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VIETNAM

We left my little brother and a world behind us when we escaped Vietnam by boat
Opinion by Nina Trieu Tarnay;
Video by Paddy Driscoll, Shane Csontos-Popko, Melody Shih, Ignacio Osorio, Kelly Flynn, Madeleine Stix, CNN
Updated 7:32 AM ET, Fri April 30, 2021

Nina Trieu Tarnay lives in Manhattan Beach, California, with her husband and three children. The views expressed here are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Out on the water, the smell of diesel mixed with the ocean salt, the sound of the engine puttering along was slightly louder than my mom's muffled cries. I recall being terrified and wanting to cry, but knowing I shouldn't, I clenched my teeth and fought the urge. It took a while before I realized I was in pain. I had cut my foot running across the beach. The throbbing in my foot was the same tempo as my heartbeat, pulsating, lulling me to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning, I felt so seasick I could barely lift my head. The night before felt like a nightmare -- I thought I would wake up in bed next to my mom with my grandmother and my brother in the other room.
My brother. It all started to sink in at that point. We had left my little brother behind. My dad and two older brothers were on one side of the world. My little brother and grandmother were on another side of the world, behind us. We were in the middle of the ocean, drowning -- at times -- in my mom's tears. It's been 46 years since the Fall of Saigon and 43 years since my family fled Vietnam by boat following the war.
As a child, I thought our story was "normal," nothing unusual, just your everyday journey to America. It wasn't until I became an adult and a parent myself that I grasped the enormity of what my own parents had done to provide us with a better future. Not just my future, but by extension, my children's and hopefully, one day, my grandchildren's.

Whenever I think about my family's story, I ask the same questions: Would I have been able to make the same decisions my parents did? What would have become of our lives had my parents not had the courage to leave their homeland?"I'm always met by the same answer -- I don't know. All I know is the decisions they made then led me to where I am today. It's been a long journey, one that began with them but undoubtedly continues through me, and then my children and theirs. It's our collective American story.
I hope when people hear stories like mine, they don't think of it as "an Asian or Vietnamese immigration story" but as an American story. My family and I are as American as the Pilgrims who came to this country in search of religious freedoms. We are as American as the Germans, Italians, Polish and Irish whose names are memorialized on Ellis Island. The "American story" does not belong to one culture, one race. It belongs to those of us bold enough to seek a better life for our children and open enough to accept that others want the same. Our American story continues to be written by the next wave of immigrants."

After Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City) fell to the People's Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong in 1975 and the last of the US forces left the country, my dad was captured and sent to what was known as a "reeducation camp" -- where he remained for about two years. My dad rarely spoke about the roughly two years he spent in prison, but while he was there, he decided that his homeland was no longer home.
He and our mom planned our family's escape shortly after he was released. We decided to travel in two groups. Stories of whole families perishing together at sea had become more common. My parents decided to divide our family into two, in case one group didn't make it. The mass exodus of Vietnamese Boat People began a few years after the end of the war, when people like my parents realized there was no other way out and staying meant there would mean no meaningful future. More than 700,000 Vietnamese fled by boat. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that between 200,000 and 400,000 boat people died at sea.

Xinjiang's Vanishing Christians
MOST PEOPLE ARE AWARE OF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT'S PERSECUTION OF THE UYGHUR MUSLIMS. THE VAST MAJORITY OF UYGHURS ARE MUSLIMS, BUT THERE IS ALSO A SMALL UYGHUR CHRISTIAN MINORITY WHO ARE ALSO BEING PERSECUTED BY THE CHINESE AUTHORITIES.

By Georgia L. Gilholy

Since its construction in 2000, Sacred Heart Church has sat at the industrial crossroads of Yining, a modest-sized city in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Northwest China, also known as Xinjiang. Its colourful onion domes, array of icons and white-painted facade are more reminiscent of an eccentric orthodox chapel in Greece or Russia than an overwhelmingly Muslim area of Central Asia under the jurisdiction of a militantly secular state. Or at least, they were.

In 2018 local authorities required the church to remove its crosses, along with four bas-reliefs that adorned the exterior, the two statues of St. Peter and St. Paul on the sides of the building, and its twin domes and bell towers. Recent reports from Asia News now claim that the church will be forcibly demolished to clear the site for "commercial purposes". For Chinese Christians, especially Uyghur ones, this story is more familiar than it is shocking.

It is to the credit of many fearless testimonies and investigations that there is increasing international concern over the Chinese government's policies in Xinjiang. The persecution of the Uyghur Muslims, who make up the majority of the region's population, has received particular attention. Since 2017, over a million Uyghurs and members of other Turkic Muslim minorities have disappeared into a vast network of "re-education" camps. Uyghur Christians, along with Han Chinese dissidents are also interned in these facilities.

Detainees are subjected to political indoctrination, forced labour, coerced into renouncing their religion and culture and in many instances are subjected to torture, rape and organ harvesting. Women in and outside the camps are regularly the victims of forced sterilisation and abortion. Nor is this process of elimination aimed solely toward Uyghur individuals, but their ancient history and culture. Thousands of mosques and shrines, including protected sites, have been damaged or demolished since 2016. The story of Xinjiang's dwindling Christian minority is an equally pressing, and even less well documented one.

Although Islam has long been the dominant faith of the Uyghur people, the presence of Christianity predates it by several centuries. The 'Nestorian' Church of the East, the common ancestor of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church reached Central Asia, Mongolia and China by the seventh century. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, "the whole tribe were considered Christian." From the fourteenth century however, Christianity essentially disappeared among the Uyghurs for 500 years as a result of conversions to Islam in the Besh Balik and Turpan regions.

The Lutheran Swedish Missionary Society has operated in Uyghur communities since 1892. By the 1930s over 300 Uyghurs, primarily in Kashgar, had converted to Protestantism. Modern Catholic missions in Xinjiang were mounted by the Scheutists throughout the 1920s and 30s from the neighbouring Apostolic Vicariate of Kansu under its authority.

CHRISTIANITY UNDER SIEGE

It is difficult to estimate the current number of Christians in Xinjiang, but regional sources suggest a figure in the thousands. The number is certainly somewhere below 2 percent of the population. Ideological repression is a fact of life across China's many regions, and the Uyghurs, Muslim and Christian alike, are no exception to this rule. The presence of transcendent faiths, whether they be Islam, Buddhism or Christianity in its various forms, is an inherent threat to the uncompromising ideology of the ruling Communist Party, for whom, in the words of US-based Sinologist Ross Terrill "the religion of China is China."