Immigration By Sea: The Story of Sophia Kha Piano
Profilers: Ryan Brem, Benjelee Nguyen, Aaron Fotedar, Lindsey Piano, Ricardo Laborin
Q: Please introduce yourself and explain how you’re connected to the war.
My name is Sophia Kha Piano, and I was a refugee from Vietnam after the end of the Vietnam War.
Q: We want to know a little bit about your childhood and how that was a little bit leading up before the war and how you grew up.
So my family is Chinese, and so my grandparents moved to Vietnam I guess for a better opportunity and so that’s how we got started in Vietnam.
I come from a family of 12 children, so I am one of twelve. And so after the Fall of Saigon, the Communist government wanted to basically get rid of a lot of non-Vietnamese, mainly Chinese, out of the country, and I came to learn that it was mainly because the Chinese who were in Vietnam tend to have businesses and they did well financially.
I guess they didn’t assimilate too much into the Vietnamese community, and so there was a little… resentment there among the Chinese locals. The Chinese… weren’t really involved in politics; they weren’t in government, but they had a lot of economic power.
I think if you were ethnic Chinese, certain villages allowed you to leave the country, kind of unofficially. You couldn’t leave from the city, but if you go into these certain towns and villages, you can escape from there, so my dad bought an old boat, and at that time you couldn’t build new boats. They would let you go but you have to buy an existing boat.
Oh we also had to pay per person for passage out of the country in gold—they’re not gold bars, so I’ve asked my sister this—they’re called gold sheets like pure gold but in sheets that each adult leaving had to pay seven sheets, and each child was five sheets. So my dad had to come up with a lot of money, first of all to build the boat and then, he kind of spread the word to friends and families who also wanted to leave the country, and then that was the preparation stage.
So we left Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) [on] May 30th, 1979, and we set out—I don’t think we knew where we were going exactly, but we just needed to leave and find a country that was accepting refugees at the time. So we spent the first three days on this island—it’s called Karamat Island—and after that, they took us to a different island called Cuckoo and it was not inhabited on this island. People, most of the men—those who were able to work—had to go into the forest and start cutting down trees to build homes because there was nothing there, so you had to start building either a shed, a hut, or whatever you could build on your own. And so my family was big, and we had like my uncle—[and] my brother was older—so we had men so we were able to build a couple of homes. We got one—it was like a log cabin that’s in my memory. I just remember it’s like… felt like a log cabin, but it was all open.
At that time, so when we got there, the UN knew about us, so they were shipping food like canned sardines, maybe rice, like certain things to feed the people, to feed us. And they also had officials come over and basically take all our information and say, “Alright.” And also they were vetting us right, and so part of it was, like, we had to tell them where you had family, so I had one brother and one older sister who came to the U.S. a couple years before we did, and so we said “Okay, we have family in the U.S.”
It took about like a total of nine months for us to finally leave the island to come to the U.S. My memory of the island, I just always remember the beach. It was just every day was a beach: not like it was a holiday, but that’s just how I remember the sand and the water. It wasn’t like anything like [how] I would think of the beach in America like “Oh, you’re having fun.”… we were just existing.
We first arrived in San Francisco, we were there for a couple of days, and we were able to get in touch with my brother and sister in Los Angeles, so after that connection, we flew down to Los Angeles from San Francisco, and we’ve lived there since.
Q: Quick follow up question: You mentioned you came with three hundred people: how many of those people were your siblings because you said you have twelve. Was it all twelve of them at the time?
Okay, so two of my siblings had left for America a couple years before so it came down to ten siblings, and then we lost my youngest brother at the refugee camp, so we had nine, but all of us were together with my parents, and then my uncle, my aunt, and their kids. Those were our immediate family, and after that, we also had, I guess, cousins—I know I had some cousins from the countryside and then the other ones were just people who wanted to leave the country.
Q: What were your brother and sister… doing in the time in California in the time between when they got there and when you got there?
I don’t know much. I know they went to work. I know my sister was working in a supermarket or as a cashier, but I just think they were working and trying to save money.
Q: What would you say the hardest aspect of escaping was?
It was being at sea, not knowing what’s going to happen. Like, we could all have died at sea because that’s—we were left without food or water with a very weak engine that was like dying or something.
Q: Adding on to that, you mentioned how you stopped at different islands and then you obviously ended up in America. What was the end goal when you first left Vietnam? Was America always the end goal, or was it seeing how it went?
For my family, I believe it was because we had family here already, but for other families, I know they went to Australia, Canada, but yeah, for my family, U.S. was the end goal.
Q: Can you go more in depth about what life was like in Vietnam before you escaped?
We had a very comfortable life. My dad was an entrepreneur. He went from the countryside after he got married, and he decided to do business. You know, to do well, you had to go to the city, so he and my mom moved to the city, and they started very—they had a very humble beginning. They had to like rent a room in someone’s house in the back of the house. My mom learned how to sew and my dad went to work for his boss, and I don’t know exactly what he did. It was maybe… was it import or export, I’m not even sure, but he worked, and they were able to work and save money and they decided to open their own textile business.
Q: Do you remember anything specific about the refugee camp you can talk about [to] us? Was that the island you told us that was open, that was a lot of beach? Is there any more information you can give us about the refugee camp?
It started with nothing, and so we started building our own community. We had our own, you know, every family had their own house or cabin, and at that time, my dad was kind, people trusted him so he kind of became like the mayor, so he had gathered people and they had created a, what is it, freshwater system. So they recruited whoever was like…had any knowledge of the field, so they had a freshwater system they created, they created kind of public bathrooms like away from the camp, so that you don’t have the filth coming when people bathed, and then he had a hospital built there. So whoever was a nurse or a doctor, they could work there and it got to a point where they even had a helicopter pad by the hospital for emergencies.
Q: You mentioned that this is an island that was uninhabited. How did the UN find out that you guys were on this island? Were you placed there?
Once they did, they kind of basically transported us to, initially the first couple days were on this one island, and after that, they found there was an island that we could use, so they transported us over to that one.
I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t think it was anything weird or crazy or different. I was just like, “Okay, that was quite a life,” until then. As a family, we didn’t talk about it too much, or at least I didn’t. It just wasn’t like a big deal until I got married, and my husband—he’s American—and when he heard my story, he kept saying, he kept wanting to know more, and that’s why I asked questions because growing up, we never really asked like “Why did we do this?” or “Why were we there?” because for me it was just part of growing up. But now, it’s just like kind of interesting that we survived that.
When we got here, we really appreciated what we had when we were here, so I know it was a big part of my work ethic growing up, like I worked really hard [on] whatever I want. I was studying really hard, being a good student, like don’t give people trouble, like to truly appreciate life here because everything was just like so much better than it could have been, I guess.
Q: When you got to America, do you feel like you were treated differently from your white peers, and how was the transition into your life in America?
The two siblings who were here before us gave us all American names because they wanted us to assimilate as soon as possible, hopefully making our lives a little bit easier, and that’s how I came with my name [becoming] Sophia. And that’s the only name I kind of know
So I’m not too clear, but I had sometimes felt that people looked at us a little different or like odd, strange, and like maybe at that time there was a lot of boat people coming to America, and so maybe there were too many at once. It kind of made the local people uncomfortable.
But my teachers were just so kind and loving and accepting, and they really brought out the best in me. They really made me feel like I could do anything, and so I think, in a way, they made me work even harder for them.
Q: Do you think that what you and your family experienced in both Vietnam before leaving and all the time while leaving Vietnam before coming to America; do you think that your family is still affected by that today? You said that you don’t really talk about it, but how is it addressed in your family?
They weren’t hiding anything when I asked to talk to them about it. It’s just um, from my perspective, I didn’t really care so I didn’t really engage, so they might have talked about it, but I didn’t.
Q: Right before we close off, I want to ask, is there anything you want to add, any part of your story that you’d want to talk about that we didn’t address?
I think most of the people who came had no intention of coming, but we couldn’t stay in Vietnam after the Communists took over. There was no place for us.