We met H. at a cozy Vietnamese restaurant in Munich, where she lives, on a cold day in December, after we had arranged to meet up a few weeks before. We were connected with her through a happy coincidence.
A month earlier, Q. was in a group exhibition of 2nd gen Vietnamese artists, and had exhibited their installation based on their dad’s life in Germany, from his time at humanitarian organization F. until he became a technical drawer at an engineering firm. Among the exhibition attendees was an older Vietnamese man in his 70s, who spent a long time reading through the texts about F. in the installation. Eventually, he approached Q. and introduced himself, sharing that he also came to West Germany on a scholarship that allowed him to go to university, and had spent a lot of time as a volunteer at F.
P. knew many of the people in the scholarship cohorts from 1971 to 1973 at F. and even had a group of 4 adopted sisters from there, with whom he is still in frequent contact with. We took a few photos together with him before we parted ways. Q forwarded the photos to their dad, “Do you remember him? He used to visit F. a lot.” “Yes, of course I remember him. He spent time with many of us,” B. answered.
Through P., we got H.’s contact information. H. is one of P.’s adopted sisters from F. and is a retired nurse. As we slurped the warm phở broth from our bowls, H. reflected on her life and started telling us her story.
Life in Vietnam and first impressions of the scholarship
H. grew up and Sai Gon, and attended Catholic school, then later also attended Trường Quốc Gia Nghĩa Tử (School for the Nation’s Orphans), because her father was a fallen soldier in the Vietnam War. H.’s mother heard about the program when she was in line to receive widow’s pension. She was told that there was a scholarship program by a West German organization recruiting Vietnamese schoolchildren from 13 to 16 years old. H.’s mother submitted the application for H., and H. was invited to interview. She and her mother came to the interview and met with two Vietnamese men who worked for F. They gave H. and her family a lot of promises: “They told us that Germany has everything, so we don’t need to worry. He even said that in Germany, there is a vending machine that you can give your money to for a hot bowl of phở to come out. They said all sorts of things to get me to come.”
After the interview, she was invited to attend a health check up. To help H. prepare for her new life, before the trip, the program bought her a blue ao da and a coat. Three months after the application process started, H. was already on the flight to West Germany, at the age of 15 (1971).
“Hearing that the program would take care of everything for me, I didn’t bring much with me. When I came, it was a warm July, they took care of our meals, gave us shelter, and it felt like heaven. However, they sent us to our traineeships just three weeks after we arrived, and that’s when the bitter reality hit.”
Experience with the scholarship and F.
H. frequently talked about how difficult life was for everyone in the program and how abandoned everyone felt. They were split into two groups, the girls groups, and the boys group, and sent to work in different traineeships. She and three other girls were sent to do a nursing internship at a hospital run by Caritas, a Catholic non-profit organization, in Dülmen. They worked five to seven hours a day.
“Turns out the program was for us to do traineeship for 3 years and then return to Vietnam to work. It was very intransparent, because they told us that we would come to study. Everyone of us wanted to study and get a degree. But when we came, after 3 weeks, a Vietnamese counselor told us that we needed to start doing traineeships to make a living, because no one would pay for us to go to school. In reality, going to school here was free, but no one told us that. All they wanted to do was send us to traineeships, so that they wouldn’t have to take care of us anymore.”
Things got worse once winter came. H. and her peers didn’t have warm clothing, and the coat that was given to them was too thin to keep them warm, nor did they have shoes. A nun at Caritas asked Rotes Kreuz (Red Cross) for clothing donations for the girls in the group. In the evening, after work, she taught the group basic German terms needed for the job, so that the girls could communicate with patients.
H. also talked a lot about how lucky she was to be in the nursing program with Caritas. Her food and lodging costs were subtracted from her salary, and the rest of the salary she could keep as pocket money. Many people in the hospital saw that she and her group were so young and took good care of them. On the weekends, the doctors and staff members would take the girls to their house, where the girls were invited to have coffee and meals, spend time with the staff’s family, and swim in their pool. After working at Caritas for two years, in 1975, Caritas supported H. to apply for a nursing traineeship (Ausbildung), and H. moved to Cologne to pursue the traineeship. Even after H. had left Caritas, the staff, doctors, and nuns would still check in on how she was doing and maintain communications with her throughout the years.
The boys’ group, on the other hand, had a much more difficult time. They were sent to work in workshops doing labor-intensive jobs. Unlike the girls’ group, there were no adults taking care of them. They were wearing rubber sandals in the winter and didn’t have enough money from their traineeship salary for food. Because they were hungry, some had to steal corn and eggs from F.’s farm. In the group, there was a boy as young as 13 working in a furniture-making workshop. He was so small that he couldn’t reach the workshop table, and had to stand on a stool to work. H. heard that the group often sat and cried together in the evenings.
NA remembered reading an archival article about F., which stated that, as part of the scholarship program, they would also help scholarship receivers and their families stay in contact, by passing along mail and packages between both parties. NA asked H. if F. ever offered this service. H. replied, “F. didn’t help us with anything. As soon as I came over, all communications were cut off. They didn’t take care of much. Vietnamese people call it “đem con bỏ chợ” (leaving your child at the market).
In 1972, F. initiated a festival to raise donations for a F. campus that would be built in Da Lat. They asked the Vietnamese children in the village to put on a cultural show. There was a model of the future campus at the festival, and the initiative was meant to showcase these cultural festivals to demonstrate how wonderful this project would be. F.’s employees had brought from Vietnam some nón lá with them, which they gave to the children to wear for the show. H. and her peers learned how to sew áo dài on their own for the festival, which would include dancing and a fashion show. The festival was “successful” – many city officials and the mayor even came. The local newspaper was there and reported on the festival, however, the scholarship and the scholarship recipients weren’t mentioned, and only the wounded children were. After 1975, people from F. said that the plans had been canceled, and H. never heard about what happened to the funds.
The Evangelical pastor leading F., named F.B., was a charismatic man with a notable laugh. Once his name was brought up, H. quickly shared that during her time at F. she had heard from several people working at F. that F.B. and his staff were embezzling a lot of the organization’s donation money. Not a lot of people knew about this, and H. decided to keep quiet, because she was worried it would otherwise affect the children living in the village.
At the same time, F. was asking the scholarship receivers to give their passport and savings book to F. for “safekeeping.” Even when H. had moved to Cologne, over 70km away from F.’s campus, she was still asked to do this. H. could tell that F. was trying to make the scholarship receivers dependent on F., and refused to.
H. shared that felt a lot of disappointment about F. and decided to distance herself from it. At first, she would still come to visit F. a few times, but eventually, once the program ended in 1975, she officially cut off all contact with F.
Experience after the end of the war in 1975
Once the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and South Vietnam had fallen, H.’s passport also became invalid. Fortunately, H. had applied for a German residence permit herself by going to the immigration office, and was granted one. She would renew it annually until she acquired a passport.
When H. heard the news of the war, she was afraid for her family and wanted to support them, especially because her mother would no longer receive a widower’s pension under the new government. However, she was skeptical about how things would go for her if she went to Vietnam. Being stuck in Germany made her feel helpless and anxious: she was unable to help her family, and might never be able to return to Vietnam.
H. ultimately made the decision to return to Vietnam in 1979, buying the ticket herself to go from Germany to Bangkok, and then to Saigon, since there were no direct flights at the time. Her first trip back to Vietnam was heavily controlled: Before entering Vietnam, she had to specify when she would be where and at what address; she was only allowed to stay in the area where she had registered in Saigon. Vietnamese officials living close to her family’s house would come by and ask for small favors like soap or other goods. If she didn’t give them these items, they wouldn’t have left her alone. During this visit, she was able to help her family financially. She also met with T., another member of her scholarship cohort, who had returned to Vietnam a few years earlier after being very disillusioned with the program and experiencing severe depression as a result. That was the last time H. saw and heard of T. We shared with H. that we had heard from B. (Q.’s dad and another member of the scholarship cohort) that T. tragically died at sea while trying to leave Vietnam as a boat refugee. We shared a moment of silence together.
Gradually, H.’s trips to Vietnam became more relaxed, and she would visit Vietnam again in 1984 and 1987.
View of the scholarship today
H. remains skeptical of the scholarship and of F:
“The people running the organization used the children of the village, burned, amputated children to get donations. Those children were the ones sustaining the livelihood of the whole business. It was cruel, but it was a reciprocal relationship. The people running the organization weren’t doing it purely out of love or kindness.” We asked H. why she thinks there was so little reported on the scholarship holders, she replied with no hesitation: “We weren’t interesting enough. We were just children of fallen soldiers, but had no injuries or anything visible that could be used to solicit donations.”
H. shared that her daughter, now 42, once gave a presentation at school about H.’s life as a scholarship recipient. “When she finished the presentation, her classmates cried. I guess that was something to cry about.”
H. and people in the scholarship cohort used to have yearly reunions. Their last reunion was a few years ago in the Netherlands, where one of the women in the program now lives, and B. also attended it. However, ever since the COVID pandemic started, the group has been meeting less and less. It became much harder for the group to schedule a time to come together.
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Once we finished our phở, as planned, H. joined us to a theater house where a play Q. wrote about the Vietnamese-German community was showing. In the audience were many other Vietnamese people of different generations and backgrounds – some former boat people, some former contract workers, some who came to Germany recently for university. Before the night ended and H. headed home, we took some photos together to keep the evening as a memory.