Voices of the Past, Voice of the Future

Life in Vientiane

My father’s memories are fragmented because of a stroke he suffered in 2012. He can’t remember certain things. His short-term memory was affected most, but the combination of time and the stroke also affected his older memories. Stitching together his story was a daunting task. So, his story is much shorter than my mother’s.

Prasith Silavong, born 1955, grew up in a rural suburb of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, into a family of farmers that grew rice and fruits. The capital, by this time, was a den vices — gambling, brothels, opium, alcohol and government corruption. Although he lived near the city, he said he didn’t go there often.

His father and mother, Phan and Chantao Silavong, tended their farm constantly. My father didn’t have much to say about his parents except that all they did was work the farm, which seems plausible because they had 14 children to raise. His father died around 1997 or 1998. His mother is alive but likely has Alzheimer’s Disease; they’ve been able to see each other again because of the internet and social media.

My father said he and his siblings worked the farm with their parents. It was important, he said. He plowed the rice fields using a hoe pulled by a water buffalo.

Because my father lived near the capital city, he didn’t experience the war like my mother. He didn’t have to hide from airplanes or cross mountains to escape the communists. However, he said he always feared that they would one day invade the city riding on top of elephants. That fear lead to a preparedness: His family also dug holes camouflaged with trees, branches, leaves and grass in case warplanes showed up one day.

He loved school and learning. He didn’t have a favorite subject, but he decided to learn mechanical engineering and went to the a school taught partly by German instructors. The schools in Vientiane, he said, gave the students a 1,000 kip (Lao currency) stipend every semester. He must have saved up some of that money because he said he owned a motorcycle by the time he went to school for mechanical engineering. He worked on cars.

After school, he and some friends would go to the Buddhist temple to learn from the monks. He said they taught English and Buddhism — how to lead a good life and how to be a good person. The monks didn’t charge anything, and they fed the students. He said he wasn’t forced to go to the temple, and that he went because he wanted to learn.

His dream after finishing school in Laos, he said, was to study engineering at a Japanese university. He chose Japan because he heard there was less crime there. There was no proof this was true, but that’s what he believed.

“I didn’t think about (having) a family at all,” he said. “I just (thought) about school, grow up and make a lot of money.”

For his higher education, my father attended a mechanical engineering school also partly taught by Germans. However, he would never graduate.

By 1975, protests broke out in Vientiane. Demonstrators called for an end to corruption in the Royal Lao Government and against the Pathet Lao. My father took part in the protests and strikes, but he didn’t do it voluntarily. A government official told him to go and protest, he said, so he didn't ask any questions. Privately, he wondered why he had to protest, but feared incarceration if he spoke up. He constantly said during our interview that he didn’t question the authorities, including the communist regime, and did whatever they said.

Leaving Laos

My father learned over the radio that the Pathet Lao took over the government in December 1975.

He said the new regime prohibited the publication and distribution of newspapers, and anyone caught with one was taken to “seminar,” a euphemism for labor camp. He was taken to a few seminars to cut down trees, he said.

They conscripted him often but he didn’t stay in the camps very long.

“It was bad. Everybody felt sad because the jungle people came to run the country,” he said. “They didn’t have experience. There was nothing we could do. We just listened to them and went to school.”

In July 1976, at night he swam across the Mekong River into Thailand. He gripped an empty one-gallon water container with one arm and held it in front of his chest for added buoyancy, while he stroked with the other arm. He said he made sure to swim the shortest gap in river between Vientiane and Thailand.

A Thai patrol spotted him when he reached land. They took him to a nearby patrol post, asked a few questions, took this finger prints and asked why he crossed the river. They took him to a detention center that night. It would be a few more days before they moved him to a refugee camp.

My father stayed in a camp in the Nong Khai province. The encampment was separated into two areas: Lao and Hmong, and it was crowded with men, women and children. As with my mother’s camp, there was a market in Nong Khai. However, not everyone could afford what the market had to sell.

There were a few permanent structures in the camp, but those were occupied by the camp's earliest refugees. As the camp grew over the years, after my father left, more housing was built — ranging from shelters consisting of only roofs with no walls to bed sheets tied to bamboo sticks.

My father said he felt like a prisoner. He lived in the camp for one year.

He applied for relocation with three countries: France, because he could speak the language; Germany, because of the mechanical engineering school he attended; and the United States, because his brother was already there.

His first interview for resettlement was with an American representative. They cleared him and he accepted. My father didn’t have a preference among the three countries. He said he chose America because it was the first country that accepted him.

My uncle sponsored my father through the United States Catholic Conference (USCC, renamed the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). They continue to work on many humanitarian issues, including issues with refugees, today.

He was happy when he landed at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California. He lived in an apartment complex in Garden Grove. He also took English language classes. He attended classes much longer than my mother, by three months, but he had eventually to find work.

He found a manufacturing job making precision lenses at an optics company, where he met my mother about a year and a half later.

My father was the kind of person who didn’t mind going out of his way to help a friend. He picked up my mother every day, even though she lived in Huntington Beach, which added about 15 to 20 minutes to his commute. Most of my parents' interactions were during the carpool or at work. They didn’t go on dates — it wasn’t a custom from what I understand. But they liked each other.

My father proposed to my mother about one year later. Unfortunately, neither of them remember where and when he proposed. My father said it was during a carpool to work, but my mother said that didn’t sound right. I don't think that history will ever surface.

They moved in together to an apartment in Anaheim within one year of meeting. They married December 1979.