Reunion Brings Home Resiliency of Vietnamese

The old lady waited, as she had waited so often during her 93 years, for her sons. She fidgeted, smoothing the pleats of her purple dress, and peered out from her home, out into the rain, out into the bamboo thickets. Maybe she had the wrong day, she fretted. Maybe the family reunion wasn’t today. Or maybe it was the rain. How could anyone come in such weather?

Then Nguyen Tri Nheh saw the first two sons--the two who had been soldiers in the South Vietnamese army--sloshing up the muddy path to her home. And behind them, sheltered by an umbrella, their older brother, the doctor, the one who had crossed the Ben Hai River into North Vietnam as a teenager, become a Communist and spent the war patching the wounded and burying the dead.

“Hurry, children,” she called out, “or you will be wet.” And the doctor, Nguyen Xuan Nghien, 58, Vietnam’s top rehabilitation specialist, shouted back, “But Mother, we are already wet!”

Dr. Nghien, who had traveled from Hanoi for the reunion, bent to kiss his mother’s cheek and hugged Nguyen Xuan Kien, 47. “Ah, my little brother,” he said, squeezing hard, and turned to Nguyen Xuan Tinh, 53: “And you, Tinh. How lucky we are to be united. I wish Father was alive to see us together again.”

For two decades, when Vietnam was a divided country, the separation and silence between Nghien and his family were so vast that neither knew if the other was alive or dead. But on this morning, Mrs. Nheh’s home once again glowed with the warmth of small talk, just as it does, once or twice a year, when the Nguyens gather to share the bonds restored by peace and to consider their good fortune in surviving a war they never voluntarily speak of anymore.

Compared to many families--one mother who lives not far away lost eight of her nine children in the war--the Nguyens were lucky: No one in their family died. But like the Mason-Dixon Line of America’s Civil War, the Ben Hai River that split Vietnam into North and South from 1954 to 1975 pitted brother against brother, and in small ways the story of how families like the Nguyens dealt with that division and the eventual reunification is the story of modern-day Vietnam itself.

“Which side did I support when I had sons on both sides? asked Mrs. Nheh, her jaws working a wad of betel nut gum as she pondered a visitor’s question. “Oh, really, I never distinguished between North and South. What was the difference? I wasn’t interested in politics. I just wanted my sons back. And peace. I wanted peace.”

Matriarch Recalls a Lifetime of War

The Nguyens had lived in Quang Tri province for, well, forever, Mrs. Nheh said, and the war--or wars, really, first against the French, then the Americans--had dragged on “for longer than I can remember. I lived with war most of my life.”

French soldiers had burned down her house and most of her village in 1952, and she hated the former colonialists for that. But at night she didn’t have to deal with them. They withdrew to the safety of their base camps, and the Viet Minh--the forerunners of the Viet Cong--would sneak into the village to instruct the children in propaganda and basic skills like reading. In the process, they began winning hearts and minds, just as the Americans would try to do, without success, more than a decade later.

On May 8, 1954, a day after the defeat of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, representatives of eight countries met in Geneva and, after two months of negotiating, partitioned Vietnam at the Ben Hai. The division was to be temporary, until free elections could be held in 1956 to reunify Vietnam, under either the North’s Ho Chi Minh or the South’s Ngo Dinh Diem.

Mrs. Nheh’s husband, Nguyen Xuan Nghinh, sent his brightest and only literate son, 13-year-old Nghien, the future doctor, to tailor school, then, to the North, which Nghien reached by wading alone across the Ben Hai early one evening, carrying nothing but a plastic bag of extra clothes he had sewed and knowing not a soul on the far side of the river.

“Education is free in the North and schools are better,” the father had said. “You will only be gone two years, until the election.”

But neither Vietnam nor the United States signed the Geneva Accords, and Diem, believing Ho Chi Minh would win a popular vote, refused to hold elections. The partition became permanent. For the next 21 years, Nghien would not see or communicate with his family in the South.

Young Nghien moved in with a family of peasant farmers. “Oh, I was homesick, so homesick, at first,” he said. He tended the farmer’s water buffalo in the morning, went to school in the afternoon and studied until late at night. Each year the state gave him two shirts and two pairs of pants. He was the brightest boy in his class and in 1961 was chosen to study medicine. He became a doctor in 1966.

The “American War” was raging in the South by then, and the North was under heavy U.S. bombardment. The rice paddies and villages south of the nearby demilitarized zone had become a no-man’s land, but unlike most South Vietnamese in the area, Nghien’s mother and family decided to stay put rather than seeking safety farther south.

“Where would we have gone?” Mrs. Nheh asked. “This was home. Besides, I was old, even then. So we lived with the war.”

Brother Held Out Hope for a Homecoming

Mrs. Nheh sat quietly, hands folded on her lap. Thunder rumbled overhead. Her three sons, laughing and talking at the little table next to their mother, had to raise their voices to be heard over the drumbeat of rain pounding through the bamboo thicket. Mrs. Nheh tilted her head to better hear their stories, but she said little.

“I always believed one day my brother and I would meet again, because we were separated by a border, not by our hearts,” said Tinh, a farmer with calloused hands and skin darkened by years in the nearby rice paddies. “Really, it made no difference who fought for which side. That was just circumstances.”

In the North, Dr. Nghien and the nurse he took as his wife, Nguyen Thi Bien Hop, moved, by foot and bicycle, from city to village to commune and finally to the forests as the U.S. bombing intensified in the late 1960s. They dug shelters for patients, conducted operations by candlelight and, he said, never once considered the possibility that the North might lose the war.

Years later, the doctor’s wife would say, “I believe I’m a stronger person today for what we went through. That’s my generation’s contribution to the young--strength and peace and a better standard of living. I just hope they have the knowledge to avoid the trouble my generation knew.”

She was pregnant with their first child when Nghien went off to East Germany to study rehabilitation for war injuries in 1971, a year before the U.S. Christmas bombing of Hanoi that left up to 30 patients and staff dead at the city’s main hospital, Bach Mai. By then, young North Vietnamese volunteers were pouring down the Ho Chi Minh Trail toward southern battlefields.

But the call to duty that was answered so willingly in the North met a less enthusiastic response in the South.

Brother Kien, who is now a member of the local Communist People’s Committee, managed to avoid the draft for four years by using a doctored identification card. His older brother, Tinh, the farmer, was just as reluctant to fight a war that stirred no passions except the will to survive. He refused to volunteer.

“I mostly only saw Americans at a distance, on patrol in the paddies, when I was tending water buffalo as a boy,” Tinh said. “They scared me. They were so big, their skin was so pale. They had so many weapons. They appeared strange. I thought they had come to invade our country.”

Eventually both boys were drafted into the South Vietnamese army. Kien was in Ban Me Thuot on March 9, 1975, the day Hanoi’s tanks rolled into town, beginning a rout of South Vietnam’s forces in the Central Highlands. Seven weeks later Tinh watched Saigon fall to the Northern soldiers.

“I really didn’t care who won or lost,” Tinh said.

Both brothers had the same reaction: They discarded their South Vietnamese uniforms, stole civilian clothes, and on foot, by bicycle and by bus made their way back home to Dong Ha.

“I returned to Hanoi from East Germany about that time,” Dr. Nghien recalled. “My wife met me at the airport. We embraced and I cried. She was very thin and wearing a torn dress. She told me she had lost 16 kilos [35 pounds]. Everyone was so thin, so gaunt. I was very moved. I couldn’t imagine how much they had suffered.”

It had been 21 years since Nghien had seen--or had any word from--his family. He journeyed south, crossing the Ben Hai that was now just another river in a reunified country, and reached his village after two days.

“There was nothing left, not a house,” he said.

But in a lean-to, covered by a mosquito net, he found an old woman who peered at him with a glimmer of recognition. By then heavyset with thick glasses, he bore little resemblance to the 13-year-old boy who had crossed the Ben Hai alone so long ago.

Not until he showed the woman his birthmark--a brown spot on the right side of his neck--did Mrs. Nheh know for sure that she had reclaimed a son. She could offer him only a sweet potato in celebration for dinner, but all night, unable to sleep, she sat by his bed, touching his hands, his feet, his face.

The Vietnam that Nghien returned to was an impoverished, isolated and dark-spirited place. The markets were empty, and just owning a bicycle qualified a man for middle-class status. Nghien sold the motorcycle he had brought back from East Germany and with the money rebuilt his mother’s house and supplemented his family’s meager monthly rations: 35 pounds of rice, one pound of meat, half a pound of both sugar and vegetables. Mostly the meat was Mongolian lamb fat.

“I went to school wearing old, ripped clothes and shoes that were a hundred years old,” said Nguyen Xuan Dong, the son who was born to Dr. Nghien while he was in East Germany. “I had one classmate whose father was a high party official. He always had nice shoes, new jeans, good shirts, and I’d say, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. Where did he get them?’ ”

But slowly, ever so slowly, the fog of desperation lifted and the Nguyens began realizing the fruits of peace. Hanoi’s Communist government took the first timid steps toward a free-market economy in 1989, and the family eventually scrambled out of poverty. The United States lifted its trade embargo in 1994, and diplomatic relations with Vietnam were restored in 1995.

The last hints of animosity toward America faded for families like the Nguyens, to be replaced by a sense of relief that life was on the mend and times were getting immeasurably better.

Prosperity Brings TV, Refrigerator

Today, Tinh farms a one-acre plot the government has provided him, and Kien, the People’s Committee member, thinks economic reform has brought many achievements but worries that not enough foreign investment is coming into Vietnam.

Dr. Nghien’s wife, Hop, says she has every possible material need in life--a TV, refrigerator, electricity--and Nghien, who practices at Bach Mai, the hospital bombed by the Americans, and earns $50 a month as one of Vietnam’s most respected doctors, flushes with pride when he talks about two sons, both college-educated and starting off on worthwhile careers.

Sometimes he talks to his sons, Dong, 27, also now a doctor, and Ha, 23, about the benefits of joining the Communist Party. The party, he says, is about nationalism, not theory, and is a vehicle for development. The young men listen politely and silently, rolling their eyes, their faces crossed by vague smiles, as if to say, “That’s the old generation talking again.”

“In my father’s time,” Dong said one day, “if you wanted a good job, wanted to get ahead, you needed to be in the party. All good people were in the party. So I can understand why it was important to him. But times have changed. You can get ahead now by knowledge, and you don’t really need to be a Communist.”

And so much has changed in the relationship with the once-hated Americans that Dr. Nghien hardly knows where to begin.

His rehabilitation program at Bach Mai is supported in part by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, or VVAF. His second language these days is English instead of German. His son Dong will soon leave for the United States to study public health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. And Dong has brought home to introduce to his parents the first real love of his life--an American woman who works for the VVAF in Hanoi and is the daughter of a Marine who fought in Quang Tri province.

“I had no experience with love before, but Sarah and I agreed to spend time together and not talk about tomorrow,” Dong said. “Maybe things will work out, maybe not. I do not yet know if my love is an endless love.”

Dr. Nghien has even been to Washington twice. “Who’d have guessed I’d ever be in America?” he asked, still a bit bewildered by the improbability of it all. On his most recent visit, two years ago, he found himself standing in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, wiping away a tear as memories of war and separation and an old woman living in a lean-to came flooding back.

“When I touched the names that day on what you call the Vietnam Wall,” Nghien said, “I thought, ‘What beautiful people they would be if they were alive today.’ All bitterness left me at that moment.

“I understood that if some visitors there knew I had been on the other side in the war, I could be beaten up. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to think about how much both sides lost.”

Mother Receives Farewell Embraces

And still the rain fell in Dong Ha. The three brothers talked on. The water was rising over the river’s banks now. Finally Nghien said, “Mother, we really must be going, or we will have to swim.” Mrs. Nheh nodded and remained seated to receive a farewell embrace from Nghien, Kien and Tinh.

Nghien spread his umbrella and his two brothers squeezed in under it. “We’ll be back soon, Mother. I promise,” he said. Then the three of them headed back down the muddied path. Mrs. Nheh watched them go and did not avert her gaze until they had turned the bend and disappeared beyond the bamboo.