By Victoria Mullen, WKTV

When he was a kid growing up in Saigon City, Vietnam, Fr. Peter Vu’s parents strove to provide him and his two sisters the semblance of a normal, middle-class life — a stay-at-home mom, a dad with gainful employment at a government job working in national security. Consequently, Vu didn’t feel the pain of war, at least not until the very end.

“I remember a lot of family time, touring places in Saigon like the cathedral and Independence Palace, driving the roundabout — those are the memories I have before the war ended,” said Vu.

Then, reality reared its ugly head.

“The last day of the war was like the apocalypse — the end is here,” he said. “My home was not too far from the airport, and I saw a lot of airplanes being bombed.”

Vu was only five years old.

The communists got right to work, gathering up people they perceived to be threats, particularly government workers.

“The communists tricked them, told them that they were going to re-education camp,” said Vu. “‘Oh, you’ll come back in about a week.'”

So, when his father was taken away, the family thought it would be for only a short time. Vu would not see him again for 12 years.

“The communists evaluated the prisoners based on rank and seriousness of your job with the South Vietnamese government and they either shipped you to ‘Hanoi Hilton’ where Senator John McCain was held, or they sent you to the Gulag in Russia, never to be seen again,” he said.

From 750,000 to over 1 million people were removed from their homes and forcibly relocated to uninhabited mountainous forested areas.

“When the communists took over, we didn’t have any of the rights or freedom that we used to have,” Vu said. “We had to ask for permission to go from one town to the next. They could enter our homes and search any time they wanted, in the middle of the night. There wasn’t enough food. We had to live very resourcefully.”

As Vu grew up, he thought that maybe he could stay in Saigon and be the head of the household, but as the son of a former regime official, he was already on the blacklist. He knew that they would not allow him to go to college, even though he was at the top of his class in high school.

“When dad was released from the camp, he had to leave Vietnam because he was still being oppressed and persecuted by the communists,” said Vu. “He said that if he left, maybe they would leave our family alone. Wrong. Because after my dad left successfully — he had to try several times by boat — they knew my dad was in the U.S., so they watched our family even closer because there ‘had’ to be some connection with the western government.”

He began to think about leaving Vietnam and emigrating to the U.S. to join his father and pursue his calling of the priesthood.

“My dad had told me that if I wanted to become a priest, I might be able to come to the U.S. So, I had to make that tough decision about leaving. I knew that I might die. I knew that I might not see some of my family and friends again. Those are the reasons I took the risk to come over here by boat.”

First, he had to raise the money to get on a boat, and even then there would be no assurances. He didn’t make it on the first try.

“But with God’s help and my family’s savings, I was able to make it in the end. I was stranded at sea for quite a few days and ran into the perfect storm — like that movie Perfect Storm — and thought that I might never make it.”

His boat encountered pirates, and the refugees suffered gravely. In the end, he and his fellow refugees were rescued by a South Korean tanker that took them to Singapore, where Vu spent the summer before he was able to get in touch with his dad.

“I was a minor, and I didn’t know if I would ever see my family again,” he said. “I see what is going on now with minors being separated from their parents at the southern border — I shared the same fate and had to deal with that. I know what those minors had to go through.”

He didn’t have his father’s address or phone number, so he risked writing back to his family when he was in the Singapore refugee camp. All the mail that goes through a communist country gets opened and censored at any time. For some reason, his mail got through — he says it was God’s will — and his mother was able to give him the address to contact his dad, who sponsored his passage to the U.S.

It was always Vu’s goal and focus to serve God and help others, especially the poor and unfortunate. After acclimating to his new life in the U.S., he entered the seminary. He credits the hardships he experienced in Vietnam with instilling the deeply ingrained values he preaches, including kindness and generosity.

“Like many of the figures in the Bible, I bargained with God: If you save me, I will make sure I serve you,” said Vu. “And I kept my end of it. Some people might say, you know what, I have a good life here, so God, thank you but I’m going the other way. But I try to keep my end of the  bargain.”

Vu has been a Catholic priest for over 21 years and currently is pastor at Saint Mary Magdalen Parish in Kentwood. He is also the author of the book, Living for a Higher Purpose: Story of a City Boy Who Survived the Vietnam War by Living for Jesus and Others, which is being adapted into a movie.

Listen to Vu’s VOICES conversation here.

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