Ho Chi Minh City

It's been 18 years ago since I was in Vietnam.

My family was a fishing family from the south. During the Vietnam war, my family tried to live a normal life in the daytime, after dark it was a different story. They slept on the floor for safety, in case the bullets from the battles between the forces would hit through their house. Bombings and explosives could be heard from a close distance. There wasn't someone they knew that didn't knew someone who had been killed in the war.

When the north Vietnamese/Vietcong's reached the city of Saigon, my family and thousands of other families from the south, fled to the ocean in overfilled handmade boats, hoping that foreign ships would spot them and take them to refuge. My uncle Vu, only a teen at that time, told me that more than 50% of those boat refugees disappeared in the open sea. The boat that my mom, my dad, my grandma, 2 uncles, 2 aunties and others were picked up by a Norwegian ship, who brought them to safety in Singapore. My mom was pregnant at the time and gave birth to my older sister while they were there. Most of my family stayed there for 2 years, some had already been placed in Denmark in 1980. A year after, 1981 the rest of the family was send off to Denmark to be reunited, 2 years later I was born. My mom never spoke to me about her time in the war and the things that she saw in those terrible times, neither did any of my family members until I asked my uncle last year.

Their story makes me forget my so called everyday problems.