Imagine being brought up in luxurious wealth, only to find yourself first in a refugee camp and then a penniless immigrant in a country half-way around the world from where you were born! How would you cope? When Ha Tran found herself in this situation she remembered her beloved father’s wise words and used them to build a life for her family and herself. Ha tells her story of struggle and triumph in this inspiring book. She weaves her father’s profound, yet simple wisdom into the true story of her escape from the Communist regime in Viet Nam, living in a refugee camp, and starting life over in the United States. You will be moved and awed by what Ha has accomplished and inspired by how she demonstrates that "Hope is living with a promise in your heart."

Empowered by Hope

By Ha T. Tran

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Ha T. Tran
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-6929-2

Contents

Acknowledgements........................................................................xiDedication..............................................................................xiiiAuthor's Note...........................................................................xivIntroduction............................................................................1Chapter One: Lessons Learned............................................................3Chapter Two: Hold On ...................................................................10Chapter Three: ... And Never Give Up....................................................13Chapter Four: Stay in the Present.......................................................17Chapter Five: Be Disciplined and Fight the Good Fight...................................22Chapter Six: Do Your Best, Be Honest ...................................................26Chapter Seven: ... and Keep Your Promises...............................................29Chapter Eight: Let Your Vision Guide You, But Your Passion Lead You.....................32A Ha Moment: Essays.....................................................................37Letters from the Heart..................................................................59Words Of Wisdom From Sam Antion.........................................................67

Chapter One

Lessons Learned

Of all the things my father taught me, there were two things above all he wanted me to remember. As I was leaving Vietnam, he kept saying: "Do your best, be honest, and keep your promises" and "No matter what, you must live your life until you take your last breath." These two pieces of wisdom have carried me my whole life.

My father knew what I would need to survive, and that he had to give me the words that would act as a life preserver in a stormy sea. These became words for survival.

Mr. Nguyen Van Tho, my father, is a wonderfully wise man. He lived his life and let me watch, teaching me by example. When he did say something, he would back it up with his actions. For example, he always told me to be truthful and I witnessed him being truthful with others. He didn't just preach ideas to me, he lived them. He truly "walked the walk."

It was a powerful way to teach his precious daughter, his only child. Being impressionable as any young child, his words and actions became deeply embedded in my being.

Because my mother had died when I was eight years old, he felt that he had to make up for her absence and give me everything that both a mom and a dad would.

We had an intellectual tradition in my home while I was growing up. I remember spending time with my father in our library, which was a large room with floor to ceiling bookcases, filled with books on philosophy and literature. I was expected to do well in school and after graduating high school, I entered law school.

My dad was also fond of inspirational quotes that illustrated his principles and our home was dotted with fabric banners, framed quotes, and plaques bearing these sayings. To this day I have a love of quotations and inspirational sayings.

I had a privileged life growing up in Vietnam. My father was a wealthy rice merchant and we lived in a big house on a big plot of land which was beautifully landscaped. I wore beautifully tailored clothes made of silk and always had plenty of delectable food to eat.

I even had my own little companion, a girl my age named Mai, who waited on me at my beck and call. She called me "Little Miss" and her job was to play with me and pick up after me. Mai lived in our house from the time we were both very young. My father had made a financial arrangement with her parents, which I started to understand when I was about 12 years old. She even came to live in my apartment in the city of Soc Trang where I stayed during my last year of high school.

Then, on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell, the Americans left South Vietnam, the civil war was over, and the Communists took over the part of Vietnam where I was living. The atmosphere was paranoid because anyone could be arrested and tortured at any time. Fear and terror were the order of the day.

The fact that my father and I were educated and well off put us in further danger since education and personal wealth were seen as examples of capitalism. My father's property was confiscated, and that's when he knew we were going to be in real trouble.

In order to ensure my safety and survival he knew I must escape the Communist regime. I had to leave Vietnam, the only home I knew. I was twenty years old, and my father did not want me, his only child, to escape Vietnam alone.

Despite worrying for my safety if I traveled alone, his unconditional love brought him to the heartbreaking decision that he could not come with me. He thought that if we went together and were caught, he wouldn't be able to save either me or himself. So he stayed behind to ensure that if anything happened to me he could take the necessary measures to free me.

Still, he did not want me taking an uncertain journey into an unknown world by myself. He could have sent a servant with me but he believed a family member would be more loyal than a hired companion. He thought a husband would take care of me in his place and ensure my safety.

My father talked furtively with people he did business with, including my future father-in-law. He couldn't let anyone know what he was doing. If word got to the authorities, they would suspect we were trying to escape and we would be arrested.

One day my father came home and told me he had arranged for me to get married. That is how, seventeen days later, on October 27, 1975, I came to marry a stranger, someone I had met only once for half an hour seventeen days before.

There was no monetary dowry, one which would have been typical for a wedding in Vietnam. Instead my husband gave an emotional dowry, the promise to my father, and me, that he would care for, love, and protect me, my father's only child. My father's unconditional love gave him the strength to let me go, even though his world revolved around me.

My relationship with my husband was that of an acquaintance. We had to get to know each other over time. There had been no courtship or falling in love: This marriage of convenience meant I had to learn to get along with someone I had no choice but to be with.

After my family and I had escaped Viet Nam and survived in a refugee camp we came to the United States. Our first home on American soil was in La Salle, Illinois. Thanks to the largesse of ten women in a Bible study group, we arrived there in the winter of 1979. These ten wonderful sponsors guided and assisted us in our new life with great kindness, but it was extremely difficult for my family and me nonetheless. We did not speak any English, and the huge sense of cultural bewilderment was exacerbated by the language barrier.

In a few short years I had gone from a life of opulent comfort to living a dismal life of uncertainty. Life had to take on a new meaning for me.

It was during this time that I started to fully appreciate my father's words of wisdom and, eventually, integrate them into every fiber of my being and make them my own.

In order to survive and thrive, I had to understand what his ideas meant for me and how to implement them in my everyday life. Doing so has given me purpose, a road map for my life, and a never-ending determination to live my life to the fullest.

The journey of learning to live my father's wisdom has been entwined with my journey from Vietnam to the United States of America, from a pampered child to an adventurous, self-reliant adult.

Chapter Two

Hold On ...

When the time did come to flee, my husband and I escaped Vietnam on a fishing boat.

We had been waiting for the right time and the right connections for two and a half years. During that time we bought passage on the boat.

* * *

We had no notice for leaving. Our guide simply showed up at the door of our hut and, without saying a word, signaled to us to pick up our children and follow him. In the middle of the night we snuck away. Quang, my husband, and I carried only what we could put on our backs and hold in our hands. Our most precious possessions were, of course, our sons: our one-and-one-half-year-old son, Do, and our 28-day-old infant son, Dinh.

We walked through rice patties with rough-cut stubble that painfully thrust into my feet and legs.

My right ankle was already broken. I had been thrown from a sidecar on the way to the hospital the day my youngest son was born less than a month earlier.

There had been no one to reset it. A midwife delivered my son, but there was nothing that could be done for my ankle, because all the doctors had been put in concentration camps.

After the long, very painful struggle through the rice patties, we finally reached the river. A man with a small bark-canoe was waiting to transport us to the boat.

When I saw the boat, I was terrified. It was an old fishing boat that had been outfitted to hold far more than the maximum of 80 or 100 people it was meant to hold. The greedy owners stuffed over 400 people on board. None of us cared at the time, since this was our only way to freedom.

As soon as we got aboard, my husband and I were separated. He and our older son had to stand on the deck because there was no place for them to sit. I sat in the bottom of the boat near the engine hole, my baby in my arms. I was back to back, side to side with three other women. Breathing in nauseating diesel fumes, I felt suffocated and exhausted by the heat and the bodies pressing in on me. I was in excruciating pain, my bruised legs and broken ankle paralyzed beneath me.

When the boat started moving, I became extremely seasick. I couldn't eat or drink, nothing would stay down. I was totally drained.

I was breast-feeding Dinh, who was only 28 days old. Due to the lack of nourishment, my milk supply dried up, and all I could do for him was let him nurse for comfort. It was agony to hear my son crying his heart out for food and realize I had nothing to give him. He cried until he was so exhausted he could cry no more tears.

Because my mother had died when I was still a child, I hadn't had anyone to teach me about nursing and taking care of my babies. I thought my body would just keep producing milk endlessly no matter what.

I did not understand that I needed to ensure that I was properly nourished to be able to feed my son. When I had nursed Do at home I had had adequate food and drink. It never occurred to me that I might not be able to produce milk, so I hadn't thought about what to do if that happened.

After a day and a half at sea the old fishing boat's faulty engine failed. The captain said that all we could do was pray. So we prayed while the boat drifted.

I prayed hard to the spirit of my deceased mother, to Buddha, to God, "Please do not let us die on this journey."

We drifted for another day and a half. I lost consciousness from dehydration and heat exhaustion. I was carried up to the deck of the boat to get fresh air. Later, my husband told me that when he saw me, he was frantic. He thought I had died, and those people were just about to throw my corpse overboard. He didn't know where our baby was. He was thinking to himself, "How can I write home to tell her father that the boys and I have finally gotten to the refugee camp; however, she did not make it? She died during the exhausting ordeal!"

I woke up enough to feel rain water on my face, and then drifted into a dark but peaceful place of unconsciousness. I thought I had died and was going to enter Heaven. I started to prepare my case to Heaven. I pleaded, "I am not Heaven-worthy because I have failed my sons. I promised to them that I would be there for them from the first day of their existence and will always be there, but now I can't ... So please send me back for me to make it right." There was only silence; I didn't receive a response. I turned to my baby in my arms, "Please forgive me, I have broken my promise to you and your brother ... forgive me ..." I said good-bye to my son.

* * *

I felt a soft touch on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see a woman kneeling beside me. She was draped in white and helping me sit up. She wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and spoke to me in a soft voice, in a language that I did not understand. I thought she must be an angel.

She waved over another woman, also dressed in white, to bring me my baby. He was wrapped in a soft, blue blanket. He was finally peaceful, sound asleep and satisfied with a tummy full of formula.

Then the first woman pointed to the shore where my husband and son were standing. It wasn't until then I finally realized that I was alive.

Holding my baby in my arms, life was precious and being alive was wonderful!

I realized that I was on a rescue boat, and those women were nuns. The boat had picked us up and brought us to an island in Malaysia where we were given refuge.

Chapter Three

... And Never Give Up

When we arrived in Malaysia, the port was crowded with people waiting to see if the boat held their family members or friends. Some of the waiting crowd found familiar faces on the boat, others asked for news about their relatives and were disappointed. No one was waiting for us.

In the refugee camp I was very sick. I had not yet recovered from pregnancy and childbirth when we left Vietnam. On top of that, I had broken my ankle the day my son was born, and it hadn't been properly set.

I was further depleted from nursing my son and not having been able to take in any nourishment on the boat. And from the time I had stepped onto the boat until several days in the camp I had not been able to go to the bathroom at all. My system was septic from all the built-up toxins. I was in really rough shape.

It was more than a week before I started to recover.

While I was struggling to get better, I was strongly aware that I needed to stay alive so I could take care of my family. My mind was constantly working, but my body was shutting down. There was nothing I could do so I prayed and prayed. I didn't know what would happen next; I could only wait for things to take their course. All I had were prayer and determination; my determination was bone-deep from the very core of my being. It gave me strength.

I remembered my promise to my father to never give up. He had sacrificed so much for me in his effort to give me a better life of freedom and a chance for happiness. My gratitude for his unconditional love and respect for his wishes made it impossible not to keep fighting with every ounce of my strength.

The way my father loved me taught me how to love my sons. I wanted and needed to be there for them, as he had been there for me.

My father had told me, "When you're a parent, you parent someone from the moment they're born until the moment you die." Because of my devotion to my family, I found the strength to keep going.

* * *

Our living quarters in the camp consisted only of a tent with a single long bed. We shared the bed with our sons and three other couples and their children.

The bed had been made from the wood of ship wrecks that drifted to shore. Each family was separated only by a cloth rice sack hung from the tent ridge pole and had only about four to five feet of space.

We received food and medicine from the American Red Cross and other relief agencies. We had mostly canned food plus fresh eels every other day.

Every morning my husband and three of the men who shared our tent waited in line for our rations. The other women in the tent cooked and visited with people they knew. They were polite to me but didn't try to make friends with me.

I wasn't able to do much at first because it was very difficult for me to move around. My broken ankle had not been properly set and I was in constant pain. The island was hilly and the ground was uneven which also hampered my movements.

After a few months, I started to make an effort to move around more. Unable to lift my foot, I dragged my right leg behind me with my baby clutched in my arms and my one-and-a-half-year-old son holding onto my pant leg.

We would go down to the sea shore. While I watched my sons play in the sand, I searched for the meaning of all this and wondered, "What next?"

During this time, I felt so miserable that I questioned my faith in my father's decision, wondering if he had done the right thing.

Yet every morning I watched the sun rise. Every day was a new day with new hope and new possibilities. Every day was a reaffirmation of my promise to my father to "Live life until I took my last breath."

On the island, in the refugee camp, we waited a very long time for our interview. While we were waiting and waiting time stood still. Every day seemed much longer than twenty-four hours.

Each day I thought, "Maybe today will be the day we get picked for an interview." We didn't know what the system for choosing families was, or if there even was a system, or if it was just pure luck.

We did know, however, that once we'd been interviewed, we'd have a sponsor. We'd be able to settle in the United States or another first-world country where we'd be free and able to realize the opportunities we had only imagined. We were hoping for the U.S.

Then one day, after six long months of waiting, we were notified. We got scheduled for an interview. We were excited about it but there was no sponsor yet, only more waiting. And waiting....

What helped us get through the waiting was our ability to just keep going. We held onto hope and the possibility of a promising future.

And we learned to be patient. Sometimes what you need or want is not yet available and all you can do is wait.

(Continues...)

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