Andrew Lam reflects on the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War and what that meant for his family.
When I was 11 years old, my family and I fled Vietnam when Saigon fell and resettled in San Francisco. I grew up to become a writer but the best thing I can say about war, half a century ago later, is that the horror and the hurt do fade with time, especially if you work through them. Yet for those of us who were profoundly touched by it, the war never truly ended.
After hundreds of essays and four books, after participating in a couple of documentaries about Vietnam, I still wake up in tears on some early dawn, fresh from a vivid dream of a long-lost world. Fifty years have passed and still some part of me remains that 11-year-old standing alone in the refugee camp in Guam listening to the radio announcing the fall of Saigon, still mourning a lost country, a robbed childhood.
Our lives in America were thus contradictory. Weddings, college graduations, new homes, European vacations — the American dreams realized – were peppered with the tragedy of Vietnam, a captured uncle in a re-education camp and friends who disappeared in the new economic zone.
For years, the loss of family and friends of Vietnam owned us nightly. My father remade himself in America but his conversation always veered back to a time when he was still fighting that war, when life has meaning. Over time, I came to accept that my American optimism will always be burdened by memories of a lost country.