For a Moment the Sky Is Empty

There are things to be said. No doubt.

And in one way or another

they will be said. But to whom tell

the silences? With whom share them

now? For a moment the sky is

empty and then there was a bird.

(From “There Are Things to be Said” by Cid Corman)

Migratory birds are programmed to move south annually. From birth, they were groomed to endure the hardship of their flight; to follow in formation, to shift with the winds and rest only at sundown. On the contrary, refugees fleeing war are thrown head first unprepared into the unknown, facing possible death.

It was time to face our challenges. We had to leave our home and seek freedom, like the birds seeking a more tolerable climate in order to survive.  Like these migrating birds, we had to leave before the first frost set in, before the collapse of the food supply, before the real danger was even palpable. We had to depart when the sun was still warm, the trees green with leaves and insects abundant. Already the wind had changed direction.  At the end of the 1975-1976 school year, our innocent world began to topple. We were informed that our school would not reopen for us but would be turned into a state-owned university. We would have to withdraw our school records and enroll with our home district. I was dumb-struck. What would I find in my school district, among the people I had never met?  How should I fit in with the local girls who donned their white traditional tunics and boys from blue-collar homes?

One August dawn, our family departed from home. The younger kids left with Mom on a hired cyclo to a bus station located in Bình-Ðông, Chợ Lớn, about 45 minutes away from home. Half an hour later, Dad pedaled out on his bike. It was to be dumped at his friend’s home and Dad would take a cyclo to the rendezvous place. I was the last person to leave home for the bus depot with Mrs. Duyệt, a stranger to me until then.

Early dawn was the intercity bus station’s busiest time. A strong odor of diesel fuel, wet mud, and human sweat attacked our noses at once, laced with a whiff of food aroma contributed by the snack peddlers.

The ticket window was already closed. “Sold out,” a sign said. It was expected that we would be obtaining our tickets from the black market, which was now in full swing purveying the coveted items, in a cacophony of price haggles, bargaining charades, and ensuing tirades of grotesque cusses. It was a strangest place to be dragged into for the first time in my life. I was completely dependent on a person I hardly knew, whose face I hadn’t had enough time to study, whose ample bodice I stuck close, lest I would be lost in this chaotic place.

From afar I spied the familiar sights of my dad and felt reassured of my safety. I knew enough to not call out for him. He was not supposed to be anyone I knew. I was myself supposed to be a countrygirl in my black pajamas, my baba top bought for this occasion, with holes at the elbows, a paddy hat in hand, and the stranger by my side my dear aunt Duyet.

The hours ticked by fast as I witnessed the craze for boarding passes around me. I followed my aunt from one line to the next, as she huffed and puffed in her pursuit of one man after another to secure two seats on the designated bus, pre-arranged for our group, whose members arrived separately. I knew nothing of the rest of the people in our group, except for my immediate family and one or two members who had come home to discuss the escape with Dad. Since the day we returned home from the Embassy's rooftop, I dutifully obeyed my parents without their having to explain anything. It was understood that the less said between us, the better. I was constantly reading them instead, their body signals, their facial expressions, my mom’s unspoken gaze, my dad’s head movements. Then my younger brother and sisters would look up to me for cues to follow. Our new code of conduct was fast adhered. One learned the signs of danger very fast at young age, and survival mode immediately kicked in.

The sun was now high up and hot, and just like that, the black market ceased its frantic operation. The buses were leaving in clouds of black smoke, with trails of children running after them to offer the passengers their last chance of snack, chanting “five for five” instead of “three for five.” The two of us, Mrs. Duyệt and I, were still ticketless. I saw Dad gesticulating wildly in a hot debate with a motorcyclist. Then Dad, too, disappeared. I was speechless still, but my mind was racing for possible answers. What does this all mean?

As if to answer my question, Mrs Duyet motioned me toward a motorcycle, where the man previously engaged in heated discussion with Dad stood waiting. “This is our ride,” she simply said, as the man, hatless, his toes stuck out from a cheap pair of flip-flops, kickstarted his gear. Not daring to protest, I approached the first chauffeured motorbike, xe ôm, of my life, about to discover the latest mode of transportation called “embraced ride,” adopted overnight post April 1975, in response to the shortage of motored transportation. A gigantic question loomed large in my head, “How? Where do I sit?”

I had ride with him on my brother’s man Suzuki and loved our ride together each and every time, especially when cocooned in the back of his poncho as he varoomed us through the monsoon rain to my school friend’s home. At fifteen years old, I had seen my fair share of Saigon’s innovative transportation. A whole family could pile up on one motorcycle. Poor children traveled inside baskets carried by their mothers, as she hawked her traveling market from neighborhood to neighborhood. Limbless veterans scooted around on pieces of lumbers equipped with wheels. We had xe lam, or Lambretta, a converted motorcycle encased in a metal frame completed with a roof for up to thirteen to fifteen passengers, with three sitting in front, including the driver, and up to thirteen in the back. I had traveled in both pedaled and motorcyclos.

I had ride on bike, propelled by my friend who, for the distance she traveled together with me, pushed me with her foot as she motored her moped to save me from the ardeous pedaling between home and school.

But I did not look forward to this new awkward situation. We, two urban women, would be traveling an eight-hour trip gluing on the back of a strange man. I could plainly see that the only option available to me was to either sit hugging the man or coyly behind my protector, although that would place me off the cushioned seat, on the porte baggage. I chose the latter. Mrs Duyet mounted behind the motorist and hung on to the driver like a cat to a tree, leaving a small gap for me to lodge myself in. My thighs cradled her large behind like we were two monkeys on a circus ride.

Soon, we were hat-to-hat on the tarred highway, carrying forward by the wind and sun, our cityscape far behind us. The rice fields on both sides of the highway zoomed by in a blur. The scorching sun kept us in focus, then soon it was drawing shadows of tree branches and leaves, and our own shadows riding in tandem to the darker passing lane underneath. The shadows, like our past, trying to catch up to us as we fled southward in search of our future. 

We traveled through small towns, then out into the open again, gliding past more rice paddies in an expanse of thin, bare stalks. They waved to us from their pools of murky water, chanting in chorus, “Goodbye. Adieu! We are stuck here, deep in the mud. But lucky you are flying away.”  The black buffalos did not care to say goodbye, but sadness was in their eyes. 

I had avoided to circle Mrs Duyet’s voluminous waist with my arms, using my hands instead to brace against the metal frame of the luggage carrier to prop myself up, since I could feel I was sliding off from the tiny space reserved to me, but my butt had gone numb and could no longer feel the frame underneath it to let me know whether I was still somewhere on that metal horse, which coursed on furiously, or would find myself flat on my face on the street in the next lunge and lurch, while the other two eloped toward the sunset. The white Pan Am bag, stuffed full with my two poetry diaries, a change of clothes, two sets of underwear, and small girly keepsakes, which I had worn sideway, weighed heavily on my shoulders now.

Had it been hours? My head, wind whipped, sun stroked, rattled by the roaring engine, was befuddled. Bumped and bounced with each swerve and dip of the road beneath, all the bones in my body felt as if they were all loosened and about to crumple in a heap.

But finally, we stopped. The motorist excused himself and went behind a tree to relieve himself, his back still visible to us. I looked on with envy, because my bladder had been pushing in agony for some time now. But how would I find privacy on the road? I didn’t have the courage to answer my body’s demand, so I let it suffer for my pride.

The road took us back into an indeterminable stretch of dirt, with the leaning sun throwing patches of orange into the sky.  Our past and future played a tag game along the deserted road for the longest time until the sun fell back into the far horizon, yielding the open space to the chiller air.

As we headed west, the sky became heavy with clouds—thick, dark and wooly, until they blocked off the horizon and blanketed us from above, pushing the heavy dampness into our lungs, while the slivering dirt road slipped quickly by underneath. Then, the monsoon clouds burst, pouring down all the water that the dragon had drank. I restrained myself no longer. The warm liquid washed down with the torrential rain unnoticed. Thunder clapped across the darkened sky.

We pushed forward, gaining minute distances, but onward, onward. Many times, when the feverish bike skipped a track and skittered dangerously over the muddy ground, I felt myself slipping further away. I braced both my shaking legs onto Mrs. Duyệt’s bouncy thighs to inch myself forward, forgetting hunger, ignoring chill, and concentrating on only one thing: to remain on that metallic horse.

We were now one three-head beast fighting the sheets of steely rain, bending low on hunched backs, shoulders to shoulders. In the final hour, the open mouth of a large rocky mountain swallowed us. We squeezed our way through towering walls that looked like giant sentinels in white costumes. It seemed a hundred thousand years had gone by, and I had been lost into a surreal, crystallized world blanketed in a thick, liquefied substance. I strained my blurred vision to locate myself, but my senses were bewildered.

The last trek was finally over. We stopped by a dark roadside, thereupon Mrs. Duyệt dismounted. “I’d be right back,” she murmured into my ears and walked into the black abyss. I was left alone in the cold night with the man, whose eyes glistened like the blade of a knife. My senses sprang on heightened alert. I was old enough to understand a woman’s fragility in nature, where man and beast borrowed forms. I stood apart and kept my silence. As time dragged by, the silence between became oppressive. The man started inquiring about my destination, and the reasons for our urgent travel. I gave him incoherent answers, making myself as stupid as I could, behaving the way of an awkward mountain goat. He couldn’t draw any sense out of my convoluted replies and gave up his small talk. After what seemed like an eternity, to my relief Mrs. Duyệt returned. She had found the designated house. She paid the man then led the way to the end of a road, where a wooden dwelling stood on stilts above black water. 

The entrance door opened into a spacious home constructed of heavy oak. The soaring beams supported a high ceiling of wooden planks. The warm abode swept me into its peaceful, tidy interior, where dancing halo of lantern lights dripped gold. I, on the contrary, was dripping water like a piece of wet sheet as I was led deeper inside, leaving puddles behind instead of footprints. At different corners of the house, the sleeping areas were being readied. White netting hung like unfurling sails of a gigantic ship; I, the prisoner princess, was being sold to foreign lands. 

I bobbed gently to the host, a tiny and frail patriarch with luminous skin and white hair. He welcomed us with a benevolent smile and introduced his wife, who busied herself by pulling shyly at the bed nets. I stared in disbelief. Here was a lady just barely older than me, fresh as spring, her shiny skin gleaming under the soft light. She untied her cascade of velvety hair and was in the process of combing through it with a large plastic comb. We nodded discreetly at each other, exchanging looks, interpreting each other’s motives in our actions.  She must have been simply curious about this lost city girl whose outlook indicated a privileged life and was now in pursuit of some unknown happiness, while my staring eyes screamed out loud to her: “Why? You…a mere girl, wife of an octogenarian. Are you nuts?” Then the young lady calmly returned to her task, as I was led to a bathroom in the back. I pushed open a creaky half-door to step into a small wooden enclosure. In a corner trembled the flame of a small candle, revealing in its shadowy light two fifty-gallon wooden barrels, filled to the brim with water. I closed the door and breathed in my solitude, recovering slowly from the shock of my travel, my eyes slowly adjusting to the soft light to curiously inspect the small stall I was in. I peeled off my soaked outfit, shivering, yet craving the therapeutic shower. There were thin gaps between the floor planks, made especially to drain out the wastewater. Through it reflected the black river below.

In this part of the country, homes were built on tall columns above the steep riverbanks. Many owners were fish farmers, feeding their stocks of catfishes conveniently with their own waste; the best food was human excrements. The fish thrived; their fatty meat was the main item in all recipes.

I searched for a scoop and found it hung neatly by the drum, next to a small cake of white soap. Above the drum, I saw an array of bamboo poles, designed skillfully to bring in rainwater. I washed myself slowly, and slowly, my beaten spirit was restored as the layers of road grime were rinsed off. I began to savor the novel environment and hungrily soaked my memory with flashing images and sounds of this lifetime adventure, intending on retelling my experience one day. In the quiet night, the sound of splashing water reverberated from below, waking the jumping fish.

Ravenous, I changed into a fresh set of black pants and black bà ba to join Mrs. Duyệt and our old host for dinner. A crockpot of steamed rice was exhaling a delicious perfume. A large bowl of catfish cooked in a thin watery soup of tomatoes, pineapple, ginger and white mung bean sprout sat waiting.

Afterward, I was led into one of the rooms dominated by a tall covered bed alcove. I was again by myself. My PanAm bag was on the floor, containing in its familiarity my whole universe, a soft reminder of a family somewhere waiting. I pulled out my diaries and, reading them for a last time while crying softly, tore off the pages, and tossed the shredded pieces of my childhood into the water below. This was the farthest I planned to carry my treasure with me, for they belonged to my past, too dangerous for me if I was caught by the authorities.

Through the wooden planks, I saw the white shapes floating toward the open river. Then I slumped onto the thick cotton pillow, burying into it my youthful dreams, yearning nothing more than the warm bosom of home.

The next day, I woke to a glorious morning full of sunshine.  The wretched outfit that I had washed and hung out to dry in the bathroom stall had been moved outdoor. It was dancing joyously now and when I found it again, it waved to me as if I was the one needing to be brought back. I was told to change quickly so that we could rejoin the rest of the group. We were led on foot through an endless rice field. In the middle of this leafy ocean stood a small thatch hut.

It was there that I rejoined my mom and siblings in a solemn atmosphere. Something wasn’t right. A man named Uncle Thanh was still fussing about something. Mrs. Duyệt joined in the conversation and through Mom’s retelling, I learned that Dad had been captured midway to Hà Tiên. For the sake of the whole group, Dad immediately stepped down from the bus as ordered. He was last seen escorted at gunpoint toward the village.

Uncle Thanh jumped in angrily, “Didn’t you see him, dressed up all black like a peasant but wearing shiny leather shoes?”.

Another man shook his head and clucked his tongue, “The Omega watch was on his wrist. And a gold pen in his pocket. A gold pen….” 

Somebody else added, “He stuck out like a sore thumb! Of course they’d notice him.”  Mom’s face was drained, but fierceness burned through her eyes. She said, eerily calm: “Now, I need to decide. I don’t know if we should continue with you all or return home to wait for Anh Khoa’s news.” 

 “I think you should continue with us,” Uncle Thanh advised. “We’ve come this far. He’ll follow you and the kids later. It’ll be easier for him to take care of himself without a family.” 

Mrs. Duyệt’s voice rose, her words well measured, “In my opinion you should go back, but let us take the children along. They’ll be fine with the group. You return for your husband.”

They spoke under their breath, but the air was dense with the intensity of their collective emotions. There was a long silence when Mom debated internally, her eyes closed. When she finally made eye contact with the worried faces around her, her voice cracked: “I’ll stay back, and the children. We’ll take the next boat.” It was that resolute. Short and clear. Her determination was at once respected, and no one tried to convince her otherwise. Our group split that night. We took a bus home the next day, while the rest of the people continued their journey across the ocean.

For months, my mother combed through all the provinces around Hà Tiên in search of my dad. At each detention center that she visited, she sent in a roll of sticky rice bearing Dad’s name, and waited for its rejection as undeliverable. Then, one day, oh joy—her roll of rice wasn’t returned. My mother didn’t accept her hunch so easily. She told the jail guard that she had sent the food to the wrong place. He told her it had gone to the correct recipient, and to prove their point, they escorted Dad out, a haggard man with twinkling eyes. Mom had found her husband. He then knew she had stayed back for him, tethered to him by her intense love.

He had been placed in a high-security prison. “Your husband was a flight risk,” the young guard of merely sixteen or seventeen said, shoving Mom’s bribing cash into his pocket. “He tried to break away.”

When Mom told my aunt about this, I was stunned. Dad, jail breaking? Dad, running like a rabbit at gunpoint across the field? In my mind I saw him stumble, then get back on his feet, fumbling for his eyeglasses. I saw him claw wildly for a defeated freedom.

But all I saw that day in my mother’s demeanor was steel. It was her turn to lead our family.

Last Dragonflies: April 29, 1975

Uncovering my face from the woolen blanket, I floated into consciousness at the soft calling of Grandma Dong, “Hong-My, wake up!  Time to go bathroom.” 

When I finally emerged from the elastic path between past and present, it was my brother Patrick tugging at my leg, calling, “Hong-My!  Wake up!  Time to go.”

As the morning of April 29^th, 1975 peeked through Uncle Chan’s slatted windows, we were ordered to get ready to leave.  The adults had stayed up all night to come up with a new plan to get out of Saigon. 

“You cannot leave your family, and your children are too young to travel this way,” I overheard Mom’s advising her brother.  “With Danielle and Mai-Xuan being French nationals, you would be better protected than the rest of us.”   

My uncle was nervously pacing the living room, now glancing at the wall clock, now tuning his radio to another station.  We heard nothing but static, until he tuned to BBC.  Then it was my turn to frustrate, because I could not make out the meaning in the foreign tongue.  Often, the rising pitch of the emergency warning siren pierced through the whole city, “Ooooo…,” like a dog’s howl, drawing on, then abruptly cut as though its throat had been slashed.  With each “Ooooooo...,” Mom would plead, “Let’s hurry,” until finally, the adults seemed to reach a breaking point, when they could no longer think, debate, but need to run, to act.

Dad stood up. “Let’s go.”

Mom reached for the bag of provision and called for us.  The four of us climbed into the backseat of our red Mazda.  Before getting in the car, Mom held my uncle hand’s for a brief moment.  Their fingers enlaced.

“We'll see you in France,” she said. 

My uncle nodded. 

Dad came out with only his briefcase, the only item necessary for this change of plan. The rest of our luggage was abandoned behind.  My uncle hurried over to to shake Dad's hand. Through Dad’s last words to Uncle Chan, I vaguely understood that our family would try the American Embassy, located nearby.  On top of the embassy building was a heliport; inside it were the American Ambassador, Graham Martin, and his key personnel still holding out hope for a last-minute reversal of fortune.  Dad and Uncle Chan had counted on Esso’s promise to help.  The exit visas inside Dad’s Samsonite was supposed to clear us through the bureaucratic hurdle at the airport.  But now, even the vital documents inside the Samsonite seemed useless. All we had for the Embassy was the verbal assurance from Esso, months earlier. 

Slapping my uncle's shoulder, Dad attempted his usual light joke, “If we aren't back by tomorrow night, we may be  on our way to France, or Heaven.”  His ill-timed pleasantry would surely horrify our mother, had she been within earshot.  I shifted nervously at the idea of an impending quarrel between our parents.

Dad took control of his Mazda, and the chauffeurs were sent back home with the other two cars and extra luggage. Within ten minutes, we arrived to the Esso Building on Thong Nhat Street. Dad often took me to his workplace, either for a health checkup at his company clinic or to pick up some work documents on his way to town.  We clambered out silently.

As he was locking up, a man approached and proposed money for our car.  He must have guessed our intention to flee the country from the way we dressed. We were ridiculously bundled in thick, woolen clothes.  Dad said he was not interested, and when the man kept pushing for a deal, Dad acted rudely. 

“Leave us alone. We aren't going anywhere.”

Then our family of six quickened our steps toward our destination. I saw the mass a few blocks up. It was mayhem. Total chaos reigned on this normally stately neighborhood lined with government buildings, international company headquarters and foreign-owned mansions.  It was a market scene–food scraps, discarded luggage and clothing, scattering boxes of cigarettes, and tons of papers everywhere, trampled on by thousands of feet, running this way, that way. We were no more than scared animals, our wits driven by our escaping limbs. I saw harried faces with bewildered, searching eyes–searching for ways to run, searching for lost children, searching for unguarded belongings to steal, searching without a clear purpose, mouths hollering, all panicking. 

Rising above this frantic mass was a majestic building, a formidable boxy fortress with white concrete lattices enveloped by a vast compound:  the U.S. Embassy.  All I could see clearly was the high exterior wall with barbed-wires, the tall corrugated gates, and green, striped uniformed soldiers guarding above the walls. In front of this stronghold was an uncoordinated, loud, and mad makeshift camp, teeming with people. Fellowmen shoved and pushed one another for the prime locations closest to the embassy’s high gate. The frantic fathers and mothers bawled out the names of their straying children. From all directions, the calls of “Cu ơi! Hoy, Cu! Where are you?” echoed, transmitted from groups to groups. 

Over the course of the day, different cu was lost, and others rejoined their parents.  The hailing reminded me to be vigilant of Patrick, whose hand I pulled. I could feel that Patrick, our own cu, had had enough of being dragged around by me as we trailed behind our parents from one corner to the next—Mom holding tight to little Michelle, Dad with Anne on his shoulders. I doubted if my brother understood this new game. Often, he tried to pull away from my tight grip, and more than once, I had to promise him that I would let him go free, "At that big gate," I said, showing him with my chin the mighty wrought iron entrance to the embassy.

We finally joined the thousands waiting for an opportunity to be airlifted in a scene that could have been taken straight from the Day of Judgment, when groups of people were called and separated out; the salvaged souls were led to the Gate of Heaven, while their condemned fellows were left for the hellfire. Each step closer to the forbidden gates seemed to cut a bigger escape hole into our fast-sinking world. 

The day lengthened. Around us the mass thickened in multiple lines stretched forth to the faraway embassy gate. Worn in their fight for survival, people were no longer on their feet tussling for territories but spread out on pavements, dozing off, chewing on bits of dried food, feeding their children. The crowd was at the same time patient and aggressive. Like air, it quickly filled the gaps left by the people who either had given up the wait to return home or had been called and allowed inside. The latter group were families with connections or with the backup of large fortunes, we soon found out.  But we would get there, I thought. We were already so close to that gate. 

By noon, there was a small breeze, and with it the odor of urine and sweats. The little boys were all exhausted in their parents' arms on the ground. The little girls all looked like Cosette, their hair matted and faces besmeared. The wailings of babies became hoarse, unnerving cat’s scream, and the men started to curse everyone present and absent. The government was “Son of a b_tch.” The same epithet was attributed to a neighbor for encroaching their space on the camping ground. Brawls broke out, only to be separated by the wives and other menfolk. 

While we were thus lost in the anonymity of the mass, “Quân, Quân," the sound of someone hailing Mom’s name rose above the brouhaha. We looked for the caller, which might mean help in this sea of sharks. The faint call became distinct.  There she was, Aunt Khang, cupping the name of her cousin.

Mom swam towards her across the human sea.  When they parted Mom swam back to us with great difficulty while Aunt Khang hastily peeled herself off from the mass. Mom relayed to Dad the content of the urgent message, which I caught in bits and pieces. "Leave," then "seaport." Navy ships, I later found, were still picking up evacuees at the port Ben Chương Dương to be ferried out to sea for subsequent airlifts.  

Dad’s favorite ear was pointed toward Mom as she spoke. I saw his other ear, the weaker one, disdainful with its thick lobe, always ready to ignore my mother's words in all my parents' debates. In the end, the left ear won. We were staying put. "It's too late to move away from here," Dad said. "Precious time has already been lost," he added, and really, who exactly knew what the right thing to do, which way to freedom, and which to mere running to and fro, to no use, or worse, death, crushed by the fleeing mad crowd, or pushed into the water, or shot at.

We did not budge from where we doggedly stationed.  Time and again, in a burst of desperation, Dad would get up to try for the embassy’s high gate for the umpteenth time, to no avail.  The human mass, packed in layers immovable in front of that gate, had become an effective barrier against any attempts of line breaching. Normally docile and accommodating, the grievous and abandoned Vietnamese had turned savage, easily provoked to violence.  Young men were seen climbing the barbed wall, only to be thrown back by soldiers guarding above it. 

The sun descended from its high arch, and the heat risen up like hot steam from the asphalt was dissipating.  Mom ordered us to get atop a car roof to rest, in case of a stampede towards the gates.  Above, the noisy choppers came and went, whipping the air with their blades, like a giant blender operated by an impatient chef. Suddenly, from the far horizon appeared a double helix Chinook, looming larger every minute through the canopy of tamarind trees, pulverizing leaves and branches, sucking up clouds of dust like the vortex of a tornado. The famous scene is well-described in an abridged version of Heroes by John Pilger.

… It was approaching midnight. The embassy compound was lit by the headlights of embassy cars, and the jolly Green Giants were now taking up to 90 people each. Martin Garrett, the head of security, gathered all the remaining Americans together. The waiting Vietnamese sensed what was happening and a marine colonel appeared to reassure them that Ambassador Martin had given his word he would be the last to leave. It was a lie, of course. It was 2:30 a.m. on April 30 when Kissinger phoned Martin and told him to end the evacuation at 3:45 a.m. After half an hour Martin emerged with an attaché case, a suit bag and the Stars and Stripes folded in a carrier bag. He went in silence to the sixth floor where a helicopter was waiting. "Lady Ace 09 is in the air with Code Two." "Code Two" was the code for an American Ambassador. The clipped announcement over the tied circuit meant that the American invasion of Indo-China had ended….

It might have been 3 A.M. when a great commotion was heard at the main gate, then a shout: “It’s open!”  I only learned of the significance of that moment through research as I wrote these lines, that moment when the embassy's enormous tamarind was felled to accommodate the large Chinook. The tree's life was taken to save American lives was the same Martin Graham, the American Ambassador in Saigon, had vowed to protect as it symbolized the American might in Southeast Asia.  Now, with that tree severed from its root and the last represent of U.S.A airlifted from his post, its buckskin would become the symbol of a painful defeat.  The ants had won the elephant. 

Unknowingly to the populace, Washington had long given up South Vietnam in exchange for a more profitable diplomacy with China. The death certificate of Saigon had been signed months ago. Just like the faithful reports of our journalists had failed to raise the sound of alarm inside the capital weeks ago, the brave resistance of our soldiers in the last hours of Saigon was only abortive efforts to slow the advancing enemy.

When the American radio started playing “White Christmas,” when over the inner circuit the coded message for the abandonment of Saigon was articulated to all Americans, when the last helicopter had picked up the ambassador, not realizing that the malevolent force of the cosmos had been unleashed to seal our fates, Mom and Dad continued to fight to save their family. They dragged us with them, using their elbows to pry their way through the crowd, lunging, pushing, squeezing through, and pulling their long tail of kids like a great serpent.  It was as if we were playing the “dragon and serpent climbing up the sky."

We were finally pushed inside the sovereign building, up a narrow flight of stairs, then through a small landing and upward, higher and higher.  As we clambered in the dark stairway, a faint fizz was heard, followed by a painful burning sensation in both my eyes.

“Tear gas,” a cry went up, to the confusion of all others.  We continued pushing up in search of an exit, sputtering and mopping our watery eyes.  Just when I thought that the stabbing in my eyes would blind me, if it continued, a merciful whiff of fresh air invaded the confined space.  The door to the heliport had been burst open. 

We found ourselves under a starry sky, atop the world.  Hope was grinning at me, showing all her teeth. I cried and laughed at the same time. I was instantly reenergized. We were saved. We filed in and sat down. There was a tacit cooperation among the people. There seemed to be a mutual agreement to behave, as if the wolves from the streets below, through the process of ascending higher towards the heaven, had reached their higher karma, had shed their furs, dropped their fangs and transformed into nobler beings. The departure would be orderly, people's behavior seemed to say.

Among us was one American civilian.  He, like the mass, looked searchingly into the stars, ears alert for the sound of “dragonflies,” as helicopters were dubbed. The few that came left hurriedly. After a long time, seeing that the people all became agitated each time another helicopter hovered closer, the American stood up and said these words, which a Vietnamese man translated: “Be calm! Be still! You are scaring the pilot. We must remain orderly.”

Afterward, a silence blanketed us like the dark drape of Death, suffocating all sounds, muting the agitated young kids.  Even the babies stopped stirring.  In that suspended position, we waited. We waited and waited. But no helicopter came. 

As dawn slowly rose over the horizon, the American got on his feet and left, and soon the people one by one followed him, going through the same opening that the previous night was the door to heaven and this morning gaped like the mouth of the devil, eating away our last hope. 

“Let’s go, children. Quân! Let’s leave,” was Dad's voice in my ears, so far off, unreal. This was a second time in less than three days I witnessed his powerless defeat. It was incomprehensible.  Didn't he say we would be saved on time? I had placed my full confidence in him to lead us out of danger. He had never failed to get me out of trouble before. A signature or a phone call from him always resolved everything at school. When I felt and scraped my knees and the blood was so awful to see, just the fact that he scooped me up erased all pains. I saw how he extinguished the flames that had engulfed our kitchen when a hose from the propane tank leaked. Within weeks the kitchen was new again, the cabinets rebuilt and the walls repainted. What happened? Why did he fail this time when so much was at stake? Was he negligent?

He might choose to surrender, but not I. I could not accept this new fate. No. God would answer me. I had been a good Catholic. Stubbornly, I prayed, “Our Father who art in heaven ….” I prayed like a zombie, without faith. It dawned on me that Dad knew better. We could no longer be saved.  The clock had stopped ticking. Our morning sun would be replaced by a sickle and hammer bathed in blood.

We took the same flight of stairs down, passing through the many offices that we didn’t see in the dark the night before. All the doors were thrown open, and inside nothing was left unturned: chairs toppled–like wooden horses kicked by a spoiled child’s tantrum; desk drawers on the floors, their contents spilled like vomit out of a sick patient, and once more, papers, printed documents everywhere.  Mobs of looters pushed past us in the opposite direction, women and children among them, pouring left and right into the ransacked rooms for bounties, with the same urgency as witnessed in the people running for their lives on the streets. I didn't understand anything anymore. The chaos on the street seen only a day before was nothing compared to what lay at our feet, once we were disgorged from the Embassy cavity.  It was as if a hurricane had just blown through and had swept the contents of the whole city into the boulevards.  Floor fans with their blades silent, supplicant inside their metal cage.  Books. Binders, their pages torn off, the loose papers fluttering like white birds in the breeze.  Under the late morning sun, someone's refrigerator waited patiently in the middle of the street. 

We walked on, accepting the new face of the city unquestioned.  Convoys of tanks rolled down Highway One bearing soldiers in green uniform, with flags billowing in the air.  My initial reaction was joy, for I thought our army was still there, retreating back to defend the capital. Then my eyes spotted the darker green uniforms everywhere, like corpses, on the streets, and realized the difference. No, it wasn't our soldiers on those tanks, but the advancing enemies, into the heart of the Southland to claim their victory. We had lost the war.

At the corner of Thong Nhat, our crimson Mazda waited patiently.  "EO3592," beamed its license plate, like an old friend holding up a cardboard sign at the airport.  Dad pulled out his set of keys, and we boarded uncomplaining.  The Esso guard, recognizing Dad, ran out from his shack to share the terrible thing he had just heard. Dad quickly turned on the car radio. This was the announcement that invaded my ears at thirteen years old on that April 30th, 1975: “Compatriots!  I declare the war over.  I order all of you to put down your weapons and join our liberators in the process of reconciliation.  I repeat! The war is over!”

Dad cut off the sound, and both our parents wailed uncontrollably. Their tear-shrieked faces had aged all of a sudden. I could not bear to look at them and stared instead into the sun-clad boulevards, to the same scenery now unrecognizable under our new circumstance. Why were we still in this city? Whose country was it? But of course, there were no questions asked in that moment. Only sobbing. Only swirling thoughts in my head, possible answers, possible new realities, possible deaths. 

Dad drove our family to his sister, Aunt Su. Together, under the guidance of a Red Cross employee, a close friend of my aunt’s family, our group took off in two cars toward Saint Grall–one of Saigon’s few well-established hospitals, in search of amnesty under the protection of Red Cross International. Our car bore two flags on each side of the windshield: the tricolored flag of France and the universal Red Cross flag.  We took refuge inside the hospital for a few days, then when it was deemed safe we returned to our separate homes.

The old, quarrelsome turkey had been slaughtered for meat in our absence, but all was as before.  Our three servants decided that they would stay with us.  The chauffeurs had all left, since their service would no longer be needed. South Vietnamese would soon find out the chameleon laws of the jungle, wielded by party members and the Red regime. The prophetic phrase, "Don't listen to what the communists say, but look at their actions" would soon be enacted.

But I am getting ahead. Let my story unfold and speak for itself.