Saved by the Viet Cong
Justin: Was there any particularly scary moment living in Vietnam?
Kiphan Kan: Well, as we grew up there were a couple of instances. One was the coup in 1963 that brought Ngo Dinh Diem down and I think escalated, well, was the starting point of the escalation of the American involvement. So I do remember that day because things were going on and we were told to stay in our house and we sort of got– we assemble ourselves in the kitchen which was quite, which was in the middle of the building because we felt more protected having the whole structure around us; so that was one point. And then another day was a big bomb explosion at the American embassy. So I remember that because it was very close to where we were living and it made a pretty big noise. Then also the Tet Offensive. Now the interesting thing about it is that we were not in Saigon when that happened. We were in a resort called Vung Tau, or Cap St. Jacques in French, so we really didn’t experience it first hand but people told us that these things had happened and we couldn’t go back to Saigon and so, we were stuck there for a few days.
Justin: Are there any interesting stories that you want to share about your experience?
Kiphan Kan: Well I did mentioned about how we were not home during the Tet Offensive and because at the time these friends of my parents had offered us their villa in the resort and they said “oh, you know you should go and get some rest there because of the Tet New Year, the Chinese New Year so everybody had time off” and so they said “Oh you know we have this villa there why don’t you go there and enjoy a vacation.” And so they convinced my parents that we should go and so we did and we stayed at the villa and so we missed the whole Tet Offensive in Saigon. Then much later–when we have left Vietnam– we found out that these friends were actually Viet Cong and they probably knew that this was going to happen and they were trying to protect us. So they got us away from the capital, uh, so it was kind of interesting; we– I remember I was still writing to them for a while but we didn’t find out much until much later that that was the case that they probably knew something about it.