Inheriting the War Page 15

  The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, according to several disaffected former staff members, has capitulated to the process because it believes the only way to solve the problem is to make life so difficult for the Vietnamese refugees that they would rather volunteer to go home. “In fact, forced repatriation is working—the number of asylum seekers has dropped dramatically,” said a former UNHCR staff member. “Forget human rights and compassion—the bottom line is to find a quick fix for the refugee crisis.”

  In the South China Morning Post, letters to the editors are mostly anti-refugee to the point of being rabid. After almost two decades, Hong Kong is fed up. One resident urged that “Vietnamese people should be sent to labor camps to work as slaves.” Other letters suggested Hong Kong should force everyone back to Vietnam regardless of screening. These are presumably the same people who are themselves searching frantically for visas out of Hong Kong before China takes power in 1997.

  These days no one will speak up for the Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong or, for that matter, the refugees scattered in various camps in Southeast Asia, but perhaps that is beside the point. The boat people, kicking and screaming as they are carted off to airplanes for the journey home, warn us that maybe it is also our misfortune that we can no longer hear them. Our own idealism wanes; we too, like them, sit in the dark, our hands on our ears, poor, huddled masses.

  On the bunk bed where he stored all that he owned, where he wrote and slept and ate with his wife and two kids, Lieu Tran, 31, offered me lunch. One afternoon we sat cross-legged with the curtain drawn and had fried chicken wings—a staple here in the camp—along with porridge.

  “I just got my second chicken wing last week,” he said matter-of-factly. This expression is something of an in-house joke. You get your first “chicken wing” when you receive your letter from the Hong Kong immigration authorities informing you that you have failed your interview with immigration officials—that you have been deemed an “economic refugee.” You are allowed to appeal to the court under UNHCR’s observation. When you get your second chicken wing it means your appeal has come back and, if the answer is still no, you’re out of luck. With two chicken wings, Lieu said, laughing, “you can fly home to communist paradise.”

  Below Lieu’s pillow were stacks of notebooks and letters. Life in the camp had given him plenty of time to reflect. His whole life, he said, had bled into these notebooks and letters—“an autobiography of a stateless man,” he called it. He took one out and said, “If you could publish this in America I would really appreciate it.”

  I was tempted to write something about Lieu’s life, but having read the following letter, I thought it best if he told it himself, translated here in full:

  “This letter I write to you in the free world begging for help. You can lend your voice and scream for us, we who scream constantly but are never heard. You who live on stable ground can reach out to a people who live on the edge of an abyss.

  “I grew up in the city of Hue, Vietnam. My father served in the South Vietnamese Army during the war as a sergeant. He was shot and killed by the Viet Cong in September 1973 while on his way home on leave.

  “After 1975, South Vietnam fell into the hands of the communists. The communist regime began to confiscate our property and put many of us on trial. Because my father was in the army, my family was tried for having committed ‘crimes against the Party and the People.’

  “We owed them, our accusers said, for our ‘crimes of blood.’ In January 1978 we were forced to leave Hue for the high mountain wilderness in Dac Lac, an area the communists call the New Economic Zone.

  “How we suffered! Those years in the NEZ we were slaves. Each day we went into the forest to clear brush. We planted vegetables, which got taxed by the state so we had little left. We had to survive on tree roots and yams.

  “We suffered diseases and many accidents. There was no medicine. Many who were sent there with me died slowly from malaria. There were no schools, no churches, no temples. We had nowhere to turn.

  “My siblings and I couldn’t take it anymore and we fled. In the city we begged on the streets and worked as coolies and tried to avoid government officers who would send us back to the NEZ if they found us.

  “We thought that if life in Vietnam continued this way, we would die slowly. In 1988, my sister, my wife, my little daughter, and I escaped from Vietnam. Our boat was made of bamboo, and with thirty others we sailed out to sea. Some of us died of thirst, some of starvation, but at least the dead found peace at the bottom of the sea. It was better this way—to risk becoming fish bait for a chance of freedom.

  “Those who survived among us arrived in Hong Kong after twenty-five days. Immediately we were placed in a detention center called Thai-A-Chau. We lived on cement floor like animals. Each of us got two bowls of rice daily. In winter we went without blankets. Our daily lives consisted of waiting in food lines and trying to protect ourselves from beatings by the Hong Kong police.

  “A year after I arrived in Hong Kong I was screened for my refugee status. The interpreter, who was Chinese, did not speak Vietnamese very well. The screening officer did not allow me to explain but only to answer questions. When I said something he didn’t like, he shouted at me. ‘You’re a liar,’ he screamed.

  “The worst thing was that he would not write down important events about my past so that the court could see that I was truly a political refugee. All was lost when a letter came back to my barracks informing me that I was an ‘economic migrant’—ineligible for asylum. My family and I live in constant fear of repatriation, afraid of having to return to the prison of communist Vietnam.

  “Our home these last months has been a place called Whitehead Detention Center. Life has gotten worse for people who live here. Some have gone crazy because of the crowded conditions; others have gotten sick because there is so little medicine. A few I know have committed suicide. I fear most for the children. What future is there for children who live without a place to play, who live behind an iron fence?

  “Vietnam and the United Kingdom have agreed to return all boat people from Hong Kong to Vietnam. Facing that impending action, we live in anguish and pain. But my family and I have agreed to this: we are determined to commit mass suicide here in Hong Kong, if necessary, rather than return to Vietnam where one has no right to be human.

  “Perhaps you Americans can recognize in us a kindred people who treasure freedom more than life.”

  The screening process Hong Kong uses to determine which Vietnamese fit political refugee status is controversial and has been condemned by Amnesty International and the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights. Many interpreters are Chinese immigrants from Vietnam who can’t speak Vietnamese very well. The people aren’t allowed to tell their stories. The process has declared that fewer than eight percent of the boat people are eligible for political asylum, a number that has stayed consistent for months, suggestive of a quota. The rest are to be shipped home.

  I asked Lieu if he knew the difference between involuntary repatriation and voluntary repatriation. “Those too weak to fight when the police raid this place for potential repatriates will be termed voluntary,” he answered. “Those of us who fight to the death will be called involuntary.”

  Then he showed me his knife. He had taken a metal bar that once supported his bunk bed and rubbed it onto the cement floor until it had become a kind of sharp swing blade. “I will never go home,” he said and gripped it until his knuckles turned white.

  In Section 6 a woman named Xuan Le, who had the look of someone malnourished for years, told me how she and her family nearly drowned while escaping from Hai Phong Province. In her mid-forties, she looked ten years older, her face darkened by the sun, the wrinkles deep, her shoulder blades protruding. She stood about five feet tall, weighing no more than ninety pounds. Her hair had turned almost all gray.

  “One night my family and I decided to escape. There were three of us in the family. My husband was still in a re
education camp. My sister lives in Canada. She sent money home and I kept saving until I had enough to buy seats on the boat. I took my two little boys and left from Hai Phong in the middle of the night.

  “A few days out and our boat hit a coral reef. God, it was so terrifying. Water started to rise. Children were crying. It was winter. The sea was ice cold. It began to sink.

  “I stood there for maybe eight to ten hours. The water went slowly up to my knees, then my waist. My two children, I would not let the water touch them. One hung onto my neck and the smaller one sat on my shoulders . . .

  “I don’t know how I got my strength. I thought we were going to die. Everyone on the boat thought so too. People started praying. But I just stood. I didn’t move at all. I would die first before my children, I decided. I turned into stone.”

  Then a miracle happened to Xuan Le. A Hong Kong patrol boat came by and rescued the despondent refugees. As the patrolmen pulled her and her children out of the freezing water, Xuan Le said she couldn’t feel her own body at all. “I was no longer human. I was something else. It took a week or so before I had feeling in my fingers again. It was . . . it was as if I had turned into Hon Vong Phu,” recalled the gray-haired woman, laughing hysterically.

  Up in the coastal province of Quang Ninh there was a rock in the shape of a woman holding a child. It was called Hon Vong Phu—the Rock Waiting for Her Husband. According to legend, the stone figure had once been a real woman. A thousand years ago, as she awaited the return of her war-faring husband who was most likely never to return, a thunderstorm turned her and the baby in her arms into stone. Over time she became a local goddess, and villagers and fishermen prayed to her for good weather.

  I told Mrs. Xuan that she was very brave. But she shook her head adamantly. “Look around you,” she said and gestured toward the squatting women washing their children by the washing area out in the bright cement courtyard. “Tell me which Vietnamese mother would react differently?”

  Save me! Save us!

  You’re our savior.

  You are our only hope.

  There is a famous photo of two Vietnamese women screaming for help from behind white metal bars. It was taken on December 12, 1989, in Hong Kong. One woman has her hands outstretched; the other, on her knees, wearing a white headband, prays.

  A couple of hours after this picture was taken, the two women, their families, and other inmates from the Phoenix House Detention Center—fifty-one people in all—were sent back to Vietnam against their will, flown by Cathay Pacific Airlines.

  The main reason I was sent to Hong Kong was because forced repatriation not only affected the thirty-five thousand Vietnamese boat people living in refugee camps across Southeast Asia but all of the thirty million internationally displaced persons now scattered across the globe. It was becoming a universally accepted practice.

  But I also went because of that picture. For days I couldn’t get it out of my head after I first saw it, especially the image of the praying woman, her white headband, and the way she looked into the camera. The white headband is the Vietnamese funeral garment. Vietnam’s national forehead, one might even say, is bound with this white strip of cloth. Over the years it has become this woman’s unofficial flag—her symbol of suffering, of struggle, of death.

  When I first saw the photo I immediately thought of my mother: it could have been her. It could have been us.

  The photo brought back painful memories. One afternoon in the refugee camp in Guam, my mother came back to our tent with her clothes all wet and her eyes full of tears. The American GIs had built the shower stalls without roofs, and while the women took their showers the GIs parked their army truck next to the stalls and stood atop the hoods and watched. Water was rationed; there was no second chance. Mother bit her lips and took the shower with her clothes on.

  Another time, a GI tossed a quarter at me. I bent to pick it up from the muddy ground, despite my better judgment, trying not to look at his face. I had come from an upper-class family in Vietnam. I had seen urchins begging on the streets of Saigon. When I came back to our tent and gave the coin to my mother she looked at me astonished. But she did not say anything and took the coin. I don’t remember saying anything either. Just the same, we recognized the look in each other’s face: shame and humiliation.

  I went to Hong Kong not knowing what I would find, but I knew what I felt: rage against the treatment of boat people, rage against the West. I had wanted to do something. I had wanted to help. But I went not purely out of my own piousness. There was no denying it: a cub reporter, I jumped at the rare opportunity. I had connections and I knew I was going to be the only American journalist who spoke Vietnamese there and, therefore, could get into the notorious Whitehead Detention Center as an interpreter. The fact was, despite everything else, thrilling throughout my time in Hong Kong: me, going undercover, alone, watching an important post–cold war story unfold.

  What I hadn’t prepared for, however, was that I was too close to the story. Go back a few years and it could easily be me mired in this camp. Worse, throughout my presence in that detention center, I was bewildered. I had no clear sense of where my true alliance lay, where exactly I stood. Was I an activist, an interpreter, or a journalist? So many people with so many stories and I was the only receptacle for their tragedies. I was dizzy, and each time I entered that camp I felt like I was drowning in their sorrow and sadness.

  What was the true nature of my relationship with the boat people?

  I was both connected and disconnected from the refugee’s narrative. My experience belonged to the cold war story, one where I fled the on-coming communist army and was taken in by a generous America. I lived the American Dream, grew up as an American in an American suburb, and graduated from a good university. I went on further. I fancied myself a writer. I saw myself living a cosmopolitan life, a premise of ever expanding opportunity and choices.

  The boat people who fled after the cold war ended, on the other hand, left Vietnam too late. And all over the world the business of protecting refugees has turned into the business of protecting the West from asylum seekers themselves. Movement toward resettlement countries, UN officials will now tell you, is movement in “the wrong direction.”

  Perhaps nowhere else but among Vietnamese refugees lost in no-man’s-land and facing deportation would a Vietnamese from America, however deep his sympathy, however fierce his rage, cease to simply be a Vietnamese. He confronts a crucial self-realization: he is no longer a refugee, no longer an inheritor of one set of history.

  In America I had nurtured a hidden psychic wound, a stigma to which I had uncritically attached myself and, over the years, I wore it like a scar or a badge of honor. I had seen myself as a refugee living in America. I was obsessed with my own story, my expulsion from my homeland. Among those whose future was as dark as that of a condemned prisoner facing a firing squad, I was made keenly aware that I had been self-indulgent. They may love the USA but the USA can no longer afford to love them. I, who left Vietnam earlier as a child, on the other hand, have been generously embraced by the West and have, in turn, embraced it.

  The refugee sobriquet no longer fits. I was a free man, someone who grew up in California, took vacations to Europe and Mexico, someone who attended a prestigious university, someone with an American passport, a press pass, and various credit cards that, in an age where borders are becoming increasingly porous, seem to open every door and customs gate.

  Indeed, after a few weeks in Hong Kong, confronted with the boat people’s profound grief, I began to miss my friends in America, my life in America. I felt that I began to tense up each time I walked through the barbed wire gate while the armed Chinese guards gave me dirty looks. Looking back I realized that I had unconsciously made the point of looking different from the boat people. I dressed impeccably. I ironed my shirt. I could not have possibly been mistaken as a boat person were a riot to break out and the Hong Kong police had to come in with their batons and tear gas.


  I was no savior, no hero. I wasn’t even sure how much, as a writer, I could help. If anything, I was, in stealth, trying to save myself from them.

  Among almost all the people I met and deeply admired—Hung Tran, Pam Baker, Duyen Nguyen, Quyen Vuong, Phu Bui, and many more—lawyers, social workers, NGO (non-governmental organization) officials, scholars, and so on—people who dedicated months if not years of their lives to helping the boat people in Hong Kong, there was almost a pallid pall that hung over their lives. They lived and breathed refugee policies. Boat people’s cases piled up high on their desks. They took tragedies home with them.

  But even if compassion fatigue hadn’t defeated them, it was at least wearing them down. Duyen Nguyen, for instance, rarely cracked a smile and I never once heard him laugh. Quyen, a Fulbright scholar, was informed by her own journey as a boat person, but her smile was infinitely sad. Others—volunteers, workers for NGOs who returned to help—bickered among themselves, disagreed as to which was the best tactic to help those facing deportation. One night at a hush-hush secret meeting between social workers and lawyers and NGO workers who had wanted to go beyond their professional capacities to help boat people’s causes, one man just plain lost it, stood up and screamed, then promptly stomped out.

  If they agreed on anything at all, it was that I was a lightweight, a fly-by-night sort who came in for a story and no more, whereas they . . . they were entrenched. They had chosen their battle. I, though sympathetic, hadn’t chosen mine. I was merely a visitor to the front line. By gathering and disseminating news from inside, I might be able to be of some help, but by all estimates, considering how global generosity has dwindled in the face of millions upon millions of stateless people, not by much.

  I had initially wanted to dissuade them of that notion, but soon I came to accept that it was true. I didn’t want to be consumed like a Duyen Nguyen or like that unrivaled champion of refugees Pam Baker, attorney at law, who worked tirelessly and who didn’t seem to need sleep or food, just cigarettes. I was, less than a month into the fight—and I hated to admit it at the time—already tired and worn out. I brightened up one morning when the phone rang and my office told me that my assignment to Europe in the spring had been approved. I couldn’t wait to leave. Lightweight indeed.