What takes place would seem to be something in the nature of a ‘displacement’—of psychical emphasis, shall we say?
I was not born here. I was born in a place that no longer exists. On a world map, Saigon is not there; where it used to be there is now a place called Ho Chi Minh City. Saigon, the city of my birth, lives on only in the mythical recreations of war films and in the hearts of those exiled from it. In our hearts, physical displacement becomes mental. The past is an actor who wears the present like a mask.
My childhood ended, in a sense, with the siege of my home city in the final days of the Vietnam War. The journey to the US that began then was one of transformation, a passage through new names and identities: first I was a child, then an evacuee, and then a refugee. After my departure from Saigon on helicopters, warships, and boats, and my passage through refugee camps, I transitioned upon arrival in Brooklyn to “resident alien,” then gradually over time I morphed into a “naturalized citizen.” These identities were not my choice, but created by an external body, by the US government, who granted the permission to physically remain on foreign soil. Many travelers and expatriates pass through these identities, but in my case they were baptized upon my head by others. And they were instigated by a displacement. It is still a scar. The internal injuries leave me yearning for something unattainable, to regain equilibrium from the loss of safety, of identity, of a past and a future. The striving to acclimate and settle here in the United States never ends.
Over my last remaining days in Saigon, in April of 1975, enduring week after week in a city where daily life unfolds before a backdrop of smoke-filled horizons blotting out the sun, with the soundtrack of explosions, fires, and death, my parents contemplate the future under a regime which will surely kill us either by physical violence or the assassination of our spirit. My mother decides she would risk everything rather than live another day in this grim reality. Each morning, instead of our familiar regimented routines, we the children are told to be ready for anything. We have not been able to
“I WAS NOT BORN HERE. I WAS BORN IN A PLACE THAT NO LONGER EXISTS… SAIGON, THE CITY OF MY BIRTH, LIVES ON ONLY IN THE MYTHICAL RECREATIONS OF WAR FILMS AND IN THE HEARTS OF THOSE EXILED FROM IT.”
return to school. Just after Tet, the building finally succumbed to the daily bombings: a direct hit on the playground at the heart of the school and on our sense of order and normalcy. Now we are told that we are packing for a possible last-minute trip. We are placated with vague excuses in response to our many questions: Why can't we go back to school? Why are we packing? May we pack our treasures, books, toys, a favorite dress? Where are we going, and for how long? Will we see friends? The list of endless inquiries is answered with hurried, unintelligible responses or, worse, silence. Children can instinctively sense the current of finality. My siblings and I turn to ourselves for answers via deductions and fantastic narratives. Maybe we are taking an early vacation, to return at a later date. What had started this stupid war anyway?
In truth, all sensation is already memory.
Frenetic energy now dictates all actions of our lives. My diminutive feisty mother, Napoleonic at 4'9“, holds the reins of the household. She is indefatigable, starting her campaign each morning at 4 a.m., while the darkness shrouds the chaos and abates the heat. She would retire not to sleep, but to organize. At the first crack of light, Mother would independently brave treacherous journeys in our unravelling city, trying to anticipate all worst-case scenarios. In addition to our survival, she had to think about her in-laws, my father's extended family (my grandmother and my aunt's family) now joining us, seeking refuge from the seaside city of Nha Trang, a few kilometers from Saigon. Their arrival at our home, a precarious family reunion, is the indicator of the approaching shadow, the calm before the storm. Monitoring the fighting and troop movements, which everyday rumble nearer and remove more pieces of the city's infrastructure, my mother deals with each momentary minor emergency of sustaining young and old, with an eye on the ultimate goal: to get out. Meanwhile, the rest of my family hastily attempts to exert some kind of control through the act of packing suitcases, though in the end, by necessity, we would leave everything behind.
By the twenty-ninth of April, the possibility of an orderly passage out of Vietnam is diminishing. My father at the time served as a researcher and director of the National Cancer Institute of Vietnam, as well as an ENT surgeon and an army general practitioner. He was assured by the heads of the institute that there would be an evacuation plan put in place: helicopters were available to fly the medical staff out, as their collaboration with foreign doctors would be seen as traitorous to the new regime. Despite my father's trust in the hospital's proposal, the plans were never carried out. My mother's skepticism, on the other hand, never wavered, and this would rescue us time and again. Perhaps she was reliving her previous exodus from Hanoi in 1954. Her memories and firsthand experience with the Northern regime fueled the difficult decision to evacuate our family. She loudly argues with my father, a regular occurrence, though today we children are listening. Mother cleverly devises a backup plan which can still leverage the resources available to my father. She pleads with him to take us along when he is next called out for emergency service. Our family could ride with my father in the ambulance, “a vehicle large enough to transport everyone at once,” she states. She rejects any escape options other than one which would keep the family together.
This plan is currently our best chance, an effective means of transport through a burning city, a pragmatic choice in which my father does see merit. Later, however, Father was never able to reconcile the decision to leave with his wish to remain behind in the hopes of rebuilding his war-torn country. His own mother was dead set against my mother's perilous evacuation plan.
Father is pulled between his mother's wishes and his wife's stubborn insistence. His fatalistic view of the situation clashes with my mother's. He feels the war will inevitably arrive at our front door, and there is nowhere else to run, so why risk uncertainty and our children's lives? Perhaps his medical skills will be enough to save us, as he could be useful to the new regime in the reconstruction of the country. My mother, having had experience with the North Vietnamese, warns my father of the reeducation camps, of the likelihood of family separation. He says that he'll think about it after a nap, then perhaps have energy to play a game of tennis.
“Perfect,” she says, “we'll see you for dinner, when we will all be dining on rat poison. We can all leave together, or we can all die together. Your choice.”
My father acquiesces.
Later that day, arriving in an available ambulance from his attending hospital duties, my father returns home to salvage additional supplies from his private practice to continue his
rounds. Gathering his doctor's bags, my father also takes along our family. The moment has finally come to actualize my mother's plan. She is resolute to take everyone. The space constraints of the ambulance do not deter her at all. It will require various methods of arranging our bodies and covering us in blankets and bandages, leaving room to bring only the barest of necessities. Years later, I asked my mother what she had decided to pack with her.
“A few worldly possessions which remind us of who we are,” she said, “and a few items to ensure our survival,” all of which fit into a small carry-on bag on her shoulder. It contained a partial collection of our family's documents, her identification, a handful of photos, and most importantly a few cans of condensed milk. Everything else was left behind, including the hastily packed suitcases full of our precious random possessions.
When my family members are loaded into the ambulance, with my siblings looking on, I am the last to board. My singular desire is not to let go of the hand holding mine, my precious nanny chị Quý. (Her name literally translates to beloved sister.) “Why can't she come with us?” I wail. There are frustrated commands from my family directing me to “just get into the vehicle.” I don't budge, nothing can make me let go of chị Quý. She was my shield, my nurse and teacher from the moment I was born, until now. As a child, I saw my own mother as a woman to admire from a formal distance, someone who is poised, beautiful, and brilliant—who nurtured my ideals, my intellect, my reason. Chị Quý, my nanny, is my warmth, my heart, my guide to everyday life. When the school closed, she filled the gaps of my education with practical knowledge of household chores. She taught me to appreciate the smell of calm, the odor of clean shirts in various shades of white hanging on the laundry line. In unspoken affection she lifted my spirit with simple foods. With a sweet melody she lulled me to dreamland.
I do not accept this separation. I exhibit my refusal by physically hanging onto the nearby wall fixtures. My screams are intense, drowning out the sounds of explosions and the jets that rattle the windows and doors. After what seems like an eternity of crying myself to the point of exhaustion, she is able to soothe me. I am then told the first significant lie of my life: that she will follow me after, once our family reaches the airfield, that the ambulance is to return to bring her to us. That day, I experience my first great loss. I hold onto her promise for dear life, refusing to let her go. She was my everything, my childhood, and her loss would leave me emotionally stoic. From then on, I would remember to limit my range of acceptable emotions, maintain distance, not form any attachment so strong as to risk further loss.
The back of the ambulance is hot and airless, but we are told to keep quiet anyway. We children are riding blind, hidden underneath blankets, mapping the route in our minds by feel: a braille system of craters and bumps on the road. The vehicle shakes and moves haltingly, sometimes coming to a standstill. Outside voices are louder when the ambulance is no longer moving. Travel documents and visas no longer matter. The embassy is impenetrable. Our only means of exiting Saigon is to be directly airlifted by helicopters from Tan Son Nhat International Airport. The ambulance is redirected further into the heart of cacophony.
Outside, possessions are strewn around the streets; swirling meaningless paper money, lost shoes, hats, and all manner of personal property lose their function and context in the chaos of desertion. As the ambulance trundles closer to the airport, my parents witness the runways being bombed. How can we leave now? Besides, my nanny, chị Quý, is still not here. The panic and frustration of helplessness makes my anger—the rage of a child—fiercer than the destruction in front of us. The ambulance discharges us all and turns back toward the broken roads for its salvage mission to bring a few more souls to hypothetical safety.
When we reach the airfield destination by foot, it is even louder up close: more bullets, more explosions, more screaming. I am fascinated how all matter can be consumed by the phenomenon of smoke, of perpetual burning. My focus becomes singular, closer, narrower. After registering the backdrop of the chaos, my perspective has shifted only to the minutiae of things closest to my field of vision: the intensity of colors, the exact position and pressure of my mother's hand gripping me tightly, and the presence of only her in the crowd. I can no longer think about what I've left behind, my world has been reduced to the Now. If I let go of the promise, the
memory, I know the idea of my nanny will cease to exist; she too will evaporate in the smoke. My breathing accelerates and I am gasping for a breath of clean air. We wait squatting on the ground, huddled together for hours amidst the cacophony of sounds, mechanical noises blended with explosions, screams, and violently barked orders, all the while just waiting. The daylight is fading, a dusky haze of sunset blends with the smoldering city ablaze, where no one can extinguish the burning anguish of its inevitable downfall. Someone points to us, and my mother says, “Yes, we are a family!” They ask questions, while those in charge count people, trying their best to keep families together. “How many?” We have the right number of members in our family to go.
Though I become dissociated in the fugue state of watching myself go through the motions of being evacuated, I also notice and read the other silent faces who are in the same conversation with fear. I vaguely register a woman pushing past me to get on the helicopter, when she tugs the buttons off of my dress. I remember the pressure and pain from my mother's hand grasping mine and my siblings' wrists all together so tightly that it leaves bright red marks and starts to bruise. It's a beat of silence, then the cold, the immense drastic temperature drop of being lifted upwards. I feel a rush from intense heat to the blast of cold in the open copter, in my inadequate attire, then the panic of my realization that it's too late, chị Quý will not be coming with us.
“Looking back, I remember an intensely physical sensation the French call l'appel du vide—‘the call of the void’—a powerful urge to be enveloped in the ocean…”
Hurtling onto the uncaring metal floor of the ascending aircraft, I vomit my motion sickness and inarticulate fear into a tin. I still recall the act of kindness of the old man who gave the tin to us. I feel gratitude for this simple act; he gives me back a momentary sense of humanity. I had never flown in a helicopter, going straight up towards an abstract color field, the chaotic blur of saturated feelings: cold, hunger, anxiety, fear, terror, excitement, and guilt entwined together like a ball of twisted yarn, one that has taken years for me to unravel.
Our whirling metal dragonfly descends onto the deck of a giant warship. To a child having never seen an aircraft carrier, it seems like a fragment of floating highway. We are being moved once again like loads of random cargo, parceled off into segments down metal stairs, entering the belly of the mechanical beast underneath, as if plunging into a sci-fi universe where the alien spaceship is now a reality. Later on, I would learn that my spaceship also has a name: the USS Midway.
We are all packed in tightly, to make room for as many souls as possible. Time passes as we are physically examined by soldiers and crew members in uniform. My mother grasps onto her meager possessions and clutches her children to her even tighter. We children in unfamiliar surroundings are coaxed out of our fears for a little while, eat little sandwiches of foreign food, which my senses would always remember the taste of. We walk onto a rectangular floating space with three sides, the soldiers are closing the fourth side, and we are now on another form of transport. Moving slowly away from the burning city, we head out toward the infinite nothingness of the sea. I can only feel the cold now, coughing, clinging closer to my mother. She is holding me as I gasp for air; an asthma attack forces me to focus solely on my breathing. But I am still an observer: it's raining now and drops of rainwater drown the salt in my tears, mixed with a taste of ash in my mouth, trickling down into the sea. We are all saturated. It's evening, the dark sky illuminated by the bright artificial glow from the deck of the spaceship, throwing giant shadows, all the danger of the moment cueing our senses, and somehow we endure it; even when our spirit could no longer, our bodies still pick up and carry on.
Looking back, I remember an intensely physical sensation the French call l'appel du vide—“the call of the void”—a powerful urge to be enveloped in the ocean, in shades of clear colorlessness, a mesmerizing pull to step forward with outstretched hands, only to be jarred back again from the shimmering abyss by the immediacy of noises and smells of all the unwashed bodies packed together on the deck of this floating island. We were lined up to be hosed down during a routine group washing. I felt on my skin the great difference in scale: the size of a child against the seemingly boundless body of water.
Today, in the new country I call Brooklyn, I sometimes feel that visceral appel du vide, a panicky sensation more than a memory. I live with packed bags even when there are no plans to travel. My packed bag is what I believe, rationally or not, will prepare me for the next escape. While emergency preparedness kits typically include flashlights, protein bars, water bottles, maybe a thermal blanket, the items on my list differ. In my bag is that same handful of pictures that my mother packed.
Tati Nguyễn is a visual artist, storyteller, filmmaker, and arts educator; her multicultural perspective continues to shape her work. She holds an MFA from Cal Arts and a BFA from Cooper Union and currently works as the creative media specialist at Pratt Institute.