Escaping Communism - Carmen Tsui

Carmen Tsui
AP WH – 6
June 14, 2010

Escaping Communism

Interview One:
Introduction: This interview is about my mother Karen Tsui. She is a Bank of America worker and is the boss of many people (she works in the tall buildings in downtown, Seattle). I interviewed her on why she left Vietnam, which was because of communism, and how the immigration to America was like and what happened. This is connected to the Cold War because Vietnam was a proxy war of the Cold War, and the defeat of South Vietnam resulted in many Vietnamese citizens leaving Vietnam for America and many other countries. She was in South Vietnam at the time, and she was a teenager/young adult when this all happened.
My family and I were Chinese and lived in South Vietnam in the 1970s. At this time, there was a war going on between the North and the South. I was sixteen during this time. South Vietnam, who was allied with the United States, was fighting against North Vietnam, who was communist. This war affected everyone, but didn’t affect me that much since the only thing that affected my life from the war was the fact that they closed down all the schools. My eldest brother was a South Vietnamese military soldier so he fought alongside the United States army soldiers. However, the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War because North Vietnam took over South Vietnam when the Americans withdrew from the war. Even though this was the end, it was actually the beginning of the turmoil that would come from the communists that took over. After the war had ended, both North and South Vietnam had united together. Since we lived in South Vietnam, many people around us were wary and very apprehensive about the communist takeover. Soon enough, the communists took away our house because they said that we had too much money. These communists who kicked us out of our own home gave our money to the government and we were left with absolutely nothing. After that, my entire family had to hide in other people’s homes, such as our friends and relatives. Our entire family was split up and we hid in a total of about four or five houses. I believe that there were approximately two family members hiding per house. Although we were able to find shelter, it was not that great because the families we stayed with were not very good to us and we all had to pay the families for their living and ours combined. I had to stay with my sister in my friend’s house, and we had to work very hard in order to earn this money. Later on, everyone in the South wanted to leave Vietnam because of this unfair, communist government. We tried very hard to get on the boats to leave, but there were so many complications. One of them was that there were just too many people wanting to leave Vietnam at this time. Another was that everyone knew how dangerous it was and all the risks that were involved since this was a hazardous journey, so that made it even more difficult. Our oldest sibling, the South Vietnamese soldier, had been sent to America after the war had ended since he had worked with the United States and all South Vietnamese servicemen and their families would be able to be sponsored. Immediately after South Vietnam lost the war to the communists, many Vietnamese who had worked with the United States were afraid of malevolence by the Communist Party so about 125,000 or more Vietnamese citizens left Vietnam. The majority of these people was airlifted or fled Vietnam on American military cargo ships and was transferred to American government bases, refugee centers, etc. Many of these people were exiles, South Vietnamese, and political refugees escaping the new communist government.
Finally in 1979, my family was able to go on the Orderly Departure boats. The government was aware of these Orderly Departure boats, but they pretended not to know that it existed or they simply did not care that thousands of Vietnamese citizens were leaving their country in order to go elsewhere. These boats went to refugee camps all over the world, such as Thailand, Hong Kong, the Phillippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Many of the Vietnamese people did not know exactly which refugee camp the boats were going to, so it was kind of up to random chance. However, in the end all of these refugees did the same thing and admitted you to America or to other countries.
At this scary, rushed time I was only a nineteen year old woman just waiting with my family members who ranged from ages thirteen to fifty. It was just my siblings and my uncle. I was the middle child, so no one really acknowledged me… especially my parents. Life was changing so fast. One day I am waiting for a boat to come so my family and I could get on it to leave and go to a refugee camp, then to America. The next day, I am on a boat, risking my life, with about four hundred strangers on a 200 acre boat sailing to a new future out of Vietnam.
My siblings and I had no choice but to take whatever boats were available, and this small and overcrowded boat, like all the other ones, was the one that I had to take alone. For four to five days straight, everyone on the boat had to sit there and could not move at all; it was not because we did not want to move, it was just simply because we could not move at all because there was absolutely no room except for everyone to sit. The journey to where ever we were going to was extremely boring since we could not do anything, but it was also very frightening because there were so many dangers we were all aware of such as drowning, getting raped, robbed, etc. Knowing all these risks were terrifying since we were all completely exposed and isolated during our sail to another unknown destination. We had absolutely no food to eat the whole journey, and everyone was basically starving. Everyone on the boat brought very few things with them because if they brought too much, then they would have to leave it behind or the people who control the boat would have to get rid of it their own way. Also in these circumstances, it was best to just take whatever you really needed and to bring as less as possible.
Finally, my overcrowded boat safely arrived to our destination, India. All of us refugees were so relieved when we got off the boat because that meant that we had traveled to our destination from the beginning to the end without anything unfortunate events happening to us. When all of the refugees got there, everyone one else and I tried to get our luggage, but when I tried I could not get it because someone had either taken it or the people putting the bags on the boat had thrown it off the boat in order to make the boat lighter. I wasn’t angry about the fact that I had not gotten my bag because there is really nothing you can do about it so there’s no point being angry about something you do not have any control over.
In India, I stayed at a refugee with all the other refugees who were on the same boat as me and more. In the mean time, we were all waiting for admittance to America or third world countries. All my other siblings had taken different boats and went to different refugee camps elsewhere. We knew nothing about where each other were, if we were all safe, etc. Some of us were able to go to refugee camps together, but those were the lucky ones. I believe that most of us had to go alone… or at least I did. While I was waiting, I worked as a teacher and taught English to all the children there as a job. Everyone called me teacher, which was a weird, fun, and interesting experience. I was still nineteen or twenty around that time, and I had to be independent for the first time in my life because I was always with my family. I continued to wait and teach during my stay at the refugee camp in India.
At last, five months after I had arrived from Vietnam to India, my oldest brother in the United States sponsored me to come to America. He was able to sponsor me because he became an American citizen, since he was a South Vietnamese soldier and was transferred to the United States military bases. My family and I are very fortunate to have a brother that was in the army because of three reasons. One, the benefits he received from being a soldier that worked closely with the United States also contributed to us and affected our lives in a positive way greatly. Another reason is that these benefits were definitely very helpful in getting to the United States. The third reason is that being a soldier gave him benefits, which gave him the rare opportunity, which most people do not have, to bring our whole family over to America. Because of him, many of us were able to be sponsored to America from the refugee camps since we were family members. I arrived to Seattle in 1980 and lived with my brother. I went to college for two years and immediately started working in order to make a living, meanwhile my brother continued to sponsor the rest of my family over to the United States of America. He was the one to always sponsor because it was the oldest sibling’s duty to do it. My siblings, uncle, and I were the ones that had to go on that hazardous journey that many people would be too afraid to take and were separated right from the start. After all that time of risking our own lives, we were finally reunited. My family was able to sponsor my parents over to America, so they came in a plane instead of a boat like what we had to go through. Since then, all of my siblings and I have been working and have been a new family.

Interview Two:
Introduction: This interview is about my father David Tsui. He was born in China and migrated to Hong Kong when he was very young. He began work when he was only eight years old and ever since then has been working very hard his entire life. He is now 58 years old and has never really taken a break from working since he was eight. I am interviewing how his family left Communist China in order to migrate to America. This connects to the Cold War because many Chinese people were leaving China because they did not like communism, and the United States was encouraging the Chinese to immigrate over to America to show that capitalism is better than communism. This was around maybe the 1960s or 1970s.
I never really had any fun during my childhood. All I remember was working really hard and trying to earn enough money each day just to get by. I ran all over the place in the overcrowded city and eventually learned my way around the demanding place. My parents had no choice but to make me work because their work was still insufficient and was not enough for us to survive. I was a young uneducated boy, working in a hot, heavily populated, busy city on the Eastern hemisphere. That is what my childhood was like.
Before all this, I was only four years old. My mother disliked the government because everyone would do a good, hard day’s work and what would they get at the end? Nothing but little pay, and maybe only just enough to carry on with their lives. This was a hard life for my family because my parents worked very hard for very little which was unfair to the workers. My mother did not like how this system worked, so we migrated to Hong Kong on a plane. We lived with my aunt in her house and my mom worked every day so that we could raise enough money to go to the United States of America. I basically just stayed at home during this time because I could not do any work since I was too young. My mom was able to sponsor my father over to Hong Kong from China, and he also started working right when he arrived. They both worked very hard in order to earn enough money to immigrate to America, but we still did not have enough.
When I turned eight years old, I began working in Hong Kong. I was not educated, so I did many simple jobs. The jobs I did were delivery jobs. Basically what I would do in this job was I would go to a place, they would tell me to bring it to this location, and I would get paid. It was that easy. I did this job for the entire day, from morning to night, ate, then went to sleep. This was my routine everyday. The only thing that was bad about this job was that I had to run around a lot by myself, and I was only still a young boy with no one watching over me in case something happened. I was basically independent and on my own since I was young; not many children my age were even working yet because most were in school being educated. I was just as busy as my parents because all three of us were working very hard to achieve our goal, which was to migrate to the United States, and to survive. Later on, my mother and father had another child. This child became my brother, and I was older than him so I had to take care of him and I was not as alone as I was before.
Soon enough, the time finally came where we were able to achieve our goal which we had been working hard for, for a few years. My older sister, who was living in the United States, sponsored our whole family who was living in Hong Kong (my mother, father, brother, and I) to America. She was able to bring us over to America because she was an American citizen. The immigration policies were that children under the age of twenty one, spouses, and parents of American citizens were granted to come over to America, including family members. These policies were like this because America’s main priority was to reunite families, so this helped us out and made the great opportunity to migrate to the United States as legal immigrants possible.
By the time my family and I migrated over to America, I was already fifteen or sixteen. My whole childhood consisted of working and earning money to survive while other people’s childhoods were made up of playing, friends, school, etc. I never actually had the time and opportunity to go to school, and I am not sure if I could have afforded it since we wanted to use our money to go to the United States, home to the free and where you can live the American Dream. My family and I lived in San Francisco’s Chinatown, which is the most powerful network for Chinese in America and has been the oldest for many decades. I believe that is why we all settled in San Francisco, because then we would be connected with everyone who is similar to us in many ways such as culture. For the very first time in my life, I began my education in high school. I still worked very hard because my family was poor, so we had to earn money to survive. From there, I graduated high school and went to college for two years. After that, I still continued to work and am still giving the same, great amount of effort in my job that I did back in the past.

Interview Three:
Introduction: My interview is about my grand uncle, who is my mom’s uncle. He was around fifty years old at the time and he is now seventy four years old. I am interviewing him about the immigration from Vietnam to America and the dangers there were. This is connected to the Cold War because the Vietnam War was a proxy war in the Cold War, and the defeat of South Vietnam resulted in many Vietnamese citizens leaving Vietnam for other places, such as America.
I was born in China around the mid 1930s and was old enough to remember World War II in my country. I lived in the countryside and lived in the village with my family. I was the youngest of them all, and my parents had seventeen children. Later as one of my older brothers, who I was closest with, grew older, he had a business in Vietnam and he took me with him since I was the youngest of all the siblings. Also, he did not want me to do the farming and backyard kind of jobs because they were hard work for very little benefit and pay. In Vietnam, my brother met a woman and they married through an arranged marriage. They both opened a business together involving diamonds and jewelry, and I worked with them. This work was better than what I would have done in Communist China because this family business actually gives me my hard day at work’s pay. Everything was good in South Vietnam, and my brother and his wife had about eight children. I took care of many of these kids while helping my brother with his business. I lived with them in the same house. However, things changed when the Vietnam War ended in 1975. The Americans had withdrawn from South Vietnam, which resulted in the defeat of South Vietnam. The communists came pouring in from the north to the south and that changed every South Vietnamese citizen’s life. We were all fearful of what will happen when the communists came to take over, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had already fled from Vietnam to America; but these people were mostly people who worked with America during the war.
Soon enough after North and South Vietnam reunited, communists were knocking on our door and kicked us out of our own home because they said that we had too much money and that it now belonged to the government. We had no idea what to do except to find shelter, which was to pray that people would let us stay in their homes and hide. Fortunately, we were able to find places for all of us to stay, but we all had to split up in the end. For the first time, I was away from my older brother and I was with his son, who was around ten years old at the time. I had to take care of him and we were living with a family in the same house. Even though we found shelter, life was still hard because we had to pay for these families and ourselves in order to stay in their homes. My nephew and I worked very hard and were able to pay off these expenses.
Eventually around 1979, the whole family tried to go on the Orderly Departure boats to leave Vietnam to a better place like the United States of America. That was everyone’s dream place because there was freedom and democracy, and it was way better than the Vietnam now because America does not take your homes away just because you have too much money. Everyone knew the risks and dangers of going overseas. There are possibilities of getting robbed, raped, drowned, etc. We were very afraid of going on these boats since we did not want to lose our lives. I especially was afraid because I had to take care of my nephew and it was only around thirteen years old and I did not want anything bad to happen to him. Also, your trip overseas is not the end of your journey because once you reach your destination, you have to go to the refugee camps and await your admittance to the country of your desire (which is usually the United States). That made the journey to America even more difficult because you would not be done with the migration even when you already risked your life.
Later on, many of nephews and nieces had already gone on these boats either together or alone because they had no choice. I am quite relieved that the government is allowing these Orderly Departures because if they did not, it would make the conditions worse since more people would leave illegally and die out in the seas quickly. My nephew and I were the last ones of the family to leave on the boats. We finally got onto an Orderly Departure boat three years after my other families had left, and started off on our journey to America and to reunite with them.
We were stuck on the overcrowded boat for five days straight with no food or water. No one could move on the boat at all because there was absolutely no room to do that, and my body’s muscles were getting stiff from not moving. I was worried about my nephew during the migration, however he seemed fine with it so I was glad that he was okay.
After a long, tiring boat ride to our destination, everyone was happy that we had made it out of Vietnam and across its potentially dangerous waters. We had made it to the Philippines, and all the refugees from the boats and elsewhere went to the refugee camp. My nephew and I also went to the refugee camp to await our admittance into the United States of America.
It did not take long for us to get admitted to America because many of our family members were already there and they had become American citizens by then. When my nephew and I arrived in the United States, we settled in Seattle, Washington because that is where my family lived. We all lived in the same house just like before, and the family members who left on boats to America was finally reunited. Soon enough, my oldest nephew, who was a South Vietnamese soldier that worked with the Americans, sponsored my brother and his wife over to America. They came to live with us and the whole entire family was reunited once again. When I came to Seattle, I immediately started working at Picture Frame and have been working there for the past twenty years as my first and very last job here in America.