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SEAS AND MULBERRY FIELDS 3
REFUGEE LIFE
Pulau Tengah
In Pulau Tengah, we had the first chance to contact with delegations from the third countries. We were refugees from Vietnam, so Vietnam was our first country. The second country was Malaysia, where we were illegal immigrants, and tolerated temporarily until another one voluntarily accepted us for political asylum. That last country where we would eventually go to live was called the third country. Because of past political and military ties with South Vietnam, the United States had been the most willing to accept us. In fact, in the previous years, most Vietnamese who made it to refugee camps had been readily accepted for resettlement in the United States. Exceptions were people who were rescued at sea by another country’s ships. By international convention, they were automatically accepted for resettlement in that respective country, like Germany, Sweden, even Israel. (One of my medical school classmates, a surgeon, was rescued by an Israeli ship, immigrated to Israel, married a Jewish woman, fought in the Israel army and later became heart surgeon in New York).
By 1981, so many Vietnamese had settled in the United States that there were signs of “fatigue” in their open arms policy. The Americans did not automatically accept even former military officers of South Vietnam who had fought on their side during the war. My “credentials”, like having a professional degree recognized in America (I had the ECFMG certificate that would allow me to find a paying position in a hospital in the US) and having spent time in a communist concentration, did not help either. The Americans required us to apply to two other countries and to be rejected by them before they even open a file for us and consider our application. Therefore, I had to apply with the Australian delegation first. Australia wanted only very young, single applicants at the time; I guessed that they wanted mostly young, cheap labor force that didn’t have the burden of a large family. Many uneducated, non-English speaking men in their twenties were accepted to Australia without significant delay. We felt a lot of bitterness then, but in retrospect and in a philosophical sense, I think that it was probably fair. Someone else sometime needs his own dose of good luck, and we cannot expect to keep our own socioeconomic advantage all the times.
We had the same misfortune with the Canadian delegation. I still remember the Asian Canadian who courteously told me that doctors were not encouraged to come to Canada. Again, it became a pattern here. The communists hated us because we were educated, therefore belonging to the privileged, “exploiting class” on the side of capitalists. Now that we were begging the capitalists for help, they were rejecting us because we were “too educated” for their use. Laughing at this “Catch 22” situation was probably a good coping strategy for us. Later, I thought of it as another example of the law of “the frontier man who lost his horse”.
The story of the frontier man (tai ong that ma) is a cliché in Chinese popular philosophy. That man caught a wild, beautiful horse and his friends congratulated him for his luck. He said, “Don’t congratulate me, it might be good or bad”. His son rode the horse and broke his leg. Bad luck? Maybe not. There came the war, everybody fit person was drafted to the military. People died in the war, the son survived…you have got the pattern now. So, later, when I became well established and comfortable in the United States, looking across the Canadian borders at my friends who fought the freezing climate for most of the year, “tai ong” came back to my mind. But, I know, as part of the rule still, who knows?
Sungei Besi in Kuala Lumpur.
Two months after our arrival to Pulau Tengah, they decided to close the camp because it was too small and planned to evacuate all refugees to the island of Pulau Bidong, more to the North. Pulau Bidong was the largest, most crowded refugee community in Malaysia with a population of more than 30,000 refugees at a time. It was not as peaceful as our place, with its reputation of unruly life and unsanitary health conditions.
They offered me an exception however. On March 3, 1981, the two of us physicians were allowed to go with our family to Kuala Lumpur. (Later, I learned that my paternal grand mother passed away in Hue, on the 14th of the same month.)
We were assigned to work at a small “sick-bay” (hospital), helping two American doctors there. One was a young, single internist you took a year off his fellowship to volunteer to work for a charity organization there with the refugees. “ Who do you think you are?” his friends asked him when he made the decision to go to Malaysia..
The other doctor, Dr. Laura Brandt, was a pediatrician of my age, from Indiana. I enjoyed very much working with her. Later she wrote many letters of recommendation on my behalf when I applied for a residency position. Because of my transfer to Sungei Besi in Kuala Lumpur, I had to stay another year in the refugee camps. Sungei Besi was supposed to be a transit camp, where refugees spent only a few weeks before boarding an airplane to the States. They did not open new files for refugees there, or rarely, because there was no pressure to make place for new comers as at crowded Pulau Bidong. Also they probably were not very eager to lose a good doctor working day and night, always available for emergencies, baby deliveries, and transfer to the hospital emergency room in Kuala Lumpur downtown.
Sungei Besi , despite its location next to a capital city and its security, was one of the worst experiences of my life. Extreme confinement into very small place, uncertainty about my future, lack of any educational experience for the children, its perpetual noise, daily farewell parties, melancholic songs reminding us our old country on the public addressing system, non stop day and night. It was hell for me, even worse than the concentration camps.
Then at last, after many recriminations and protests sent to the American delegation, we were considered at last for resettlement in the United States. Our sponsor would be my wife’s cousin who was living in Newport News, Virginia. Her husband had a painting job at a bus company and was moonlighting in fixing old cars at night and reselling them. They had two girls and one boy, and lived in a rather modest house across the street from a Catholic church. When we were in Vietnam, we saw them in a picture in front of their house and that appeared to us like a dream of peace and happiness, very difficult to reach.
When we were in the refugee camp, they sent us some money and a few letters. Probably much of that mail was lost before it reached our makeshift local post-office. Required paper work from our sponsor in America was slow to come by. Another problem was that neither of us on each side of the Pacific really understood what kind of situation the other side had to deal with. There were a lot of unmet expectations, frustrations. At one point I was lucky enough to have Dr. Brandt make a very long distance phone call for me. She made a fifty dollars call to our relatives in America to remind them to send us what very important documents called” reassurance letters” written by our sponsors. In retrospect, I guess these were affidavits whereby our sponsors promised to take care of us once we were admitted to the U.S, so that we would not be a burden to the welfare system. The costly phone call did not help much anyway because, in America, they did not know what we were referring to.
After more than six months in the camp, most of the paperwork was done. We went to the American embassy in Kuala Lumpur for our final interview. Our airline tickets to America were ready. When we thought that our ordeal was over, there was a sudden major change in the policy towards the refugees coming to America. The Reagan administration made the new requirement that every refugee should have spent a half a year course in orientation and English as a second language in the Philippines before coming to the US..
My wife was shocked at the news, she developed acute stomach pain and threw up blood because of gastric bleeding. She had been preparing for months for our departure to America. She had spent long nights sitting outside under a street light to knit sweaters for the children to get them ready for the cold climate and to knit for money for other leaving refugees. With that money she was able to buy some extra food for our children, a watch for me and another one that we intended to bring as a gift to our sponsors. All her dreams collapsed all of a sudden. I still remember the help of Ms. Lorna Lutley, a British nurse volunteer who came to our living quarters, talked to my wife about Job’s biblical story, tried to comfort her and hugged her emotionally. She later gave me her only nurse stethoscope just in case I may need it to take care of my family. She also lent us 100 dollars, which we added to the other 100 dollars that my wife had just received from her cousin Anh and a 20 dollar gift from her other cousin Dung. in America. Dr. Brandt had a farewell party for me. She asked me what I wanted as a gift. She gave me the heavy Nelson’s Textbook of Pediatrics that I wanted, the only one that she brought along for consultation. I still treasure it and keep it in my library. . So it was with a heavy heart and a lot of uncertainty about our own future and the future of our children that we left Kuala Lumpur.
Our move to Bataan in the Philippines.
On November 3,1981 we had to leave the camp by night furtively in large trucks, to enter the airport by the rear entrance. We were allowed to use the airport lobby only when everybody had left at midnight and then only did we board the plane for another destination.
We arrived to Manila in the Philippines at night. A long caravan of buses took us to Bataan , a remote area, on the west coastline of the country. When we went through the streets of a Manila suburb, I was unable to see anything besides the lighted stores and the streetlights that reminded me of downtown Cholon, the giant Chinatown next to Saigon. After we left the city, the road was winding uphill, among the mountainous landscape. It was the first time in many years that I saw such a long line of lights on the road. Since 1975 most traffic that we had in Vietnam consisted of bicycles and military trucks, so any indication of modern life like the colors of traffic lights in Mersing, a taxi in Kuala Lumpur, a drinking water fountain at the airport, a neon store sign in Manila were encouraging signs meaning to me that we were making small steps toward civilization. (Later, after years of living in the west, I found out that those same tokens of industrial society are in fact the object of hate and anger to a lot of people like the Unabomber who take them for granted).
My dream of coming back to the urban life ended when we arrived to the Bataan Philippines Refugee Processing Center (PRPC). It was really late and we were sent to a small house with the family of a friend. She was a former teacher whose husband, a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese Parachutist Force, was still spending time in a communist concentration in North Vietnam. She traveled with two sons and two daughters.
Life at the Philippines Refugees Processing Center in Bataan.
The morning after, we were taken to our real living quarter. The PRPC was a village built from scratch with American money, just for the purpose of processing and preparing refugees who were heading for the United States. It had schools for children and adults, a community center where movies were shown on weekends and facilities for its staff.
Adult education consisted mostly of Basic English at slightly different levels and orientation to American life style. The faculty was mostly Filipino, not surprisingly because the country was a former colony of the United States therefore people spoke English very fluently, with a small peculiar accent. A Catholic Sister, Sister Eugenia, was in charge of the orientation part. Refugees who had spent some time in the U.S. were recruited to the faculty and underwent 100 hours of training in the techniques of teaching.
Before my escape I myself never went outside Vietnam but, because I was a doctor and spoke rather decent English, I also was drafted to the faculty. I taught the other teachers about basic medical knowledge, the health care delivery system and preventive medicine. It was done in English and it seemed to me that the Sister appreciated it a lot. I never attended the orientation classes themselves, which were conducted in Vietnamese to the majority of the refugee students. They learned how to use an American bathroom, run a vacuum cleaner, or cook on a gas or electric range. There was even a small model house (a tiny one by our current standard) with everything from an American bed to a carpet floor. From our point of view at that time, it was like a dream house.
After the initial paper work we moved in a small apartment about 3 meters by 4 meters in size, with a total surface area of around120-130 square feet. An attic added some extra living space to our two families, 10 people in all, three adults and 7 children. My wife and I shared the large cot bed with our three children at night . Hoa, though only 9 years old, did help with some of the housekeeping and babysitting for his mother.
The first disheartening sight we had was the apartment itself. The building was made of light material; walls were of thin concrete and roof of corrugated steel. There was a yard without trees in front and in the back there was a shallow moat full of black foul smelling water that probably was draining from some sewage nearby. As we entered the apartment we were overwhelmed by a strong smell of human feces. The cement floor was littered with trash from the previous tenant and under the cot bed there were many remnants of bodily function products. We spent the whole day cleaning that mess. The condition of the communal outhouses about ten yards away later gave us an explanation why some people had elected not to use them. They were small buildings made of concrete; divided into narrow booths. Instead of toilet seats there were small gutters where people were supposed to relieve themselves without any sense of privacy. Above the gutters ran a water pipe with occasional copper faucets.
Only a small stream of dripping water came out and it failed the purpose of flushing the gutters. Besides, those faucets also provided us with the only source of running water that we had. Every member of our family group had to take turns spending 15 minutes to half an hour waiting for that water to trickle down and fill up a small bucket. Add to that the impatience in the waiting line and the strong stench from the gutters. That’s how we got our washing, cooking and drinking water.
Fortunately, there were streams about half a mile from the camp. We followed a narrow, tortuous path leading to the valley and took bathes there. The scenery surrounding the streams was idyllic with green, exuberant tropical vegetation. The water was limpid and turbulent in places. Sometimes it gave us the impression of being immersed in a Jacuzzi tub with its cool and singing stream, soothing our pain and worries. There was a place where water was deeper and overlooked by a shaded promontory. Some children could not resist the thrill of diving there and a few lost their lives. However that place was one of the few bright spots of my memory about Bataan.
Another fine moment was the celebration of the Vietnamese New Year. We had a kind of fair where fake fire-crackers were hung from fake Vietnamese cherry trees. The pagoda was decorated with look-alike Chinese characters welcoming Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. For us, it was a day of painful nostalgia that marked another year in exile and at the same time Tet as always brought us some amount of hope for the future. That night, we had a large bonfire that burned until the wee hours. I remembered that fire well because I was able to get a warm bath for the first time in years, from a bucket of hot water.
Another memorable event was our trip to Olongapo, a nearby Filipino city of about one hundred thousand inhabitants. The people there thrived on service provided to American
servicemen stationed at the nearby military base of Bataan. We sneaked out of our camp because in theory we were not aloud outside. We boarded a small Filipino boat that took us to the city.
We shopped for a few cheap items. I bought my first Sony boom box and a little
“uni-focus, instamatic ‘’camera that cost about 16-20 dollars. I was eager to spend that precious money because I wanted to have the pictures that would later become witnesses of the most memorable days of our life. Recently, Hiep restored and made enlargements of some of those photos and I am really happy to have been able to capture those unforgettable moments.
One of my favorite pictures shows my wife in front of our apartment. Above her hangs a five pointed, star shaped paper lantern that I made myself from bamboo rods and paper for my children. It is a Vietnamese tradition to hang that kind of paper lantern during holidays like Christmas or Mid-Autumn Festival. Another picture shows Hiep dancing with his daycare schoolmates; another one has our children at a welcoming party when Mrs. Marcos, First Lady of the Philippine, came to visit us in her helicopter. I also remember my first ice cream in years that we had at a small restaurant where one of the Filipino teachers, Ms. Ninfa Alderette, took us. At night, we also had some entertainment at a few makeshift cafes at some refugees’ apartments.
On March 27, 1982 we left Bataan and boarded our charter plane in Manila, headed for Newport News, via San Francisco.
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Epilogue
Ðêm Giáng sinh xưa
Mùa Giáng sinh xưa con tàu định mệnh
Ðưa ta đi đời ai biết về đâu,
Bao lớp người nằm chôn đáy biển sâu,
Kẻ thơ ngây chết theo người đầu bạc.
Cơn biển động lay con thuyền trôi dạt,
Cảng Mersing ngọn sóng dữ vô tình,
Biển âm u đời vắng bóng thần linh,
Ôm chặt con , buốt đau lòng cha mẹ.
Rồi sóng gió qua đi, đêm lặng lẽ,
Con nước đưa thuyền dạt vào bờ,
Ðêm cuối năm , công viên vắng chơ vơ,
Thành phố lạ, bơ vơ nơi phố chợ.
Qua hôm sau, buồn vui còn bở ngỡ,
Thoát ngục rồi, du mục biết về đâu,
Ðời sẽ dành bao bến cảng, con tàu,
Thân tị nạn kiếp bể dâu ai biết.
Rời Mersing, gánh gồng ra hoang đảo,
Tengah quạnh hiu, trốn bão từ đây,
Nhìn con thơ, con yên ngủ trên tay,
Ngoảnh mặt lại ngày đắng cay ly loạn.
Mưa núi gió ghềnh, sóng vỗ triền miên,
Ở lại nghe con, giấc ngủ bình yên,
Cha mẹ đi, lòng nặng triũ nổi niềm,
Mong tìm đến niềm tin nơi Thánh Chúa.
Giọt nước biển, nước mưa, giòng lệ ứa,
Nổi buồn, nổi vui, quyện chảy thành giòng,
Bài thánh ca cao vút tận không trung,
Ðêm Giáng sinh tha hương, sao buồn thế !
H.V.H. Nhân mùa Giáng sinh thứ hai mươi tha hương.
Ngày 14 tháng 12, năm 1999.
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Thirty years ago
Thirty years ago
To Hoa
Once, thirty years ago, I stood
Where you are now:
At the threshold of life
With hesitant steps.
My family was far away.
I hadn’t met my new friends,
I didn’t know what a medical student’s life was like;
They said it would be a never-ending classroom,
And I would be an eternal student.
War had risen for years,
A nation was in turmoil,
The door to the future seemed to never open.
Keeping my eyes closed,
Studies were my present, my future,
My breath, my daily life.
Friends, strangers, dear ones, coming, going away;
Too fast to remember, too soon to forget, to regret, to miss.
Then one day, I left my school, my city,
My just wed wife,
I left my neck long hair, my motorbike,
My student hostel, my adolescence,
My intellect, my passions, my books, my notes;
Everything left behind,
To become a pawn, anonymous;
To become a piece of coal
Fed into the furnace of an international war.
Then I watched human lives suffer
Something worse than an animal’s fate;
Then I forgot my future, my hopes.
I lived my life day by day,
Night by night;
One meal after another;
Paycheck by paycheck;
One leave after another.
Happiness was rare;
The night I waited for you and your mother
At the airfield,
When pounding mortar shells relented.
Desperation was simple:
Flights were cancelled;
You couldn’t come with your mother for Christmas to the Highlands.
Then days passed by, then came "liberation", "reeducation’,
Then escape, refugee camps;
From war furnace, it was now a life of water lilies,
A modern times new race of wandering Jews,
In the oceans of the world.
Looking into the future, thanks to Heaven, thank God,
It seemed as if future was in sight.
Worst days were over, better days coming,
New days unexpectedly beckoning.
For more than twenty years
We led you in this life, passing over the reefs of history.
Now, we walk you to a new future; introduce you to the world of medicine.
The struggle will be tough, the path of learning long;
Many challenges lie ahead.
We wish you luck, we wish you courage.
Never deviate from your goal in life
That you already have set.
"If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone
I so hold on when there is nothing in you,
Except the Will which says to them:"Hold on".
(Rudyard Kipling)
Learning in school, in life;
Two years, four years,
In four directions, all over the world.
Present, future,
I wish you all your years,
All your days of freedom on this globe.
Future is welcoming you;
Stormy days are over.
I want you to give the world your helping hands,
To achieve success, to achieve manhood,
To honor your mother, your father, your ancestors.
Dedicate your humble abilities to great causes;
Deserve your freedom, your luck;
Young man of a new day, a new century.
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