This story is about the boat people in our family.  In 1975, there were 7 of us, 6 brothers and one sister. I was the fourth child.  My mother was 59 years old and my dad had passed away several years earlier.  In April 1975, my wife and I and our oldest son (18 months at the time) were the only ones who could get out of Vietnam in an American cargo plane.  My second brother and his family were among the boat people leaving Saigon as the communist forces were entering the city.  They spent several long months in Pulau Bidong island, in Malaysia, before being allowed to come to Virginia.  My brother was a dentist, his wife a school teacher, but they are both retired now.  Their three children went to school in Virginia; the oldest is a pharmacist now, the second a medical doctor and the third an IT professional.

My next younger brother who was 34 in 1975 was a lieutenant in the Vietnamese army.  When the communists took over the country, he was sent to a “reeducation camp” for 8 months.  When he was released, he went to Phan Thiet, a coastal fishing town in Central Vietnam to try to find a way the get on a boat to leave Vietnam.  The first 3 attempts were unsuccessful; somehow the communist police learned about the attempts and several people were arrested.  On the 4th attempt, something terrible went wrong.  We did not what really happened but somehow my mother (who was still in South Vietnam) learned that my brother 's body washed ashore and he was buried in town.  My mother went to Phan Thiet but could not learn what had happened.  She did make a positive identification through pictures of my brother's body.

My older sister's family had three children, all girls.  About a year after my younger brother died, my sister’s family decided to let her husband and her oldest daughter try to escape by boat first; she and the other two daughters would try to join them at a later date.  My brother in law and my niece left by boat from a coastal town in South Vietnam.  That is the last we know about their fate.  We assume that their boat sunk because of overcapacity or that the Thai pirates sunk their boat after they had robbed everyone on board.  We don’t know exactly what happened.

In 1980, my oldest brother (a medical doctor) and his wife and one of my younger brothers (an architect) and his pregnant wife and young son decided to try their luck together.  After several failed attempts, they finally made to Pulau Bidong, Malaysia.  The refugee camp was overcrowded with people; living conditions were terrible, and paperwork was processed very slowly.  Even though my brothers and their family wanted to immigrate to the U.S., they decided to accept an offer from the French government to come to France because after 9 months at the refugee camp, they were afraid the new baby, born in the camp, could not survive.  Both of my brothers had attended French seconday schools in Vietnam.  In fact their secondary school diplomas were issue by the French Ministry of Education, so language was not a problem. However, the French government did not recognize their medical and architecture degrees.  My two brothers enrolled at the University of Rennes to obtain their French medical degree and architecture degree.  My oldest brother is retired now, and my young brother, the architect, has his own business in Rennes.

My youngest brother remains in Vietnam.  While I am writing this very  story, I just received a call from him, from Vietnam, just about an hour ago, to let me know that his he coming to the US to see me at the end of this month.  Imagine the surprise and elation.  I have not seen him for 33 years and he has never seen my two daughters, age 26 and 19, who were born after I left Vietnam.  This is such a wonderful day. back to top