Return to Vietnam

Pham Van Tu left his war-torn homeland for America in 1975. This winter, he returned to Vietnam to show his children the country he once knew.

The two-day journey from Washington to Hanoi, with stops in Los Angeles and Taipei, has left every passenger but 73-year-old Pham Van Tu looking ragged and rumpled.

His stiff formality apparently does not allow for slouching, not even on overnight plane trips. He arrives without a wrinkle in his suit or a mark on his stiff black dress hat; he has said barely a word during the entire trip.

But in the boyhood home he once shared with his 81-year-old brother, who still lives here, Mr. Pham seems a different man. Animated, lively, effusive with his smiles.

Mr. Pham left Hanoi 46 years ago, moving to Saigon soon after the country was divided, leaving the North in communist hands. In Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, he worked in the protocol office of the U.S. Embassy. In 1975, when the Americans fled, Mr. Pham and his family went with them, living in a refugee camp before settling in a St. Louis suburb.

Throughout the decades of war, he could not even write or phone his family in the North. In those 46 years, he has visited only once before, in 1994.

But now he settles back in his brother's house, stretches out his legs and says, "I feel now I'm home. To me, everything in this house tells a story." But there are four of us on this trip. We each bring our own lens, through which we see the country.

For Mr. Pham's youngest daughter, 32-year-old Cam Tu, this is a foreign land. A thoroughly Americanized computer help-line manager in St. Louis, Cam Tu was only 7 when her family left Saigon. She has almost no memories of ever living there. She dresses stylishly and has no trace of an accent. On her first walk down a Hanoi street, she expresses shock at the open-air markets typical in Asia, where women are cutting hunks of meat and swatting flies. "They're using the same cutting board and knife for meat and for vegetables," she says, frowning. As we finish our walk she concludes, "I am so lucky."

Her brother, Tony, 36, was 11 when his family left, telling him they were going to the beach for vacation. On his first trip back, at age 30, he rushed from the airport to his boyhood home in Saigon, where other relatives now live, and asked if they had kept his toys. During that trip, Tony, a New York City Internet design architect, fell in love with the homeland he hadn't been aware he still cared about. He's been returning at least once a year since 1994.

I am here to observe the homecoming of these three. But I have come of age during an era defined by the Vietnam War, and as I plan my first trip to this small nation on the other side of the world, I'm surprised by how many towns and hamlets are familiar. Places where my high school friends fought, in a war my college friends protested. Places where boys my age died; deaths I watched on the nightly news.

To me, Vietnam was a war. Now, I will see it as a country. As a great travel destination. And as a place where every piece of furniture in a little house means something to an old man who expects that this will be his last visit home.

Pham's Last Visit

About a million Vietnamese Americans live in the United States, including 50,000 in the Washington area.

Although most immigrants leave home these days expecting to return at least for visits, most Vietnamese Americans came as refugees, and leaving their homeland represented a final break. When the United States normalized relations with Vietnam in 1994, however, they began flooding home. A small minority refuses to legitimize the Vietnamese government by visiting. But for most Vietnamese Americans, going home is an almost sacred goal.