This is how my father taught me how NOT to hate all communists - despite his 5 years in arbitrary captivity by the very same communists in «re-education» / forced labour camps

I will tell you this story - because it needs to be told in these polarized times in history we are currently living.

Norwegian with Asian looks

• My parents were boat people from Vietnam. They fled the country after the war.

This is ususally what I answer when people ask, and wonder how I look so distinctly Asian when I say I come from Norway. There is a certain mismatch between my looks and my country of perceived tall, blue eyed blonds, that sparks people´s curiosity.

The dramatic boat ride

What happens next is that I usually have to tell this jaw dropping story of how my father five years after the war, built a boat, brought my mum, my brother, who was then just 6 years, and my sister who was 6 months old on this boat and left Vietnam. Not knowing where to go, except that they took the route less ridden by pirates at seas, but on the other hand - had plenty of tyfoons and bad weather conditions.

They got out of course due to a tyfoon, drifted at seas- and then, we, and I mean they, were randomly picked up by a Norwegian oil tanker, and thus were saved from the sea and certain death. At the time they were saved - they had already been drifting several days and nights without a managable sail, no running engine… no anker, and no other way to stear the boat. My mother had lost her breastmilk in terror and my sister had a bad diarrea.

At this point in my storytelling, people usually gasp, and say - wow! Their eyes grow bigger and then, they let out a relieved sigh, somehow also in aw and not so little respect for my father and my family´s journey.

But then - I, if I feel like it, go on and tell them the story of why my parents left their country, their family, their roots, their food (!) and the tropical warmth. I mean - the Vietnamese kicked out the French with the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu, and then the American imperialists - right? So why the hell would they want to leave a free country?

And this is when the story gets complicated.

Why flee a free country?

Vietnamese people are not migratory people. Quite the opposite. They are deeply rooted and connected to their land and their origins. They have endured pain, war and what not for centuries. First fighting the Chinese roughly thousand years back and forth, then the French roughly hundred years, then the Japanese for some time and then - the Americans. Oh, and Cambodians somewhere in there as well. Under none of those horrible circumstances did you ever see the Vietnamese massively leave their country like they did many years after the «good guys», the communists, the fighter of the country´s independence had taken «their country back» from the Americans.

I am not a historian, but will remind you of a few events-  the Americans officially pulled out their troops from Vietnam in 1973, after the signing of the peace agreements in Paris. Ten years before, the world had seen the immolation of buddhist munks on the streets in protests. The CIA accepted the coup on the president of South Vietnam -Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother…. and Kennedy was assasinated the same year. Saigon, my parents hometown, and the capital of the south fell ten years after - in 1975, two full years after the American troops pulled out - and the Americans were long done losing their young. There is a collective and wanted amnesia connected to those two years of actual civil war bewtween the north and the south Vietnam. The fighting among brothers of the same family.

My parents happened to marry in april 1975 - 10 days before Saigon fell. My father was studying medicine, before he had to become a police officer of the south instead. My mother got pregnant shortly after their marriage.

As a brilliant student, all he wanted was to become a doctor - before he had to become a police officer instead to dodge military service and certain death. The move to study to become a police officer might have saved him from military service, but cost him his freedom and youth after the war. The «winning party» made him work, work, and work - and starve. They isolated the prisoners from their families, asked for forced confessions on acts of war they never committed, and moved them around  to various camps so they could forge no friendships. Being a police officer was enough to give you years of prison- I mean re-education for no reason. He sat along with dissidents, artists, teachers and the like - and the worst - the ones with glasses were often beaten.

What?? yes.

Re-education

I grew up in Norway, touching my father´s two long scars on his stomach. He would lift up his t-shirt, and we would touch his long scars running from his stomach, slightly crossed and down past his waist, while he would gently scratch them, as playing on a guitar. When he laughed, his scars would bulge and move with his laughter. From the side of the long scars, there were small «stars», where he had been stitched.

My father learnt harmony in prison. He build his own guitar in prison, doing the math and algorithms to get the right distance between the bands. Creativity, music and nature keeps you alive - that is what he told me. He smuggled green morning glory to his comrades, in the same barrels they carried the human feces of the prisoners. But he also told me the story that has saved me from polarization and dehumanizing other people since.

They were ill fed in the jungle. At one point his knees were bigger than his thighs. Honestly - he looked like a concentration camp survivor even several years after he was freed. He remembers the flat, dead mice in the bag of Chinese rice, they had to be taken out, before they cooked the rice, full of sand and no nutritions. Shortly after they were taken to prison, a lot of people fell ill. My father had to do surgery in order to survive. First he had to remove his appendix. His body was so week, so thin, his bones stucking out like sticks, lying on the hard wood bed was so painful he had to switch hands, lying on his hands to avoid the pain. He begged to be laid on a stretcher. The fabric would hopefully not cut into his bones.

When the wound would make his gut grow into his stomach, they needed to open up and cut him up again. The nurse who worked in the camp, pitied him, and his unborn child when he saw a picture of my pregnant mum, that my mother somehow had managed to send him. The picture was kept in my fathers shirt pocket, close to his chest. The nurse told my father to write a letter, and have family members smuggle pencillin to him, to save him from bacterial infections that would cause the worst risk for his life.

My father wrote a letter to my mum, with shaken hands, and not much hope for life.

My auntie 5, bless her soul - lived not so far away from this first camp he stayed in at that time. She and the rest of the family gathered the money, pencillion and the food, and also cigarettes and had them smuggled in. The sigarette smoke and occasional oranges that were sent into prison revield the smuggle with its smell, and the nurse was sent away.  The nurse would accept no money - but my father ow him his life.

My parents and my fathers family tried to find this communist nurse many years later to thank him by announcing for his name on Vietnamese TV - but in vain.

So what now?

Communists are not just communists. They are humans. Extremists are not just extremists. They all have their stories and are also humans. Yes,we need to put them firmly in jail, like we did in Norway after the terror, massacre and killing of the 22nd of July. But it was after a due process and a trial. People here in my country still believe in justice.

You, and we, and I always have the choice to choose humanity. To choose kindness and compassion. Even at the risk of our own life.

Some of these communists threw my father in the river for their own pleasure, with his hands and feets tied. It was not because they were communists. It was because they were bored, hungry and isolated as much as their prisoners. Some of them asked them to steal food and share with them. Some of them enjoyd music and beautifully carved things in tin and aluminium. Some of them would beat the shit out of them, lock them into connex boxes, and not consider them human.

But the story my father chose to tell us, and wanted us to remember was not of all the acts of cruelty alone - but of this nurse who saved his life - and therefore also mine.

I try to live my life in gratitude through the times we are living. I try to live in civility and humanity. And this is what I am telling you. Stay kind. Stay soft. Stay fierce to your own and other people´s humanity.

And oh- just on a last note. My fathers grandchildren are French. I asked him during the course of my research for my book …this:

-Ba, what do you think of me being married to a French guy, after all the French did in Vietnam? I mean the exploitation. The violence, the colonialization?

-That has nothing to do with him. Period. Mai - with time enemies can become friends. Look at France and Germany now. Look at Japan and USA.

Onwards.

Please do not hold on to hate. Let go, and let the next generation flow.

I believe in fighting for justice and boundaries. But I also believe in letting hatred go.

In peace and with peace, and full freedom of speech -

Mai

This is the picture of my pregnant. mother that saved my fathers life