Chapter 1: What harrowing experience did Anh Nguyen Austen's family face while fleeing Vietnam?
This is an ABC podcast.
On the internet, there's this video. It's from the early 1980s and it's shot by an international medical group called Médecins du Monde, Doctors of the World. And it shows the rescue at sea of an overcrowded boat of Vietnamese refugees, families of men and women and children. And the boat's been on the South China Sea for some three days. It's been tossed by storms.
And the boat's filled with a whole lot of people, many of whom had never even seen the sea before. Many of the people on board look either catatonic or beside themselves with terror. And it's amazing to watch the transformation of those people as they're pulled onto the larger boat and they begin to allow themselves to hope once more. Anne Nguyen-Austen was one of the kids on that boat.
She was just six years old at the time. After her family was rescued, they went to the United States. Anne worked really hard. She was admitted to an elite college where she earned a double degree. Now, Anne lives in Australia.
Chapter 2: How did Anh's family adapt after being rescued at sea?
She's an academic at the Australian Catholic University. She's a volunteer with the ATSpeak, which is a community-based language group in inner West Melbourne, and she cooks for Free To Feed, an enterprise that supports refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. And it was only a few years ago that Anne saw that dramatic and powerful footage of the rescue of her family at sea. Hello, Anh.
Hi, Richard. When you cook at this place, Free to Feed, what do you cook?
Oh, I cook this, actually, Tex-Mex Vietnamese menu, which is kind of a flair of all the places that I kind of grew up.
How does that work, Tex-Mex and Vietnamese? A lot of chilli, obviously, is the connecting ingredient there, I would think.
No, it's actually the fresh herbs and the cilantro. So I think of them both as very fertile and fruit-oriented vegetable cuisines, very fresh.
Tell me about the town where your family lived when you were little.
Well, we grew up in, I grew up in Binh Hoa, and it's a very Catholic town. It's about 20-some minutes outside of Saigon, which is Ho Chi Minh City now. And it's so Catholic that I took my son back there, and we discovered that people have been visiting the Statue of Mary where she's bleeding tears out of her eyes.
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Chapter 3: What role does food play in Anh's life and cultural identity?
So we're like, how does it work? How does it work? Yeah.
And what is this town? Is it an agricultural town? What's going on in this town?
It's actually a lumber-based town and my grandfather had inherited that business. So you see a lot of furniture making and then you see a lot of nuns and priests and, you know, I live at the house around the corner from the church, really.
Was your family relatively well-to-do then before the communist takeover in the 70s?
Yes, because my grandfather, he had the luck of inheriting this business and town kind of industry. He was a young man in his 20s at the time, after the 50s, after the French War. And there was a man who was a very wealthy landowner who basically wanted to get rid of all the assets that was in his land.
portfolio at the time before communism comes and so he really took a liking to my great-grandfather and so he he gave him business so how much protection did that wealth and status afford your family in the town that while the war is raging throughout the 50s and 60s and early 70s between the north and south
Well, it gave my father certainly a lot of protection, and he was still kind of drafted to do military service, but his father was able to have him only stay in the office and take an office position, so he never had to go to the front line. So my father had the opportunity to do his baccalaureate, French baccalaureate, for instance, by post, and one of the last to do that.
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Chapter 4: How did Anh's upbringing in Vietnam shape her perspective on life?
How did your parents meet?
Oh, my parents, they met in 1970. As I understand it, see, my mother went to boarding school and everyone went to some kind of Catholic school. My father went to seminary and there was a nun visiting her town. She lives in the country near the coast. And the nun had noticed her and then mentioned to my father's family, there's a really nice girl here.
And so they send my grandfather to go and meet her, and then the grandfathers kind of created the courtship.
So there was a matchmaker involved. There's a whole culture of that, isn't there?
Yes, and mostly around the families and the two grandfathers. So my grandfather was very fond of my parents' marriage, and he remembers it exactly. The courtship is six months and nine days.
How did they get on?
Oh, they got on really well. My father was very debonair and very handsome and very learned and sophisticated.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Anh's parents face as refugees in the United States?
So when he kind of arrived at the door, kind of walked out and he's quite tall because he had some French blood in him and came to meet her. You know, her father told her right away, just put on something nice and go out and bring out the tea. And then he did also give them time. I think they sent the two of them to the second floor and they got to talk.
And my mother was very impressed with his conversation and sophistication.
So did they court together for a while, go out, and did they end up falling in love even though it was an arranged marriage?
Oh, yes. My father was a very romantic, very French-influenced person. So the courtship is really just lots of letters. He wrote a lot of letters. And from what my mother said, they only got like one day trip together in Paris, which is near Vung Tau, a very popular tourist town now. So that was around that. And then otherwise, she just had lots of letters from him and he would write about it.
walks in the woods and he had all these stories and kind of very romantic prose.
Was this in French or Vietnamese that he was writing in?
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Chapter 6: How did Anh Nguyen Austen pursue her education in America?
I think he would have written in Vietnamese to my mother. She didn't probably know as much English as he did.
So when they got married, how did it go for your mum when she moved into the family home?
Yeah, I asked her about that and she said that, you know, she never met them and she didn't know. So she became kind of the new person or kind of a bit of the housemaid in the family. And she did struggle a little bit with my grandmother who was very...
demanding and she didn't know what she was in for but later you know that grandmother on her deathbed asked for my mother so I think despite some difficulties they ended up quite fond of one another.
What was your dad doing for work in those years?
So he just would go to the office, the army office, and then he would bring his studies. And then that was what his main job was. And he was kind of completing that baccalaureate then. And he would bring little treats back to her. He knew she was struggling a bit, so he would find petite fours and they would have some quality time together.
on their own, and later when he had my brother, they had their first child, he decided to insist that they get a separate home so that they wouldn't have to live with the grandparents.
Still a married couple who are Catholic in Vietnam.
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Chapter 7: What significant moments influenced Anh's career path and values?
having petit fours and tea and everything else. It feels a bit like St. Petersburg just before the Russian Revolution. It feels like... I know I just sort of feel the fragility of this as you're telling me this.
Yeah, it is 1970 and, you know, so they are struggling actually to have children and they go to the priests and they ask about this and you can sense the post-war...
malaise and the priest turns to them and says you know look around at all the poverty and suffering around you I don't think you're concerned of that much of magnitude in the world and you know so they go away and then finally they get a first child which is good and then by the time it's 1976 right after the fall of Saigon is the year that I'm born so I think they proceeded in a way despite the war
So 1976 is after the US has pulled out that dramatic scene of everyone climbing aboard the chopper on top of the US embassy in Saigon. That's all been and gone and now the Communist Party has control of the entire country. What did that mean for your Catholic, slightly Frenchified family under the new regime?
Well, there's certainly that sense that we were property owners and that our fortunes would change. But it was just pure chaos for everyone. And specifically for my mother's family, they were living on the coast. So when the US Navy had left and evacuated, they all got to go on those Navy ships. So her entire family had evacuated and were headed to the US.
But she lived inland because she had married my father.
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Chapter 8: How does Anh reflect on her family's journey and their impact on her life today?
And so there was no way for her to go. So she heard news of that. But it was kind of constant news about people leaving. And even, you know, my father's family was extremely sad for her. And I think they became much kinder to her in that sense. But it was one of the saddest days. There were, you know, people that remember the exact...
hour of the radio announcement and South Vietnamese soldiers committing suicide. It's just a very, like, even when my mother talks about it, she really tears up at that very particular hour. They remember that hour.
Was your family going to be a target of this regime, like I said, given the fact they're bourgeois Catholics?
Yes, I guess we'd grown up with some raids on the house. They were, you know, checking for weapons or whatever it is that they're saying they're doing. But mostly it's just confiscating property.
How about the big house that your grandfather had? What did the regime want to do with that?
Well, I think what happened is people's fortunes had changed. So they kind of left us just a very small part of the shop front. And so they had given the other parts away to other families that were probably working for the regime.
Were your parents sent to re-education camps?
No, my father did not have that kind of a fate because he was protected by his family.
And how was he protected? Did they have connections with the regime or was it just through, I don't know, paying off soldiers or how did it work?
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