Escaping Saigon 30-4-1975: Câu chuyện của 1 gia đình Việt trong cuộc trốn chạy khỏi bàn tay Cộng Sản HCM (Búa Liềm)

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FORWARD: http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2017/05/11/escaping-saigon-mothers-quiet-courage-aids-daughter-challenging-childhood/101445324/

Escaping Saigon: One Vietnamese family's story

Lex Talamo , alexa....@shreveporttimes.com Published 5:25 p.m. CT May 11, 2017 | Updated 2 hours ago
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Escaping Saigon
Escaping Saigon
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Hanna Hoang and her family fled from Vietnam in 1975, when communist forces took over the country. In this video, she tells a small part of her story. (Lex Talamo/The Times)

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(Photo: Courtesy of Hanna Hoang)
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Hanna Hoang was 1 when her family fled from Vietnam to a refugee camp in Guam.

Hoang, the assistant manager at the Hamilton-South Caddo Library in Shreveport, said she doesn’t remember much about her family's dangerous journey following the Fall of Saigon. But she remembers that her family, and particularly her quietly courageous mother, helped her navigate childhood and the challenges that came from immigrating to the United States.

Hoang said she was not always open to telling her story. She doesn’t consider herself special. She doesn’t consider her story unique.

“A lot of refugees and immigrants have come to America and been successful,” she said.

Her mother Nghia, now 68, has been asking for her to share the family's journey with others for years, Hoang said. But it was news about refugees and immigration issues in media coverage since the most recent presidential election that tipped her to finally tell that story now, for the first time.

A “desperate” journey by boat

One of Hoang’s most cherished relics of her family’s past is a yellowed newspaper clipping from 1975. It shows her parents registering her for school in America.

Hoang has preserved the photograph in a glass-covered turquoise frame. She said it reminds her of the dangerous journey her family took when she was too young to remember.

“You hear stories about people taking desperate journeys by boat? That was us,” Hoang said.

The Fall of Saigon refers to the capture of South Vietnam’s capital city by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong on April 30, 1975. The capitulation of the southern regime signaled for many the end of the Vietnam War, according to news sources.

News sources relate that at the war’s end, between 200,000 and 300,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were sent to “re-education camps,” where they were tortured and starved while being forced to perform hard labor. To avoid that fate, thousands of South Vietnamese civilians and families fled the country prior to the takeover by communist forces, according to news sources.

Hoang's family was one. Hoang said her family feared what would happen to her father, a former sailor in the South Vietnamese Navy - the reason for the family’s hasty retreat from the country in 1975.

“If he had stayed, we would have been killed,” Hoang said. “It was not a choice. We could only go forward.”

Hoang’s father Binh died three years ago. Photographs from his military service show a serious looking young man, whose dark and intelligent eyes stare unflinchingly into the camera. Hoang said his funeral was attended by dozens of South Vietnamese acquaintances who came from where they had settled in Texas, California and Michigan after fleeing from Vietnam decades ago.

“That meant so much to us,” she said.

Binh Hoang, a former sailor with the South VietnameseBuy Photo

Binh Hoang, a former sailor with the South Vietnamese Navy, fled with his family to Guam in 1975. (Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

After landing in Guam in 1975, the family immigrated to Michigan, where they remained for 10 years. In the earliest days of the family’s arrival in the United States, Hoang said her father spoke very little English. But he was a hard worker. He found manufacturing work at a General Motors plant in Michigan, Hoang said, before being transferred to the Shreveport plant when she was 6.

Hoang remembered that her mother, who also spoke little English, almost immediately signed up for language lessons. While she is “close” to all members of her family, Hoang said she has a special relationship with her mother - a woman of small stature but great courage and compassion.

Pictures of Hoang’s mother Nghia show a bright-eyed, smiling woman surrounded by her husband and four sons and daughters. Family means everything to her mother, Hoang said.

“She loves her family, and her best memories are of her family,” Hoang said.

As in Hoang’s other photographs of her mother, Nghia Hoang is smiling in the turquoise-framed newspaper clipping that depicts the family’s new start in America. Hoang said the framed photograph also shows the importance her family places on education.

“My family knew that education was one of the only ways that would translate to something in the future for us,” she said. “My parents weren’t imbued with any sense of futility. They believed everything we did mattered.”

Hoang remembered when her mother took her to enroll for the eighth grade in Shreveport. It’s one of her favorite memories.

Hang (Hanna) Thi Hoang and her siblings in a familyBuy Photo

Hang (Hanna) Thi Hoang and her siblings in a family photograph. (Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

The school’s administrator noticed that the young Hoang walked with a pronounced limp - the result of having contracted polio while a child in South Vietnam. The administrator told Nghia that her daughter would have to attend a “special” school.

“My mom said, ‘She is not going to a special school. She is going to a normal school,’” Hoang recalled with a smile. “That showed her value in education and also her value in me. I am glad that my mom fought for me.”

Hoang attended the school her mother had chosen. But she sensed her family was somehow set apart from other families: she picked up on the sentiment from her parents’ unspoken attitudes and the way her family stayed so close-knit.

“I knew even as a kid that our family was different. I knew my parents were wary, not comfortable yet in American society,” she said. “It gave me an outsider perspective.”

Fitting in and finding herself

Nghia Thi Hoang and her grandchildren.Buy Photo

Nghia Thi Hoang and her grandchildren. (Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

Hoang said she spent much of her girlhood days buried in books, trying to understand American society and culture and the ways American people worked.

She valued the odysseys of others. But she needed to learn how to value her own experience.

“Americans considered that they ‘lost’ the Vietnamese war. That was still fresh,” Hoang said. “When I told people I was Vietnamese, I never did it with a sense of pride."

As her parents had predicted, education became the key for Hoang to unlock her confidence and her identity.

It was at Baylor University in Texas, where Hoang earned her bachelor’s degree in English, that she started to question her views on diversity. Her course of study involved reading American classics, the majority of which were written by white, male authors.

She found herself wondering: Why is it that I have never read great works of African American authors? Why don’t I know a single Vietnamese author?

Hang (Hanna) Thi Hoang and siblings in a family photo.Buy Photo
Hang (Hanna) Thi Hoang and siblings in a family photo. (Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

Meanwhile, she continued to assimilate. She said she became weary of pronouncing and explaining to people her Vietnamese name - Hang Thi Hoang -so she started going by “Hanna.”

"It sounded the closest," she said. "There's a very clear demarcation in my life, of those who call me 'Hang' and those who call me 'Hanna.'"

But the seed for an inner transformation had been planted. Hoang cited the election of former president Barack Obama, in 2008, as a major turning point in her life.

“He put a spotlight on people who had not been recognized,” she said. “When I looked at the people in politics and social venues, I thought to myself that I had missed a lot in my formal education.”

Hoang said many people would mention “Sriracha” or “doctors” when they found out she was Vietnamese. She knew her identity was more than those stereotypes. She started questioning her quiet acceptance of the stereotypes of Vietnamese people - and other stereotypes, as well.

Hoang hopes telling her story now, for the first time, will help kindle a greater understanding and compassion for those tagged with labels like “immigrant” and “refugee.”

“The refugees aren’t these foreign people with new-fangled ideas. They want jobs, education for their children, to not be shot,” Hoang said. “They want the same things we all want.”

A mother-daughter bond

Hang (Hanna) Thi Hoang, right, and her mother NghiaBuy Photo

Hang (Hanna) Thi Hoang, right, and her mother Nghia Thi Hoang, left, in their Shreveport home. (Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

While she and her mother have successfully integrated into American society, and while they’ve maintained their close bond over the years, Hoang said they have their moments.

Moments that remind her of the past. Moments that remind her of the struggle.

Recently, Hoang was helping her mother clean out a cabinet in their shared home when she came across four cheap-looking bowls. She asked her mother if they could throw them out.

Her mother was adamant: “No.”

The bowls, Nghia explained to Hoang, were the first bowls she had ever bought in Shreveport. She had bought them for $10 at Kroger, with the money she had made at her first job.

The bowls, Nghia insisted, must be kept. They might be needed someday, when it was least expected.

Hoang laughed in recounting the story. Even today, at 68, her mother still shows the same mix of quiet courage and bold assertiveness that helped her family survive the early days of their immigration.

"We are very close," Hoang said. “She has a great sense of humor, despite all the hardships she has gone through."







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