I. I was born in Saigon, on June 1, 1960. Both of my parents were from North Vietnam. They both moved South in 1955, along with about 1 million mostly Catholic Vietnamese. My parents were Buddhists.
After the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, both Vietnam and France signed the Geneva Peace Accords. Under the terms of the Geneva Accords, the country was temporarily divided at the seventeenth parallel. A national election was supposed to be held in 1956 for a president of Vietnam.
Vietnam agreed to this temporary division to allow the French its dignity, and at the urging of its allies: Russia and China. Both of these countries did not want to provoke the United States, a France's ally during the war against Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh led the Viet Minh in the war for independence against the French. He was already a national hero, and would have won the national election by a landslide.
But the history of Vietnam is a long and sorrowful one. The war came upon my generation like many previous generations of Vietnamese in the past. This war was always a backdrop of my childhood years in Vietnam. Once again, we were invaded by the most powerful nation of its time--the United States of America. But unlike other wars of the past, the enemy this time was particularly cruel and inhuman.
II. In 1956, the Eisenhower's administration of the United States installed a counter revolutionary government in South Vietnam, with Ngo Dinh Diem as the head of the government. Diem prevented the national election from taking place in 1956 according to the Geneva Accords. Instead, he rigged an election for the presidency of South Vietnam, with himself receiving more votes than the total number of registered voters. In 1959, Diem's government began to put all suspected Communists in prisons without a trial and subjected them to tortures, with the approval of the United States government. Diem, a devoted Catholic, declared Catholicism to be the official religion of Vietnam, and began to persecute and oppress the Buddhists in South Vietnam. As a selfless gesture of protest against religious persecution, a monk by the name of Thich Quang Duc immolated himself at a busy intersection in Saigon in 1963.
Venerable Thich Quang DucUp until 1960, North Vietnam still wanted to unify Vietnam through political means. However, as the Diem's government intensified its attack on political dissidents, North Vietnam approved the creation of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam to overthrow the Diem's government through both political and arms struggle. Thus, the war in Vietnam began in earnest the year I was born.
III. I was born to a poor family. We are a big family, even by Vietnamese standard. I have two older brothers, one younger brother, and three younger sisters. I am the third oldest child. Unlike my relatives who held high military and political positions with the government of South Vietnam, my father was a low ranking policeman for the government of Saigon.
My father is a very intelligent man, but he didn't have the opportunity to go to college. My father and my uncle were raised by my grandmother, a single mother. I don't think my relatives on my father's side were very well to do in North Vietnam prior to moving to South Vietnam in 1955.
I have never met my mother's side of the family. She was the only one in her family to move south. I think she would have stayed in North Vietnam if it wasn't for being married to my father. I do know that my mother's family was wealthy in North Vietnam.
It is still a mystery to me as to why my parents would move south in 1955. My relatives told me that the North Vietnamese would torture and kill land owners, but my relatives were neither wealthy nor land owners in North Vietnam.
