OC HIGH / STUDENT NEWS &...

Loc Thien Ho wrote about his experiences in Vietnam and escape to America as part of a school assignment when he was a junior at Santiago High in Garden Grove. Ho prepared this account with the help of Jesse Cook, a sophomore at Santiago.

I was born in Vietnam in 1976. The previous year, on April 30, the North Vietnamese tanks drove into Saigon. Hanoi, the communist capital, quickly imposed a Lenin-Stalinist dictatorship on all of Vietnam.

The communist regime began confiscating our property and put my whole family on trial. My dad had been one of 11 national police officers, with the rank of captain, serving during the war for the South Vietnamese Army on the Phoenix Campaign, an intelligence operation established by U.S. advisers.

My dad was imprisoned in a re-education camp in Vinh Phu, where most educated people were forced to go. My mother and brothers were forced to leave Saigon for the mountain wilderness in Bau Can in Long Thanh Province, a lawless region called the New Economic Zone. It was here that I was born and grew up as a child.

Day after day, we walked into the forest to clear the brush and to plant vegetables, which were taxed by the state so we had little left. All of us had to fight for our survival, eating little but the roots of trees and yams. Some, who were sent there with us, had been seriously ill with malaria. About 20% died from other diseases and labor accidents. Fevers, mosquitoes, lack of medicine and other poor conditions contributed to these deaths. We were all in a sad mood because of the many negative aspects of our living conditions. There were no schools, no hospitals, no temples.

In June, 1989, we sneaked away, walking more than 100 miles to Chau Doc, a city west of Saigon. There we met eight others and took a boat to sea. It was a cold, dreary night. I could see nothing but dark mist. The wind grew stronger and stronger. Finally, the rain followed. Monotonous drops of water fell persistently on the cover of the boat, performing a long musical background song. I felt as if I were lost in a dream world.

By midnight the tempest was raging. The ocean, which had been so quiet and calm the day before, looked furious and made a moaning sound. The wind blew tremendous waves, which broke heavily against our boat. I stood by, clapping my hand to my mouth, feeling as though I were going to vomit. Facing the impending danger, we sailed slowly in anguish and in constant fear.

Two days later we arrived in Thailand, where we waited nearly three years for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees to screen us before we came to the United States. (Ho arrived in Orange County last November.) My father had escaped in a boat to the Philippines in 1986 and arrived in the United States the following year.

I was only 13, but the memory of our escape from communist persecution, during which many were denied basic rights, remains vividly in my mind. It took me some time to perceive and accept how anyone could put a little child through such a painful and ugly ordeal.

Because of our dad’s background, we children had no opportunities in education or employment. One by one, we each had risked our lives through numerous situations in order to escape to freedom, not knowing what would come.

It is through sorrow that we learn sympathy and through suffering that we have the chance to prove our mettle as people who have painfully fought our way to the peace that can never be attained by reason alone, since we have never had a day of happiness in a land we could truly call our own.