Americans that might have been

We are diving into a new Vietnamese cookbook this week, "Secrets of the Red Lantern," by Pauline Nguyen.  Following the author's careful instructions, we now can make summer rolls for ourselves, and even are getting good at rolling them properly so they don't fall apart in mid-bite.

Between recipes, Nguyen relates her family's escape from Viet Nam as boat people in late 1977.  Part of the story is the usual depressing parade of horribles:  idealists take over a county and, by way of transforming it into a worker's paradise, make it illegal to leave; a lucky few survive the desperate sea voyage, only to be interned on shore; refugee camps degenerate into hellholes administered by bureaucrats with shriveled souls.  The part I want to highlight on this Independence Day is the three mistakes Nguyen's father now thinks he made, which prevented his realizing the dream of a new life in America.

Mistake Number One:  Resolved to escape Communist domination or die trying, Nguyen père planned his family's flight meticulously.  He and a blood-brother from his military days built a sturdy boat with a reliable engine and packing enough food and water for all twenty-four passengers:  six men, six women, and twelve small children.  What he didn't guess was that ship after ship would refuse aid to a boat full of refugees who didn't look desperate enough.  In retrospect he wonders if they should have torn their clothes and stood on deck weeping.  Turned away from one Malaysian shore, he even wondered if he should sink the boat.  In the end, he landed his family safely in Thailand, where they were interned in what purported to be a short-term refugee camp.

Mistake Number Two:  Theoretically Nguyen was a high-priority prospective U.S. immigrant as a result of his services to the American military before the fall of Saigon.  Wanting to be useful while he awaited processing, he quickly emerged as the natural candidate for camp manager.  He did such a fine (unpaid) job that his benefactors kept moving his application for immigration to the United States to the bottom of the pile.   Upon the realization that the average camp resident was processed within a couple of months while he and his family had been trapped for several times that long, the idea dawned on him:   "Never give 100 percent until you are working for yourself."  He resigned as camp manager and was put back on the fast track for processing.

Mistake Number Three:  Nguyen's benefactor/captors had uneasy consciences.   It was important to them to maintain the fiction that refugees were processed and resettled within a month or two.  Pressed by a reporter one day, Nguyen incautiously admitted that his family had been in the camp for nine months.  "When stuck in a refugee camp," he now says, "do not speak the truth."  Many weeks later he forced himself to write a letter of abject apology to the U.S. immigration officer who ran the camp.  The next day, the officer informed Nguyen that he and his family would be moving to Australia.

Australia won some valuable citizens, while we missed out.  But the Nguyen family risked everything to be free, first in Ho Chi Minh City and then in a Thai internment facility, which in my book makes them honorary Americans on this Fourth of July.  In honor of the boat people, for our neighborhood holiday party, we are bringing Vietnamese spring rolls, fried and wrapped in lettuce with cucumbers, carrots, mint, Thai basil, and nước chấm dipping sauce.  Here's to the right to the fruits of one's own labor, and the determination to live free or die.