A Former Refugee Reflects On The Vietnam War And Starting Over In The U.S.
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DAVID GREENE, HOST:
And it's time for StoryCorps. Fifty years ago this week, Lan Cao's family was living just outside of Saigon getting ready to celebrate the Lunar New Year known as Tet. But the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong launched a surprise attack on her city and more than 100 other locations across South Vietnam. This fighting became known as the Tet Offensive, and it was a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War that led to a decline in public support back in the United States. Lan Cao was 7 at the time. She shared her memories of the offensive with her daughter, Harlan. And just a warning - there are some graphic descriptions here.
LAN CAO: There was so much fighting very near our house. You could hear automatic gunfire. The sky would be lit up with explosions at night. And then my grandfather was a landlord and was captured by the Viet Cong. They killed him, and my father found that my grandfather had been beheaded, and they had put his head onto the body of a pig.
HARLAN VAN CAO: What do you remember about the day you left Vietnam?
CAO: My parents told me that I'm just going on a short trip with Papa Fritz. He's sort of like a second dad for me. And he was going to take me to Connecticut to be with his family for maybe a few weeks. So I packed up my stamp collection and some books, and that was it.
HARLAN: What is something that you really wanted to bring but you couldn't?
CAO: I wanted to bring my dog, Topaz. He was a German Shepherd. But they killed the dog.
HARLAN: Why?
CAO: I don't know why they killed the dog.
HARLAN: Was it hard for you to adapt to your surroundings when you arrived?
CAO: Well, I would watch the American nightly news and see that each city was falling. That was when I realized that, oh, my God, I'm not going back to Vietnam, and I'm going to be stuck living in this country without my parents, and I was only 13. So that was when I began to seriously learn English, and I started going to the library, reading books, taping shows on a cassette tape and then putting it under the pillow and playing it overnight so that I would just absorb the language. You know, life is like a lotus flower. The lotus flower lives in mud and is open and blooms.
If you come as a refugee with nothing, no matter what trauma you went through during the war, no matter what you have lost, you have to have the mental toughness to start over and to succeed. That's what I'm most proud of, that I did not collapse, and I'm able to pass that on to you.
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GREENE: That was Lan Cao with her daughter, Harlan Van Cao. Lan is a law professor living in Huntington Beach, Calif. That story will be archived at the Library of Congress and featured on the StoryCorps podcast.
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