Hoa’s father sighed and looked out the window with a thoughtful face. I was running into him, curiously and innocently asked my father.
" Our family is still fine, why do we have to move ...?"
Certainly, her father, like other parents, would not say the reason for his children:
"If the lamp post can go, it goes, ... let alone our family!", he laughed.
When the Great Migration occurred in the 1950s, Hoa was just a 5-year-old child living with her family in Hai Phong, the port city in the North of Vietnam, became the last leg for thousands of families in Northern Vietnam migrated to the South, desired to find the “ sky of opportunities” instead of staying to survive under the harsh inhumane rule of the Northern government at that time.
At her age, she saw life with a lot of optimism and innocence, so she was not afraid of the adventure of leaving her home in the North to go to the South, which was thousands of kilometres away. Part of it was due to the youthful adventurous interests, but most of it was to escape the dictatorship, which was about to besiege the North. The witnesses testified to the massacres of murder and destruction of people who did not share the political views of the North government. They also had to face the colonial "ignorant" policy, something that she only understood until she was older.
"Makes people foolish to be easy to control”, which was the most haunting line in a history book when she deepened and widened her knowledge about the history of “ ignorant” policy.
It was thanks to an uncle who was their relative, uncle Hy. He worked at the administrative office in charge of arranging ships going to the South, so he asked the superior to give our family a boarding pass to get on an obsolete fairly large ship of the French army called Gascogne. This ship is specialized in carrying the equipment for the military, so it does not have enough facilities like a normal passenger ship. But at that time, their group of refugees had no other choice, as long as they were lucky enough to escape the North. The number of passengers on the boat was from 700 to 800 people, and most of them were from remote provinces in the Red River Delta but soon made it to Hai Phong to catch up to the South in the first few trips which are organized expressly after the Geneva Agreement was signed on July 20, 1954, dividing Vietnam in half,“ Terrible”, Hoa remembered. “It was such a terrifying ordeal. I’m glad that it was over”. People are congested with luggage. The carriages were crowded, and some even climbed on top of the train, into the cars, everything was in chaos.
“I just clung to my mom because I was afraid of losing my family.”, Hoa recalled with a pale face because of fear.
The trip lasted up to three days then arrived in the South, at Vung Tau port. Migrants were taken to Sai Gon city and temporarily stayed at the theatre, which was later rebuilt as National Assembly Building, people scattered in the following days. They were generously provided from the workers here with a number of wooden planks removed from the formwork platform, used to make firewood for cooking rice and boiling water. It was truly the first gesture of the Saigon people to the newcomers from the North to the South - this reminded Hoa all the time. A distant cousin helped their family to stay at his home. He also helped them from the first moments when they were still like a fish out of the water.
Her father, like many other Vietnamese, was a man with a strong ability to survive, ready to overcome all obstacles and misfortune of life to support his family. She still remembered the image of my father plowing a field in a faded black shirt, drenched in sweat. Thick blue pants were rolled up, revealing red skin due to the heat licking him, manually control the plow skillfully, regardless of hotness or rain. During his leisure time, he also did a part-time job to earn money to support his family. The day they emigrated, he sold off properties and land, willing to accept gold instead of cash and brought it to the South to cover their life. When Hoa's parents sold gold to settle down and rebuild their lives, they realized it was all fake gold. She could imagine their pain when in their 40s, suddenly empty-handed, with a small child in foreign soil.
" We lost everything," he said with the glazed-over look and the look of despair, leaning against the door because he could not stand. But he did not collapse because of that, he quickly regained his mind and started over. Hoa's father worked as a construction worker, but the Southerners then discriminated against the North people, thinking that the North came to steal all their jobs and lands so they slandered him, gave the hardest work for him. He was gone from home all the time. Hoa was worried when it was raining at night and she did not see her father come back home. The burdensome on his shoulders since he was still sharply padded now became scrawny. Her mother sold clothes stalls in the market while 8-year-old Hoa went to school.
Hoa became familiarized with the life of a new land called Saigon, noticing something strange. A few details that Hoa found funny, about the permissive and comely characteristic of the Southerners: bought items with five coins, or 50 cents, gave the paper a dollar, the seller casually torn the note and split the halves, giving her half back. She liked the creative way of making Vietnamese sandwiches in the South: in addition to ham or pâté, there were also pickles, cilantro, and cucumber. But what Hoa liked most about the South is the abundance of comic books, books that could not be seen in the North, and places to rent books, replacing the public libraries. The South, since then, opened up so many opportunities, compared to the North after the day “the bamboo curtain falls”.
Time flew, Hoa’s family was more stable back then. The owner of the woodshop in which her father worked, he left everything to my father and from there, with hard work and dedication, Hoa's family built his career and it became one of the wood factories made the most famous furniture in Saigon at that time, even though he only completed primary school. Thanks to that opportunity, they settled into a small wooden house, which had a fancy white fence around and a garden.
“ I was very fond of our house and I loved it from the very first time I saw it". Hoa said in joy with her glowed eyes.
Hoa then became the elder sister. Binh was the second daughter in the house, 10 years apart from Hoa. Hoa and Binh are the names given to them by their father. He chose these names because he longed to see peace on the land along the Pacific coast, which had been in constant war. Then in turn for the second generation in the family, everyone was succeeded in Saigon. Therefore, Hoa did not hear from my grandparents any complaints or regrets leaving everything to bring her to the South. She expressed her gratitude to her parents for sacrificing so much - and thus giving them great opportunities to study and achieve success in life. Hoa was always grateful for the generosity and kindness of the Southerners - who spread their arms to receive and cover for the unfortunate victims of the dictatorship. This was especially evident because, after 1975, the family was able to meet their relatives from their homeland in the North, they all confirmed that they had been brutally persecuted, exploited and suppressed by the government, extreme misery, hunger, and suffering, miserable.
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