PRAISE FOR WHERE THE WIND LEADS
“Desperation. Overwhelming odds. Heroic rescue. This story has all the elements of great fiction. But it is not fiction; it is real life. The account of Dr. Chung and his family will inspire you to believe in second chances and miracles and the God who gives them both.”
—MAX LUCADO
New York Times BEST-SELLING AUTHOR
“I love true stories, and Dr. Chung’s is the best I’ve read in a long time. It’s packed full of family drama, plus really engaging recent world history, and it is woven from beginning to end with the consistent theme of God’s sovereign mercy. This kind of real-life rescue story makes reality television pale by comparison!”
—LISA HARPER
AUTHOR AND WOMEN OF FAITH® SPEAKER
“Where the Wind Leads is an incredible adventure story of loss and survival, rescue and resilience. Once I started to read it, I simply could not put it down. It’s a fascinating account of family life in warring Vietnam, but even more so it’s an amazing tale of how God’s grace can bring an individual, and a family, from certain death to flourishing life.”
—LEIGHTON FORD
PRESIDENT, LEIGHTON FORD MINISTRIES
“Where the Wind Leads is a remarkable story of determination, dedication, resilience, and ultimate success. It is truly inspiring!”
—SANDY SANDERS
MAYOR, CITY OF FORT SMITH, ARKANSAS
Where the Wind Leads
© 2014 Vinh Chung
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by W Publishing, an imprint of Thomas Nelson.
Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920.
www.alivecommunications.com.
Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].
Quotations in chapter 37 are reprinted with permission of the American Legion Magazine, © June 2013. www.legion.org.
The photograph of Clifford Pier is believed to have been taken in the early 1960s or late 1950s and is from Memories of Singapore, http://www.singas.co.uk.
Map Design: Kelsey Downs. All maps used are public domain.
Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the English Standard Version. © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.
Scripture quotations marked NLT are from Holy Bible, New Living Translation. © 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
978-0-529-10554-7 (IE)
ISBN 978-0-8499-2295-4 (eBook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chung, Vinh, 1975—
Where the wind leads : a refugee family’s miraculous story of loss, rescue, and redemption / Vinh Chung with Tim Downs.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8499-4756-8 (hard cover)
1. Chung, Vinh, 1975—Family. 2. Chung family. 3. Chinese—United States. 4. Chinese Americans. 5. Chinese—Vietnam. I. Downs, Tim. II. Title.
CT274.C496C58 2014
920.0092951—dc23
2013039729
14 15 16 17 18 RRD 7 6 5 4 3 2
For my mother and father:
Thank you for your courage and sacrifice.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Richard Stearns
PART ONE
1. The Story Begins
2. A World on the Edge
3. A Handful of Rice
4. Building an Empire
5. The Prince of Bac Lieu
6. Assisted Marriage
7. The Dragon Lady
8. Deception
9. A Nation Falls
10. The Farm
11. Gathering Storm
12. Why Me?
13. No Turning Back
PART TWO
14. First Days at Sea
15. Pirates
16. One Man’s Burden
17. Land at Last
18. Blood on the Sand
19. Sheltering Angels
20. The Beach
21. Betrayed
22. Seasweep Sets Sail
23. Endless Sea
24. The Prayer
25. Rescue
26. Singapore Bound
27. 25 Hawkins Road
28. Across the Pacific
PART THREE
29. Waking Up in America
30. Allied Gardens
31. Starting School
32. Grand Avenue
33. The Factory
34. The American Dream
35. Peer Pressures
36. The Restaurant
37. Ghosts of the Past
38. Flying Blind
39. Aiming for the Stars
40. Boy Meets Girl
41. Special Good Friend
42. Harvard
43. Love Story
44. Cap and Gown
45. Giving Back
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Photos
FOREWORD
A FEW YEARS AGO A YOUNG DERMATOLOGIC SURGEON contacted me with something important to say. Over the phone that day, Vinh Chung told me one of the most amazing stories I had ever heard. This story is so precious to me because, as the president of World Vision US, I work to change the lives, literally, of millions of children every day. But I rarely hear the rest of the story thirty years later. The story of Vinh Chung is what I hope and pray for every vulnerable child.
The story you are about to read is the one I was told. It is the thrilling account of Vinh Chung and his family’s harrowing journey from Vietnam to the South China Sea to the Deep South in Arkansas and eventually to the halls of Harvard. It is the story of a family who faced political persecution, who were forced to leave behind everything they had and take incredible risks to start a new life. Vinh’s family, miraculously, began their new life from scratch, relying on their resilience and determination, learning a new language and starting new jobs. And then Vinh and his brothers and sisters achieved far more than most families ever dream for their children. You’ll also see that Vinh and his family couldn’t have made this journey alone. All along the way good people, and many good Christians, intervened with a helping hand.
In 1979, as the new communist regime in Vietnam consolidated its power, families fled by boat in search of a new home. Yet when the lives of hundreds of thousands of these “boat people” hung in the balance, most of the world decided to look away. Governments, politicians, and citizens wanted to forget the tragedy in the South China Sea.
But World Vision’s president, Stan Mooneyham, believed he must do something. He believed that God hadn’t turned His face from those who were suffering. So Mooneyham wouldn’t allow the world to turn away. When he couldn’t get others to help, he set out onto the open seas himself. Mooneyham believed that God didn’t create any throwaway children—that we cannot look away when people are suffering.
As you read and when you’ve finished reading this book, I hope you’ll reflect on the bigger picture. We live in a world where hundreds of millions of children like Vinh Chung have been driven from their homes in the last two decades.
Even now, at this moment, children are being driven from their homes in places like Syria, Central African Republic, and the Philippines. Today there are twenty million
children living in refugee camps, tent cities, and other temporary shelters. And they are not throwaways either.
A few months ago I sat with refugee children from Syria. They had fled their country, forced to leave by the fighting in their cities. Their homes destroyed, their parents killed, they left simply for the chance to stay alive. Now their future hangs in the balance. Will they have the opportunity to grow up healthy and go to school and live ordinary lives?
Vinh’s is the story of one—the incredible potential locked inside one refugee child. But it’s also the story of every child in the world who is poor, forgotten, and abused, a refugee. It’s a story that shows there is no such thing as a throwaway child.
Thirty years ago Stan Mooneyham did something outrageous because he believed that every child is precious and that God has created each of them with potential and gifts and talents. Among our staff at World Vision today, Mooneyham’s resolve still resonates as an example of the lengths we must go to make good on our belief that every child is precious. What he did—to be frank—was reckless. Yet because Mooneyham wouldn’t ignore these children, neither could the politicians who wanted to look the other way.
Mooneyham was only one link in a whole chain of actions that saved Vinh’s life, the lives of his family, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. It required a number of individuals, often strangers, who decided to do something, including the little Lutheran church in Arkansas that chose to adopt a large family of refugees from Vietnam.
Today, when we read in a newspaper about a famine or we watch as diplomats argue about how to resolve an international crisis, it is easy to think that such troubles are too difficult to fix. It is easy to feel helpless in the midst of a complex catastrophe. But the remarkable story told in this book is proof that we can turn the tide. We can shift the world’s attention to those who are suffering. We may not be in charge of a global charity, but we can write letters to members of Congress; we can raise awareness online and in social media; we can donate to worthy causes.
Whatever you do on behalf of the world’s forgotten, it can make a difference for generations. Today, because a few people did what they could, Vinh Chung is saving lives as a surgeon and as a World Vision donor. He is also now helping to lead our ministry after I invited him to become a board member. It’s only fitting, after all, to have someone like Vinh, who can remind us that there truly are no throwaway children.
Don’t ever underestimate the difference you can make in the life of one person. What if Nelson Mandela had died in a refugee camp, Mother Teresa had been forced into an early marriage, or Gandhi had died as a child for lack of clean water? One small act today can lead to another and another. Like a line of dominoes, where each one plays a minor but essential role, we can each play a part. It may only take one act to save one life that can change the course of history.
—Richard Stearns, Bellevue, Washington
Part One
The winds of heaven change suddenly; so do human fortunes.
—CHINESE PROVERB
One
THE STORY BEGINS
THIS IS A STORY TOO BIG FOR ONE PERSON TO TELL.
It’s a story that spans two continents, ten decades, and eleven thousand miles. It’s the story of a fortune lost and a treasure found, the story of two lost men and three extraordinary women who changed their lives.
My name is Vinh Chung. I was born in a country that no longer exists and grew up in a country I never knew existed.
I was born in South Vietnam just eight months after its fall to the communists in April 1975. But this is not a story about the Vietnam War—this is the story of what happened next, to more than a million people, including my family. For most Americans the final image of the Vietnam War was a grainy black-and-white photograph of an overloaded helicopter lifting off from the rooftop of the United States Embassy in Saigon. When that helicopter departed, my story began.
When I was three and a half years old, my family was forced to leave Vietnam and flee to a place we had never heard of, somewhere in the heartland of America, called Arkansas.
I am a refugee.
My family went to sleep in one world and woke up in another, and more than anyone in my family I was trapped between those worlds. I was born in Vietnam, but I was not Vietnamese; I was raised in America, but I was not an American. I grew up Asian in character but American in culture, a citizen but always a refugee. I had no lessons from the past to guide me, no right way to do things in the present, and no path to follow into the future.
Since I was so young when I left Vietnam, I never really had the chance to understand Asian culture or master the Vietnamese language. I grew up in America, where there was a new culture and a new language to learn, but there was no one to help me because no one in my family had been there before me. We were all lost and had to find our own way in America, and it was hard for each of us in a different way.
We are Chinese by ancestry, born in Vietnam, and raised in the jungles of America. We arrived in this country with nothing but the clothes on our backs and unable to speak a single word of English; my family now holds twenty-one university degrees, including five master’s and five doctorates from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, George Mason, Michigan, and Arkansas.
But in July 1979, my family lay half-dead from dehydration in a derelict fishing boat jammed with ninety-three refugees lost in the middle of the South China Sea.
How we got from there to here is quite a story.
Two
A WORLD ON THE EDGE
Within ten years of my father’s birth, fifty million human beings died. He was born at a moment in history when the entire world was about to erupt in a frenzy of violence that left no one untouched.
My father’s name is Thanh Chung; he was born in 1937 in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. When my father was born, an emperor still ruled Vietnam, the nation was still a French colony, and communism was mostly an obscure political theory discussed by radical students in Paris.
It was a world that would soon cease to exist.
In 1937, Japan was already at war with China, Adolf Hitler was about to invade Poland, Britain and France were about to declare war on Germany, and the United States was desperately trying to maintain a fragile neutrality that was destined to fail. The earth’s great powers were shifting like tectonic plates, and entire nations were about to be thrown off their feet by the resulting quake. Ancient loyalties were realigning; longtime friends became foes, and former enemies were forced to unite to survive. Chancellors and prime ministers spoke of thousand-year empires and mustered massive armies in pursuit of their dreams. Rapidly industrializing countries lusted for raw materials like oil and iron and rubber and overran neighboring nations to obtain them. All over the world soldiers and civilians alike began to perish in unimaginable numbers, and only a few fortunate nations managed to escape the violence and devastation.
Vietnam was not one of them.
One day, when my father was four years old, he heard the drone of an engine high above him and looked up into the sky to see a formation of cross-shaped silhouettes drifting overhead. They were the first airplanes he had ever seen, but these were no ordinary airplanes. They were Japanese long-range bombers being redeployed from China to air bases in southern Indochina, where they would be within easy striking distance of Malaya, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. When America saw that Japan was extending its ambitions deeper into Southeast Asia, it immediately imposed an embargo that cut off Japan’s supply of iron and oil—two resources vital to any industrialized nation. Japan was left with only two options: either withdraw its armies from Southeast Asia or eliminate America’s ability to enforce its embargo. Japan chose the latter option by launching a sneak attack against a little-known American naval base, known as Pearl Harbor.
My father was witnessing the beginning of the Second World War.
The next forty years of his life would be a time of unceasing conflict as violently
opposing powers battled to decide who would own Vietnam. The Japanese wanted to conquer it, the French wanted to keep it, and the communists wanted to overthrow it.
My father just wanted peace.
The Mekong Delta is a fifteen-thousand-square-mile river delta formed by the nine tributaries of the Mekong River, known to the Vietnamese as the “Nine Dragons.” To Asians the dragon is a symbol of prosperity and good fortune, and the Mekong Delta has the very good fortune to possess nine of them. For thousands of years the waters of the Mekong have regularly flooded to deposit layer after layer of mineral-rich silt from as far away as the Tibetan plateau, creating some of the richest soil on earth. The fertile soil and tropical savanna climate make the region perfectly suited for agriculture, which, unfortunately for the region’s inhabitants, has also made the Mekong Delta an object of desire for nations all over the world.
My father lived with his older brother and four sisters in the countryside near the provincial capital of Bac Lieu. His father—my grandfather—had two brothers, who also lived in Bac Lieu, and together the three Chung brothers ran a lucrative business. My grandfather was a seller of medicinal herbs and traditional Chinese remedies, while my grandmother sold fabrics imported from Saigon a hundred miles to the north. Business was good for my family in Bac Lieu; and for a family of merchants, when business is good, life is good.
By temperament my father was a kind and gentle boy who adored his father and mother and wanted nothing more than to live his life peacefully in the pastoral beauty of the delta. Unfortunately the peace he longed for was something he rarely experienced.
When he was five, he looked up from his chores one day to see a band of unfamiliar men walking toward him through the center of his village. The men were muttering to one another in voices too low to hear, and when one of them raised his arm to point to one of the houses, my father saw that the man was holding a long, silver-gray machete. The blade was stained red.
No—it was dripping red.
These were the men his mother and father called Khmer—the dark-skinned men who came from unknown villages somewhere to the northwest. My father had heard grown-ups whisper stories about the Khmer, but whenever he asked about them, he was told that he was too young to hear. But late at night his older brother used to tell him stories—stories about the vicious, dark-skinned men who hated the Vietnamese so much that they would use their machetes to hack off their arms and sever their heads and burn whole villages to the ground. My father had always thought his brother was lying, just making up ghost stories to watch his little brother’s eyes widen with fear—but now he knew the men were real.
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