Thirty-five years ago today, Saigon fell.
In the New York Times today, Linh Dinh writes:
DEPENDING on which side you were on, Saigon either fell on April 30, 1975, or it was liberated. Inside Vietnam, the day is marked as Liberation Day — but outside, among the Vietnamese refugees, it is called Deep Resentment Day. (The resentment is not just over losing a war, but also a country.)
The Associated Press details the celebrations in Vietnam, marking the communist victory.
Communist Vietnam marked the 35th anniversary of the end of its war Friday with a dramatic re-enactment of the day North Vietnamese tanks smashed through the gates of the former Presidential Palace and ousted the U.S.-backed South Vietnam government.
The celebration took place as signs of the emerging market economy are everywhere in the city once known as Saigon and communist banners now compete with corporate logos.
A crowd of 50,000, many waving red and gold communist flags, lined the parade route, which was adorned with a massive poster of Ho Chi Minh, the father of Vietnam's revolution.
The proceedings brought back vivid memories for Do Thi Thanh Thuy, 49, who watched the tanks roll by her home on April 30, 1975, when she was a junior high student. She and her neighbors on the outskirts of the former Saigon ran into the streets to cheer.
"When I saw those tanks, I felt so happy," said Thuy, who carried a red and gold flag adorned with communism's hammer and a sickle symbol. "The South had been liberated, the country was united, and the war was over."
The fall of Saigon marked the official end of the Vietnam War and the decade-long U.S. campaign against communism in Southeast Asia. The conflict claimed some 58,000 American lives and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese.
The war left divisions that would take years to heal as many former South Vietnamese soldiers were sent to communist re-education camps and hundreds of thousands of their relatives fled the country.
Friday's celebration featured patriotic songs, some of them put to a pulsing disco beat. And in the day's re-enactment of the war's end, everyone in the former Saigon greeted the troops with jubilation.
...In his anniversary speech, Lt. Gen. Le Thanh Tam, the chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Veterans Association, warned that Vietnam must be wary of "hostile forces who use democracy and human rights as a pretext to sabotage Vietnam."
"We affirm that the Communist Party of Vietnam is the only party which has the prestige to lead the Vietnamese people to stable development and international integration," Tam said.
From the San Jose Mercury News:
The first inkling Kim Lien Pham had that the war was finally ending came when she found the gold bars her mother had sewed into her underwear.
Growing up in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, the 7-year-old had turned a blissfully blind eye to the blood being shed on battlefields across her war-weary country. Until the spring of 1975, when children began finding bullion in their briefs, many remained largely untouched by the fighting.
"But I knew something was going on when my mom began exchanging money for gold bars," she recalled recently. "My father said, 'Any day now, if I come home and say, "Run," you run.' "
Thirty-five years ago tomorrow, they ran.
Eventually Pham — who changed her name to Melissa — settled in San Jose, which has the largest Vietnamese population of any American city. Now 43 and herself the mother of two children, Pham is yet another golden product of the American immigrant dream, a member of what is among the largest diasporas in modern history — the Vietnamese "boat people."
Like many Vietnamese-Americans around the South Bay, on Friday, Pham will once again mark the fall of Saigon. But unlike those for whom the suddenness of the South's surrender and the subsequent brutality of the North's authoritarian regime have made "Black April" a somber annual remembrance, time and distance have not made Pham long to return to her homeland. During her only visit since the family fled Vietnam, she found the country depressing. "The whole time I was thinking, 'I'm so glad I'm not living here,' " she said.
...Melissa Pham's passage to freedom began the day Saigon fell aboard a South Vietnamese navy vessel, the most surprising aspect of which was that South Vietnam had a navy. "We had no clothes except what was on our backs," said Pham, who had two gold bars sewed into her underwear in case of emergency. "My father had filled a gas can with water and people were trying to steal it, but they couldn't because my father had a gun. That's how you defended your water on the boat. It was scary."
After drifting for days while "packed like sardines" on the boat, Pham hung from her father's neck as he climbed aboard a barge on the high seas. After stops in Guam and Arkansas, her family was sponsored by two churches in Milwaukee, where she and her siblings learned to speak English from Catholics. She learned it so well that she later had to relearn Vietnamese by watching dubbed Chinese kung-fu movies.
"My father said we would go with whatever religion would help us out; it didn't matter what they believed," said Pham, a Buddhist.
By Christmas of 1975, an estimated 130,000 Vietnamese refugees had been sponsored by churches and families who provided them with new homes in the United States. According to an article in Vietnam magazine, an American publication, the only state that initially resisted the influx of boat people was California, where Jerry Brown was then in his first term as governor. Brown's administration reportedly attempted to prevent planes loaded with refugees from landing at Travis Air Force Base.
Brown received a stinging rebuke from White House photographer David Hume Kennerly, who had photographed the evacuation. According to the article, Kennerly said Brown had "no compassion for your fellow human beings."
Four years later, while positioning himself for a presidential bid, Brown created a task force to help boat people find homes in the state. A spokesman for his current campaign for governor, Sterling Clifford, declined to comment on Brown's previous positions.
[Melissa Pham] returned to Saigon during the 1990s and came home disillusioned. Pham went back with her parents, visiting Saigon — which she refuses to call Ho Chi Minh City — and Dalat, a once-beloved retreat in the Central Highlands. "Dalat was like a dream when we were children, foggy and mysterious," Pham said. "Now it's stark and bright, with no trees. And there goes your dream."
Interesting that California, under Gov. Jerry Brown, was the only state unwilling to accept the Vietnamese refugees.
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