PHOENIX — Kelly Mac is a successful business owner, but her journey was a long one before she ended up in the Valley. The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago, on April 30th, 1975, with the fall of the city of Saigon. Mac was there that day, fleeing the country alongside her family.
As part of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Mac sits down with ABC15 and opens up about being part of history.
“This is our family here, the Mac clan,” she said, showing photos of her large family.
This April 30, many Macs gathered for a reunion in Texas to mark the somber anniversary. Exactly 50 years earlier, in 1975, the same family was fleeing Vietnam.
“April 30th, that afternoon, has changed my life. And many lives of the Vietnamese people,” Mac said.
Despite being born in the 1960s in the midst of the Vietnam War, Mac says she had a happy childhood in Saigon. The city, which is present-day Ho Chi Minh City, was the southern capital when the country was split.
“Towards the beginning of ‘75, things were getting really, really hostile. Grandmother would be glued to the television,” Mac said.
Living with her grandparents and younger sister, along with some uncles and aunts, Mac says the family practiced evacuating for months.
“We lived in a three-story building, and every night we would sleep on the floor with our emergency pack,” she remembers.
Then, April 30, 1975, came. U.S. troops had pulled out. Mac was 10 years old when her grandmother got the phone call from a contact in the military, telling them that North Vietnam was making its offensive on Saigon.
“Her reaction to the phone call, right after she hung up, she grabbed every one of us so fast,” Mac said. “You can hear the bombs, you can hear the chaos. Everything was falling in front of us. And we knew grandmother had to make a decision that was life-changing.”
The Saigon invasion prompted the largest helicopter evacuation in history. Mac’s family had planned to depart the country by air, but that changed in the chaos.
“We had it planned out where we're going to be escorted and leave the country with dignity,” Mac said. “That went out the window when that call came in that afternoon.”
The family ended up at the boat dock, their belongings tossed aside to make room for as many people as possible in the fishing boat.
“I remember the pirates were opportunists. They pried her mouth open to make sure there was no gold or monies,” Mac said. “They even stripped her of her wedding ring. And you know, Grandmother was like, ‘Okay, take everything and anything you want. We want to get on this boat.’”
Yet what followed on the boat: horror. Mac says they sat packed like sardines under the blazing sun for days.
“I remember sitting under my grandmother's armpit with my sister on the other side vomiting. There was no food, shelter, or water,” Mac said.
Some other passengers gave up. Mac remembers hearing people jump off the boat in the night.
“Originally, the whole boat was just full of people. I witnessed suicide. I witnessed death,” Mac said. “By the third or fourth day, there was room, because all those people had left us.”
The Fall of Saigon spurred a refugee crisis, with more than 100,000 people fleeing Vietnam in 1975. Thousands died on the journey. Those like Mac, who left by sea, became known as Vietnamese boat people.
For Mac’s family, the fourth night on the water finally brought salvation: a U.S. Naval carrier. Mac still remembers the sailor who carried her on his back up the ship.
“I wish I knew who this young man was, so I can say thank you for sparing us, and helping us, and rescuing us,” she said.
On the carrier, a sailor gave Mac an orange. She was so hungry that she ate it with the skin on.
All eight members of her family onboard survived.
They traveled to the U.S. through Guam, first to a Naval base in Arkansas, then to New Jersey, where family members in Princeton greeted them.
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“This is what I looked like when I came to America, 1975,” Mac said, showing a photo of herself at age 11. “This was actually after I was cleaned up and given a nice set of clothes from Red Cross and local charities, and I was so happy to get my hair combed.”
Mac did not speak a word of English, and she remembers being stunned by the novelty of America.
“I saw someone put a coin in the Coke machine, and it dropped all these delicious Coke and Pepsi products, and I just stood there and stared at it,” she said.
When her parents and two other siblings joined the family in New Jersey, they all packed into her aunt and uncle’s one-bedroom apartment, until Princeton University offered the refugees a house behind campus for one year.
“From the boat that was left to die, boom, we're now housed in this gorgeous mansion,” Mac said. “I've never seen daffodils in my life, and they were all over. I still can feel it. It's such a beautiful time of my youth and my introduction to America.”
Mac and her younger sister started feeling at home and learning English in the summer of 1975, when they enrolled in a YMCA camp in Princeton. Now a fitness instructor at a YMCA in the Valley, Mac feels her life has come full circle.
She has lived in New Jersey, California, New York, and now runs her Kelly Mac Bikini line out of Scottsdale. In her life, Mac has fulfilled what she says is her calling: being a mom.
Mac and her daughter Michelle visited Vietnam together. They stood in the same doorway where she once fled, and again, on that boat dock.
“It was really emotional,” Mac said. “I got to go see the dock that I left as a little girl, and it shook me.”
Fifty years after that fateful day, Mac stood alongside other survivors: her family, now Americans.
“We haven't seen each other for nearly 40 years, 50 years, right?” Mac said. “To have everyone again, to catch up and reminisce, you know, 1975, do you remember? A beautiful reunion. And where you are now, where are our children?”
Mac says she did not choose to be an immigrant. Yet at the end of the Vietnam War, that path shaped her life
“The American story, I'm so lucky, and I ran with it,” she said.
From the boat, to a life marked by determination, Mac feels her story is just one exemplifying the resilience of Vietnamese Americans.
