I personally have not lived under the red banner but I have known good friends who did, in Poland and in Viet Nam.
I'll keep this as short as possible but it will run on to tell it all. Chin was a 52 year old man when I met him I worked with for two years, '98 to '00. He was a Vietnamese growing up in a rural village. One day the Viet Cong rolled into town -uninvited and at gunpoint- and the first thing they did was gather everybody, about two hundred people in the middle of the village. They grabbed the village elder, the leader by tradition in their agrarian culture and put the old man up to a tree. They slit his gut and tied him to it with his own intestines. That got everybody's attention and then a boss type authority figure commenced with a lot of talk about how a new day was coming and it was to be for the people, with the farmers voting and all that, choosing their leaders but everyone was split up into groups and led away, leaving the village entirely empty.
Chin and his brother were tied at the wrists, along with all other males from the teens to fifties and led away by the V.C. The old men, women and children got marched off in another direction, he never found out where and never saw the rest of his family again. After two weeks of being marched into Laos, to a V.C. bootcamp and begun military training to become V.C. Chin ad his brother managed to escape into the jungle and get away by floating down rivers on logs. They joined the A.R.V.N. and spent the next eight years fighting the V.C. and the N.V.A. The average American soldier's experience in Viet Nam was 13 months, Chin never got any "liberty" and spent eight years in the field in constant combat. He had the scars of bullet wounds, missing fingers and mortar shrapnel you could feel by squeezing his legs to show for it.
There was never any question in his mind about freedom concerning what life was to be under the communists.
Chin and his brother got lucky and survived all of that and got out of Viet Nam on a boat to the Phillipines in 1980.
Another Vietnamese I worked with there was too young to fight in the war but also got out as one of the "boat people" and he too came here with a brother, the rest of his family scattered by war, they too only had each other. His name is Be ("Bay"). His brother, like the Polish guy's father I'll tell you about, didn't stay, he went back. Be's brother now runs a coffee plantation. Be spoke very limited English but that is how he explained his brother's position to me, boss of a coffee plantation. We talked about that, with Chin translating. Not an "owner" but rather a "boss", and subject to higher ups but living by far a much better life than the average worker, "in the club".
Both Be and Chin, and BTW several other Vietnamese guys I worked with there, did I mention this was at a railyard? We were all welders and "carknockers", we repaired and also did complete rebuilds of railroad cars. About 80 employees, of which about 15 Vietnamese. They were the best workers. Period. They could drink anyone under the table. Period. They could kick anyone's ass. Period. They never bitched about the cold (working outdoors in Buffalo winters in the constant wind off Lake Erie two miles away) and weld circles around anyone, bar none.
I am not shitting you, these guys were the most patient and concise welders and diligent about quality, no matter if it was 15 minutes to quitting time on Friday.
They lived in the 'hood, maybe 20 people to an upper in the worst part of town but had absolutely nothing to do with their neighbors. They sent their kids to the best private schools and conservatories. I learned at the time that Buffalo alone had 5,000 Vietnamese expatriates and there are bigger communities in Minnesota and Ohio.
They are very conservative.
The other guy I knew in the service, he was from Poland. He came to the U.S. (Connecticut) on the last plane out from Warsaw to London to Toronto to New York when the Gdansk shipyard shit hit the fan. When he boarded the plane it hadn't happened yet. It took over a decade to get the permits to travel. I asked him why he got them, him and his dad and he didn't know why, everybody applied for them He had a mom there, his parents weren't divorced but she couldn't go. Like the Ronald Reagan joke, and this is no joke, it did actually take ten years to get a phone in their flat in a town south of Warsaw. They couldn't get a car. His dad spent less than a year here and went back because he just couldn't adjust and didn't like it, even in the midst of the solardarnosc happy-doo unfolding on the news every night he went back. This was a decade before the Berlin wall came down so he knew what he was going back to but his wife was there.
"Ski" was my best buddy in the marines, finished high school in Connecticut when he arrived, enlisted in the marines, made Corporal, Honorably discharged, got out and went to Las Vegas to live with his adoptive extended marine corps family, that of his Sergeant when he served at Kaneohe Bay and started life there, getting married. Got called back in Desert Shield and did another year driving Motor T at Camp Pendleton.
Hey, I did say it was going to be short, right? IT WAS, this was the Reader's Digest version
