As if there was no separation: Leaving dad to follow mom was a mistake

Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly - Ảnh 1. — Ms. Phuong cried when she saw her childhood image in As if there had never been a separation - Photo: BTC

In As if there had never been a separation, Ms. Phuong said: "Now I really regret going with her. After growing up, I hate myself for leaving my father at that time. I thought I could never return to Vietnam."

The fateful trip in As if there was never a separation

In Huizhou City, Guangdong, China, there is a Vietnamese woman living with her Chinese husband and two children. Her daily job is selling food from 5:30 am to 9 pm.

Trailer As if there was never a separation episode 189

After 20 years of living in a foreign land with few Vietnamese people, she gradually forgot Vietnamese and communicated in Chinese: "There were New Year's Eves when I saw other families reunited, and I felt really sad.

Every time I dream, I dream about my hometown, school, and the roads we used to walk on. But I don't know why I can't remember where my home is."

Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly - Ảnh 2. — Ms. Phuong collapsed when she met her father and stepmother - Photo: BTC

She is Nguyen Thi Phuong, 36 years old, the person who registered to find relatives with Nhu who had never been separated in Vietnam. Strangely, she cannot speak Vietnamese fluently, but the letter she sent asking to find relatives was in Vietnamese.

Her life through As if there had never been a separation is a long and sad story.

When she arrived in China, her mother took her to Shantou City - a special economic zone of China. Phuong went to work in a dried fruit factory. In 2006, her mother forced her to marry an older man. Phuong did not agree, left home, and has not seen her mother since.

Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly - Ảnh 3. — Ms. Phuong works at a restaurant in China - Photo: BTC

In 2007, Phuong went to Guangzhou to work for an electronics company. She understood that to survive in a foreign land, she had to learn the local language.

In 2008, Phuong moved to Shenzhen to work. There she met and married Truong Cuong To, returned to her husband's hometown in Hue Chau to live and had two children: a boy and a girl.

In 2019, when her youngest child was 3 years old, Phuong asked her grandparents to take her to school and then returned to Vietnam with her husband to find her family but could not find them. At her most desperate moment in Vietnam, she happened to watch VTV9 and saw the program As if there had never been a separation .

So she went to the police station to ask for help sending a letter to the program.

"Why don't you come back to find your dad and brother?"

When looking at the photo of her when she was still living happily with her father, stepmother and siblings that the program showed, she choked up in tears.

Phuong's father is Mr. Nguyen Quoc Hoi. After joining the army, he went to Dak Lak to make a living. He met and married Ms. Xuan but did not have a marriage certificate. They had two children together, Phuong and Nam.

Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly - Ảnh 4. — Sister Phuong and her father held hands tightly.

The family was not peaceful. Mrs. Xuan once took her two children to her paternal home in Nghe An to live for a year. When Khi Phuong was six and her younger brother was three, Mrs. Xuan took her children away from their paternal home and got on a bus. After a short distance, she dropped her two children off, abandoned them in the middle of the road, and then drove away.

Seeing the two children wandering around on the street, people came to ask about them and then asked their families to come and pick them up. In the story told to the program, Ms. Phuong did not mention anything about the period when she lived with her paternal grandparents. Perhaps, this was also a way to forget the pain of being abandoned by her mother when she was only 6 years old.

Ms. Phuong and her younger brother lived with their grandmother for a while, then their father came to take them back to Dak Lak. At this time, he had a second wife, Mrs. Duong. They had two more daughters, Phuong and Tam. In 2005, his ex-wife returned. Ms. Phuong agreed to go with her mother.

Mr. Hoi and his second wife still live in Dak Lak. Their children chose to settle in other cities.

Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly - Ảnh 5. — Ms. Phuong cried on the day she reunited with her family.

Mr. Nam said: "I wondered why you were already grown up when you left, at 16 you knew many things. Why didn't you come back to your father and siblings?" Mr. Hoi explained why Phuong left: "Dad forbade too many things, I went with mom, mom didn't forbid me."

But the person who was most troubled by Phuong's passing was her stepmother. She kept asking herself whether she had done anything wrong to her stepdaughter.

On the day they met again, Ms. Phuong cried and sat down on the ground hugging her father and stepmother. To be able to converse during this reunion, she quickly practiced her Vietnamese after not using it for so many years.

Dangerous mother

In the first few minutes, Ms. Phuong appeared, choking up as she answered the question posed by the organizers, "Do you want to say anything to your mother now?" in Chinese: "I don't want to say anything. I definitely don't want to see her again."

Như chưa hề có cuộc chia ly - Ảnh 6. — Ms. Phuong was emotional on the day of reunion - Photo: Organizing Committee

Mrs. Xuan left behind a lot of debt. The creditor came to Mr. Hoi's house to collect the debt by taking away all the cows and pigs. Three years later, he received a letter from Mrs. Xuan asking for clothes and money. At that time, he learned that Mrs. Xuan had been arrested for human trafficking.

After returning from military service, Nam and a relative from his mother's side visited his mother in prison. "I asked my mother where she had taken her sister. She said that someone had taken her to China and then lost contact with her. At that time, I knew she had sold her own child."