I was born in 1964 into a family that already had two girls, so my dad really wanted me to be a little boy. My mother told him not to worry so much as the next baby would be a boy. Unfortunately, there was never was a next time and my dad never had a chance to have the son he wanted to carry on his proud family name.
My name is Kim and my sisters, Akela was four when I was born and Vatsana was two. My family was a royal family many generations removed. Our family tree goes all the way back to the thirteenth century to the first unified Lao kingdom of Lan Xang Hom Khao was created by King Fa Ngum. My family’s ancient ancestors continued through the seventeenth century until that king died without an apparent heir and from that point forward, we became a fractured country filled with many territories and fought over by Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam. I can remember many nights when we sat around the dying fire after dinner and my dad told stories of yesterday that had been handed down to him from his dad and his dad had learned them from his father and so on. My two sisters and I would sit around with eyes shining waiting to hear how our ancestors fought battles they won, governed a kingdom they earned and had children that would lead the next generation. I don’t think we ever thought that it was possible my dad could lose any battle or not be there to protect us until the day we found out he couldn’t but by then it was too late. Almost too late for all of us.
Laos never generated the publicity of the Vietnamese or Cambodian refugees as their stories seemed more horrific and tragic than ours, but they weren’t. My country is small but vital and most of our conquering nations were interested in us because of the strategic importance of our Mekong River which leads to China. When the U.S. became involved in the Vietnam War we were swept into the conflict simply because of our location. From the year I was born until 1973, my country was bombed every eight minutes day and night. We understood that the Americans were trying to disrupt the flow of the North Vietnamese troops and supplies but I heard my dad tell a neighbor who had just lost his son to one of the bombs that dropped all day and night around us that the bombs rarely did anything except kill civilians in Laos. None of us knew if anyone cared about the bombings, so we tried to live and move forward in our lives among the cratered and savaged landscape and learned that being afraid does not mean you’re a coward and having fears doesn’t mean you are defeated but the greatest thing we learned was calling yourself a realist doesn’t mean you aren’t also heroic, noble and selfless. My dad was all of those things and was the bravest man I have ever known, and he is my hero.
Then everything changed for the worse. On a hot summer day in 1975, my dad came home from his job where he worked in diplomacy and community development for USAID to tell my mom some very bad news. My dad could speak four languages and not one of them could save him from what was about to happen in Laos. I was only eleven years old that summer, but I had never seen my dad pull my mom away from all of us where they could speak privately. He had forgotten to greet us when he came home from work and that was enough to make us look at each other in confusion. When my mom and dad came out of the room they were talking in, they never told us what was going on but went about their normal, daily routines as if it was a normal day. But that day haunts me still because it is the only time I saw a lifetime of emotions play across my dad’s face as he watched us go about our nightly routines. It seemed as if the power of his emotions reached through to us without him saying a word. We could feel the myriad of emotions but had no idea what to do with them or understand what had caused them.
The next day, we found out that the Laos People’s Revolutionary Party had taken over our country and our King had been forced to abdicate. My proud ancestral family line would never rule again. The People’s Revolutionary Party started rounding up anyone who was a threat to them and sent them to ‘seminars’ which they said would re-educate and advance Laos into a stronger and unified country under their rule. My family was on borrowed time as my dad was labeled an ‘imperialist slave,’ and we represented everything this new government hated. My dad knew the end could come any minute. He finally found an official he could bribe to get us to Thailand and into the U.N. Refugee camps. He was given a promise that for more money, this official could make that happen. I don’t know how much he paid, but the next morning we were gathering up what supplies and food we would take with us when that promise became a threat to our very lives. Soldiers burst through our door with machine guns and started beating and hitting my mom and dad. My dad fought with the ferocity of ten men but he had no gun and quickly overtaken. Yet, he kept trying to get to us. Over and over again, he would wrench free of his ropes to attack one of them and over and over again they would beat him almost to death again and tie him to a chair.
My sisters and I were pulled to the side and we watched my mom be raped over and over again by each soldier. My dad had to watch it too and whatever fight was left in him suddenly fell away. When the last soldier was done with my mother, one of the soldiers went up behind my dad’s chair where he was bound with rope and shot him in the head. I can still hear my mother’s scream every time I lay down to sleep at night. Nightmares fade over time, but they haunt you with emotions which are elicited by sound and smells.
They grabbed my mom up from the floor where she was rocking back and forth with no clothes on and threw a blanket on her and marched us out of the house. My sisters and I were all crying but I remember looking back at my mom and while she had her mouth open like she was shouting or screaming no sound ever emerged. We were taken to one of the re-education camps to one of the three types of jails they kept at each camp. We were sent to the first one, which was the worst one as it was under the ground where we couldn’t see the sun or breathe any air that wasn’t putrid and foul. From 1975-1979 we toiled underground. We worked constructing sawmills and cutting bamboo and did whatever they told us too, repeated what they had taught us, gave thanks to each of them for how they opened our eyes to their way of thinking and each night, my sister and I huddled together with our mom and tried to believe we would find a way to escape. We had no money to bribe anyone and my mother after enduring the multiple rapes and the murder of her husband was barely able to shuffle around.
My sisters who were 13 and 15 by this time, took over my parenting. I cannot remember how many times we were beaten but my oldest sister was noticed by several of the soldiers and she too had to endure what my mom did and was raped repeatedly at their will for amusement purposes. But my sister Akela was strong. Her name means noble and she lives through its meaning. She refused to cower and would not let them take her mind even if they had the power to take her body. She told me and my sister that life may lead us in a direction we do not always foresee but to survive the tragedies that we may experience along the way, one must grasp it onto that fate and own it as you move forward. You cannot change it, so own it. It is a powerful lesson and one I have let guide me through many years.
I don’t know what Akela did but somehow in 1979, she arranged our escape into Thailand. In 1978 my sister had a baby boy we named Keowynn which means God’s gracious gift. Once he was born, my mom slowly started to take an interest in us again and became almost fanatical about watching over Keowynn. Here was the boy my father dreamed of and wanted so many years ago. Keowynn was a bright and loving baby boy and when we escaped he was strapped onto my sister’s back so we could safely carry him over the Mekong River into Thailand.
The Mekong River is known for its unexpected swift currents sometimes and none of us had ever had the chance to learn how to swim. I saw what happened in front of me but was too little to give my sister strength and too late to save Keowynn. A strong current came at us from nowhere and Akela was swept under for only a few seconds. She struggled to reach the surface we struggled to get to her. All of us in unison moving towards her with a single, ferocious mindset to save them both. My mom reached her first although to this day I don’t know how but a mother’s love even in the shell that was left of my mom is a powerful thing to behold. As we were being thrust under and fighting to get out of the river and to my sister, my mother reached five feet beyond what physics would tell you is possible and finally got a handful of my sister’s hair to pull her up. We finally staggered out of the whirlwind of that incredibly strong current only to realize that the sling we had fashioned for her back to hold nine-month-old Keowynn was empty. He had somehow come out of the tied sling across her back and slipped into the water with no sound we could hear and no way to go back and find him. He had been swallowed by the last remnant of Laos we ever saw, the Mekong River.
We were all inconsolable but Akela who was the most distraught spoke the words she taught us in the jail that lives underground. That was to remember life leads us in a direction we do not always foresee but to survive the tragedies we may experience along the way, one must grasp the fate it gave you and own it as you move forward. So we did. We moved forward shirking from the darkness of the tragedy and looked up towards our future to see what it might be.
We finally reached the refugee camp but conditions weren’t much better and there was still violence we witnessed every day. We were so poor and so hungry all the time. It wasn’t until 1981 that we were able to finally get an official document created by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) which was placed inside a large white bag marked “IOM” (International Organization for Migration) which marked us as able to leave.
When I was 16 in 1980 I met the boy, who became the man I married. His name was Saengchanh and he reminded me of my father so much in spirit. He was noble, kind, strong yet compassionate. He still believed in the good in the world when my family had long ago left joy and wonder behind and he made all of us laugh with his ability to see light in the darkness we lived in.
Our immediate family now consisted of my six-week-old baby boy, two sisters, mother, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and husband. We named my son Kham meaning precious or gold. We made the journey on a refugee resettlement boat which also held horrors from our past. The fact that I was a nursing mother did not stop me from being beaten and raped, but my husband wasn’t killed. In fact, no one in my family was killed during the trip although we saw many murdered right in front of us. We were in the second or third wave of refugees and we worked closely with the Americans through whatever agency we were assigned. Fate finally gave us a beacon of light when it assigned us to Catholic Charities in Richmond, Virginia.
Catholic Charities gave us housing and $200 dollars a month to purchase groceries. We were assigned a kind counselor who taught us how to spend the $200 a month in the grocery store to make it last and I still smile when I think about how we taught her how $200 dollars a month for groceries can last for two months if you buy what usually isn’t and eat sparingly which we learned to do anyway through the harsh years of our past.
But a funny thing happened to Akela when we got to the United States. She started slipping away from us in body and spirit. It was if she had been as strong as she could be for as long as she could and once we were safe, she retreated into her past which held nothing but pain and sorrow. She no longer owned her own fate but rather it took control of her. Akela never came back to us fully. She came and went like the waves of the Mekong River which took her son.
My mother did become whole again or as she tells us, as whole as she can be with her soul residing in the past and her heart in the present. It’s enough she says with a shrug. My other sister, Vatsana had escaped bodily harm to herself but mentally she endured every beating and rape we all experienced. She will not go to any movie that has a gun in it and will still jump if she hears a car backfire but on the whole, she has grasped her own fate and moved forward by marrying and having a lively family of five with three boys and two girls. My mom beams with joy every time they come over for holidays or just get together and she visits them often. They live in Minneapolis where her husband is a lawyer of international law.
My husband and I opened up a nail salon in Richmond in 1988 and have since expanded our business to include several stores, salons, and even a hotel. I had another baby when I was 23 and both my children both finished their education in Ivy League colleges. I never had the chance to learn in school after I was eleven, but I have learned a lot about life.
I have learned promises made to anyone no matter how good they sound can end in a threat for which you cannot prepare. But, you can win if you don’t fear fate. I learned that death is less an end and more of a returning. Tragedies that happen can be overcome by taking them and making them yours, so you can move forward. Real love stories never have endings even after death. Finally, I learned fear has two meanings. One meaning - is some people try to forget everything and run away from fear and even from themselves. I prefer to live the other way with fear and that is to face it head-on and rise. Everyone has that choice no matter their circumstance.
| Writer: Samantha Seconds | Editor: Colleen Walker |