Remembering the ‘boat people’ gives me a sinking feeling
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
One Sunday when I was a kid , Pastor Stady announced that our church had the opportunity to sponsor a family of “boat people.” That was the popular term then — I guess this would’ve been about 1980 or ’81 — for the refugees who fled from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. Some two million people took to the sea or attempted to escape from the region overland, risking incredible danger in an attempt to save their families. More than half of them didn’t make it.
Our church was very white fundamentalist and very white conservative politically. In Sunday school classes I had studied the young-Earth creationist “flood geology” of Henry Morris and the premillennial dispensationalist folklore of Hal Lindsey. In our “King’s Kids” junior-high youth group, we rehearsed the clumsy apologetics of Josh McDowell. Politically, everyone was Republican (except for Mrs. Penrose and Mr. Jackson) and giddily supportive of Ronald Reagan.*
That was the congregation Pastor Stady was addressing when he announced that our church was going to sponsor a family of boat people refugees. And that congregation was thrilled to have the chance. It was like getting to be missionaries right here at home.
We took up special offerings to pay the rent on a nice apartment in Plainfield and we collected furniture, clothing, linens and household goods to help them feel at home. A delegation of church ladies even went grocery shopping with money from the deacon’s fund to stock the refrigerator and kitchen the day before the family moved in.
Creative Commons photo via Max Pixel
In part, we felt that we had a special obligation to help people like this family. Our congregation had supported the war and so we were obliged to support the refugees fleeing the outcome of that war. That was obvious to us, and we recognized this was something we really had to do.
But more than that, it was something we got to do — and we were thrilled to do it. It wasn’t simply a begrudging obligation that we grimly accepted. It was an exciting chance to participate in an exciting mass-effort. It was “Please, please can we?” not “Oh, fine, if we must.” We approached it with both a sense of star-spangled patriotism and Christian missionary zeal. The chance to welcome this family to America was cause for celebration.
I don’t mean to paint an overly rosy picture of what our church did then. The apartment we rented for this family, after all, was in Plainfield and not, like our church itself, in North Plainfield — not in our back yard, as it were. We were who we were, and that wasn’t always pretty, but it did not yet entirely prevent us from welcoming a desperate family into America even though they didn’t speak English and they weren’t white or Christian.
In typical American fashion, we celebrated ourselves and congratulated ourselves for this expression of exceptional American idealism, scarcely even noticing that the tens of thousands of refugees we were resettling paled in comparison to the hundreds of thousands finding new homes in China and Thailand and other smaller and less-prosperous countries.
And, of course, the initial enthusiasm for welcoming “boat people” gradually faded. Those people soon became “those people” in the white imagination, and many of the same people who had earlier said, “Yes, of course, how can I help?” were later the same kind of people laughing at Clint Eastwood’s racist jokes in Gran Torino.
But today, in the 2018 America of the 81 percent and the 40 percent, the demonstration of national hospitality and American ideals that led so many of us to eagerly welcome the “boat people” — at least initially — seems completely gone. We no longer seem to have any sense of obligation to the refugees fleeing the countries we bomb and then abandon. The stunted counterfeit notions of “patriotism” we now perform or put on as a cheap costume make the words on the Statue of Liberty seem like a cruel joke. And the white evangelical churches that once embodied the ideals of “missionary” Christianity emphatically reject the idea that any of those people from the mission field be allowed to cross the sacred borders of our white nation.
We have — as Americans, as Christians — gotten smaller, crueler, uglier, and more selfish. We act like the world is a zero-sum game of musical chairs, and we’ll shiv anybody who we fear might be trying to take our seat.
What we have lost is massive and important. Getting it back won’t be easy.
Since Lady Liberty and Pastor Stady and the Nguyens and Martin and I are all from New Jersey, let me close with this from Bruce Springsteen. “Galveston Bay” doesn’t have the catchiest melody, but read the lyrics — the story here is beautiful.
I once thought of this as an all-American story. Whether or not it still is I’m no longer sure.
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* This was the early 1980s, so that support for Reaganism and the Republican Party had nothing to do with abortion or anti-gayness. Those issues weren’t yet on our radar.** Our Republicanism and Reaganism had to do with standing up to the Commies and the Ayatollah and with not looking weak by giving away canals and such. Years later, we’d spend a series of Sunday evening services watching awful Francis Schaeffer movies that would convince us to regard anti-abortionism as a new part of our faith and citizenship. Happily, it turned out that all that required of us was blanket support for Reagan and the Republican Party, which we were already doing. (It turned out we were already heroic champions of the Most Important Cause of All Time, without even knowing it. So that was nice.)
** Well, there was one guy — Mr. N., who made all his kids go to Bob Jones — who was fired up about the Big Gay Menace in the late ’70s. But there was something creepy about his obsession with Anita Bryant, so he didn’t manage to get anybody else on board with that. We later learned he beat his wife. So.
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I knew some of "those people" first hand. All of these people were state side by early/mid 70s.
A good friend of mine, we'll call him J, ran/maintained "radio stations" in locations we did not exist. Jungles of Thailand and Cambodia. J made friends with many of the villagers near near his stations. He provided them with food and other items of daily convenience. In turn, if there was some form of danger along a path J would normally take while on his travels through the jungle the villagers would mark the path with one or two dead snakes known as 1 steppers. That meant take another route.
During this time J met a pretty Thai "girl" and developed a serious relationship. We'll call her C. He would make a point to always meet and spend time with C when near her village. One day evacuation orders came in and J bolted and ran straight to C's village, explained the situation, proposed marriage and had a ceremony then and there. They got back in time to catch the helicopter out. C was stopped while boarding and J grabbed her and said "she's coming with me" and they boarded. I'll save moving them with the help of my best friend on a freezing, icy winter night at 2 AM with a flat tire for another time.
That is how C came to America.
Then in University, I shared several classes with people who should have been my instructors. One had been a University Math instructor, another a Physics instructor, and another an South Vietnamese Airforce Pilot. He was not an urban legend. He was for real. He flew his jet out of there.
We had the best physics class I ever attended. Every day our instructor would give us time at the end class to run our own project. We "sent a rocket to the moon".
Then in late 79, there was K. Her husband was also a Math instructor and she was an IT professional. I met her at my first IT job. K was funny. Somewhere along the line she learned I liked spicy food. I saw the look in her eyes. She thought she was dealing with the typical "Yankee". So, she gave me some of her rice, which was spiced with these little peppers that look like darts. It was god and had a little spice to it. She was surprised it didn't bother me. That was a challenge for K. Daily she upped the dosage of peppers. Finally she gave up. K made good rice.
K and her husband P never told me how they got here.
As for today, I really don't have an answer. Dynamics are different. The stakes are much higher now. The political games of one upmanship needs to stop. We need smarter people than me deciding how to handle the problem we face. Unfortunately, I do not know where these smart people are.
Wonderful story, and well told. Thank you.
I guess you arrive at the same place as the seed author: remembering a time when, however imperfectly, America took responsibility for people whose lives it had rubbished... but not knowing how to get back to that place...
Thank you Bob.
I guess you are right about my view of the situation.