Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  South Vietnam was doomed, and everyone knew it. It was no longer a matter of months or years; it was only a matter of days.

  My family did almost nothing to prepare for the fall of their nation. They were aware of the war, of course, and they were surrounded by constant reminders. At night they could hear the sound of distant gunfire and occasionally caught a glimpse of a passing helicopter silhouetted against a glowing red horizon; in 1968, the corrugated roof of one of their rice mills had even been ripped apart by shrapnel. They knew that when the last of the American forces had withdrawn from the south, the North Vietnamese army had begun to advance on Saigon; but for Peace, Unity, Profit, business went on as usual—right up to the very day the first Soviet tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon.

  You may wonder why my family didn’t follow the example of so many army officers and government officials, who stuffed a few belongings into a duffel bag and fled before the communist advance. The chief reason my family didn’t leave is that they had a lot more to leave behind. It was one thing to give up a government position or a military assignment, but it was something else entirely to abandon an empire—especially one that you scratched from the dirt with your own sweat and blood.

  But why didn’t my family at least shut down the rice mills, send the employees home, and take off on a timely vacation? As the Vietnamese wisely point out, “It is no disgrace to move out of the way of the elephant.” Why would they keep doing business as though nothing was going to happen?

  The reason is they weren’t sure anything was going to happen. My family had been caught in the middle of political upheaval all their lives. First it was the Vietnamese, then the French, then the Japanese, then the Vietnamese again. This time it was the communists—so what? At first their country was a kingdom, then a colony, then a vassal state, then a democracy. This time it would become a socialist republic—did it really matter? For decades my family had been bending with the prevailing wind, and they had no reason to believe that the current wind would be any more powerful or permanent.

  This time they were greatly mistaken.

  Saigon fell to the communists on April 30, 1975. In Soc Trang word spread that communist forces could arrive en masse at any moment, and everyone scrambled to display any scrap of red cloth and yellow star they could find to proclaim their loyalty to the new regime—and hopefully avoid destruction.

  But the North Vietnamese army never came. A week later one lone personnel carrier with a handful of uniformed troops and a megaphone mounted on top rolled into town to announce the new government. That was it—there were no mortar blasts, no rumbling tanks, no battalions of vengeful soldiers breaking into homes and dragging weeping people into the streets. The residents of Soc Trang had braced themselves for attack by an invading army, but the army never showed up.

  They didn’t need to.

  There were two enemies that had been working for decades to overthrow the government of South Vietnam—an enemy from without and an enemy within. The enemy from without was the People’s Army of Vietnam that marched on Saigon from the faraway north, but the enemy within did not have to march south because they already lived there—they were the Viet Cong.

  When word reached Soc Trang of the fall of Saigon, the Viet Cong began to come out of the woodwork like cockroaches. My family was astonished to discover how many neighbors had been Viet Cong sympathizers all along. Poor farmers who had brought their rice to the mills; one of the teachers from the private school; even rice mill employees, people with whom my father had associated for years—they were all Viet Cong.

  And they were now in charge.

  It was predicted that when the communists came to power, the changeover to a socialist system would be immediate, but in areas like the Mekong Delta the new way of doing things was introduced gradually to reduce resistance. First, a series of town meetings was held to reassure the residents they had nothing to fear from their new government and little would change in their daily routines. Everyone would go to work as usual and do what they had always done; only now they would be working for the government. The government would take its share, the residents were told, but it would only take what was fair, and it promised not to abuse its authority. “If there are ten roads,” one of the new administrators announced, “the government will take only nine and leave one for you to walk.” That sounded reassuring at the time.

  It was also announced that the new Vietnamese government had no intention of interfering with the ethnic Chinese who lived in Vietnam—the government even promised to punish anyone who made a threat against the Chinese. That came as a huge relief, and it served to reinforce my family’s belief that the changeover to the new regime would probably prove to be a temporary nuisance but otherwise have little effect.

  Over the next five months, however, things began to change. Government administrators began to visit my family’s rice mills to take “inventories” of the assets. They took a similar inventory of the house, though at the time it wasn’t made clear why the government would need a list of personal possessions. Each inventory became more and more invasive until it finally became obvious that the government’s intention was much more than inventory—it was seizure. After repeated inventories of the house, the family began to find potted plants dug up and ceramic tiles pried from the floor in search of any hidden wealth.

  At the rice mills it was becoming more and more difficult for my father to do business. The business still generated lots of cash, but now the government claimed it and hauled it all away. Then the government claimed the exclusive right to sell gasoline and oil, and strict limitations were enforced. But milling machines need gas and oil to run, and with dwindling fuel supplies, the family rice mills began to process less and less rice.

  The Chung family empire was in a graveyard spiral.

  In September the new socialist government made its ultimate intentions clear: there would be no more inventories. Instead, my family was informed its rice mills were being permanently “borrowed” by the government and the government’s own employees would be brought in to work them. My family was left with no alternative but to walk away and leave behind everything they had worked for.

  Now it was Grandmother Chung’s turn for despair. She had spent the last twenty-five years of her life building a successful business, and it was all being taken from her—without excuse, without apology, and without remuneration. It was the same devastating loss that had helped drive her husband to an early grave. When her husband had succumbed to despair twenty-five years earlier, she had remained strong, but now she was sixty-seven, and the thought of starting over was almost more than she could bear. She even talked about throwing herself off the bridge near our house and drowning her grief in the deep water of the Bay Sao River—but it was only talk. My grandmother was a woman who opened Pepsi bottles with her teeth, and she still had a lot of fight left in her.

  My grandmother and uncle began to skim off large amounts of cash from the rice mills before the government could take it away. Past profits that had been converted to gold bars were carefully hidden to avoid possible inventory, and my grandmother quickly removed her coffee can of diamonds from the house. The communists who conducted the household inventories were sometimes neighbors or former employees, and it was no secret to them that the Chung family possessed wealth. My grandmother knew they would eventually tear the house apart in their search for hidden treasure, and that meant there was only one safe place to conceal her diamonds.

  The bottom floor of the house was the throne room from which my grandmother ruled her kingdom. The front entrance was covered by a pair of wooden doors that hung side by side like the doors of a barn. Every morning those doors were rolled apart to open for business, and whenever the doors opened, my grandmother would be found seated in the center of the doorway on her throne—a tall, round-backed rattan chair that framed her like a shield. Her thick arms rested on the wicker armchair, and her large hands dangled loosely,
with her long fingernails pointing at the ground like daggers. The house had no need of a security system because anyone wishing to enter had to make it past Grandmother Chung.

  When the communists arrived for their final inventory of the house, they found my grandmother seated as always on her throne. To the right of her throne was a table that held a tray and a small knife, and on the floor to her left sat a brass spittoon. My grandmother had the delicate habit of chewing betel nut, an ancient Asian habit that remains especially popular among truck drivers and construction workers in Taiwan. The green-husked areca nut, known to the Vietnamese as cau, is chopped into small pieces and wrapped in a betel leaf along with a pink calcium powder and spices like clove and cardamom for flavoring. The concoction is chewed like tobacco and has a similar stimulating effect, and the pink lime has the attractive side effect of turning the teeth bloodred. Empress Chung’s glare alone was enough to start fires and make strong men cower; imagine the added effect when she bared her red teeth and ejected a spurt of blood into her spittoon. My brother Bruce assures me that at least one of those men lost bladder control.

  My grandmother could not prevent the men from entering our house, but she could stare each one down as he passed. The men did what they came to do, but each time they passed through that doorway, they gave my grandmother a wide berth. Their inventory included carrying off most of our possessions, but no matter how hard they searched, they were never able to find the diamonds. My grandmother had hidden them in the one place she knew none of them would ever dare to look.

  She was sitting on them.

  The communists eventually confiscated my family’s house to use as a civic building for the new local government. The eviction notice allowed the family only a few hours to gather what they could and leave, but by that time there was very little left to take anyway. Everyone packed a few personal belongings and household items and literally walked away. Walking was the only option because all the cars had been confiscated.

  The loss of the business and home was devastating, but it could have been worse. When the war ended, more than a million South Vietnamese government officials and military officers were sent to reeducation camps to be taught the error of their capitalist ways and punished for their participation in the war. Some were sentenced for years, and many never returned.

  New Economic Zones were also created to help stimulate the economy and increase food production. These were areas of previously uncultivated land, some of which were located in remote and densely wooded areas. Those sentenced to New Economic Zones were handed primitive hand tools and left to survive off the land, though many of them were highly educated and skilled professionals who had no previous farming experience. The zones did nothing to help the economy, but they did an excellent job of punishing the formerly rich and powerful.

  In the Mekong Delta the local communist committee decided who would be sent to a reeducation camp or New Economic Zone and who would be allowed to remain. The authorities who decided my family’s fate were local rice farmers and former employees, many of whom had been helped by the kindness and generosity of my family. It was a classic example of “cast your bread upon the waters.” Though wealthy, my family had given generously to the poor; though powerful, the Chungs had shown compassion to those in need. Now that bread was returning.

  My family’s kindness may have saved everyone’s lives, but it did not provide for the future. The house was gone, the source of income was gone, and my mother and father had five hungry children to feed.

  And my mother was once again pregnant—this time with me.

  Ten

  THE FARM

  THE COMMUNISTS CONFISCATED EVERYTHING MY family owned: the business, the house, the cars and motorcycles, the television, even the slightly used refrigerator that had never been plugged in. But there was one asset that the Chungs managed to retain, and the only reason my family didn’t lose that, too, was that the communists knew nothing about it.

  It was a farm.

  At least everyone called it a farm, though a more accurate description might be orchard or garden. It was a ten-acre tract of land in the Mỹ Xuyên district on the opposite side of the Bay Sao River; about a mile away was the house from which my family had just been evicted. When the family business had been at its peak, my grandmother was searching for places to invest money, and one venue she decided to try was real estate. She bought the farm and planted it with fruit trees and a garden with the intention of making it a sort of weekend getaway or private retreat. She never expected to have to live there.

  In fact, she never did. There were eighteen in the extended family at the time they were evicted from their home, and it was impossible to find a new house large enough for all of them to live in together. The problem wasn’t money, because my family had managed to stash gold, diamonds, and a fortune in currency before the communists could take it away. The problem was no one could risk spending any of it. The new government had required all assets to be declared, and my family was expected to be poor now. If my father or uncle had started doling out cash for a large house, my family would have found themselves headed for a New Economic Zone. To avoid suspicion, it was decided that my grandmother and my uncle, with his wife and children, would search for an inauspicious house in Soc Trang while my family would move to the farm.

  The farm was an L-shaped parcel that backed up to the Bay Sao River. Facing the river was a house, if you could call it that; in reality it was more like a hut. The front wall of the house was made of brick, but the other three walls were a patchwork of palm and coconut thatch combined with the occasional sheet of plywood. The roof was made of corrugated tin, which my father would later cannibalize to extend the front of the house as the family grew larger. The house itself was shaped like a square, and in the center there was a tall wooden pole that supported the sagging roof. The beds consisted of two wooden platforms covered with rice mats. My father and the boys slept on one of them, and my mother and the girls slept on the other; each bed had one thin blanket that had to stretch to cover everyone.

  The house had no running water. Water for drinking had to come from captured rain while water for bathing and cleaning had to be carried from the river and stored in cisterns outside the house. The Bay Sao was part of a river system that emptied into the South China Sea, and every night the rising tide forced salt water into the river and made it undrinkable. The next morning, when the tide went out again, the brackish water retreated to the sea and fresh water from upstream filled the river again. It was easy to remember: when the river was low, it was safe to drink; and when it was high, it wasn’t.

  There was no outhouse on the property. The younger children used a ceramic chamber pot that had to be taken to the river and cleaned out after each use. For the older children and adults, the toilet consisted of a trowel and any patch of dirt they cared to use. They simply dug themselves a hole, squatted, then covered the hole again—all the time hoping that they were the first one to dig there.

  There was no electricity either. Light had to come from oil lamps, and the stove was an old cast-iron unit that burned rice husks, coconut branches, and wood when we were able to find it. My mother set up the kitchen with the few household items she had been able to bring, and Jenny helped with the cooking, which was no easy task for a tiny nine-year-old. The stove burned fast and hot, and the opening where the wood had to be inserted was almost level with Jenny’s face. It was like working in front of a blast furnace for her, but as always she did it without complaint.

  There were five children in the family when my parents first arrived at the farm, but before they left, there would be three more—me and my twin brothers Anh and Hon. The biggest challenge was finding enough for a family of ten to eat, and that was where living on a farm came in handy. The farm was part orchard and part garden, and they ate everything the land would produce. There were papayas, bananas, coconuts, guavas, mangos, and figs; my family grew corn, sugarcane, watermelon, several kinds of potatoes,
and yams. They even grew lemongrass to keep the mosquitoes away.

  Nothing on the farm was ever wasted. My mother had an almost supernatural ability to multiply loaves and fishes and to turn inedible objects into dinner. Rice was a staple, but there was never enough to go around, so my mother made it go further by cooking a thin porridge. Cassava root could be soaked in water until it fell apart, then dried and ground into flour that could be used to bake bread and muffins. There was an irrigation ditch that ran from the river to the garden, and when the river rose at night, water would fill the ditch and bring the occasional fish with it. There were also small frogs that came up from the river, and when my brothers and sisters could catch enough of them, my mother served them for dinner.

  Behind the house there was a chicken coop, where the family raised chickens and ducks for their eggs and geese because they were believed to kill snakes—a comforting thought in a land that had serpents such as the banded krait. American soldiers used to call it the “two-step snake”—one bite, two steps, and you’re dead. That was an exaggeration, but the story kept American soldiers on their toes and made my family take very good care of the geese. Whenever my mother killed a chicken, it was a feast, and a single chicken had to feed the entire family. My father always got to eat the best parts, which were the head and butt, where most of the fat is found.

  My family also kept dogs but never fed them. In Vietnam there was no such thing as dog food, and giving human food to a dog was unthinkable. The dogs ate whatever they could find, just like everyone else, and they seemed to do just fine.