At Last I Am Free
                                           Phan Vũ
Vietnamese Americans’ Month, 2007

"Phan, you’re released.  Your name’s just been called.”
“Don’t trick me, man.”
“No.  Trust me,” said Mực, a friend of mine in the re-education camp.
It was about 10:00 a.m.  Mực and I were busy working like other detainees. The big old speakers fixed on the watchtower near the main gate announced with a rough and cracked sound the names of released prisoners.  I did not hear my name.  To make sure, I ran to the camp office to check its veracity. 
I was the last one out of the gate with my release paper.  I felt extremely happy.  I did not read the paper, but I gingerly fold it and inserted it into my front pocket; then I donned another shirt.  I was sure that nobody could steal it or I would not lose it by accident.  I was waiting, walking back and forth for about 30 minutes on the road. Neither bus nor three-wheel Lambretta approached.  I was impatient, something burning in my chest or my stomach.  I was standing in front of the camp gate that I had hated the first time I saw it four years ago.  Now I was very afraid of it.  Was there any case, I thought, they took me back, saying they had freed me by mistake?   I wanted to run far away at once.
At last a rusty, collision-damaged three-wheel Lambretta slowly came near.  I got in, not paying attention to the black exhaust and the loud noise.  The vehicle roared, taking off heavily.  I did not dare to look back for the last time the barbed wire gate under the long red sign having the yellow letters: “Puppet Soldier and Puppet Administrator Re-education Camp,” a land without any cherished remembrance, but replete with many painful, angry feelings etched in my memory.
After two short breakdowns and repairs, the three-wheel Lambretta dragged slowly into Bà Tô District bus station.  The last bus to Bà Rịa town had gone one hour earlier.  I took a deep gulp of air, and then I breathed out to chase my despair.  What should I do?  I mulled over an answer, sitting on a pine wood bench in a thatched hut.  The so-called bus station was just a bit of land having a row of empty shacks, some covered with rotten decayed fan-palm leaves, others, with rusty, holed and warped sheet metal.
It was getting dark.  A gust of wind blew up a cloud of yellow dirt and a rumbling chugging truck, full of firewood hidden under a dark-grey tarpaulin coasted to a stop.  A sun-tanned-faced driver got off, dressed in an avocado-colored, grease-and-oil tainted uniform, a threadbare cap on his head and a pair of plastic sandals at his varicose feet. 
“Nam, go and buy two five-gallon cans of gasoline.  Here’s the ticket and money,” he told his helper. Transportation vehicles were managed by a state-run corporation, and gasoline and diesel, controlled by tickets. 
“Comrade,” I said.
“I’m driver, not comrade.”  His glance flicked round my body from head to toes and came to rest on my face.  With that inquisitive look, he asked, “You’re a re-educated person, aren’t you?”
“How do you know?” I asked, wondering.
“Your appearance has told me…Well, no more room for you in the truck cabin; I give you a lift, but you have to sit on firewood, okay?”  He did not wait for my answer, “I go to Biên Hòa, not Saigon.  You must get off at Long Bình intersection.”  He then left.
I recalled one of the meetings, “You’re the re-educated, criminals against Party and State.” The cadre spoke, “You do not have citizenship. You must apply for it when released.” I thought, traveling on firewood is better than staying here and sleeping on these benches. Giving a ride denoted a favor to me.
It was strange that I felt comfortable, sensing no difference between lying on firewood and on a mattress. I was dreaming my daughter Audrey, 14 and my boy Minh, 8 running towards me, followed by my lovely wife Đính.
“Get off, man. Get off, man. Long Bình intersection.” The helper pounded on the truck body, yelling.
“Okay… Thank you for your kindness, Driver.”
Still asleep and shortsighted, I saw indistinctly a light coming. I raised my hand, asking for a lift. It was a three-wheel Lambretta.
“No more room, Driver.” Two women sitting side by side with the driver protested.
“Sit closer, ladies. Give him a room. He’s a re-educated.” I was very surprised at that remark. “Today is a release day of re-educated prisoners,” he continued.
At Saigon Eastern Bus Station, I went home, by taking a “Honda Ôm,” Honda for hire. I reached home at about 2:00 a.m.
“Đính, I’m home. Open the gate.”
After seconds, the door exploding open, Audrey and Minh, followed by their mother rushed to unlatch the gate. Three of them embraced me, hot tears welling in my eyes and the balm of their love, their embracing comforting me immensely. More than four years of hardships, of hard labor, of suffering, of humiliation, of hunger was washed out completely. The happiest moment in my life!
The following day, my wife threw a one-course party with bún chả giò, egg rolls, rice noodle and vegetables. 
“I haven’t eaten this plate for four years,” said Audrey. “Mom, I think you forgot how to do it.” 
“Do we get rid of rau muống sauté and grilled dried fish from now on, Mom?”  Minh asked.
“Pork is expensive, isn’t it, Honey?” I asked my wife.
“It's not from the market.  Don’t worry.  This is my monthly ration of meat.”
“How much is the ration?”
“A high school teacher’s ration is one and a half pound of pork a month.”
A vivid picture of my family’s misery flashed on my mind.  I gingerly looked at my wife and my children.  She was skinny, sun-tanned, haggard eyes and sunken cheeks.  My children were pale and skinny. Their threadbare clothes had been unstitched, reversed inside out and sewed back to have a fair-colored look. My glance stopped at the place where my Honda motorbike which used to be had been gone.  I slowly pieced together my family’s wretchedness.  I tried to push down a rising lump of anger and hatred in my throat.
“How delicious the egg rolls are!”  I appreciated while picking up egg rolls and put them in my wife’s bowl, Audrey’s, and Minh’s.  I felt happy to see my loved ones chewing them.  After one thousand five hundred long, waiting days, I could sit down and have dinner with my wife and my children: my soul in peace, my mind at ease, my eyes soothed, and my stomach full.  At this moment, flashed on my mind different pictures of internees killed in their escape trails, suffering by hunger, cold, hard labor in the jungle prisons from the North to the South Vietnam. Then rolled back before my eyes the questions I had asked myself without answers and ruminated on about the fall of Saigon, the Americans’ betrayal in cutting military supplies without mercy, and Vietcong’s cruelty after their triumph. I remembered General Grant’s words to General Lee, “We are brothers and Sisters.” Yes, Vietnamese are Lạc Long Quân’s and Âu Cơ’s hundred children’s descendants: they were the first family of Vietnamese people.
“Daddy, why don’t you eat?”  Minh reminded me.
“Because of the tasteful chả giò your mom made.”
“Welcome to your first flattery,” replied my wife.  All laughed.
The following morning, with that sentiment, I went looking for a job. 

“Is your name in your family booklet?” The manager of a sedge-mat co-operative asked me.
“No, it isn’t,” I replied.
“Sorry, I can’t hire you.  You must have your name registered in your family booklet.” The manager advised me.
I came to the District Security office (police) and I applied for the family booklet registration.
“Do you have a job?” That question startled me.
“No, I don’t.” I answered, perplexed: No family book, therefore no job; No job, so no family book…My worry was escalading; but I did not lose my hope.

Nguyễn văn Linh became Communist Party Secretary General. With him began opening a new era of the “Open Door” policy and a vogue of English language learning.  I rescued my family’s starvation by giving English tutoring lessons. The first Evening English School, established, run and taught by the re-educated was located at an elementary school in Nguyễn Chí Thanh Street. The first three-month English session ended up in a big success with 500 students. The second one started with 2,000 students at Fraternité School, renamed Education College after the Fall of Saigon. I had enough money for the family’s expenses. However, my children could not enter Saigon University because of political discrimination. What should I do?
Arrivals of boat people waves to Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia pounded through BBC radio every day, every house, every South Vietnamese. Gossips about building boats and buying propeller motors, diesel, boarding beach…spread to every corner of the country. I was not happy with that news. The first reason was that I did not have gold. The second, more important was that I did not trust the organizers: many planned voyages failed not once or twice, but five or six times, and people being taken into prison. The last one was that the voyage was very perilous: fragile boats, storms, loss of direction, and sea pirates. As father, I knew my responsibility towards my children’s life. I thought I could not bear remorse if any danger occurred to my children when I sent them abroad illegally by boat. I was extremely perplexed. 

In April or May of 1983, I vaguely recollected, a friend of mine gave me a copy of the Agreement between the US and Vietnam on the operation of Orderly Departure Program. I felt excited about that news. The re-educated was waiting for its implementation. I was dreaming of it day by day, month after month, year in year out; but nothing happened. My wife and I grew old; my children became grown-ups without profession. My yearning for freedom was dwindling to the lowest point, next to despair.  Almost every weekday, especially Monday, the re-educated people gathered in Saigon Cathedral parks, the so-called Pine Radio, to share together hot news from the US about Khúc Minh Thơ’s activities and other re-educated prisoners’ wives’.

Fortunately after a storm comes a calm. Late in 1988, Nhà Bè District Security office accepted passport applications for the Humanitarian Operation. Through a State-run Immigration Services, my family was granted passports. We then passed UNHCR interview. With a loan from USCC, we bought flight tickets. The flight date was April 22nd, 1993. Holding these papers, I was extremely happy because the last leg of my 14-year waiting and hoping journey was near at hand. My happiness was sometimes laced with intervallic homesick sentiment. I haven’t lain any wreath or flowers onto my mom’s tomb in Gò Chung Church graveyard, Phú Yên province since 1943. I haven’t known where my grand-parents had been buried since I left them in 1946. I didn’t know when I would see my brothers and their families again. Very heartfelt and endeared to me were the places I had lived in my natal village in Thanh Hóa, grown up in Tuy Hòa, Huế, Nhatrang, and Saigon, and the schools with smart and gentle students I had taught in Sóc Trăng, Biên Hòa, and Nhà Bè. Despite of passport and flight ticket in hand, there was rumor going around about some internees who, already on board the plane, were ushered back to the tarmac. I prayed that I would not be the next one. My prayers were so ardent that I forgot to say good-bye to my brothers, sisters, and friends once I had booked in at the flight counter. 
The Airbus 380 taking off the runway, bound for Singapore, then boarding a Boeing 747 for Japan, and finally Los Angeles meant that I was eventually and completely freed from the big prison aka Communist Vietnam. Looking through a window at rows of gleaming jet planes with different foreign names at their tails, I did not know what countries they belonged to. I wondered if the people working on the air field were Japanese. I wished I would have a job like them. On board the plane I was served sandwich, soft drink, and cookies. They were not tasty because I did not feel fine.  My soul was empty, blank, and sometimes anxious: what would my family’s future be like?  Would it be uncertain or hopeful? An evident sure thing was that tomorrow would be better than yesterday in Vietnam.

My brother Frank, his wife Chi, and their children Lynda, Sophia, and Philips greeted me and my family at Los Angeles Airport. He had been released before me and he successfully took his family by boat to Indonesia. He came to the US in 1980. My family spent a month in my brother’s house in Anacapa Dr., Huntington Beach City.  Frank took us to Little Saigon, Long Beach City where Chi’s parents lived, and SSA offices to fulfill all kinds of papers. From that day on, my memory began collecting new sceneries, beautiful, well-shaped landscapes, and different body-built people with their conversations in English and in Spanish around me. I was interested in single houses on big lots of land with green lawns and rose beds, which soothed my eyes. I suddenly remembered my father’s red brick and metal sheet house hidden under the foliage of hundreds of the dark green coconut trees reaching the sea waves of the Pacific Ocean at Mỹ Á Beach, Tuy Hòa District, Phú Yên province. I spent time strolling along Golden West St, admiring Westminster High School, its size as large as Pétrus Trương Vĩnh Ký High School in Saigon, in the year I had been at the 12th final grade of French instruction program. I compared the strikingly busy traffic of six-lane street with lines of cars speeding at 40 miles per hour to 2-lane street in Saigon with low-speed motorbikes, bicycles and cyclos  

The following month, my family moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Maple St. Westminster City. It was comfortable, but narrow. I remembered my father’s house on a 67,500 sq ft lot, plenty of jackfruit trees, the best kind of fruit in Hóc Môn District, 10 miles from Saigon. I had bought it for my dad when he had to relocate from Tuy hòa in 1966. I had to think about my family’s future. 
My wife, my children, and I enrolled at Cypress College for A.A. degree.  After passing the test, in 1994, I worked as teacher-aid at Hayden Elementary School, Westminster School District. My life in Orange County was not plain-sailing; neither had it been in Vietnam. I underwent two surgeries of cataract for both eyes, two more surgeries of retinal detachment in both eyes the following year, two more laser surgeries to straighten out my eyelashes, and finally two more beauty plastic surgeries of my eyelids. I could smell my flesh burning the same as the beef or pork grilled on red-hot charcoal. After Cypress College, I transferred to CSU Long Beach, and I graduated in 2000, major in English, section Creative Writing. 
My wife and my daughter sewed clothes at home with a Juki sewing machine.  They worked very late in the night. One day, they took more than 200 shirts to the shop.
“Audrey, you’ve sewn the wrong side.  Look, this side of the material is glossy. It should be outside,” the angry manager shouted.
I had to help them unstitch more 200 returned shirts, reversed the inside out and then sewed them back. We stayed awake until daybreak to finish such a boring, desperate work. One night they left the sweatshop at 2:00 a.m. and drove home in fear in so a dense fog in Garden Grove Boulevard that my daughter hardly saw the street far only six yards ahead. 
My wife sitting in the passenger seat uttered, “Audrey, you’ve got out of your lane. Go to the left.”
“I don’t see the white-painted line.  Is it all right now?”
“It’s okay.”
For them it was a dreadful but memorable drive.
When my daughter transferred to CSU, Fullerton, I advised her to take an exam and an interview to become a teacher-aid in Ocean View School District. I did not want the energy-consuming sewing detrimental to her health. She graduated, major in accounting.  She has been working for Boeing company since 1999. My wife got a job as a front desk clerk in Nhân Hòa Clinic in Euclid Street. My son worked full time and took evening classes. Finally he was a graduate in electronics and worked for the Good Guys, then Best Buy. 
I am very satisfied to see my children have jobs and own brand-new houses.  They are full-fledged Americans. I am proud of them. My job as father has been done.  Thank God.

In July, 2000, as an American citizen, I traveled back to Vietnam to remodel my mother’s and my grandparents’ tombs after more than half century of separation. I was happy to admire my mother’s new tomb but I could not find my grandparents’. My family’s cemetery yielded to a new road. My home village was completely changed. The house on the lot of land where my grandparents and I had lived when I was 10, was still there, but warped and downgraded. The pond with trout and anabas and the bamboo hedge that encircled it were gone. My picturesque house in my memory had been gone with my grandparents’ cemetery. It was very sad because all photos of them had been lost with the war. We did not want the war; but it came. The Americans did not expect the 9-11 attack; but it came in plain daylight before their eyes without reaction.

Furthermore there was some moment in my life I wondered whether the fates conspired against me. On April 5, 2003 my son and my wife rushed me to Fountain Valley Regional Hospital for a three-bypass surgical operation. However, I could not breathe because the heart, my wife thought, did not work well. She was asked to sign a second consent-paper so that the cardiologist surgeon opened my chest again for the irrigation of blood clot surgery. Sometime during that period, my wife, my children, Frank, his wife Chi, their children, and my friends came to see me with bad and sad feelings, at the lowest hope for my survival. They were ready for the last rites for me.  Besides me, on my hospital bed, an indefatigable black American was sitting, every day at the same hour, talking with me in coma. He reported my updated illness condition to my wife who, exhausted, had to stay with my daughter in Grenada Hills, Los Angeles. After work, my daughter drove my wife down to Fountain Valley Regional Hospital to visit me and traveled back to Granada Hills at midnight. That man was Dr. Keith Collins, History Professor at CSU Long Beach. My wife called him, from that day on a Black man with a Heart of gold.
After 55 days, I was released from the hospital. My wife pushed my wheelchair while I enjoyed the green landscape around my neighborhood. Gradually I got rid of the wheelchair and then I walked with a walker. Finally I slowly strolled by myself and did physical therapy exercises. Now I could dance with my wife on the tango or rumba rhythm in the Evergreen World Adult Day Health Care in Westminster Boulevard. “Is it a miracle?”  “Yes, it is,” some people said that.

“Hello.”
“How are you, Daddy?  How about your knees?  Do they still hurt you?”  Audrey asked me.
“Just a bit, when I climb up or down the stairs.  I don’t feel pain while I walk,” I responded. “When and where’s your MBA commencement?”
“Friday, June 1st in Anaheim.  What’s up?  I hear the music.”
“Your mom and I are dancing a Waltz.”
“What’s the song?”
“The Blue Danube.”
“Enjoy it.  Bye, Dad.”
“Bye, Audrey.  See you this weekend.”
“Okay.  Take care.”
That was her daily check phone call.

“Đính, your cell phone’s ringing,” I said to my wife.
“Hello,” my wife answered.
“Mom, what are you doing?  I hear the music,” Minh asked.
“Your Dad and I are enjoying a Waltz in the Senior Club with other old dancing friends.  Have you had lunch yet?”
“Tell Dad he’s grandpa and you’re grandma.”
“Cigar or doughnut?” My wife exploded, smiling.
“Cigar.” My wife and I laughed.
“How much is his weight?”
“Seven pounds.”
“Do you have any given name for him on your mind?”
“Henry.  What do you and Dad think?”
“It’s a beautiful name.  Dad says that.  Congratulations.”

Two good news flew to us on the Mother’s Day, 2007 celebration in the Evergreen World ADHC in Westminster Blvd.

Sometimes, I ask my wife if we were still in Vietnam, what we would be like.  Would our children have good jobs and decent living?  Would our old age be well taken care of?  My wife asks me who would pay for those hospital and medicine expenses if we were in Vietnam.  More than 300,000 dollars figured in the bills, our fellow American tax payers.  We pray: God bless Americans and God bless us, too.