Waiting Nearly Over : Reunion Near for Freed Vietnamese Minister and Brother in Oceanside

When Tuoi Nguyen last saw his brother, 15 years ago, he tried to persuade him to leave Vietnam before the North Vietnamese took over Saigon.

Tuoi, his wife and their seven children fled in the spring of 1975, just five days before the South Vietnamese government collapsed.

But Cuong Huu Nguyen, a Christian minister, felt that he was called to lead his church, near what is now called Ho Chi Minh City, and so chose to stay in their war-torn homeland.

“I tried to get him out, but he many times denied, he said he doesn’t want to get out,” Tuoi said. “He said the Lord called him to stay in Vietnam and serve the people of Vietnam.”

Today, the two brothers--one who moved to the comfort of Oceanside, the other who was condemned to Vietnamese prison camps because of the success of his church, will be reunited when Cuong’s plane arrives in Los Angeles.

As Tuoi waited Thursday, his brother stood in a beige-and-cream-colored waiting room at Tokyo’s Narita airport.

It was a far cry from the labor camp near the Cambodian border where he had been sent to grow vegetables and tend cattle, he told a reporter in Tokyo.

“They call it re-education center, but actually it’s a forced labor camp,” Cuong said.

A year ago, he was transferred to the prison in Ho Chi Minh City, where he slept on a bare floor until his family managed to get him blankets. His diet was two bowls of rice and one bowl of soup each day, he said. But the harsh prison life made it easier to find Christian converts, he said. Although they were not permitted to have Bibles, Cuong said, he and another minister converted about 200 fellow prisoners.

“The communists actually have helped the church grow,” Cuong said. “So many people have become Christians since 1975--and it’s easier to convert them. Capitalism and communism, people are disillusioned with both.”

Cuong, now 49, is among the first wave of former political prisoners allowed to emigrate to the United States under an accord reached between Washington and Hanoi last July after seven years of negotiation. About 700 Vietnamese ex-prisoners are expected to arrive in the U.S. by the end of January, said the State Department, and about 150 will arrive between today and Tuesday. Catholic Charities of San Diego, which handles about half of all refugee cases that come to San Diego, expects to manage at least 14 refugee cases from Vietnam between today and Tuesday.

The former political prisoners had been placed in labor camps in Vietnam because of what the communist government called their “harmful activities,” mostly those associated with the previous regime.

Cuong was an unusual prisoner, a man of God among former politicians and military men. His church in Vietnam had drawn crowds of new worshipers. In 1982 alone, 300 people were baptized at the An Dong Church.

Amnesty International said that Cuong and three other Vietnamese clergyman were tried on August 27, 1987, in Ho Chi Minh City and charged with “preaching against the revolution.” Their plight has brought them the nickname “The Chi Hoa Four,” after the name of the prison in which they were believed to be held, near Ho Chi Minh City.

“The four men were detained because they were influential church leaders with an increasingly large following, and because of their nonviolent resistance to an order authorizing the confiscation of the church premises, aimed at preventing them from exercising their ministry. . . . Little is known about their circumstances in detention,” said an Amnesty International statement in late 1988.

The butterflies in Tuoi’s stomach this week, as the days and hours slowly moved towards Friday, came not just from the thought of seeing the brother he last knew as a young man, but also from the anxiety of seeing how the re-education camps have affected him.

Also, he did not know whether Cuong’s wife and daughter, Le Phuong Lan and Thi Linh Tuyen Nguyen, also had made the trip.

They had, and, in Tokyo, Cuong’s attention--and that of his wife and daughter--were focused more on the luxury there.

With them was a fellow Protestant minister, Ha Hieu Ho, who 10 days ago had been Cuong’s cellmate in the Ho Chi Minh City prison.

The two ministers and their families stared at the digital watches in the gift shop and leafed through glossy Japanese magazines.

“It’s so elegant. In 100 years, Vietnam wouldn’t be able to achieve this,” said Hung Duc Ho, 20, the pastor’s son.

“Now that we’re outside, we see how poor Vietnam is,” said his mother, Phuong-Lan Thi Le, 39, who plans to resettle in Santa Ana.

The first 300 political detainees left Ho Chi Minh City for Bangkok last week. But mechanical problems grounded their Tokyo-bound plane in Bangkok late Thursday.

The two ministers and their families, along with eight other Vietnamese emigres entering the United States under a different program, managed, however, to catch a flight to Tokyo and will arrive in Los Angeles this morning. About 55 more political detainees are expected to arrive in Los Angeles on Saturday.

What Tuoi heard of his brother’s fate over the years came through disheartening and infrequent letters from friends and relatives still in Vietnam. They told him that Cuong was abducted in the night in June 1983; his church was closed and he was forced to choose between leaving his homeland or going to the camps. He chose the camps.

Rumors circulated that he was being forced to sign a confession that he had committed crimes against the state, preached against the communists, and acted as an agent of the United States’ CIA.

“When I first heard my brother was in prison, I was certain that they were going to kill him,” said Tuoi, 57, who had been a chaplain in the South Vietnamese Air Force.

“You know, under the communist regime, it’s very dangerous. My wife’s brother-in-law, after they took over the Phuoc Long province (in 1975), because he was a missionary, they took him away. Two months later, my wife’s sister escaped from Vietnam . . . she said that they dug a hole in the ground and buried him alive.”

But a letter from Cuong’s wife shortly after his imprisonment assured Tuoi that his brother still lived.

Tuoi said his sister wrote from Vietnam and said their brother was being kept in isolation and moved from prison to prison, adding, jokingly that “his beard was down to here (pointing to his stomach), and his hair was down to here (pointing to the small of his back).”

A year ago, Cuong was interviewed by the U.S. negotiators in Vietnam, and Tuoi was told that his brother appeared to be in good health.

“(The State Department) said the communists gave him enough food to look good for the interview,” Tuoi said. “And so I hope he is OK now.”

Cuong remained in the prison camps up until several days ago, when he left Vietnam for Bangkok aboard a chartered Air Vietnam jet, where he underwent medical testing and administrative processing along with 300 other ex-political prisoners before coming to the United States.

“I don’t think he changed his mind about staying, but he had to get out,” Tuoi said of his brother’s imminent arrival in the United States. “The communists kicked him out, pushed him out. They forced him to leave.”

He was right: Cuong wasn’t all that happy about his new-found freedom Thursday.

“As pastors, it’s said for us to have to leave the country because we have to leave our flock behind,” said Cuong, a pastor in the Evangelical Church of Vietnam. “If the government ever allows us to go back, we’ll go back.”

Cuong said that, after his arrest in 1983, he and Ho stood trial before a three-judge panel and were sentenced to eight years in labor camps for “counter-revolutionary propaganda.”

An Amnesty International spokeswoman said this week that the circumstances of about 100 other priests and ministers in Vietnam are unknown.

But Tuoi sees improvement in the once bleak outlook for ministers in Vietnam.

“Most of the pastors, they have been put in jail, but now I think they will all be released,” said Tuoi, who started the Vietnamese Alliance Church in San Diego and now is retired from the ministry.

There are no official figures available on either the total of political prisoners held in Vietnam or the number of re-education camps, according to the State Department and Amnesty International, although a Paris relief organization estimates that there are at least 183 camps and prisoners in those camps number in the hundreds of thousands. U.S. officials said they expect as many as 100,000 people will qualify under the refugee program that brought Cuong to the United States.

And, as Tuoi prepared to meet the brother he has not seen in 15 years, he smiled.

“I am proud of my brother, that he has been persecuted for his preaching . . . and I am very happy that I will see him again.”

Times staff writers Sonni Efron and Thuan Le contributed to this report.