The following is based on conversations with Tran Chi Cuong, a Vietnamese born and raised ethnic Chinese man whose grandfather emigrated from the Pear River in China around 1929. Cuong relates the stories of three generations of "boat people"* who share the experiences of those Nanyang Huaquiao, or overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia, referred to as the "boat people". His stories are of the Japanese occupation during World War II, the Vietnam War, Chinese-Vietnamese relations, and most of all what it means to be an economic refugee.

[note: though not literally "boat people" because they did not emigrate by boat, the Trans are one family whose experiences are those of the "boat people" and as such give personality to an otherwise faceless people who we learn of only through an abstract news item.]

Becoming a Huaqiao

In 1929, Chan Kung-li decided to leave his small town on the Pearl River, south of Canton, and search for a better life for himself and his family. His eldest child, a girl, had been sold into domestic servitude somewhere in Nanyang, or Southeast Asia. Leaving his eldest son and an additional two daughters left behind in China, and he set off for Vietnam

Prosperity did not come quickly for the immigrant Chan family. They first settled in Sa Déc in the Mekong Delta of Southern Vietnam where Kung-li's cousin owned a small business. The Chans believed this cousin would assist them in getting started in this new country, but the cousin's wife refused to allow her husband to aid the Chans. In the absence of this aid that they had hoped for and expected, they moved to Cho Lon ("big market"), an ethnic Chinese dominated business section of Saigon. Here Kung-li assisted the owner of a small goods store run the business.

The Vietnamization of the Chan family, in as much as it could be said that this did occur in some small part, can be illustrated by the Vietnamization of the names of the Chan immigrants and their offspring in Vietnam. Kung-li's wife bore him two sons in Vietnam, the second son was named Tho, and his full name was Tran Van Tho. The family name, "Chan", was Vietnamized to "Tran". Tran Van Tho's children were given both Vietnamese and Chinese names, but the Vietnamese names were commonly used in the house and in public.

Second Generation

Tho began working in a glass mill when he was seven-years old. Three years later he started working in a casino. The ethnic Chinese owners were childless and wanted to adopt the boy, but he refused even if they could have provided better for him than his own parents could have. He was too poor to attend school until he was fifteen-years old, when a Chinese family association collected enough funds to start evening classes for disadvantaged children. He had begun working as a waiter at a dim-sum shop about this time, and every night after work he would practice drawing Chinese characters on a table top with a shard of ice.

World War II

Tho was a young boy when the Japanese invaded and occupied Vietnam, but what little he remembered, he passed on to his eldest son. The Japanese soldiers were admired for their remarkable discipline and kindness. A Japanese soldier might be disciplined in public by having his face slapped. Tho saw an officer helping common soldiers "fox"-holes shoulder-to-shoulder. He would mention this years later when comparing the way American officers reigned over their subordinates. Tho also recalled a time when a Japanese soldier gently patted him on his head and offered him candy. Still, the Japanese occupation of Vietnam does not hold only pleasant memories for this naïve young boy. After Japan's surrender, but prior to the arrival of the Allied forces, Japanese soldiers went on a rampage, raping ethnic Chinese women [it seems perversely odd that an ethnic distinction was made in these war-time depredations though this is how the story was handed down accompanied by an explanation that Chinese were de-facto orphaned in a foreign land].

The first representatives of the Allied armies to arrive in Saigon were Ghurka soldiers originally from the English colony of India and they began to rape the ethnic Chinese women just as the Japanese had before them. The Japanese occupation was a striking contrast to the position accorded the colonial lords just prior to the Japanese invasion. An image which foreshadowed the realization of a Vietnamese national self-determination decades later emerged when the Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese saw Allied soldiers gaunt and weakened with malnutrition as prisoners of war.

After his father died, Tho obtained a job at a boulangerie in the mountainous city of Ðà Lat. His elder brother, who had been working as a baker at the boulangerie for two years , had referred him to the owner. Tho's mother lived with him and they combined resources with Tho's brother's family to open a cooking condiment shop. The two brothers worked both at the boulangerie and their new shop for a long hours and the strain took its toll on Tho's health, but his determination sustained him. The children of the boulangerie owner owned many businesses in Ðà Lat and when one of the sons decided to emigrate to Hong Kong, he sold his general goods store to Tho. It was thirty-seven years since Kung-li had first immigrated to Vietnam, and it seemed his son was now finally becoming the master of his own destiny. He now owned his own business, would eventually have a maid, and own to small motorcycles.

A year or so after buying the general goods store, Tho married Minh-phuong who was the third of nine children, all born in Vietnam, in a family that had also immigrated from the Canton region of China in the 1920's. Minh-phuong's family was without means. One brother went blind during his teenage years due to malnutrition and/or poor medical care, and another brother suffered throughout his life from deteriorating eyesight. Minh-phuong and her siblings were factory laborers in Cho Lon and Tho became acquainted with her on his many business trips to Saigon. They were both fast leaving the marriageable age for ethnic Chinese and their marriage could be said to have been one of convenience.

Ðà Lat and the Vietnam War

Ðà Lat is a pristine, cool mountainous city. It was developed by the French colonialists as an escape from the sweltering heat which plagued the commercial and administrative centers of South Vietnam. There was an unusual concentration of intellectuals in Ðà Lat due to the presence of a French Catholic seminary, three colleges and a lyceé built during the French colonial period, and a military academy for the South Vietnamese army. Perhaps 20% of Ðà Lat's estimated 60,000 residents were ethnic Chinese in this time, but their numbers dominated the merchant class.

Ngo Dinh Diem became president of Vietnam after the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu, and the country was partitioned into a Communist North and a de facto U.S. controlled South. Ngo began instituting nationalist policies which had the effect of weakening the mercantile power of the ethnic Chinese, and called on all residents of Vietnam to become citizens. The Guomindang government of Jiang Kai Shek in Taiwan and the Communist government of Mao Zedong on the mainland responded to restrictions on the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam by nominally accepting any huaqiao (Southeast Asian Chinese) who wanted to resettle in Chinese controlled land. Few were interested in returning to a China controlled by the Communists and the Guomindang stopped accepting refugees after only two planes left Vietnam for Taiwan.

The war between North and South Vietnam a decade later was a boon for the ethnic Chinese merchants because there was a massive infusion of money from the United States. There were occasionally sounds of a sniper firing in Ðà Lat or explosions somewhere near the city, but the war was for the most part a distant happening. The Vietcong (communist guerrillas fighting in the South) were derisively referred to as "rats" due to their evasive tactics. The most notable success of the Vietcong in Ðà Lat was the capture of the local radio station which was retaken two days later. In 1968, during the Vietnamese lunar new year celebration known as Tet, the Vietcong conducted a massive surprise offensive. A gasoline station was hit by some rocket fire, but Tho's greatest concern at the time was over his gravely ill mother. He was concerned that he would not be able to giver her a proper burial if she died during such heavy fighting. She survived for a few more months, but did not live to see the next lunar new year.

In 1975, with the imminent surrender and pullout of the U.S., the civilian leaders of Ðà Lat secretly left the city. When this became known by the local populace a mass exodus to Saigon ensued. The roads were so bloated with people that the Trans felt they could only reach Saigon safely if they went by plane. Tho bribed some officials so that he could take his family to Saigon by plane. Minh-phuong's sister, who served as the Tran family nanny, accompanied Tho and his three boys to Saigon where they stayed with the boy's maternal grandmother while Minh-phuong, who was pregnant - this time about six months along - stayed behind with the family maid to secure the family's belongings from looters.

The movement of the Vietcong closer to Saigon could be measured by the sound of shells pounding the outskirts of the city which turned into a light show at night in a way that seductively obscured their destruction. The sound of American helicopters going to and fro, constantly filled the air as they ferried Americans to transport that would return them home. People began hoarding rice and panicked as rumors spread of what the Communists would do when they arrived. Many left the city for the countryside thinking they would be safer there than in the city. The streets of Saigon became strewn with hastily discarded South Vietnamese military uniforms, equipment, and weapons. Others began picking these items up to sell them a short while later. In early April, Minh-phuong's sister took her nephew to see one of the romantic Taiwanese movies which were popular at the time. The movie was interrupted with sounds of shells exploding outside and occasionally the lights inside the theater would flicker or the movie itself would be stopped only to be restarted again. After the show, the twenty-year old young lady boasted to her siblings about the danger and excitement of her experience. On April 30th, Tho and Minh-phuong's eldest son, Cuong, was eating his lunch when a neighbor told him to take down the South Vietnamese flag and any other symbols of the defeated South Vietnamese government from his household. A few moments later a North Vietnamese soldier came walking down the street. Suddenly the fear of a marauding enemy from the North vanished as Cuong looked upon the soldier who walked down the street in rubber sandals, his pale, malnourished face looking tiredly out from beneath the small-branch covered helmet that crowned his head. The takeover of Saigon was a quiet one with little or no bloodshed, but the new government staged public, summary executions of petty criminals to serve notice that they were instituting law and order. South Vietnamese soldiers were told to surrender themselves to the new communist authorities. Regular soldiers were sent to be re-educated for a few months, but the officers' "re-education" took several years and when they were released they were mentally distressed, malnourished, and treated as pariahs by society.

Ming-phuong came down from Ðà Lat and told her husband that there had been looting that she alone could not have hoped to have stopped, but reassured him that their residence and much of what they owned had been salvaged. A few days later the Tran family returned home.

Vietnamese-Ethnic Chinese Relations

The home that the Trans returned to was sometimes only nominally their home. The Trans never truly felt at home in this foreign land. The reasons for this are complex and debated in abstract terms by academics, but can be rather simply understood by the fact that the Cantonese speaking Chinese who had immigrated from China and the Vietnamese people were separated by cultures, historical legacies and the homogeneity of their respective societies before they blended together. The economic prowess of immigrant Chinese in Southeast Asia has set them aside from the host populations both as a result of the envy and disdain that is engendered by such a fact. These differences are perpetuated by the parents as they teach their children in ways that they are sometimes unaware of themselves. And so young Vietnamese children might smear excrement on the door handle of a Chinese business or residence. Sometimes these children would yell after Chinese, "nguoi tau" (boat people) or refer to them as "ba tau (three boat) and tell the Chinese to go back home.

After reaching the age of puberty, Tho's son, Cuong, was attracted to Vietnamese women more than Chinese women. The Chinese women wore Western clothes, but in an extremely conservative fashion that tended to de-sex themselves. Vietnamese women wear "ao dai", which while looking somewhat similar to the traditional, ubiquitous "qi pao" dresses that the Chinese women wore, are distinctly different because they are cut just above the knees and worn with pants, and made of a thinner material more suitable for the tropical climate of Southeast Asia which gives them a more sensual look. If a man looked into a Chinese woman's eyes as she walked past she would invariably look away, but the Vietnamese woman, Cuong noticed, were far less shy and would return his gaze. This combined to give Cuong the impression that Vietnamese women were more flirtatious and less reserved.

A social gap existed between the ethnic Chinese and the Vietnamese. Cuong was only aware of the Chinese viewpoint and repeatedly reminds that whatever divisions that did exist between the two groups, they were subtle divisions that were typically not expressed openly though there were exceptions. Certainly as a means to reinforce their own culture and customs, the ethnic Chinese who were economically better off than the Vietnamese as a group, criticized the native population. The differences in dress and demeanor that distinguished the Vietnamese woman from her Chinese counterpart were used to suggest that the Vietnamese woman was sexually loose, to some degree, uncivilized and somehow inferior to the Chinese woman. While it was not uncommon to see mixed, Vietnamese-Chinese children, they were often stigmatized by ethnic Chinese community. Mixed ethnicity children of Vietnamese and Chinese parents were called la gan, a mild colloquial Cantonese-Vietnamese word meaning "mixed blood", or jap jon, a strong curse word meaning "dirty" and "impure seed of semen" in Cantonese (the spellings here are phonetic). An ethnic Chinese woman who married a Vietnamese man was treated as an outcast. Conversely, it was considered undesirable for an ethnic Chinese man to marry a Vietnamese woman , but acceptable because the difficulties such a man encountered obtaining a Chinese wife were perceived to necessarily leave him with no other choice.

In economic terms, the ethnic Chinese though of the Vietnamese as conspicuous spenders. Cuong recalled hearing Vietnamese villagers being mocked by Chinese merchants behind their back as gullible. Ironically, many ethnic Chinese viewed Vietnamese city dwellers as unscrupulous. Chinese businessmen were easy targets of attacks by the Vietnamese. Two incidents from the time of the war stand out in Cuong's memory. A veteran soldier entered Tran Van Tho's store and handing Tho about a third of a US$100.00 bill, he asked for change. The veteran needn't say anything more and his request was attended to without comment because the soldier was quite openly carrying a hand grenade in the other hand. This soldier later returned to extort more money. On another occasion a handful of veterans walked down the street with a casket which served as a symbol of their losses in the war. They would lay down the casket in front of stores owned by ethnic Chinese, and ask for money. Cuong believes that the veterans were not necessarily singling out Chinese because of antipathy for them, but because they were merchants who had cash on hand and as an immigrant population, had less protection from the local authorities.

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.

Life Under the New Regime

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.

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.

Min-phuong's sister borrowed gold bullion from the Trans so she could emigrate to Malaysia. Being alone, she asked Tho if she could take his eldest son with her. Tho refused. In denying her assertion that he didn't trust her, he explained to his sister-in-law that his father had left children behind in China when he came to Vietnam in 1929, but was never again to see them before he died twenty-five years later. Tho had resolved never to break up his family and be threatened with the same fate. Min-phuong's sister went to Pulau Bidong, an uninhabited island off the coast of Malaysia where the authorities had designated refugee camps. Conditions were miserable and many people died of malnutrition and disease. The Malaysian authorities were overburdened by the numbers of refugees seeking haven there. After ten months she was finally able to immigrate to the United States under a refugee program created under President Carter. After arriving in Hawaii, she petitioned for the Tran family to join her.

Exodus from Vietnam

As already mentioned, the Trans had begun to convert their earnings into gold bullion rather than reinvest in their business. They did so in anticipation of emigrating from Vietnam. The conditions were such under the communist regime that the Trans were not permitted to take the bulk of what they had earned over their lifetime, including that which was converted to gold bullion or U.S. dollars, and that had not already been taken. In this way they liquidated their assets in the quietest way they could think of. Of course they were not permitted to send large sums of money out of the country so they did so on the black market. They contacted a man through a mutual relation who had a connection, probably a relative, living in Hong Kong. Minh-phuong would give this man large sums of money in Vietnam and then the man's counterpart in Hong Kong would send an equivalent amount, less a transaction cost, to Minh-phuong's sister who resided in Hawaii. Minh-phuong's sister would wire back a message to Vietnam saying that she had received "the present" for her birthday or something of the sort without letting on that she had received cash.

A week in advance of emigrating from Vietnam, the Tran head of household had to appear before customs officials with an enumerated list detailing all they were taking out of the country to verify that they were not taking more than officially permitted. They had been able to send thousands of U.S. dollars to Hawaii, but were only allowed to take a few suitcases and about U.S.$20.00 per person with them on their journey. The Trans were in fear the day of their departure. They feared that at any moment they could be denied their exit. The customs officials searched them to see if they had anything of value that had not been declared. They boarded a plane which was filled mostly with other refugees numbering some 120 people and a handful of business tourists. The first leg of the journey was to Bangkok where they would be processed as refugees by U.S. officials with the aid of the Thai government. It wasn't until they actually landed in Bangkok, where they were to be processed as refugees by U.S. officials with the help of the Thai government, that the fear of being told that they were not to be permitted to leave was really lifted from them.

Once they got off the plane a new identity had been presented to them. They were now refugees in search of aid. These ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese refugees numbering some twenty to thirty families got off the plane first and were herded to a building apart from the terminal. These refugees were shocked by the unfamiliar surroundings and the fact they never knew what was going to occur next. Thai officials who were in charge of the refugees spoke to them in Thai, sometimes in broken English, and became frustrated and angry when the refugees didn't understand them and act as they were told. Their luggage was dropped off in this building by the airport employees as if it were trash. These bags which with the things that they held which were after all now their only possessions. Cuong noticed a few, tall white American men enter the building as these veterans met the petite Vietnamese women who were the mothers of their Amerasian children after several years apart. It was a shocking sight to Cuong who had only seen a few white people before, Russians and other Eastern Europeans in Saigon. This combined with the fact that they towered over their wives and children of mixed races as they hugged each other and cried was the first of new memorable experiences for Cuong.

The 120 or so refugees were loaded aboard three busses and taken to a fenced camp about two hours away from Bangkok. Cuong recalls being impressed with the newness of the bus, the size of the freeway, the multitude of shining new automobiles, and the bright lights of the city as dusk appeared. A refugee woman sardoncially remarked to Cuong's father, "We should thank Uncle Ho for making it possible to see the luxuries of capitalism!" [Ho Chi Minh, founder of Vietnam's nationalist movement and the Communist Party as well as the personification for legitimacy of the Communist regime there]. At the refugee camp, they were housed in simple buildings with three walls, the front wall was missing, furnished with thin mattresses to sleep on. A truck arrived every day to provide them with a portion of water for washing. Here they stayed for about a week while documentation was processed, interviews conducted, and vaccinations given. The proceedings were strange in their newness and unfamiliarity but none was so unusual as the request that they assemble twice a day for a Thai ceremony as they stood at attention in the compound yard listening to what must have been the Thai national anthem though there was no flag in sight.

At the end of a week someone came to Tho and told him that their flight to Hong Kong (they were to go to Hong Kong and then fly to Hawaii via Japan) was scheduled for that day. They were taken in a minibus to the airport only to learn that their flight was not scheduled until the next day. The official in charge aiding them apologized profusely and since the minibus had already left asked them to get into the back of his pickup truck so he could take them somewhere for the night. He treated them to a lunch and refused repayment and then took them to some government building. The outside looked much like an office building, but the inside looked like a dilapidated warehouse because the interior walls had been torn down. This building, they learned, was a jail of sorts for illegal immigrants. The "inmates" looked liked the flotsam and jetsam of East Asia: Cambodian, Lao, turbaned Indians, many dark skinned people that Cuong had never seen before strewn about the building in various states of dress; mothers breast feeding their babies; smells that assaulted the senses; and no privacy. The next day they were allowed to take a shower before going to the airport. It was their first in a week and they couldn't be happier. At the airport they saw many of the same people who had enviously looked at them leave the refugee compound..

There were several times during the journey to Hawaii and his new home that Cuong felt like he was loosing his identity and really felt like a refugee. Aboard an Air France plane from Saigon to Bangkok, the refugees cleaned and stored away their utensils, plate and bowl they had been given with their lunch because they were just used to do such a thing. They had know concept that some of the items were worthless and that others were the property of the airline and had to be returned. Cuong felt uncomfortable because he noticed the shock on the faces of the business travelers as they watched the refugees. When his family waited to board a plane in Tokyo he realized how different his family looked from the other travelers. It was not because of their faces, but the way they were dressed in such a way that distinguished their economic status from the rest of the international travelers.

More complex identity problems occurred when they had dealings with other Chinese. From Bangkok, many of the refugees flew to Hong Kong where they were again questioned by customs officials. The officials here were Hong Kong citizens, but as such were Cantonese and spoke to the ethnic Chinese in Cantonese when chastising them with the words: "You Vietnamese don't know how to stand in line! You are always trying to push your way to the front!" Then when they were on board a Hong Kong operated plane the one Cantonese speaking flight attendant was telling another, "These Vietnamese are all thieves. They steal everything. They even stole my flashlight!"

After residing in America for a dozen years the Trans feel varying degrees of belonging. Cuong still suffers from an identity crisis of sorts and longs for a feeling of belonging. Cuong's aunt used to suggest that he tell anyone that should ask that he was from Hong Kong, "people have a stereotype that Vietnamese and other people from Southeast Asia sit down and take advantage of the welfare system in the U.S. without working." One of his high school teachers in Hawaii, a Chinese-American, asked Cuong if he was going to adopt an [Europeanized-] American name when he became nationalized. It was considered chic to do so because those who kept their Asian names were considered to be "fresh off the boat." Unlike his two brothers and sister who did just that, Cuong resisted and decided to keep "his" Vietnamese name[because of the falsified birth certificate that Cuong's father had obtained during the war, Cuong and his brother exchanged names so that their official identities would still reflect their order of birth]. He has done his best to capture his Chinese identity by studying written, literary, and spoken forms of Chinese.

Because his identity is complex, Cuong has had to develop an understanding of himself that he wishes to present to others. In European-dominated American society Cuong signs all documents in the traditional Northeast Asian manner with his surname first, followed by his given name. When he meets Vietnamese people who after hearing him speak Vietnamese ask him about his identity, he proudly states in Vietnamese that he is a Vietnamese of Chinese ancestry. To Hong Kong-Chinese who ask him about his heritage he states proudly that he is huaquiao, overseas Chinese. He is particularly proud to be huaquiao because Dr. Sun Yatsen, the leader of the 1911 Revolution which ended the Qing Dynasty was also a huaquiao. When he married, Cuong married a woman from the same province in China his grandparents were from. His cultural conflicts with this woman have once again pushed him in another direction, this time realizing how Americanized he has become in spite of all his attempts to remain true to his Asian heritage and experience. As time goes by, and he matures, he is beginning to realize along with the difficulties, there are also many strengths that can be realized from such a diverse experience but it hasn't been an easy journey.

Cuong's younger brothers and sister have more comfortably assimilated into American society than he has perhaps due to the age differences between them and the time in their life when they immigrated(Cuong was born in the year of the Tet Offensize, 1968, his two brothers were born two and four years after him, and his sister was born in 1975, the year of the Communist takeover). In totality the Trans are experiencing an American reality of economic stability that began as a mere dream two generations before their own and nearly seven decades earlier when Chang Kung-li became the first generation of this "boat family"'s odyssey in search of relative prosperity.