What Price Freedom?

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What Price Freedom?

             What is freedom? What does freedom mean to you?  What price are you willing to pay in order to obtain freedom? To me it’s priceless. It means being able to make my life what I want it to be, with sacrifice, courage, faith, and hope.
           The Vietnamese civil war was a long and exhausting affair, which claimed many lives and affected many families (Vietnamese and American). 
            In the 1970s I was a teenager. I had seen nothing yet of life and the world. My father was a very successful businessman so I grew up with luxury and privilege, everything I wanted my father would give me. I never had to struggle for anything I wanted or needed, it was simply handed to me.
            When I was growing up, I was unaware of the civil war. It had been going on since I was very young, and had not yet affected me. The Tet Offensive in 1968 brought the war into my consciousness. The Easter Offensive of 1972 escalated the war, and many of my friends were drafted as they finished high school. At that point I really started to understand the ramifications of the war.
            The war wreaked havoc on my life. It curtailed the innocent and carefree days of my youth, and destroyed many of our young people, their families, and my country. It still haunts me; it is always an undercurrent in my mind
            April 30, 1975. That was the day when South Vietnam fell to the Communists. I was hiding in a shelter underground and afraid I would die. Life as I had known it had just become a distant memory. 
            The atmosphere in Viet Nam under the Communists at that time was one of fear and terror. Everyone spied on everyone else, and if you did something someone didn’t like, you could be reported to the authorities. We were constantly at risk of offending the wrong person, doing the wrong thing. Anyone could be arrested and tortured at any time.
            Being wealthy was now a liability, and my father could no longer work at his business. The new government considered him an oppressor of the people, thinking that he was forcing them to work for him without proper recompense. We were paralyzed with fear and anticipation of horrible things, and within a few months we were put in a re-education camp.
            When we got out, my father was forced to make one of the most difficult decisions of his life. To ensure my safety and survival he knew I must escape the Communist regime and leave Vietnam, the only home I had known.
            I was twenty years old, and it was important to my father that I would be well taken care of. He did not want me to escape alone, but he couldn’t come with me. He decided he must remain in Viet Nam. If anything happened during my escape then he would be able to do something to rescue me.
            My father was worried that I would be traveling into an unknown world on an uncertain journey. He decided the best way to make sure I would be well taken care of was to have me get married so that my husband would take care of me and continue to keep me safe.
            So I married a stranger. There was no physical dowry, one which would have been typical for a wedding in Viet Nam. Instead my husband gave an emotional dowry, the promise to my father, and me, that he would care for, love, and protect me, my father’s only child.
            My sacrifice to get my freedom was to marry a perfect stranger, and come to a country I had never known, with only a handful of dollars in my pocket. My father’s unconditional love gave him the strength to let me go, even though I was his only child and his world had revolved around me.
            My faith and my strength carried me through to be able to know what freedom was about, in a way that was wholly new to me. I appreciate freedom today far more than I could have if I had not had to struggle and sacrifice for every bit of the life I have now. 

This is an excerpt from Empowered by Hope, which will be coming out this fall.