Legacy//My Grandfather

My Legacy

An interview about my grandfather

My grandpa, Bảnh Văn Trần, was born in Bà Điễm, Vietnam. Bà Điễm was the countryside, and it was very humid and warm there. It was a small providence with many small villages, where people used horses and carriages for transportation, and people were farmers. Everybody grew fruit trees or had a specialty, and raised horses and traded rice and grew crops and other things. They still used horses and carriages for transportation around that area in the modern day, and the people in that area are very healthy because they are hard workers and do a lot of tough work.

He started out as a carpenter, and later he bought his own sawmill and became a sawmill owner because his pay as a carpenter wasn’t enough to support his family. With the help of his friends and family he was able to open his own business, and all of his brothers were in the sawmill business too, his older brothers owned their own sawmills.

His generation started with French invasion of Vietnam. He lived when the French war transitioned to the next war. Vietnam was always in war. When he was around fourteen years old, his brothers had all moved to the city to be with their wives and open their own businesses. When the French tried to get all the young men who were in their early teens to join the army, my great-grandfather told my grandpa to run away to the city because he didn’t want his son to die in another country’s war. He went to the city, Chợ Lớn, and went to work with his brother. He met my grandma there, too.

After a while he had money and his own family and opened his own business in 1953. He went to an empty area and built his sawmill there and named it An Lac. People began to come and gather around, to work for him, and they brought their friends and family with them, and soon it became a town, named after An Lac. Grandpa built the town, and was influenced by the government and other similar businesses when he built it. He built a temple, and he gave money to the town to build a school and later many other schools that still exist today. But he never gave his name when he gave the donations. The person who founded the town in the first place has been long forgotten by the newer generation, but the older people still know, and his family that still live there know, too.

He was wealthy and down to earth. He didn’t care about class and would help out the poor. He played with those who weren’t in his class, unlike the other wealthy men. He was friendly and had lots of friends, and that’s how he was successful in his business. He had to know and befriend and he had helped many people from different sorts of lives. One of the people he knew was my great-grandfather on my father’s side—they were best friends, and great-grandpa provided help to grandpa’s business and was the sawmill’s wood supplier.

It was because of this reason that he was framed after the communists took over Vietnam. He was framed for political reason, mostly, though. Some of the reasons were because he was wealthy and his money should go to the “community” because his workers were the ones doing the work; another reason is because my mother’s cousins were in the U.S. Army, and the communists saw that as betrayal since he was related to them. Basically it was just, “Your son-in-law is in the U.S. Army, so you oppose us,” and they tried to jail him. The government just wanted his property and wealth, mostly because they were poor at the time and many southerners in Vietnam were wealthy. They made up reasons to arrest him to take all his land. There were no laws against it, in fact, there were no laws at all right after the communists took over, but this would later be changed. They took the sawmill and his land, but they didn’t have the deed for it so they made him give it up, and they wanted to kill him. So he had to escape and left most of his family behind, because basically, he would have gotten killed for being wealthy. Maybe they thought he was a “slave owner” because they thought all the wealthy men were wealthy because they had slaves, so they used it as an excuse to frame them. Slavery was unacceptable to the communists and was punishable by death. Neither my grandpa nor anybody else was a slave owner, but my grandpa had to leave anyway. He couldn’t fight back, just run away from them. He had a big family and if he wanted to get killed, he would fight back; but he didn’t and he wanted his family to be safe, so he left.

Life in a war country was hard. He had to constantly worry about it, and get ready to leave home at anytime. After the war and when he left his country, he lost everything, and he had to build everything up again in America, though he struggled due to financial hardship.

He felt scared, lonely, and sad when he had to leave Vietnam. In his life, he was most influenced by his family and children, and his hope to bring back a better life and future to them after they left their home and built a new one arriving in America with his daughters. His worst memories were on the ship to America: where he experienced terrifying storms, pirates, starvation, and other things, all on a small boat going overseas. He once joined the army, but he didn’t talk about it, maybe due to a bad experience.

But he had left Vietnam to seek freedom and a better life for his children after the war, and so he did. He had built everything from the ground up in Vietnam and lost it, but he did it all over again when he got to America. Unfortunately, he was old and didn’t speak English and couldn’t do much, but he encouraged his children, my mother and her sister, to go to school, learn everything they could, and build their lives to be better, just like he once had. His wisdom and encouragement has given his daughters strength to adapt and become successful.

When he passed away, it was in San Diego, California in June 1997, and he was sent back to Vietnam for a funeral in his home country. Everyone from his town and all his friends were at his funeral—thousands of people. He was an honorable and friendly man, a loving father, and my grandpa.