Rediscovering Long-Lost Relations

I yearned for a hug. A warm welcome from aunts, uncles and cousins I left behind when my family fled Vietnam in a small boat. Instead, the long-anticipated reunion was restrained at first, as if I was meeting them for the first time. In a way, that was true. It had been more than two decades, and I could feel the separation.

Business--conducting interviews with families torn apart by the Vietnam War--brought me to Vietnam for two weeks. It was my first visit since we escaped when I was 6, and I discovered that my family also had been divided forever. We live, literally, oceans apart.

Because our lives are so different, it was hard to find something to say. They have lived under Communist oppression and whisper “cong an,” a term for the dreaded government police, when they speak. Nearly all my life I have lived in the United States, where we more often ridicule the government than fear it.

Even in the universal ritual of sharing food, the gulf was apparent. In a restaurant I splurged, ordering a dozen plates for the group, including two dishes of chocolate ice cream for a little cousin I had never met. It was probably the biggest dinner they had had since my mother visited in 1992. I hesitated to dig into the salad, where a little worm wriggled. They asked why I was so finicky.

The contrasts were everywhere. I saw street-smart children living in terrible poverty and wondered if my life could have been like theirs. The barefooted kid who begged me for my plate of leftover shrimp and then ran to share the food with his friends. A girl who ran alongside my car for half an hour in slow traffic, trying to sell me a bottle of water for 40 cents. The teen whose mother, selling flowers at the market, offered to give her away to a stranger who could give her a better life abroad.

After three unsuccessful attempts to escape, my family fled Vietnam in 1977, ending a two-year period filled with fear and uncertainty. My father, a former city councilman and owner of an electrical supply shop, was jailed for four months after the fall of Saigon because he worked for the former government, and we knew Communist authorities could return at any time to arrest any of us for any reason.

By this time, of course, there were no American airlifts. We left secretly, smuggled out in a 16-foot boat. My parents carried me, my brother and sister to the dock along with a bag containing 25 ounces of gold bars--the cost of our escape. My siblings and I were packed into a crawl space deep inside the vessel along with 18 others. Then we sailed out into the dark, quiet sea.

Though we children had been sedated to keep us quiet, my 2-year-old brother began to cry. “You’ll have to shut him up or throw him overboard,” the captain warned, fearing discovery by Communist troops at the harbor. My mother covered his mouth with her hands and found a way, somehow, to quiet him.

After four days at sea, our ordeal was over. A giant Japanese tanker picked up the boat and took us to Kobe, Japan, where we spent six months before we could arrange to enter the United States through the sponsorship of an aunt.

We settled first with my aunt in Peoria, Ill., where I remember rolling in the first snow I had ever seen. But my parents couldn’t adjust to the freezing temperatures, and we soon moved to Houston, where other relatives were living.

As the years passed, we kept in touch with family back in Vietnam. After my father died in 1979, I made a particular effort to stay connected with his mother, sending her family pictures and small gifts, such as rubbing oil. I didn’t want her to forget us.

At first, when I saw her again on my visit to Vietnam, it seemed that she had.

“Who are you?” my grandmother asked in Vietnamese, looking up as I stepped into the bare room where she lives behind a shop filled with dim light and incense. “Who are your parents?”

My eyes swelled with tears. I didn’t want to believe she had forgotten me. I was her favorite grandchild.

Now 94, her face was wrinkled and her body was skinny and hunched. But I recognized her eyes. I also recognized a photo of my father on her wall, near an altar with plates of oranges.

I pointed to the picture. She stared at me and raised her eyebrows. I looked into her watery eyes--and finally saw signs of recognition.

“It must be a wonderful day,” she said, kissing me. “I am so joyful that you have come to see me after all these years.”

I told her I wouldn’t be able to stay long. I handed her small presents, a bag of fruits and bottles of medicated oil.

By the time I had to leave, Grandma had something to give in return: She pulled the gold wedding band from her hand and glided it onto one of my fingers.

“I won’t be there to watch you wed,” she said. “So this is my early gift to you.”

“I love you, Grandma,” I said. “I want you to keep up your health so you will be here when I come back.”

Knowing that, in reality, I might well never see her again, it was the longest goodbye I’ve ever had. I kissed her a final time. “Grandma, lie down and rest,” I told her, “so you will be here when I come back again.”

I stepped into the taxi and wept, oblivious to the honking motorcycles and screaming street vendors. Each time I glanced at the ring, I knew it was all we had to stay connected.

By the end of my visit, however, I discovered a deeper bond, an understanding of my family and my homeland. I understood why small things I take for granted--bubble gum, toothpaste--matter so much to them. I understood why neighbors and families depend on each other so much.

And I admired their fierce effort--amid poverty, government oppression and almost medieval living conditions--to survive without the advantages my family gave me so many years ago.