My mother’s escape story as a Vietnam War refugee

By Nadya Poisac-Nguyen ‘23

Author’s note: I’ve written this piece to share the first-hand recount of the story my family and hundreds of thousands of other Vietnamese refugees experienced after the Vietnam War. My hope is that people will read this story, share it, and understand the hardships these refugees endured and other refugees around the world are currently enduring.

*My mother’s family portrait from approximately 1970 of her five brothers, two sisters, and parents; she is wearing the sunglasses.*

My mother, Kimya Nguyễn, and her family escaped Vietnam the same day the war ended. The Vietnam War consisted of the Communist regime of North Vietnam, also known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its main ally, the United States. The US joined the war to stop the spread of Communism throughout Asia.

The US dropped out of the war in 1972 after signing the Paris Peace Accords, an agreement to end the war, and withdrew their forces from South Vietnam. However, North and South Vietnam broke the deal, and the war between the two sides continued

On April 30, 1975, North Vietnam tanks rolled through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, South Vietnam, marking the end of the Vietnam War.

*A North Vietnamese tank rams through the locked gates of the Saigon Presidential Palace; courtesy of* *The Epoch Times*

Many Vietnamese families escaped Vietnam because North Vietnam was a Communist country, and was attempting to bring Communism to the previously anti-Communist Republic government of South Vietnam. Citizens didn’t want to live under communist rule because it was restrictive and no freedom existed. My mother’s family escaped for a particular number of reasons.

In 1954, her grandparents escaped from North Vietnam to South Vietnam when the Geneva Peace Deal was signed, dividing Vietnam into the North and the South.

“The government said if you want to go from the North to the South… you’re welcome to, but if you actually do it, they will kill you at night. They would come to your house, and you would be disappeared and no one would know,” she said.

Her grandparents knew how difficult it would be to live under Communist rule and therefore escaped in the middle of the night without telling anyone.

“Because in 1954, they escaped to the south, they’re northerners forever. We speak with a northern accent even if we’re from the south, so we’re northerner. In 1975 when the war ended, the Communists came over, we were considered traitors. Automatically you’ll be penalized, concentration camp, whatever.”

The second reason was that her father worked for the South Vietnamese government. “They would hunt him down and send him to a concentration camp and we would have no future. I would probably have no school, no money, probably be on the street begging.”

In order to escape successfully, money was vital. My mother’s family was poor and lived with her grandparents. When her grandparents escaped, they sold their home and gave her father money to escape. Then, her father went to a fortune teller who told him how to escape, what routes to take, and when to go.

On April 30, 1975, they left their home in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, and rented a van and drove it to a city by the sea called Rach Giá (pronounced: Rack-Ya). Three families were in the van, all relatives, totaling to 27 people.

There was only one highway away from Saigon, and the traffic was extremely slow because a surplus of families was escaping. South Vietnamese soldiers were running around throwing their clothes off because they didn’t want to be identified as a part of the Southern government.

“The VC [Viet Cong] came in with tanks, and the flag with megaphones, they said ‘people of Southern Vietnam, listen up! We are the soldiers from the North, the VC…we are freeing you from the government of the South and the domineering of the foreigners from the Americans and the French. We are freeing you, you come out and greet us blah blah blah’, obviously no one was coming out, everyone was running.”

On the way there, everyone had to tear up their paperwork and identification so the VC wouldn’t know who they were and that her father worked for the government. At nighttime, traffic was a standstill, and the adult men would hide underneath the cars. One night they were stopped by the Northerners.

“We told them we were fishermen, luckily they stopped us but they didn’t take us out, like at night, all the older men, the adults, they go and hide underneath the van and we the kids would just hide in the car. So they shined the light and saw all kids, so they didn’t do anything.” Some people were harassed and told to get out of their cars, but luckily my mother’s family did not have to.

After arriving at Rach Giá, since they didn’t have any money and didn't want to stay in a hotel, they ended up staying in a temple where the monks fed them for free for almost two weeks. Every day, her father and uncle would walk around to find a fisherman or boat to take them out to the international harbor. Unfortunately, they could only find a small fisherman’s boat, which took them to a small island off the coast of Vietnam called Phú Quốc (Pronounced Phoo Kwook).

In Phú Quốc, they miraculously found an empty house to stay in and her father hunted for a boat to take them out to the sea. They luckily found one, but it was too small and could only take half of the 27 people.

“Looking back, I guess our lives were not worth it because my mom, three girls, and my youngest brother Giác (pronounced: Zack) stayed back, and he [her father] took all the boys. Each family, just the men and the boys, left because they were afraid that the boys would be in concentration camps.”

Her mother had an aunt who lived in France, and her parents planned that wherever they ended up, they would write to her. She would write back to them so they could communicate.

So almost all the men and boys in the three families went out on the boat with the fishermen while the girls were forced to stay behind. About a week later they were about ready to return home to Vietnam when a miracle occurred.

“But the third family only had girls and one boy who’s six years old. My uncle went by himself, and my father took four boys, and the other family took all boys. So once they arrived at the international harbor, luckily the ship picked them up and then the uncle who was by himself, he decided ‘Oh no this is not worth it I don’t want to go alone, I’m going to go back and get them’. So lucky for us because of him…he went back and found us because we were still there, the fisherman guy agreed to take us all.”

My mother, her mom, two sisters, and youngest brother spent four to five days on the sea with 16 other people. They drifted into international waters with only dried ramen to eat. It rained so hard they had to scoop water out of the boat before it flooded.

*Representation of what the boat looked like; courtesy of* *manhhai on Flickr*

Five days later, a huge Thai fishing vessel passed by them. “Finally we saw a big ship so we took a white shirt, and you know SOS, save our spirit, it’s an international word, so they finally circled around and picked us up. By that time we were all so seasick and everybody was almost motionless. So they helped us, they picked up everybody, they brought us over, and they were really nice.”

My mother’s family was extremely lucky; others would get harassed, beaten, and stolen from her, but the fishermen cooked for them and took them to Thailand.

They arrived about one to two days later. They were treated as illegal aliens, so the boat was held up at the harbor and forbidden to leave.

“At that time, the international community, the United States, the Church World Service, The United Refugee Committee blah blah blah, everybody, they made a big announcement that there’s an exodus of the refugees fleeing Vietnam because of the Communist, so please pick them up please give them asylum.”

Luckily because of this, they could fill out paperwork and enter the country. They took them to a refugee camp called Camp Vayama in the city of Sattahip that they set up for the refugees. Her mother and father both wrote to their cousin in France, and so they were able to reconnect and find out that they were still alive.

My mother had an aunt who worked for the US embassy, and they flew her and her family out of Vietnam straight to the United States. At that time, the Church World Service asked churches nationwide, one in each city, to sponsor a Vietnamese family.

The same aunt and her family had gone into a refugee camp in the US, and then were sponsored by a church in Arcada, California. She then went and asked a church in a nearby city called Eureka to sponsor my mom’s family.

After spending about three months in Camp Vayama in Thailand, they were flown out to a marine base in San Diego called Camp Pendleton by the US government. Two months later, they flew to San Francisco. Her father and her brothers had gone to Singapore and then flew to a refugee camp in Arkansas. On October 4, six months later, they reunited in San Francisco.

Each church has one person to help support the family, and so for my mom’s family, Chuck and Sylvia Selden helped sponsor them and get them acclimated to the United States. In Eureka, there was an old church that they reconstructed into a house for them. The other relatives they traveled to each got their own sponsors in other cities.

“I thought going to school, everyone would speak Vietnamese, but of course not.” My mom was in the 6th grade when they left, but because she never finished, she had to start all over in October when everyone had already started in September.

My mom and her family grew up in Eureka, and eventually, all the siblings went to college.

My mother stated that she thought they were going on vacation when they first embarked on the escape. “My parents didn’t want to worry us so they said ‘Oh we’re going on vacation!’ That’s the first vacation in twelve years. We don’t go on vacations, we don’t have the money. Because during the war, you can’t go anywhere; everywhere you go you have to get permission…I’m a war baby.”

On their journey, they were each allowed only a small duffle bag. She packed about two pairs of pants and two pairs of shirts.

“At first, we didn’t know. This [was] a weird vacation because we were seeing people running and hiding. We don’t have a house, we stay in a temple, on a boat in a refugee camp, it just slowly slowly made sense. I had nightmares for months once I arrived in the US, that I would wake up and I was still in Vietnam…those were hard times.”

My family’s entire journey was a more than life-changing experience. My mother’s oldest brother was 21, and her youngest sister was 8 years old. They embarked on a dangerous and risky journey. They traveled for six months without knowing where they were going and where they would end up. Due to extreme fortune, all of them made it to safety and were reunited.

After the war, an estimated two million Vietnamese attempted to escape Vietnam over the course of 20 years. Many families were not as lucky, and over 250,000 people perished on the seas: primarily due to drowning or being captured by pirates and sold in human trafficking. About 65,000 South Vietnamese were executed, and one million were sent to prison or re-education camps.