Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

Because my parents had been exiled to a small farm, they were more or less insulated from the growing hostility, but we could see the handwriting on the wall. We had been spared the wrath of the proletariat, but we understood our sentence was more of a parole than a pardon. When we began to sense that public sentiment was about to turn against us, we decided to leave before it happened. There was a saying among the Chinese in those days: “If streetlamps had legs, they would have tried to escape as well.”

  And the government was willing to let us go—for a price. Since the fall of South Vietnam, more than 130,000 refugees had fled to other countries, which made the refugee business extremely profitable for the government. With so many people wanting to flee the country, the government realized they had only two options: they could try to prevent everyone from leaving, which would have been a violent and expensive business, or they could allow them to leave but administrate the process—and bureaucracy is something communists do very well.

  When the Chung family first gathered to discuss the idea of leaving Vietnam, my uncle suggested the most practical option would be for some of us to leave while some remained behind; a smaller party would make planning easier and reduce the overall cost. His suggestion might sound a bit cold and calculating, but splitting up was a common practice among Vietnamese refugees since leaving the country was extremely expensive and always dangerous. Instead of an entire family leaving together, someone, usually a father or an oldest son, would leave first and find a job; when he had earned enough money, he would send for the rest of his family to join him. That was the theory anyway, but it often didn’t work that way. Many families were often separated for years, and because of the dangers involved, many of those fathers and sons were never heard from again.

  Since my immediate family was the largest, it was suggested we should be the ones to split up, leaving the younger children behind—especially the twins. The journey might be too rough for them, it was suggested, and a pair of eighteen-month-old boys would be too much of an annoyance and possibly even a danger to the rest of the group. When that suggestion was made, my mother put her foot down. She made it very clear to everyone involved that there were two non-negotiables: our whole family was going to stay together, and our whole family was going to leave Vietnam—end of discussion.

  Once it was understood that everyone in our family would be leaving, planning could begin in earnest. My uncle, along with another man, named Mr. Hong, spearheaded the effort. It was a role that suited my uncle well because his prior job as director of sales for Peace, Unity, Profit had made him very good at making connections and negotiating deals.

  There were two basic ways my family could leave the country—by land or by sea—and each had its benefits and risks. At first glance a land route seemed easier and safer because no one in my family had ever been on a boat or had even seen the ocean. But the northern border into China was closed, and land routes to the west would force us to pass through the killing fields of Cambodia or the minefields of Laos. Even if a safe land route could be found, the distance we would have had to travel would have been staggering, and most of it would have had to be done on foot—not a pleasant prospect for a family with eight children under the age of twelve.

  It was quickly decided our best option was to leave by sea, but that meant we would have to obtain a boat, and in Vietnam boats were in short supply because almost every seaworthy vessel in the south had already been taken by earlier refugees. It would have been much too expensive and time-consuming to construct a boat, so an existing boat would have to be found that could be patched up and made seaworthy.

  My uncle and Mr. Hong made contact with the Public Security Bureau, a department of the Ministry of the Interior that was responsible for overseeing all would-be refugees. The two men quickly discovered that the process of leaving Vietnam was going to be complicated and extremely expensive; and like many things run by the government, it was also corrupt. Even to begin the process there was a “registration fee” of two taels of gold per person, the equivalent of about $2,700 per person in today’s dollars. (The tael is an Asian unit of measure equivalent to about 1.2 ounces.) The total fee would amount to eight taels of gold per adult, four per child between the ages of five and fifteen, and children under five traveled free—what a bargain. The government even controlled the sale of all boats and gasoline; at every step of the departure process, the government had figured a way to take a cut.

  My uncle did the math and realized that the cost for my extended family to legally leave Vietnam would be almost a quarter of a million dollars. Half the money would go directly to the government, 40 percent would cover the cost of the boat and fuel, and the remaining 10 percent traditionally went to a professional organizer or to pay bribes—and everyone had a hand out.

  The government had a final requirement: at the time of departure, all refugees had to sign a document turning over all their property and possessions to the government, waiving any future claim. That made leaving an irreversible decision; it meant my family would not be able to rent out the farm, just in case we had second thoughts or if the voyage turned out to be too difficult. When we left Vietnam, we would be leaving for good, and if we changed our minds, there would be nothing to return to.

  My uncle decided that if we included more people in our party, we would be able to afford a larger boat. That was more than a financial decision; a larger boat would be safer because a small boat had a much greater chance of being capsized or swallowed by rough seas. He began to search for other refugees who might be willing to join us by making discreet inquiries through trusted family connections like distant cousins, family acquaintances, and friends of friends. By the time he was finished, our little family outing had expanded to an exodus of 290 people and included sixteen different families.

  At any point in the departure process, some government official could ask for a bribe, and if he did, we would have no recourse but to pay him whatever he demanded. Professional organizers were notoriously corrupt. Every additional refugee meant more profit, so at the last moment before a boat’s departure, an organizer often showed up on the dock with several additional passengers, and the current passengers would have no choice but to take them aboard, even when additional passengers overloaded the boat and made it dangerous for travel. The refugee was never in control of his fate, and potential dangers were at every step of the journey. Old and unreliable boat engines could break down at any moment, inexperienced captains had never steered anything larger than a river barge, and incompetent navigators had nothing but a compass to navigate by.

  Finding a salvageable boat, repairing it, and making all the other necessary arrangements should have required at least six to eight months to complete, but two events occurred that shifted the project into high gear: in the middle of 1978, devastating storms and floods made the struggling Vietnamese economy even worse than it already was, and in February 1979, Vietnam went to war with China. When that happened, Vietnam’s Chinese citizens became Vietnam’s enemies, and the government began an organized campaign to eject as many ethnic Chinese from the country as possible. That was when my family knew it was really time to go.

  The soonest we could be ready to leave was June, and we didn’t dare leave later. June marked the beginning of the typhoon season in the South China Sea, and even the big commercial ships didn’t risk crossing in a typhoon. A departure date was chosen—June 12—and we hurried to make all the final arrangements.

  It was around that time my mother had a dream.

  In the West we’re too sophisticated to pay much attention to dreams anymore; psychiatrists are about the only people left who seriously entertain the idea that a dream could have a deeper meaning. But in the rest of the world it’s different: people take dreams very seriously, and they are willing to consider the possibility that sometimes a dream could be more than a dream—it might be a message.

  One night my mother dreamed she was in the marketplace in Soc Trang along with our entire family.
Grandmother Chung wasn’t there—it was a dream, not a nightmare—nor was my uncle or his family. It was just the ten of us: my mother, my father, and the eight children. The market was noisy and crowded with people from all over town, talking, haggling with vendors, calling to one another across the square.

  Suddenly everyone fell over dead.

  My father and all eight of us children—we were dead too. Even my mother was dead; though in the manner of dreams, she was still conscious, and her eyes were open. At the far corner of the market, she saw a solitary standing figure: a man dressed in a white robe, with long brown hair and a beard to match. As my mother watched, unable to move a muscle, the man began to make his way across the market toward her, stopping from time to time to point down at one of the reclining bodies—and whoever he pointed to, that person came back to life and stood up.

  My mother began to fervently pray that the man would point to her, too, and sure enough, when the man finally stood over her, he pointed to her, and my mother rose to her feet. She was ecstatic—until she remembered that her husband and children were still lying dead. She didn’t dare speak to the man, but she began to pray again, this time that he would extend the same kindness to her entire family and bring them back to life too.

  And he did. As he pointed to each of us, we rose to our feet until our whole family stood alive and well again.

  Then the dream ended.

  But my mother wanted to know what the dream meant. For some reason this dream seemed different to her—so vivid, so powerful, so suggestive of some deeper meaning. She began to ask her friends to help her understand the dream, and they offered different interpretations.

  “That was the Buddha,” one of them said. “He was appearing to you, trying to tell you something.”

  “The Buddha is bald and fat,” my mother replied. “This man looked nothing like that.”

  “It was one of your ancestors trying to communicate with you,” another friend suggested.

  But my mother shook her head. “None of my ancestors ever looked like that.”

  And that was where it ended. No one was able to interpret her dream, so my mother simply filed it away as one of those unexplained mysteries of life.

  Besides, she had more important things to worry about.

  Leaving the land of their birth was no longer just an intriguing idea that our family discussed in whispers behind closed doors—it would soon be a reality. We were actually leaving Vietnam, and there would be no turning back. My mother remembered that dark day of despair, when she almost threw herself into the Bay Sao River with Jenny in her arms; now she was about to cast her entire family into an ocean, and the prospect terrified her. She had heard the radio broadcasts from the Voice of America, Voice of Australia, and the BBC warning potential refugees about the extreme peril; she had heard the stories about the refugees who didn’t make it, the ones who died of thirst or sank into the sea or just disappeared without a trace. Would her family be among them? Was it really better to die than to live in communist Vietnam? Would her family have enough food, enough water for the voyage? And if they survived the voyage, where in the world would they live?

  Little did my mother know, half a world away, someone else was asking the very same questions.

  Twelve

  WHY ME?

  STAN MOONEYHAM RELAXED IN A COMFORTABLE CHAIR in the pastor’s study at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles. Across the desk from him sat the pastor himself, Dr. Ed Hill, who had invited Stan to speak at Mt. Zion that Sunday evening in early December 1977. The two men couldn’t have been more different. Stan was white and lean with a full head of snow-white hair; Ed was black and stout and had no hair at all. Stan lived in the suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley; Ed lived in one of the worst parts of Los Angeles. Stan’s organization was fewer than twenty-five years old; Ed’s church had been around for more than a century.

  Despite their differences, they shared a common background and passion that made them friends, and their meeting that night was like the crossing of two live wires.

  Ed tossed a recent edition of the Los Angeles Times across the desk to Stan and pointed to a photo on the front page. “What are you going to do about that?” he asked.

  Stan looked at the photo, then at his friend. He had no idea what to say.

  Walter Stanley Mooneyham was born in a small farming town thirty miles south of Tupelo, Mississippi, just three years before the Great Depression began. He was the seventh son of a poor cotton sharecropper, and when the bottom dropped out of the cotton market during the Depression, he experienced the effects of poverty and hunger firsthand. Like many young men of his generation, Stan couldn’t wait to escape the dreariness of farm life and see the world, and when he came of age in 1944, he joined the navy and served the remainder of the Second World War in the South Pacific, where he added death and destruction to his list of life experiences.

  Stan had a strong desire to tell others about those experiences, so after the war he studied journalism at Oklahoma Baptist University on the G.I. Bill. When he graduated, he took a job writing obituaries with the Shawnee, Oklahoma, News-Star, but he wasn’t satisfied writing about the dead; he wanted to write about the plight of the living and the suffering of the poor, and before long he realized he wanted to do more than just write about those things—he wanted to help. His vision for assisting the poor and suffering kept expanding, from his city to his nation to the world. He first took a job as pastor of a small local church, then put his journalism training to work as a media liaison and advance planner for a large international ministry, where he saw up close what he later described as “the awesome human needs.” He was working in Singapore in 1969, when he was asked to become the second president of a fledgling relief organization called World Vision.

  World Vision was started in the early 1950s, to provide food, clothing, and medical supplies to orphans in the wake of the Korean War. They began their relief work by soliciting clothing and supplies from corporations to meet emergency needs, and they developed an innovative child sponsorship program to assist on an ongoing basis. By the 1960s, the organization was global in scope; and by the 1970s, they were expanding their relief efforts to include agricultural and vocational training for families to create self-sustainable relief from poverty and hunger.

  The organization was a perfect match for Stan, and he dove into the job of president with all the passion and energy he had—and he had plenty. When Stan came in as president, World Vision had an annual budget of $7 million; by the time he left, the organization had an annual budget of $158 million and a worldwide staff of eleven thousand. He constantly challenged others to “Come walk the world,” and he practiced what he preached. He spent three-quarters of his time traveling the globe and made connections in capitals all over the world.

  Stan pioneered the use of direct mail and telethons to raise awareness of the needs of the poor and to solicit donations, which he did with great passion. He was sometimes criticized for his emotional financial appeals, but he was a passionate man and he refused to treat poverty and hunger as academic topics. “We are accused of emotionalism,” he once said, “but hunger is emotional, death is emotional, and poverty is emotional. Those who wish to make it all seem neat, clinical, and bureaucratic are the ones falsifying the picture, not us.”

  Ed Hill grew up during the Great Depression too. He was one of five children raised by a single mother in rural Texas, where men like Ed usually dropped out of school by the tenth grade and spent the rest of their lives doing manual labor for $2 a day. But Ed managed to finish high school—in a log cabin, no less—and even enrolled in college at Prairie View A&M, though he had no money to pay for it. He got off the bus in Prairie View, Texas, with a suit, a couple of pairs of jeans, a few shirts, and $1.83 in his pocket. But Ed received an unexpected four-year scholarship that paid his tuition, room and board, and $35 each month that he could spend any way he wished. That was more money than he had ever seen in his
entire life.

  “I didn’t really know I was poor,” Ed said. “Poverty was a matter of spirit, and we were always rich in spirit. The fact that I lived in a log cabin was not embarrassing to me. The fact that my shoes had holes in them wasn’t embarrassing to me because everybody else’s did. But we all said, ‘It won’t be that way forever.’ ”

  That spirit led Ed to become a pastor and to get involved in the early civil rights movement, where he became a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. Ed worked tirelessly and passionately to meet the needs of the poor in his community, and he pushed for social and economic reform at a national level. In Houston Ed became known as “the Hellraiser,” which was an odd title for a pastor, but it accurately described his passion and determination.

  In 1960, he came to Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church and he brought his zeal to help the poor with him. Mt. Zion was located in one of the poorest sections of Los Angeles, which gave him plenty of opportunities to help. “The average income is between Skid Row and welfare,” Ed used to say, and he knew that his community was struggling with not only poverty but with all the social problems that came with it.

  Ed made the struggles of the poor and underprivileged the focus of his preaching, and he was known for preaching with tremendous passion—and endurance. “I can only guarantee here what time we get started,” he said. “I’m not in charge of the close.” But he didn’t just preach about the problems; he got busy doing something about them. Under Ed’s leadership Mt. Zion started the Lord’s Kitchen on Fifty-Ninth and Main, which eventually served between two thousand and five thousand meals every week free of charge, and they set up a clothing store that distributed hundreds of thousands of articles of clothing at no cost.

  South Central Los Angeles was the focus of many studies on the problem of poverty in America, but Ed had little patience with people who only wanted to study a problem without getting involved. Ed believed in getting things done, and he knew from long experience that people can accomplish great things if they will only try—especially when they work together. J. Edgar Hoover once called in Ed and two hundred other leaders to discuss the problem of violence that was being caused by the Black Panthers in New York City. The Panthers were about to ruin New York, Hoover said. Stores were forced to close at four o’clock, and every day four million people jammed the bridges, trying to make it safely into suburbia before dark.