I have forgotten you — you who sang the Vietnamese national anthem with tears in your eyes and who believed that borders, like the Great Wall of China, were real demarcations, not easily crossed — you read Tintin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Hugo’s Les Miserables. I have committed so much to remembrance, yet somehow I have omitted the sense of you.

But there you were, with the rest of our family, before the fall, before our abrupt departure and subsequent transformation. Finding you again was really something of a shock. Three decades after the war ended, and the past suddenly came spilling out in the form of letters in a shoebox as I helped Mother clear out the family closet. The house she and father lived in for more than a quarter of a century in peaceful suburban America was finally up for sale.

The round, undisciplined handwriting bordering on chaos I instantly recognized as my own, but the boy who wrote them was someone I scarcely remembered. In fact, it took time – months — before I found the courage to really take the plunge and read the letters. No doubt I was afraid of what I would find: a conflicting version of the past to the one that I have told and retold others and myself all these years in America.

Saigon, March 12, 1975: “Yoo-hoo brother, have you seen snow? Aunt Cuc has a new dog. So very cute. I’m going to get one too, maybe in two months. It’s going to be so very beautiful.” This letter you wrote to your older brother, then a foreign student in America, six weeks before that fateful day: April 30, 1975, when the war came to an ignominious end as communist tanks crashed through the gilded iron gates of the Independent Palace in Saigon while overhead helicopters frantically flew refugees out to sea.

“My friend told me half of your classmates are now drafted. His brother is going too,” you informed Brother, seemingly oblivious of what it really meant, because the next sentence was about your childhood obsession with stamp collecting: “I wrote to Uncle Tho in Dalat to ask for stamps. No results yet.”

What could you have been thinking, considering that a few days after this letter, Uncle — father’s older brother, a two-star general and administrator of the Vo Bi Military Academy — was forced to detonate portions of that school, one built by the Americans to mirror West Point, before evacuating with his cadets a day ahead of the advancing communist army?

At 11, you seemed glibly unaware of how intricately your own life was connected to current events, even if history was about to sweep like a tsunami through your world and leave shattered lives in its wake. For, as it turned out, not only would you not get a new dog, but the three dogs that you had dearly loved, along with the house you lived in, your neighbors, relatives, schoolmates, teachers, servants, and, ultimately, a way of life, would all be taken away from you, too.

The words written by everyone else in these letters near the end of the war pointed toward this impending doom. “Hey bud, talk to your father if you can,” Brother’s high school friend begged him in a letter dated March 26, 1975. “Your father can use his influences to send me out of the country. I would be indebted to you forever.” Though trying to sound cool, Brother’s friend could barely mask his desperation. Like all my brother’s classmates, he was being drafted.

Before the fall: Clockwise, Andrew Lam, far left, with his mother, older brother and sister shortly after their villa was attacked in the 1968 Tet offensive. A family gathering 1971 and a 1964 family portrait, minus his father, an army general who was often away fighting for the South Vietnamese forces.

This passage from Sister, too, in a letter marked April 12, 1975, was as ominous as it was unintentionally comical: “Cousin Phuong and I talked about how things look so bad now. If the Vietcong come into Saigon, we will go out to the countryside, and there we will take up arms and become guerillas.” How she would do this would be beyond anyone’s imagination. The pampered teenager who was chauffeured to school, and whose routine was piano lessons at home, then swimming at the country club called “Le Cercle Sportif,” didn’t even know how to cook or wash her own clothes. But there is no denying the seriousness of her tone, and, considering the odds, its hopelessness.

And here, on April 2, 1975, in atypically uneven handwriting that betrayed great distress, is a passage to Brother by Mother: “The situation is chaotic. I hope that because we have been good people we will manage to escape this dire situation. No matter what, listen to me carefully: don’t come home. Even if you get a letter from me or your father, later, do not believe it.”

Father, who just barely survived the evacuation of Danang, and who was sick with malaria, had just come back to Saigon that morning, and managed to write a succinct paragraph to say the same thing in that letter. “I’m safe. No matter what, continue your education. If we ever tell you to come home, you are to stay put and continue your studies.” Both were afraid that after the war ended, they would be forced by the communists to send for their oldest son in America, and he too would suffer their fate were he to come home.

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