The American Surgeon Who Escaped the Viet Cong

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we’re back with Our American Stories, and up next, a story from Wat Wong. Today, Wat is a surgeon, but his journey to getting there was far from ordinary. He’s here to share the story of his family fleeing Vietnam and arriving in America with nothing.

00:00:31
Speaker 2: Growing up in South Vietnam, I was really young at the time, but the things that we remember are the things that we did all the time, and so we were Catholics, so we went to Mass all the time. Every morning, we would go to church. Our village was along the seashore. It was a fishing village, and so my dad was a commercial fisherman. He would leave every morning, come in every night, and so we would run out to the dock to see the day’s catch. We didn’t have running water. Though we had electricity, it was really limited. So we had a light in the house. And my grandparents, my dad’s parents, they had the only TV in the village, and so all of us would swarm to his house and watch his TV. We didn’t have an ice machine. We had an ice box. So my mother, if she needed ice, she would send me to the ice factory. She always ordered the bigger block of ice because I would walk along the beach in the hot sand. When I picked up the big block of ice and started walking home, ice is cold, so the ice would fall on the sand, and then it would start to melt, so then I would pick it up and start walking a little bit more and it would fall again. So, by the time I made it home, that block of ice was a lot smaller than the block that I started with. So those are some of the simple, fond members of the things that happened all the time. But at that time, the North Vietnamese Communists, which they were supported by China and by the Soviet Union, were trying to overtake South Vietnam, which was non-communists. So we were the democratic side of Vietnam, and it was a civil war going on during that time, and so ultimately, South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese Communists. That’s when I remember things such as the troops storming South Vietnam and people just scrambling under military fire. I remember, as a six-year-old, hiding underneath the mattress, underneath the bed. And the North Vietnamese troops would run through our house and ransacking the house and hearing gunfire in the village and thinking, “Oh, my goodness, this is not going to end well.” I remember hearing them yelling, “You know, where’s your dad?” because my dad was part of the South Vietnamese military. He had served a while back, but at that point, any grown man was considered a to them, and so they were looking for any men. So, the North Vietnamese, as they came down, we knew that democracy was going to end because Christianity was not going to be loud. There was going to be a lot of tyranny as far as religion, as far as economy, as far as finances, and my parents knew that was coming. And so, when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese, and that was April 30, 1975. When it happened, it happened in a hurry. The North Vietnamese troops came in rapidly, and my parents decided to flee. And so, as the troops were storming the ground, the only place you can flee is to the ocean. We knew that the U.S. had some presence in the ocean, and so we thought, “Okay, well, if we stay on land, you know, we’re doomed, but maybe if we head out to the sea, maybe there would be somebody to receive us.” We just had to flee. We didn’t have time, really, to say any goodbyes. My immediate family and cousins and aunts and uncles, we all jumped on my dad’s boat. I had three siblings; one of them was a newborn. And as we fled land and headed out, we saw a larger vessel, and we thought, “Oh, thank goodness, you know, here’s somebody that can help us.” And as we approached that ship, come to find out that was a communist ship, and so they started firing on us, and my grandmother was hit, and of course she was hurting them, and she told her husband, my grandfather, “Listen, and we need to get back to land because I won’t be able to survive this.” So, when we went back on shore, my grandfather told my dad, “Son, there’s no life for you here. Take your family with you, take the kids. We’ve lived a good, long life, and you go make a new life for yourself and your family.” I think back now, and I think, “Okay, so I’m a dad now with two kids, and I can’t imagine my parents telling me that.” And I had to choose between: Do I stay with my parents, or do I take my family to a new opportunity? Whatever that opportunity was, we didn’t know that it was going to be better. We just knew if we stayed, it wasn’t going to be good. So my grandparents stayed, and I can’t imagine my dad what he felt. He took the four kids, wife, my mother, of course, and headed back to see. And eventually, we came upon a U.S. ship that received us. We really had no idea of what a U.S. ship was going to look like versus a communist ship, and so when we came and approached one, and it turned out to be friendly, my dad boored it first, and then my mother handed me to my dad, and then handed my youngest brother, who was a newborn at the time, to my dad. And so the three of us got on the neighbor ship first, and right then they cut off any more people coming onto this ship because the ship was full. So then, my mother and two other siblings were still on my dad’s boat, and so they separated us, and then because they had no more room, we were now parted from one another, and who knows when we would see each other again? You just literally watch it float away. That was hard on my dad because my youngest brother was still breastfeeding at the time, and so here he is with a newborn baby being breastfed, and he can’t feed the baby. I learned pretty quickly where to find milk in the ship, and so we just stumbled through it, but eventually got my younger brother fed. And I do remember the first good memory of being on that U.S. ship was when we were looking for something to eat, and the first U.S. food that I ever put in my mouth was a Hershey’s chocolate bar, and it was the best-tasting thing I had ever put in my mouth. Gosh, that Hershey’s bar was good! So, of course, we were fearful and not knowing what we were getting ourselves into. But several weeks later, we were all reunited. We all met together back again in Guam, which was U.S.-owned at that time. Basically, we just stumbled across one another on that island. Then we were all brought to Florida. We were at an immigration camp there, and from there, the different families were sponsored by American and U.S. families to different locations within the U.S. So there was a farming couple in Kentucky, Campbellville, Kentucky, that through the U.S. Catholic Charities Association, they sponsored my parents and the four kids, and so we packed up, got onto a Greyhound bus to Campbellville, Kentucky, from Florida. There, my dad, who worked in the ocean his whole life, was now transplanted into a farming community. And at the time, none of us spoke English. The only English we knew was ‘yes’ and ‘no’. So I started kindergarten in Kentucky, and somehow along the way, we were supposed to bring a blanket to take a nap with. Well, not understanding English, my parents didn’t pack a blanket, and so when I showed up for a first day of school and all the other kids were napping and they all had their blankets, and I’m standing around looking at the kids, “I don’t have a blanket to take a nap with.” And so we quickly learned and adapted. I do remember things that made it easy. For example, math, because two plus two will always be four, regardless of whatever language you speak. And whether you attend a Catholic Mass in Vietnam or you attend one in Campbellville, Kentucky, it’s, “Hey, we all worship the same God, we all have the same Savior, and we’re all trying to get to the same location.” But the rest of it, it comes quickly when you have to speak that language. The material things that you accumulate over time, all of that you set aside, hoping you’d find a new life, a better opportunity for yourself and for your kids.

00:09:27
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Wat Wong tell the story of what happened to so many families when Saigon fell, when South Vietnam was captured by the Communists, and there were consequences when we left Vietnam. But my goodness, Americans did step up. The role of the Catholic Charities plays in so much of this, and all kinds of Protestant charities as well, and stepping up and taking care of the least of these. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Wat Wong’s story here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories, to the story of Wat Wong after fleeing Vietnam. We’d heard about how he and his family had begun to assimilate into American life. Here’s Wat to tell us about more of his adventures here in America.

00:10:30
Speaker 2: I think, in growing up and in hindsight, you see the things that your parents do or did and appreciate their efforts. You know, my parents made a lot of sacrifices a long way, and I hear stories like, for example, growing up in South Vietnamese culture, we eat a lot of rice, and in Kentucky it was all potatoes. And so my dad would come back and come home from hard day’s work, and the farming couple that sponsored us, they would have a little bit of rise, and so we would cook it up and there really wasn’t enough to go around, and so my dad would just go hungry and sacrificed it, and saved it for us. And so there’s no telling how many countless sacrifices that I don’t know about it they’ve made. But they instilled in us the work ethic, the faith that is required through life, and so I tried to teach that to our kids as well. So in South Vietnam, Capolicism was not necessarily the most prevalent religion, but it was for us, and it was impactful for us and my parents. If they had their preferences, I would be a priest right now. But I didn’t go that route, much to their dismay, so I went to med school instead. That’s a funny story. My younger brother was asleep, and my cousin and I were playing while he was taking a nap. And we had a coin, maybe a quarter or something like that, and we were just spinning it on top of my brother, who was asleep on his forehead, thinking, “Oh, that this is kind of fun.” That quarter landed in his mouth. He woke up, inhaled, and swallowed that coin. So that got us in so much trouble. So, we went to the emergency department. The doctor came to see him, took him to surgery, took the coin out, saved the day, and came back out. My mother, of course, is still mad at us, but her son is saved. And I thought to myself, “You know what? That’s pretty neat.” He saved my younger brother’s life. I think, “I want to do that one day.” It was just by chance, doing something silly. It’s something I shouldn’t have been doing. That kind of peaked in interest. We never know what’s in front of us and the experiences that we go through at the time that we go through. Sometimes you don’t really appreciate it until much after the factory. When we were growing up, we were poor in the U.S. We were poor, and my parents were not educated, so they did mostly labor jobs. And one of the jobs that my mother did was, we worked in a crab factory. We picked the meat out of the crabs. And so, here I was, middle school and in high school, picking a stinky crab. And, “Why am I doing this?” You know, a lot of my friends during the summer were hanging out the house watching TV and all that, and I’m going to a stupid crap factory. We were paid by production, so the more crabs you crack, the more meat you get, the more you get paid. What I’m getting at is the moltor dexterity that’s required to crack a cloth precisely to get that meat out so that there are any shells in that meat. It helped improve my hand speed, my manual dexterity, so my left hand is just as good as my right hand. And yes, my mother woke us up at four o’clock in the morning every day to go to the craft factory. And it smelled horribly, and I hated it and I dreaded it. But here I am as a surgeon thirty years later, with finger and hand dexterity that could not have been more polished than because of that manual worth it I did. So, another something that I thought, “Gosh, why am I doing this?” which then I later appreciate. So in college at LSU, during my freshman year, as I was walking around campus thinking about what I was going to do in a for a summer job, I saw a flyer about the Southwestern Publishing Company. And I no idea what the Southwestern Publishing Company was, but it’s at four hundred dollars a week summer job. And I thought, four hundred dollars a week, that’s good money for a college student in 1987. And so I went to one of their seminars, not knowing what I was getting myself into. And so, come to find out it was door-to-door book sales, blind code calls, knocking on the door, seeing if a mom or dad might want to buy educational books for their kids. And I thought, “There’s no way,” but I gave it a try, and so we learned how to approach someone—a complete stranger—try to determine what their needs were, and maybe provide a product or service that can help them and their children do better for themselves. So fast forward twenty years later, I’m sitting with a patient who I’ve never met before. This person could be from any walk of life, and they have a problem, an unmet need. And so you try to identify with that person, see what their needs are and how can I make their life a little better. And so that experience, as a nineteen-year-old college student knocking on 180 doors per week, code calling, really shaped how I communicate with people to this very day, you know, trying to identify what their needs are and hopefully make a difference in their life. As you’re going through these experiencing in life, most of the time is there for a reason. We just don’t realize it at the moment. But you do learn to appreciate those things later on. As I was growing up, I had a lot of horrible dreams about the troops storming the village, and crawling under the bed, and the nightmares within, and that lasted for decades. It took a long time for those dreams to go away. The U.S.—we, and I say ‘we’ because I feel like I’m obviously I’m part of the U.S. now—welcoming society. And every one of us has a culture and a background that’s interwoven into one another, and so the U.S. was welcoming, and the U.S. Catholic Charities Association really did a great job with bringing us in and finding families and assimilating us within the U.S. I just remember the kindness of our sponsoring families. They had kids and grandkids that were about our ages, and so my siblings and I, you know, played with them and ran around the farm and did silly things. But I just remember their kindness. If it wasn’t for them and what all they did for us, you know, we wouldn’t be where we are now. I can’t imagine what my parents went through. Everything is falling apart around you. You’re leaving your parents. You don’t speak the language. The only thing that we had was literally the clothes on our backs. “Who knows where are you going?” Not everyone came to the U.S. It all depended on the immigration services and where they decided. So we were just happened to be within that group that came to the U.S. You never know what happens in life and how that might impact you later on, but appreciate it for what it is when you’re going through and try to make the most of it.

00:18:32
Speaker 1: And great work by Madison on the production. And a special thanks to Wat Wong for sharing his story with us, and what a quintessentially American story it was. His parents wanted to be a priest; he disappointed them and became a doctor. His work at the crab factory, well, that helped him with his hand dexterity and also his discipline. He had to get up at four a.m. His door-to-door book sales gig taught him to listen, taught him empathy that helped him with his bedside manner. He had bad dreams, he said, from all that happened in South Vietnam, but they diminished in the U.S. He said, “Well, it’s a welcoming society.” Our cultures are interwoven. My Sicilian grandparents, my Lebanese grandparents, would agree. And a special thanks to Catholic Charities for all the great work they do. The story of Wat Wong, the story of America. In the end, here on Our American Stories.