Starting From Scratch, Again

The escape from their first life was harrowing enough to supply a lifetime’s worth of nightmares: She was a mother with three children, all fleeing a Vietnamese village in the middle of the night in 1975. They drifted at sea for three weeks in a rickety boat crowded with 18 other people.

“I thought we were going to die,” she said.

Her husband, a former South Vietnamese naval officer forced to labor in the jungle, escaped on a boat three years later.

Sinh Tran and her husband, Ninh Nguyen, and their children settled into new lives on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. They shucked oysters for a living until carpal tunnel syndrome injured Tran’s hands. They learned how to fish for shrimp and bought a succession of boats, working all day and night when they had to.

But two weeks ago, they were forced to flee again -- this time from another brutal, if apolitical, storm. With their home left behind and their shrimp boat probably ruined by Hurricane Katrina, they, like thousands of other Vietnamese immigrants on the Gulf Coast, once again must start over.

Tran, 55, sat glumly in her grown daughter’s southwest Houston apartment, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“It is more emotional this time,” said her 57-year-old husband, who has 50 relatives shrimping for a living along the Gulf Coast, “because we see our lives have been devastated.”

It was never an easy life in Mississippi, but it became a good one.

After Tran and her children left a refugee camp in Singapore, they landed in Nashville, their move sponsored by a Catholic church. They bounced from the Southeast to Houston to Southern California, where Nguyen joined them, studying English and trying to become a mechanic. But it was difficult to make a living in the competitive environment of California, so in 1982, they set out for Mississippi, where Nguyen had relatives.

The Gulf Coast waters, rich with fish, provided a livelihood amid a community of other Vietnamese transplants. Some already knew how to fish, and others learned. Tran and Nguyen learned to shuck oysters. It was a job that didn’t require school or English language skills. They didn’t even need a car. All an oyster shucker needed was a glove, a hammer, a knife and a taste for miserably hard work.

They earned $5 for a gallon bucket, and on a good day, they filled 20 buckets. “It was not a lot of money, but we had to find a way to raise the kids,” Tran said.

The family lived in the coastal town of Pass Christian, where their neighbors were mostly seminarians studying nearby.

“It was a lonely place, but we just got used to it,” Nguyen said.

After eight months in the oyster business, Tran developed carpal tunnel syndrome from the repetitive handwork and had two operations.

The couple switched to shrimping. Again, they learned the trade from friends and relatives, fishing along the coast from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama.

Nguyen learned how to cast a net and mend it when it tore. They spent two days on a boat with relatives, mastering the radar system and learning minor repairs in case they were stranded at sea. On the return trip, Nguyen steered the boat in the wrong direction and ran it aground.

The couple borrowed $2,000 to buy their first boat, a 20-footer. Their family grew from three children to six. The children born in the U.S. -- all daughters -- learned to steer the boat and fish from it before they could drive a car.

“I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t have a choice,” said Nguyet Nguyen, 17, the youngest. “It was very labor-intensive.”

Nguyet and her mother would separate the shrimp from the other fish they caught, pouring buckets of ice onto the shrimp to keep them fresh. The 30-pound baskets of ice were difficult for the thin young girl to lift.

“You got used to it,” she said.

Some days during the high season, in the fall, the family didn’t sleep at all, fishing 24 hours straight.

But usually, the men’s nights were devoted to gathering to bond and imbibe, or, as the Vietnamese call it, nhau. The shrimpers would gather on the dock to sit and talk, drink beer and eat fried fish, boiled chicken and sweet-and-sour fish soup.

In the mid-1980s, as more Vietnamese arrived, immigrant communities blossomed on the Gulf Coast. Biloxi, Miss., and the town of Versailles outside New Orleans became cultural and commercial hubs for the immigrants. Flea market fruit stands grew into dozens of establishments, selling groceries and jewelry, among other things, and catering to a Vietnamese clientele.

For the Nguyen family, there wasn’t a lot of money, but there was a lot of freedom.

“We don’t worry about bills,” said Ninh Nguyen. “I can work when I want to. I don’t have to answer to the boss. I manage my own time. If I’m sick, I can stay home.”

The family scrimped and saved. They ate their daily catch of flounder or shrimp and vegetables they grew. They never went to restaurants, bought a new car or stepped inside the casinos that revived the Mississippi coastal economy, but they managed to upgrade to a better boat every few years -- the latest purchase a 46-footer. Nguyen, a devout Catholic, named the vessel St. Jude.

They went without a television set, relying instead on the CB radios that all the shrimpers used to pass along information about where to fish -- and news about storms.

As the family learned the trade, they also learned to take the weather in stride. At first, ominous warnings of hurricanes were frightening. They would pack up and leave their home and boat. But after the third or fourth, the huge storms became routine.

Ninh Nguyen said he has fled more than 50 times since 1982. In his first brush with a big storm, in 1985, he took his boat to a canal, tied it up using a steel cable, hunkered down and braced for the onslaught. But the hurricane changed direction.

Since then, he has done the same thing each hurricane season: He moves the boat farther up the canal, ties it to others so it won’t blow away, rolls up the 25-foot net, puts the baskets and shovels in an underground compartment, and opens all the windows.

But Katrina was different. Nguyen sent his wife and children to a shelter -- although the family wasn’t expecting catastrophe. “We only grabbed two outfits, because we thought we’d be back home the next day,” Tran said.

Nguyen got on the boat and went through his usual hurricane protocol. He and other fishermen waited to see whether it would hit. At 8 the night before the hurricane struck, “I realized it was for real,” Nguyen said. He clutched the wheel of the boat inside the cabin as the wind whipped and ropes snapped.

“It sounded like a shooting or a long chain of fireworks,” he said. “I didn’t think it was going to go away.”

Boats flipped and capsized. The St. Jude was tossed against others. Nguyen, a weak swimmer, jumped into the water and clung to a treetop for about 30 minutes. He saw a swarm of boats coming toward him as the storm pushed and crashed them like toys.

Suddenly, a boat came toward him sideways, and he jumped aboard. Inside were five of his friends from other boats who had hopped on to seek cover. The group fired flares to seek help, but none arrived until the next day. After they were rescued by National Guardsmen that morning, Nguyen was hospitalized with leg wounds and high blood pressure, he said.

He was reunited with his family after he contacted relatives in Southern California to tell them that he was alive.

They’re now staying with daughter Thuy Nguyen, 35, in her Houston apartment. Tran and her husband sleep on an air mattress in the living room.

Ninh Nguyen leads his family in a nightly 15-minute rosary, saying prayers to the Virgin Mary.

“We don’t know what to do, because we’ve lost everything,” Tran said tearfully.

She doesn’t know whether she wants to live on the Gulf Coast again. But Nguyen is determined to return.

“These huge hurricanes only come once in a decade,” Nguyen said to his wife, trying to persuade her. “If we go somewhere else, what are we going to do for a living?”

Tran reported from Houston, Hall from Los Angeles.