By Leah Garchik, SF Gate
On Friday, the night “Last Days in Vietnam” opens at the Opera Plaza Cinema, documentarian Rory Kennedy will be here to attend a reception in her honor. The movie is about South Vietnamese who had to flee their country when the North took over, at the end of the Vietnam War. The reception will be at the Slanted Door in the Ferry Building.
‘Last Days in Vietnam’ (Photo by Bobby Bank/Getty Images)
The restaurant was the first in a considerable empire founded by Charles Phan, who was one of those South Vietnamese who fled. He was 13 years old on May 1, 1975, when his family left on a ship. “April 30 was the night that the North Vietnamese army took over the presidential palace,” he said. It had taken the North Vietnamese 50 days, he said, to end “a war that had lasted for 20 years.”
Phan’s family had come down to the former Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) from the North, where they had a general store and a coffee plantation. “My dad had left China before,” said Phan, “and he was not going to stick around. We had been trying to get out of the country two or three weeks before that.” The kids were sent south on a plane, and Phan’s mother stayed behind, eventually fleeing from the army.
“I thought my mom was dead. She was actually in the jungle,” eventually becoming part of a convoy of refugees. Once the family was reunited, Phan’s father tried to plan an escape. Information was hard to come by — “it was bought,” said Phan — and it was in his father’s club that he learned there was a ship leaving that night.
There were 400 people aboard that ship, which, after “bobbing around the ocean for three weeks or so,” landed at Singapore. The Phans had with them one piece of luggage. From Singapore, they went to the Philippines, and from there to Guam, “with 400,000 people in a displaced persons camp.” There, they had a choice: “Either stay there or get on a plane and they take you somewhere. But you don’t know where they’re taking you. … We chose to stay in Guam.”
Most of the people chose to leave. But stories circulated that “they would send you to this frozen tundra in Minnesota. My mom said if we’re going to be homeless, let’s be homeless in paradise.” So the family stayed in Guam for two years, worked and saved money for plane passage to San Francisco.
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