Odyssey of the Boat People, page 3

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When the Americans began to suggest that they were going to pull out their troops by calling for the Vietnamization of the war, Chinese-Vietnamese began to be drafted in the South. It was only after I began discussing this issue with Cuong, whom I had known for six years, that I learned the name that he had grown up with and that his family knew him by was not "Cuong" at all, but "Minh". Cuong's father had obtained a fictitious birth certificate for his eldest son which declared that he was two years younger than his real birth date. When Tho obtained this birth certificate, he had to destroy the authentic one though his son continued to use the name Minh until he emigrated from Vietnam and had to rely on his fictitious birth certificate for purposes of official identification. As it turned out, the war ended before Cuong reached the age which would have made him eligible for the draft. Other routes taken to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War included: obtaining false papers that state you are enlisted but serving in a non-combat position; faking a marriage or not and becoming the father of more than five children; intentionally crippling yourself in such a way as to make yourself officially incapable of combat by cutting off a portion of your trigger finger or some other means; going into hiding in a building while your family and neighbors support you; or for wealthier individuals, to emigrate to Hong Kong. Cuong's uncle had obtained a fictitious birth certificate when the French were still in control of Vietnam so that he would have several years to avoid the official taxation which applied to abled-bodied males of a certain age and older. Because his new birth certficate showed that he was several years younger than he really was when the ethnic Chinese began to be drafted into the Vietnam War years later, this uncle was officially within the age group of those eligible for the draft though his true age would have exempted him from service. He attempted to increase the size of his family to five children to avoid the draft and together with a bribe he successfully avoided the draft.

When the Trans returned to Ðà Lat they learned that several individuals claimed to have fought as Vietcong for several years and consequently designated themselves the local provisional ruling committee. This was only the beginning. The communization of Southern Vietnam had four distinct phases. First in 1976, there was a conversion of the "renegade, fake government" of South Vietnam's currency to a new currency unit that created a massive deflation overnight and caused the pauperization of the nation. A year later the government instituted a communization program directed at the wealthiest of urban merchants. They were to loose their holdings and be sent to re-education camp which was supposed to last from three to six months but was extended for several years. In 1978 this communization program was spread to lesser merchants. One day when Cuong came home from his schooling, he saw twenty-one strangers (he remembers the exact number) in his home. Two of the strangers stood out from the rest: a soldier who carried an AK-47, and a middle-aged woman with a heavy northern accent who had the unmistakable look of a North Vietnamese communist: she wore a black and white striped scarf and dark dress, and her hair was tied simply back. She was the principle speaker for the group and announced that they were going to conduct an audit of all the Tran family's possessions. The audit took three days during which time the strangers made themselves at home, eating and drinking from the Tran's household as if it were their own. Everything was accounted for except their persons where they had hid what items of value they could. The Tran's had been using their house as a warehouse to supply their store and the auditing committee gathered up all the goods throughout the house and sealed them in one room. The Trans were told that these goods were confiscated and were instructed not to break the seal that was upon the door. They became penniless overnight due to the confiscation of their goods. These were difficult times for the Trans and all that had been gained since their parents had emigrated from China now seemed to be rapidly disappearing. After they had all left , one member of the group returned to explain what had happened and that he would do what he could to help. The Trans recognized that he was a Northerner by his accent. He said that he held no grudge against them and explained that he had been aided by ethnic Chinese during the war when he was fighting in the jungle. He explained that a neighbhor had certainly informed on them to the neighborhood committee because he did not consider them wealthy enough to have their goods confiscated. He gave them a roll of tape, identical to the kind that had bee used to seal the makeshift room in which their shop goods were stored, and instructed them to take what they needed when they needed it. Over the next few years, he returned often to visit the Trans and supply them with condensed milk and canned goods booth of which were luxury items at the time. Tho tried to rebuild the business with what he could, but much of their profits were used to purchase gold bullion rather than to reinvest in the business. The fourth and final phase called for the merchant class, which was predominantly ethnic Chinese to be relocated in undeveloped, tropical areas. The merchants were not given any means to survive and lacked the necessary skills. The Vietminh had been aided by China in their fight against the French and the Vietminh had adopted some of the thought of Maoism. The Vietminh however saw China trying to dominate their affairs and so pulled back from the relationship, yet China was still a friend with ideological and material ties to Vietnam. In 1979, the 1.5 million ethnic Chinese of Vietnam were dealt a further blow when Chinese forces from the People's Republic of China invaded the northern border of Vietnam in response to an earlier Vietnamese invasion of Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge who controlled Cambodia. Suddenly the rhetoric of school textbooks changed from referring to China and Vietnam's relationship as that of "brother" and "sister" and "water and mountain" to criticism of Chinese expansionism and imperialism.

Ðà Lat, Vietnam
Most ethnic Chinese students in Ðà Lat attended privately owned and run Chinese Schools. Textbooks were imported from Taiwan. The communist government eventually nationalized all schools. Cuong learned Vietnamese when he attended second grade, following a government proclamation mandating Vietnamese instruction for ethnic Chinese. From this point on, the school day was divided into half with one portion going towards Vietnamese instruction and the other to Chinese instruction. Eventually Chinese instruction was reduced to a mere one or two hours per week. In the belief that the official education of his children was becoming increasingly doctrinaire in its promotion of communism and that this was of little benefit to them, Tho finally told his children that they no longer needed to attend formal school. He was a strong supporter of education because his had come so hard, and he taught the children what he could when he had the opportunity. After a while he devised an alternate form of education for his boys whereby they would go to private tutors for French, English and Chinese, and for job apprenticeships. One boy learned to fix watches and some basic, but practical lessons about electronics; another learned how to make handicrafts; and the third boy was trained in drawing.
Also in 1979, France normalized relations with Vietnam creating a loophole for ethnic Chinese wishing to avoid relocation. Cuong's father had a business relation who in turn had a brother residing in France. To forestall relocation, Tho solicited the aid of this relation in the pretense that he was planning on emigrating to France. Under the communist regime, the neighborhood committee was the smallest administrative authority. They approved transit requests and had police authority. Cuong's father needed official approval every time he went to Saigon to attend to the business of acquiring exit visas. An official of the neighborhood committee took advantage of this and would often come to the Tran house, mention that he knew they would be leaving soon and asked it they might give him this or that since they couldn't take it with them. He would also ask for a loan now and then realizing that a refusal could easily be met with a denial for a transit request for any number of imaginary reasons. Since the official was also in effect the police, there was really nothing Tho could do but pliantly agree to the extortion just as he had to do under other circumstances during the war.
These sort of problems brought about by living under the communist regime were indicative of the difficulties created by Vietnam's unique brand of communism. Upon seeing a photograph of a gas station in Vietnam in 1996, Cuong recollects that he had never seen a gas station when he was growing up there. Gas stations consisted of an empty, transparent bottle on the side of the road. Someone on a scooter or motorcycle might stop alongside the bottle if they were in need of gas and then be met with someone who would walk up and offer to sell them gas. The gas was inspected in a cursory manner and a price agreed upon in a hurriedly manner. It was all a surreptitious transaction that could land either of the participants in jail.
Everyone had their own unique problems with the way the rules changed your life under communism. Medicines and supplies were in severely short supply after the Americans surrendered and pulled out. Someone going to a doctor might be told that a medicine that need is not available at the hospital and be advised to go out and search for it on the black market. There were no guarantees that it could be found, you needed to know someone that knew someone that had access to such medicines and you also needed money because what ever the prices were once the goods were to be found they were certain to be exorbitantly inflated. One woman neighbor became unexpectedly pregnant after having had several children and decided to have an abortion. When she went to the state hospital the doctor who performed the abortion sterilized her without her being aware of it. After she returned home she began to hemorrhage severely and her husband had to bribe another doctor to look at her so that they wouldn't have to go back to the same doctor. They found out that she had been sterilized and the doctor agreed to reverse the procedure, though it is not known if he actually did so. A man caught what appeared to be a cold, but his condition deteriorated as time went by. One month past and then another. His brother consulted the wife of the sick man and asked her to take him to a doctor in Saigon. She refused thinking that she would lose face by letting someone else tell her how to care for her husband. The brother then consulted his own wife asking her if he should not take his brother to Saigon himself. She argued that he shouldn't do this because he would only suffer the blame of the wife and the community if the ailing brother died during the trip. A few months passed without any improvement in the brother's health and he died.
It is worthwhile to not that despite their misfortunes, Cuong believes that his family experienced the most benign transition to communism and life under that beast when compared with that of Russia, China, or Cambodia.

Christian Church in Ðà Lat

For Cuong, this church was no more than part of the invisible scenery of Ðà Lat until after the Communist regime put a fence around it with barbed wire to keep people away from it. In his political innocence, Cuong could not figure out why they had done such a thing and he suddenly became fascinated with the church. The upper left portion showing the inside of the church is Cuong's first glimpse of the inside.