American Engineers Reunite With Family After 50 Long Years

12.14.09 Guest Authors: Hang Nguyen and David Regenold

Hang Nguyen and David Regenold live in Tempe, Arizona where Hang is a Principle Engineer with Intel Corporation and David is a design engineer with Marvell Semiconductor. They have two children, Nathaniel Regenold who is a Junior at Washington University in St. Louis and Jonathan Regenold who is in 7th grade at Aprende Middle School.

Hang and David, along with their family, made a memorable journey back to Ha Noi last year and reunited with relatives they have not seen in over 50 years. Below is there story that many of us can definitely identify with.

The Arrival

We arrived in Hà Noi by taxi from the airport on May 28^th of 2008. My wife, her sister, my two sons, and I began our journey in Saigon a week earlier. After 5 days in the South and a few days in Hue, we made our way further north to the place that my wife, Hang, and her sister, Hien, could claim as their ancestral home. In a sense, we were closing a loop that began more than fifty years earlier. Hang’s parents had grown up in the Hà Noi area, married, and then left for Saigon in the 1950s, the city where all of their children would be born. There they lived until the final days of April, 1975 when circumstances would lead them from the Saigon airport to the U.S.S. Midway, The Philippines, and eventually, the United States. Hang was 14 years old. Until this visit, no member of their family had ever returned.

On the morning of the 29^th, we set out in a taxi from our hotel in the Old Quarter on an attempt to locate relatives. Throughout the more than 30 years they had lived in the USA, Hang’s family had maintained contact with their relatives in Hà Noi through occasional letters, but these had grown less frequent as the years went by leaving considerable uncertainty in the contact information we had brought along with us. We spent several hours chasing dead ends before finally locating a phone number that led us to Minh, one of five children of my mother-in-law’s bother. Within minutes, Minh showed up on his moped and escorted us back to his home. It was there that we encountered our first surprise of the day.

The Surprise Reunion

Our timing could not have been more coincidental. Completely unaware that there was anything special about this particular day, we had come on exactly the 14th anniversary of the death of Minh’s father. As most readers know, the Vietnamese remember the anniversary of a loved one’s death with a gathering of family members and a meal in memory of the deceased. Needless to say, the family in Hà Noi was completely taken by surprise. A family gathering was already in the works, and seemingly out of nowhere, members from this branch of the family that had left Hà Noi more than 50 years earlier simply showed up at the front door, unannounced and unexpected.  For a brief time, Minh was beside himself in tears over this unexpected arrival of his cousins from the USA whom he had seen in pictures, but had never met.

One by one, the other cousins arrived. We had an enormous lunch while sharing the history of the last 50 years from both sides of the family and viewing pictures that Minh had accumulated over the years. Many of these were pictures of Hang’s family sent from Saigon before they had left for the United States.  Their quick departure from Saigon in 1975 had required them to leave behind all their belongings, including pictures, so that to Hang and Hien, these pictures offered a rare glimpse into their own past.

We invited Minh, his sisters, and their families out to dinner that evening at a restaurant on the West Lake in Hà Noi. Altogether there were some two dozen relatives at this dinner. Ming became my constant companion on this day and the days to come, and though neither of us spoke a word of the other’s language, we spent many hours drinking beer (and Snake Liquor), laughing, and communicating the best we could.

A Second Surprise

But even before the meal at the West Lake, we encountered our second surprise of the day. It came when we inquired into the whereabouts of the other half of the family – my father-in-law’s relatives. We had come to Vietnam with no addresses for them, and Hang’s father believed that his brother was likely no longer living as by now he would be in his mid-eighties. We learned from Minh, however, that this was not so. In fact, he had kept in touch with this side of the family and knew that Hang’s Uncle lived across the Sông Hong in the pottery village of Bat Trang in the very house that my father-in-law had grown up in. Minh wasted no time in calling a cab to take us there. When we arrived we found that Hang’s Uncle was in the hospital undergoing some treatment and would not be home for a few days. We were able to meet for a while with his wife and some of his children. Promising to return after the Uncle was released from the hospital, we set out on several excursions to cemeteries on the outskirts of Hà Noi to visit the graves of departed family members, and eventually headed back into Hà Noi for the meal at the West Lake.

Tears

We returned to Bat Trang after a 2-day excursion to Ha Long Bay. This time we were greeted by Hang’s uncle and yet another two dozen relatives. It was a very emotional reunion. Hang’s uncle sat on a couch and spent nearly an hour recounting for us many details of their life in the fifty years since Hang’s Father had gone to the south. At many times during his speech, he was moved to tears, which was quite contagious and spread to at least half the people in the room. The most poignant part of his speech was when he recounted how his mother had sat on the porch of her home nearly every remaining day of her life looking southward in hopes that someday her other son would return.

After the story telling was over, we sat down for yet another magnificent meal. Fifteen minutes into it, a storm moved in from across the river accompanied by much lightning and loud claps of thunder. Hang’s Uncle arose and announced to the gathering that the storm was of no concern and no random occurrence. Rather, he said, the heaven and the earth were rejoicing because his brother’s daughters had at last come home.

From a Destination  to a Home

That note would be a good one to end the story on, but our visit didn’t quite end with that evening.  The next few days in Hà Noi saw an endless stream of visits and family gatherings. It seemed that any time we got back to our hotel room and thought we were to have a moment’s rest we would get a call from the front desk telling us that someone else was in the lobby asking to see us. Usually our visitors brought along gifts . . . So many, in fact, that we had to buy a new large suitcase just to carry all the gifts back home. But all good things come to an end, and there were still other places on our list of sites to visit while in Vietnam. We left on a train to Sa Pa, promising to return someday.  Our goal of meeting “a few” relatives had been far exceeded and Hà Noi, only a week earlier more or less a tourist destination on our travel itinerary, was now clearly much more than that . . . a home base where we could find family and friends.

We want to thank Hang and David for sharing their experiences with us. If you also have a story about returning to Vietnam, please share with us at contactus@onevietnam.org.