1940, Saigon.
The war was a little over a year old by now, but Saigon was untouched by it. The scars of combat were bleeding across the world. The Germans were setting up dominion across Europe and (thankfully) France. The Italians were working on establish a new empire that would hold the weight of the Roman Empire of the past. Japan was doing… questionable things in China.
Saigon was spared… until today.
The girl was in her teenage years. She rode her bike through the labyrinth of streets in the city, dodging between cars and greeting the people she knew. The past decade, this place had been her home.
As she came closer to her home, she began to notice the atmosphere of despair. For a strange reason, the usual happy chatter was largely reduced. Many people were having conversations about the war. Of course the war was big, there was no denying that… but it hadn’t been a concern so big people would be blatantly talking about it on the streets. So what was happening now?
The girl passed through a central roundabout in the city. As she weaved her way through the traffic (which was unusually crammed) she noticed a flag in the distance. It wasn’t the French tricolor or the yellow colonial flag that featured the French watermark. It was something different… a strange mix of red and white. The girl wasn’t sure which flag it was— she never had much time to study them. She put her worries aside and assumed that the flag was simply a newly French-sanctioned colonial flag she wasn’t aware of.
As she reached her neighborhood, she encountered one of her friends who lived near her. Her friend was riding on a bike of her own. Sweat dripped from her head and the panic in her eyes was unmistakable. “Don’t go to your house,” Her friend said urgently. “Don’t go!”
For a brief moment, the girl was in fear. What was her friend talking about? Everything about today was unusual… first there was the unusually high chatter about the war. Then there was the strange flag of red and white. Now her friend was forbidding her to go to her own house? Her friend’s bike passed her in an instant, and the girl’s fear abated as quickly as her friend had left. There was only a short distance to her house. Once she arrived, she’d see what her friend was talking about.
And when she arrived, she found out her friend was telling her to run from the worst. Her home was being occupied and raided by Japanese soldiers. The flag in the distance she’d seen was a Japanese Colonial Flag. Later on in a speech (You’ll understand the speech part of it soon), she recalled the first thing she saw was a gun pointed at her sister’s head. Apparently the soldiers stole some antiques and things her sister had that was worth quite a bit and she was too resistant to them. After all these years of researching, I still don’t know what happened to her.
The sun was rising over Vietnam.
You might be thinking: Alright, just last chapter we were talking about Malcolm Anderson in the Vietnam War. Now we’re backtracking to the Second World War?
Yes. We’re backtracking because now we’re going to start on the backstory of my second grandparent, Malcolm Anderon’s wife. This girl is not his wife. If she was, Malcolm would be dating someone who is two decades above him. This girl is his wife’s mom, who gave birth to his wife during the Japanese occupation. (I think you can see where this is going)
That first little episode with the Japanese occupiers was only the beginning for Hoa Tran. Indochina would orbit Japan for the next five years, all the way until 1945.
Hoa Tran was born in 1923 somewhere in the South. I interviewed her daughter (My grandma) a couple years ago and discovered the complicated backstory of Hoa Tran and Hana Suzuki. The next couple chapters will focus on their story throughout the early 1900s before we eventually get back to the Vietnam War.
I currently don’t know where Hoa Tran was born. I spent weeks grilling my grandma (I’ll just call her Grandma Hana) about exactly where, but the most I could get after all the research in the world was somewhere near the coastal city of Vung Tau. Tran moved to Saigon with her family sometime in her early years (About my age) because they saw Saigon as a place of opportunity for their family, sort of as a chance to get away from horrible working conditions in those dirty, rotten crop fields.
The 30s came and went. Tran grew up until she was nearly an adult, and by this point she was helping her parents with work around the house and as merchants. It was a busy life, but it was a fairly safe one. As she got older, she began to hear and learn more about the tensions going on around the world. The Empire of Japan was invading China… Europe was drowning in the chaos of the Second World War… and eventually, France fell to Germany in an unexpectedly quick campaign that only lasted a month. The Germans replaced the French government with a new regime, weakening France’s hold on Vietnam. Although not completely independent, Indochina was slightly more autonomous.
Tran wasn’t very fond of the French colonizers. From what Grandma Hana said, Tran’s family’s work fed largely into the French colonial business. In much of school life, curriculum prioritized France over Vietnam, and that made much of Tran and her peers (some were nationalist) very unhappy. She often faced discrimination as an Asian by the soldiers. Grandma Hana also said that many of the children in Saigon that were her “enemies” also were part of the small group of Vietnamese elite that helped the colonizers. So she wasn’t too upset by the German occupation of France.
Until Japan came barging in, and suddenly it was realized that they had no protection against foreign occupation.
And the soldiers raided her house, stole their riches (Or what little they did have), and killed many in her family.
One of them was Hiroshi Suzuki.