When the Vietnamese government sent word last summer that they would allow Lam Ton to visit his native country, it made at least two people happy. The first was Ton, the owner of Chicago’s Mekong restaurants and a veteran of the South Vietnamese army. He left his country by helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy in 1975, and he’s wanted to go back to visit ever since. “I missed my family so much,” he says. “I also missed my friends, and my country.”
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Aronson met Ton about four years ago, when he and his wife went to eat at the Uptown Mekong and got to talking to its owner. “Lam wanted to go even then, but the government was too closed,” Aronson says. “There was also a lot of fear”–about repercussions both here (from vets, the families of MIAs, and local Vietnamese) and in Vietnam. But should he get to make the trip, Ton liked the idea of a TV crew coming along.
“Then about two years ago, a Gorbachev-like Party chief came in, and they began to talk about opening up the country and changing it,” Aronson says. He and Ton flew to New York to visit the Permanent Mission of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the country’s only diplomatic outpost in the United States. But again they were denied permission to visit.
One of the first stops on the trip was the office of Nguyen Co Thach, minister of foreign affairs and Vietnam’s third highest ranking official, where Ton and the minister discussed economics. “I told him he should give the people freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and freedom of enterprise,” says Ton. “Not until such freedoms are granted will drastic changes be made in Vietnam, I said.”
Aronson says the locals didn’t seem put off by the cameras or the American faces; the crew was greeted warmly almost everywhere. When they reached Hoa Bin, the small town at Vietnam’s southern tip where Ton’s family lives, a huge crowd had gathered to welcome them.
“Some of the people who fled the country . . . hold a grudge against Communism,” Ton says. “Before I landed in Hanoi, I was still holding the grudge. But the leaders were willing to admit they made a lot of mistakes. That touched me.”
