The War “Ends”
My name is Linh Dang and I was born after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
So, my family is actually very wealthy in Vietnam. So, after the fall of Saigon, when I was born in 1975, and that’s actually when the communists took over, and what they wanted to do was wealth redistribution, so my parents are placed in reform camp because they refused to give up their property.
So basically they are—this is what my mother told me—she was put in a reform camp, it’s kind of in a very rural area on the countryside, and then there’s like no electricity and no lighting. She was there with my dad. It was somewhat similar to a refugee camp where they actually—you were limited by the amount of food. It’s a little bit like being in refugee camp or even somewhat in prison. Basically, she was pretty scared because she didn’t really know what would happen to her. I actually didn’t really get to see my mother that much because they were in reform camp. But I was young, I was like, you know, one or two years old. And then the whole time, I was pretty much staying with a nanny. There was no milk, like I wouldn’t be able to have my mother’s milk, or even—even formula—so I was pretty much drinking rice water.
As I mentioned before, the government—the guards—are pretty corrupt. Before the fall of Saigon, the currency wasn’t worth anything anymore, so my parents actually bought a lot of precious metals, such as gold. They were able to buy their way out [of the reform camp]. But they actually went back to Saigon, so, that’s where I kind of grew up.
This whole time we were somewhat in hiding for—let’s see—ten years. Yeah, so I never got to go to school. I didn’t really learn to read and write. It’s like… when you grow up in a bad situation, you don’t realize that you are really in a bad situation. Right, so basically I thought life was normal. Pretty much, I lived with my parents, and then we kind of had—I actually had—a nanny. I would actually be able to go out, but I never had any friends, so the majority of my time was just interacting with my parents. I never really had any other children to play with, so I thought that was just the normalcy of growing up. When you don’t have something you don’t know what it is like to have something.