I put the photograph back next to the more prominent portrait of an old man sitting stiff-jawed before the camera. He seemed too gaunt to be the family patriarch. The Asian folds that tugged at the corners of his eyes made him look sad. Tam quickly pulled out two photo albums.

"Our father died in 1991, one month before we got permission to go to America," he said, flipping open the first album. The fading photos showed the old man lying on a bed, a sheet tucked under his chin. A dozen relatives clustered around him, their heads wrapped in the white scarves of mourning. The smallest children stood in front, their tiny hands resting on the edge of the bed, their eyes wide with fascination and fear.

"He was cremated," Tam said regretfully. "We couldn't bury him." He saw my confusion and explained. "All land belongs to the Communists now. Even if you pay for a plot, they can take it away." He described a huge private cemetery in Saigon that had been turned into a park with the stroke of a pen. "They didn't even move the bones! Just the headstones." Only the official martyr cemeteries were safe, with their look-alike memorials teased into garish, rocket-ship shapes and copycat eulogies in soldierly rows. Even those headstones, it was rumored, often guarded empty graves as officials in charge of reburial pocketed the money and left the bones to rot in the jungle. Tam shook his head. "You never know when they'll come to take away a grave. It made my mother very sad."

ESCAPE FROM VIETNAM · NEW LIFE