North Philadelphia, a competitive, but good-natured game of table tennis takes place. Two elderly Vietnamese gentlemen wail back and forth at the tiny ping-pong ball mercilessly, dodging behind and around the table with surprising speed. The shorter of the two gentlemen, wearing a pair of glasses and a beige baseball cap, seems to be winning the match.
The basement belongs to the Holy Trinity Bethlehem Presbyterian Church, but it’s the site of the Nationalities Senior Center, one of the community partner sites and a teaching space for Project SHINE tutors. Nationalities provides a daily space on the corner of 11th and Rockland for elders in the Philadelphia to congregate and interact, hosting a variety of activities and meals regularly. A majority of the attendees and staff are first-generation immigrants from East Asia, specifically Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
The winning tennis player, Do Dinh Tan, came from Vietnam in 1991. Tan, as he goes by, enjoys at Nationalities the regular pleasures of life that most of us do – he eats meals on a consistent, healthy basis; he spends his free time coming and going as he wishes; he socializes with friends about whatever topic or controversy interests him.
Once upon a time not too long ago, however, Tan lived in an environment void of these privileges.
“His friends and he came from all regions to undergo their political disaster in the dense forest and mountains.”
Do Tan grew up in Vietnam as the youngest in his family. with one older brother and two older sisters. For seven years, he worked as a captain for the Republic of Vietnam.
In 1975, however, the Communist government rouded up all officers of the Republic of Vietnam and sent them to detention camps throughout the country. Tan was sent to a South Vietnamese camp, and would later move to the Fansipan mountains, finally ending up in he the northern Thanh Hoa province. There, at the Thanh-Phong detention site, he would spend the most trying years of his life.
“His dream for a better future suddenly vanished at age thirty.”
Tan’s life in the camp was marked by routine and suffering. Days were spent awaking at 6 a.m. to chop down tremendous bamboo trees and carrying them back to the camp. Most of the trees were used to build barracks, while some of the material went to one or two skilled carpenter detainees to build furniture for the Communist officers. Nights were spent in the cold, crowded barracks built of the trees they cut down earlier that morning.
Tan and his fellow detainees received three meager meals a day, generally consisting of dry potatoes and occasionally a small bowl of rice. Some of the more valued prisoners, such as the carpenters, received slightly bigger portions of food. Everyone else had a chance to receive larger ration sums only if they worked hard. By and large, regardless of work effort, most remained underfed and malnourished, including Tan.
“Then the life kept going on in the deserted forests and mountains. My friends and I shared together a single manioc, even dottle.”
Each day was routine, but not everyday was the same. On one particularly arduous workday, Tan dropped behind the rest of the group while carrying his tree back to the camp. He collapsed from exhaustion and dropped the tree, injuring himself. He was left behind, and the camp officer did not realized he was missing until their arrival at the camp.
So Tan’s team leader, a fellow detainee, set out to find his friend. He found Tan stranded in the forest and led him back to camp, saving Tan’s life. Soon after, that man was killed by a falling tree while working in the forest. This was life for a prisoner in the Vietnamese Communist detention camp.
“With hopeless heart, their coming back home was just a legend…”
For most of the captives, hope for freedom seemed beyond reach. For while they were prisoners in the Thanh-Phong, they also remained prisoners in an oppressive homeland. In Thanh-Phong, if you were caught talking about a time in Vietnam before Communism, you were thrown into a holding cell. Outside Thanh-Phong, if you were caught reminiscing about the same era, you could get thrown into the camp.
There are two kinds of freedom, says Tan – freedom from the concentration camp, and freedom from the Communist government. They had neither.
“I was once sick seriously – my health became so weakened that my heart almost stopped beating. My mind seemed to forget completely Thanh-Phong detention site.”
But they did have their friendship with one another. “I loved all the prisoners of war,” says Tan. “I shared food with them…we all had to share [everything].” That friendship saved his life when he was stranded in the forest. It saved him again when he was ill and ready to give his life up to death: “Tan, you must live to wait for a day of freedom…”
That freedom came in 1982, when, after seven years of imprisonment, Tan was released.
By Jeremy Samsoe
