When I was about six years old, my oldest brother, who attended university in Saigon, became the chairman of the Hoa (Chinese) student resistance group.[1] They passed out fliers and led student protests against the French colonization of Vietnam. Ever since the sixteenth century, the French had commissioned countless Catholic missionaries, mainly to the North. They eventually modernized our country and built schools to educate the people, but they also exploited the Vietnamese in other ways. For this reason, many of the students, like my brother, protested their influence. So, the French seized my brother along with his vice chairman and tortured them both. The vice chairman was a young woman who was in love with my brother and also passionate for the cause. She took the entirety of the blame for organizing the student protests and was executed by the French.
One afternoon, my father heard some terrible news from a villager with a relative in Saigon. The man showed my father a Saigon newspaper which listed troublemakers who were sentenced to be exiled by the French. My father saw my oldest brother, Tran Phuoc Chuong, was on that list and fainted on the spot. I had been lying on the bed beside my mother, when I jolted upright to watch the servants revitalize my father. After that, my mother also promptly fainted. We feared that even if the French did not execute my brother, they might exile him to Algeria or Reunion Island where other Vietnamese monarchs and revolutionaries had been banished.
This began my family’s downward spiral. As my oldest brother languished in prison, our two sisters had to return home to help the family. We sold off most of our rice crops at a discount to pay the lawyers whom we had hired to free my brother. Even my youngest brother’s birth around this time brought little joy. My father, still superstitious, wrongly thought that Tran Phuoc Binh had brought bad luck on the family by being the sixth son. My father would come to love him over time, but not until many years after our family’s sadness had faded.
As I child, I wondered to myself how my father could bring fifteen or twenty pigs to sell in Saigon and not return with a single penny. But back then, just like today, lawyer’s fees were extremely high. We had to mortgage our family’s comfortable luxuries to keep my brother from being exiled. The multiple trips to and from Saigon were very costly and my father bankrupted the family fortune to free my oldest brother.
Thankfully, the law, at the time, stated that Vietnamese citizens must be tried in the Vietnamese court system, not the French, and we were able to produce documentation which proved my mother was Vietnamese. After several years of wrangling, the courts finally allowed my brother to return home in 1954. My parents were overjoyed and threw a colossal celebration in the village a few days after his release. The men roasted a couple of pigs over a bed of hot coals and prepared many special dishes for the festivities. Everyone cried when they saw my brother again and they welcomed him home with open arms. The Viet Minh hailed him as a hero, but my oldest brother’s decision continued to put his life in danger.
On the day after the celebration, French soldiers passing by Tan Loc village had an altercation with some Viet Minh troops. Two French soldiers were killed, so they returned several days later to seek retribution. They set fire to our village, burning down thousands of homes and all the crops we were about to harvest. They also shot any men they could find and beat the women without mercy. Our family had to flee to second wife’s home in the other village. We didn’t have time to gather our possessions, but my second sister was quick thinking. She tied a bagful of gold to her waist and carried me in her arms as she ran. Along the way, though, we were stopped by a group of both French and Viet Minh soldiers. One of the French officers commanded his men to shoot us, but a Vietnamese officer intervened and insisted that they must not shoot the women and children. He prevented the soldiers from killing us and enabled our escape.
Only my mother and my fourth brother, Tran Phuoc Tai, who was twelve years old at the time, stayed behind to look after the house. We had hoped the French would not harm innocent women and children, but we were wrong. They beat my mother and brother, though not too badly. So, the next day, they too fled to second wife’s house to join us. Yet soon after, French soldiers also barged into second wife’s house. They found my oldest brother still hiding there because he did not have time to escape. His fair complexion gave him away as a university student from Saigon, although the soldiers did not know he had been part of the resistance group. So, they deemed him harmless and left him alone.
My father was so upset that he left the village immediately and refused to meet with or even speak to my oldest brother again. My brother would write him a letter, pleading with my father to let him return to Saigon and help to care for the family. He promised to abandon any participation in revolutionary activities and to honor my father’s every wish. He sent this letter through a relative, but my father ripped it into pieces without even reading it. He remained angry at my brother for many years because he blamed him for squandering the family fortune. He also banned my brother from ever returning to Saigon and forced him to remain in the countryside to guard the crops. Thus, my brother dutifully remained in the countryside, became a village schoolteacher, and married a farmer’s daughter. To this day, he is still saddened and full of regrets for losing the family fortune. As the oldest son, he felt that his father had invested in him greatly and had allowed him to pursue the highest education. Yet because of his involvement in the resistance group, he had lost the family fortune and none of his younger brothers were able to enjoy the same level of education. I am proud of my brother, though, for the choice he made because opportunities in life often involve more than education and career advancement. Very often, our conviction to stand for what is right requires great sacrifice.
[1] We differentiated between the Hoa Chinese (who had lived in Vietnam for a time) and the Han Chinese (who had more recently immigrated from the mainland).
