Photo by Michael J. GallegosTribune

Tribune

Dai Phan, whose family and thousands of their countrymen escaped from Vietnam in small boats in the late 1970s, shakes hands and shares a laugh with patient Roberto Garcia as Bernard Stevens (behind door) waits his turn. Phan is a dental specialist at the New Mexico VA Health System in Albuquerque.

Photo by Michael J. GallegosTribune

Tribune

Dai Phan, a dental specialist at the New Mexico VA Health System in Albuquerque, has been in the United States since 1980, when his family arrived as refugees from Vietnam.

More Living Columnists

• Dolores Sanchez Badillo: The view from the fenceline
• Mary Penner: Learning about your past is an awesome journey
• Steve Brewer: Goofy fads can hold fond memories for families

MOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

• ABQTrib.com to remain available
  08:48 a.m., February 25, 2008
• Congressman is indicted
  08:37 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Series of attacks target Green Zone
  08:36 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Iran is defying U.N., agency says
  08:35 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Waterboarding approval probed
  08:34 a.m., February 23, 2008

TRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

• Ty Murray Invitational thrills fans in Albuquerque
• Is Rome Burning?
• Ominous Skies
• The Road to Invalidation
• Albuquerque company participates in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

Dai Phan is a man with a hearty laugh.

He laughs at things that, while maybe not so funny, make you want to laugh along, just because it looks like so much fun.

Phan, 39, a dental specialist at the New Mexico VA Health Care System in Albuquerque, stood in an elevator at the hospital last week, still chuckling at a story he told an hour or so earlier.

It was something about a banana leaf, and how it was a way of telling when someone stranded on an island was about to use the bathroom.

The island was like the one near Indonesia, on which he was stranded for a year and a half. . . . After being attacked six times by Thai pirates in a cramped and unseaworthy wooden boat. . . . After spending nearly six months in a Vietnamese jail.

All before junior high.

It's a wonder he laughs at all.

• • • • • • • • •

Vietnam is a beautiful place, Phan said while flipping through landscape photos of his native country on a laptop computer.

"If you have a chance, please go to Vietnam," he said. "It is very, very green."

But in the 1970s, Phan and his family were among thousands of Vietnamese refugees eager to leave.

In April 1975, as North Vietnam was on the verge of overrunning the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, then-7-year-old Phan and his family found themselves under fire at the Saigon airport. Phan said his left eye was shut for a week from a North Vietnamese rocket attack injury.

In 1977, after his father, a medical officer with the South Vietnamese military, had spent two years in a re-education camp, Phan, his parents and older brother made their first attempt to leave the country by boat.

Doing so, in the middle of a military takeover, proved harrowing. It came down to a matter of paying the right people, he says.

And the first time around, they didn't pay the right person.

The person who offered them a ride to freedom put his family on a bus bound for a boat. "We sat on the bus, but the bus didn't go anywhere," Phan said.

Their helper turned out to be a police informant, he said, and the family ended up spending six months in jail.

Using gold bars and the connections of an uncle who used to fight for the North, the family was free by late 1978 and ready for a second attempt.

This time, they got access to a boat leaving from the southernmost tip of the country.

It was a wooden boat with two decks that would carry 165 people - plenty more than it could hold comfortably. The family settled into the bottom deck.

"It's cozy down below, right?"

• • • • • • • • •

Unlike Columbus, this wasn't a brave journey of discovery. It was a brave journey to be discovered.

"Our hope is to get out to into international waters and be rescued by a boat," Phan said.

They were discovered several times over the next week, but not in the ways they had hoped.

Pirates, mostly Thai fishermen sensing opportunity, ravaged the small boat, Phan said. Women were raped, men were beaten. One woman, he said, committed suicide to avoid rape.

"Our boat looked like a gigantic trash can," he said. "After the third time, the fourth time, we signed our fate. Whatever comes, comes."

The boat eventually came within sight of Malaysia, but at a time when neighboring governments were pushing Vietnamese refugees back to sea.

The refugees on Phan's boat decided to sink the vessel. "You sink the boat, you're stranded," Phan said. "They couldn't push you back."

The boat people spent 10 days on a Malaysian beach before being taken away by bus - with the belief they were headed for a refugee processing center.

"People were waving to us," Phan recalled, "but they weren't waving hello. They were waving goodbye."

The refugees were instead taken back to their own boat, which resurfaced once the tide receded. A Malaysian navy destroyer tugged the fragile boat back out to sea during a thunderstorm, stranding it in the ocean, Phan said.

"Talk about life on a thread, man," Phan said. "Was I scared? Not at the time. I was with my parents."

• • • • • • • • •

The boat people soon found their way to an island in Indonesian territory.

Kuku Island may not have seemed comfortable to most - Phan said four sticks marked the territory of his "house" - but it represented a different kind of comfort.

"We don't have to worry about being pushed back," he said. "There was no navy there."

Phan and his family stayed for a year and a half. Islanders lived mostly on seafood but ate grubs, birds, snakes - pretty much anything they could, he said.

The biggest threats were rats, disease and falling coconuts. Rats "came and gnawed on your legs at nighttime," he said, while disease cut the island's population of about 1,000 in half.

"It's a shame to make it through Vietnam . . . only to be killed by a falling coconut," Phan said. "It's funny, but it's no laughing matter."

After about six months on the island, they were spotted by a passing UNICEF boat. While this was the family's chance to leave, Phan's father, who received medical training in Hawaii, opted to wait for America.

And eventually, with the help of an aunt, the family found sponsorship from a church and landed in Beaverton, Ore.

It was April, 1980. The next month, nearby Mount St. Helens erupted.

• • • • • • • • •

Phan has lived in Albuquerque for the past four years. As a maxillofacial prosthodontist, his work encompasses prosthetic rehabilitation in the jaw and head area.

The hearty laugh, he says, isn't a defense mechanism, a way of bringing light to an otherwise dark past.

He's just a funny guy who likes to tell funny stories.

He laughs, for example, when talking about when he entered school in the United States as a seventh-grader. Kids made fun of English skills, "but they didn't lay a single finger on me," he said. "They thought I knew kung fu."

Even now though, his story remains something of a mystery. "I can't believe I went through all that and didn't fear," he said.

It was being with his parents, feeling that veil of protection in their presence, he said.

But it's still hard to believe, he said. So he might as well just laugh.

"They say laughter is the best medicine," said the long-landed boat person. "It's my nature."