GROWING UP IN SOUTH VIETNAM
In this highlight video, Mr. Nguyen discusses life growing up in Vietnam and his views of the French and Americans when they were occupying his native country. He comments on the Communists’ claims that they were doing good for the country, and accuses the Communist leaders of being “liars.”
Highlights Transcription
Eric: If you could just start by telling us your name, and by telling us a little bit about yourself and where you grew up?
Minh: My name is Minh Nguyen, I was born in Saigon, South Vietnam.
Eric: What was it like growing up when both the US and the French were present in Vietnam?
Minh: When I was born, that was when the French were beginning to withdraw and the US starting to come in, so I didn’t really live with both of them.
Eric: What was it like after Dien Bien Phu and when the US started taking a more active role in the South?
Minh: I was only a little kid when they were coming in. As a kid, we loved them – they were foreigners. They both gave kids candy and were always nice. As an adult, Vietnamese saw the Americans and the French the same – they were both white, both foreigners, they both came into the country. There wasn’t much of a difference – there was a problem with language, but there wasn’t much difference.
Eric: What was life like in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon with the Communists in power, compared to growing up around Americans?
Minh: 100% different, it was like night and day. Before the fall of Saigon, if you wanted to eat then you could eat, if you had the money; if you didn’t have the money, then you could find a job to get the money to eat. After the fall of Saigon, there was no money at all – no money for food, for clothes, for medicine. If you were sick…if you survived you were lucky and if not you just died. If you wanted to get money, you had to work with the Communists in the jungles and help clean up the after-effects of the war.
It’s different now because the overseas Vietnamese send back money for their relatives still in Vietnam, so people nowadays aren’t as bad off as they were in ‘75. But from 1975-1985 they took all the rich people and took away all their money and possessions. Say one person has 10 dollars and one person has one dollar. They will bring the person with 10 dollars down to one dollar, and if you starve you starve, there’re no more social classes. The rich people that they took money from, they didn’t give it back to the poor. They just brought it back to Hanoi to give it to their soldiers, their officials and their government. They didn’t give it to the people at all.
Eric: So they didn’t balance the classes by taking 10 dollars and the person who had one now had 5 and the person who had 10 now had 5, instead they lowered the standard of living to the lowest common denominator and the rest of the money went to the soldiers, officials, and government?
Minh: It was a form of control. If you took the money from the rich and gave it to the poor and balanced it out, the Communists think they can’t control them; they won’t listen to the government or anything. But if you make everyone poor, then you can have some control over them, like: “If you don’t listen to me then I won’t give you food.”
Eric: So if everyone’s poor then you have to rely on the government.
Minh: Yes, that’s how Communists are.
Avi: What did you think of the fact they acted that way when during the war they claimed they were trying to unify Vietnam and make life better for everyone?
Minh: They were liars – that’s how I feel about what they said and what they did after. Gorbachev said, “If you’re young and you don’t go to the Communists you’re dumb. But if you’re 40 and you’re still with the Communists you have no brain at all”. Because he’s a liar. That’s how the Communists are. They’re just liars. I’m speaking from personal experience…they manipulated me and my family. They said if we worked for them they would give us food and that we didn’t need money, just food. But we still had to find ways to find food – if we got food, it wasn’t enough.