The air was thick with salt and leaving, the kind that clings to your sunburn skin at the end of beach summers. On July 4, 1977, we stepped off the plane in America, 16 hours from Hong Kong shores, our bodies exhausted with the weight of a sea we had just crossed. My father, who inspected roads and bridges for the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, carried the scent of diesel and survival. He charted our escape from Vietnam, a nearly two-year plan drafted in whispers and fear. As a former South Vietnamese Marine officer, he was part fugitive and part scavenger. For months, he stealthily searched for two crucial items in Saigon’s market stalls — a sea compass and a bidirectional radio. My parents bore their tasks in silence and apart. My mother shepherded the four of us to a small fishing village to procure the vital sea vessel while hoarding rationed fuel in sand ditches for our inevitable departure.
It was Christmas morning 1976, when we slipped into the fog, the kind so dense it swallowed the world two feet ahead. Saigon had fallen on April 30, 1975, and with it, our lives. The communists came, their boots heavy with the promise of “reeducation” for men like my father, who aided the Americans. We fled in a boat that creaked like a prayer, the fog shielded and wrapped us in its mercy.
My dad was stoic throughout the night during our harrowing sea escape. By some stroke of fate, he’d scavenged a U.S. Navy manual from the abandoned shelves of a friend. It charted 30 years of tempests in the South China Sea. The monsoon rhythms showed a remarkable pattern — a fleeting calm followed every few days of monsoon — just enough time, he calculated, to weave our way toward Singapore. BBC radio warned the sea storms were deadly, but my dad graduated in the top of his class, his sea confidence was unwavering. The sea had its own plans when we left communist waters. Thai pirates hunted us for an hour, but their long pursuit was futile. My dad credits the sturdy Japanese motor that graced our seafaring vessel. His hidden rifle remained untouched throughout. Fate pushed our hopes toward Indonesian shores, where Natuna Island officials graciously restocked and refueled our supplies, before pushing us onward.
My father charted our escape from Vietnam, a nearly two-year plan drafted in whispers and fear.
Many years later, my mother’s voice unspools our escape story. It’s 2019, we huddle in a weekend rental near Glass Beach for my father’s 87th birthday. I hold a video camera, capturing her words as if they could stitch her to me forever. She speaks of the Kuching refugee camp, that half-world in Malaysia where we slept on long tables, formerly used for sorting and cleaning the daily shrimp catch. It was formerly a fishing factory, where about 100 other families also took refuge. Six months we waited at this Red Cross shelter, among the ghosts of fish and fishermen, for the word asylum to mean America, not Australia or Canada or France. Those countries did call for us and my father was captivated by Australia’s open fields, but my mother held fast to the promise of the American dream. To ensure she would never be exiled again, my mother would only accept political asylum from America — whose liberty beacon shone brightest and strongest for her, above all others. And finally, in the seventh month, the call from America came. My dad’s many accolades from his six years with the U.S. Navy proved priceless.
For 48 years, my father carried a sorrow that lived in the silences between his words. She was a German Shepherd named Net, gifted to my dad by the U.S. Navy when they knew their departure was impending. Net was whip smart and courageously protective. When we stole away in the dark and fear of Christmas morning, we could not take Net with us. My father knew her protective bark could betray us to the patrols slicing through the dark. Twice she was left behind by those who loved her — leaving deep scars of her unknown fate. Like many others, she never made it back home. He never spoke of her, not in the Kuching Red Cross camp, nor in the American years that followed. But in his Alzheimer’s twilight, when memory unraveled uncontrollably, her name spilled from him in lamentations. “I wanted to bring her with us and regret every day that I did not.” I saw my father cry only twice: once when my mother passed in 2021 and now. He thought of her often, he said, her memory was always lingering; a man who built roads but could not pave a way to bring her back to her American home. I always thought my dad hated dogs, because he never gave a glance or a stroke to the dogs we had growing up. Now that I understand my father a little better — he was just too loyal and refused to replace her in his memory.
These video frames of my mother’s face are lanterns in the dark. Her voice, soft as ash, tells me how the fog saved us, how dreams fulfilled are ninety-nine percent sweat and blood, and one percent faith. Her words stay long in my sacred troves — you must have both to overcome insurmountable odds and clutch your destiny. I watch her eyes carrying the sea, and I think: to leave is to love what you cannot keep.
We landed in America on a day of flags and firecrackers, but for us, freedom was the weight of a new language, heavy with possibility, sharp with loss.