French Vietnamese Torn Between Two Worlds

Nguyen Dang Nga crooned “Feelings” into the mike. Nguyen Huu Khanh got up and melted her with “Unchained Melody.” No simple karaoke kismet, this was a turning point in an evocative Vietnamese family saga.

“Neither of us speaks any English, but we each got the message,” Khanh said, in French, casting a happy eye at Nga, now his wife.

Other than the same ubiquitous Vietnamese surname, the couple had little in common when they met that night a few years back. They represent opposite spectra of a half-million Indochinese propelled toward France by tumultuous times.

The story of their families, told to a reporter in Paris and in Hanoi, exemplifies the clash of borders and bloodlines in a post-colonial, post-Cold War world of unequal parts.

Nga’s grandfather, Nguyen Dang Thuyet, planted her family tree in France back in 1954, the last year Paris ruled Vietnam. He was working on a boat to Marseilles and stayed when the defeated French came home.

Thuyet sent for three of his children, who prospered in France. Nga’s father was not one of them. By the time she was born in 1963, a divided Vietnam was back at war. The South fell in 1975, and borders were sealed.

In 1987 Nga left Vietnam the hard way, sneaking out at age 24. She spent all her savings to crowd into an open boat with her 6-year-old daughter. Her husband, who followed two days later, was lost at sea.

Robbed by pirates, abused by soldiers, forced to hike for days without food, Nga made it to a Thai refugee camp just in time to give birth to a son. After she had spent three years in squalid camps, France gave her asylum.

In Marseilles, Nga set up a small restaurant with an uncle’s help. That failed, and she hitchhiked to Paris with only a knapsack, kids in tow. She got by on welfare until she happened into that karaoke club.

Khanh had come to Paris in 1976 at age 15, flying in with his parents and five siblings. His family was repatriated by the front door because his grandfather was a francais de souche that is, a white Frenchman.

After studies, Khanh worked for a security company and then bought a cab. Calling himself Antoine, with a fashionable diamond in his right earlobe, he is at home in France with a loving wife.

Nga’s older daughter, who now goes by Marie, speaks English better than Vietnamese, and her first language is French. She wants to go to America to study ancient Egyptian history.

Nga’s son, Michel, born in the dirt near the Thai border, never learned Vietnamese, but he is a master at computer-speak. Her new daughter, Angele, born in Paris in August, will have her little family’s first French passport.

On the face of it, it is a classic immigrant tale, two families’ time-release immersion into a larger melting pot, part of those age-old global flows from east to west, from south to north.

But in the new world order, immigrant tales are seldom classic.

The Nguyens are still Vietnamese, torn between a comfortable but alien land of adoption and a hardscrabble homeland with left-behind families and cultural roots.

Thuyet, the patriarch of Nga’s family, missed his granddaughter’s wedding because he moved back to Vietnam in 1997. It was his first trip back after 43 years as an add-on Frenchman.

“This is where I should be, in my real place, in my final days,” he says, frail at 89, in his simple rooms behind a sewing shop in central Hanoi. “I wanted to secure the fortunes of my family here.”

Time, however, had taken its toll. One of Thuyet’s sons had commandeered the old family house, assuming his father was gone for good. He refused to move out. Other kin say the old man is demanding and quarrelsome.

Rather than finding peace in a family circle, Thuyet ended up taking his own blood to court.

He considered going back to France, but he says he cannot get an exit visa from Vietnam. Now, alone much of the time, he sleeps in a small room, between a Buddhist altar and a giant poster of the Mona Lisa.

Nga wants badly to see her ailing father, her mother and her two brothers in Vietnam, but she is afraid that if she visits them the authorities won’t let her leave.

“I’m happy in France,” she says, having made the best of it. “You have to live life with a smile, or you’ll suffer from a long face. But you must love your own country with your heart and soul.”

She misses little things like durian, that spiky green fruit with a pungent odor only a Southeast Asian could love. “You get them here, but they are not fresh, not real, just not the same.”

Paris restaurants serve pho, but here it is only noodle soup. In Hanoi, no day starts without friends chattering over steaming bowls of rich broth, rare beef and crisp greens.

Marie, now 18, remembers Vietnam mostly as a terrifying flight to freedom. But she hesitates when asked whether she considers herself French or Vietnamese.

“Both,” she answers. “I am OK in France, but you cannot forget your homeland, where you come from. I want desperately to go see it.” She writes monthly letters, eager for news from a family she does not know.

For those who stayed behind, feelings are equally mixed.

A visitor catches Nga’s family at lunchtime in their two-room apartment up a rickety staircase behind a raucous street market. Their meager meal of soup cooked over a single burner is not what their French relatives imagine.

Nga’s father, Nghia, manages a military bearing despite pains in his legs that make walking difficult. He served in the French navy during the 1950s. With some pride, he speaks of a distant country he has never seen.

Nga’s younger brother, Phuc, looks at the handwritten invitation to his sister’s wedding with a mix of curiosity and longing. “She’s getting married,” he muses, with a slow smile. “And he is a nice man?”

Phuc taught English in Saigon, but he moved back to Hanoi to be a dancer.

“I may be the best dancer in Hanoi,” he says, simply stating a fact that is likely true, with no trace of a boast. “I love to dance. Ballroom, salsa, anything.”

Phuc gives private lessons and performs at tourist hotels. He looks like a dancer, lithe and alert, the sort of young man who might enjoy himself in the salons of Paris’ Right Bank. But he also looks at home in Hanoi.

“We are poor here, but we have a good life,” he says. “People have a sense of order, of what is important in life.”

Phuc works seven days a week, but so does Khanh, his new brother-in-law in Paris. The Paris Nguyens have a toaster oven and free speech. The Hanoi Nguyens breathe the moist, scented warm air their ancestors did.

“I don’t know if I am happy or sad how things happened,” Phuc says. “When it was decided that Nga would try to go to France, I thought about going too but I couldn’t.”

Later, his relatives in France sponsored him for a French visa, and he asked Vietnamese authorities for approval.

“They did not reply favorably,” he says, with a little shrug. “Who knows? I might be in France too.”

From all appearances, he could deliver a mean “Unchained Melody.”