Peace Came Without Bliss

“Saigon is lost! Saigon is lost!” A former South Vietnamese soldier was screaming from outside our tent.

He had a ham radio and was among the first to hear the news at a refugee camp in the Philippines where my family and I were staying.

As the words came into our lives--uninvited--I turned to my mother, Toan Ngo, whose face seemed frozen. All was still for a few moments before her tears began to flow, then the tears turned into sobs. And the sobs didn’t stop for what seemed like forever to me, then 8 years old.

We had flown out of Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon two days earlier and had been waiting at Clark Air Base for a connecting flight to Guam. My mother, brother, two sisters and I shared a tent furnished with military-issue cots and one dangling lightbulb.

I’m not sure if my mother was crying because she was thinking of my father, who had been separated from the rest of the family. (He would endure a reeducation camp and reunite with the family four years later.)

Maybe she was crying for the life she had worked so hard to build, only to lose it forever in those three short words, or perhaps it was for much bigger things, like all the people who died for our homeland. I cried, too, but for none of those reasons. I cried because I saw everyone else crying.

The war was finally over. And it wasn’t at all like everyone said it would be.

During my childhood, people dreamed of life after the war and wrote songs about it. One was about how we would all drink a toast after the war, to the soldier coming home, to the mother seeing her son.

Certainly, after the war ended, there were no more bombs and no more guns. But peace came without bliss.

We were shuffled from military base to military base, from the Philippines to Guam, and eventually to Arkansas, not knowing whether my father was dead or alive. Every day, we went to check a list of new arrivals, but his name never appeared. When the camp was getting ready to close its gates to immigrants, we relocated to Keller, Texas, then a one-stoplight town between Dallas and Fort Worth.

My mother had been president of an import company. Now she scrubbed floors and toilets at a nursing home for $2.30 an hour. On weekends and after hours, she sewed. Eventually, we all did. My mother, oldest sister and brother operated the industrial-size sewing machines while my younger sister and I performed such minor chores as clipping extra thread from the clothing. This earned the family from 90 cents to $2.50 per item.

We would later see the same items at department stores selling for at least 10 times as much. Even now, when I buy clothes, I sometimes wonder how much of the price tag went to the people who toiled over them.

Eventually, we stopped thinking about the war and the peace. After that, it was just the act of living life, and for this I was thankful.

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I appreciated the dullness of routine: a favorite noodle soup that my grandmother prepared every week, playing in the woods with my friends after Sunday school, our cat sitting on the front porch waiting for me to come home.

In 1980, my mother bought a house in Irving, Texas. This is where we still celebrate Thanksgiving with a turkey marinated in seasoning that includes a little bit of fish sauce--and watch the Dallas Cowboys play football.

Time has a way of moving on, but always leaving some things behind like an absent-minded house guest.

I traveled back to Vietnam last Christmas.

I passed an old playground where my parents used to take us. It is called Turtle Pond, named after a sculpture of a turtle that, according to legend, protects the city from invaders. When the North Vietnamese took Saigon, they destroyed the turtle.

Or so my aunt told me. Co Hoa, who used to paint flowers on her toes, now has gray hair and doesn’t even bother with makeup. Every morning, she sets up a booth in an alley market where she sells homemade pastries. As we tended the booth together one morning, she and I traded postwar stories. She told me about life in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, and I recounted what my family had endured. But no matter how I tried to explain, she couldn’t believe that life in such a “rich” country could be hard. She kept asking more questions, to which I ran out of answers. Finally, we dropped the subject and sat there in silence.

I was close enough to touch her, yet I couldn’t reach her. I realized that there was an ocean between us, beyond distance or language. Between me and Co Hoa. Between me and Vietnam.

Then I began to understand why my mother cried that night nearly 25 years ago.