Transcript of Oral History Interview with Vuong Huy Thuan
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Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project Copyright Notice: © 2019 Minnesota Historical Society Researchers are liable for any infringement. For more information, visit www.mnhs.org/copyright. Version 3 August 20, 2018 Vương Huy Thuần Narrator Trần Thị Minh Phước Interviewer November 25, 2018 Minneapolis, Minnesota Vương Huy Thuần -TV Trần Thị Minh Phước -PT PT: My name is Trần Thị Minh Phước. I’m going to conduct an interview with Vương Huy Thuần in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s part of a Minnesota Historical Society Vietnam War Era Oral History Project. Today is Sunday, November 25, 2018. Good afternoon em. TV: Good afternoon chị. PT: How are you today? TV: I’m good. Thank you! PT: First I would like to thank you for accepting our interview and first, do you have any question regarding this interview? TV: No question so far. I’m just glad to be here and thank you for inviting me to participate in this project. PT: Thank you. Now, let’s start the interview. Please state and spell your full name. TV: My full name is Thuan Huy Vuong. The last name is V U O N G, first name T H U A N, middle name is H U Y. PT: So, when you state exactly the way our Vietnamese state our name. How do you say? TV: Vương Huy Thuần. PT: Lovely name. Do you have any meaning to your name? TV: The last name is, according to my dad, my great-great-grandfather came from China. Vương is like a Vietnamese name but originated from China and Thuần is like, according to my dad when I was born, by the way I was born premature. I was just seven months. But anyway, 28 according to my dad when I was born, the nurse in the hospital said this was going to be a wild one so that why he named me Thuần. Wow so I can calm down and take it easy, something like that. PT: How’s about the middle name, Huy? Does he say anything? TV: Huy is like a family name every other brother has the same middle name. PT: Yes, you know, my family have all of us a middle name Minh. TV: Yeah, that is common. PT: Yeah, right. Tell me a little bit about your childhood. Where were you born and what was your daily life like? TV: I was born in 1970 in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam, Việt Nam. It was known as the capital of the South Vietnam back then to the Vietnam War. My parents’ house was about four to five miles from the capital back then. And that was where I was born I don’t remember much about my childhood but I had a very happy early childhood, an early childhood. PT: Wonderful, I am glad to hear about the special you were premature right? How many brothers and sisters do you have? TV: I have two brothers and two sisters. I am the second youngest. I have a younger sister. We— grew up together basically and we came to the US together. PT: So like you were born in 1970, so on April 1975, you were about five years old. Did you remember anything about your childhood at that time, five years old? TV: I remember particularly one event because our house was very close to Tân Sơn Nhất airport at the time. It was the most major airport in Việt Nam at the time and I remember there was some day as a kid, I had a lot of commotion. I saw a lot of airplanes on the sky. People run and hundreds of thousands people run on the streets. A lot of explosions here and there and I remember as a kid, I was a little mad because my mom wouldn’t let me go outside to play. She locked us inside the fence in the house and occasionally yelled at us to go inside the house. I thought it was fun but I later realized that was the evacuation going on when the fall of Sài Gòn on April 30, 1975. At the time, I didn’t know the scale of it. Now I am glad that my parents kept us safe. PT: Did your family live like in Tổng Tham Mưu, near Tân Sơn Nhất or no? TV: No, we had our private house near Tân Sơn Nhất airport. PT: So, maybe you were young but what was your favorite place when you were young? TV: My favorite was home. I was pretty much a very shy kid and I like to go out and hang out and play with the other young kids on the street, in the neighborhood. And then that I remember as a kid, I don’t have any particular place because we didn’t travel a lot, we couldn’t afford to. So home was my most favorite place for me. 29 PT: Of course, right? Home sweet home. TV: Yeah PT: Where did your parents do at the time? Can you tell me about where were they born? TV: My mom and dad came from— they were born and raised in Cần Thơ, a big major city in Southern part of Vietnam at the time. According to my dad and my mom, my dad, my grandfather was a mailman, and my mom’s father was like a manager of the farmers in the area, something like that. Both of my grandmothers were just housewives, which was very typical, very common back then. They grew up in that area and then both sides, my mom and dad, they both had ten brothers and sisters which were very common back then. PT: The more the merrier. TV: The more, the merrier (laughs), yes. So where my dad grew up along with his brothers and sisters, they moved out of Cần Thơ and went to Saigon for better education. And they were in school and college over there and then the war broke out and they just did what they did back then. PT: Thank you and what memories do you have of your parents? TV: I don’t remember a lot as a little kid. I just remember when I was a little kid younger, before the Fall of Sài Gòn on April 30 1975, we typically had a good childhood. I have— according to my siblings, I was a spoiled kid, whatever I wanted, and my dad just gave in. So I remember I was a happy kid, I didn’t have anything to worry about. So when the Fall of Sài Gòn on April 30, 1975, when that happened, I didn’t know much about it, I was five years old. But I knew some major happened, some major changed of life because I could see the atmosphere, by the look, I could see the look, the worry look on my parents’ face. The quiet, there was no laughter in the house. And then, a couple week later, my dad went away. I didn’t know what for until later I was told that he and his comrades were brought up to be shipped out to re-education camps for many years. PT: We can save this question for later on for your daddy in re-education camp. So— now you mention about your brothers were in college right? Do you have any special— memory about your siblings even when you were five years old? TV: They—we were just normal kid. There were nothing special about us. My oldest brothers, they went to school and my sister too and we all did. Nothing special. The most thing that was struck me was that we were very poor. Every day we were worried about what to eat the next day. But other than that, I think my mom managed to give us a good education back then. PT: Thank you. I agree. Especially your daddy was sent to re-education camp. Right? TV: Yes. PT: So now, you talked earlier a little bit about the Fall of Sài Gòn on April 30. Do you remember anything the last day when you were five years old, right? You saw people were evacuating and what else? 30 TV: I would like to mention a little bit about the Vietnam War back in 1968. That was Tết Offensive that happened in Vietnam. Many years later, I went to the US, I learned from the history channel and my dad and his people that there was an event happened in Huế and when the communist North took over Huế, the central part of V, they rounded up all the government people, military people that worked for the South. They considered collaborators of the South and they considered them as traitors and they executed them in the neighborhood in front of your family. When the South and the Americans took Huế back, we found a lot of mass grave and because of that it affected my dad. So when—I later learned from him that when April 30, when the communist took over Sài Gòn, he was worried about it, he thought he was getting arrested, get executed in front of his family, neighborhood just like it happened years before. He thought about killing us all and committed suicide. He didn’t talk about this until many, many years later, not even to us but I overheard him saying this to his people later on, many years later when they go to America and once a while they went to meeting, reunion meeting and they shared the stories and I learned about that.