In the middle of a cramped fisherman’s boat, barely more than 10 feet long, a teenage girl made her treacherous journey from Vietnam to Thailand with hopes of starting a new life. Senior Nicholas Lai’s mother, Tuyen, left her home and family on a cloudy, moonless night in 1979.
But what was supposed to be a two-day journey stretched to a week, becoming an escape riddled with fierce storms and fearsome pirates.
In 1975, Tuyen’s birthplace in South Vietnam was overtaken by Communists from the North, marking the end of freedom and education for those who did not support the regime. In 1979, she was one of almost 800,000 Vietnamese who dared to escape.
Tuyen, as the only daughter of two teachers, valued education, but was provided little education in Vietnam: A higher education was awarded only to Communist families. She decided that her best option was to escape Vietnam and head for the U.S.
“My life changed overnight,” Tuyen said, reflecting on her decision to leave everything she called home behind.
Her parents, who were open-minded enough to support her decision, asked her older brother to go with her for protection. He agreed, and their parents paid 20 gold pieces for their voyage.
A small skiff took Tuyen and her brother off the shore of Vietnam that night in 1979, carrying them to a larger fishing boat that awaited farther away from the coast.
Tuyen said there were around 100 escapees like herself crammed into the bottom of the boat “like sardines in a can.” Refugees were scooping water out of the boat. Many were praying for mercy.
Soon after the storm ended, a group of local fishermen-turned-pirates spotted their damaged, sinking boat and forced them off.
The refugees were lined up and searched for valuables. Afterwards, the pirates boarded their ship to continue looking for gold. They threatened the refugees but did not do any physical harm, even providing them with steamed fish, white rice and supplies.
Tuyen stood on the edge of the ship, staring into the ocean. In that moment, Tuyen could feel an unwavering resolve forming inside of her.
“I said to myself, ‘If I can escape from this difficulty, if I can escape from this boat, then I will not waste a single minute of my life,’” Tuyen said. “I had to make my life worthwhile because I risked everything I had just to have a chance at a higher education.”
A week later, their boat arrived at the refugee camp in Thailand. The camp was isolated, overcrowded and poor but located near an ocean beach and, she said, “not too bad.”
“I enjoyed the time going to the beach and swimming,” Tuyen said. “Being young, I wasn’t too worried about it.”
The refugees at the camp were given two hours each morning to visit a local flea market, where they could buy food and converse with the locals until they were taken back. Tuyen spent most of her time inside the camp trying to learn English but with little success.
Representatives from international organizations came to interview the refugees, bringing books and magazines as donations to the camp library. Tuyen devoured the books, but understood little of what she read.
Eventually, she was able to contact a distant cousin in Texas, whose church sponsored her and her brother’s trip to America. Although Tuyen was thankful to be out of Vietnam and experiencing newfound opportunities, her struggles were far from over.
“When I got to the U.S,” Tuyen said, “the most difficult part was the isolation.”
At first, Tuyen lived in the predominantly Caucasian city of Tyler, Texas, and said she and her brother were some of the only Asians in the town of 5,000. Her limited English hindered her from making friends and expressing herself in school.
“It was lonely,” she said. “Nobody understood me and that feeling was difficult. Every word in an English or history book I practically had to look up in the dictionary because I didn’t understand.” As Tuyen spoke, she extended her arms to emphasize the enormity of her difficulties.
However, she found help in her history teacher who noticed Tuyen’s difficulty with English. He arranged for her to live with him and his family, and her brother with a friend of his, in order to immerse her in English and so she could not speak Vietnamese with her brother. In this way, Tuyen said she was able to learn English quickly, mastering it in a year.
Slowly but surely, Tuyen began to overcome her difficulties, eventually becoming the salutatorian of her class.
“Initially [the other students] were looking down [at us] like ‘who are these barbarians,’ but it turns out we always beat them in class, especially in math and science, so we started to gain their respect,” Tuyen said.
Tuyen graduated with several scholarships. She went to Texas A&M and majored in engineering, but the grants and the scholarships she received were not enough to support her and fund her education. She also worked at fastfood restaurants to support herself.
“I came from the bottom, penniless coming to this country, so I did anything you could think of that was dirty work,” she said. “Cleaning bathrooms, cleaning kitchens, washing dishes — I did it all.”
During her third year of college, things started looking up after she got an engineering summer internship in Dallas with TRW, a defense company.
“I survived. I felt better, [and] life was getting better,” said Tuyen, smiling.
It was not until after she had graduated college, where she met her husband, and had married that her parents and three younger brothers could join her and her brother in America. Tuyen and her brother had slowly worked for 10 years to raise enough money to sponsor her family’s trip over, but by then, Tuyen’s new life was already secure.
She has tried explaining her voyage and troubles in her new life in America to her sons, Nicholas and Class of 2015 alumnus Andrew Lai.
“I remember her telling me multiple times [when we were children] of how she escaped from Vietnam in a crowded, decrepit fishing boat, like those you see in the APUSH textbook,” Nicholas said.
Nicholas, however, lives a world away from the hardships his mother faced at his age. His closest experiences to his mother’s culture have through family gatherings.
His mother understands the gap between her life and her sons’ lives well, knowing it is hard for them to understand her struggles.
Having been in the U.S. for around 30 years, Tuyen said she does not regret her decision to flee to the U.S.. She moved to Saratoga in 2007 and works as a senior business manager for a semiconductor company.
“All of these hardships, all of these living conditions, other people looking down on me did not make me stop,” she said. “They were not strong enough to make me stop. If I survived that, I could survive anything in life, and that was the moment I felt really, really good.”
