Pha Le - Oh Captain, My Captain

 

So, I was seven years old. I was living in Vietnam at the time in the countryside. I lived with my mom, my brother, my grandmother, and my aunt and uncle. 

 

On this particular day, I just come home from school, and I was playing in the front yard with my brother and my aunt. Suddenly, a man appeared in the front yard. He walked straight up to me, bent down to my level, and said, "Are you Két?" Két means parrot in Vietnamese. Apparently, when I was growing up, I learned to speak very early and I echoed what everyone else said around me. So, they called me Két. 

 

And I said to him, "Yes, I'm Két." And looking at him, I thought he looked a lot like my seventh uncle, my dad's brother that I visited recently in Saigon. And I said, "You must be my seventh uncle." And he just smiled, kissed me on the cheek, and said, "Yes, I am your seventh uncle." He then hugged me for a really long time. After that, he asked me to take him to where my mom worked. 

 

So, we took a short walk and arrived at a tailoring shop where she held a job at the time. I said, "Mom, seventh uncle is here." She looked up, immediately threw down what she was holding, ran out and jumped on him, and proceeded to kiss him and hug him passionately. I was so confused. [audience chuckles] “So, what's going on?” When she was able to calm herself down, she walked over to me, got down to my level, and said, " Két, this is not your seventh uncle. This is your father." 

 

My first childhood memories were of me living with my mom and my brother. But every time I asked about my father, I was told that he died in the war against the communists in Vietnam. My father attended the Naval Academy of the Republic of South Vietnam. He served many years and achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander. At the end of the war, because he was on the losing side, they put him in a concentration camp in North Vietnam. The family did not hear from him for months, so they all just assumed that he died. But my father did not die. He survived the concentration camps, and he had come home to me. 

 

Shortly after coming home, my father took me out of school and moved the entire family to Saigon to live with his mom and his brothers. There he taught me math and English the little that he knew. Tried to live a normal life, but it proved to be difficult. Randomly, the police would come by to interrogate him. I did not know this at the time, because I was always sent away every time they showed up. But apparently, they would ask him how he spends his days. When he couldn't come up with all the answers, they would threaten him with imprisonment. 

 

This kind of mental torture worked very well, because my father began to have severe nightmares about prison that only got worse with time. And it got so bad that after only a few months of being home, he decided that we must leave Vietnam. But how? This is a communist country. You can't just leave. If you want to get out, you have to escape. The only way we knew was to get on a boat and run for the ocean. But in 1982, one seat on such a boat could cost as much as US $10,000. This is money that we just didn't have, especially when you think about a family of five. But I knew my dad would find a way. 

 

One day, I was visiting with my grandmother in the country. My parents showed up unexpectedly late one day. I knew something was going on, so I asked them. They took me aside and said, “The next day they would take me back to Saigon and we would be escaping the day after that.” I asked them, "You know, is the whole family coming?" And that's when my mom started to cry. She said that in exchange for my dad's skills as a captain of the boat, he was allowed to bring two people with him. But only two, regardless of the size, age or weight of the passenger. And my two brothers would have to be left behind to be cared for by my grandmother. We would send for them at a later time. 

 

She also said that I couldn't discuss this with my middle brother at all. He was seven and a half at the time. And he could not be trusted with the information. If information got out and my dad was captured, he would be imprisoned. And this time, likelihood is that they would execute him. So, we couldn't tell them. So, the next day, the whole family was waiting at the roadside, waiting for a bus to take us back to Saigon. There we were when the bus pulled up. Not a bus that you would recognize here in America. It's actually a broken-down transport truck from the 1960s that someone had fixed up and put passenger benches in the back. 

 

My dad told me to get on first, and I did. Sat down on the bench and watched as my parents’ said goodbye to my brothers. My mom was holding on to my baby brother, already crying, not wanting to let go. But with a little coaxing from my dad, she was able to hand over my baby brother to my aunt who would be taking care of him. As she did so, she began to wail in agony. She slowly got on the bus, and continued to cry and cry as if someone had died. Tears are streaming down her eyes, wetting her shirt. As the bus pulled away, my brother realized at that point that he was being left behind, and he began to cry, which made my mom's cries get even louder. I continued to wave to my family as the bus pulled away and they disappeared from view. 

 

We got into Saigon late that night, stayed up most of the night talking with my uncles about the trip. We then woke up before dawn and headed toward the bus station. My dad had pre-warned me that we were going to make a lot of exchanges in transportation in order to avoid detection. It was a long day, so we first took a bus out to a town called Vĩnh Long. Vĩnh Long is on the Mekong river delta. This is where I was born, because that was where my dad was stationed when he was in the Navy. 

 

Once we got there, we took a taxi that took us down to the river. And at the river, we took a riverboat taxi that took us out to a transport boat. I remember this transport boat looks like this big brown blob with not many windows, but a huge passenger compartment, kind of reminded me of like a semi on water. Once we were inside, I saw all the other passengers, and my dad spoke up. He said, "That night we're going to transfer over to the escape boat, and all the people on this boat were going to be escaping with us as well." So, I looked around, mostly adults. There were only a few children, all waiting patiently for instructions. 

 

We waited for what seemed to be a very long time before a man came up to my dad and said it was time to go. He kissed me. He said he'll see me over at the escape boat because he needed to help transfer people and supplies over. And with that, he was gone. My mom and I waited for our turn. And when it was time, we walked over to the window. My mom handed me to a man standing on a ladder. He carried me down the ladder, and at the bottom of the ladder, he gave me back to my dad. I looked outside, and I could barely make out my dad, because it was pitch black, except for the light on the moon and the shimmering light off the water. 

 

My mom took me into the belly of the boat where we were to stay for the remainder of the night. We waited for the rest of the passengers to show up. When everyone found their seats in the belly of the boat, the hatch closed, and there we were in complete darkness, waiting to go. With a sudden roar, the engine started up and we started moving through the water. We moved faster and faster. And all of a sudden, I hear gunfire. I'd never heard gunfire before, but from movies. I knew what that sound was like. I got so scared. 

 

All day long, my dad had been protecting me from the dangers of the trip by building up the sense of excitement. But now, he's not there and I'm in the dark. There's gunfire. I began to cry. People were crying around me. But my mom stayed strong. She just held me tighter and said, "Don't worry. Your dad will get us through this." And with those words, the gunfire stopped. 

 

I soon fell asleep to the sounds of the engines moving through the water. I woke a few hours later to the sound of people vomiting around me. The smell and the sounds made me sick as well. A few minutes after that, the hatch opened and it was daylight already. It was raining outside. It was my father. He opened up the hatch and walked down the ladder, and he stood there and made announcement to the whole boat. He said, "You are all sick because we've made it out to the ocean." And with that, the whole boat erupted in cheers and laughter and applause. 

 

“We've escaped from Vietnam. We've made it out.” But as we found out over the next couple of days, once we got above deck, we realized that our dangers were not over yet. Black and blue ocean as far as the eyes could see, the weather was tossing our boat around. We were still concerned about being recaptured. We were concerned about the Thai pirates that frequented the South China Sea. 

 

But on the third day, our deliverance came. It's a gorgeous day, I can almost feel the warmth of the Indonesian sun on my skin. There was not a cloud in the sky and the oceans were so calm you felt like you were going through a swimming pool. My dad deliberately headed towards a cluster of islands that separated into two island chains. He went right in between. When he turned the corner of this one island, a refugee camp came into view. Our freedom had been won. Our lives were saved, and my life was saved by my father. 

 

We waited in Indonesia for a year before we were accepted to America as political asylum refugees. Initially, life in America was tough. At one point, we had to live out of a fixed-up garage and go on welfare. But even then, we felt like we had a life plenty when compared to the family we left behind. 

 

It took us 10 years before were able to unite with my brothers. But we're all together now. My parents live in a home of their own. My middle brother is an accountant. My baby brother graduated from UC Berkeley and is now in sales. [audience laughter] 

 

 

 

I graduated from UCLA for undergrad. I attended medical school in Missouri and did residency in Chicago. I am now a practicing emergency medicine physician in Southern California. I'm married to a beautiful woman who gave me two wonderful boys, and life is good. 

 

So, deliverance comes to all of us in many different ways. For some, it's through divine intervention. For myself, my family, it was through the perseverance of my father. He didn't give up in the war, he didn't surrender when he was in the concentration camps, he never gave up in bringing me to freedom. 

 

As I was growing up, he always told me, "The greatest gift you can ever give me is to be greater than me." And even now, as an adult, as a doctor, as a son who's doing everything I can to help out my parents, I don't think I can ever repay the gift that my father has given me. That was hard. [chuckles] [audience laughter] 

 

 

But the future is bright for my family and myself now. But no matter what the future brings, I know through the lessons of my father and the legacy of my family, to never, ever give up. Thank you.