Quiet Nights of Grace

A true story told...

by Abigail Grace Lind

Envision a soldier looking across a rice field and beholding a young girl, who immediately captures his heart. He doesn’t know her name. He doesn’t know what her voice sounds like. But he knows that he has to find out. The girl is thirteen years old, a fact unknown to this twenty three-year-old until he speaks to her, but he promises to wait until she is seventeen so they can be married. This “love at first sight” story belongs to the parents of Keo Chan, who was born in 1973 in the communist country of Laos. “In order to understand my story,” Keo begins, “you must know about my Father.”

Her father, Phone Rasavong, was a martial arts instructor and freedom fighter in the Vietnam War. In 1975, he and the eleven soldiers he was in command over were captured and put into a concentration camp. “In a place like this, they brainwash you and basically work you to death,” Keo explains. “My father knew if they don’t escape they die.” So, the soldier decided to take his eleven men and flee. Late one night they escaped the camp, but outside the walls, a bigger obstacle lay ahead of them. The men realized their only route to freedom involved swimming across the Mekong, a river about a mile wide.

Meanwhile at Keo’s home in Laos, her mother began to worry about her father. “Our family knew something was wrong in the 70s when we heard nothing,” Keo says. Everyone in the community told her mother, “If you don’t hear from your husband for a week, consider him dead. Do not speak of him, do not think of him. Just forget him.” Following this tradition, Keo and her younger sister Kack carried on without a father figure, knowing nothing of him, and not attempting to ask questions for fear of what might happen. Keo’s mother Seng was strong and supportive of her family, and found ways to provide for them. “I was a dancer from the day I was born.” Keo says. “My mother was a dancer; she taught me how. That’s one way we made a living in the village.”

Growing up in a little village in Laos in the 1970s was quite different from life in the United States. There was no electricity or running water. Keo’s family owned a rice field and they prepared, sowed, and harvested their crops to be sold. The girls married young, usually between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. “If you were sixteen or seventeen and not married, you were an old maid in my time,” Keo remarks. Chickens and water buffalo were in the place of cats and dogs for pets, and Keo smiles as she remembers laughing while riding across a rice field on the back of a water buffalo. “That’s just the life of a little girl there!” She says. The little boys in her village were “like the ones you see in National Geographic: running around butt-naked!” Yes, life during the war was tough, yet it was all they knew.

But what happened to Keo’s father and his men? It was a strenuous journey that night in the darkness (you see, they lack lights like the ones in America that line the banks of rivers), but they actually did swim across the Mekong River, and all but one soldier made it out alive. When they reached Thailand, they were placed into a refugee camp for people escaping from Laos. The camp was to help people start a new life. “A refugee camp is all wired.” Keo explains. “You can go in, but you can’t come out. You fill out paperwork, and wait for a sponsor in another country to allow you in. You do not know how long you will have to wait, or what country you will get into. So that’s what my father did. He worked in the camp, and waited.” Phone Rasavong was fortunate enough to get admission into America, and began to work for his citizenship there, alone and missing his family, with no way to contact them. For all they knew, he was dead and it was their duty to forget him.

In 1981, Seng heard a rumor that her husband was in the United States. “It was just a rumor,” Keo says, “and we had no proof of knowing if it was true, but the next day, my mother pack her bags and took her two daughters – my sister and me – at age six and eight, to escape the country to find her husband. My mother just expect to go to the United States and search for my father. Like it’s a small place! She had no idea what she was doing, and my grandparents beg her not to go, but she would not change her mind.” Leaving a communist country is no small affair, especially when a young woman and two small children venture out on an unplanned whim. The government kills anyone trying to escape into Thailand, but Seng was determined. The little family disappeared from the village that night and crept in the shadows, striving for freedom and a forgotten father. Keo didn’t exactly know what was going on, because from 1975 through 1981, there was no mention whatsoever of her father. But she knew that what was happening was serious. “I distinctly remember,” she says, “at eight years old, my mother said to me, ‘Don’t say a word. Don’t ask questions or our family could be killed.’ We snuck in the bushes and there were soldiers everywhere – lined up all along the border – but somehow, they didn’t see us.”

When they got near the border of Laos, Seng gave the “little bit of money” she had to a fisherman so that he would sneak them across the river in his boat. They managed to get into the boat, and the man covered them up with cloth so that they would not be seen. While crossing the river, a huge storm came up, and the cry “We’re going to die” continually came from the mouth of Keo’s mother. “Now, at this time,” Keo interjects, “we were Buddhists, and we didn’t know anything about the real God, but for some reason, my mother didn’t cry out to Buddha during that storm. She said, ‘Trajao, help me!’ And Trajao means Jesus.” After that phrase left the mouth of the frightened woman, the storm began to calm, and they made it safely across the river into Thailand. Then they were put into a mound of hay on a wagon and brought into the same refugee camp that their father had entered just a few years prior to them.

“Life wasn’t much better at the refugee camp,” Keo remembers, “but we could see the light at the end of the tunnel.” They had come this far; what good would it do to give up hope now? The living facilities were harsh; Keo and her family lived in a tiny one-room hut consisting of a space just large enough for all of them to lie crowded in the floor to sleep at night. Everyone in the camp shared a community outhouse, “which is more like going to the bathroom out in a bush somewhere, it’s just gross,” Keo said. While living there, Keo and her sister were required to get their first full-time jobs at the young ages of eight and six. They worked for a man lugging water all day – to and from certain places in the camp – from morning until nightfall. They had no idea how long they would have to be there, but they worked with the hope of one day finding Phone in America. As the man who owned the water pump was getting to know these two little girls, he decided he wanted to meet their mother. “It wasn’t anything weird,” Keo says, “he was a nice man and wanted to know about our family.” So, the meeting took place, and as they talked, they discovered a surprising correlation between their lives. Once again, “coincidence” struck the lives of this young Laotian family.

Overwhelming emotion falls upon Seng as she finds out that the man her daughters had been working for knows her husband. This man is not only an acquaintance of Phone, according to Keo, “he is his best friend – one of the soldiers he had crossed the Mekong River with – and he knows how to contact my father!” He informs the family that their beloved husband and father is in America and working toward gaining citizenship there. “He decided to write my father a letter telling him the way he met us, and that we are waiting to get a sponsor and get paperwork to come into the United States and find him so that we can see him again,” Keo says. When Phone sent a return letter, he explained that he was to become a citizen of America soon, and he could be the person to sponsor his own family to come into the United States! The Rasavongs were soon to enter America, after being in the refugee camp for only a year. “Most people are there for twelve or fifteen years,” Keo explains. “We were so blessed to be working for this man and to be able to find our father! We did not know it at the time, but it was God working the whole way through.” Escape was accomplished not by coincidence, but by grace.