Huynh Hai

Huynh Hai, 74, was imprisoned by Communists for seven years after the fall of Saigon. He was severely beaten and starved. In 1995, Hai and his wife were admitted to the United States.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN and WAVENEY ANN MOORE
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 2, 2002

Click here to enter gallery Click a name to read each survivor's story: • Germaine Pitchon • Huynh Hai • Ramon Liceas Frias • Muharema Jerkic • Daniel Agau • Anh Nguyen

ST. PETERSBURG -- Small and frail, Huynh Hai sat near his wife one recent afternoon. Proudly, he said they had been together for almost 52 years.

Smiling over a fragrant cup of lotus tea, she gave credit to the right portents. He was born under the sign of the dragon and she, under the sign of the snake.

In over half a century, their relationship has endured extraordinary pain, the loss of two of five children, prolonged, enforced separation and now Hai's life-threatening illness.

A political prisoner in Vietnam, he had been shackled, beaten, starved and deprived of basic sanitation and medical care for seven years. On this afternoon, as he sat at a dining table pushed against a wall in his spare St. Petersburg apartment, he was fighting a new battle -- lung cancer.

He would soon lose that fight. A few days would pass before Hai would be moved to a nursing home, where in pain and delirium he would ramble about going to Jesus and to heaven.

In his letters home to Vietnam, he had written about his adopted country as a place of freedom, happiness and abundance, said daughter Thu Ha Huynh, 44. Only in America, she said, did he feel free to talk about his suffering under the Communists. In Vietnam, he shared his story with none but his family.

His nightmares and flashbacks, though lessened with passing years, followed him to his new life, said his wife, Hac Nguyn.

"I was working in my yard when they came to arrest me," Hai had recently recounted through a translator. "When they first arrested me, one of them hit me with a tree branch as big as his forearm."

He was threatened with execution and held in solitary confinement for six months. He saw the sun five minutes a day.

He was deprived of a bed and had to subsist on scant rations of soup or rice and salt. Sometimes, Hai said, he was able to scrounge for roots and frogs.

Once in America, and before his health worsened, he spoke gratefully of the medical system here, which he said had added years to his life.

And he yearned to visit Vietnam again. Only his ashes, he predicted, might make it back. He died on Feb. 19.

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