house—except for one. One machete was left leaning against the wall, with its bloodstained tip glowing like a torch. My father was fascinated by the machete and reached down to pick it up, but when he did, my grandfather grabbed his arm and jerked him back.

  “Never touch that machete,” my grandfather said sternly. “Never touch the blade and never, ever move it from that spot.”

  My grandfather’s solemn tone told my father that this was not a command to be questioned. As always, he obeyed, and the blood-tipped machete remained against the wall exactly where it had been left.

  My father was too young to understand that his family had just served a sort of Passover meal. The Cambodian angels of death who dined at our house that day had just finished slaughtering a group of communist sympathizers and were passing through my family’s village, searching for any others they might have missed.

  For more than a thousand years, the Mekong Delta was ruled by the Chinese. For the previous hundred years the French had been in charge, laying claim to Vietnam as an official “colony of economic interests” and growing rich off the sale of its rice, rubber, coffee, and tea. When Japan invaded Vietnam at the beginning of the Second World War, communist leader Ho Chi Minh founded the League for the Independence of Vietnam, commonly known as the Viet Minh. Their initial purpose was to repel the Japanese, but their ultimate goal was to free Vietnam from all foreign oppressors, which led them to hate the French almost as much as they did the Japanese.

  The Cambodians who dined at my father’s house that day supported the colonialist French and despised the communist Viet Minh. My father’s family had been spared a violent death because they were Chinese, and the Chinese were considered a neutral party to the conflict. Neutrality was a blessing, but it was also a difficult and dangerous balance to maintain. By feeding the Cambodians, my grandfather had won their favor—but an act of kindness to the Cambodians would have been viewed as an act of betrayal to the Viet Minh. The blood-tipped machete left leaning against their wall told other Cambodians that the family should be spared, but the Viet Minh would not have felt the same way. No matter what course of action my family took, someone could have been offended, and that meant their lives were in constant danger.

  Random violence was a constant danger in Bac Lieu, and after my family’s house had been burned to the ground twice, my grandmother decided she had had enough. After all, she was raising six children, and the rural delta was just too dangerous. She began to press her husband to relocate the family near the city of Soc Trang in Soc Trang province, about thirty miles north. They would be safer near a city, she insisted, and there would also be better education for the children there. My grandfather was reluctant to leave Bac Lieu because his business had prospered there, but eventually he relented and moved his family while his two brothers remained behind to protect the family property.

  But the violence soon followed them.

  After victory over the Japanese, nationalist sentiment was strong in Vietnam, and the communist Viet Minh were hurrying to attack the French before they had time to reconsolidate power. In Soc Trang the French were everywhere; there were French soldiers, French gendarmes, and French bureaucrats, and that made the region a target for Viet Minh attacks. Looting and assault became so common in Soc Trang that my grandfather found it almost impossible to conduct business there.

  In the months that followed, things grew even worse for my family. Business slowed to a standstill, and the money they had saved from Bac Lieu was gone. Now the only way they could survive was by selling off their possessions, and the Viet Minh had already stolen the best of them.

  Then on top of it all, my grandfather received the tragic news from Bac Lieu that one of his brothers had been killed in the recent uprising. His other brother had vanished without a trace and was presumed dead. This was the final straw in a lifetime of difficulties.

  My grandfather fell into a deep depression fueled by alcohol. At times his gloom was so dark and overpowering that he became suicidal. In moments of deepest despondency he would sometimes race up to the rooftop to throw himself off, and my father and uncle would have to hold him back to keep him from jumping and ending his life. My grandfather’s depression slowly descended into utter despair, and over the next three years the family could only watch as my grandfather withered like a drying leaf until he finally crumbled and died.

  My father was only twelve when it happened.

  At forty-one, my grandmother had been left to raise six children all by herself. Her children were poor and hungry, and all that had been left to her was the burned-out shell of a French colonial house. She had no money, no job, little education, and no one to help her. A forty-one-year-old woman with six children had virtually no prospect of remarriage; the only two options for a woman in her situation were servitude or prostitution, and she was too proud to do either. She faced an almost impossible challenge, the kind of Herculean task that would crush most men.

  So Grandmother Chung rolled up her sleeves and went to work.

  Three

  A HANDFUL OF RICE

  MY FATHER’S MOTHER WAS THE MOST FORMIDABLE woman I have ever known. It’s almost impossible to describe Grandmother Chung in a way that is both accurate and believable. In my eyes the woman was taller than bamboo, tougher than a water buffalo, and shrewder than a mongoose.

  An Kim Trinh was larger-than-life. At almost six feet in height, she towered half a foot over most Asian men and a full foot above most of their diminutive wives. She was broad shouldered and stocky in build and walked with such fearless confidence that people stepped off the sidewalk to let her pass. She could wield a machete like a Viet Cong regular and had a temper like a Laotian land mine, a woman whose angry glare could make my oldest brother wet his pants. You could love her, you could hate her, but no one could ever ignore her—she made sure of that. Grandmother Chung was the first of the three extraordinary women who would shape my life and alter my destiny. I loved her, I feared her, and I count myself fortunate that some part of her still lives in me.

>   Grandmother Chung was born just after the turn of the century to a Chinese family in the rural Mekong Delta. She married my grandfather in her early twenties, and together they set about building a business and raising a family. Unfortunately for them, they were doing it at a time when the Vietnamese, Cambodians, communists, French colonialists, and Japanese were warring all around them.

  Three times my grandfather’s business was completely destroyed, forcing him to begin again, and each crushing setback robbed a little more of his soul until, after his brothers died, he finally succumbed to alcohol and despair at age forty-eight. I have no way to comprehend the pressures my grandfather was forced to endure; what I do know is that the same pressure that can crush coal into dust can also turn carbon into diamond, and the same setbacks and disappointments that drove my grandfather to despair somehow only made my grandmother more determined. Tough times produce tough people, and my grandmother was the toughest of them all.

  Grandmother Chung was widowed in the worst of times. The year was 1949. Vietnam, like most of Asia, was still struggling to recover from the ravages of a global war. In Vietnam entire industries had been destroyed, the few paved roads were left pockmarked by mortar shells and bomb craters, and rail lines were turned into little more than twisted knots of rusted steel. In the north almost two million Vietnamese died of starvation, when both the Japanese and the French made the monstrous decision to stockpile immense quantities of rice to burn in place of oil.

  The economy of Vietnam was in ruins. No one trusted the currency because no one could be certain who would rule Vietnam next. Why trade in piastres if the French were about to depart? And why exchange piastres for the Vietnamese dong when the French might very well remain? And if the Viet Minh succeeded in their desire to throw everyone out—then what would happen? Commerce came to a standstill, food was scarce, and death was everywhere.

  That was the world in which my grandmother found herself solely responsible for the safety and survival of six children ranging in age from seven to nineteen.

  With all those hungry mouths to feed, her first priority was food, but she knew that scrounging for crumbs today would not provide tomorrow’s dinner; what she needed was a business—something that could grow, something that could put food on the table today and provide for tomorrow as well. But what type of business was open to a woman like her? And how could she start a business without skills, equipment, or capital?

  The answer was rice.

  One thing the Mekong Delta has always had in abundance is rice, and rice is the staple diet of all Asian countries. Everyone needed rice, my grandmother knew, so she began to scavenge handfuls of raw rice wherever she could find them and mill them by hand. Hand-milling is an ancient process that is still employed in underdeveloped areas of the world; it involves pounding the rice in an improvised mortar and pestle until the inedible outer husk and bran are removed. The process is labor-intensive but free, which made it a perfect fit for the unskilled Chung family.

  When the first few handfuls of rice were ready, the three oldest children sold them on the streets of Soc Trang. My grandmother used the money to buy more raw rice, set some of it aside, and sold the rest. She repeated this process again and again until she had finally collected enough raw rice to fill twenty sacks, a substantial enough quantity to allow her to approach a commercial rice mill and pay to have the rice milled by machine.

  That was how the family business grew: handful by handful, sack by sack, year by year, until it became one of the largest businesses in the entire Mekong Delta—a rice-milling empire worth millions in today’s dollars. It was a genuine rags-to-riches story, made even more impressive by the fact that it was accomplished by a woman with no financial resources and little formal schooling.

  Education was never an option for my grandmother; in Vietnam girls rarely had the chance to attend school beyond an elementary level. Daughters were given a basic education and training in the domestic arts they would need to run a household one day. But building a business empire required more than knowledge of domestic arts, and Grandmother Chung was left to accomplish the task with only her native intelligence and fearless determination. Fortunately for my family, she had plenty of both.

  There was a darker reason to limit a girl’s education in Vietnam—a timeworn Asian proverb that said, “A woman who cannot write is a woman of virtue.” According to the proverb, a girl who was taught to write would become an unfaithful wife who wrote to other men while a woman who couldn’t write would have no choice but to remain faithful and virtuous.

  There was no tax-supported public school system in Vietnam, so education had to be funded privately. If you wanted your son to be educated, you essentially found yourself a teacher and hired him to teach. But in the Mekong Delta the uncertain economy and constant threat of violence made prosperity fleeting and education a stop-and-go process. Often a family could afford to send only one son to school at a time, in most cases the oldest first. When my family lived in Bac Lieu and my grandfather’s business was still flourishing, my father’s older brother started school. My uncle was an excellent student and was known for his beautiful penmanship, which to the Chinese is an indication of culture and intelligence. But when the family moved to Soc Trang and the business began to decline, my uncle’s schooling ended. His education stopped at an elementary level, and he never had the chance to resume.

  Because my uncle was the oldest and strongest, he was most needed to help with the growing family business, and that gave my father the chance to begin his own education. My father loved school and dreamed of becoming a doctor one day. He was especially adept at languages and became proficient at several, including Vietnamese, Cambodian, Cháo zhōu (pronounced chow-joe), and several other Chinese dialects.

  The year 1954 was pivotal for my family and for Vietnam as a nation. That was the year the Viet Minh finally defeated the French, and Vietnam’s hundred-year colonial era came to an end. It was also the year the United States first took an active interest in Vietnam. Fearing that all of Southeast Asia was about to turn communist, the United States backed a plan at a Geneva peace conference that split Vietnam into two separate nations, with a communist government in the north and a loosely democratic government in the south. No one could foresee it at the time, but that event made the Vietnam War inevitable.

  When the nation split in two, an enormous migration took place in both directions at once. A million souls fled from north to south: Catholics, Buddhists, government workers, intellectuals—anyone who hated the communist land reforms or feared reprisals by the new government. About one hundred thousand Viet Minh activists migrated in the opposite direction to join their communist colleagues in the north, though many Viet Minh remained in their native villages in the south.

  The migration put an end to open conflict and ushered in a brief era of peace and prosperity. That was the pivotal event for my family—a peaceful environment and stable economy that allowed my grandmother’s rice-milling business to begin to grow exponentially. The business was given an official name: Hoà Hiệp Lợi.

  Or in English: Peace, Unity, Profit.

  For my father, the name could not have been more appropriate. For seventeen years he had loathed the constant violence and the poverty it spawned. He longed for peace and the unity of the many ethnic groups that shared the Mekong Delta—and five years of hunger and deprivation had given him a desire for profit too. At last he had the peaceful world he had always hoped for.

  It didn’t last.

  Within two years the South Vietnamese government launched a campaign to root out and destroy the remaining Viet Minh in the south. To carry out that campaign, they needed soldiers, and in the war-weary south the only way to get them was to draft them. My father was at the perfect age for conscription, and the possibility of military service terrified him. He was a peaceful man who had always despised violence, and he was about to be forced to become part of it. And so, just a few years before American conscientious obj
ectors began to head to Canada, my father fled to Cambodia.

  It was my grandmother who gave the final order for my father to go. Her sons were the backbone of her growing business empire, and she was not about to let the political interests of the South Vietnamese government take precedence over her corporate plans. For my father, dodging military service was a moral and ethical decision; for my grandmother, it was just good business.

  My father spent the next two years in lonely exile in Cambodia; but by 1960, the family business was growing by leaps and bounds, and my grandmother sent for her son to return home. Peace, Unity, Profit was about to experience explosive growth and undreamt-of success under the iron rule of my grandmother and the tireless efforts of her two obedient sons. But two events that year would alter the course of my father’s life forever. In the north Ho Chi Minh announced the establishment of the National Liberation Front with the expressed purpose of “liberating” the people of South Vietnam and reuniting the two countries. And in the south US advisers and journalists came up with a nasty pejorative to describe those remaining Viet Minh that the government just could not seem to eliminate.

  Viet Cong.

  Four

  BUILDING AN EMPIRE

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S FIRST TWENTY SACKS OF RICE quickly turned into a hundred, and a hundred had the potential to mushroom into thousands—but she knew it would be hard for the business to expand as long as she was forced to pay someone else to mill her rice. Rice mills were a monopoly in the Mekong Delta; every rice farmer had to have his rice milled before he could sell it, and unless he was willing to perform the laborious task of hand-milling, he was forced to do business with the local rice mill—and forced to pay whatever the mill demanded.