Beyond Behaviors

Photo: Reuters
A North Vietnamese tank crashes through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon on April 30, 1975. The taking of the palace marked the fall of the U.S.-backed south and the end to a decade of fighting.

To many of my friends in the CNMI and the rest in the U.S., April 30 isn’t a day of significance. It’s not a holiday. It’s not the birth or death of anyone famous either. But, to me and my family, and millions of Vietnamese around the world, April 30 will forever hold a special place in our hearts and minds.

Photo: CORBIS/Bettmann
An American punches a man in the face as he tries to close the doorway of an airplane overloaded with refugees seeking to flee Nha Trang, which was being taken over by Communist troops in April 1975.

You see, on April 30, 1975 —32 years ago today— the South Vietnamese government surrendered to the North Vietnamese Communist forces ending a decade long civil war known as the Vietnam War. Besides the political consequences (of which I’m not going to go into) there were the emotional, social, and cultural effects that the now infamous, “Fall of Saigon” left.

Had it not been for that fateful day of April 30, 1975, I truly believe that my family and I along with millions of other Vietnamese (who left our homeland as refugees in possibly the largest mass exodus of people by boat ever called “boat people”) might have never left Vietnam.

“In the spring of 1975, 130,000 refugees escaped Vietnam. Tiny boats full of South Vietnamese soldiers and their families set off down the Mekong River in the hopes of surviving the 600 mile journey to the Malaysian coast. They were the first wave of Vietnamese boat people. But they were not the last.”

All totaled, roughly 1.5 million “boat people” left Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon between the mid 1970’s through the 1990’s.

Source: “Why they fled: The fall of Saigon”. The CBC Digital Archives Website. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Last updated: 19 July 2004. <http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-524-2705/life_society/boat_people/clip1>.
[Accessed 30 April 2007.]

There is a great selection of audio and television clips from the Archives of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC Archives) on “boat people.” You can find it here: “Boat People: A Refugee Crisis”. The CBC Digital Archives Website. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Last updated: 19 July 2004. [Accessed 30 April 2007.]

For those of you who are educators and would like more information on how to share the “boat people” story with your class, you can find lesson plans also from the CBC Archives.

I am in awe of how my life has turned out because of April 30th. If the “Fall of Saigon” on April 30, 1975 had never occurred, I would most likely be composing this blog entry in Vietnamese (and I’d be fluent in my native tongue, unlike my current state of fumbling and stumbling with speaking let alone trying to write anything in Vietnamese). I’d probably be living in Vietnam with a Vietnamese girlfriend or wife (not both). Instead, as fortune would have it, I grew up in Texas, was educated and indoctrinated with the American lifestyle and way of life and learned how to use big words like “indoctrinated” (all of which I am eternally grateful). My education eventually led me here to Saipan (CNMI), where I met my Japanese wife.

What if life had been one of those “sliding doors” where if I chose left it would turn out one way and if I chose right it would turn out another way? So, if April 30, 1975 never happened, I might still be in Vietnam with my family and friends and with a mindset that’s — Vietnamese. Instead, because April 30, 1975 did happen, I grew up in Texas, attended a southern Baptist college (got a useless degree) and then later on a college primarily for women (got a more useful degree), which all led to me coming here and sitting up at 12:40 am typing this blog today.

What if April 30, 1975 never happened? I sometimes wonder…