When Bao Huynh was 13, his father told him to get ready for a fun weekend vacation at a seaside Vietnamese town, just the two of them. Only a couple of nights later, Huynh would be saying good-bye to his father – a former South Vietnam soldier who Huynh barely even got to know after he was held 10 years in a North Vietnamese reeducation camp – and farewell to his homeland of Vietnam.
But before Huynh boarded that tiny vessel crowded with other “boat people” as they became known, Huynh, now 45, working as a computer engineer and living in Marion, lived a life as a child in South Vietnam, and it was never an easy life.
The second of three sons, Huynh grew up in a family that could barely get by – a mother who worked all the time and barely had time to look after the children, and three boys forced to find menial jobs to help keep the family going while Huynh’s father was held, essentially imprisoned, for a decade.
Huynh never got to visit his father. The journey to the camp was too expensive. Instead, he held a job sewing buttons onto shirts and other small jobs in the textile industry of South Vietnam.
“Life was a little bit tough for us, especially in the south,” said Huynh. “We were not really treated equally (by the North Vietnamese). They didn’t want us to be too educated. There were no college options after high school. Only factory work.”
Huynh and his family did what they could, searching every day for that light at the end of the tunnel, as many other Vietnamese did, too, after the war.
Two million people escaped Vietnam after the war to become refugees abroad, hopeful for a better and brighter future for themselves or their children. Some 800,000 escaped by boat, and only about half of them ever made it to dry land.
“And I was one of them,” Huynh told a large classroom of sixth-graders at Sippican School on Friday, March 3. Huynh was invited to speak as a way to tie-in the students’ experiences reading the three chosen novels this year, all of which had to do with the underlying themes of refugee life and post-war life of children. His daughter, sixth-grader Sakurato Huynh-Aoyama, sat in the front row.
The night before Huynh and his father left Saigon for the coast, Huynh was dreading his final exams at school. He jumped at the chance to avoid schoolwork and take a vacation. He was also sick with a cold, which is why Huynh figured his mother was crying so much before they left.
“I didn’t know why she was crying,” Huynh said. “She said nothing.” Before he left, his mother, a very religious Buddhist, gave him a gold chain with a gold Buddha on it. “This is going to help you on your journey,” she told the young boy, sobbing.
For two nights, Huynh said he had fun with his father by the sea. But on the final night, instead of taking the boy home, Huynh’s father took him to the shore and pointed to the ocean. “You’re going there,” Huynh said recalling that night. “That’s when I knew I had been chosen to go.”
The young Huynh didn’t know why he was the chosen son to escape on the boat that night. It shocked him that his parents would sell their home to pay for this secret passage out of Vietnam on his own. There was no warning, although Huynh had heard stories about the boat people before. “It was never a good story,” said Huynh. “It was always a terrible story.”
But the boy had no choice, and he stood obedient and said nothing as his father left him there. Forced to carry heavy containers of fuel along with the other passengers on the same journey, Huynh could barley find the strength to hold his own. In fact, like many others, he dropped his containers and left them on the beach before boarding. And boarding altogether almost ended Huynh’s journey early, since most passengers had to swim out to the vessel and Huynh did not know how to swim.
Huynh clung to the side of a basket towing elderly people and small children and was the last one boarded on the tiny crowded boat destined to float across the sea for seven days and seven nights before being rescued.
Every square inch of the boat was occupied by the flesh of humans hopeful to survive the journey for a better life elsewhere. “We didn’t even have room to lie down. Just sit there and hope we make it.”
After four days, the boat ran out of fuel and for three days and nights Huynh and the others drifted slowly towards the Philippines. They prayed and waited. They drank small water-bottle size daily rations of water and cooked rice to eat using seawater. They looked out across the water and saw nothing but ocean and sky and emptiness. “It was a scary journey,” said Huynh. “You look around, you see nothing. But it’s beautiful. It’s so quiet. And at night you can see all the stars.”
“You have no choice when you’re out there. You’ve got to think of something to make you happy,” said Huynh.
On the seventh night, a boat of Philippine fisherman approached the tiny refugee boat and offered to help them, but not without some form of payment. Everyone on board was forced to give up something of value for their rescue, and Huynh did not have anything with him of value – except his mother’s gold necklace.
He hastily hid the chain in his pocket, but to no avail. Forced to stand and his pockets searched, the gold chain his mother gave him the last time he saw her was taken.
“I was very sad,” Huynh said, pausing for a moment of emotion before he could continue telling his story. “I had to give it up and think about the next chapter in my life,” he continued. That next chapter would consist of two years at a refugee camp on a small island in the Philippines, sharing a hut with other unaccompanied boys until the day came when the United States grated him permission to enter.
Not everyone could go to the U.S., said Huynh. Many went to other countries, but Huynh’s father’s ties to the U.S. military and the time he spent in Oklahoma and Texas training for the war gave Huynh an actual connection with the country, and he was promptly placed with a foster family in Boston. He arrived with nothing but the shorts and T-shirt he had on and his legal documents.
But Huynh’s life in America turned out not how he had imagined it. His foster placement was not a nurturing, supportive environment, as Huynh described in a follow-up interview to his talk at Sippican School.
“It was all about the money for them,” said Huynh. There were six kids living in bunk beds in the attic. The refrigerator was locked during the day, and the un-insulated attic room was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. “The image of America, it was just gone.”
Huynh ran away from his foster home and stayed with a friend’s family until graduating from high school and moving on to Juniata College in Pennsylvania on a full scholarship. There he met his future wife, a study abroad student from Japan.
Huynh says he raises his children to not take advantage of all the blessings they have in their life, although, like every parent, all he ever wanted was a better life for his children than the one he had. His mother, father, and two brothers eventually settled in the U.S. with Huynh’s help.
“I was so mad at them,” Huynh recalled feeling towards his parents. He wondered, “Why me? Why me?” It took him months after reaching the Philippines before he contacted them. “I was so angry. All of a sudden, I have to be all out by myself.”
But, Huynh said, he still had a better life than his father. “They kind of gave up their life for me,” he said. So, to answer the young Huynh’s question of ‘why me?’ – Huynh said, “Because parents always know. They know what each child is capable of. They knew I could survive.”
By Jean Perry