50 years ago today Saigon fell, and that changed the trajectory of my family's life, and marked the beginning of the Viet diaspora. We were actually supposed to get off the ship we had boarded a few days before (because 6-week-old Sissy was dangerously ill, sleeping on an open ship deck; another infant - older than her, younger than me - had already died, and had a burial at sea - tossed overboard), but once South Vietnam fell, the ship wouldn't stop and headed out of newly Communist Vietnamese waters. Drinking water was rationed, so the first word 13-month-old me learned and spoke was "drink."
An article about our family and our American sponsors was published in a local paper close to 7.5 months later, when we were relatively safe, after the refugee camps, after the rebuffed attempt to settle in Tunisia, after temporary holding on an American military base. A photo shows me on Papa Rooster's lap, looking out at the camera, in serious toddler mode; Sissy is on Mama Hen's lap, chubby and cute, hand stuck in her mouth, being cooed over by the president of the ladies' auxiliary club that spearheaded our resettlement. Papa Rooster clipped out the article and put it into an album. He also has the centerfold photo essay published in a national magazine one year later marking the first anniversary of "Ngày Mất Nước" (the "Day the Country Was Lost"), where he happened to spy his platoon mates sitting among a large group, on the ground, at a jungle re-education camp.
If today you know what phở or bánh mì or cà phê sữa đá or summer rolls are, or have used the bottle of sriracha with the rooster on the label and the green cap, it is because 50 years ago people who lost a war and feared (rightly) retaliation against them by the incoming Communists fled the only land most of them had ever known and became refugees, leaving their families and ties and place in the world.
