...I was born in Da Nang, South Vietnam, in August 1965. My father was a soldier in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). My mother had a small business. When the North Vietnamese Communists took over South Vietnam in April 1975, my father, like hundreds of thousands of other South Vietnamese, was sent to a "re-education" camp, where he suffered horrendously from hard labor, malnutrition, torture, and solitary confinement, for 12 years. (His father had been killed years earlier by the Communists). My mother’s business was confiscated, and we had to do everything we could to scrape by. I have no idea how we survived those years.

From 1979 to 1981, I made many unsuccessful attempts to escape Vietnam, and was caught twice. Each time I spent only about a month in jail, and my mother bribed me out. In jail, I was beat up, but I wouldn’t call it torture. Compared to what my father went through, my treatment was kid stuff. Finally, in August of 1981, at the age of 16, I managed to successfully escape on a small boat, making it to Hong Kong after 4 days on the South China Sea. After spending 8 months in a refugee camp there, I came to America in April 1982. I was sponsored by my brothers, who had also escaped as boat people and settled in America in 1979. My parents finally were reunited with us when they were sponsored to come as immigrants in 1990. We sometimes tease our parents that they had it better than us: they came on an airplane instead of a boat!...

...What’s this blog about? Well, I just want to share my thoughts on any number things that occur to me. Current affairs, for example. Or, on a totally different topic: Vietnamese poetry. I plan to offer some thoughts on the Vietnam War from a South Vietnamese perspective, which is sorely lacking in the media and academia (I will omit the adjective “left-wing” since it’s redundant)...