Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

I am sitting before my uncle. His eyes rove over documents typed on an archaic machine with a wild menagerie of Vietnamese punctuation—squiggles, dots, and tiny circles—scrawled in by hand with black ink. The thin onionskin paper of the documents crinkles audibly with the rise and fall of his breath. We are in a single-story, door-less box that serves as the local police station in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, tucked into the lushly green coffee plantations of the surrounding foothills.

I met my uncle for the first time four days ago, arriving with a government-approved translator who drove me by motorbike from the highland city, Boun Ma Thout. This is the first contact with my mother’s family since she fled Saigon in 1975.

Our reunion has attracted the attention of the local police because I am a foreigner and my mother’s people belong to the Dega hill tribes, an indigenous minority. In yet another chapter of a 50-year old struggle for autonomy, the Dega held demonstrations in 2001 and 2004, and ever since these protests, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has enforced strict regulations about who is allowed to enter the tribal region.

According to the Vietnamese government, the roots of the current civilian unrest are "foreign agitators," such as Dega political exiles and American vets who encourage the tribes to demand their religious and ancestral land rights. An alliance with the American Special Forces, who relied heavily on hill tribe recruits for guerrilla fighting against the Viet Cong, contributes to the Hanoi government’s general distrust of any American.

Still, I am left to wonder how it is that I—a 23-year-old Dega-American female, barely five feet tall, searching for long-lost family—can be viewed by the police as a threat. As my uncle reads the documents, old-fashioned black reading glasses balance low and awkwardly on the bridge of his nose, ill-fitted to his broad features. Traces of his prior life as a schoolteacher are reflected in his demeanor: He was stripped of his professional license when the Communists won the war. He is around 60 years old and his face is gaunt and leathered from countless hours of tending to coffee plants in the tropical sun.

His eyes are heavy-lidded with fatigue, tanned yellow and bloodshot, and speak volumes to me about the war, although my uncle was never a soldier. Once he did try to enlist with the American Special Forces but as the story goes, the moment a gun was placed in his hands he threw it down, ran away and hid. “Guns terrify me,” he explains. This small irony is lost on the Vietnamese government, who placed him in re-education camp for three years because my mother had escaped to the United States.

The early morning light shines on the right side of his face, spilling in from a window behind him. An iron grate bars the window, the green paint chipping. At first glance the light is too blinding to look at directly. Slowly my eyes adjust. The grate, I begin to see, is in the form of a peace dove.

Taking cues from my uncle, I have gotten a basic lesson in how to deal with bureaucrats in Vietnam. Offer cigarettes. Light cigarettes. Nod quickly and seriously at what they say. Smile at their jokes. Answer all their questions quickly and briefly. Offer more cigarettes to the other cops who straggle in. Light them. Don’t appear too relaxed. Read and sign the paperwork they give you. Answer the same questions multiple times. Fill out more paperwork. Make sure they are happily chain-smoking.

I finish filling out all the paperwork and wait for my uncle to read through all of his. I can’t help but feel guilty; I am the reason that he is in the police station, being interrogated once more. A day earlier, he had explained to me that the cops continued to harass him after being released from re-education camp, assuming that his rich American sister had been sending him money to care for their mother.

They hadn’t believed that he too was looking for her. No word ever reached his village that he had two nieces in the United States—until I showed up on his doorstep. Now, with my sudden appearance, he has to deal with the police again.

I watch him reading, the peace dove captured in iron letting the only light into this old, dilapidated room. My gaze wanders out the window. Fifty or so yards away, a young girl stands on a crude ladder reaching up to a small, wooden house erected on stilts. Her dark skin blends in naturally with the wooden house against a backdrop of deep green coffee trees. A Vietnamese flag, bright red with a yellow star, is mounted high on a pole next to the wooden house where the girl stands.

Earlier, when we drove to the police station on motorbikes, I noticed music coming from a tinny-sounding radio. Up until now I had tuned it out, but now my ears pick up the familiar sound of Janis Joplin. The music drifts over from the house where the girl stands. Joplin’s voice wails, full of metal from weak speakers.

In this small village, it’s not a surprise that everybody knows I am here; I imagine that Joplin is a salute to me as an American visitor. But then I begin to sense something else. Am I also hearing that they have not forgotten the war and its battle cry, twisted and reinterpreted into Joplin’s lyrics? I hear rebellion. Repression. Cries for self-determination and freedom.

But the reality for my uncle, stripped of his livelihood as a teacher, a prisoner of a re-education camp, and a survivor of a gruesome war, is that he fears for the well-being of his family. He’s not political or religious. His house is planted firmly on the ground. He worries about the weather and how it affects the coffee, and about giving his family a better life. To him, there is much to lose.

I sit before my uncle as the scene before me zooms out like a camera, framing layers of circumstance in entirety. My uncle and the papers. The light shining into the dank corners, through the iron peace dove. The little Montagnard girl in the shadow of the Vietnamese flag. And Joplin’s wail. I reach into my backpack to pull out my camera. But my uncle stops me with a quick shake of his head. Cameras are not allowed here.

* To protect her safety, the author's name has been changed.