MY PLACE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE Chased by Communists Toward the American Dream
	JUNE 2005

by Lien Tran, as told to Don Huntington
Photos by Russell Byrne

Our trip from Southeast Asia to Northern California lay along a path of tears and dangers that was typical of the experience of many of us who came here chasing the American Dream. Our first home in our new country was in the Bay Area. A friend of ours worked as a lawyer for the Bangkok, Thailand branch of the Bank of America. He got a B of A sponsorship for us and we ended up settled in an Oakland apartment. I began working in the accounting department of the B of A San Francisco Branch.

When I showed up for my first day of work, the HR person asked me, “What kind of job do you want?” What could I answer? So for some reason they gave me the task of approving credit card applications in the bank’s VISA and MasterCard processing center.

My Hanoi Childhood
I was born in North Vietnam to relatively wealthy parents. My mother had her own business making silk fabrics and dye. She had a farm plot where she raised the caterpillars that spun the silk that she made into fabric. I was too young to help in the family business, but I remember that factory and recall seeing the 40 or so people who worked for her.

I had six brothers and sisters. The seven of us lived in a large house next door to the factory in a suburb of Hanoi. When I was about ten, we moved to a luxurious house that my paternal grandfather had given to us in downtown Hanoi, about six miles from the city’s center. My parents commuted every day to the silk farm. This was just before the outbreak of WWII.

We were relatively untouched by the terrible suffering that the war inflicted upon most of the rest of the planet. After the end of the war, however, the communists began moving into the area. I could see clearly the troubles that were about to come upon the North so in 1954, at my urging, our family moved from Hanoi to Saigon. It was good timing, because two months after we moved the communists seized control of the North, and split the country into two pieces. My parents believed that they would be able to return to their home in a couple of years after the troubles died down, but of course the troubles never died down.

Our big house in Hanoi displayed our family name on the entrance on a large sign above the gate. The communists destroyed the sign and I am sure that if we had remained in the North they would have destroyed us, as well. We were afraid of the communists, but could not have imagined what cruel people they would actually become. Beginning in 1956, Ho Chi Minh began murdering tens of thousands of residents. He would put to death farmers who owned only one acre of land for the crime of having a capitalist mentality. Ho eventually admitted that 50,000 civilians had been “executed by mistake.” My parents, my siblings, and I would certainly have become nine of those “mistakes” if we hadn’t gotten out when we did.

Peace and War in South Vietnam
My parents eventually moved us all to Saigon. I enjoyed the life we were living in Saigon. We didn’t have to work too hard and the communist threat seemed remote. In Saigon I met the Vietnamese airborne officer who became my husband. He was eventually promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonial. He was not faithful to me, however. He had a number of girlfriends and at least one other wife so, following 20 years of marriage, I divorced him.

Our peace even in those early days in the South was not total. The French who were ruling at that time seemed at times to be not much better than the communists. For example, my cousin personally witnessed the murder of townspeople in the City of Bien Hoa. After one of their patrols was ambushed, French soldiers lined up 45 random men and put them all to death.

The communists eventually chased us out of Saigon just has they had chased us out of Hanoi two decades earlier. I left Vietnam April 24, 1975, when my son, James, was 13 years old. I had four other children ranging in ages from 11 to 19. Our timing was even better than it had been in the earlier evacuation because we got out of the country only six days before the fall. It was a savage time — people were fleeing in any way they could. In desperation some of them tried to cross the South China Sea in flimsy boats. Half of those boat people are lying at the bottom of the ocean. Some of them were neighbors and friends of mine. One family in particular remains vivid in my memory. The man was a medical doctor. He, his wife, and their two children shut the door of their home behind them and were never heard from again.

After the fall of Saigon, the Viet Cong captured my ex, sent him to Hanoi, and held him prisoner in a concentration camp for ten long years. After finally being freed, he retuned to Saigon and escaped by boat to Malaysia. He was able to immigrate to the U.S. because my daughter sponsored him.

Living and Working in the Bay Area
I worked at the B of A for about three years while my two older children were working part-time jobs. I moved to San Jose because my oldest son wanted to study electronics at Bay Valley Technical School. While in San Jose a friend of ours partnered with me to open a small restaurant, featuring beef noodle soup. The operative word really was “small.” The place was actually a converted hamburger take-out joint. We had four tables. All of us were working to make our new family business a success. My son James got stuck with the job of cooking meat over a tiny charcoal grill in a cramped back room. This was in 1978. I soon opened my own place, so I called it “Lien’s Café.” Shortly afterwards I opened a really nice restaurant in Milpitas that I called Minh’s after the name of my son-in-law.

For a while James made good use of a technical education. He started out as a draftsman in a high-tech company. For a couple of years he was in business for himself as an architectural designer, before getting a job as representative for a U.S. company in Vietnam. He studied networking and became net administrator for Standard and Poor. Later he worked for HP where he says that he maintained 50 servers. (I don’t know what that means, but it sounds impressive!) James rode the Silicon Valley technology wave into a company called RGI that doubled his salary. When the dot.com boom turned into the dot.bomb bust the company replaced him with a younger man who was willing to work for a third of his salary. After getting laid off, James ended up for a while, as he had begun, by cooking at my restaurant.

We blame my cousin for our Brentwood Minh’s adventure. Her name is Hoang-Anh (Yellow Bird), but everyone calls her Auntie Anh. She read in a paper a restaurant review of a Vietnamese restaurant in Pleasant Hill in which the claim was made that the restaurant served, “A soup to die for.” Auntie Anh went to the restaurant and ordered the soup. She reported that it came nowhere near to being as tasty as my soup. If people would die for that soup, then Auntie Anh said they would kill for mine.

She told us, “Bring the food we are cooking in Milpitas to the East County.” James and I started making trips, coming up here looking for a place. A year and a half ago we discovered that Ragin’ Cagin’ was going out of business and in February we took over the lease on their downtown location. Our grand opening was March 24, 2004.

The Good Life in Brentwood
We’re thankful to Auntie Anh for making this happen because we really like East County. We appreciate the small-town atmosphere in Brentwood’s downtown area. The people around here are really friendly! It has been easy to get to know them and to begin making friends with local residents.

I think my story is typical of the tale of a lot of people who have come to America from Southeast Asia. We were fleeing persecution and death. We were seeking a place where we could be at peace. We wanted an opportunity to raise our children and our grandchildren without worrying about whether evil people would come in during the night and kill them or take them captive. We were searching for an opportunity to work hard, become financially secure, and take care of our family and our friends.

In other words, hundreds of thousands of us came here over the past four decades from Southeast Asia searching for the American Dream. The United States has many detractors and critics, both within and without. The fact can’t be ignored, however, that opportunities still abound for people to take control of their destiny — to create the good life for themselves, if they will.

Some people say that life is like a journey we take from the cradle to the grave. If that is so, then the section of road I’ve traveled from my family’s home in Hanoi to our restaurant in Brentwood has been long, often difficult, and always interesting.

So stop by and see how our food actually tastes. Whether or not our soup is good enough to die for or to kill for, we’ll serve it to you with a smile. You will also be able to witness an authentic example of the American Dream as it is being lived out by us happy people who are running Minh’s Restaurant in this part of the wonderful “land of the free.”