When he was 14 years old, Hung Nguyen left his godfather’s farm and set out alone for a town some 100 miles away at the southernmost tip of Vietnam. He had heard a rumor that people who wanted to escape to America were leaving from there secretly in boats, and he was determined to go with them. He knew that his American father, if he was still alive, probably didn’t know he existed, but he wanted to find him if he could. And he was already sure that America, not Vietnam, was his country.
In 1970 or ’71 an accident with a kerosene lamp burned a part of the house, destroying all the papers that proved who his father was, including the envelopes with his address. His mother had sent his father just one letter. The only clues left to his father’s identity were the few photographs his mother had kept in her wallet. On the back of one she had written his father’s name and social security number. Later, Hung had the photos laminated in plastic. They’re musty, and their color has faded. In one, his father stands alone behind a car that’s parked in an American driveway. In another, he’s in uniform outside the Vung Tau house with another American soldier who’s holding a little Vietnamese girl. In a third, he stands behind Hung’s mother, his arms at her side, her head leaning back against his chest.
The family treated Hung like another son, and Hung loved them, especially his godfather. But the family understood when he told them he wanted to leave Vietnam. “They want let me go because they want I come to my country in America. They hated the communists.”
He bought food from the street vendors, but he usually couldn’t afford much and sometimes couldn’t afford anything. “I not have a lot of meat. Fish sometimes. Usually I take bread, not rice, because bread is cheap.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Soon after he and his mother arrived in the country, Riem decided he was going back to the city. “I lived out there, and I don’t like. So I come back to Saigon and take care of myself. In Saigon it’s easier–you can make money and live easier than in the country. I think so. I always wanted to live in Saigon, I didn’t want to live anywhere else in Vietnam.” To avoid the police, who would have sent him back to the country, he kept changing where he stayed at night, sometimes sleeping on the street, sometimes at a friend’s, sometimes in the house his mother had bought after they left Vung Tau. He was only ten years old, but he too found people in the market who needed help and he quickly worked himself up to selling cigarettes. His mother soon followed him to Saigon and began trundling goods back out to the country to sell.
