Out of Vietnam: the divergent paths of a father and son

Sometimes in life we take strange paths, paths that reshape everything we know about life and redefine everything we believe in.

On April 28, 1975, my family and I traveled one such path, fleeing our country amid bombings and shrapnel and the insanity of war.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of Vietnam, and every year, my sister teases me that I was too young to remember.

But I remember all too vividly.

I remember my nanny tearfully clutching me and not letting go because she knew it was our last time together.

I remember being stuck at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport because of rocket fire, and I remember thinking I was going to die.

I remember sirens waking me up, and I remember my parents pulling me into the trenches. I remember my father covering me, risking his life.

I remember crying and wanting to go home.

I was 6.

It's been said that life has to be lived forward but can be understood only by looking backward. So here I am, 25 years later, looking back and wondering what the Vietnam War means to my family and what my ancestors would think.

I am a descendant of Emperor Gia Long, the first ruler of Vietnam. My uncle was Buu Loc, the prime minister of Vietnam in early 1954. His cousin was Bao Dai, the country's last emperor.

What would they say if they saw me in America? Would they hate me for abandoning a country they built?

Every refugee has a story. Every family has a legacy.

As I grow older and seek answers, they are harder to find. My father is 80 years old, and Alzheimer's has robbed me of the man I know only in memory. As death courts him, he will take with him stories of our lives and our history, thoughts he couldn't share with me.

His thoughts on the war were his guarded secrets.

Not like the movies

Don't let Hollywood fool you: There is nothing comforting about trenches. That was the most disheartening realization for someone who grew up in Vietnam watching all those black-and-white war movies. In the trenches, the dirt gets in your eyes and ears and inside your shirt. The closer the gunfire, the more the earth trembles, showering more dirt over you as a reminder that death is a short distance away.

This was my introduction to the Vietnam War. This is how a 6-year-old realized that John Wayne was just an actor.

My father, Quan Buu; mother, Thuy; sisters, Huong and Chi; and I were stuck at Tan Son Nhu airport on the night of April 28, 1975. Our flight couldn't take off because the Viet Cong filled the sky with artillery and rockets.

So we slept on the terminal floor. Every few hours, sirens would wake us and we'd flee outside to the nearest trenches.

I saw shrapnel lacerate a man's leg. My mother covered my eyes, picked me up and jumped into a trench. My father blanketed me to shield me from stray bullets.

Some U.S. Marines brandishing M-16 rifles surrounded the area looking for Viet Cong. But they had scattered.

As uncomfortable as it was for me in the trenches, it was worse for my then-16-year-old sister, Chi, who has polio.

The next day we rushed toward one of the evacuating helicopters, my sister limping in front. She got on board, but we couldn't. The chopper was full. The Marines steered us to another before we could tell her.

My sister turned, didn't see her family and jumped off to look for her mom and dad. But our chopper had taken off.

She could only look up as ours grew smaller and smaller, until the night sky swallowed us.

The one person my family didn't want to be alone was now alone.

The journey that couldn't seem to get worse just did.

Sometimes, I think what's worse than death is the uncertainty of it. The uncertainty tortures the consciousness.

I told myself she was OK, but I was scared she wasn't. I envisioned her alive and I envisioned her dead. The uncertainty occupied me day and night; it crept into my sleep and made me cry out her name, over and over.

As we moved from one refugee camp to another, my father scanned the new-arrival list every morning for his daugther's name.

A month later, we received news. It turned out that 45 minutes after our departure from Vietnam, a U.S. soldier had heard my sister's cries, picked her up, fought through the crowd and jumped on board with her safely in his arms.

The Red Cross cared for her as she made the trip to America without her family.

We were reunited five months later in Bethesda, Md. We staked out our new home in the area and started over.

New life, many changes

Everything we knew about life was about to change. My father was never the same after that, and neither was our relationship.

He was an old man set in his ways. I was young and getting more Americanized each day. We were living under the same roof, and yet distant.

Growing up, I was bitter. Bitter because our relatives had warned us to leave months earlier, but he wouldn't budge. Bitter because I blamed him for putting my handicapped sister through this ordeal. Bitter because I had to attend a French school and learn Vietnamese as a second language in my own country. Bitter because I was in a new country and had to learn another language.

These were pains that healed only decades later, because I couldn't crack his exterior to see the man inside, to understand what the war had meant and what it had done to him.

It wasn't until college, when I studied journalism at the University of Maryland, that I learned the depths of his pain through my mother and sisters. Each had bits of the story. I pressed for all of their pieces because I needed to understand the whole man.

From what I gathered, he had a plan for his life, and the war had threatened all that. For the first time, he had lost control.

He owned a few buses that ran through Saigon. He owned seven pieces of real estate with river views and had set aside parcels for each of his children.

He felt a sense of obligation to be with his grandmother in the twilight of her life. He didn't want to abandon the homeland his forebears had built.

About a month before Saigon fell, my father fell into depression. All the pills and food my nanny fed him couldn't keep him from losing weight or snap him out of his state.

Everything he had invested in, everything that had brought him comfort, everything he had achieved and considered his identity was in Vietnam. And he refused to start over.

My uncle was the prime minister who had worked with the French in Paris to stop the Communist insurgency, and my father knew, even if a part of him was in denial, that his life was in danger if the Communists figured out his lineage.

On April 28, as the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were encroaching on Saigon and nearing our home, my father deferred to his relatives' wishes and fled.

We left just in time.

The last days before the fall were filled with pandemonium in Saigon as Communist artillery and rocket fire echoed through the capital. We couldn't see the enemy, but we could hear the salvos. Looters filled the streets and mothers cried for U.S. servicemen to take their babies with them.

On April 30, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the presidential place, signaling the end of South Vietnam.

The Communists took over everything we owned.

It wasn't until months after arriving in America that my father put his life back together, accepted his fate and moved on.

His is the story of so many other immigrants - long hours in remedial jobs, working at a department store, then working with a travel agency and raising enough to provide a middle-class existence for his children. As hard and as humbling as it was for him to start a new career at 55, the bigger pain was losing his children to marriages and careers. We had been through so much. But life is bigger than war, and it had beckoned us to move on. My two sisters, Chi, now 42, and Huong, 40, have married and relocated to California.

In the summer of 1993, when I packed by belongings into my Mustang and headed to North Carolina for a newspaper job, my father stood with tears streaking his cheeks.

"What?" I asked.

His voice cracked, but the words couldn't come.

I understood. I knew from the war that he didn't handle change well. They were stressful disruptions in his order of the universe.

As I stood before him, I wouldn't let myself cry. But all my sadness was on my father's face.

He cried profusely and unabashedly, and I realized then that before me stood the toughest man I knew, someone who had made his fortune, lost everything in the war, and in the autumn of his life started over in America and carved out a comfortable living for his family and for his retirement.

He taught me the resiliency of the human condition.

Rediscovering the past

Every generation is supposed to leave the country a better place; every generation is supposed to build on what the previous generation had left. That's what I learned from reading about my ancestors, who were emperors of the Nguyen Dynasty.

In 1802, Emperor Long's men defeated the Tay Son armies and unified Vietnam as it is today geographically. His son, Minh Mang, ruled Vietnam from 1820 to 1840, and strengthened the Nguyen Dynasty from the Red River Delta to the Mekong Delta.

They were my great-grandfathers. My uncle, Prime Minister Loc, worked with French Premier Joseph Laniel in Paris in early 1954 to try to stabilize Vietnam amid the rising power of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.

His cousin Dai, the last emperor, ruled from 1926 to 1945 before abdicating and going into exile in Paris during the Communist uprising.

I wasn't old enough to talk to Loc or Dai, but I wonder how they would feel if they knew their descendants had become so apolitical and indifferent about their country and ancestors.

The younger generation in my family have not left the country a better place, as my ancestors had wished. We don't even live there; instead we're scattered all over the United States and France. Like many of my young relatives, I've been more interested in finding my place in my new homeland than I am in rediscovering my past.

But Vietnam is still in my heart, as it is in my blood.

For me, the reconciliation with my past starts with my father. Since that summer afternoon when we parted on the front path of our house before I headed to North Carolina and then Georgia, we'd talked so little that my father hadn't realized I had picked up a Southern accent.

And he never will.

My father is in late stages of Alzheimer's, and he recalls little of Vietnam, his heritage and his only son.

When I visited him four years ago and saw him sitting so peacefully, I hugged him from behind and rested my head on his shoulder. That image is embedded in my mind, and I realize now that it recalls the Vietnam days when my father was on his scooter, with me in the back.

With my hands wrapped around him, it felt as if we were one, gliding effortlessly across the countryside and the city, enjoying the majestic vista of our ancestral homeland.

I felt so much closer to him then.

There was no talk of politics or war. No cultural gap between father and son. It was a time when he felt like the king of the world, and I was too naive to realize life's complexities.

It was a time when he was at peace with himself because he loved watching the villagers and the street vendors and the countryside and the city, and the purity and innocence of them all.

It was his Vietnam. My Vietnam. Our Vietnam.

Tan Vinh's phone message number is 206-515-5656. His e-mail address is tvinh@seattletimes.com.