When the pale yellow envelope arrived at Linda A. Barndollar’s doorstep in Keene last fall, she thought it was a mail scam.
The return address was from Ontario, Canada, and she didn’t recognize the name.
When she opened it and unfolded the pages inside she was transported back to her days as a high school girl during the Vietnam War and a friend she thought died nearly 45 years ago.
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| Linda Barndollar talks last week about reconnecting with a long ago pen pal. |
Barndollar, now 61, was a sophomore at Keene High School when she signed up for a pen pal in her English class in the early 1960s.
She wrote down her name, age, interests and hobbies and turned it in. Soon, she received the name and address of a Vietnamese high school student: Lang T. Nguyen from Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam.
Some of Barndollar’s friends also had pen pals, from places like Sweden and Turkey.
But Barndollar’s pen pal brought American foreign policy to her doorstep.
Suddenly, the grainy images of jungles and U.S. military operations on the other side of the world that flashed across her family’s television screen every night held more personal significance.
Looking back on it, it was probably their shared passion for reading that matched them, Barndollar said in an interview last week.
“I remember being surprised that she’d read ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and I had, too,” Barndollar said. “We wrote about those books at first.”
The two wrote long letters to each other about every three months, sharing stories and telling about the cultures of their countries.
Barndollar remembers telling Nguyen that she set her hair in rollers each night before bed. Nguyen wrote that in Vietnam, girls wore their hair straight.
“We both just thoroughly enjoyed this growing relationship through the mail,” she said. “It was so exciting being in high school and waiting for the next letter.”
Barndollar described the young Americans who protested the war in her friend’s country and Nguyen described her own day-to-day life, shying away from details about the turmoil in her country.
“I just didn’t have a clue how bad it was,” Barndollar said. “I wondered how bad it was, but being a young teenager myself I didn’t have the assertiveness to ask.
“I would watch things on TV and wonder, ‘Is Lang near that,’ knowing there was nothing I could do.”
The girls exchanged letters for more than two years. They traded photographs, like the one of Barndollar’s brother sitting on the hood of their parents’ car, and once Barndollar received a package with chopsticks and a woven basket.
Then the letters from Vietnam abruptly stopped.
Barndollar, who knew the war was heating up, wrote three more letters. All went unanswered.
“Knowing where she lived, I kind of assumed she died in the war,” Barndollar said. “I wondered if she was safe all the time.
“I was fearful that someday I would get a letter saying, ‘My parents were killed,’ but I hadn’t imagined that anything would happen to her.”
Growing up in Saigon in the late 1950s, Lang Nguyen’s comfortable childhood foretold nothing of what was to come.
Her grandfather had worked for the French government, earning her father a slot in a prestigious private French school. As a boy he moved to France for a short time to study medicine, but soon dropped out and returned to Vietnam.
His connections to the French government gave his daughters, Lang and her sister Mai, who was two years older, places in a French school for girls in Saigon.
The school was strict: the Vietnamese students were expected to speak French all the time in classes and at recess. For a “second” language, they took English and were required to have English-speaking pen pals.
Lang Nguyen got Linda Barndollar and Mai had a student from Massachusetts. Her father would read the girls’ letters and correct their grammar and spelling before they sent them.
At first, Nguyen, now 62, didn’t have much to share with Barndollar about the war, she said in a telephone interview last week.
“We were in Saigon,” she said. “We heard the bombing, but we were not affected a lot by the war.”
But when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, things began to change.
“In Vietnam, we loved President Kennedy very, very much,” she said. “When we heard about his assassination we were very sad.
“There were a lot of demonstrations in Saigon.”
Political tensions grew and Nguyen’s family also began to realize that their mail was being read when letters from America arrived that had been opened and resealed.
“All the letters in and out were censored and everything was not confidential anymore,” she said.
Her father worried that government officials would think the family was pro-American and asked her to stop writing.
“I stopped my letters without daring to write to Linda about the reason,” she said. “She continued to write and I got her letters.
“It was very, very sad that I could not answer her letters.”
Eventually, Barndollar’s letters stopped and Nguyen’s link to the world beyond the war in her country broke.
“With the gloomy situation of the city (Saigon), receiving something happy from the U.S. was a big, happy event for us,” she said. “At that time that happiness seemed to stay there in my memory.”
Ten more years of war ravaged her country and she became a medical secretary after school.
About the time Saigon was captured by the North Vietnamese army in April 1975, Nguyen decided to leave the country with other members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, to which she belonged.
Despite fleeing with church members, Nguyen felt she was leaving the country alone.
Her sister Mai, who she was very close to, had taken her own life during the war and her parents refused to leave.
“I asked them if they wanted to go with me,” she said. “They said, ‘No.’
Only allowed to carry a small bag on the flight to the United States, she left her beloved letters and photos from Barndollar in Vietnam.
When she arrived in California with about 3,000 other Vietnamese refugees, a pastor in Maryland sponsored Nguyen and another girl.
For about two years, Nguyen worked in the church’s headquarters, helping other Vietnamese refugees settle in the United States.
She worked for several more years in Maryland, copying church documents to microfiche before requesting to be transferred to Canada, where she eventually settled into a job with a printing press owned by the church in Ontario.
She married and had three children, and in 1984 she sponsored her parents, who still lived in Vietnam, to move to Canada. Her father died in 2001 and her mother still lives at the family’s home.
While she often thought of her American pen pal, she didn’t think she’d ever find her again until, late last year, Nguyen decided it was time to search for her.
“My oldest daughter is a pharmacist and has a boyfriend in Boston, which I knew was near New Hampshire,” she said. “I thought maybe Carl can find where Linda is.”
Within a few hours of her request, he’d tracked down Barndollar through an Internet search.
“I was thrilled,” Nguyen said. “It’s so marvelous how people find other people that they have lost.”
She tentatively wrote to Barndollar, worried that after so much time Barndollar wouldn’t remember her.
“I wrote her a long letter at first,” she said.
Barndollar, who had become a nurse and lived throughout New Hampshire over the years but returned to settle in her hometown, was also thrilled when she realized her friend was alive and well.
“I was like a kid at Christmas,” Barndollar said. “I sent out e-mails to people, I just couldn’t believe that she’d found me.”
The two wrote letters to each other for a while, then began e-mailing, sharing the missed stories of 45 years.
They discussed meeting, and then one day Nguyen e-mailed Barndollar to say her daughter Carol had bought her a plane ticket to Boston.
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On May 22, Nguyen’s daughter, who was also visiting her boyfriend in Boston, drove her mother to Keene.
The two old friends spent the day together, having lunch and talking about old times.
For Nguyen, reuniting with Barndollar provides a rare link to her past.
“I have found a friend from my childhood,” she said. “All of my friends from high school have scattered around the world.
“I could not reconnect with them all and I will never see them again, but now I have Linda.”
And Linda has Lang.
“I’d been feeling like I was about to meet a long-lost relative,” Barndollar said of the first meeting. “Even though we only wrote for two years, I felt like I’m getting back together with her.
“We just picked up where we’d left off.”
