Secrecy of War Memories
Can you tell us what your family’s experience was?
My dad fled before the Vietnam War actually broke out.** The reason why he fled was during that time, Vietnam was fighting Cambodia and he was very scared of being drafted into that war because he was eighteen at the time.* My grandpa—my paternal grandpa—had also just passed away from cancer, so he and two of his other siblings had decided to flee to America. He was the first out of nine siblings to come to America. He was in a refugee camp for a little while and then he became a boat person before landing in Richmond, Virginia, where he lived at for about a year. And then, eventually he settled in California.
My aunt had also followed after. At the time, she was just married and she had just had her first child. She went to a Malaysian refugee camp before also becoming a boat person and coming to America. They were all sponsored by a family friend that had lived in D.C. I just found out about this family friend a couple of years ago when he had passed away. Beforehand though, my dad had not mentioned anything about him to me. To me that was very common among children of refugees that their parents will most often not tell them anything about their times [during the Vietnam War]. They will either laugh it off or downplay it a lot.
I never really understood this until one point when I was at a [Lien Doan Chi Lang] scout meeting. [Lien Doan Chi Lang is a scouting organization, where Vietnamese cultural learning is emphasized, with chapters in both the Boy Scouts of America and Girl Scouts of the United States of America.] All of the scout leaders, almost all of them, were refugees from the Vietnam War and they came back and they had formed this Vietnamese community and they had started their own scout troop as well. One of the scout leaders, at the time, just one morning gave us a long, half hour talk about what had happened in the war. For us, for the most part, none of us really knew anything about the war because our parents wouldn’t tell us anything because they wanted to keep their children from having that heaviness weighing them down.
He said, “We want you guys to be successful, there is no reason for us to burden you with our problems.” He went on to tell us about how he, particularly in the Vietnam War, had a best friend who had died by jumping on top of him to save him from a bomb. That was a story that I believe that his children did not know and that they had found out for first time at that meeting. It was only one of many memories and from then on he also didn’t really speak about it again.
For my dad, particularly whenever I had asked him about it, he would laugh. I just called him the other day asking, “Dad, would you ever tell me about what happened when you were a refugee from Vietnam?” And his first reaction was to laugh. He said, “Oh, you know, it was just like everyone else’s.” And I said, “But I don’t really know what everyone else’s story is because nobody will ever really tell me.” He said, “Oh, you hear bits and pieces and that’s fine. That should give you enough to give you a vague idea of what happened. You don’t ever need to know the details of it.” And whether or not it’s casual or I outright ask him, he will always avoid the question. My aunt is the same. But ironically, she has told me more about her refugee experience than to her own daughter. She was the one that went to the Malaysian refugee camp and her daughter at the time was, I believe my cousin was two years old. She had very severe diarrhea and they were scared that she was going to die because the likelihood of her dying was very very high. My aunt carried her all the way from the refugee camp to another camp that was approximately two hours away, right across the river. And even then she was not able to find medical help for my cousin.
And the fact that my cousin is alive today is honestly a miracle because they were in full honestly expecting her to pass away while in the refugee camp. But the thing is, my cousin still today does not know that she had almost passed away when she was two, and my aunt will never tell her that. And she explicitly told me not to tell my cousin that as well.
Can you tell us why you think she doesn’t want to tell her own daughter?
The reason why my aunt never told her own daughter was because when I asked her this question, I said, “Why did you never tell me that? Why did you never tell my cousin about this experience?” And she told me, “Because there is no need to. All it would do is trouble your cousin for no reason when your cousin is very healthy, very successful today.” And my aunt just never saw the need to tell her something that could honestly put her through stress for a little while.