Escape Processes
Brent: During your time in Viet Nam, who were you with or who did—in terms of family—whose support did you have?
Leslie:
At that time I was married and with two young children. My daughter was four years old and my son was eight—no, six months old. And that’s when we escaped—with the baby. But we formed escaping right from the beginning of the fall of Saigon and it took six years for it to come…To become reality.
Ze Khai: How did you guys figure out how to escape? How did that work?
Leslie:
It took a long time. Like I was saying, it was six years because they had to study very carefully. Every wrong move could be life and death matter. So it took a long time. They—I’m sure the organizer had connections to work with people who lived low to the sea that owned the boat and then they would, you know, share the news with family members, and then family members would, in turn, share with close friends—very, very trusted friends. We were lucky that we get to know one of the members in the family. So they trusted us. And then, negotiations—how many ounces of gold for gold for each member—each person to reserve a spot in the boat. So that was planned very carefully and they would give us instructions to disguise ourselves. I remember at that time my husband disguised himself into a farmer. And of course, we probably didn’t do a good job. I mean, you see a farmer look different than a doctor or a blue collar or white collar workers, right? But we did the best we could. And most of the time people would either use the very, very bad timing at sea because that is when the coast guard would not pay much attention, or the time when the big holiday that everybody was kind of more relaxing or not paying attention to you. And so we picked the second occasion which was Lunar New Year.
I was disguised into like a street vendor—wear very simple clothes—old—pretty much like rag. And the children would pretty—kind of like poor people. And I carried the baby, and with one hand hold hands with the four year old one. And then my husband would carry stuff like a farmer—dry fruits or vegetables. Something like that. And we boarded a boat—um, not a boat, but a bus. Like a charter bus—to go to very small village next to a river of the south side. Very, very deep south side that is close to Cambodia ’cause you want to take a short boat ride—as short as possible—to go to the next country. So we stayed there and I remember when we got off the bus we were instructed to look across street by the telephone pole—at that time was no telephone but electric pole. We saw a man who was standing there dressed in a certain type of clothes, wearing a hat that tilted down a little bit. So when we saw that—what we were supposed to do—we either tilted the hat or, you know, we made a signal to let him know that we’re the one that he’s waiting for. And, in turn, he would do something to signal us—That I’m the one to pick you up. So imagine that—it was so tense!
It seemed like children get more mature when they were growing up in that situation. My four year old one was very, very smart. She knew we were doing something, so she was very well-behaved. She did not cry or question anything.