bbqdinner:

This past Saturday, April 30, marked the 36th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon to the army of the Northern Vietnamese government. The Vietnamese have a name for the month of the takeover: Black April. I never knew my Vietnamese history that well in high school and didn’t read into Black April until last year when I heard about it for the first time. I decided to contact someone I knew close to my family. He was a father living in California, and I knew he had been there in Vietnam during the fall. He didn’t flee the country like how many others did. Instead, he stayed and got sent to a “reeducation camp.” I wanted to write about not just his experiences there, but also how his experiences shaped the life that he currently lived in the States.

This is the story I wrote and posted on my old blog exactly one year ago, the story of his life thirty-five years after the fall and a series of anecdotes from the time he spent in the reeducation camps. I’ve gone back and revised the story a little. (I admit there’s a lack of a narrative arc. This story wasn’t originally meant to be a standalone entry but rather, an entry that gave some context to a larger story. You’ll understand what I mean when you reach the end.)







“Tháng Tư Đen”

I don’t want to walk in on my son having sex with his new boyfriend.

It was Sunday late morning. Minh tapped his youngest son’s bedroom door and got no response. He knocked.

A long, dreary voice answered. “Yeeeeeeah?”

“I’m going to wash your car,” he said in Vietnamese. “Could you hand me the car keys?”

“Yeah.”

Minh cautiously opened the door, but not even enough to peak in. He waited for his son to get his clothes back on or whatever it was he usually needed to do. Minh figured that his son had brought that Mexicanish Filipino boyfriend of his over because his son had driven up to San Francisco the day before and came back home at night.

“Uh, you can come in.”

Minh opened the door, only to see his son—and no one else—in bed. Strange. His son had been taking every opportunity to spend as much time at home in the Bay Area with his new boyfriend during the last four months.

His son got up and handed him the keys.

“Thank you.” Minh closed the door as he left, leaving his son to go back to bed for another few hours.

His car was a mess. What else was new? Minh had long stopped bothering to clean up inside his son’s car, not just because it was so messy, but also because sometimes, he didn’t like what he found inside. Dance workshop fliers, Aristotle and English books, teaching brochures—there was even that one time when his son had a bag of condoms and lube sitting in the backseat—they all served as reminders as to how his son completely steered off the path of a stable future, the future that Minh had dreamed for him.

But nevertheless, Minh had to get started on cleaning right away because after this, he had to drive to Banh Mi Thanh Lan to pick up six chicken sandwiches for his son before he left home for college again. They were his favorite.

Tomorrow, with his son gone again, Minh would get back into his regular routine: He’d wake up in the morning to go to his most recent job. He ran errands and made deliveries for a computer technology business. It was the best job he could get at age 65. After work, he’d come home and make dinner so that there was food on the table for him, his older son, and his wife by the time she got home from work at 7. After dinner, he’d watch TV with his wife, and at 10, he’d go to bed and wake up the next morning to start the cycle over again. His job paid him the money he needed to pay for the education of his youngest son who he never saw or never really knew, the son who turned out not at all to be the son he had hoped for. In the past, his son often saw him and fought him as an enemy, and he wondered if his son even ever really cared about the kind of life his own dad lived. He didn’t live through one war to fight through another one waged within his own family.







Following the Northern takeover of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, soldiers of the Viet Cong and Vietnam People’s Army invaded Phan Thiet, a town that lay 120 miles east of Saigon. Millions of Vietnamese had fled their country by boat to escape the Communist regime, but Minh and his family stayed behind in Phan Thiet. The invaders stole all of their personal belonging, his father was jailed, and his step-mother, in protest, martyred herself by self-immolation.

The new Communist regime promised humanity, yet very quickly Minh began to question, What humanity? This question, along with the fact that he was a high school history teacher, put him in a reeducation camp, deep inside a forest one hundred miles away from Phan Thiet.

The purpose of reeducation camps, as the name suggested, was to in the most humanitarian way possible, reeducate and to instill within the South Vietnamese a sense of a new Vietnamese patriotism. However, it wasn’t as much instilling within as much as it was burning to the ground and recreating a totally different person. The word “reeducation” was just a mask for brainwashing, and “camp” was for jail.

Each camper went through a curriculum of political indoctrination. Upon his arrival at the camp, Minh was forced to write a confession about his supposed crimes against the government. He had none, but the authorities insisted that he did. They didn’t relent, so he eventually gave them the fake confession that they wanted: as a history teacher, he taught his students a history that inaccurately painted the Communists of North Vietnam as scoundrels and the citizens of South Vietnam as victims.

Minh and the prisoners were taught about the greatness of the Communist Party, the weaknesses of the United States, and the evils of American imperialism. These lessons intertwined with hard labor. Minh planted cotton trees and made bricks. He and the campers got no breakfast when they woke up, and their lunch and dinner rations were meager. His meals consisted of scant servings of uncooked rice and vegetables, and it wasn’t uncommon to find rat feces mixed in. He knew this. All the prisoners knew this. But they ate it anyway.

Officials of the new Communist regime had promised that Minh would only stay for a few days. Days, however, turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, and that was when he realized that he was not a camper. He was a prisoner.







In Minh’s reeducation camp, there was a Christian nun undergoing religious prosecution. Any mention of Christianity was strictly forbidden, but she refused to renounce her faith. Every day she marched through the camp and delivered to each and every prisoner a message: May the lord be with you. Whenever the nun approached Minh, he felt his spirits uplifted, even though he was not a religious man. He could not believe in a God at a time like this, but he deeply admired the nun for standing up for what she believed in.

What the nun was doing was no secret, however, especially since spies posing as prisoners continually reported that she was still expressing her faith. She wielded words and faith instead of guns and knives, but the government considered her just as dangerous. Guards beat her, chained her, and cut her food rations, but they could never break her.

One morning, Minh heard her cries ring throughout the fields during call time. Believe in the lord Jesus Christ, and we will be saved! she proclaimed. He is the one who feels our needs, our pains, and our weaknesses! Jesus Christ, our sav— She fell to the ground as several guards ambushed her and dragged her away. They threw her into solitary confinement, and Minh was sure that he’d never hear from her again.







Minh had many friends who died. Some died from malaria, tuberculosis, or malnutrition. The guards beat some to death and buried others alive. Two of his friends tried to escape, but they were captured and shot dead in front of Minh’s own eyes and the eyes of all the prisoners. The message was loud and clear: Do not even think about escaping.

Occasionally, Minh received visitors. Some were friends and relatives, who brought him food, clothing, and medicine. But he vividly remembers one visit that was too heart wrenching.

Chào anh thầy! Hello teacher!

Minh was shocked to see the young faces of his high school students. What are you guys doing here?

We came to visit you!

Are you okay? another student asked.

The guards had them all under watch. Any wrong words would result in punishment; both Minh and his students knew this.

Yes, I am doing fine. You did not have to come visit. Minh looked at their faces. A thin layer of shimmering tears coated their eyes. They wept silently as they looked at the man who used to be their history teacher. He was so thin now, nothing but flesh and bones. He wore rags, and it was apparent that he hadn’t showered in months.

We really miss you, a student said.

I miss you guys too. Seeing his students’ tears was too unbearable, and Minh could not help but begin to weep too. His chest tightened, and if he hadn’t felt broken before, he felt broken now.

Don’t worry, I will be back soon, Minh assured them.

He was released five years later in 1980, at the age of 35.







Minh was sitting on the couch, watching TV at 1:30 in the afternoon when his youngest son came down to say goodbye.

“Ba, I’m heading back down to school now.”

“Ok. Drive safe.”

Minh sat still in place, not really expecting anything else from his son, so he was caught off guard when his son leaned down to give him a hug and a very light peck on the cheek. Minh returned it with a peck on his son’s cheek. He then watched his son disappear out the front door with his backpack and bags full of shoes and clothes that he wasted money on all the time.

There went his son, back to college and gone from his dad’s life again. There went his son, the one who rebelled against his parents in every way imaginable when he reached high school. In middle school, he was the child Minh had hoped for: he earned straight A’s, excelled in Math, played tennis, talked about wanting to go to Harvard or Stanford and becoming a dentist, and—hell, he even had a girlfriend. All that was different now.

But Minh didn’t live through a war to have a son that he couldn’t love, and he hoped that one day, his son would understand that.

On the evening of April 30, 2010, one week later, Minh received a phone call on his cell phone and was surprised to hear his son’s voice on the other line.

“Hi Dad, it’s me.”

“Hi honey, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” his son answered. “Uh, I’m calling because it’s Black April, and I was wondering, well, I know you had to go to the reeducation camps. I kinda wanted to know about that, so could you tell me about them?”







The communists released Minh after he spent five years in the reeducation camp. They felt that they had scared enough sense into him, but he ended up escaping by boat to Malaysia two months later. As for the Christian nun, she was still alive when he left, but he never knew what became of her. The only one thing he knew was that she never gave up.

Sponsored by one of his brothers, Cuong, Minh arrived at Lincoln, Nebraska in October 1980. At the end of 1981, he moved to San Jose. He married a beautiful wife on July 15, 1985, and they had their first son in 1987. They named him Jonathan. And on May 12, 1990, they had one more son. They named him Brian.







Christmas in the Park in San Jose, 1991. Minh and his youngest son.







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