The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the boat people 9780415613101, 9780203813102, 2010052704

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The Chinese/ Vietnamese Diaspora Revisiting the boat people

Edited by Yuk Wah Chan

Routledge Contemporary Asia Series

The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora

Over three decades have passed since the first wave of Indochinese refugees left their homelands. These refugees, mainly the Vietnamese, fled from war and strife in search of a better life elsewhere. By investigating the Vietnamese diaspora in Asia, this book sheds new light on the Asian refugee era (1975–91), refugee settlement and different patterns of host-guest interactions that will have implications for refugee studies elsewhere. The book provides: •

• •

a clearer historical understanding of the group dynamics among refugees— the ethnic Chinese ‘Vietnamese refugees’ from both the North and South as well as the northern ‘Vietnamese refugees’. an examination of different aspects of migration including: planning for migration, choices of migration route, and reasons for migration. an analysis of the ethnic and refugee politics during the refugee era, and the subsequent settlement and resettlement.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, migration, ethnicities, refugee histories and politics. Yuk Wah Chan is Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong.

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The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora Revisiting the boat people Edited by Yuk Wah Chan

First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Yuk Wah Chan for selection and editorial material. Individual chapters, the contributors. The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora: revisiting the boat people / edited by Yuk Wah Chan. p. cm.—(Routledge contemporary Asia series; 33) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Vietnamese diaspora—History. 2. Refugees—Vietnam. 3. Refugees— China—Hong Kong. 4. Refugees—United States. 5. Boat people—Vietnam. I. Chan, Yuk Wah. HV640.5.V5C52 2011 305.895′10597—dc22 ISBN: 978-0-415-61310-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-81310-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

2010052704

Contents

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements Contributors

ix x xi xii

PART I

Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people 1

2

3

4

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era: an Asian perspective from Hong Kong Yuk Wah Chan

3

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus: Hong Kong in comparative perspective David W. Haines

20

The boat people crisis of 1978–79 and the Hong Kong experience examined through the ethnic Chinese dimension Ramses Amer

36

In search of the history of the Chinese in South Vietnam, 1945–75 Li Tana

52

PART II

Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement 5

The Vietnamese minority: boat people settlement in Hong Kong Yuk Wah Chan and Terence C.T. Shum

65

6

Vietnamese youth and their adaptation in Hong Kong Ocean W. K. Chan

76

viii Contents 7

Thanh lọc—Hong Kong’s refugee screening system: experiences from working for the refugee communities Peter Hansen

8

Visions of resistance and survival from Hong Kong detention camps Daniel C. Tsang

9

Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong: visual images and stories

85

99

116

Sophia Suk-mun Law PART III

Hong Kong and beyond 10 Sojourn in Hong Kong, settlement in America: experiences of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees Jonathan H. X. Lee

133

11 Dark tourism, diasporic memory and disappeared history: the contested meaning of the former Indochinese refugee camp at Pulau Galang Ashley Carruthers and Boitran Huynh-Beattie

147

12 The repatriated: from refugee migration to marriage migration Yuk Wah Chan

161

Conclusion Yuk Wah Chan

172

Index

177

List of figures

8.1 “Tap Chi Tu Do”/Freedom Magazine (cover) 8.2 Comprehensive action plan, boat people detention center in Hong Kong 8.3 Hope of freedom 8.4 Camp protesters 8.5 Rejection letter 8.6 Forced repatriation 9.1 The first wave of Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong 9.2 Skyluck drifted ashore on Lamma Island. More than 3000 Vietnamese refugees on board were received by the Hong Kong Government 9.3 Five hundred and seventy-three refugees were found inside the lower deck of a 35 meter long vessel, Ha Long when it arrived in Hong Kong on April 15, 1979 9.4 The government dockyard at Canton Road in June 1979 9.5 Life behind the wires 9.6 The interior of a detention camp where teens were crowded together in between rows of bunk beds 9.7 The riot at Shek Kong detention camp on February 3, 1992 led to 24 deaths and 114 injuries

105 106 106 107 108 109 117

119

120 121 123 124 127

List of tables

1.1 Vietnamese arrivals in Hong Kong 3.1 Arrivals of Vietnamese refugees by boat in other Southeast Asian countries and Hong Kong in 1978 and 1979 3.2 Arrivals of Vietnamese refugees by boat in Hong Kong in 1978 and 1979 4.1 Share of profit on rice trade in 1936 4.2 Rice shops in South Vietnam, 1956 4.3 Vietnam’s rice export for the 10 years between 1955 and 1964 4.4 Rice mills in South Vietnam, 1970 5.1 Age of informants 5.2 Level of education received in Hong Kong and Vietnam 5.3 Upholding traditional values 5.4 Senses of identity among the Vietnamese

6 37 38 54 55 55 57 66 67 69 70

Acknowledgements

We thank the many Vietnamese who provided us with information and shared their life stories with us. We particularly thank the core informants who not only made our survey possible through their personal networks, but also provided us with their ‘intimate’ knowledge about the situations of the boat people settlement so to help us revise our survey questionnaires and other interview questions. This book would have been impossible without their help. Permission has been granted to publish four images from the Paul Tran Files on Southeast Asian Refugees (MS-SEA002) and two images from the Project Ngoc Records on Southeast Asian Refugees (MS-SEA016) in Chapter 8. These images are reprinted: 1. 2.

Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Paul Tran Files on Southeast Asian Refugees (MS-SEA002). Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Project Ngoc Records on Southeast Asian Refugees (MS-SEA016).

Permission has also been kindly granted by Paul Tran who donated the materials from the Hong Kong Detention Centres, where 80,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers were housed. When the material were given to Mr Tran at the time, the authors’ intentions were to get their voices heard in the outside world, and the materials were not meant to be sold commercially.

Contributors

Ramses Amer, PhD and Associate Professor in Peace and Conflict Research, is Senior Research Fellow, Department of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University, Sweden, Guest Research Professor, National Institute for South China Sea Studies, Haikou, China, and Research Associate, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm. Major areas of his research include (1) security issues and conflict resolution in Southeast Asia and the wider Pacific Asia and (2) the role of the United Nations in the international system. His most recent book is International Relations in Southeast Asia: Between Bilateralism and Multilateralism (co-edited with N. Ganesan, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010). Email: [email protected] Ashley Carruthers is Assistant Professor at the College of Arts and Social Sciences at Australian National University. He has published actively on various issues about overseas Vietnamese communities in Australia. His research interests focus on kinship links and cultural flows across the borders of Vietnam and the diaspora, grassroots cosmopolitanism, cultural borders, and local-global relationships. Email: [email protected] Ocean W. K. Chan graduated from Massachusetts College of Art in 1994 and received his M.Phil. degree in Anthropology at the Chinese University Hong Kong in 2003. He worked as head teacher and education coordinator at Pillar Point Refugee Camp for young Vietnamese from 1997 to 2000. He has lectured at many art institutions in Hong Kong, and has over ten years’ volunteer experience in art therapy, theatre and music performance for community youth centres, hospitals and elderly homes. From early 2008, Chan has been directing arts and emotional therapy programs in quake-affected areas of Sichuan Province. Email: [email protected] Yuk Wah Chan is Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong. She has published on China-Vietnam relations, overseas Chinese and outbound Chinese tourism. Her current research interests cover migration and diaspora, Chinese tourism, and the Vietnamese minority in Hong Kong. Email: [email protected]

Contributors xiii David W. Haines has been a professor of anthropology at George Mason University since 1997. Prior to that, he worked for the federal government’s refugee resettlement program and as a senior manager in state government. He is past president of the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA), convener of the Wind over Water comparative project on East Asian migration, and a founding member of George Mason’s Diversity Research Group. His publications include several edited volumes on refugees and immigrants and, most recently, a social historical monograph on Vietnamese kinship (The Limits of Kinship, 2006), and a history of refugees in the United States (Safe Haven? 2010). Email: [email protected] Peter Hansen is lecturer in Asian Church History at the Catholic Theological College, Melbourne, Australia. By training both as an historian and a lawyer, he worked from 1990 until 1993 in the Asylum Seeker Detention Centres of Hong Kong as a volunteer legal advisor for Australian Lawyers for Refugees (ALR). ALR provided legal advice to Asylum Seekers to prepare them for their screening interviews with officers of the Hong Kong Immigration Department. During his work in the Detention Centres, he interviewed more than 1,000 asylum seekers, and was able to form friendships through which more of the inner workings of the asylum-seeker communities were disclosed to him. Email: PHansen@ ourladys.org.au Boitran Huynh-Beattie is curator and art historian at Asiarta Foundation, currently researching on ‘Witness Collection’, a private collection of Vietnamese art works featuring influential artists from 1921 to the present. She has worked with the Australian National University, Melbourne University and the University of Wollongong on different projects related to Vietnam’s Diaspora. She also documents Vietnamese literature in Australia for the Australian Literature Resource, a collaboration between twelve Australian universities and the National Library of Australia for 2009–2011. Huynh-Beattie worked with Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre on several exhibitions, and was the Project Curator of Nam Bang! in 2007–2009. Email: [email protected] Sophia Suk-mun Law is Assistant Professor at the Department of Visual Studies of Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She gained many years of nursing experience before starting her academic career. Her research interests include the therapeutic nature of art as well as the early visual and cultural history of Hong Kong. In a two-year research project on the expressive and healing power of art, she examined 800 images drawn by Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong detention camps in the late 1980s. In collaboration with Garden Streams, she organized an exhibition called C.A.R.E. (Vietnamese Community Art Re-Encountered) at the Lingnan Art Gallery in April 2008 where more than 200 artworks by the Vietnamese boat people were displayed. Her second research interest involves a series of interviews with elderly people concerning Hong Kong art and culture before the 1970s. Email: [email protected]

xiv Contributors Jonathan H. X. Lee is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Lee teaches courses on Southeast Asian American studies and Asian American history. His research interests are in contemporary Chinese religions in “cultural China”, postcolonial studies, Asian American religious studies, Asian American folklore, and Chinese Southeast Asian American studies. Lee specializes in Chinese-Cambodian and ChineseVietnamese American studies. Email: [email protected] Li Tana is Senior Fellow at Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. She has been interested in the maritime history of Vietnam, particularly the southern Vietnam. Her major publications include The Nguyen Cochinchina (SEAP, Cornell 1998), The Water Frontier (co-edited with Nola Cooke, Rowman and Littlefield/NUS Press, 2004), Peasants on the Move (ISEAS, Singapore 1996) and Inscriptions collected from the Chinese Congregation Halls in Ho Chi Minh City (in Vietnamese and Chinese, co-edited with Nguyen Cam Thuy, Social Sciences Institute, 1999). Email: [email protected] Terence C. T. Shum is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong and Thailand. He is also a volunteer worker at Christian Action Chungking Mansions Service Center in Hong Kong and Bangkok Refugee Center. He is an associate member of Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network. Email: [email protected] Daniel C. Tsang is a bibliographer in Asian American studies, economics and political science at the libraries of the University of California, Irvine. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he did his graduate work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He co-founded the Alliance Working for Asian Rights and Empowerment in Orange County, California, a group that fights police abuse, especially against Southeast Asian Americans. A freelance writer, his essays and articles have appeared in the ethnic and alternative press as well as in mainstream publications such as the Far Eastern Economic Review, Los Angeles Times, and the San Jose Mercury News. As a contributing writer, he covered ‘Little Saigon, California’ for the OC Weekly from 1996–2003. He is host of a weekly public affairs program, Subversity, on KUCI in Irvine. He was a Fulbright research scholar in 2004, based at the Institute of Sociology in Hanoi. Email: [email protected]

Part I

Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

1

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era An Asian perspective from Hong Kong Yuk Wah Chan

Over three decades have passed since the first Vietnamese refugees left their homelands. These refugees fled from war and strife in search of a better life elsewhere. The first wave left immediately after Saigon fell to the communists. The second wave occurred after the two Asian communist regimes, Vietnam and China fell out with each other, and the subsequent anti-Chinese atmosphere in Vietnam in the late 1970s. An estimated 70 per cent of these refugees were Chinese-Vietnamese. Unlike the first two exoduses which have been well documented, the third wave of mainly ethnic Vietnamese refugees who fled to Hong Kong and other parts of Asia between 1988 to 1991, has been somewhat neglected. We were asked why it was worth re-examining the issue of Vietnamese refugees after all these years when the issue seems to have ended and the second generation of the Vietnamese refugees, especially those who had settled in the West, had already grown up, and no longer bear the ‘refugee’ status. Many reasons make us believe that there is a need to revisit the period, one which had alarmed most countries in the West as well as in Asia. It is the ‘missing’ Asian part of the refugee story. Although most refugees had been resettled in the West, many had remained ‘stuck’ or settled in their place of first asylum; their stories never told. This volume is the result of a concern among academics who felt the need to revisit this era to allow the inclusion of new data and a more-balanced understanding of events in Vietnam and the many Vietnamese who fled their country. Many reports on the flight of the Indochinese were produced by scholars and journalists during and immediately after the massive exodus from 1975–80 (Cartmail 1983; Benoit 1981; Wain 1981; Grant 1979). These contain stories of policies implemented by communist Vietnam, refugees’ recounting of their political and economic suffering under the communist regime, and their often horrifying journey in rickety boats. In the 1980s and early 1990s, accounts of boat people being locked up in camps began to predominate (Tsamenyi 1983; Oxfam HK 1989; Chan 1990, 1995; Yuen 1990; Sutter 1990; Le 1990; Chantavanich and Rabe 1990; Hitchcox 1990; Yeung et al. 1991; Freeman 1995; Chang et al. 2000; Freeman and Huu 2003). In the same period, a number of studies were devoted to examining the adaptation of the early refugees who had been resettled in the West (Haines 1989; Caplan, Whitmore and Choy 1989; Viviani 1996; Coughlan and McNamara 1997; Zhou 1998; Do 1999; Valtonen 1999; Thomas 1999; Bemak,

4

Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

Chung, and Pedersen 2003). More recently, there has been new literature related to the identity changes of ‘overseas Vietnamese’, and to a newly grown-up generation that includes many who return to Vietnam to find their cultural roots and pursue new economic opportunities (Chan and Tran 2011; Chan 2006; Thomas 2004; Long 2004; Carruthers 2002). This, then, is how the story goes: refugees from Asia pass through Asian asylum centres briefly and then settle in the West. The sequence seems to fit in the same old story of refugees coming from the poor Third World and ending up happily in the First World. Yet, as a matter of history, the Vietnamese refugee story does not end there. A significant part—the Asian part—is still missing. In 2009, a workshop was held in Hong Kong to draw attention to this missing part, and to review new data and new ideas of refugee origins and settlement. The initiative for the project sprang from the fact that most current studies are about overseas Vietnamese with ‘refugee’ backgrounds who resettled in the West. We seldom hear about the Vietnamese refugees who failed to go to the West and had been repatriated or were ‘stuck’ in places of first asylum. We start with an attempt in examining refugee settlement stories in Hong Kong, and have resulted in bringing together an international research effort to relate the Hong Kong story to wider concerns of ethnic politics, refugee history and resettlement. We believe that there is still much untapped space in the Vietnamese refugee story. Thirty years provides sufficient distance to reflect on earlier as well as later events in this story. By investigating the Vietnamese diaspora in Asia, with a particular focus on Hong Kong, we aim to explain some of the confusion remaining about Vietnamese refugees, and shed new light on refugee settlement and different patterns of host-guest interactions that will have implications for refugee studies elsewhere. This volume will give both the general and academic reader: (i) a clearer historical view of the group dynamics among refugees—the ethnic ‘Chinese Vietnamese refugees’ from both the North and South as well as the ethnic ‘Vietnamese refugees’; (ii) a better understanding of the different aspects of migration, including a recounting of the reasons for and meanings of migration, which are sometimes durable, but which also shift over time; (iii) a clearer picture of the intertwined ethnic and refugee politics within the Vietnamese boat people period, less known aspects of refugee camp life, and the subsequent resettlement; (iv) a new recognition of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora in Asia, hinting at a different model of settlement and home-settlement connections; and (v) an overall evaluation of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora and its linkage to the continuing Vietnamese migration trajectories. As suggested by the title, the work distinguishes between Chinese Vietnamese and Vietnamese within the overall Vietnamese refugee diaspora. Hong Kong offers a particularly good case to show how asylum-seeking and ethnicity are intertwined

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era 5 in complex and shifting ways. While the refugees from Vietnam in the 1970s had the sympathy of Hong Kong society (with a large number of Chinese-Vietnamese), the Vietnamese boat people in the 1980s (many are Vietnamese from the north) were depicted as a violent and unscrupulous group. Differences between the ChineseVietnamese and the Vietnamese had formed part of the refugee politics within the refugee camps and in the mainstream media. Chinese Vietnamese refugees also found it easier to integrate into the Hong Kong Chinese communities. This work highlights various issues of refugee migration and settlement tactics, and the continuation of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora with chain migration. We understand the concept of diaspora with both subjective and contextual dimensions. Not only is the Vietnamese diaspora in Hong Kong continuously constructing its relationships with home in Vietnam as well as other co-diaspora members in other parts of the world (see Vertovec 2005: 3), it is also subject to different institutional and social discrimination distancing it from total integration.

An Asian context of a refugee era Vietnam and the other two Indochinese countries, Laos and Cambodia, produced millions of refugees in the last few decades of the last century. From 1975 to 1997, there were in total 1.5 million Indochinese refugees and asylum seekers who took temporary asylum in the camps of UNHCR in various Asian places; around 840,000 of these were Vietnamese (Robinson 1998: Appendix 1). In that period, Malaysia was the Asian country receiving most Vietnamese asylum seekers, while Hong Kong received the second largest amount, around 200,000 (Robinson 1998: Appendix 1). Besides Hong Kong and Malaysia, other Asian countries taking Vietnamese and other Indochinese refugees include Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, Macau and Korea. Hundreds of thousands had escaped on land to China and Burma, but these escapees did not fall into the category of arrivals recorded by the UN. Most previous literature on Vietnamese refugee settlers have focused on those who settled in the West, without much acknowledgement that there are actually many who have settled in the places of first asylum in Asia. Their plights remain underreported. A popular view of Vietnamese refugees tends to think that after risky boat trips and a few years of asylum detention, the refugees are now either ‘living happily’ in the West, or had been ‘unluckily’ repatriated to Vietnam. Hong Kong people also entertain the thought that the Vietnamese refugee issue had come to an end in 2000 when the last camp closed. Few bother to ask what has happened to the Vietnamese who were repatriated and those who were left behind in Hong Kong. Even less people are aware of the fact that many Vietnamese left the camps before they were repatriated. It was believed that the 67,000 boat people who failed to be screened as ‘refugees’ were repatriated to Vietnam (Panares and Ku 2000: 3). The UNHCR also recorded that the Vietnamese boat people were either resettled to the West or repatriated: around two-thirds of Hong Kong’s Vietnamese refugees were resettled in a third country, and the others (around 66,700) were repatriated to Vietnam with backlog

6

Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

cases of slightly over two thousand (Robinson 1998: Appendix 1). The fact was that quite a large number of Vietnamese boat people, though classified as nonrefugee, were neither resettled, nor repatriated. Many remained in Hong Kong, the place of temporary asylum, by marrying local people. From the official record, there are only 2,994 Vietnamese in Hong Kong (HKCSD 2009). However, as suggested by our informants, this figure is vastly underestimated. Many believe that the number of migrants from Vietnam (including Vietnamese and Chinese Vietnamese) should be no less than thirty thousand; among them, the majority are ex-refugee or ‘boat people’. However, Chinese Vietnamese would not usually claim the identity of ‘Vietnamese’ after settling here. The number of boat people that arrived over the years of the refugee era are recorded in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Vietnamese arrivals in Hong Kong Year

Arrivals

Total Vietnamese boat people population at the end of the year

Left for New-born resettlement Vietnamese in Hong Kong

1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987

3,900 Unclear 1,001 12,406 68,784 11,173 18,301 3,485 3,651 2,230 1,112 2,087 9,893 (3,393 Vietnamese boat people from Vietnam and 6,500 ex-China Vietnamese illegal immigrants, ECVII) 19,383 (7992 refugee, 10,449 boat people and 942 ECVII) 34,347 (34,116 Vietnamese boat people and 231 ECVII) 6,599 20,207 12

/ / / 3,561 55,705 24,065 16,027 9,841 12,770 11,896 9,443 8,093 9,530

/ / / / / 37,468 18,000 9,000 4,200 3,694 3,953 3,816 2,212

/ / / / / / / / 727 553 412 327 319

26,601

2,772

621

56,045

4,754

1,665

/ / 45,387

/ / 3,439

/ / 421

1988

1989

1990 1991 1992

Sources: Hong Kong Report published by the Hong Kong Government from 1976–93.

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era 7 Readers may note that since 1987, the Hong Kong government began to use EXCVII to denote those Vietnamese who had taken the route to China and had stayed in China for a certain period before they went off shore again to arrive in Hong Kong. The government treated EXCVII as illegal immigrants from China and would not allow them to resettle or stay. Our Vietnamese informants from northern Vietnam revealed to us that the fleeing routes of many inevitably led them to China and their stay in China varied from days, to weeks or months before they could leave for Hong Kong. To avoid being classified as EXCVII, many used cover stories. In the following, we recap the three peak times of the Vietnamese arrivals, and explain the constitution of the Vietnamese population in Hong Kong.

1975 Hong Kong received the first group of recorded Vietnamese refugees in May 1975, with the arrival of a Danish vessel which carried over 3,700 Vietnamese men, women and children (Chan 2000: 29–32). These refugees marked the end of the Vietnam War. After this first wave, a few hundred, continued to arrive on Hong Kong’s shores in the following two years. Despite the fact that 1975 was the first year Vietnamese refugees were seen, many Vietnamese, especially Chinese Vietnamese, had been sneaking into Hong Kong since the 1960s. Many fled because they feared military draft, while others saw a better future in Hong Kong than in war-torn Vietnam. Over five thousand of them re-surfaced after the arrival of the post-Vietnam War refugees, they were granted Hong Kong identity cards (Hong Kong Government 1977: 135). Most of this group have assimilated into Hong Kong society, though many still have connections to Vietnam.

1978–79 The second peak of Vietnamese arrivals was due to the mounting antagonism between China and Vietnam in 1978, and the outbreak of war on the China– Vietnam border in 1979. The year 1978 brought over 12,000 refugees, mostly Chinese-Vietnamese, while the following year saw several times more. Arrivals in 1980 and 1981 remained high, causing the Hong Kong government to implement a closed-camp policy in 1982, under which all Vietnamese arrivals were no longer allowed to roam freely in Hong Kong. They were kept in these camps to wait for resettlement in a third country. When the US government began to slow down its Orderly Departure Programme in 1986, the ‘refugee bulk’ in Hong Kong increased, and the year 1987 saw a new rise in the number of refugees again. Although most in the first two waves of refugees had been resettled in a third country in the West, quite a number of them were allowed to settle in Hong Kong. Before the 1988 screening policy, Hong Kong had accepted around 15,000 refugees (Wah Kiu Jat Po 16 August 1988: [1]:1). It was believed that many of these refugees were Chinese Vietnamese who had relatives and families in the territory, and found a better future by settling in Hong Kong.

8

Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

1988–89 These two years were a time when a new wave of refugees hit Hong Kong’s shores. Starting from early 1988, around 2000 Vietnamese boat people arrived each month (Wah Kiu Jat Po 3 May 1988: [2]:1). Fear surged through society. The massive influx forced the reopening of some closed camps to accommodate new arrivals. On 16 August 1988, the Hong Kong government announced a screening policy to distinguish refugees from non-refugees (or economically motivated boat people). For non-refugees, there would be no chance for resettlement and they would be repatriated. Many Hongkongers would still remember on the morning of 16 August 1988, a stern male voice on the radio announcing the government’s policy: 香港對越南船民已經實施甄別政策，跟住呢段越南話廣播，就係向佢地講 述呢個政策呢內容 [Hong Kong has already implemented a screening policy on Vietnamese boat people. The following announcement in the Vietnamese language is to explain to the Vietnamese the content of this policy]: Bắt đầu từ nay, một chính sách mới về thuyền nhân Việt Nam đã được chấp hành tại Hồng Kông. Từ nay về sau, những thuyền nhân Việt Nam kiếm cách nhập cảnh Hồng Kông với thân phận những người di tản vì vấn đề kinh tế sẽ bị coi là những người nhập cảnh phi pháp. Là những người nhập cảnh phi pháp, họ sẽ không có chút khả năng nào để được đi định cư tại nước thứ ba, và họ sẽ bị giam cầm để chờ ngày giải về Việt Nam. [A new policy regarding Vietnamese boat people has been implemented in Hong Kong. From now on, those boat people from Vietnam who seek to enter Hong Kong due to economic reasons will be considered illegal immigrants. As illegal immigrants, they will not have the chance to settle in a third country, and they will be detained until repatriated to Vietnam …] The new screening policy failed to stop the refugee influx immediately. Instead, it led to an even larger influx, described by some as the ‘last-chance’ effect. During the several weeks after the implementation of the policy, 8000 more arrived, and were then detained at the Chi Ma Wan and Hei Ling Chau refugee camps (SCMP cited in Davis 1991: 92). In 1988 and 1989, Hong Kong received over 53,000 Vietnamese boat people, and the year 1991 also saw over 20,000 arrivals (see Table 1.1). Only after the Hong Kong and Vietnamese authorities agreed to speed up the screening and repatriation process were the arrivals reduced (Hong Kong Report 1993). Over 80 per cent of the boat people failed to be classified as refugees. The success rate was 17.5 per cent in 1990 and 15.2 per cent in 1991 (Yeung et al. 1991: 13). At the beginning, the Hong Kong government, with the assistance of social workers from non-government organizations (NGOs) and religious groups, had attempted to persuade the Vietnamese boat people to participate in the repatriation scheme voluntarily. It had also negotiated strenuously with the Vietnamese authority to accept the repatriated. When it was obvious that the Vietnamese boat people were unlikely to join it of their own accord, the government initiated an involuntary repatriation scheme. Under pressure from the Beijing government to

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era 9 ‘solve the Vietnamese boat people issue’ before 1997, the time for the handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty back to China, tension mounted in the camps as well as in Hong Kong society. More and more violent events erupted in the camps, which served to build up an image in the public’s mind of the boat people as ‘violent’. Many boat people also attempted to break camp regulations to take revenge on the screening policy. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, the Hong Kong public developed negative perceptions of the Vietnamese boat people as a whole. Most of this period’s Vietnamese boat people came from the northern part of Vietnam, a large number of these from Haiphong and Quang Ninh, a city and province at the north eastern coast of Vietnam. Since they were mostly screened as nonrefugees, many began to make use of ethnic resources and networks in Hong Kong and other countries to find ways to avoid repatriation. The most common way was to get married locally or overseas. In our estimation over a thousand, mostly single women, had got married locally. It was also not uncommon for the repatriated boat people to return to Hong Kong, using marriage, a few years after their repatriation, constituting a group of ‘refugee-turned-marriage migrants’ (see Chapter 12).

The Vietnamese refugee saga in Hong Kong history The Vietnamese refugee saga played an important part in the history of Hong Kong’s transition. The Vietnamese first arrived during a time when Hong Kong began to take off as a rapidly developing Asian city. However, the Hong Kong and the British governments were alarmed by the influx due to a lack of space and facilities to accommodate the refugees. Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Britain at the time, asked the United Nations (UN) in June 1979 to organize an international meeting to solve the Southeast Asian refugee issue (Robinson 1998: 51). Besides worrying about the problem of space and the sheer number of refugee arrivals, Hong Kong was also troubled by the fact that in 1974, the legislature had made it unlawful for illegal immigrants from China to enter Hong Kong. All illegal immigrants from mainland China would be summarily returned to China. The Hong Kong public thus queried why Chinese-Vietnamese and Vietnamese could stay whereas Chinese would be deported. The continuous flow of Vietnamese into the territory in the 1980s coincided with a series of tense political negotiations and meetings between China and Britain on Hong Kong’s future as its lease on the New Territories was about to expire. News about the influx of the Vietnamese boat people and the outflow of Hong Kong people ran parallel in the columns of Hong Kong newspapers. While around 50,000 had emigrated during the period 1983–88, it was feared that one tenth of the population would emigrate due to the fear of the 1997 handover of sovereignty to China. Most of these would be professionals as they were the ones with the means to do so; the potential ‘brain drain’ was another focus of social debate (Wah Kiu Jat Po 3 May 1988: [2]:1). Hong Kong is largely a migrant society. Before the 1980s, the majority of the population was made up of migrants coming from the Chinese hinterland. In 1930, two-thirds of the total population (around 650,000 people) of Hong Kong had only

10 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people lived there for less than ten years (Faure 2005: 28). By 1950, Hong Kong had three million people, and a local identity began to emerge (Chung 2005: 198). However, it was not until late 1970s that a local Hong Kong identity was more clearly recognized. Indeed, during the main period of Vietnamese refugee arrivals, a vast majority of the 5.5 million strong Hong Kong population were either born or had parents who were born in China. The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s witnessed a post-war baby boom; it was a time when Hong Kong entered a relatively stable period, developing its industrial, trade and finance economy as well as a local cultural identity. By the mid-1980s, this identity had been firmly established, an identity that was constructed vis-à-vis the Mainland of China. Ironically, although itself a young migrant society, Hong Kong had little sympathy for new immigrants (whether legal or illegal), such as those from mainland China and Vietnam. Hong Kong people were, in general, impatient with the massive influx of Vietnamese refugees. The Vietnamese refugee impact had certainly brought about some social tension. The closed-camp policies had made Hong Kong the focus of criticism by the international community. Closed camps were considered something not unlike a form of imprisonment. Such criticism put much pressure on the Hong Kong government and gave an excuse for the UNHCR to not pay for operating refugee services. The Hong Kong public also criticized this policy, not because it was harsh on the Vietnamese refugees, but because it was too lenient. People asked why Vietnamese could stay while refugees from China had to be deported; this created tension in Hong Kong society (Sutter 1990: 157). The screening policy met a lot of resistance from the boat people. Violence began to mount in the camps. Starting from the late 1980s, the image of ‘violent boat people’ began to cloud the public’s perception of the Vietnamese through Chinese tabloid magazines and the Chinese news media in general. Social debates about the treatment of refugees had split society during the late 1980s and 1990s. Views were especially divided between expatriates and Hong Kong Chinese (Davis 1991). A mainstream local Chinese perspective was to see Vietnamese as trouble-makers and inauthentic refugees, while the Western media sympathized with the boat people. Many local Chinese also worried about the unending demand on taxpayers due to the expense needed to host the Vietnamese. Those who criticized the treatment of the Vietnamese in the local Englishlanguage press were mostly expatriates. Some likened the boat people’s situation to the uncertain future of Hong Kong, saying that the Hong Kong people, worrying about their own future as a part of a communist regime, should be more lenient towards the Vietnamese who were also running away from an oppressive communist regime (Davis 1991). The 1989 democratic movement in China unfortunately proved such worries could be substantial and had invited even more criticism on Hong Kong’s inhuman treatment of the boat people.

Asian refugee migration and survival tactics Refugee migration is one form of migration, ‘the most and the most sensitive form of world migration’ (Cohen 1995: 431), especially so in the last quarter of

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era 11 the twentieth century. As the UN has estimated, there were around 20 million refugee migrants at the end of the last century. By 2007 (UNHCR 2007), there were around 28 million refugees and other categories of asylum seekers. However, not all of them fit into the legal category of ‘refugee’. Many were forced to leave their country because of military fighting, poverty, disease and starvation, and became asylum seekers or displaced persons. This volume is not keen to follow the strict legal sense of the term ‘refugee’ or refugee migration in the strict legal definition of the term. Though many of the informants of the later chapters were screened out by the Hong Kong government as ‘non-refugees’, we still put them into the same group of refugees fleeing from Vietnam and as part of the refugee settlement in Hong Kong. In the post-World War II decades, many parts of Africa, Caribbean countries like Cuba and Haiti, as well as the communist bloc of USSR and Eastern Europe, had produced large numbers of displaced persons. Hong Kong was one of these global ‘post-communist’ migrant communities. Many of the richest families in Hong Kong today are themselves refugees, who escaped poverty and wars in mainland China before the 1950s, or fled from communist China after the 1950s. In the following decades, Indochinese refugees constituted the most significant part of the world’s refugee migration. Vietnam, as a single country, had induced the largest refugee exodus and refugee-related departures in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s from Asia. Their peculiar mode of fleeing in makeshift boats also produced an indelible image transmitted worldwide during these decades. Within migration studies, refugee migration is a relatively less attended area. What has made the Vietnamese refugee migration different from many others was the lengthy period of detention in first-asylum places, and the large number of Western countries that had participated in the resettlement schemes for them, thus producing the most geographically widespread refugee diaspora in the second half of the last century. The impressive list consisted of 29 countries, including America, Canada, Australia, and most countries in Europe; all had received Vietnamese refugees in 1979 (Mignot 1995: 455). This also set the precedent of a worldwide concern for a single group of refugees. Many Asian places too, as stressed by this volume, were also involved in settling the Vietnamese. Today, refugees from African and South Asian countries involved in regional and local military and power struggles seldom arouse such worldwide concern as the Vietnamese had once done; their choice of resettlement is also much more limited. As said above, 80 per cent of Vietnamese boat people in the third wave exodus in the late 1980s failed to obtain refugee status and had to be repatriated. Theoretically, they had to accept their fate, and repatriation. However, many strived for a last chance to stay or settle. Their widespread connections to the worldwide Vietnamese diaspora had allowed many to command overseas resources for help. For those Vietnamese who had family connections abroad, many were able to migrate through such linkages; especially common among the boat people women was to find someone to marry. For those who did not have such networks, they turned to local marriages. They were also

12

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able to solicit financial help from relatives abroad to pay the families of the Hong Kong husbands. Single Vietnamese women chose to marry lower class and older Hong Kong men whom they knew very little about. Some families had to produce fake divorce documents in order to let the wife marry locally. Others married out very young daughters to save a chance for the family to re-migrate. All these were done in the hope of fulfilling the migration dream. One thing typical about Vietnamese refugees is their high level of adaptability and mutual support in surviving. In face of the screening policy and frail hope of resettlement, people resorted to the second best choice—staying in Hong Kong, which was more desirable than repatriation. They reacted by tactfully turning around rules and subverting regulatory constraints, and are particularly resilient against pressures presented to them in various adverse situations. They are also an extremely coherent and solidified group willing to help each other, discussing ways for each other to tackle similar difficulties, and are thus able to draw on ethnic network resources to maximize their adaptability and resistance. One refugee-turned-Hong Kong wife reflected on her days in the camp during the 1990s: You know what, in those days, the camp was like a country, you can find any sort of person, doctors, lawyers … I don’t know how they did it. But when families needed a fake divorce document, they could produce one. And because many families had overseas connections, they could find someone to get married with in order to go abroad. Sometimes, foreign lawyers also helped us and taught us to get around rules in order to secure a chance to stay in Hong Kong or move to a third country. Refugee tactics is one area under researched. Tactics used by the Vietnamese have a collective character. People imitate each other and acquire information from acquaintances to cope with regulatory obstacles. They also help each other find ways around rules and laws to attain personal wants. During their days in the refugee camps, many had made use of or witnessed how others made use of such tactics. Two most commonplace tactics included fake documents and arranged marriages (both real and fake). James Scott (1985) has argued that the weak do have ‘weapons’. For the Vietnamese who were subject to all sorts of institutional scrutiny and camp regulations, they had found various ways of resisting. People made use of both true and made-up stories to achieve their hopes of settlement. Some informants told us that those who underwent early screening interrogation were at a disadvantage, because they did not know the criteria for attaining the refugee status. But after a while, when the lawyers helping the refugees figured out what the criteria were, people started to invent stories which would most likely fit the refugee status requirements. A number of Vietnamese male inmates who saw no hope of acquiring refugee status used other methods to escape. Pretending to get sick or making oneself sick was one way. They ran away when they stayed in the

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era 13 hospital and started to hide and work on construction sites. For adult females, the most common tactic was marrying Hong Kong men. One informant estimated: I was in Whitehead at the time, there were ten tents, each tent had ten rooms. One of those rooms was a room for single women without families, around 100 of them. For those living with their families, there were also young single women. I would estimate for each camp there were over 1000 single women available for getting married. Some young women did not want to get married locally. But seeing more and more leaving the camps and 1997 approaching, they began to panic. One informant who left the camp ‘late’ described the situation like this: I was so dumb at the time that I refused a marriage offer from a Vietnamese man who came from America to help translation in the camp. I thought that as I was a good girl I would be allowed to stay in Hong Kong. I was alone with no relatives in the camp. But when I saw more and more of my female friends leave the camp to get marry, I felt unsafe. In the last two years approaching 1997, the camp became emptier and emptier. Every month there were more and more women leaving the camp. Everyone I knew had gone. Later, some friend introduced a man to me, and I pretended to understand what he was talking about. Though I did not understand one word he was saying, I answered him with all the prescribed lines that I had recited. …

Refugee transnationalism and uncertain settlement Having made attempts to settle in Hong Kong, the Vietnamese migrants remained emotionally attached to their families back in Vietnam. Though adapting well to local life, their social life predominantly revolves around other Vietnamese relatives and friends within the Vietnamese community in Hong Kong, as well as to familial circles in Vietnam and abroad. Their abundant connections with Vietnam and co-diaspora members elsewhere are made through countless international telephone calls, money remittances, transactions of ethnic food and goods, tourism and family visits. Many Vietnamese women send their children back to Vietnam in summer to expose them to homeland culture. They are also a nexus for female acquaintances, nieces and sisters to find husbands in Hong Kong. Globalization and migration have greatly accelerated the formation of new transnational social fields/spaces (Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Pries 2001; Khagram and Levitt 2008; Kearney 1995; Basch, et al. 1993). Migrant transnationalism has aroused increasing scholarly concern in the last two decades. As asserted by Vertovec (2009: 13), ‘Migrant transnationalism … is a subset of a broader range of transnational social formation’. While earlier migration studies have dichotomized the destination and place of origin, studies of transnationalism tend to stress that migrants are still involved in continued social, economic, cultural and even political connections with homelands. They neither totally integrate into the destination society nor are they completely segregated from the homeland. Instead, many

14 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people are found living in ‘transnational social spaces’, linking themselves to, and at the same time feeling and keeping a distance from both. The Vietnamese diaspora in Hong Kong is particularly active in keeping connections to homelands in Vietnam as well as to other overseas Vietnamese communities worldwide. Transnationalism as a way of life has given rise to the discussions of unbounded identity and flexible loyalties. Migrants and transmigrants are people making a large number of border-crossing contacts, and inter-mixing the use of at least two languages, currencies and different cultural habits that transcend the boundaries of the state. This transcendence is seen by some as a defiance of the state, challenging the neat categories of identity, loyalty, and culture bounded by the state (Bhabha 1990; Portes 1996). Social practices are no longer contained within ‘uni-local geographical containers’, but are embedded in overlapping geographical and ‘pluri-locally spanned transnational social spaces’ across the boundaries of sovereign states (Pries 2001: 3). Studies of diasporic identity particularly stress the multiple as well as liminal positionalities of the migrants, fitting neither here nor there, breeding an uneasy category of transnational ‘in-betweenness’ of the migrant experiences (Bhabha 1990; Ang 2001). Such ‘in-betweenness’ can both be seen as an ‘unsettled sense of identity’ and multiple possible senses of belonging. Unlike the mental and intellectual work of the above narrators, however, the ‘in-betweenness’ we have found among the Vietnamese refugee migrants in Hong Kong is particularly enshrined by the fact of their being ‘physically’ stuck in a ‘transitory’ settlement centre (Asia—Hong Kong in the present case), which is not their original migration destination. When the Vietnamese set off from the coast of Vietnam or China, they had aimed at settling in the West, not Hong Kong. Though they succeeded in avoiding repatriation, they are still stuck physically ‘in-between’ a place of transitory/temporary settlement. ‘Out of the camp’ doesn’t mean they are free. They are still locked ‘in-between’ the middle-ground, perpetuating the transitional period of asylumseeking, as well as that of migration. The migrants have not yet achieved the goal of reaching the far-away West. Do they still have a desire for further migration? Some say yes, some say no. Abundant overseas connections and resources also make them more susceptible to a remigration decision. Without hedging on any negative connotation of the term ‘refugee’, the theme of ‘refugeeing’ is used in this volume to relate the unsettled stories of the refugee migrants as well as those who had been repatriated. Moreover, many Vietnamese migrants are still in the process of struggling for citizenship and nationality (see chapter 5). Unlike the situations narrated by intellectual migrants (see Ang 2001 and Ong 1999), the refugee migrants are groups conducting different strategies of transnational life and survival tactics to cope with their ‘in-betweenness’. The sense of ‘in-betweenness’ should, however, not be interpreted as unadaptability. As stressed above, Vietnamese migrants are highly adaptive and able to draw plenty of support from among the ethnic communities, both locally and abroad. Compared to other minority groups, such as the South Asians or Africans, the Vietnamese find it easier to ‘melt’ into the local society because of similar skin colour and physical features as the Hong Kong Chinese. Many of the

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era 15 informants stressed that they could find jobs within a short period of settling, and adapt well into Hong Kong ways of life; but whether they feel belonging in Hong Kong society is another issue (see Chapters 5 and 6). Moreover, due to the proximity of Hong Kong and Vietnam, the Vietnamese migrants are able to conduct frequent visits back to Vietnam, and in particular, send their local-born offspring to Vietnam for homeland cultural exposure. A major intention of this book is to explore new/hidden dimensions (especially the Asian ones) of the Vietnamese refugee story. As hinted by David Haines (chapter 2), the Hong Kong model (of refugee settlement) may offer both anomalous as well as central themes of the Asian refugee diasporas; particularly on the complexity of their ethnic layers and the flashing identities of Asian families who constantly move across borders, generating what Haines in his chapter calls ‘a borderlands’ political field’.

Organization of the book This book is organized into three parts. The first part provides a recounting of the historical contexts and ethnic dynamics of the Vietnamese refugee exodus. David Haines’s chapter sketches the general background of the Southeast Asian refugee exodus that began in 1975, and considers implications of that exodus for the major resettlement countries. The overall East-Asian experience with migration is not only crucial to an understanding of the region but is also a vital corrective to the North American and European research that tends to dominate discussions of global migration. Haines attempts to explore the lessons that emerge from considering the specific case of the Vietnamese in Hong Kong, and how the Hong Kong case can contribute to a broader understanding of the Vietnamese diaspora and other refugee movements. Ramses Amer’s chapter examines the ethnic Chinese dimension of the Vietnamese diaspora. While the ‘boat people’ crisis of 1978–79 has incurred global concern for the Vietnamese, very few have examined the fact that some 60–70 per cent of the arrivals were ethnic Chinese. This chapter takes away much misunderstanding of the ‘Vietnamese’ migrant communities worldwide, and calls for a distinction between the Chinese Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora. Tana Li’s chapter traces all the way back to the history of the integration of ethnic Chinese in the south of Vietnam from the 1940s to the 1970s. To Li, the Chinese’s business power had been declining and the common knowledge of the ethnic Chinese as a detached group in Vietnam was dubious. Though having made an effort to integrate into the Vietnamese nation, the Chinese were, however, under purge in the late 1970s and made up the bulk of the ‘Vietnamese’ refugee migration. The chapter pushes the historical dimension of the Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora way back before the beginning of the Vietnamese-American war. The second part of the book reports on the boat people’s settled life in Hong Kong and retells their stories in the refugee camps. In Chapter 5, Chan and Shum elaborate on a survey of the ethnic Vietnamese community, which shows that most are Vietnamese boat people women who married local men.

16 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people The refugee-turned-Hong Kong wives constitute a homogenous Vietnamese community closely knitted together due to their similar refugee background, their marriage to working-class Hong Kong men, and their Hong Kong-Vietnamese offspring. Many young Chinese Vietnamese and Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong were either born or grew up in the refugee camps and had spent most of their childhood in the camps. How do they relate those years to their settled life? Ocean Chan, an art teacher of the refugee youths in the 1990s, sketches the life of the Vietnamese children in the camps. Growing up with a childhood full of iron bars, fighting, drugs and an imperishable desire for freedom, many of these young people have now settled into Hong Kong. Some have been more successful in integrating into local life while others ended up in jail. Chan unveils the bitter experiences in the process of their adaptation. Peter Hansen reviews the impacts of the screening policy on the boat people and reflects on the plights of the boat people from his own personal experiences as a voluntary lawyer in the 1990s. The chapter by Daniel Tsang derives data and analysis from selected archives of refugee artwork and poems at the University of California, Irvine relating to detention experiences in the period from the 1980s to the 1990s. The archives document the Vietnamese’s struggles for survival and their resistance to camp conditions and forced repatriation. Sophia Law examines the ‘public’ images of the Vietnamese boat people, especially those published in local magazines and newspapers during the 1990s. With an attempt to deconstruct the stereotypes painted by Hong Kong local media, Law unravels the psychological uneasiness of a young migrant society in face of an unstable refugee population and an uncertain political future pending the returning of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China. The last part of the book goes beyond Hong Kong to explore what has happened to those who were once in the city, but have been resettled or repatriated. Jonathan Lee, from a refugee family himself, was once an inmate of a refugee camp in Hong Kong. His family resettled in America. Having grown up in the United States, Lee is now a professor at San Francisco State University. By reflecting on his own family’s history and studying the Asian refugee communities in America, Lee explores the contested meanings of being a Chinese-Vietnamese American. In the following chapter, Ashley Carruthers examines dark tourism in relation to Vietnamese refugees settled in Australia paying visit to Pulau Galang, a previous refugee camp site in Indonesia which has been turned into a dark tourist site. Once a site of death and suffering, Pulau Galang is now open to tourism as well as multiple interpretations of the Vietnamese returnees and tourism curators. In the last chapter, Yuk Wah Chan traces the remigration stories of some repatriated refugees. These are mostly women who found their way back to Hong Kong through marriage. They continue the sojourn story by building an outbound marriage network with family members at the home base and Hong Kong. Their stories shed light on the shifting of Vietnamese migration from a refugee to a marriage model, and illuminate the theme of ‘refugeeing’ at a time without refugees.

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era 17

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Faure, David (2005) ‘The common people in Hong Kong history: their livelihood and aspirations until 1930’, in Lee Pui-tak (ed) Colonial Hong Kong and Modern China: Interaction and Reintegration, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 9–37. Freeman, James M. (1995) Changing Identities: Vietnamese Americans, 1975–1995, Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Freeman, James M. and Nguyen Ðình Huu (2003) Voices from the Camps: Vietnamese Children Seeking Asylum, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Grant, Bruce (1979) The Boat People: An Age Investigation with Bruce Grant, New York, NY: Penguin Books. Haines, David W. (ed.) (1989) Refugees as Immigrants: Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese in America, Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Hitchcox, Linda (1990) Vietnamese Refugees in Southeast Asian Camps, Basingstoke: Macmillan. HKCSD (2009) (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department), “Census 2006” http:// www.bycensus2006.gov.hk/FileManager/EN/Content_981/c114e.xls (assessed 9 June 2009). Hong Kong Government (1977) Hong Kong Report, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Government. —— (1993) Hong Kong Report, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Government. Kearney, Michael (1995) ‘The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 547– 65. Khagram, S. and Levitt, P. (eds) (2008) The transnational studies reader: intersections and innovations, New York, NY: Routledge. Le, X.K. (1990) ‘Forced repatriation of asylum seekers: the case of Hong Kong’, International Journal of Refugee Law, Special Issue, September: 137– 43. Long, Lynellyn (2004) ‘Viet kieu on a fast track back?’ in Long, L. and E. Oxfeld (eds) Coming Home? Refugees, Migrants and Those Who Stayed Behind, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 65–89. Mignot, Michel (1995) ‘Refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, 1975–93’, in Robin Cohen ed. The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, pp. 452–56. Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oxfam HK (1989) Vietnamese Boat People: The Five-point Solution, Hong Kong: Oxfam Hong Kong. Panares, Adrielle M. and Ku, Brenda (2000) ‘The Vietnamese saga”, in Joyce Chang, et al. (eds) They Sojourned in Our Land: The Vietnamese in Hong Kong 1975–2000, Hong Kong: Caritas-Hong Kong, pp. 3–12. Portes, Alejandro (ed.) (1996) The New Second Generation, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Pries, Ludger (2001) ‘The approach of transnational social spaces: regarding to new configurations of the social and the spatial,’ in L. Pries (ed.), New Transnational Social Spaces: International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early Twentyfirst Century, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 3–33. Robinson, W. Courtland (1998) Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus & the International Response, New York, NY: Zed Books. Scott, James (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Revisiting the Vietnamese refugee era 19 Smith, Michael Peter and Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo (eds) (1998) Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Sutter, Valerie O’Connor (1990) The Indochinese Refugee Dilemma, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Thomas, Mandy (1999) Dreams in the Shadows: Vietnamese Australian Lives in Transition, St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin. —— (2004) ‘Transitions in taste in Vietnam and the diaspora’, Australian Journal of Anthropology, 15(1): 54 – 67. Tsamenyi, B.M. (1983) ‘The boat people: are they refugees?’, Human Rights Quarterly: 349 –73. UNHCR (2007) UNHCR Global Appeal 2008–2009—UNHCR: An Overview, http:// www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/search?page=search&docid=474ac8c12&query=fig ure%20refugee%202009 (assessed 15 March 2010). Valtonen, Kathleen (1999) ‘The societal participation of Vietnamese refugees: case studies in Finland and Canada’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 25(3): 469 –91. Vertovec, Stevan (2009) Transnationalism, New York, NY: Routledge. —— (2005) ‘The political importance of diasporas’, COMPAS Working Paper 13, Oxford: University of Oxford. Viviani, N. (1996) The Indochinese in Australia 1975–1995: From Burnt Boats to Barbecues, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Wah Kiu Jat Po [Wah Kiu Daily], 16 August 1988 and 3 May 1988. Wain, Barry (1981) The Refused: The Agony of the Indochina Refugees, Hong Kong: Dow Jones Pub. Co. (Asia). Yuen, Mary (1990) ‘Vietnamese refugees and Singapore’s police, Southeast Asian Journal of social Science, 18(1): 81–93. Yeung, P.S. et al. (1991) Boat People in Hong Kong (in Chinese), Hong Kong: Hong Kong United Democrats. Zhou, Min (1998) Growing up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States, New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

2

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus Hong Kong in comparative perspective David W. Haines

This chapter begins by sketching the general background of the overall Southeast Asian refugee exodus that began in 1975 and considering some of the general patterns and implications of Vietnamese resettlement in the West, particularly for the United States as the major resettlement country. Based on that review, the chapter then explores the rather different lessons that emerge from considering the case of Vietnamese in Hong Kong, how that Hong Kong material—the “missing Asian part of the story” that Yuk Wah Chan notes in her introduction—can contribute to a broader understanding of the Vietnamese diaspora, including how such refugee movements both reflect politic pressures and themselves create new political configurations. More generally, the East and Southeast Asian experience with migration, whether for economic opportunity or political refuge, is a valuable addition and potential corrective to the mass of North American and European research that tends to dominate discussions of global migration. This volume’s reconsideration of the Vietnamese in Hong Kong is thus important on its own terms, but also a useful addition to a growing literature on the breadth and complexity of migration to, from, and within East and Southeast Asia.

The aftermath of war: exodus The roots of the Southeast Asian refugee crisis lie with French colonialism and the creation of a five-part French Indochina: Cambodia, Laos, and a Vietnam split into three distinct administrative segments of north, center, and south. During the Second World War, when the French in Vietnam were under the control of the Japanese, the United States developed some appreciation for the Vietnamese revolutionaries, who provided significant assistance to the United States in the war effort. After the war, however, the United States became a supporter of French attempts to regain control of the country and, with the withdrawal of the French under the provisions of the 1954 Geneva Accords, the United States became the major force for the creation and maintenance of a separate Republic of Vietnam in roughly the southern half of the country. American influence was initially far less in Laos and Cambodia, but increased as the war in Vietnam expanded. In Cambodia, in particular, American involvement escalated

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus 21 with the 1970 coup that replaced the neutralist Norodom Sihanouk with a new government more sympathetic to American interests. The initial Southeast Asian refugee crisis came directly with the fall of these American supported governments in 1975 and the need to evacuate people who were closely allied with the Americans or with the American-supported governments. The fall of Phnom Penh in Cambodia in mid-April was abrupt and only a few people managed to escape, whether on their own or through a small American evacuation (Operation Eagle Pull). In Laos, there was also a small scale evacuation in May of about 2500 Hmong, the highland group who had been recruited into the CIA’s not-so-secret “secret war” in Laos. Over time, however, more refugees escaped from Cambodia and Laos westward into Thailand. Some, especially ethnic Lao, merged into the general Thai population with whom they were closely related in linguistic and cultural terms. Most of the refugees, however, ended up in camps whose population exceeded 70,000 by the end of 1975, and would continue to grow in the following years.1 In Vietnam, however, there was more time and more planning, and thus a far larger initial evacuation. In January 1975, control of Phuoc Long Province (north of Saigon) was lost, and in March 1975 communist forces scored another victory by taking the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot in the central highlands. The South Vietnamese government initially made a decision to withdraw forces southward, then reversed itself, but by then North Vietnamese troops were streaming south with little resistance. Refugees fled southward in advance of the North Vietnamese forces. South Vietnamese forces did put up serious resistance at Xuan Loc as communist forces neared Saigon, but it was apparent that the South Vietnamese government would soon fall. Evacuation of those particularly closely tied to the United States began with flights out of some of the cities north of Saigon as they were being overtaken and from Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon itself. This formal US evacuation continued up until the moment that the last US helicopters left early on 30 April 1975. In addition to those formally evacuated by the United States, there were also many refugees who escaped by their own means. Some left through commercial flights, but more escaped because they had access to planes or helicopters, or boats. Most of these were picked up by US craft. Both those evacuated and those picked up from the sea were generally sent first to transit camps in the Pacific (particularly Guam and Subic Bay in the Philippines) and from there were processed through camps set up in the continental United States: Eglin Air Force Base, Florida; Camp Pendleton, California; Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania; and Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. By the end of the year, the processing of these 130,000 largely Vietnamese refugees was complete and the camps were closed. Some of the 1975 refugees found other routes of escape, including the 3,743 who arrived on a Danish vessel in Hong Kong in May. But they, too, were mostly eventually funneled into the United States or other Western resettlement countries. A second Southeast Asian refugee crisis developed in the late 1970s. There was, of course, the continuing problem of those already in temporary camps in Southeast Asia, whose numbers continued to increase. To this was added a new set

22 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people of factors pressuring larger numbers of people to flee. In Vietnam, tensions with China increased after its invasion of Cambodia, and ultimately resulted in a border war between Vietnam and China in early 1979. Vietnamese authorities were thus glad to find ways to weaken the large ethnic Chinese communities that existed in both the northern and southern parts of the country. In Cambodia, the ravages of the Khmer Rouge were pushing even those who had supported it toward exile, and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia then pushed even the Khmer Rouge into flight. In Laos, the intransigence of the new government pressured both ethnic Lao and highland groups to cross into Thailand—particularly the Hmong who had been recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency’s war operations. While this second crisis reflected new pressures to flee, it also reflected changed circumstances that permitted escapes that had not been previously possible. In Vietnam, the government itself became involved in refugee departures, most notoriously with the “big boat” trade. During the second half of 1978, rusty ocean freighters like the Southern Cross and Hai Hong (found going south and west from Vietnam) and the Huey Fong (going northeast from Vietnam to Hong Kong) were discovered packed with Vietnamese refugees. Reports from passengers (and from Vietnam) indicated the collusion of Vietnamese authorities. In Cambodia, the Vietnamese invasion of early 1979 pushed the Khmer Rouge west toward the Cambodian border and in the process opened up an escape route through the western part of the country into Thailand for those who wished to escape Cambodia altogether. To the small but steady stream of people fleeing their countries were thus added new large flows of “land” refugees across the Thai border and “boat” refugees leaving from various parts of Vietnam. These refugees were a very heterogeneous group, more mixed in ethnic, linguistic, educational and occupational backgrounds than those resettled in 1975, and far larger in numbers. Furthermore, this was no longer a formal evacuation, with automatic resettlement options. International efforts focused initially on ensuring such refuge. The temporary camp population in Southeast Asia thus grew rapidly. In Thailand, camps were largely for refugees fleeing by land, with Laotian refugees toward the north and Cambodian refugees toward the south. There were some Vietnamese who crossed by land into Thailand or by boats that hugged the coast, but most left across the open sea, landing in the greatest numbers in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. The number of land refugees increased sharply but much more dramatic—at least to the media in the West— were these Vietnamese “boat people” whose numbers climbed from approximately 62,000 at the end of 1978 (UNHCR 2000: 82), to some 200,000 by the middle of 1979 (Robinson 1998: 50). As the camps grew, the question of where the refugees would ultimately go became more pressing. The numbers were clearly beyond the capacity of the temporary hosts for any kind of settlement in place. Nor was there any feasible way to repatriate the refugees. This left resettlement in so-called “third countries” the only feasible way to begin to reduce the number of refugees in temporary camps. Above all, the international community needed to find a way to resettle enough refugees to at least keep the temporary asylum countries from refusing

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus 23 refuge. Toward that goal, the United Nations convened a conference in Geneva in late June 1979, with a total camp population then estimated at 350,000 people (UNHCR 2000: 84). The conference resulted in commitments from a wide variety of nations to resettle at least some of these refugees. Also, earlier in 1979, the United Nations helped establish a program that would permit the emigration of refugees by more normal immigration channels. This Orderly Departure Program (ODP), developed with the concurrence of the Vietnamese government, would provide an alternative to the hazards and losses of escape and the uncertainties of life in temporary camps. This process of maintaining asylum by reducing camp size and regularizing refugee flows continued through the 1980s. The numbers of refugees resettled in third countries rose rapidly and soon dwarfed the numbers that had seemed so large in 1975. UNHCR statistics indicate, for example, that the total of international resettlements rose from 9,000 per month in the first half of 1979 to 25,000 per month in the second half of 1979 (UNHCR 2000: 86). At the same time, some countries continued to reject refugees or, as in Hong Kong, moved to stricter control of more completely closed camps. “Deterrence”—“inhumane deterrence” as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (1989) labeled it for Hong Kong— became the watchword. Yet at the end of the 1980s, despite the combination of deterrence and resettlement, the refugee problem was unresolved. For example, the Vietnamese government suspended processing under the Orderly Departure Program in 1986, resulting in another wave of boat escapes. Hong Kong, in particular, saw a sharp surge in arrivals. Thus the number of Vietnamese in temporary camps in the 1980s initially declined but then rose again. Some 70,000 Vietnamese sought asylum in 1989 alone (UNHCR 2000: 84). This continuing need to empty the camps and keep them from refilling led to another international agreement, the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA). The CPA was approved in mid-1989 and in operation by the end of that year. It included provisions for processing refugees to resettlement countries but also addressed the inevitable repatriation of those refugees in the camps who did not qualify as refugees. The resolution of the Southeast Asian refugee program through the CPA was difficult and drawn out. Initial efforts to increase resettlement went well, but difficulties inevitably emerged when it came time to repatriate those who were not granted refugee status. Critics were vocal in their opposition to what they considered a violation of the central principle of nonrefoulement embodied in the United Nations Convention and Protocol on the Status of Refugees: that people must never be forcibly returned to the country from which they have fled. Concern about such forced (or semi-forced) repatriation led to attempts to track those who returned to their home country, provide economic assistance to them as returnees and even provide them with opportunities to then emigrate from Vietnam legally. By the time the CPA officially ended in June 1996, the resolution of the Vietnamese and Laotian refugee situations was largely complete, although a camp population lingered in Hong Kong through the end of the decade. Riots in 1999 among the few remaining refugees again brought attention to the problems of forced repatriation.2

24 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

The aftermath of exodus: resettlement The acceptance of refugees for resettlement is the end of one story, but the beginning of another. What actually is “resettlement”? At the most basic level, refugee resettlement programs operate on the premise that refugees need some transitional assistance before they can fully support themselves in a new country. Refugees simply lack the preparation for a new life that most other international migrants have. Thus transitional assistance is needed in such areas as initial housing, medical attention, language training, employment orientation and training, and often general cultural orientation as well. Transitional assistance usually entails some cash and medical assistance until refugees can “get on their feet”. It also requires some kind of formal program to manage or at least coordinate this assistance. A consideration of how this kind of resettlement program operated in the West— particularly in the United States—may be of some use here in reviewing what refugees resettled out from Hong Kong ultimately experienced, and highlighting the very different experience of those who remained in Hong Kong. At the time of the 1975 refugee crisis, the United States did not have a comprehensive program for refugee resettlement. Historically, there had been a general division between the government, which made decisions on admissions, and the private sector, that was responsible for refugees after arrival. However, the government had provided initial assistance to Hungarian refugees in 1956, including the use of a military base in the United States for processing (Camp Kilmer in New Jersey) and then developed a far larger involvement with Cuban refugees that began under the Eisenhower Administration and expanded under that of President John Kennedy. There was also a sizeable and growing resettlement program for Soviet Jews. All programs focused on particular populations, although they had a common approach in pursuing some kind of partnership between the government and private voluntary agencies. The initial Southeast Asian program (IRAP, the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Program) was, like these previous refugee programs, designed specifically for this population, with its own legislation, admissions criteria and funding authorities. The second Southeast Asian refugee crisis of the late 1970s helped spur legislation (sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy) to create a unified refugee program both in terms of admissions and of post-resettlement assistance. The legislation also brought US refugee law into conformity with international conventions on refugees. The legislation formalized a system in which most refugee cash and medical assistance would be provided through the same kinds of mechanisms used to assist other Americans, although with more complete federal reimbursement of state and local costs. This linked refugee assistance into exactly the “welfare system” on which the incoming Reagan Administration would launch a strong attack. Refugee assistance thus became more visible and contentious. One result was the rapid decrease in the amount of assistance available to refugees. The period of availability of special cash and medical assistance for refugees, for example, was reduced over the course of the 1980s from 36 months (established by the 1980 Refugee Act) to 18 months in 1982, 12 months in 1988, and eight

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus 25 months in 1991. During the same period, the federal government’s reimbursement period for state costs for regular cash and medical assistance provided to refugees dropped from 36 months (established by the 1980 Refugee Act) to 31 months in 1986, 24 months in 1988, four months in early 1990, and zero months in late 1990. One result was that, just as the heterogeneity of the refugee population was increasing, the amount of funding was decreasing. Another result was that states and localities often had to shoulder costs that had previously been reimbursed by the federal government. One attempted solution was to include refugees and refugee organizations more directly in the resettlement process. With the wide variation among Southeast Asian refugees in terms of nationality, ethnicity, class, and education, this was not always easy, but the net result was probably a more balanced program than would have otherwise existed. It is also worth stressing how many Americans were involved in resettlement activities whether for general moral reasons, more specifically religious commitments, or because of a sense of connection with particular refugees.

The resettlement experience The experience of exodus is one of difficult decisions, terrifying and numbing events, and sharp personal losses. The decision to leave itself can be harrowing. For the early 1975 refugees, the press of events often required a decision within a short period of time. Many such decisions meant leaving relatives behind as well as making irrevocable breaks with one’s home country. One set of interviews from 1975, for example, indicated that over half of the refugees had to evacuate in less than ten hours and over a fourth had to do so in less than an hour (Liu, Lamanna, and Murata 1979: 15). Later on, in Vietnam in particular, escape was still possible but difficult, dangerous, costly, and unpredictable. Thus relatives might well be left behind because of cost or age, and last minute changes in arrangements could separate a planned travel group. The journey itself was hazardous and often deadly. There are no firm counts on how many people lost their lives in the journey, but there is enough evidence to indicate the proportion was significant.3 Refugees who tried overland passage had to cross terrain that was dangerous, often dense with land mines and sometimes effective free-fire zones for armed forces on both sides of the border. Those whose passage was by sea often died as unseaworthy ships sank or rations of food and water were depleted. Even those who survived the journey faced problems along the way. At sea, pirate attacks were frequent and ranged in severity from robbery to murder. Women were often victims of assaults and sometimes kidnapped and either later killed or sold into servitude. Those who survived the journey and were able to either cross a land border and disembark from their boats, often met with hostility. They were sometimes pushed back to sea or back across the land borders. If they were accepted, they were usually relegated to refugee camps where they might languish for years. The camps varied greatly. Some were relatively well-run by international agencies and insulated from the politics of the country of refuge and the recruiting

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efforts of warring factions in the source country. As long as the hope of return remained alive, such camps had considerable appeal, and some refugee groups thus preferred them to resettlement in a third country. Other camps, however, were subject to very limited international oversight, restricted people’s freedom of movement, and often served as recruiting grounds for on-going wars. Even in the best camps, security was far from complete. Life was usually very difficult, uncertainty about the future was severe, and the opportunities for work and education limited. Even for those accepted for resettlement in the United States or another country, there was often an additional stage as they moved to yet another camp where they waited out the resolution of medical problems and went through language and orientation programs. Even when refugees reached a final destination in a new country, life remained difficult. Many refugees lacked much prior English language experience or the kinds of educational and occupational skills that would help them in their new lives. Even those who had such skills, faced hurdles as well, and usually ended up working in jobs well below their capacity. By and large, they were not able to bring out as much financial capital as other immigrants and, at least initially, they lacked the existing ethnic community structures that provide not only cultural and emotional support but also the networks that help support self-employment in small businesses. For many refugees, life in the United States meant living in relatively poor neighborhoods where they often faced hostility from other minorities. Parents, intent on the education of their children, found a dangerous influence from the streets and sometimes confusion from the educational system. For many, long work hours for multiple members of the household helped provide an adequate household income, but at the cost of family time together and supervision of children. Even basic religious practices could pose problems. Buddhists, for example, faced the difficulties of earning merit in a society where temples are few and far between, yet contributions to the temple are essential to earning merit. Christians found few existing churches that reflected their own experience and thus faced the arduous task of creating new churches or parish programs. Over the thirty-five years since Southeast Asian refugees began resettling in the West, no single pattern of adjustment has emerged. Many refugees have done well for themselves in economic terms; even more have had their children go on to successful lives. Others have been less able to adapt and remain more isolated from the general society. For the United States the attempts to impose “model minority” stereotypes on refugees—especially the Vietnamese—have found some basis in the social science data, but so also have more negative stereotypes about refugees who have failed to adapt and whose children drop out of school, marry young, and sometimes drift into crime. Those refugees with limited formal education, fractured households, and sharply different cultural backgrounds have, predictably, tended to fare the worst. They, like other immigrants, have also been absorbed into racial and class categories that may sometimes work to their benefit, but also sometimes to their loss. Southeast Asian refugees, in particular, have tended to bear the effects of model minority assumptions, which may benefit those with the skills to excel but hinder those who lack such skills.

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus 27

The politics of migration and the migration of politics For many Western countries, and certainly for the United States, the Southeast Asian refugee crisis was the largest and longest-lasting program of refugee asylum, assistance, and resettlement. From 1975 until the mid-1990s, refugees from Southeast Asia were the major portion of all refugees accepted into the United States. By the end of the century, the United States had received some 1.4 million Southeast Asian refugees. The majority came from camps of temporary asylum in East and Southeast Asia, but many also came through the orderly departure program that originated in 1979. The exact numbers can vary depending on the US legal status given to specific individuals, which may differ from UN definitions. Whatever the specific counts used, the numbers resettled have been large and represent both a general humanitarian commitment and a formal political recognition of responsibility for the American involvement in the Vietnam War. That political recognition is seen not only in the regular refugee program guidelines, but in special legislation to acknowledge Amerasians, those who were in “reeducation” camps in Vietnam, and those (especially the Hmong) who fought most closely with Americans. Yet in the process of meeting that political obligation, the United States also invoked general humanitarian commitments to refugees and its traditional refugee partnership with voluntary agencies which, in turn, drew on the commitments of individual Americans. Many of those individual Americans had actually opposed the Vietnam War. The US government was thus melding two distinct political constituencies, those who recognized a specific personal responsibility to these particular refugees and those who recognized a more general humanitarian commitment to refugees. This dual political commitment is seen in the efforts to reform and regularize the refugee program during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Refugee Act of 1980, in particular, invoked the UN refugee definition and envisioned a program that would serve refugees from around the world, not just particular refugees groups like those from Southeast Asia who were of direct US concern. But no sooner was the bill passed, than its universalistic vision was fractured by special provisions for individual refugee groups—whether it was the gray status of “entrant” for the influx of Cubans and Haitians in 1980 or special processing provisions (especially in-country processing) for those from Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. That vision was also challenged during the early 1980s by a major shift in ideas about public cash and medical assistance (particularly the emphasis on reducing “welfare dependence”), a much larger influx of other immigrants (that threatened to create a nativist resurgence), the collapse of the Soviet Union (which undermined the ideological value of refugees as effective voices about the problems of communist systems), and the influx of people from Haiti and Central America (which was shifting the very meaning of refuge). The results were often detrimental for refugees and the refugee program. Refugees sometimes came to be viewed not as survivors in search of refuge but as a “welfare dependent” population causing burdensome “impact” on local

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communities. Victims of American politics overseas, they were now victims of domestic American politics. Few people in America have been subject to so many different political pressures. As Southeast Asian refugees struggled to survive and succeed in the United States, they thus found themselves enmeshed in political turmoil that reflected both their past and their current lives in America. The political issues that drove them into exile endure. With the reestablishment of US diplomatic relations with Vietnam, for example, Vietnamese refugees began to have additional opportunities to reconnect with their home country. Vietnam generally desired their involvement and benefited greatly from the money they sent back. Yet the refugees remained opposed to the Vietnamese government. Thus the decision to return, even for a visit, involved a complex set of moral and political considerations. Even at the end of the century, in 1999, a California Vietnamese shop owner’s display of a picture of Ho Chi Minh and what to refugees in the United States is the “North Vietnamese” flag, caused large demonstrations by the Vietnamese refugee community. The political events that propelled their exodus were not to be forgotten. They, like the Cubans who later rallied around Elián González, continued to oppose communist governments while their host society—satisfied with the collapse of its major communist rival—often seemed to act as if these ideological concerns no longer mattered. The political forces that propelled the refugees to leave came with them in the form of their own strong political opinions that have, in turn, become part of crucial political debates in the new country, sometimes synchronized with them and sometimes not. Here then is one sort of intersection between the politics of migration and the migration of politics.

Hong Kong: anomaly or main channel? Having sketched this history of the Southeast Asian refugee exodus largely from the perspective of a resettlement country, rather than a country of initial asylum, the question arises whether Hong Kong ought to be viewed as some kind of anomaly precisely because its story is one of temporary asylum, or only of some largely “ethnic Chinese” from one place moving to join other ethnic Chinese in another place. The Hong Kong case might thus be important in its individual terms, or perhaps provide some lessons about managing asylum-seekers, but would carry few broader lessons about the longer trajectories of resettled refugees. Where, then, might an apparently anomalous Hong Kong fit into the broader story of Vietnamese refugees? In the overall story of the Vietnamese exodus, at least as viewed from an American perspective, there are several broad themes. One is that of hidden diversity. This exodus was originally viewed primarily as Vietnamese and as a result of the “Vietnam” war—and the Vietnam war with the United States not the one with China. There was, however, considerable diversity within the 1975 exodus, whether by class, region, ethnicity, or religion—including many ChineseVietnamese. This diversity, however, tended to be obscured by the numerical

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus 29 predominance of the Vietnamese and by a rather consistent public stance of people identifying themselves as Vietnamese, as refugees, and as refugees who, much like the earlier Cubans, came both from a reviled political system (communism) and from notoriously personalized American enemies (emblematized by Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro). With the crisis of the late 1970s, diversity was harder to ignore. Clearly refugees came from different countries, from very different cultural traditions, and with radically varying potential for adaptation to the United States. However, the particular issue of ethnic Chinese tended to be lost behind the more pressing and dramatic issues of Cambodian holocaust survivors and Laotian hill tribes (especially the Hmong). It is also probably the case that Americans tend to identify people from other places by nationality rather than by ethnicity. Certainly many US surveys of refugees continued for some time to report their findings in terms of “Vietnamese”, “Laotians”, and “Cambodians” as if these national categories made some intrinsic sense on economic or social terms. It may also be that the complexity of the Chinese experience in Vietnam (e.g. Whitmore 1985; Li 1998; Li’s chapter in this volume) strained the limits of public understanding in the United States.4 There were, however, some research efforts on refugees, both qualitative and quantitative, that did take on this issue of ethnic Vietnamese versus ChineseVietnamese. The qualitative research tended to show a rather broad range of ways in which Chinese-Vietnamese fit between ethnic Vietnamese and existing Chinese ethnic communities (Finnan and Cooperstein 1983; Indra 1980; Peters et al. 1983; Willmott 1980; Lee in this volume). The quantitative research showed some fairly consistent patterns for Chinese-Vietnamese compared to ethnic Vietnamese, including lower education for Chinese-Vietnamese, a lower proportion with prior professional occupations, a correspondingly higher proportion with former managerial occupations, and generally a somewhat lower economic profile in the United States in terms of employment, earnings, use of public assistance, and home ownership (Aames et al. 1977; Caplan et al. 1985; Dunning and Greenbaum 1982; Haines 1986). But while these differences were systematic, they were also rather minor compared to the glaring differences between the ethnic and Chinese-Vietnamese and such other components of the overall Southeast Asian refugees as rural Cambodians and highland Laotian tribes. This relative underplaying of Chinese versus Vietnamese ethnicity in the West suggests how useful for comparative purposes is the case of Hong Kong where this issue of Chinese ethnicity in all its complex regional and historical variations was at the center of the Vietnamese refugee issue. Furthermore, it is not just that there were Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, but that they came from a bordering country whose history has been intertwined very closely with that of the Pearl River delta for millennia. It is quite plausible that—as along the Vietnamese/ Chinese land border—these issues make more sense as those of a “borderlands” in which people move back and forth over short-term and multi-generational time. If someone from Hainan moves to Vietnam and their child escapes as a refugee to Hong Kong, should we view that merely as a single instance of migration or

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rather as reflecting an enduring cross-border region of southern China and northern Vietnam? Similarly, should we view the large numbers of refugee marriages with Hong Kong residents as simply an artifact of refugee tactics or as facilitated by a similar cross-border region in Chinese and Vietnamese social interactions? The story of the Vietnamese exodus in the West has a second general theme: that refugees are uprooted and resettled in a logical linear process, that resettlement is indeed a settled settlement in all senses of the word. This is, however, not actually the common global pattern for refugees. Refugees, in fact, are often stuck in transit with unsettled status. They remain in between, “midway to nowhere” in Egon Kunz’s famous phrase (Kunz 1973; cf. Liu et al. 1979). The places in which they remain stuck are often refugee camps: places of varying duration, varying safety and control, and varying degrees of isolation: some relatively open and some truly closed—exactly as in Hong Kong—and sometimes truly closed and extremely isolated (as in Australia today). From the US perspective, however, this in-transit, unsettled part of the refugee experience is simply a condition that exists somewhere else. There were camps for Vietnamese refugees even in the continental United States, but they were more in the nature of processing centers. Thus the entire question of whether Vietnamese were or were not refugees was resolved by the time the Vietnamese came to the United States. Hong Kong, again, provides a sharp contrast. Here that issue of status determination remained ever alive. The question of which people were and were not refugees, and how they should be handled in either case, was a constant aggravation to the refugees, to the Hong Kong government trying to control the situation, and to the many advocates for the refugees, including such foreign scholars as Gisele Bousquet (1987); Nancy Donnelly (1992); Linda Hitchcox (1991); and John Knudsen (1992, 1995). For the Vietnamese refugees in the US, the broad cover term “refugee” has generally been a positive one.5 There have been cases in which panic flags have been waved about “false” refugees, but except on rare occasions (e.g. rumors of communist infiltrators among the Vietnamese refugees) these concerns have tended to be directed toward other populations, particularly the surge of Cubans and Haitians who appeared in Florida in large numbers in 1980. Those “refugees” were, in fact, ultimately denied legal refugee status but then separately designated as “entrants”. As entrants, they were then given many of the rights of refugees (but still not the official legal title). It is possible that without that concurrent Cuban-Haitian situation, Americans might have become more dubious about Southeast Asian refugees in general, or thought more specifically to question whether Chinese-Vietnamese, especially those buying their way into the “big boat” trade, might actually be economic migrants rather than refugees. Indeed, in many ways the closer policy comparison here would be Vietnamese in Hong Kong versus Cubans and Haitians in Florida. Being a first asylum country greatly changes the perspective on refugees. A third major theme in the Western approach to Vietnamese refugees involves their final trajectory—what might be called the refugee–immigrant conundrum. Once resettled, what are refugees supposed to do? The Vietnamese were

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus 31 fortunate in being relatively unambiguously accepted as “refugees” in most Western countries and, at least in the United States, Chinese-Vietnamese were generally accepted as Vietnamese and thus also as “Vietnamese refugees”. So Vietnamese were people who, as refugees, were supposed to be accepted. In the United States, the obligation to accept refugees (Haines 2008: 41–59) was partly based on the twin poles on which the United States was founded—freedom of religion and economic opportunity. But the obligation to accept was also based in the United States, as in most Western countries, on the ways in which support for refugees is wound into secular (human rights groups, for example) and religious communities (whether Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or Muslim). But, again, what was supposed to happen after this provision of refuge? Gail Kelley (1977) in her early book on the Vietnamese refugees (echoed more fiercely by Tollefson in 1989) suggested that refugees were just supposed to become good immigrants, that this status of refugee was only a way station in the trek toward becoming a regular American immigrant. Becoming American, in turn, is based on the “work hard and you will succeed” script that lies at the heart of the American—and American immigrant—dream. Here again, Hong Kong provides a contrast. Instead of Vietnamese from Asia becoming Americans and Asian Americans, we have mostly Chinese-Vietnamese becoming Chinese in a mix of new and old ways: returning to majority status in social terms but also adapting to new meanings of being “Chinese,” including sometimes finding themselves to be a bit more Vietnamese than they thought. But being Chinese in Hong Kong presented further dilemmas since, as Chan has indicated in her introduction, Hong Kong itself has had to refigure what being Chinese means in economic, social, ethnic, national, cultural, and psychological senses as it has changed from being a refugee-formed colony of Britain to being a Special Administrative Region of China—and perhaps from being a competitor to Singapore to being a competitor to Shanghai. The Vietnamese fate in the United States has thus been a rather traditional, even old-fashioned American one. The Vietnamese fate in Hong Kong has a decidedly more modern, even post-modern tone. In America, the Vietnamese have become part of long-established structures; in Hong Kong they may be part of newer, emerging structures for which conventional notions of emigration and immigration must yield to views of migration patterns that are less clearly unidirectional or permanent. Perhaps, then, it is the American case that is anomalous and the Hong Kong case that represents the central current, the main channel of a more broadly distributed, inherently migratory, yet integrated global human society. The “missing Asian part of the story” is thus a vitally important one.

On to the Hong Kong case These general thoughts about comparing the Hong Kong case with that of other countries—for which I have relied particularly on the US case—only provide a rough introduction to the discussions in this volume. Issues on which this chapter has barely touched will be addressed in more detail, whether involving the

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general history of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, the specifically ethnic Chinese dimension of that history, the current status of these Vietnamese refugees who remained in Hong Kong, or broader comparative issues. Throughout, the notion that Hong Kong is both anomalous and central may be of some use. It may well be, for example, that Hong Kong provides a very good model for what the world will be like, and that the situation of Vietnamese in Hong Kong may be an especially useful window on the workings and meanings of that Hong Kong model. The chapters that follow will fill in many of the details of the history of Vietnamese in Hong Kong and the history of Hong Kong in dealing with Vietnamese, but may also illuminate the ways in which a kind of Hong Kong-like, East Asian cosmopolitanism can contribute to a richer, more stable, and simply more interesting world. This century may—or may not—turn out to be “the Asian century”, but it will inevitably be the first truly urban century and one for which East Asian urban models like Hong Kong will be especially relevant. Put another way, in Hong Kong the politics of the migration of Vietnamese may yield not simply the migration of existing politics, but rather encourage multiple waves of political thought and engagement. In response to shifting conditions, perhaps there can be more subtle yet effective reconfigurations of a political field that defies the usual distinctions of national and regional divisions, yielding instead a “borderlands” political field of which Hong Kong may be one pivot and Vietnam—since it alone truly bridges East and Southeast Asia—another. Indeed this volume might be seen as an opening, combined consideration of the remarkably mobile societies of both Hong Kong and Vietnam, and how understanding them together can yield a clearer vision of what is possible in this now not-so-new new century.

Notes 1 This is a very broad brush review of a complex series of crises. For fuller discussion see Grant (1979) and Robinson (1998) for conditions in Southeast Asia, Kelly (1977) and Liu, Lamanna, and Murata (1979) for the early years in the United States, and Loescher and Scanlan (1986), Zucker and Zucker (1987, 1996), Bon Tempo (2008), and Haines (2010) for broader discussions of refugee policies and programs in the United States. A bibliography of materials on the early years of US resettlement is provided in Haines and Vinh (1980). For a solid summary of the Indochina refugee issue overall, see UNHCR (2000). 2 In Cambodia, which was not part of the Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Paris peace agreement of October 1991 among the contending Cambodian forces led rapidly to a massive voluntary repatriation effort aimed at returning refugees from the border in time for the 1993 elections scheduled as part of the peace agreement. Over 360,000 Cambodians returned with assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) permitting the closing of most of the refugee camps in Thailand. In Laos, which was incidentally mentioned in the CPA, repatriation was also generally voluntary, although the negotiations among Laos, Thailand, and the UNHCR were difficult and Hmong willingness to return was conditional on questions of security in Laos and internal conflicts within the Hmong community in the camps and in the

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus 33 United States. But for Laotians as well, most refugees had returned on their own or through UNHCR assistance by the end of 1993. 3 For a range of at-sea casualty estimates, see http://boatpeople75.tripod.com. 4 My sense from six months in Europe in 1986 is that the distinctiveness of ChineseVietnamese and Chinese-Cambodians was more readily accepted there and the ethnic distinctions more immediately built into resettlement programs (Haines 1991). 5 Although Vietnamese refugees in the West were thus unambiguously people accepted for physical settlement based on their being already “settled” in legal terms, the cover term “refugee” has sometimes been used fairly loosely both before and after the U.N. refugee definition was incorporated into US law in 1980. Thus, as noted, Vietnamese orderly departure (ODP) cases usually turn up in US statistics (at least those of the Department of State) as “refugees” even though ODP cases are often “immigrants” in legal terms. I might also add that most of the Cuban “refugees” resettled in the United States have been legalized under the provisions of a law that never even uses the word “refugee”.

Bibliography Aames, Jacqueline, Ronald Aames, John Jung, and Edward Karabenick (1977) Indochinese Refugee Self-sufficiency in California: A Survey and Analysis of the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Lao and the Agencies That Serve Them, report submitted to the State Department of Health, State of California. Bon Tempo, Carl J. (2008) Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bousquet, Gisele (1987) “Living in a state of limbo: a case study of Vietnamese refugees living in Hong Kong camps”, in Scott Morgan and Elizabeth Colson (eds) People in Upheaval, New York, NY: Center for Migration Studies, pp. 34–53. Caplan, Nathan, John K. Whitmore, and Quang L. Bui (1985) Southeast Asian Refugee Self-Sufficiency Study: Final Report, Ann Arbor, MI: The Institute for Social Research. Donnelly, Nancy D. (1992) “The impossible situation of Vietnamese in Hong Kong’s detention centers”, in Pamela A DeVoe (ed.) Selected Papers on Refugee Issues, Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, pp. 120–32. Dunning, Bruce B., and Joshua Greenbaum (1982) A Systematic Survey of the Social, Psychological and Economic Adaptation of Vietnamese Refugees Representing Five Entry Cohorts, 1975–1979, Washington, DC: Bureau of Social Science Research, Inc. Finnan, Christine R., and Rhonda Ann Cooperstein (1983) Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement at the Local Level, Menlo Park, CA: SRI International. Freeman, James A. (1989) Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grant, Bruce (1979) The Boat People: An “Age” Investigation, New York, NY: Penguin. Haines, David W. (1991) “Southeast Asian refugees in Western Europe: American ref lections on French, British, and Dutch experiences”, Migration World, 19(4): 15 –18. —— (1986). “Vietnamese kinship, gender roles, and societal diversity: Some lessons from survey research on refugees.” Vietnam Forum, 8: 204 –17. —— Editor (1989) Refugees as Immigrants: Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese in America, Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield. —— Editor (1996) Refugees in America in the 1990s: A Reference Handbook, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

34 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people Haines, David W. (2008) “America and refugees: morality, rationality, and expedience, 1939–2005”, in Elliott Barkan, Hasia Diner, and Alan M. Kraut (eds) From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Era, New York, New York University Press, pp. 41–59. —— (2010) Safe Haven? A History of Refugees in America. Sterling, Virginia: Kumarian Press. —— and Augustine Ha Ton Vinh (1981) Refugee Resettlement in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Hitchcox, Linda (1991) Vietnamese Refugees in Southeast Asian Camps, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Indra, Doreen (1980) “Community and inter-ethnic relations of Southeast Asian refugees in Canada”, in Elliot L. Tepper (ed.) Southeast Asian Exodus: From Tradition to Resettlement, Ottawa, Canada: The Canadian Asian Studies Association. Kelly, Gail Paradise (1977) From Vietnam to America: A Chronicle of the Vietnamese Immigration to the United States, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 172–90. Kunz, Egon F. (1973) “The refugee in flight: kinetic models and forms of displacement.” International Migration Review, 7: 125 – 46. Knudsen, John Chr. (1992) “To destroy you is no loss: Hong Kong 1991–92”, in Pamela A. Devoe (ed.) Selected Papers on Refugee Issues, Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, pp. 133–45. —— (1995) “When trust is on trial: negotiating refugee narratives”, in E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen (eds), Mistrusting Refugees, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 13–35. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (1989) Inhumane Deterrence: The Treatment of Vietnamese Boat People in Hong Kong, New York. Li, Tana (1998) Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Ithaca, New York: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. Liu, William T., Maryanne Lamanna, and Alice Murata (1979) Transition to Nowhere: Vietnamese Refugees in America, Nashville, Tennessee: Charter House. Loescher, Gil (1993) Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis, New York: Oxford University Press. —— and John Scanlan (1986) Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door. New York: Macmillan. Nguyen Manh Hung and David W. Haines (1996) “Vietnamese”, in David W. Haines (ed.) Refugees in America in the 1990s: A Reference Handbook, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 136–58. Peters, Heather, B. Schieffelin, L. Sexton, and D. Feingold (1983) Who are the SinoVietnamese? Culture, Ethnicity, and Social Categories, Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Robinson, W. Courtland (1998) Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response, New York, NY: Zed Books. Rumbaut, Rubén (1989) “The structure of refuge: Southeast Asian refugees in the United States, 1975–85”, International Journal of Comparative Public Policy, 1: 97–129. Tollefson, James W. (1989) Alien Winds: The Reeducation of America’s Indochinese Refugees, New York, NY: Praeger. UNHCR (2000) “Flight from Indochina”, in The State of the World’s Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Rethinking the Vietnamese exodus 35 Whitmore, John K. (1985) “Chinese from Southeast Asia”, in David W. Haines (ed.) Refugees in the United States: A Reference Handbook, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 59–76. Willmott, W.E. (1980). “The Chinese in Indochina”, in Elliot L. Tepper (ed.) Southeast Asian Exodus: From Tradition to Resettlement, Ottawa, Canada: The Canadian Asian Studies Association, pp. 69–80. Zucker, Norman L., and Naomi Flink Zucker (1987) The Guarded Gate: The Reality of American Refugee Policy. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —— (1996) Desperate Crossings: Seeking Refuge in America, New York, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

3

The boat people crisis of 1978–79 and the Hong Kong experience examined through the ethnic Chinese dimension1 Ramses Amer

The main aim of this chapter is to examine the ‘boat people’ crisis of 1978–79 and the Hong Kong experience through the ethnic Chinese dimension. The importance of this dimension can clearly be seen from the fact that some 60–70 per cent of the arrivals by boat from Vietnam to Hong Kong and to neighbouring countries during 1978–79 were ethnic Chinese, which made up about 2.5 per cent of the total Vietnamese population. The context in which the large-scale exodus took place is analysed and the factors that could help understand why the ethnic Chinese left Vietnam are identified. This contributes to a better understanding of the broader boat people crisis as a whole and more specifically to the Hong Kong experience. The study is structured in the following way. First, the boat-people crisis is outlined through a statistical overview in which the Hong Kong experience is examined from a comparative perspective with Southeast Asian countries. Second, the ethnic Chinese dimension is identified and outlined. Third, the factors that contributed to the exodus, in particular the large number of ethnic Chinese to leave Vietnam, are identified and assessed. Finally, a conclusion outlining the major findings of the study relating to Hong Kong and the impact of the boat people crisis of 1978–79 on the formation of the Vietnamese diaspora.

The boat people crisis of 1978–79 After the end of the Vietnam War in late April 1975, political and economic changes in Vietnam led to a steadily increasing number of people leaving southern Vietnam by boat. By the end of 1976 some 5,619 had arrived in other countries and by the end of 1977 the number was 21,276.2 In April 1978 the figure rose sharply from 2,500 a month to 5,000 (see Table 3.1). Another strong increase in the number of arrivals was during the period September to November 1978. The period December 1978 to February 1979 saw fewer arrive than in November 1978 but it was still on the high side. The period March to June 1979 was marked by a sharp increase in the number of arrivals while the second half of 1979 displayed a gradual drop in the number or arrivals bringing the monthly number of arrivals back to the pre-April 1978 level, i.e. some 2,000–3,000 arrivals. Of the boat people arriving in neighbouring countries during 1978 and the first half of 1979, an estimated 60–70 per cent were ethnic Chinese. Given the importance

The boat people crisis of 1978–79

37

Table 3.1 Arrivals of Vietnamese refugees by boat in other Southeast Asian countries and Hong Kong in 1978 and 1979 1978

1979

January

February

March

April

May

June

2,000 July 6,232

2,000 August 2,829

2,500 September 8,558

5,012 October 12,540

5,569 November 21,505

4,924 December 13,370

January 9,931 July 17,839

February 8,568 August 9,734

March 13,423 September 9,533

April 26,602 October 2,854

May 46,338 November 2,209

June 54,871 December 2,745

Note For a discussion concerning the reliability of different sources providing figures over the number of refugees see Amer (1991: 82–84, 96).

of the ethnic Chinese dimension of the boat people crisis, this aspect will be explored in more details in this study. There can be at least three explanations for the pattern shown in Table 3.1. First, people could leave by land to China up to mid-July 1978 and, following the closure of the border, people primarily from the North of Vietnam attempted to leave by boat. Second, ethnic Chinese were not singled out for discrimination prior to August 1978. Third, persons leaving Vietnam by boat did not arrive in the countries of destination until several weeks later. The figures in Table 3.1 seem to indicate that it became easier to leave Vietnam by boat in August 1978, thus explaining why the arrivals by boat in other countries increased sharply from September. The figures for the period December 1978–March 1979 show a decline compared with November 1978. On the other hand, there was a sharp increase in the number of arrivals from April to June 1979. Finally, the number of arrivals declined during the second half of 1979. In order to explain these differences, two factors have to be examined. First, did the Vietnam authorities change their policies towards the ethnic Chinese? Second, what was the impact of international events on the situation in Vietnam during this period? The decline in the number of arrivals during the period December 1978–March 1979 indicate a shift in policy that made it more difficult for people to leave. If so, this policy must have been implemented during the month of November, taking into consideration the time needed to reach the different destinations by boat. It is likely that the policy shift was connected to a conference on refugees held in Geneva in December 1978 where the Vietnamese refugee problem was subject to discussions. However, the figures do indicate that the shift in policy may have been disregarded or was ineffective in parts of the country (Amer 1991: 87; Benoit 1982: 160; Grant 1979: 108, 124–29; Porter 1980: 58; Wain 1981: 69, 193). The sharp increase in the number of arrivals during the period April-June 1979 indicates that it was once again easier to leave Vietnam by boat. Furthermore, this phase of the exodus displayed a novel feature, namely, the large number of

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Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

people heading for Hong Kong (Mignot 1984: 20; Power in Indo China 1981: 71). This is clearly displayed in Table 3.2. The pattern of arrivals displayed in Table 3.2 compared to Table 3.1 indicates that in Hong Kong the boat people crisis was more of a 1979 phenomenon whereas in Southeast Asian countries arrivals during 1978 made up a larger proportion of boat people arrivals. The trend in arrivals into Hong Kong display that figures for early 1979 are higher then in 1978 and that in the wake of the Chinese attack on Vietnam in February–March 1979 there was a sharp increase in arrivals of Vietnamese refugees. In fact the period April–July 1979 were the peak months in terms of arrivals of by boat from Vietnam into Hong Kong during the boat people crisis. The importance of the ethnic Chinese factor as can be seen from the following estimate—between 1 January and 21 July 1979—the ethnic Chinese made up 83.16 per cent of arrivals into Hong Kong (Mignot 1984: 21). As noted above, the boat people arriving in Southeast Asian countries and in Hong Kong during 1978 and the first half of 1979 an estimated 60–70 per cent where ethnic Chinese. Another difference between Hong Kong and the Southeast Asian countries was that the majority of people arriving in Hong Kong by boat from Vietnam were from the northern part of Vietnam whereas the majority of those arriving in Southeast Asian were from the southern part of Vietnam. There is an important factor explaining these differences namely navigational routes which makes Hong Kong more accessible from northern Vietnam. As noted above the fact that people could leave by land to China up to mid-July 1978 may help explain why the boat people crisis affected Hong Kong to a lesser extent in 1978 as compared to 1979. As a response to the increasing number of people from Vietnam arriving by boat in other countries from April to June 1979, a new conference on refugees Table 3.2 Arrivals of Vietnamese refugees by boat in Hong Kong in 1978 and 1979 1978

1979

January

February

March

April

May

June

38 July 837

28 August 1,023

126 September 1,177

112 October 640

203 November 282

808 December 19

January 3,151 July 8,678

February 2,901 August 2,975

March 3,114 September 2,581

April 5,702 October 572

May 18,718 November 282

June 22,835 December 421

Note These figures are taken from Mignot (1984: 20) with reference to the UNHCR. Skeldon (1994: 98)— with reference to the Hong Kong Government, Monthly Statistical Report, June 1993—provides a total number for the two years—77,863—that only differs slightly from Mignot’s total figure— 77,277—but there is a considerable discrepancy between the respective year, 1978 and 1979 in the two sources. Skeldon puts 1978 at 9,115 and 1979 at 68,758, while Mignot puts 1978 at 5,257 and 1979 at 77,277. One of the reasons for this discrepancy seems to be that Skeldon (1994: 92) refers to the arrival 3,318 people on one freighter on 23 December 1978 and they were obviously not included in the December figure provided by Mignot (1984: 20), i.e. 19 people.

The boat people crisis of 1978–79

39

was convened in Geneva in July 1979 and the Vietnamese representatives pledged to do their utmost to stem the outflow of people (Wain 1981: 221, 225). Judging from the declining number of Vietnamese refugees reaching other countries in July, Vietnam had already begun halting the outflow in June. The figures for the rest of 1979 indicate that the decline in July was not a temporary fluctuation. The time needed to fully implement the new policy can be seen from the sharp drop in the number of arrivals in October as compared to September, thus bringing the number of arrivals by boat back to the pre-April 1978 level (see Table 3.1). Although in the case of Hong Kong the number of arrivals remained at a higher level throughout 1979 as compared to the early months of 1978 (see Table 3.2).

The ethnic Chinese dimension3 In addition to examining the ethnic Chinese dimension of the boat people crisis it is also relevant to include an overview of the migration of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam to China in 1978. In the Spring of 1978 relations between China and Vietnam began to openly deteriorate over the issue of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. The first official indication of the migration from Vietnam came on 30 April 1978 when the head of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council in Beijing stated that since early April 1978 the Vietnamese authorities had stepped up their expulsion of ‘Chinese residents’. According to China, the number of expelled persons had reached 40,000 and seemed to be further increasing (BBC/FE 1978b: C3; Note of the Foreign 1978: 49; Godley 1980: 35). The exodus continued; by mid-May more than 50,000 people had crossed over to China, by early June the number was over 100,000, and in mid-July the number of arrivals was in excess of 160,000 persons (Note of the Foreign 1978: 51; Speech by Chung 1978: 39; Statement by Ministry 1978: 12). To stem the large-scale influx of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, China decided to close the border in July 1978. However, despite the closure, an additional 40,000 persons managed to enter China, thus bringing the total up to 200,000 by the end of 1978 (Chang 1982a: 52). An alternative way of leaving northern Vietnam was by boat, either to China or to Hong Kong, and the closure of the border led to an increase in departures by boat (Wain 1981: 73–74). It can also be noted that the question of the ethnic Chinese was the subject of diplomatic discussions between China and Vietnam in June–July and in August–September 1978, respectively. These discussions ended without any agreement and had the impact of further deteriorating the bilateral relationship.4 In June 1978 two events increased the expectations of ethnic Chinese who wanted to leave Vietnam. First, China dispatched two ships to repatriate ‘victimized Chinese residents’. Second, the Vietnamese authorities started to register ethnic Chinese who wanted to leave for China. There are different accounts relating to the extent to which the ethnic Chinese in Ho Chi Minh City registered, and estimates range from some 30–40 per cent to about 75 per cent—the later figure by the end of 1978 (Benoit 1982: 88–89; Chang 1982a: 39–40; Porter 1980: 57).

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The Vietnamese initiated the registration campaign despite the fact that no agreement existed between the two countries. Maybe Vietnam expected an agreement to be forthcoming, but the negotiations did not result in any agreement and the Chinese ships returned empty. Thus, a large number of ethnic Chinese who had registered in order to leave Vietnam were left in the country and started searching for alternative means to leave. This situation combined with the exodus by land to China made the Vietnamese authorities increasingly suspicious of the loyalty of the Chinese community to the Vietnamese nation and their response to the prevailing situation was twofold. First, ethnic Chinese were expelled from the party, the administration, and the army as well as from all employment regarded as sensitive from a security point of view. This policy seems to have been most effectively carried out in the former Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) (North), where the ethnic Chinese had been integrated into the socialist system since 1954 (Benoit 1982: 140, 149, 152; Grant 1979: 88; Wain 1981: 73). Second, a system of semi-legal departures was introduced which was open only to the ethnic Chinese and administered by the Public Security Bureau (PSB)—an organ that was part of the Vietnamese administration. The impact of the semi-legal departure system can clearly be seen in the increase in the number of arrivals of refugees from Vietnam during the second half of 1978. As noted above in the wake of the Chinese attack on Vietnam in February– March 19795 there was another sharp increase in arrivals of Vietnamese refugees (see Table 3.1). Judging from accounts given by refugees reaching Hong Kong during the period April–June 1979, the Vietnamese authorities were implementing a policy that was tantamount to an expulsion of the remaining ethnic Chinese in the North. Some refugees said that the ethnic Chinese had been assembled at information meetings by the Vietnamese authorities and informed about the threat of a new Chinese military intervention. At these meetings they were given two choices, either to be transferred to the so-called New Economic Zones (NEZ), at a safe distance from Vietnam’s border with China, or to leave the country. Many of the ethnic Chinese had been well established in Vietnamese society and thus far had remained in the country in spite of the increased pressure on them during the closing months of 1978, but by the time of the meetings many of them opted to leave. Others may have felt that considering their background they had no possibility to establish themselves in a new country and opted to remain in Vietnam and they were transferred to the NEZ (Benoit 1982: 140–52; Porter 1980: 58–59; Quinn-Judge 1985: 4; Wain 1981: 77–78).

Factors behind the exodus Economic policies After the end of the war in 1975 the Vietnamese authorities faced two major challenges. First to rebuild the country, devastated by the Vietnam War, and second to transform the economic structure and life in the former Republic of Vietnam (ROV) (South) in line with a socialist model (On the Eve 1986: 12; Nguyen K. 1985: 2).

The boat people crisis of 1978–79

41

One of the measures applied to cope with unemployment in the larger cities, primarily in Ho Chi Minh City,6 was to send people to NEZ. Parts of the countryside in the South had been abandoned during the war. After 1975 the abandoned regions had to be resettled and the NEZ programme was intended to be the vehicle for carrying out the resettlement policy (Grant 1979: 25–26). The NEZ and the restructuring of the economy were inter-connected. The aim was to get people who had been involved in so-called ‘unproductive’ activities in the larger cities to engage in production in the NEZ. This would fulfil two fundamental goals namely increasing food production by cultivating more land and increasing state control over the economy. The authorities initiated several moves in order to gain control over the economic life of the South. In late September 1975 a currency reform was announced. The old currency was to be exchanged and a certain amount of the new money had to be put into state controlled accounts (Tran 1993; Woodside 1979: 394). The same month a campaign—code-named ‘X1’—was launched against the ‘compradore bourgeoisie’. People falling within this category, i.e. those with large assets had their industrial and commercial properties confiscated (Tran 1993: 81–82; Vo 1990: 64–66). In an effort to curb speculation, hoarding of goods, and tendencies to monopolise the market, the Vietnamese authorities required the enterprises to register their machinery, vehicles, spare parts and stocks (Stern 1985: 259–63, 1987: 123–24). Beginning in October 1975 the authorities launched a campaign to establish consumers’ cooperatives. The initial role of these cooperatives was to act as an alternative to the open market, but the long-term goal was to gain control over the distribution of goods. In June 1976 the authorities introduced special taxes on excess profits to curb hoarding of commodities and to contravene speculative actions by businessmen (Tran 1993: 83; Woodside 1979: 395). Despite continued efforts during 1977, state control over the economy in the South was not achieved (Stern 1987: 132–33; Woodside 1979: 392–98).7 In response to these failures the Vietnamese authorities moved to implement harsher measures against the capitalist dominated economy and a campaign— code-named ‘X2’—was suddenly launched on 23 March 1978 (Amer 1991: 84; BBC/FE 1978a: B5–9; Vo 1990: 89). In Ho Chi Minh City the clampdown on private business affected the whole city, but the largest concentration of political cadres, policemen and volunteers was around the former Cholon, i.e. the areas mainly inhabited by ethnic Chinese (Chanda 1986: 231–33; Chang 1982a: 27; Vo 1990: 89). Goods from tens of thousands of retailers were confiscated and many persons were ordered out of the city to settle in the NEZ. In a simultaneous move, the authorities stepped up the establishment of consumer and marketing cooperatives and state-run stores with the goal of gaining control over trade and on 31 March all private trade in the country was banned (Chang 1982a: 27; Stern 1987: 134–35, 141; Vietnam Courier 1978: 14–15; Vo 1990: 89–90). Finally, on 3 May a currency reform was carried out. All old money and foreign currencies had to be handed in to the authorities with only a limited sum per person and per family being exchanged to the new currency (Chanda 1986: 233; Evans and Rowley 1984: 54).

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Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

The policies of socialist transformation carried out by the Vietnamese authorities were bound to adversely affect the ethnic Chinese more than other ethnic groups due to their predominant role in the economic life. In 1975 members of the Chinese community controlled most of the processing industry, the wholesale trade, and the import–export trade as well as about half of the retail trade and the banking and finance sectors (Tran 1992: 18; Vo 1990: 68).8 The clampdown on private trade launched in late March 1978 put a large number of ethnic Chinese out of work. The former businessmen and traders were ‘shifted to production’, i.e. sent to the NEZ. Life was hard in the NEZ and very different from life in the cities, especially Ho Chi Minh City, and many persons opted to try to leave the country (Amer 1991: 56). However, it can be noted that parts of the ethnic Chinese business networks remained intact and were used to organize illegal channels for people who wanted to leave the country. Furthermore, trade links between the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and ethnic Chinese in other Southeast Asian states, in particular Singapore, seem to have continued to function despite the campaign (Stern 1987: 141). Political dimension It can be presumed that the Vietnamese authorities were aware of the problem they had to face from the Chinese community when trying to change the economic structure in the South, but they were probably not expecting political challenges from this group. However, the Vietnamese claim that this is precisely what happened. According to Vietnamese research, the period from spring 1976 to spring 1979 was characterized by an ‘explosion’ of the ‘Chinese-national’ idea among ethnic Chinese in Ho Chi Minh City (Mac 1994a: 209, 1994b: 36). In fact, as early as in May 1975, several incidents were reported to have taken place and Vietnam alleged that agents from China helped set up several new organizations among the ethnic Chinese in Ho Chi Minh City. One of the main goals of the organizations was to campaign for the acquiring of Chinese citizenship. Vietnam also claimed that the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi was involved (Statement by ViceMinister 1978: 73–74; Statement by Chief 1978: 82; De l’affaire 1978: 83–101). China made several allegations relating to how the Vietnamese authorities acted with regard to the question of citizenship. First, in January 1976 the ‘Chinese residents’ in the former ROV were allegedly required to register their citizenship. Seemingly, the result of the registration campaign did not satisfy the authorities, i.e. more ethnic Chinese than expected claimed to be Chinese citizens. Another allegation was that the ethnic Chinese were ordered to register again but this time according to the citizenship they had in the pre-1975 period. Furthermore, China claimed that in February 1977 the ‘Chinese residents’ were required by the Vietnamese authorities to fill in printed forms to receive ‘citizenship cards’. Finally, China accused Vietnam of discriminating against the ethnic Chinese by cancelling household registers, reducing food rations, withholding jobs and imposing exorbitant taxes, with the aim of forcing them to

The boat people crisis of 1978–79 43 become Vietnamese citizens. In essence, China protested against the oppressive character of the Vietnamese actions (Beijing Review 1979: 28–29). The Vietnamese description of the above course of events was that immediately after the ‘liberation’ of the ROV in 1975, Vietnam had undertaken a registration of foreign residents and no ‘Vietnamese of Chinese origin’ had asked for registration. Vietnam also held the standpoint that the issue of the nationality of the ethnic Chinese had been settled before 1975 and that they were to be regarded as Vietnamese citizens. However, the Vietnamese authorities regarded some members of the Chinese community as foreign nationals and they were treated accordingly. The Vietnamese also emphasised that these persons had not been forced to become Vietnamese citizens (Statement by Chief 1978: 72; Ky 1978: 23–28). Although the two versions contradict each other in regard to some central issues, it can be presumed that at least a number of ethnic Chinese refused to register as Vietnamese citizens in January 1976. It should be noted that the registration campaign was part of the preparations for elections to the National Assembly to be held in April 1976 (Porter 1982: 85; The Socialist 1985: 43). It can also be presumed that the Vietnamese authorities at least started to treat as ‘foreign residents’ those ethnic Chinese who refused to register as Vietnamese citizens and this implied restrictions on employment opportunities and on involvement in economic activities (Amer 1991: 41). These restrictions were formalized in 1978: Foreign nationals residing in Vietnam can choose their trade or profession freely, in keeping with Vietnamese law, with the exception of the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Fishery. Forestry. Repair of communications and radio and television equipment. Driver of motor coaches and skipper of motor launches. Printing, engraving and type casting. Type-writing, mimeographing, photocopying.

For the exercise of their trade or profession, foreign nationals shall register their occupation with a competent Vietnamese organ. (Decision No. 122-CP 1978: 8–9) The policies of the Vietnamese authorities towards the ethnic Chinese led to open protests. In March 1978 several demonstrations by ethnic Chinese were reported to have taken place in Ho Chi Minh City (Chang 1982a: 26). The most important manifestation involved several hundred persons who demonstrated against people being sent to the NEZ and against the young men being drafted into the army. They also demanded to be repatriated to the Chinese motherland (Chanda 1986: 232; Chang 1982a: 26). Another demonstration involving about one hundred persons occurred in August 1978 and the demonstrators demanded, among other things, Chinese citizenship (Mac 1994a: 210, 1994b: 37). The main reason for the rejection of Vietnamese citizenship seems to have been that the pragmatic reasons for adopting it during in the pre-1975 years no

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longer prevailed, i.e. the policies of the ROV at that time had made Vietnamese citizenship a prerequisite for taking part in many economic activities.9 After 1975 an additional reason for claiming to be a Chinese citizen was, most probably, a hope that as a foreign national the ethnic Chinese would be allowed to leave the country, since French and Indian nationals were allowed to do so (Amer, 1991: 54, 1992: 12; Benoit 1982: 158). Relations with China10 Following the end of the war in Vietnam in late April 1975, relations between China and Vietnam went through dramatic changes from seemingly good and normal relations to war in early 1979. Relations deteriorated over a number of issues. First, there were differences in opinion concerning the Soviet Union11 and China’s uneasiness about Vietnam’s relations with that country. As relations deteriorated between China and Vietnam in 1978, Vietnam gradually moved closer to the Soviet Union and eventually an alliance between the two countries was formalised through a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation signed on 3 November. Second, there were conflicting interests in Cambodia. China’s gradually increased support for Cambodia in the conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia in 1978 also caused tension between China and Vietnam. The Vietnamese military intervention in Cambodia in late December 1978 led to a further deterioration in relations with China. Third, the territorial disputes between the two countries along the land border, in the Gulf of Tonkin and in the South China Sea caused tension. The maritime disputes contributed to the deterioration of bilateral relations by adding two more issues to the deepening differences between the two sides, however it is difficult to discern their specific impact. The clashes that occurred along the border were indications of the divergences with regard to other issues and of the overall deterioration of relations rather than important disputed issues in their own right. Fourth, the situation of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and the way in which this minority was treated emerged as a disputed issue. It was the mass migration of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam in the spring of 1978 that officially led to the open and public deterioration of bilateral relations between the two countries. As noted above talks on the issue of ‘repatriation’ to China of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam were held from mid-June to mid-July and from early August to late September 1978, but no agreement was reached. The overall deterioration of relations led to a militarized conflict that escalated into China’s attack on Vietnam in February and March 1979. The Chinese withdrawal from Vietnam was followed by attempts at negotiations between China and Vietnam from April 1979 to March 1980. However, the two parties did not manage to reach an understanding. The Semi-legal departure system As noted above, in 1978 a system of semi-legal departures was introduced which was open only to the ethnic Chinese and administered by the PSB—an

The boat people crisis of 1978–79

45

organ that was part of the Vietnamese administration. In essence the system worked as follows: the ethnic Chinese, who wanted to leave, had to pay, through ethnic Chinese organisers, a fixed fee that was handed over to a PSB official. Furthermore, they had to pay for boat, fuel, and other necessities, the same as any person who attempted to leave (Amer 1991: 85–87; Benoit 1982: 116–33, 157–60; Chang 1982a: 50, 1982b: 222–23; Grant 1979: 108–12; Porter 1980: 57–58; Wain 1981: 16–35, 84–122). It is difficult to assess when the semi-legal departure system was introduced and for how long it was in operation. One approach to assess its effects is to study the number of people reaching various destinations in East and Southeast Asia during 1978 and 1979, including Hong Kong. In other words the pattern of the number of arrivals in other countries by boat indicates the semi-legal departure was implemented in August 1978 as displayed by the figures in Table 3.1.

Factors behind the exodus to China Rumours of a coming war were an important factor in triggering the exodus to China. To understand the impact of the rumours of a coming war on the ethnic Chinese in the border region, it is necessary to carry out a closer examination of the context within which the rumours were spread. First, the Vietnamese authorities were conducting a campaign against Chinese illegally residing in the country. Second, Vietnam was moving people away from the border, thus confirming that tension between the two countries was increasing, and these Vietnamese actions gave more credence to the rumours of a forthcoming war. In this situation the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam became aware of the mounting tension between the two countries and they found themselves in a dilemma that many opted to solve by leaving for China, in order to avoid getting caught in a war. This had a triggering effect causing the outflow of Chinese from the border provinces and, soon after, from other parts of northern Vietnam.12 Thus, the prime reason behind the exodus from the bordering provinces was fear of a war between China and Vietnam.13 In others parts of the North the ethnic Chinese were less affected by the rumours of a forthcoming war due to the relative distance to the border. However, the authorities implemented economic policies aimed at curbing private trade also in the North. One such campaign was launched in Haiphong in 1977. At that time some 32 per cent of the market activities in the city were still controlled by private traders, despite the implementation of socialist policies since the mid1950s. Thus, the campaign against private trade affected a considerable number of people, and among them many ethnic Chinese (Woodside 1979: 404). Such campaigns in other places, for example in Hanoi, probably had a similar effect. These campaigns contributed to the increase in outflow of people to China in the spring and summer of 1978, but did not trigger it. In the context of how the economic policies affected the ethnic Chinese in the North, it has to be noted that the majority of ethnic Chinese lived in Quang Ninh province and were mainly fishermen, foresters and craftsmen. In the urban areas

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the Chinese were mainly workers and technicians. Thus, the Chinese community played a different role in the former DRV society as compared to its counterpart in the former ROV. Prior to the exodus there were some 160,000 ethnic Chinese living in Quang Ninh province, corresponding to approximately 22 per cent of the total population. The Chinese community provided much needed manpower to the industrial and mining sectors and the economy of the province was badly disrupted by the departure of almost the whole Chinese community (Nguyen, V. 1978: 54–55). Another issue that caused turbulence within the Chinese community was the question of nationality (Benoit 1982: 145). According to the Vietnamese authorities the issue of citizenship had been settled in the 1950s and the ethnic Chinese were to be regarded as Vietnamese citizens. Among interviewed refugees some people said that the issue of citizenship was important both for economic and sentimental reasons, whereas others were not as concerned about it.14 From the above analysis it can be concluded that the major underlying and immediate factor behind the exodus of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam was the rumour of a coming war between China and Vietnam. Other factors such as the question of nationality, the expulsion of illegal Chinese migrants from the border region and economic policies aiming at curbing private business contributed to increase the number of people who departed but they did not trigger the exodus.15

Conclusions One of the major findings of this study is that in Hong Kong, the boat people crisis was more of 1979 phenomenon compared to Southeast Asia. Furthermore, the trend in arrivals into Hong Kong clearly display that in the wake of the Chinese attack on Vietnam in February–March 1979 there was a sharp increase in arrivals of Vietnamese refugees in particular during the months of May and June. As noted above, accounts given by refugees reaching Hong Kong during the period April–June 1979, the Vietnamese authorities were implementing a policy that was tantamount to an expulsion of the remaining ethnic Chinese in the North of Vietnam. Another major finding is the importance of the ethnic Chinese factor among the boat people during 1978–79, i.e. an estimated 60–70 per cent of those arriving by boat to neighbouring countries and Hong Kong, while ethnic Chinese made up over 80 per cent of arrivals by boat into Hong Kong during the period 1 January and 21 July 1979. Given the considerable number of ethnic Chinese among the boat people crisis of 1978–79 the implications on the Vietnamese diaspora are thus considerable and it important not to perceive the members of the Vietnamese diaspora as ‘overseas Vietnamese’. In countries that have communities of migrants and refugees from Vietnam it is important properly understand the complexities of this population. The attitudes towards Vietnam would differ between people who left for economic reasons and those who had been politically active in the defeated ROV (South) side in the Vietnam War. Thus, within the Vietnamese diaspora there

The boat people crisis of 1978–79

47

could be groups openly opposed to the political system in Vietnam while other groups would be much less politicised. The identity as ‘Vietnamese’ would also differ between members of a migrant community who were migrants already when residing in Vietnam, e.g. among the ethnic Chinese, and migrants from the Kinh (ethnic Vietnamese) group.16 It is therefore vital to better differentiate between various groupings among what is often referred to as the Vietnamese diaspora. The later applies not only to the countries in which Vietnamese have settled since the late 1970s but also to the Vietnamese government when it formulates its policies and strategies towards what is termed the ‘Viet Kieu’, i.e. overseas Vietnamese.17

Notes 1 The study draws on the author’s earlier research on various aspects of the situation of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam in the post-1975 period, i.e. after the end of the socalled Vietnam War. On the situation on the ethnic Chinese, government policies and demographic developments see Amer (1991, 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2006). On the relations between Vietnam and China and the impact on the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam see Amer (1991, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2004). 2 The number of registered arrivals was 377 in 1975, 5,242 in 1976 and 15,657 in 1977 see Power in Indo China (1981: 71); Grant (1979: 31). 3 Official terminology in Vietnam classify three ethnic groups as ethnic Chinese i.e. they belong to the ‘Han Group’ based on their language according to the official nomenclature on ethnic minorities. The three groups are the Hoa, the Ngái, and the Sán Dìu. This is based on decision No. 121—TCTK/PPCD on the ‘Nomenclature of Vietnamese ethnic groups’ by the General Department of Statistics on 2 March 1979. The ‘Nomenclature’ has been used in Dang et al., (1984, 1986, 1993). See also The Socialist (1985: 45–51). Based on author’s discussions with officials and researchers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in December 1997 the attitude of the Vietnamese authorities seems to be that the members of Hoa group are of ‘Han Chinese origin’ from China and that they maintain their Chinese customs, whereas other ethnic groups originating from China, e.g. the Ngái, and the Sán Dìu, are not ‘Han-anised’ and they are not considered ethnic Chinese. In the context of this study the terms Hoa and ethnic Chinese are used interchangeably. 4 For a detailed overview and analysis of the diplomatic dispute between China and Vietnam over the question of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam including the negotiations see Amer (1991: 57–77). 5 The most extensive and detailed study on the Chinese attack on Vietnam in February– March 1979 is Chen (1987—chapter five deals specifically with the military operations, pp. 98–117). 6 Saigon, the old capital of the ROV, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City on 2 July 1976. Ho Chi Minh City encompasses not only the former city of Saigon but also Cholon which was mainly inhabited by ethnic Chinese. 7 In this context is should also be noted that in 1977 widespread drought in the North caused a deficit of several million tons of rice in the country (On The Eve 1986: 12). 8 For a detailed study on the economic activities of the ethnic Chinese prior to 1975 see Tran (1993: 41–76). 9 For further details pertaining to the ROV policies towards the ethnic see Amer (1991: 18–23, 2006). 10 For more detailed studies on the relations between China and Vietnam and the disputes between the two countries see Amer (1994: 357–63, 368–76, 1999: 69–72,

48 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

11 12 13 14 15

16

17

98–104, 2004: 320–26); Chen (1987); Duiker (1986); Gilks (1992); Lawson (1984); Ross (1988); Woodside (1979: 381–409). In this study the Soviet Union is used as synonymous to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). According to China, 95 per cent of the more than 160,000 persons who reached China up to late July/early August 1978 were from northern Vietnam (Socialist Transformation 1978: 177; Untenable Arguments 1978: 173). China refuted the notion that the rumours of war was the cause of the exodus and blamed it on the Vietnamese authorities who were said to be persecuting the Chinese, see for example: Lies Cannot (1978: 124–25). The refugees interviewed in this context came from Hanoi and not from the border provinces see Benoit (1992: 144–45). A recent study on the ethnic Chinese in North Vietnam highlights the importance of education as an issue relating to the ethnic Chinese in North Vietnam. The study offers a comprehensive analysis of the situation of the ethnic Chinese in North Vietnam between 1954 and 1978 (Han 2009: 1–36). However, since it does not deal with events in 1979 it is of more limited relevance in the context of the departures by boat of ethnic Chinese from the North of Vietnam in 1979. In Vietnamese research in the 1990s on the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam the term ‘microethnic’ was used to denote all minority groups in Vietnam and ‘macroethnic’ to denote the majority group, i.e. Kinh, which is the official name used in the Vietnamese censuses (Mac 1994a: 219, 1994b: 42). The concept of ‘Viet Kieu’ used by Vietnam does not appear to include the estimated 300,897 refugees in China, i.e. the ethic Chinese who left Vietnam in 1978–79 and their decedents (UNHCR 2005: 547).

Bibliography Amer, R. (1991) The Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and Sino-Vietnamese Relations, Kuala Lumpur: Forum. —— (1992) ‘The Chinese minority in Vietnam since 1975: impact of economic and political changes’, Ilmu Masyarakat, A Malaysian Social Science Association Publication (22): 1–39. —— (1994) ‘Sino-Vietnamese normalization in the light of the crisis of the late 1970s’, Pacific Affairs, 67(3): 357– 83. —— (1996) ‘Vietnam’s policies and the ethnic Chinese since 1975’, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 11(1): 76 –104. —— (1997) ‘The Sino-Vietnamese conflict in 1978–79 and the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam’, Multiethnica, 21–22, Uppsala: Centre for Multiethnic Research, Uppsala University: 10 –16. —— (1998a) ‘The study of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam: trends, issues and challenges’, Asian Culture, 22: 23 – 42. —— (1998b) ‘Vietnam and its Chinese minority: from socialist transformation and exodus to economic renovation and reintegration’, Journal of the South Seas Society, 53: 101–27. —— (1999) ‘Sino-Vietnamese Relations: Past, Present and Future’, in C.A. Thayer and R. Amer (eds) Vietnamese Foreign Policy in Transition, Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies; New York: St Martin’s Press: 68 –130. —— (2000) ‘Government policies towards the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam: contending explanations to the exodus of the 1970s and to the current reintegration’, in Intercultural Relations, Cultural Transformation, and Identity: The Ethnic Chinese

The boat people crisis of 1978–79 49 (Selected papers presented at the 1998 ISSCO conference), Manila: Kaisa Papa Sa Kaunlaran, Inc: 185 –225. —— (2004) ‘Assessing Sino-Vietnamese relations through the management of contentious issues’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 26(2): 320 – 45. —— (2006) A Demographic Study of the Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Paper prepared for the Conference: ‘The Chinese in Vietnam: When Past and Future Converge’, organised by Institut de Recherche sur le Sud-est asiatique, Université de Provence, Aix-enProvence, France (20–21 October). Beijing Review (1979) 7 July. Benoit, C. (1982) ‘Vietnam’s “boat people”’, in D.W.P. Elliot (ed.) The Third Indochina Conflict, Boulder, CO: Westview Press: 139 – 62. BBC/FE (1978a) British Broadcasting Corporation Summary of World Broadcasts Part Three Far East/5773/B5–9 (28 March 1978). —— (1978b) British Broadcasting Corporation Summary of World Broadcasts Part Three Far East/5802/C3 (2 May 1978). Chanda, N. (1986) Brother Enemy: The War after the War: A History of Indochina since the Fall of Saigon, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers. Chang, P-M. (1982a) Beijing, Hanoi and the Overseas Chinese, China Research Monograph, 24. Berkeley, CA: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. —— (1982b) ‘The Sino-Vietnamese dispute over the ethnic Chinese, The China Quarterly (90): 195 –230. Chen, K.C. (1987) China’s War with Vietnam, 1979. Issues, Decisions, and Implications, Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Hoover Institution Press. Dang, N.V., Chu, T.S. and Luu, H. (1984) The Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam, Hanoi: Foreign Language Publishing House. —— (1986) Les ethnies minoritaires du Vietnam [The Ethnic Minorities of Vietnam], Hanoi: Edition en langues étrangères. —— (1993) The Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam, Hanoi: The Gioi Publisher. De l’affaire (1978) ‘De l’affaire du Kampuchéa à celle des Hoa ou la main de l’ambassade de Chine à Hanoi (aveux d’agents de Pékin)’ [From the Kampuchea Issue to the One Relating to the Hoa or the Hand of the Embassy of China in Hanoi (Confessions of the Agents of Peking)], in Kampuchéa, Dossier II, Hanoi: Edité par le Courrier du Vietnam: 82–108. Decision No. 122-CP (1978) ‘Decision of the SRV Government Council on the Policy Towards Foreigners Residing and Making a Living in Vietnam, (April 25, 1977— Decision No. 122-CP)’, in Documents Related to the Question of Hoa People in Vietnam, Hanoi: Department of Press and Information, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Socialist Republic of Vietnam: 7–10. Duiker, W.J. (1986) China and Vietnam: The Roots of Conflict, Indochina Research Monograph 1, Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. Evans, G. and Rowley, K. (1984) Red Brotherhood at War: Indochina Since the Fall of Saigon, Thetford, Norfolk and London: The Thetford Ltd, and Verso Editions. Gilks, A. (1992) The Breakdown of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance, 1970–1979, China Research Monograph 39, Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. Godley, M. (1980) ‘A summer cruise to nowhere china and the Vietnamese Chinese in perspective’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, (4): 35 –59.

50 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people Grant, B. (1979) The Boat People: An ‘Age’ Investigation with Bruce Grant, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Han, X. (2009) ‘Spoiled guests or dedicated patriots? the Chinese in North Vietnam, 1954–78’, International Journal of Asian Studies, 6(1): 1–36. Ky, S. (1978) ‘The Hoa in Vietnam: some data’, in The Hoa In Vietnam Dossier, Hanoi: Documents of Vietnam Courier, Foreign Languages Publishing House: 19 –28. Lawson, E.K. (1984) The Sino-Vietnamese Conflict, New York, NY: Praeger Publishers. Lies Cannot (1978) ‘Lies Cannot Cover Up Facts, (by Renmin Ribao Commentator), (June 10, 1978)’, in On Viet Nam’s Expulsion of Chinese Residents, Peking: Foreign Languages Press: 120 –30. Mac, D. (1994a) The Hoa Society in Ho Chi Minh City After 1975: Potential and Developments, Nha Xuat Ban Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi. —— (1994b) ‘The Hoa in Ho Chi Minh City in the process of development’, Vietnam Social Sciences, 4(42): 33 – 46. Mignot, M. (1984) ‘Rapport sur les réfugiés du Vietnam’ [Report on the refugees from Vietnam], in Les réfugiés originaires de l’Asie du Sud-Est, monographies [The refugees from Southeast Asia. Monographs], Paris: La Documentation Française: 11– 49. Nguyen, K.V. (1985) Southern Vietnam (1975–1985), Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Nguyen, V.L. (1978) ‘The exodus fever in a border province’, in The Hoa In Vietnam: Dossier, Documents of Vietnam Courier, Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House: 52– 64. Note of the Foreign (1978) ‘Note of the Foreign Ministry of the People’s Republic of China to the Embassy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in China, (May 12,1978)’, in Documents Related to the Question of Hoa People in Vietnam, Hanoi: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Socialist Republic of Vietnam: 49 –53. On the Eve (1986) On the Eve of the VIth Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam: Vietnam 1976–1986, Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Porter, G. (1980) ‘Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese and the Sino-Vietnamese conflict’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 12(4): 55 – 60. —— (1982) ‘Vietnamese Policy and the Indochina crisis’, in D.W.P. Elliot (ed.) The Third Indochina Conflict, Boulder, CO: Westview Press: 69 –137. Power in Indo China (1981) ‘Power in Indo China since 1975’, Parliamentary Paper, 124, Canberra: Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence, the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. Quinn-Judge, P. (1985) ‘The Vietnam-China split: old ties remain, Indochina Issues, 53. Ross, R.R. (1988) The Indochina Tangle. China’s Vietnam Policy, 1975–1979, New York, NY: East Asian Institute, Columbia University, Columbia University Press. Skeldon, R. (1994) ‘Hong Kong’s response to the Indochinese influx, 1975–93, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, (534): 91–105. Socialist Transformation (1978) ‘“Socialist Transformation” or Anti-China, Expelthe-Chinese Campaign? (Commentary by Renmin Ribao Correspondent), (July 28, 1978)’, in On Viet Nam’s Expulsion of Chinese Residents, Peking: Foreign Languages Press: 176 – 80. Speech by Chung (1978) ‘Speech by Chung Hsi-tung, Leader of the Chinese Government Delegation, at the First Session of the Sino-Vietnamese Talks on the Question of Chinese Nationals Residing in Viet Nam, (August 8, 1978)’, in On Viet Nam’s Expulsion of Chinese Residents, Peking: Foreign Languages Press: 29 – 43.

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Statement by Chief (1978) ‘Statement by Chief Delegate Hoang Bich Son at the Fifth Session of the Vietnam-China Talks, (September 7, 1978)’, in The Hoa in Vietnam: Dossier II, Hanoi: edited by the Vietnam Courier: 79 – 87. Statement of the Ministry (1978) ‘Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China on the Expulsion of Chinese Residents by Viet Nam, (June 9, 1978)’, in On Viet Nam’s Expulsion of Chinese Residents, Peking: Foreign Languages Press: 7–17. Statement by Vice-Minister (1978) ‘Statement by Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Hoang Bich Son, Head of the Delegation of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam at the 2nd Session of the Vietnam-China Talks, (August 15, 1978)’, in The Hoa in Vietnam: Dossier II, Hanoi: Edited by the Vietnam Courier: 69 –78. Stern, L.M. (1985) Vietnamese Communist Policy Toward the Overseas Chinese, 1920– 82, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International. —— (1987) ‘The Hoa Kieu under the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’, Issues and Studies, 23(3): 111– 43. The Socialist (1985) The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Tran, K. (1992) ‘Ethnic Chinese still dominate’, Vietnam Investment Review, 24 February 24–1 March: 18. Tran, K. (1993) The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, Singapore: Indochina Unit, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. UNHCR (2005) ‘2005 UNHCR Statistical Yearbook Country Data Sheet—Viet Nam (Country Data Sheets, 30 April 2007)’. From the website on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) http://www.unhcr.org/4641bec311.html (accessed 18 August 2009). Untenable Arguments (1978) ‘Untenable Arguments of Vietnamese Authorities, (commentary by Xinhua correspondent), (July 25, 1978)’, in On Viet Nam’s Expulsion of Chinese Residents, Peking: Foreign Languages Press: 171–75. Vietnam Courier (1978) May. Vo, N.T. (1990) Vietnam’s Economic Policy Since 1975, Singapore: ASEAN Economic Research Unit, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Wain, B. (1981) The Refused: The Agony of the Indochinese Refugees, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Woodside, A. (1979) ‘Nationalism and poverty in the breakdown of Sino-Vietnamese relations’, Pacific Affairs, 52(3): 381– 409.

4

In search of the history of the Chinese in South Vietnam, 1945–75 Li Tana

Year 2008 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the peak of ‘Boat People’ exodus, a movement started at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. This war resulted in some three million people leaving their homes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. While much attention has been given to the boat people over the last three decades, little has been done on the society they left behind. Even less has been done on the overseas Chinese, who, as a group were made scapegoats for Hanoi’s inability to achieve socialism in the south, and who formed a large part of the boat people in the late 1970s. Despite the remarkable growth in China-related studies, much of the scholarship on the overseas Chinese of the last decade has showcased the intellectual poverty that went with the economic rationalism of the 1990s. Terms like ‘network capitalism’ and guanxi dominated the field, being described as uniquely Chinese (never mind that the term guanxi was a Japanese creation), and were widely used to account for Chinese economic success. If articulating class through an ethnic lens may seem a question of harmless rhetoric in the academic world, in Vietnam, the Chinese paid a high price for this categorization. As Wee and Chan point out, this process of essentializing the Chinese hides ongoing real-world processes of colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism (Wee and Chan 2006). This chapter tries to fill a gap in our knowledge and understanding of modern Vietnam and its southern society. It will focus on the crucial transitional period of the ethnic Chinese, particularly on the elites and the major business groups in post-colonial South Vietnam between 1945 and 1975.

Putting the Chinese back to South Vietnam: 1945–75 There are myths regarding the Chinese in Vietnam and the first is Cho Lon. It has been described as Vietnam’s ‘China Town’ and in the 1950s it was ranked as the ‘second largest Chinese city outside China, next only to Singapore’ (Purcell 1965:169; Chang 1982: 4). This public impression of Cho Lon crystallized the stereotype of the Chinese as a closed and unassimilated group. There, Chinese lived, spoke their own language, and sent back to China the money they made in Vietnam. This notion of a clearly alien group helped the Vietnamese government in 1976 to single out the ethnic Chinese as the targets of socialist revolution, and to describe Cho Lon,

In search of history 53 and curiously not Saigon as ‘the capitalist heart beating within socialist Vietnam’s body’. Yet, as Engelbert points out, Cho Lon has never been a totally Chinese town, and conversely, Saigon was always, until the beginning of the Indochina War, a city populated in the majority by Chinese rather than French or Viet. Viet people had made up a good half of Cho Lon’s inhabitants throughout the prewar period, and more than a half of Saigon’s inhabitants were Chinese (Engelbert 2008). Hybridism was a century-old tradition and a way of life in the south.2 Along with the Chinatown image it was also believed that there was a ‘Chinese economy’ in South Vietnam. According to Hanoi, the ethnic Chinese controlled 100 per cent of South Vietnam’s domestic wholesale trade, 50 per cent of retail, 70 per cent of foreign trade, and 80 per cent of industry (Nguyen Khac Vien 1981: 267). If indeed this was the case, the Chinese in Vietnam would have enjoyed the strongest economic position among all their contemporary counterparts in Southeast Asia. On the other side of the political equation, overseas Chinese presses of the 1970s also widely reported that huge Chinese fortunes were lost during Vietnam’s socialist transformation process; some estimated that the loss was two billion US dollars (Lung 1975). These assertions, driven by political agendas at the end of the Vietnam War, were accepted as truth and have never been independently tested. A critical assessment of the economic position of the Chinese ultimately have to be based on an understanding of the fundamental changes taking place in South Vietnam from 1945 to 1975, and a comparison between South Vietnam and its Southeast Asian neighbours. I will start the attempt first with the rice trade. Commercial rice production was the economic foundation of the Mekong delta from the early eighteenth century on, and the whole rice economy, from financing the planting to collection and transportation was all done in this location. The rice trade was the key business for the Chinese and the crux of the rice trade was the rice mills, most of which they owned. It was a major avenue for Chinese capital accumulation but things changed dramatically in the 1950–70s. Rice production was the first and foremost victim of the First and Second Indochina Wars. Rice exports in 1935 and 1936 were 1,500,000 metric tons (Annuaire statistique de l’Indochine 1936–37: 100). In South Vietnam’s last plentiful harvest (1962/1963), however, only one fifth of the rice of pre-war period (322,570 metric tons) was exported, although this was the highest exports of the post-1945 period (Sansom 1970: 101). Naturally rice milled in early 1950s Cho Lon was less than 20 per cent of that of the 1930s (Zhang 1956: 60). At the same time small mills mushroomed. Because of the running costs, the limited supply of rice favoured small mills rather than large ones. By 1958, rice milling, previously controlled by the Chinese in Cho Lon, had become virtually a villagelevel enterprise, and rice marketing became more a ‘neighbourhood’ operation, to which small farmers engaged directly (Sansom 1970: 99). The removal of the middlemen was hailed at the time. The breakdown of the Cho Lon Chinese monopoly on rice milling and trade was significant. It meant that this crucial Chinese business was affected from upstream to downstream. The erosion of the traditional rice-marketing system

54 Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people reflects the changes taking place in southern Vietnamese society, and profoundly changed the Chinese economic position in this society. Table 4.1 shows how much profit disappeared from this crucial sector of the Chinese economy. This table shows that while in the 1930s 60 per cent of profit from the rice sector went to the Chinese by the late 1950s, 40 per cent of this profit was gone (Dacy 1986: 115). The differential between paddy price in the Delta and that in Saigon virtually vanished. In fact, after Vietnam began to import rice on a large scale, rice price in the Mekong Delta—rice producing area—was 10–15 per cent higher than the consumer market of Saigon’s wholesale price. This loss of control of the rice economy was reflected in the following sectors: a.

b.

c.

Credit market. This was used to be shared by the Chinese. Traditionally, peasants borrowed from Chinese merchants and paid back in rice at harvest. It was called the ‘green crop loan’, and it was considered as a classic example of Chinese exploitation. In the 1960s, the big US dollars spent in the country seemed to have greatly eased credit conditions, such green-crop loans became uncommon in the Mekong delta (Sansom 1970: 109). Junk shipping. The industry was closely related to the rice trade, Chinese owned 5000 junks at the peak time in the 1930s. Once the monopoly was broken and rice mill became a neighbourhood industry in the 1950s, nine out of ten junks lay idle and shipping companies could not operate properly (Zhang 1956: 63). Rice mills. Many rice mills had changed hands since the 1930s and so had rice shops. According to a survey by South Vietnam’s Ministry of Economy in 1956, rice shops owned by different groups were as follows (Vietnam National Archives 1956):

It seems that in the long-settled areas of the Mekong delta: Ba Ria, My Tho, Tan An, and Go Gong, rice shops were virtually all Vietnamese-owned, and so was the Cao Dai area of Tay Ninh. Chinese retained their dominance in the Trans-Bassac or the Mien Tay area. As a Vietnamese source indicated, by 1957 60 per cent of rice exported was by Vietnamese rice exporters (Chan hung kinh te 1958:27). Table 4.1 Share of profit on rice trade in 1936 Recipient

Share (%)

Producer Middlemen Carriers Rice mills Public Treasury

26 33.6 21 5 14.4

Source: Robequain (1944: 346).

In search of history 55 If the 1950s saw a rapid decline of Chinese business in the rice trade and rice milling, from 1967 on they became even less relevant in this sector. Table 4.3 is South Vietnam’s rice exports for the 10 years between 1955 and 1964 (in 1000 metric tons). In 1967 alone, the United States organized 770,000 tons imported to South Vietnam (CIA Intelligence Report 1967),3 while the rice that South Vietnam exported from 1955 to 1959 was only 633,000 tons. From 1965 to 1975 South Vietnam imported rather than exported rice between 130,000 and 750,000 tons. The rice sector used Table 4.2 Rice shops in South Vietnam, 1956

Ba Ria Can Tho Gia Dinh Go Cong My Tho Soc Trang Rach Gia Bac Lieu Ha Tien Long Xuyen Tan An Tay Ninh Tra Vinh Saigon-Cholon Total

Viet

Chinese

Khmer

22 3 20 14 6 2 2 3 / / 12 33 4 147 235

/ 10 24 / / 13 14 10 7 10 1 / 11 85 185

/ / / / / / / / / / / / 1 / 1

Table 4.3 Vietnam’s rice export for the 10 years between 1955 and 1964 Year

Metric tons (1000)

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964

69 24 183 112 245 281 140 47 296 42

56

Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

to be controlled by the Hokkien, the richest dialect group among the Chinese, but between 1965 and 1968 when South Vietnam imported a large amount of US rice, many Hokkien merchants went bankrupt (Nguyen Van Huy 1993: 357). Furthermore, successive land reform during this period dramatically changed landownership in the Mekong Delta and created widespread peasant landownership. The vast majority of agricultural producers became middle peasants, who often directly engaged in rice milling and marketing (The 1975: 106). The term ‘rice merchant’ no longer implied ‘Chinese’ in the South. Many landownerfarmers became rice merchants themselves. Sansom reported that by 1967 it was common to encounter relatively large landowner-farmers doubling as rice merchants in the villages where they lived (Sansom 1970: 101). Vietnamese sources of the early 1970s acknowledged this situation. One journal article pointed out that ‘the Chinese monopoly of rice trade had changed: the army can transport rice quickly; there are many Vietnamese in the rice mills; and the situation is the same with the rice collecting sector’ (Khuong and Quoc 1970: 6). Existing scholarship has ignored this profound change and has continued to claim that Chinese dominated the rice sector (Tran 1993: 47), despite the fact that the decline in rice production and the import of US rice made the profit margin small and often caused losses during the War period. Furthermore, the example of the rice sector shows a fundamental problem of chronology-styled ‘Chinese in Vietnam’ studies (Tran 1993, Chau 1992). They share a critical weakness in failing to examine the Chinese economic position against the background of South Vietnamese society. Vietnam was not just a country in Southeast Asia. It was the focal point of the United States in Southeast Asia for the two decades between 1955 and 1975. More than 100 billion US dollars were spent on South Vietnam in those two decades. The majority of this expenditure and aid came through military and government channels, the very sectors where Chinese were absent. Was it possible that this excluded group still dominated the South Vietnamese economy, when the biggest piece of the economic pie was out of their reach? The following section examines the most profitable parts of this economic pie.

Ethnic Chinese investments in South Vietnam Contrary to the traditional pattern of foreign trade in southern Vietnam, where rice exports was the leading industry, during the Vietnam War period it was the import rather than the export sector that was profitable. As Dacy points out, the export sector was seriously affected not only because of the War but also because the Vietnamese government’s fixed exchange rate, a policy calculated to maximize US aid. It grossly overvalued the piaster (the local term for money) thus severely curtailed exports, because the prices of Vietnamese products were too high. This policy encouraged imports and discouraged exports, and stifled industrial and agricultural developments (Dacy 1986: 85). The claim that Chinese controlled 70 per cent of South Vietnam’s foreign trade cannot be sustained, if we note two basic facts. First is the export sector. Between 1956 and 1972 rubber—French owned—rather than rice produced two-thirds of

In search of history 57 Vietnam’s total value of exports. From 1973 to 1974 wood products and shrimp were the main stay of exports (Dacy 1986: 83). None of the three products was financed by the ethnic Chinese let alone controlled by them. Shrimp export, for example, was run by a Vietnamese businessman, Nguyen Ngoc Chuong, through his company Tan Nam Hai. In 1972 he was praised as the ‘most helpful’ in South Vietnam’s export (Tuan san kinh te tai chinh, 1973). Then there is the import sector. According to early 1970’s statistics from South Vietnam, ethnic Chinese occupied 45 per cent of the import sector, in rice and food stuff, tea and feathers, plastic and hardware (cited in Khuong and Quoc 1970: 69), while Vietnamese dominated the importation of livestock (13 out of 14 companies), medicine (66 out of 68), cement, bricks and chinaware (12 out of 13). The last items seemed to suggest that Vietnamese businessmen controlled materials related to construction, a sector important in the War period. Data from 1970 confirmed the trend about the Chinese and rice milling, and suggested that rice milling as a Chinese-controlled business no longer existed. The retail business was similarly shared by Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese. There were 6110 shops in Saigon that belonged to the first category of taxpayers (piaster $7000 tax per month), and 2492 were Chinese (41 per cent) (Huynh 1972: 100). That Vietnamese capital took up more than half of the profitable commercial sectors was an important departure of the economic order from the French period. To what extent was this result of the War? What we certainly see is that along with the remaking of the power structure there was a redistribution of resources and these changes largely reshaped the lives of both Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese in the society of South Vietnam. The banking sector shows the merging of interests between ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese. As Suehiro observed, while industrial leaders tended to collaborate with foreign capital, commercial bankers built their businesses through direct connections with political power holders (Suehiro 1989: 67). In 1974, purely Chinese capital in banking was only nine per cent while 49 per cent was capital of mixed Vietnamese and Chinese origin (Trinh, et al. 1983: 22). This seemed to indicate links between top Chinese businessmen and Viet government and military leaders. Among the 40,000 capitalists in South Vietnam, 10,000 were senior army officers (Dang 2002: 885). Table 4.4 Rice mills in South Vietnam, 1970 Region

Total number of mills

Ethnic Chinese owned

Percentage

I II III IV Total

240 121 253 801 1414

26 18 46 262 352

10.8 14.8 18.2 32.7 24.9

Source: Nguyen Van Sang (1974: 22).

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Revisiting an era of refugees and boat people

In this ali-baba alliance of the Viet and Chinese capital, Vietnamese capital was the dominant partner. One indication of this is that in 1971, Chen Cheng, a leading Teochiu Chinese, was congratulated for taking a position of the manager of the Chinese business desk of a secondary bank, the Meijiang Bank. Unlike contemporary Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines where Chinese capital played an important role (Twang Peck Yang 1998: 21), for most of the three decades covered by this study, South Vietnam did not lack capital, because of United States aid. The most remarkable change of role for the ethnic Chinese was their move to industry. The experiences of other Southeast Asian countries show that it was at the level of major industries that one finds most clearly displayed the nexus of business, politics and the state. This nexus has been central to the Southeast Asian capitalist upsurge (McVey 1992: 9). To understand the Chinese in South Vietnam this certainly should be an important dimension, as 80 per cent of investment in industry was Chinese capital, which was agreed by all parties: Hanoi and Saigon officials, and the Saigon Chinese. Woodside points out that in the 1970s, Saigon produced most of Southeast Asia’s laundry powder, candy bars, salad oil, and cigarettes (Woodside 1979: 3). A leading Vietnamese economist, Dang Phong, comments that the steadiest investment in industry was by the Chinese. One of the leading Chinese in industry was Ly Long Than (Li Liang Chen in Chinese pinyin). He owned textile factory VINATEXCO, salad oil factory NAKYDACO, and sugar candy factory called LUBICO. The textile factory was founded in 1960, in answer to the South Vietnamese government’s call to develop more industries. Half of the capital, machines and technicians were supported by the Taiwanese government and the other half was raised by the Chinese in South Vietnam. There are certain trades that indicate closer relations between the ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese power holders. For example, scrap metal contracts during the War. Ly Long Than was able to receive most of these contracts and these scrap iron and steel formed the raw material of his steel factory the VICASA (Dang 2002: 886). Import businesses engaged in farm machinery may also need some attention. Because the widespread use of farm machinery in South Vietnam in the early 1970s, this import item was profitable and thus may have required closer relations with the regime. There was one Teochiu company carrying out business in this sector (Ou 1979:109). It would be also interesting to see how many tenders for military logistics were Chinese. It seemed that at least between the late 1960s and 1975 (or the Second Republic period) many Chinese felt inclined towards integration into the surrounding society. Chinese were running for local seats in parliament and campaigning for their Vietnamese associates. It was increasingly difficult to tell the ethnic ownership of companies by their directors, a result of frequent ethnic intertwined relationships built between the two. Advertisements for night schools teaching the Vietnamese language filled the pages of Chinese newspapers. All this suggests ethnic Chinese had taken initiatives in their integration (shared language, intermarriage, joint businesses and some political alliances) into South Vietnamese society.

In search of history 59 Chinese Vietnamese constituted the majority of those who fled to Hong Kong in the late 1970s. Largely gone with them was the history of the Chinese in the war period and upon the broken pieces many myths have been constructed. This chapter represents a preliminary search into this lost history.

Notes 1 A notable exception is the work of Thomas (Engelbert 2008) on the economic role of the Chinese during the first Indochina conflict up to 1954. As Christopher Goscha has argued, there is a need for research to take a regional perspective if we are to ‘liberate’ studies of the war from ‘their fiercely nationalist strait-jacket’ (Goscha 2000: 1018). 2 Cải lương opera is an example. Although it is described as a Vietnamese national theatrical form influenced by Vietnamese Tuong opera and French modern drama (see the official website of Ho Chi Minh City Council www.hochiminhcity.gov.vn), Chinese influence was clear, and the most well known Cải lương actor was a Minh Huong named Phuong Hao, whose father was from Heshan, Guangdong. It was believed that General Nguyen Khanh, the prime minister of South Vietnam in 1964 was Phuong Hao’s son (Feng Feng 1987: 319). 3 Out of which 100,000 tons were from Thailand, 20,000 from Taiwan and the rest from the United States. 4 A leading bank, Ky Thuong Ngan Hang, was reportedly to be established by Ma Hy, a Teochiu rice merchant, together with President Nguyen Van Thieu’s wife.

Bibliography National Statistical Reports (n.d.)Annuaire statistique de l’Indochine 1936–37 [National statistical reports: Southeast Asia], Leiden, The Netherlands: IDC, microfiches. Bao, N. (1995) The Sorrow of War, New York: Pantheon. Brocheux, P. (1995) The Mekong Delta: Ecology, Economy. And the Revolution, 1860– 1960, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Chang, Pao-min (1982) Beijing, Hanoi, and the Overseas Chinese, Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies. Chau, H. (1992), Các nhóm công đông ngươi Hoa  ơ Viêt Nam [Community groups of the Overseas Chinese in Viet Nam], Hanoi: Khoa học xã hôi. Chan hung kinh te [Journal of Revitalising the Economy], 60 (17 April 1958). CIA Intelligence Report (1967) ‘The situation in South Vietnam’, no. 339/67, 27 February. Clayton, J. (1970) The Economic Impact of the Cold War, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Curley, M. (1974). Investment Behavior and Institutional Change in Rural South Vietnam, PhD thesis, University of Kentucky. Dacy, D.C. (1986) Foreign aid, War, and Economic Development, Cambridge University Press. Dang, P. (2002) L ich sử kinh tê Việt Nam, 1945–2000 [An economic history of Vietnam, 1945–2000], Hanoi: Khoa hoc xa hoi. Elliott, D (2003) The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975, 2 vols., Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Engelbert, Thomas (2008), ‘Vietnamese-Chinese Relations in Southern Vietnam during the First Indochina Conflict’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies (Oct), Vol. 3, No. 3: 191–230.

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Feng, Feng (1987) Xigong san shi nian [30 years in Saigon], Hong Kong: Wah Fung Books. Fischer, H. D. (ed.) (1986) Outstanding International Press Reporting: Pulitzer Prize Winning Articles in Foreign Correspondence, vol. 3, Berlin & New York: W. de Gruyter. Goscha, C.E. (2000) ‘The borders of Vietnam’s early wartime trade with Southern China: a contemporary perspective’, Asian Survey, 40(6): 987–1018. Chinese Traders Convention (1976) Huaqiao jingji nianjian (1975–76) [Overseas Chinese yearbook], Taipei: World Chinese Traders Convention General Liaison Office. Huynh, Truong Tan (1972) “Vai tro Hoa Kieu trong nen kinh te Viet Nam” [The role of the Chinese in Vietnam’s economy], MA thesis. Jacobs, S. (2004) America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race and US Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Khuong, Huu Dien and Quoc An, “Cho Lon”, Nguyet san Quan tri Xi nghiep [Journal of enterprises], 3 (August 1970). Lawson, E. (1984) The Sino-Vietnamese conflict, New York: Praeger. Lung, C-I. (1975) ‘Yuenan lunxian hou huaqiao jingji suo zaoshou de sunshi’ [Loss of the Chinese economy after the fall of South Vietnam], Sihai yijia, Taipei, no.12, 15 August. Marr, David and White, C. (eds) (1988) Postwar Vietnam: Dilemmas in Socialist Development, Ithaca: SEAP. McVey, R. (1995) ‘Change and continuity in Southeast Asian studies’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 26(1): 1–9. Ngo, V.L. (1991) ‘Vietnam’, in Douglas Allen and Ngo Vinh Long (eds) Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States and the War, Boulder: Westview Press. Nguyen, Khac Vien (1981) Contemporary Vietnam: 1858–1980, Hanoi: Red River. Nguyen, Van Huy (1993) Nguoi Hoa tai Viet Nam [The Chinese in Vietnam], California: NBC Press. Nguyen, Van Sang (1974) ‘Nguoi Viet goc Hoa va kinh te Viet Nam’ [Chinese Vietnamese and Vietnam’s economy], MA thesis, University of Quoc gia Hanh Chanh, Ban cao hoc kinh te, khoa 8. Ou, Qinghe (1979) Jie hou Xigong: Xigong lun wang ji xu ji [Post-war Saigon: a record of Saigon’s fall] Hong Kong: Jintian Wenhua Gongshi. Pelley, P.M. (2002) Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past, Durham: Duke University Press. Purcell, Victor (1965) The Chinese in Southeast Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robequain, C. (1944) The Economic Development of French Indo-China, trans. I.A. Wood, London and New York: Oxford University Press. Sansom, L.R. (1970) The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. Scott, J.C. (1989) Indochina’s Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shirashi, M. (1990) Japanese Relations with Vietnam: 1951–1987, Ithaca, NY: SEAP, Cornell. Stanford Research Institute (1968) Land Reform in Vietnam, Stanford, CA: Stanford Research Institute for the Republic of Vietnam and the United States Agency for International Development. Suehiro, Akira (1989) Capital Accumulation in Thailand, 1855–1985, Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies.

In search of history 61 Taylor, P. (2001) Fragments of the Present: Searching for Modernity in Vietnam’s South, Sydney and Honolulu: Allen and Unwin/University of Hawaii Press. The, T.H. (1975) ‘The economics of the rice industry in South Vietnam’, MA thesis, Australian National University. Tran, Khanh (1993) The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Trinh, T., Tran, Q.T. and Viet, T. (1983) Nhung ‘hoang de khong ngai’ [The kings without crowns], Ho Chi Minh City: Ho Chi Minh City Press. Tuan san kinh te tai chinh (1973) [Economy and finance weekly], 1 (24 Feb 1973). Twang, Peck Yang (1998) The Chinese Business Elite in Indonesia and the Transition to Independence, 1940–1950, New York: Oxford University Press. Ungar, E. (1989) ‘The Nationalist and an Overseas Chinese Community’, in John Fitzgerald (ed.) The Nationalists and Chinese Society, 1923–1937: A Symposium, Melbourne: Melbourne University History Monographs, no. 4. Vietnam National Archives (1956) no. 2, file 07. 10119 PTTDI. Võ, Nhân Trí (1990) Vietnam’s Economic Policy since 1975, Singapore: ASEAN Economic Research Unit, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Wee, V. and Chan, Y. W. (2006) ‘Ethnicity and Capital: Changing Relations Between China and Southeast Asia,’ Journal of Contemporary Asia, 36(3): 328 – 49. Woodside, A. (1979) ‘Nationalism and poverty in the breakdown of Sino-Vietnamese relations’, Pacific Affairs, 52(3): 381– 409. Zhang, Wenhe (1956) Yuenan Gaomian Liaoguo Hua qiao jing ji [Chinese economies in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos], Taipei: Haiwai chubanshe.

Part II

Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement

5

The Vietnamese minority Boat people settlement in Hong Kong Yuk Wah Chan and Terence C. T. Shum

According to the last Hong Kong government census in 2006, there are 2994 Vietnamese in Hong Kong (HKCSD 2009). Around one fourth are men, the others are women. Most of the 2200 women are homemakers, while around 750 are employees. One reason for this overwhelming feminine presence is intermarriages between Hong Kong men and Vietnamese women. However, as mentioned in the introduction of this volume, we estimate that the actual number of Vietnamese migrants is much higher than this. Many of the Chinese Vietnamese who came to Hong Kong either before, or within the periods of the refugee waves, would not claim to belong to the Vietnamese group. A number of Vietnamese informants also said that after obtaining the Hong Kong identity card of permanent residency, they might not claim to be Vietnamese. To some, it is better to under-communicate their Vietnamese identity, as the name ‘Vietnamese’ still entails much social taboo relating to bad images of the boat people and would thus incur discrimination. No comprehensive study has yet been done on the Vietnamese minority in Hong Kong. In the 1980s and 1990s, news reports and writings about the Vietnamese boat people were abundant. Most of these concerned government policies towards the boat people, their treatment in the camps and incidents of violence. Some scholars have written about refugee camp life, shifts in government policies and resettlement measures (Freeman and Nguyen 2003; Chan 1990, 1995; Davis 1991; Hitchcox 1990). Pressure to close the refugee camps escalated due to the pending reversion of sovereignty to China in 1997. In 2000, when the last open camp in Tuen Mun (Pillar Point) closed,1 the remaining over two thousand Vietnamese who were not eligible to be resettled were given Hong Kong residency and became a part of Hong Kong society. Social debates about the Vietnamese came to a halt, and matters related to them were consigned to history. Nothing further was heard about any problems that the settlers might have had. Little support was provided by the Hong Kong government to them when they were leaving the camps. The Vietnamese community in Hong Kong does not only consist of this last group. Indeed, many boat people had left the camps during the late 1990s. Most of these were Vietnamese women who married Hong Kong men. There is no way to trace how many such females left the camps for this reason during those years.

66

Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement

Our informants believe that there were at least one thousand single women who left the camps because of marriage, and they assume among the dominantly feminine Vietnamese population today, over 70 per cent have married inter-culturally with Hong Kong men. These Vietnamese women ‘quietly’ settled into Hong Kong families; they have drawn very little attention from society. No one has asked if this minority group succeeded in adapting to local life. Besides these former boat people, women from Vietnam continued to marry into Hong Kong families through a transnational network between Vietnam and Hong Kong in the last decade. Among these border-crossing brides, a number of them were actually boat people who were repatriated to Vietnam in the late 1990s. After a few years back in Vietnam, they found their way back to Hong Kong (see Chapter 12). To examine the adaptation and integration of the Vietnamese in Hong Kong, we conducted a survey on the Vietnamese in the summer of 2009. Our survey was done through snowball sampling in our connection networks which are mostly comprised of Vietnamese women who arrived in Hong Kong in the years of 1988 and 1989 and have married locally. This is why our survey subjects are predominantly women. This result coincides with the government survey which also shows that the Vietnamese population is dominated by females (73.4 per cent). One hundred and eighty questionnaires were distributed and 132 were returned. In addition to distributing questionnaires, we also conducted interviews and ethnographic observation in the Vietnamese communities. This chapter is an early attempt to examine the Vietnamese community in Hong Kong which was established in the last two decades.

Survey on the Vietnamese community Basic information In this study, of the 132 respondents, 13 (10%) respondents are male and 118 (with one missing) (89.4%) are female. The youngest respondents are 22 years old and the oldest respondent is 70 years old. The majority of the respondents are aged between 21 and 50, 41 (32%) are aged 21–30, 49 (38%) are aged 31–40, and 29 (22%) are aged 41–50. The median age of the respondents is 36 years old (Table 5.1). Most respondents are from the north: 65.2 per cent came from Hai Phong, 7.6 per cent from Quang Ninh and 3.8 per cent from Hai Noi. In terms of marital Table 5.1 Age of informants 31–40 21–30 41–50 51–60 61–70 Highest 70

Median 36

38% 32% 22% 6% 2% Lowest 22

The Vietnamese minority

67

status, 74 per cent are married, 8 per cent are divorced, 6.5 per cent are single, and 5.6 per cent are remarried. Only three people indicated they are Chinese Vietnamese. Regarding their level of education, most received their education in Vietnam. A total of 99 (75%) have a secondary school education (72 of which have finished senior secondary school); 13 (9.8%) have received tertiary training; and one (0.8%) has studied at university. A total of 17 respondents report that they have obtained education in Hong Kong: three (2.3%) have had primary education, 11 (8.3%) reached secondary school level, two (1.5%) with college education, and one (0.8%) had university education (Table 5.2). Over 90 per cent of them use both Cantonese and Vietnamese as their daily languages. A total of 65.2 per cent of the respondents arrived in Hong Kong in 1988 and 1989, the two years that saw a new wave of Vietnamese refugees arrive due to internal economic crisis. The majority of the respondents had spent some time in boat people camps: 85 (64.4%) people spent 1–11 years in refugee camps. Of these, 44 (33%) had lived in the camps for six to seven years. There were 27 people (20.4%) who had been repatriated to Vietnam and returned to Hong Kong due to marriage and family union. Around 90 per cent of the respondents are working. A larger number of them (55) are sales workers, factory workers, and conducting small businesses; 14 are housewives. The median monthly income is $8,000. In respect to their living arrangements, many 56 (44.4%) live in public housing, 40 (31.7%) live in rental accommodation and 30 (23.8%) live in self-owned private housing. Of the 106 respondents who answered the question about the ethnicity of the husband, 94 respondents had Hong Kong husbands while 12 were married to Vietnamese men. Sixty-six per cent of all respondents have one to two children. The youngest child is aged three months while the oldest is aged 41. The majority of the children are aged between 1 and 18; 21 (22%) are aged 1–5; 32 (33%) are aged 6–10; another 32 (33%) are aged 11–18. The median age of children is 10. Family life Over half of the respondents (55.3%) said that their family life is ‘fair’, 30.3 per cent say that it is happy while 2.3 per cent is not happy. As for the husband–wife Table 5.2 Level of education received in Hong Kong and Vietnam Hong Kong No education Secondary Primary College University

40.9% 8.3% 2.3% 1.5% 0.8%

Vietnam Senior secondary Junior secondary Tertiary Primary No education University

54.5% 20.5% 9.8% 7.6% 0.8% 0.8%

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relationship, around 44 per cent say that it is so-so, 34.8 per cent say that it is harmonious and 4.5 per cent say that it is not. Up to 56.1 per cent are emotionally attached to the spouse’s family and 62.9 per cent say that ‘building a happy family is the main goal of life’. Most respondents worry for their kids’ education and will feel regret if their kids cannot speak Vietnamese (64.4%). Social life and adaptation The Vietnamese community is the major source of support for Vietnamese in Hong Kong. A majority of them mainly mingle with other Vietnamese. Around 92 per cent of the respondents have Vietnamese as their closest friends and around half (51.5%) have close Hongkongese friends. Most of them (111) seek emotional support from other Vietnamese in Hong Kong. A majority (102 respondents) seek help from Vietnamese relatives and friends in Hong Kong when they meet with financial difficulties. The second most popular channel of help is Vietnamese in Vietnam (34) and then Hongkongese relatives and friends in Hong Kong (28). About 72 percent (95) say that they make friends with Hongkongese easily, but 25 people find this difficult. A majority (82, 62%) believe that only some Hongkongese like to make friends with Vietnamese. When settling into Hong Kong, the foremost difficulty for them is language learning (65.9%) and job seeking (58.3%). A majority (102, 77.2%) will seek help from other Vietnamese when they have difficulties in adapting to Hong Kong life. For some (73, 55.3%), the ‘spouse’ is also one source of help. Only a few respondents say that they have sought help from social organizations (11) and the Hong Kong government (6). A majority (88%) agree that the government should help Vietnamese more and should show more concern for them. Most say that they need more free assistance in finding a job (101) and language learning (94). Some major barriers for them to adapt to Hong Kong life includes the language barrier (62) and differences in ways of thinking (42). Quite a large number of respondents (81) say they do not feel easy in a social setting where there are only Hongkongese, and 23 people think that discrimination makes it hard for them to adapt to Hong Kong life. Transnational connections and keeping the Vietnamese identity A total of 114 respondents say that they are Vietnamese, but less than half will keep their Vietnamese nationality (40.2%). Among the 117 who answered the question ‘my life follows Vietnamese traditions and morality’, 101 (76.5%) say yes and 16 (12.1%) say ‘more or less’. We then ask about five kinds of morals and traditions; the responses are shown in Table 5.3. Of the five traditions and virtues, ‘respecting husband’ gets the lowest scores. A majority of respondents (110, 83.3%) will try to instil Vietnamese virtues and identity in their children; 85 (64.4%) people will regret if their children cannot speak Vietnamese. Also, a majority (101, 76.5%) believe that most Vietnamese would help other Vietnamese in need.

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Table 5.3 Upholding traditional values Filial piety Respecting seniors Respecting husband Worshipping ancestors Celebrating Tet (New Year) in Vietnamese way

118 (89.4%) 115 (87.1%) 84 (63.6%) 105 (79.5%) 111 (84.1%)

For the question about inter-cultural marriage, 44 people (33.3%) prefer a Vietnamese to marry a Hongkongese, and the same amount of people prefer a Vietnamese to marry a Vietnamese. But there are a significant number of respondents who refused to answer these questions (the missing numbers of responses for the above two questions are 52, 39.4 per cent and 57, 43.2 per cent respectively). Most respondents (94.7%) have kept their connections with Vietnam through periodic visits to families and friends in Vietnam. They also send money back to Vietnam. Many claim that parents and family are the things that they miss most about Vietnam. Building up a new identity Most respondents (104, 78.8%) like the Hong Kong way of life more than life in Vietnam, and 113 (85.6%) people agree that Hong Kong is more modern than Vietnam. About 65.2 per cent say that they see Hong Kong as their home. A fair number of them (54, 40.9%) would consider to moving back to Vietnam at an older age. The same percentage of people (53, 40.2%) hope and do not hope their Vietnamese families to move to Hong Kong. As for the question about the possibility to migrate to another country, 12.9 per cent say yes, 51.5 per cent say no, and 35.6 per cent did not answer. We asked three questions about the changes in their identity. Results are shown in Table 5.4. Overall, close to half (47.7%) of the respondents say that their life in Hong Kong is happy, 27.3 per cent say that life is fairly happy; 22 per cent of the respondents have not answered the question.

Marrying up, marrying down Both popular and academic understanding of transnational intercultural marriages often portray the women marrying out to foreign husbands as people marrying up while men going across borders to find a spouse as marrying down. Our study reveals a less straightforward outcome. More than half of our respondents have received a senior secondary school education. Another 20 per cent have received an education up to junior secondary school. In the survey, we have not asked questions about the husbands, but from our field visits and interviews with

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Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement Table 5.4 Senses of identity among the Vietnamese I am a Hongkongese I am becoming a Hongkongese I feel that I am adapting to Hong Kong life but I don’t feel that I have become a Hongkongese

78 (59.1%) yes, 34 (25.8%) no 79 (59.8%) yes, 28 (21.2%) no 49 (37.1%) yes, 63 (47.7% no

core informants, we learned that these husbands are mostly lowly educated grassroot workers and are ten to twenty years older than their wives. As Constable has noted, ‘… as transnational global marriage-scapes are concerned, sometimes it is difficult to tell which way is up’ (Constable 2005: 16; also see Freeman 2005 and Thai 2005). Many Vietnamese women are actually of higher education than their husbands and are economically independent. They have ‘married down’ to low-skilled and older men in Hong Kong. Most of the informants participated in this research came to Hong Kong by making rough sea voyages, and had attempted to obtain refugee status. Having failed in getting refugee status, the only way to avoid repatriation was to marry local men. A popular view of Vietnamese women who marry Hong Kong men is that they do not marry for love, but for the right of abode and money. While it is true that they married to get a chance to stay, it is not true that they married for money. As explained by our informants, during their days in the camp, women had to pay US$1000 ‘go-between fee’ to the middle person who introduced them a Hong Kong man. Some women also had to pay the family of the husband a few tens of thousands. There is also negative stereotype that Vietnamese women are sexually promiscuous. A 26-year-old Vietnamese woman who has been married to a Hong Kong man for six years said that her sister-in-law often uses a sarcastic tone when talking about Vietnamese women, saying that these women might run away from their husbands. One evening, while I was eating dinner with a Hong Kong-Vietnamese couple and their ten-year-old daughter, I commented that the daughter looked very much like her father. Upon hearing this, the husband responded, ‘Luckily, otherwise, I will think she might be screwing around.’ The Hong Kong husband of another informant said that although his parents did not say anything when he decided to marry a Vietnamese woman from the camp, some of his close friends had warned him, ‘Those women only want to use you to stay in Hong Kong, they stick to a man as long as they can stay.’ Such suspicions linger on between some couples and between the Vietnamese wife and her husband’s family. As confirmed by our informants, fake marriages do exist.2 The man would receive a sum of money from the Vietnamese woman. The women married to the Hong Kong men till they got a Hong Kong identity card to get a divorce. Some divorced the husbands when the relationships could not work out. News of divorces or problematic husband-wife relationships spread quickly among the Vietnamese community. Such cases have their social role to play. Those who

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have made up their mind to establish a happy family and stable life for their children often warn each other about the dangers of a bad husband–wife relationship and the bad behaviour of Hong Kong husbands. Such stories actually acted as ‘reminders’ for the Vietnamese women making them more conscious of winning the heart of their husbands or share ways to cope with their bad behaviour. For many, however unpromising the marriage, the bad consequences that a divorce might bring for their children and themselves will prevent them from getting a divorce. One extreme case I heard was that the husband and wife had not talked to each other for 20 years. All communication, if possible, was done through the son.

A self-dependent minority Though facing all sorts of negative stereotypes, the Vietnamese women were quick to adapt to local life. After settling in Hong Kong for over 10 years, most of them have jobs and are economically independent. Over 75 per cent of them say that they have work of some sort. Because of the relatively homogenous background of the Vietnamese women, these female settlers have been supporting each other and many have found jobs and other support through community networks. Typical jobs include construction worker, restaurant waitress/chef or tourist guide. Because most of them are from Haiphong, many will visit Vietnam together with their children during Tet (Vietnamese New Year) and summer. For those who are busy working in Hong Kong, they may even let other mothers take their children back to Vietnam. The ethnic network also provides childcare support for the women. Babysitting and domestic work open a number of informal job opportunities for these women and allow others to find employment in the city. Thus, with their closely knitted ethnic network, the Vietnamese have emerged as a minority not as vulnerable as other minority groups like the ‘new arrival’ women from mainland China. The Vietnamese–Hong Kong Chinese families are also less dependent on social welfare (HKCSD 2008).3 Many informants stressed to me that it is rare for Vietnamese to fail to find a job. ‘In a society like Hong Kong, it is not hard for Vietnamese to make a living,’ one informant stressed. ‘The Vietnamese are very hard-working and talented in saving money,’ another informant told me.

Discrimination and susceptible identity Among the boat people-turned Vietnamese migrants, though having obtained a Hong Kong identity card, many are not yet Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) passport holder. A large number of them did not hold any identity papers when they fled Vietnam, and some had sojourned for a number of years in China before reaching Hong Kong. For these different reasons, though having settled into Hong Kong, they are still stateless. Many hold a type of passports named DI (Document of Identification), which implies that the holder is a ‘stateless’ person. Some had encountered bad experiences when they attempted

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to apply for a HKSAR passport. The application requires a number of procedures and is subject to the discretion of the Immigration Department. To many, the applying process for the passport looks like the thanh loc (the screening in the camp) investigation they had experienced during the days in the camps. One Chinese-Vietnamese woman said: My father has tried to apply for the Hong Kong passport, but the immigration people asked us to prove that we have abandoned our Vietnamese nationality. But when we got out from the camp, they said that we are stateless. My passport is written ‘stateless’. Where should we go to for abandoning a nationality we don’t have? My father paid $5000 already to the people in Vietnam to get the relevant papers, but he still can’t get a Hong Kong passport. Even today, the Hong Kong government is still holding discriminative immigration policy against Vietnamese nationals. The immigration guidelines of the Immigration Department of Hong Kong state that nationals of Afghanistan, Albania, Cambodia, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Nepal and Vietnam would be restricted to the following areas: • • • • • • •

Employment as professionals or entry for investment Non-local graduates Employment as imported workers Employment as foreign domestic helpers Training Study Quality migrant admission scheme.

While many other former first asylum countries and places already import Vietnamese as non-skilled labourers and domestic workers (such as Vietnamese domestic helpers in Macau and Vietnamese low-skilled labourers in Malaysia), Hong Kong still keep the discriminatory regulation against the Vietnamese. We have posed the question to the Immigration Department ‘why there are such restrictions against the Vietnamese’, and whether these restrictions have anything to do with the refugee history. The Immigration Department did not answer our questions directly. Instead, it said this: Based on the present immigration regulation and security considerations, applications for work, study and quality migrant admission do not apply to eight types of nationals; Vietnamese are one of these. We take on Vietnamese cases on an individual basis. Having adapted to the Hong Kong way of life, many Vietnamese, however, still feel detached. One informant described her feelings like this: I can say to you with all my heart, I really sincerely want to integrate into Hong Kong and become a Hong Kong person. But many Hong Kong people

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do not allow me to do so. Like the family of my husband, they never really treat me like a Hong Kong person. They make me feel that I am a foreigner. Institutional and social discrimination described above accentuate the Vietnamese’s detachment and reduce their sense of belonging. As shown in our survey, more than one-third of them say that ‘I feel that I am adapting to Hong Kong life but I don’t feel that I have become a Hongkongese’. The susceptibility of the sense of identity of the refugee migrants is further aggravated when husband-wife relationship is breaking down. One informant described her situation as follows: When we decided to leave Vietnam in those days, our aim was to go abroad to the West, like those who had gone before. To be honest, we did not aim at Hong Kong. Many of us married locally since we did not have a choice. Now we are married and have children. As long as the husband and wife relationship is alright, our life will be alright, and we will be happy in Hong Kong. However, if something happens in the family, then we surely would like to go on and leave. Hong Kong is not our homeland, we live here, but we do not have a great emotional attachment to this place. Some people may want to go back to Vietnam when they get old. I do not want that. If there is a chance, I want to go abroad. Life there is more stable, and the air quality is better, I have a number of friends in Canada and other places. To some of the Vietnamese migrants, Hong Kong remains a transitory ‘asylum’ to them. Experiencing discrimination and subordination locally, they seek intimate relationships within their own ethnic groups that span across state borders. They are susceptible to changes in family relationships in Hong Kong and to further ‘migration calls’ from the overseas Vietnamese communities as well as from nostalgia towards que huong (meaning hometown). Almost 41 per cent in the survey would like to move back to Vietnam to spend their old age.

Conclusion: refugee migration and ‘refugeeing’ The urge for a better life and the hope of a brighter future had brought many Vietnamese to risk their lives on a risky voyage to join the refugee exodus. Most of the informants in this survey have found life in Hong Kong basically satisfactory. However, if there is a chance, many will still find better life elsewhere. In the last decade, the refugee migrants have formed a locus networking new arranged marriages between Hong Kong men and Vietnamese women, including repatriated boat people who were once in the camps (see last chapter in this volume). Arranged marriage, an old custom in many traditional societies, has become a modern method of border-crossing migration, especially between developing and developed countries and regions. Within the developing world, Vietnam is one of those ‘exporters’ of wives for neighbouring developed states. Besides ethnic networks that link up potential brides and grooms across borders, there are also syndicates conducting illegal trafficking of women and coerced

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marriages arranged between the syndicates and parents, without full consent of the young women (USDS 2009). Although the Vietnamese refugee era ended two decades ago, migration desire remains high in Vietnam. Vietnam is a unique place in Southeast Asia producing most border-crossing brides, constituting a new pool of ‘replica refugees’ in an age without refugees. Arranged marriage has been promoted and organized by the vast overseas Vietnamese community across the globe. While Vietnamese women in Hong Kong search Hong Kong husbands for their relatives and friends back home, overseas Vietnamese migrants in America return to Vietnam to look for young wives (Thai 2008). Our informants told us that each Vietnamese wife in Hong Kong had brought in two to three more Vietnamese brides over the past two decades. Doreen Massey (1994) has written on the concept of ‘power geometry’. To her, globalization and migration has allowed more and more frequent transnational flows, but not all people have the same power over such mobility. Some are more in charge of such mobility while others at the receiving end (1994: 149). While the global elite class includes those who are commanding the power of mobility, the Vietnamese, especially those from the poorer parts of Vietnam, are at the receiving end of global mobility. However, with a ‘powerful’ overseas Vietnamese community that spreads worldwide since the previous refugee migration era, those at the receiving end would act out various ‘transnational’ strategies to make possible mobility otherwise impossible. Many of the Vietnamese migrants we study here once risked their life in exchange for this mobility. Without a chance to resettle in a third country, they risked their personal wellbeing (marriage) and bet on an uncertain future by marrying local men that they had no idea about. This kind of practice is still prevalent in the post-refugee era of today. In the survey, we ask the respondents what they treasure most about Hong Kong, the most common answers are ‘freedom’ and ‘people live independently’. Ho Chi Minh, the greatly respected leader of Vietnam, has pledged to bring to Vietnamese people dan dau, doc lop va tu do (wealth, independence and freedom) through his revolutionary struggles half a century ago. Ironically, in the last few decades, many had to flee Vietnam to find these. Today, Vietnam has become much richer than before, the desire for personal ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ elsewhere, however, seem to continue to push Vietnamese people out of Vietnam.

Notes 1 Over the 30 years of the refugee era, the Hong Kong government had operated a total of 14 refugee camps; of which five were open camps, and nine were closed. 2 Bogus marriage is an offence in Hong Kong. It has been widely discussed particularly after the handover in 1997 when cross-border marriage between mainland Chinese women and Hong Kong men has increased. Most offences involved marriages between Hong Kong persons and mainland Chinese. In 2008, 143 mainland residents and 116 Hong Kong residents were convicted of offences relating to bogus marriages (HKID 2009).

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3 In Hong Kong, ‘new arrival’ refers to those who have resided in Hong Kong for less than seven years, including new migrants from mainland China and other countries. The Hong Kong government has compiled data on ‘new arrival’ CSSA (Comprehensive Social Security Assistance) recipients since 1999. Most of these years saw the number of recipients exceed 40,000. The majority of these are mainland Chinese.

Bibliography Chan, Kwok Bun (1990) ‘Getting through suffering: Indochinese refugees in limbo 15 years later’, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 18(1): 94 –110. —— (1995) ‘The Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong’, in Robin Cohen (ed.), The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Constable, Nicole (ed.) (2005) Cross-border marriages: gender and mobility in transnational Asia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 380–85. Leonard, Davis (1991) Hong Kong and the asylum-seekers from Vietnam, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Freeman, Caren (2005) ‘Marrying up and marrying down: the paradoxes of marital mobility for Chosonjok brides in South Korea’, in Nicole Constable (ed.), Cross-border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 80–100. Freeman, James M. and Nguyen Ðình Huu (2003) Voices from the Camps: Vietnamese Children Seeking Asylum, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Hitchcox, Linda (1990) Vietnamese Refugees in Southeast Asian Camps, Basingstoke: Macmillan. HKCSD (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department) (2009) 2006 Census. Available online at http://www.bycensus2006.gov.HongKong/FileManager/EN/Content_981/ c114e.xls (accessed 9 June 2009). HKCSD (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department) (2008) Hong Kong Monthly Digest of Statistics, available online at http://www.statistics.gov.hk/publication/ feature_article/B70707FA2007XXXXB0100.pdf (accessed 17 September 2009). HKID (Hong Kong Immigration Department) (2009) available online at http://www.info. gov.hk/gia/general/200701/09/P200701090205.htm (accessed on 17 September 2009). Massey, Doreen B. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Thai, Hung Cam (2005) ‘Clashing dreams in the Vietnamese diaspora: highly educated overseas brides and low-wage U.S. husbands’, in Nicole Constable (ed.), Cross-border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 145–65. —— (2008) For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. USDS (United States Department of State) (2009) Trafficking in Persons Report 2009— Vietnam, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4a421481c.html (accessed 23 March 2010).

6

Vietnamese youth and their adaptation in Hong Kong Ocean W. K. Chan

Of the Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong, a large number were children. They came by themselves or with their parents. As children, their ‘refugee’ experiences were quite different from that of the adults. I was an art teacher at a refugee camp during 1997–2000. This chapter is based on my experiences with the children and youth during this time and my research on their adaptation to outside life after they were released from the camps. It sketches the life of Vietnamese children in refugee camps during the 1990s, a childhood full of iron bars, fighting, drugs and an imperishable desire for freedom. After the closure of the last camp in 2000, these ‘camp kids’ settled into Hong Kong society and entered a new episode of their lives. However, in the early years of their postcamp life, they encountered much discrimination and found it hard to integrate. Instead of building a new sense of identity in Hong Kong society, they held nostalgic memories about camp life and found the friendship and sense of community developed during that time something to cherish.

Vietnamese refugee children and youth Many of the Vietnamese boat people were children. According to Davis (1991), about 35 percent of the 45,000 boat people in Hong Kong in 1990 were children. Most previous literature on Vietnamese refugees and their sojourn in refugee camps in Hong Kong have severely criticized treatment therein: the cramped conditions and the lack of human rights (Thomas 2000; Davis 1991; Hitchcox 1991; Chan 1987; Oxfam 1986). Few studies have conducted long-term ethnographic research on the diversity of refugee life. Children had quite different experiences in the camps compared to adults, and different camps might also have produced diverse experiences and memories. No one camp was the same. All previous studies about refugee camp life in Hong Kong were done in the 1980s and 1990s, when the refugees were still locked up in the camps. Thomas (2000) has made the grim projection (2000: 34): The younger generation of the community will have to live with the consequences of community disorganization and individual demoralization. This process will finally make the young people social and culturally handicapped.

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Having the advantage of hindsight, my research allows refugee youth to reflect on their own experiences in the camp and the post-camp transition. This research finds that refugee youth in Hong Kong have both positive and negative memories of the camps, and there is no lack of nostalgia for the ‘pressure-free’ days of the closed camps. Researchers have also tended not to differentiate between camps. Although all refugee camps were controlled and regulated by the officers of the Correctional Services Department (CSD) according to the specific laws and regulations for Vietnamese asylum seekers, the environment of different camps might differ drastically. For example, many informants who had stayed in the more open environment of the Tai Ah Chau closed camp, which was situated on an outlying island, did have many fond memories of their ‘wild’ life in the camp. Some also expressed the feeling that the camp was their real ‘home’. Experiences in the camps made the children and young people more resilient to adversity and highly adaptive to changes of situation. In this chapter, I analyse three stages of their life: closed camp, open camp, and after the camp. Through a number of the young refugees’ stories, the chapter will make some preliminary suggestions about the identity of young Vietnamese refugee settlers in Hong Kong.

The experiences of Vietnamese youth in refugee camps Days in the closed camps The young refugees studied in this research are now around 27 to 30 and many were only toddlers when they reached Hong Kong. Most came in the late 1980s, although some came earlier or were actually born in the camps. They say that their stay in the closed camps from 1988 to 1991 were the most difficult. This was the time when the screening policy was first introduced. The refugee population in Hong Kong at the time exceeded 70,000. The cramped conditions and disappointment and uncertainty about the future led to feelings of depression and tension between the Chinese-Vietnamese and ethnic Vietnamese. The Vietnamese had often suspected that CSD officers treated the Chinese-Vietnamese better. A number of violent events erupted in these years, forcing the Hong Kong government to institute a segregation policy, separating the two ethnic groups into different camps. The riot that took place in August 1989 in the Tai Ah Chau camp was horrifying. The ethnic Vietnamese burnt tents, raped ethnic Chinese women, and robbed and injured many ethnic Chinese. One informant recounted the event: In August 1989, we arrived at Tai Ah Chau, it was not a formal camp yet, and we only lived in tents. The camp management cooked and distributed food three times a day. We had no say about the food; sometimes they distributed biscuits that were too dry because we did not have much drinking water. There were many more Vietnamese than Chinese. After a few weeks, the Yuht Naahm Jai (Vietnamese) complained that the management gave more food to ethnic Chinese than to them, but they were ignored and were driven away. They drove the police away before sunset. Many Vietnamese and a small number of ethnic Chinese were left behind in the camp.

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Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement They burned tents and beat ethnic Chinese, raping the women. They took off my parents’ clothes to search for valuable belongings. It was a common practice for us to hide gold and jewellery in our underwear. I witnessed the twisted expressions and the screaming of women being raped. They stabbed my sister for a golden ring. The police came and shot loads of tear gas and then retreated until the next morning. I covered my nose and eyes with wet cloths because my throat and eyes were burning … My father sent my younger sister over a floating platform with foam boards because it was safer to stay away from the shore. We had no food and water. Some fishing boats dropped food for children on the floating platform. On the third day, police carried us to Shek Ku Chau (another small closed camp on an island). People went to the toilet to shit and vomit their gold and jewellery swallowed in the riots. The camp officers distributed raw meat and food for us to cook. I learned to appreciate a simple and peaceful life after I experienced the riot …

There were different kinds of closed camps. Some were prison-like walled-in detention centres. High Island in Sai Kung was of this type. The Tai Ah Chau camp was situated on an offshore island. After the riot mentioned above, the Hong Kong government decided to put mainly ethnic Chinese in Tai Ah Chau, with a small number of ethnic Vietnamese awaiting transit. At Tai Ah Chau, different non-government organizations (NGOs) worked in the camps to provide welfare and education. The most significant NGO for my informants was International Social Service Hong Kong (ISSHK) which provided schooling at two levels: primary (grade one to grade five) and secondary (grade six to grade ten) based on the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR) curriculum, offering both Chinese and Vietnamese instruction. Caritas was another important NGO for camp detainees. It offered training such as dressmaking and beautician courses. Save the Children provided healthcare and development support for children up to six years of age. Their programmes aimed to maintain the health of the refugees for the sake of the screening process. It consisted of mainly pre-schools and baby clinics to provide health education and family planning. Different religious groups were also present in the camp to organize religious activities or entertainment for the detainees. Children and youth in the camp enjoyed access to natural resources such as wild fruits and fish. On one occasion, they even killed a wild buffalo and shared the meat with other camp inmates. Camp children also suffered from fewer restrictions than adults and were allowed to move freely about the camp. Furthermore, the children could enjoy outings such as trips to Ocean Park, organized by volunteer groups and NGOs. Schooling in the camp was much more relaxed than studying in normal Hong Kong schools. Classes could be conducted in open areas, under a big tree or on green grass. Children only had a half-day of schooling with almost no homework assignment, thus, they had a lot of leisure time to play. In this environment, the children created their own games, like making craft items from bamboo shoots to sell to officials and visitors.

Vietnamese youth and their adaptation in Hong Kong 79 Other games include shooting marbles, throwing dolls, and climbing trees. One informant reflected: Since we did not have any toys, we used our slippers to create many games such as throwing and catching, setting boundaries to play table tennis etc. We played different primitive games like hitting sticks and glass pebbles, which we played in Vietnam … In order to watch TV, my brother and I occupied eight seats for my parents and other brothers with blankets right after the door was opened; otherwise there would be no seats for them. Games and activities in the camp fostered children’s individual creativity and problem-solving skills. As these activities were mostly physical, they developed comparatively well-balanced hand-eye coordination and became physically fit. The above description has no intention to romanticize refugee camp life. However, things happening in a restrictive environment might appear very differently to an adult and a child. Having recounted the good memories about the days in the Tai Ah Chau centre, the informants also complained about the camp conditions: extremely noisy and crowded with hot and stuffy tents, insufficient food and water, and no privacy. Days in the open camp For those who were screened as refugees, they were moved from the closed to the open camp. Gaining the status of refugee was the hope of all Vietnamese in the camps; thus, moving to open camps implied a new life. However, it was also a transitory stage exposing the refugee families and the young people to yet more changes as well as new dangers and risks. For the families moving from a closed to an open camp, for example, the Pillar Point in Tuen Mun, the Hong Kong government only gave them HK$750. Other than this sum of money, no other assistance was given. Each family of four was allocated an empty structure (eight × twelve feet) without private toilets. The young refugees helped their parents to pick furniture from trash dumps in nearby estates to set up their new homes. Indeed, once the families were screened as refugees, they were immediately ‘abandoned’ by the government to live on their own. After handling two decades of the Vietnamese saga, the government and Hong Kong society as a whole had suffered from ‘fatigue’; thus there were few to advocate for them among the local populace. For refugee families without many social connections and support from relatives, it was not easy to make a living, especially for single mothers with children. Many Vietnamese neither learned any practical skills in the camps, nor had they acquired fluency in the local language. Before 2000, they did not have any formal Hong Kong identity (as in holding Hong Kong identity cards). This made it more difficult for them to find work. Fortunately, in the mid-1990s, Hong Kong was undergoing a construction boom, including the construction of a new airport, and many of the young refugees and their parents did find jobs on construction sites.

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In the open camp, besides people being screened as refugees, there were also people who were ‘stateless’. They were screened as non-refugees, however, they were not repatriated since the Vietnamese government could not find their records in Vietnam and refused to take them. Another type of people were those who were stuck in Hong Kong because of their criminal records. These people came to Hong Kong before the implementation of the screening policy, and had been waiting for resettlement. However, because of their criminal past, they had no hope of being accepted for resettlement in a third country. In 1997, when I worked as an art teacher in the camp, there were around 2000 people in the Pillar Point Camp, and among these, 280 were children under 18, both ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese. The mixing of ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese created new problems. The camp itself was partitioned into Chinese and Vietnamese areas and a common area. Most ethnic Chinese would limit their activities to their own area inside the camp, while the Vietnamese were quite active in all areas of the camp. Chinese Vietnamese versus Vietnamese My students told me around 40 per cent of the Vietnamese adults had a criminal record, half of which were related to drug offences. Without many choices, some youngsters resorted to drug trafficking to earn a living to support their family. Others, like a single mother with a teenage son, helped the gangsters to store the drugs. The police’s sporadic search for drugs was a common occurrence in the camp. One youth told me: I hate the fact that the police kept breaking into our flat without a warrant. They flipped and cut our sleeping mats to search for drugs. They suspected all food stores like the one my mother ran were drug related. Sometimes they took money from us but we did not question them otherwise they would search longer and destroy more. It was useless to complain to the camp management. Although I hate the police, I didn’t join the triad society to gain protection. Some young people joined the gangs and were proud of being better fighters than Hong Kong gangsters; I didn’t want to hurt people. I didn’t want my mother to worry … I just want to have a simple and peaceful life with her. In the open camp, drugs were very popular, but it seemed to be limited to the Vietnamese. The ethnic Chinese tended not to touch the drugs. The Vietnamese drug gangsters often attempted to take advantage of the ethnic Chinese and extorted money from them. One young Chinese-Vietnamese informant was often scared of the drug addicts in the camp. He said: I was shocked to see them injecting heroin and sniffing white powder every morning at the food store. We feared that they would suddenly stick us with their bloody needles. It was a nonstop nightmare. A drug addict yelled and kicked us to ask for money whenever we passed the main gate. Many

Vietnamese youth and their adaptation in Hong Kong 81 Chinese gave him money to avoid trouble. The Vietnamese drug addicts did not have the chance to resettle but we still had hope because we were clean (no criminal record). It was not worth it to ruin our future for this useless trash … Besides the drug problem, gang fighting was another common issue in the open camp. Many Chinese parents would not allow their children to mingle with the Vietnamese, who were mostly divided into gangs. But some Chinese youngsters joined the Vietnamese gangs to seek protection. Some also made themselves into a ‘good fighter’ to protect themselves and others. A Chinese informant had the experience of forming his own gang of Chinese youngsters: We joined the Vietnamese gangs for protection. But the condition was that we had to follow their orders. Our major activities were playing soccer and going to discos. We eventually quit because they took marijuana and tempted us to try it. I was beaten several times for quitting the gang. They took that as an insult to their power. As the number of ethnic Chinese in the camp increased, we joined together to form an ethnic Chinese gang. However, the ethnic Chinese youth hated the Hong Kong police even more than the Vietnamese gangsters and drug addicts. One informant said this: Although the Vietnamese gangs were nasty to us, I did not hate them as much as I hated police. The gangs beat us for a reason, but the police just beat us whenever they wanted to show that they had power in the district. I could remember the shame they felt in failing to control the riot in the refugee camp … They punched us three times before questioning us whenever we met them …

Yuht Naahm Jai —Discrimination against Vietnamese refugees Discrimination by the larger Hong Kong society was an experience of most refugee youngsters during the years in the open camp and the subsequent integration period. The insult they felt when being called ‘Yuht Naahm Jai’ constantly reminded the refugee youngsters that they were a marginal and inferior group to the majority of Hong Kong Chinese. Discrimination had definitely induced anger, frustration and estranged feelings among refugee youth. The term Yuht Naahm Jai literally means ‘Vietnamese boy’. However, when it was used by Hong Kong people it became a derogatory label and conveyed all the negative views they held towards the Vietnamese who were seen as a violent, bad and uncivilized group. These stereotypes were pervasive and had been inculcated into popular discourses through the local news media and films. Ironically, the term Yuht Naahm Jai was originally used by the ethnic Chinese refugees in the closed camps to label the Vietnamese who were violent and who attacked the ethnic Chinese. As said above, the ethnic Chinese were often

82 Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement the victims of the violence of the Yuht Naahm Jai. However, after they were released from the camp and began to integrate into society, the ethnic Chinese Vietnamese were being called Yuht Naahm Jai and discriminated by the Hong Kong Chinese. The NGO ISSHK continued to run a school for youngsters in the open camp until 1998, expecting that refugee youth and children would eventually be integrated into the normal school system. Many youngsters began to attend local schools in 1998. However, with their previous education, there was almost no chance for them to adapt to the complex curriculum of the normal school. Their knowledge of Chinese was also not competitive enough to study in normal secondary classes. A number of the youngsters of the age of 15 to 17 had to start from form one in secondary school. Their Hong Kong classmates and teachers were one source of discrimination that constituted the negative experiences they had at an early stage of their settlement. Being called Yuht Naahm Jai or Yuht Naahm Muih (Vietnamese girl) was a common experience in schools. One Vietnamese woman said this: I was asked to start studying at Form One when I was already 17. There was a miss (female teacher) who was very bad, she disliked us. She called out my name and pulled my hair very hard because I had dyed my hair. But she did not pick on the other Hong Kong girls who had even more colour in their hair. Classmates often threw things at me. I reported this to the teacher. The teacher said it was because we are Vietnamese refugees, and asked me to accept this situation. Another ethnic Chinese informant said that although he hardly spoke a word of Vietnamese, he was called Yuht Naahm Jai by his classmates. He added: Eighty percent of the Hong Kong people discriminated against us. The Hong Kong youngsters were bad, they also looked down on us and the mainland kids from China. Whenever they heard someone not speaking fluent Cantonese, or had an accent, they began to bully the person. I made up my mind at the time and said to myself, today you laughed at me, but one day I will be better than you. When the Vietnamese young people began to work, they were discriminated against by bosses and got lower pay. In general, they got one-third less than Hong Kong workers. Furthermore, they were discriminated by governmental institutions. From 1997 to 1999, I took a number of young refugees to look for official apprenticeship programmes. The officers and local employers rejected them because of stereotyping and discrimination. All Vietnamese from the refugee camps were labelled trouble makers. Some of them eventually joined the drug-trafficking business after being constantly rejected from work or apprenticeships. They got caught and were sent to Pik Uk prison for three to five years. Ironically, once they were locked up in prison, they received plenty of technical training and education. For example, few years ago I went to Pik Uk prison to

Vietnamese youth and their adaptation in Hong Kong 83 visit a young drug trafficker, who was my student at Pillar Point Camp. I could not hold back my tears as he told me: Teacher, don’t worry about me, I have friends in prison, it just feels like in the closed camp, and I can choose carpentry, laundry or catering as my work. There is also a school based on the Hong Kong curriculum and the teachers are from Hong Kong too. I am healthier than in the camp because I have regular exercise and get to sleep on time. We have soccer, basketball and TV. I’ve got paid work. Just bring me some comic books. I don’t blame anyone; it is our fate. The prison provided what you ‘normal’ people worked day and night for … Work in the prison is decent; in the evening, we have free language courses preparing us for life after prison. We can take the public exams. We’ve got no drugs here. In my follow-up research of my students, I find that most of them have adapted well to their new life in the Hong Kong society. Almost all have got married, either to Hongkongers or to other Vietnamese refugee friends. One of them has become a successful cook and works as a chef in a top clubhouse restaurant. He has recently got married to a Hong Kong woman who was his secondary schoolmate. Another young guy, though being repatriated to Vietnam in 1997, has returned to Hong Kong in 2007 to get married to his childhood sweetheart who was also a refugee child in the camp. He is now working as a construction site worker and his wife is a restaurant worker. The drug trafficker who had been jailed for a few years was determined to lead a simple and peaceful life with his mother and now works in a construction site.

Conclusion—settlement and identity Where is home for these young Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese refugees? To them, Vietnam is a ‘far-away’ and abstract home. Most of them came to Hong Kong on makeshift boats when they were a few years old. Some were born in Hong Kong or elsewhere, and had not been to Vietnam. They had lived a refugee life and spent most of their childhood in the camps. When they settled into Hong Kong society in 2000, they were 17 to 20 years old. Few could say that Vietnam was home. Neither could they consider any other place home. Their negative experiences of being discriminated against in Hong Kong had also thwarted them from building a sense of belonging to Hong Kong. From my study, I found that even after leaving the camps, refugee youth continue to live with their ‘refugee’ memories. To some, the camp was a place full of good and bad childhood memories; they grew up there, played games and formed bonds with one another. Despite being subject to rules and regulations in the prison-like ‘total institution’ (Goffman 1961) of the refugee camp, refugee youth were able to build ‘communitas’ (Turner 1974) among themselves and support each other through friendship. That was why some younger informants (those born in the camp) said that the camp was a ‘garden of Eden’. Most literature on refugee youth has

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focused on their psychological traumas and settlement into the host societies (Boyle 2009). In this chapter, besides depicting their settlement problems, I have also touched on the ethnic dynamics and complexities inside the refugee camps and how ethnic Chinese refugee youth were particularly estranged when they were called Yuht Naahm Jai by the Hong Kong Chinese. I also delve into the identity issues of these refugee youth. As a group of youngsters of similar age and with similar background, they had lived out a sense of ‘togetherness’ in the camp. While both Vietnam and Hong Kong may not provide them with a sufficient sense of security, the refugee camp, a transitory ‘total institution’ with strict regulations and control and a place of danger and destitution, had on the contrary produced fond memories among the young people who have constructed a home-like nostalgia towards the camp. Homi Bhabha (1994) notes this sense of in-betweeness of those in a diaspora. The refugee youth belong neither to their Vietnamese homeland nor to the settlement society of Hong Kong. Instead, they direct their nostalgia towards the camps where they spent their childhood and youthful time. The feeling of ‘togetherness’ in the transitory detention camps constitutes a specific sense of ‘in-betweeness’ of the young refugees.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge. Boyle, Elizabeth Heger (2009) ‘Young refugee’, in Andy Furlong (ed.) Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood: New Perspectives and Agenda, New York: Routledge, pp. 89–94. Chan, Kwok Bun (1987) ‘Refugee in transit: Vietnamese in a refugee camp in Hong Kong’, International Migration Review, 21(3): 745 –59. Davis, Leonard (1991) Hong Kong and the Asylum Seekers from Vietnam, New York: St. Martin Press. Goffman Erving (1961) Asylum, London: Penguin. Hitchcox Linda (1990) Vietnamese Refugees in South Asian Camps, London: Macmillan Academy and Professional. Oxfam (1986) How Hong Kong Cares for Vietnamese Refugees, Hong Kong: Oxfam. Thomas, Joe (2000) Ethnocide: A Cultural Narrative of Refugee Detention in Hong Kong, Melbourne: Ashgate. Turner, Victor (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

7

Thanh lọc—Hong Kong’s refugee screening system Experiences from working for the refugee communities1 Peter Hansen

With the demise of the former regime in the southern Republic of Vietnam in April 1975, and the subsequent re-unification of the nation as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, those Vietnamese seeking refuge and asylum abroad were initially regarded as ipso facto refugees under the Geneva Convention of 1951, on the grounds that their departure was caused by a well-founded fear of persecution on one or more of the grounds mentioned in the Convention.2 These people were entitled under the Convention to be resettled in third-party countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, France, and a host of other nations. Over the next 20 years, more than 700,000 took advantage of this essentially openended international commitment, while an incalculable number perished in their endeavours to do so (UNHCR, 2000: 98).3 But by the late 1980s the situation had changed in two important respects. Firstly, significant numbers of asylum-seekers were leaving Vietnam not for reasons pertaining to well-founded fears of persecution, but rather from an understandable desire to escape from poverty and despair, and with the hope of forging a better life elsewhere. Some refugee advocates, and in particular politicized sections of the Việt Kiều community, repudiated the suggestion that some of the asylum-seekers were economic migrants, maintaining the position previously sponsored by the United States in particular, that flight from Vietnam of necessity involved flight from persecution under the Communist regime (Free Vietnam Alliance: n.d.). The second significant change lay in the attitudes of both the East Asian countries of immediate reception for the Asylum-seekers, and the nations of ultimate resettlement. By the late 1980s, their enthusiasm for taking in Vietnamese asylum-seekers began to wane under the social, fiscal, and infrastructural pressures brought about by the need to accommodate, and ultimately resettle, such a vast number of people. As a consequence, in June 1989, the countries of first asylum and resettlement came together in cooperation with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) at Geneva and agreed upon a Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) (Fontaine 1995; Hathaway 1993; Davis 2008). Under the provisions of the Agreement, the automatic assumption of refugee status for departees from Vietnam was henceforth withdrawn, and each family had to establish

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that it had a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons pertaining to the 1951 Convention.4 Moreover, each nation of first asylum was mandated to provide a system for determining the status of individual Vietnamese claimants. While these systems for determining the status (refugee or illegal immigrant) of asylum-seekers was to be based upon the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol, ‘applied in a humanitarian spirit taking into account the special circumstances of the asylum seekers concerned, and the need to respect the family unit’, they were also to be determined in accordance with domestic immigration law in the states of first asylum.5 Similarly, while the determination process was to be undertaken in concert with the UNHCR, it was to be administered by the local immigration authorities in those places. In Hong Kong, that procedure was prescribed by the Immigration Ordinance, and in particular by Amendments of 1989 and 1990. Under the Ordinance, each asylum seeker, or family unit, was to undergo a screening procedure consisting of an interview with an officer of the Hong Kong Immigration Department (HKID).6 As a consequence of the interview—and any other material which the Immigration Officer may wish to consider—a determination was then made as to whether the person should be considered a refugee for the purposes of the convention. If they were accorded refugee status, they were then eligible for immediate transfer from closed detention centres, such as High Island and Tai A Chau, to open camps such as New Horizons at Kai Tak, from where they would await placement in a resettlement nation. If—as was more usually the case—they received an adverse determination, they could (and almost invariably did) appeal to the Refugee Status Review Board, a body presided over by a Hong Kong lawyer, Mr. Francis Blackwell. Once this avenue of appeal had been exhausted, an asylum-seekers’ status as an illegal immigrant was re-affirmed, obliging them to remain in detention pending voluntary repatriation (or, although not provided by the CPA, forced repatriation) back to Vietnam. They had undergone what the asylum-seekers called thanh lọc: the purging. Using the many hundreds of interviews undertaken in the camp as its basic source, this paper will examine some of the attitudes of the asylum-seeker population in Hong Kong to thanh lọc, and to endeavours to persuade those who failed thanh lọc to voluntarily repatriate to Vietnam.

Life in the detention centres It would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand the attitudes of the asylumseekers in the camps to thanh lọc without an appreciation of the conditions in which they were compelled to live. By late 1991, there were seven closed detention centres in Hong Kong; Argyle (in the inner city), Chi Ma Wan (Upper and Lower) on Lantau Island; Hei Ling Chau, in the complex of correctional facilities on Hei Ling Chau Island; Tai A Chau, in the Soko Islands (the camp on nearby Sek Kiu Chau had closed down); Shek Kong, a former Air Force base in the New Territories; High Island, or Man Yee, in the Sai Kung National Park in the New Territories; and finally the largest of all the camps, Whitehead, or Sha Tin. The Hong Kong Correctional Service managed Argyle, Hei Ling Chau, Chi

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Ma Wan, and Whitehead, while the Police managed Shek Kong and High Island. Tai A Chau was run by a non-profit company known as Hong Kong Housing Services for Refugees (HKHSR), but with a significant police presence.7 Further closed detention facilities existed at Teng Chau (Green Island), which was the initial reception centre for boat arrivals, and at Chi Ma Wan Upper, which was a prison for those who committed criminal offences while in a detention centre (generally looked on with derision by the asylum-seekers, as it was felt that conditions there couldn’t be any worse than those in which they lived already). Finally, there was a series of open camps where people were free to come and go as they wished. These were for Vietnamese asylum-seekers who had arrived in Hong Kong prior to June 1988, or for those who arrived later, but received a positive result from their thanh lọc process and were accorded refugee status. The former were held at the Pillar Point Refugee Centre at and Tuen Mun,8 on the western outskirts of Kowloon (managed, like Tai A Chau, by HKHSR), while the latter were held at the New Horizons Centre, on the site of the former Kai Tak open camp, adjacent to what was then Hong Kong’s principal airport. Residents in both camps were awaiting resettlement in third countries. Pillar Point was a place of surpassing squalor. Its free status meant that it was largely unregulated. Its residents were permitted to work, an many found work as construction labourers. This led to the presence of both an income stream, and the commodities that could be bought with it. Sadly, these included heroin, which was in abundant supply, and it left many victims. Those with drug addictions, convictions for drug-related offences, and diseases pertaining to drug use (particularly hepatitis) became almost impossible to resettle in third countries for which they were notionally eligible to reside, and hence became one of the most intractable problems that the Hong Kong government faced in dealing with Vietnamese asylum-seekers (Hong Kong Government 2009).9 In the closed camps, asylum seekers were housed in something akin to industrial shelving. These bed-spaces were made of re-enforced plywood stacked three high, each space being (at most) three square metres to accommodate two people. At Tai A Chau, for example, nearly 500 people lived in these spaces on one floor, and each building in turn had three floors. The top space was considered most desirable, as it had the greatest headroom; people could even stand up, and some had natural light from windows. However, it was also the hottest space. Climbing up was difficult for those who were disabled or elderly; hence the top spaces tended to be occupied by the young. The middle space suffered from noise and vibration from both above and below, but at least had the benefit of natural light. The bottom spaces were considered least desirable. Although cooler in summer, and easier to access, they suffered from constant passing pedestrian traffic, and had little natural light. People would hang material from the steel framework of the shelving to act as curtains around their spaces, to delineate them and give them some privacy; ineffective as this may have been, the birth rate in the camps remained high. On these bedspaces, people would spend much of their lives. They slept there and all of their possessions were kept there. For many, much of their days were also spent on these spaces, talking with others, eating meals, or simply passing the time inertly.

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Toilet and ablution facilities were inadequate, and usually maintained in an appalling condition. At Tai A Chau—considered the most habitable of the camps—external steel booths acted as both toilets and showers. Drainage was by means of an open channel, with an outlet only at the end of the row of booths. Hence both toilet waste and bathing water flowed down this channel and through each of the booths. The unsanitary nature of the arrangement was self-evident. Cooking and food preparation was done collectively. Each family would be issued with a plastic bucket, dish, and eating and drinking utensils. A family representative (usually children) would queue at food distribution points three times a day to collect the daily meal. The food was adequate if monotonous; salted rice with sardines, stewed green vegetables, or a little pork fat. Many asylumseekers—particularly women—yearned to be able to cook their own food, and in Tai A Chau, some provision was made for charcoal burners to be provided, although safety considerations circumscribed this. Camp-provided food could be supplemented by purchases made, either from the Camp Shop (at Tai A Chau, run by Caritas Hong Kong), or from the myriad of small grocery stalls which people would set up in their bed spaces to sell grocery items such as tea, instant noodles, and soft drinks. A myriad of non-government organizations (NGOs) provided different services within the camp. These NGOs included International Social Services (ISS), Community and Family Services International (CFSI), Save the Children Fund (SCF), the British Red Cross, Caritas Hong Kong (the Welfare Agency of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hong Kong), and of course, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).10 Each of the agencies existed within the camps solely at the discretion of the Hong Kong Security Bureau (with the arguable exception of the UNHCR). Each had a specific mandate to perform a specific set of tasks, and there was adequate clarity about what each agency could do or not do. The NGO workers, drawn from all over the world, formed a diverse community in themselves. Interactions between agencies and their workers were generally amicable, and each camp had an NGO committee where issues of common interest could be discussed between the agencies. Occasionally, jealousies and turf wars would arise, but in the main, each agency got on with its own business. Each camp had two schools, a primary and a junior secondary school. Children were permitted to go to school until Year 9; there was no provision for senior secondary education. The schools were run by ISS, some staff were volunteer teachers drawn from within the camp populations. The curriculum was in Vietnamese, although there were also Cantonese-language schools at Tai A Chau to cater for the children of ethnic Chinese Vietnamese. Medical services were provided by an array of organizations; for example, at High Island, by the British Red Cross. Basic medical procedures could be performed in camp clinics, while more complex cases were referred to the Hong Kong hospital system. Childbirth was undertaken at these hospitals; there was also a small lying-in facility at Argyle where mothers could recover from

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childbirth before being returned to their detention centre. The cramped and unsanitary nature of the camps led to significant health problems. In the heat and humidity of Hong Kong summers, outbreaks of skin diseases, scabies, and head lice were common. In summer, it was common for young children to go about naked, their heads shaved, and their bodies covered in large patches of Gentian Violet, a sight which often disconcerted visitors to the camps who were not accustomed to it. The NGOs also provided a range of other services. CFSI performed the vital and difficult function of looking after the interests of unaccompanied minors in the camp; a group principally comprising adolescent boys, who were particularly vulnerable to both the dangers and anxieties of life in the camps. NGOs also ran programmes in areas such as occupational training, recreation and sport, libraries and literacy, and general social welfare. The asylum-seeker communities also ran networks of activities, both formal and informal. In particular, religious ceremonies and activities played a significant role in camp life. The Catholic community had a very structured and hierarchical lay organization. Its chaplains, Fr. Louis Robert SJ, a Vietnamesespeaking Canadian, and Fr. Rom Murphy, an Australian, would come to the camps to celebrate Mass, and otherwise provide spiritual care. Much of the rest of the community focus was on the provision of religious education to the younger Catholics. The organization and activities of the Buddhists in the camps, most particularly of the Gia Đình Phật Tử (Buddhist Family), were particularly admirable. At several camps, they had the advantage of having Buddhist clergy within the asylum-seeker population. But the Gia Đình Phật Tử also ran an extensive programme of religious, recreational, and personal formation programmes. Many of its leaders were highly motivated and compassionate people, and the young people under their care took great pride, pleasure and comfort from their participation in the organization’s activities. The Protestant cohort in the camps was quite small, but active and evangelical. The Hong Kong Security Bureau justifiably discouraged active religious proselytization. There was some suspicion that external visitors to the camps from charismatic Protestant groups did not always adhere to these guidelines. There were other organized groups within the camp, such as sporting, musical, and artistic groups, adult self-education groups (English language conversation groups were particularly popular amongst young adults), and anti-communist political groupings. But in many ways, the informal social networks within the camps were even more influential. Those who arrived in Hong Kong together on a given boat naturally shared a strong common bond. Others coalesced around region or quê (home district); Quảng Trị, Quảng Binh, Huế, Đà Nẵng, Qui Nhơn, Nghệ An, Hải Phòng, Quảng Ninh, and so on. North-South tensions, rivalries and mistrust between those from the different sides of the pre-1975 partitioned Vietnam were particularly virulent. Tragically, these spilled over on the night of 3 February 1992, when 24 northerners were burnt to death in their hut at the Shek Kong

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Detention Centre (New York Times 1992, 1993).11 Thereafter, Hong Kong Security Bureau adopted a policy of separating those who came from the different sides of the pre-1975 partition between the different camps, so that they did not reside together. Another malign influence within the camps was the presence of criminal networks. While by no means absent in the Southern camps, these were particularly prevalent in camps populated by Northerners. Their principal activity lay in extortion; exacting small sums from shopkeepers, and from residents who sought access to NGO facilities, boiling water or food distribution points, or even to the toilet blocks.12 There was little convincing evidence of narcotics in the closed detention centres, but people who had no money were often extorted for their supply of rice, which was then taken off to be distilled for the purpose of making rice wine, usually in contaminated vessels which once held cleaning chemicals. Alcohol, notionally banned in the camp, was in fact available.13 It was rumoured that the gangs also operated prostitution rings, but I saw no evidence of this. Occasional police raids produced an astonishing array of home-made weapons. A man murdered in the British Red Cross medical compound at High Island had been stabbed repeatedly with a whittled-down toothbrush. Notwithstanding these privations, most of the asylum-seekers regarded them as relatively unimportant; a discomfort on the journey to the vastly more important long-term future which could be secured by a positive outcome to thanh lọc. But here too, there would be privation; they had to face an essentially hostile process without representation, and largely without significant assistance.

Legal representation and the asylum-seekers The role of ALR (Australian Lawyers for Refugees) lawyers in the camps was to assist asylum-seekers to prepare for their screening interviews. A note in the International Journal of Refugee Law described it thus: The Project [ALR] worked in the detention centres for Vietnamese asylum seekers in Hong Kong from November 1990 to August 1993. Its main work was to advise people on the law regarding refugee status, assist them to prepare for their interviews by Hong Kong Immigration officers, and to inform them of their rights during the interview. (ALR 1993) It is important to note that their mandate to work in the camp came ex gratia from the Hong Kong Security Bureau, and could be withdrawn at any time. ALR had been commissioned by this department, under its then refugee coordinator, Clinton Leeks. Its mandate was strictly circumscribed to pre-screening counselling.14 They had no rights to appear at determination interview before the officers of HKID, nor to represent asylum-seeker clients, or to even be present at those interviews. No ALR lawyer was ever permitted to attend such an interview, even though they were occurring in adjoining premises. They were thus in the invidious position of advising asylum-seekers as to what would happen in an

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interview process which they had never witnessed. All information came from informal conversations with those asylum-seekers who could tell post facto what had occurred during the interview. Two justifications were given for this exclusion. The first was that ALR lawyers did not hold legal practising certificates in Hong Kong, which was true, although as practitioners within another common law jurisdiction, this could have been easily remedied. Second, the Ordinance made clear that the interview procedure was of an administrative, rather than a judicial nature, and was therefore not susceptible to the jurisprudential requirement to provide for legal representation. However, we were always of the view that these were rationalizations for the fundamental, underlying reason; that HKID and Hong Kong Security Bureau did not want an unfair, biased, intimidatory, and arbitrary procedure to be opened to external scrutiny, particularly by lawyers with a capacity to pass professional judgement upon it. Because we had no direct role to play in the screening process, it was all but impossible to know whether the work we were doing was actually having a positive effect on the asylum-seekers in their preparation for their screening interviews. We know that the majority who came to see us felt comforted by the support given them prior to seeing us, but we never really knew whether that support was efficacious. We often agonized as to whether our presence had more to do with providing a flimsy pretence of due process for the Hong Kong Security Bureau than it did in actually providing genuine assistance to the asylum-seekers. There were many problems pertaining to HKID’s administration of the screening process. First, the time taken to process individual cases was extremely lengthy. Despite protestations from HKID that they were increasing the personnel resources put into the screening process, and the expansion of the RSRB to six separate boards, delays of more than twelve months in obtaining an initial interview, three months in issuing the post-interview determination, and a further six months in having an appeal considered by the RSRB, led to a widely held belief that the process was being deliberately protracted with a view to introducing an element of attrition. In other words, there was a hope on the part of the authorities that the asylum-seeker would be worn down and frustrated by incessant delays, and hence would abandon the thanh lọc process in return for a package of small economic incentives offered to those who voluntarily participated in the UNHCR’s programme of repatriation back to Vietnam. Another significant problem was that of language and translation services. The number of competent Vietnamese-language interpreters from within Hong Kong was clearly limited, and many asylum-seekers complained to us that they believed the answers they were giving to questions put to them by HKID officers were not being competently relayed back to them. This accentuated ‘translation slippage’ would sometimes result in findings by the interviewing officers that the interviewees were being evasive, equivocal, or unclear, so that their evidence could not be trusted.

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But the most serious and persistent complaint against the HKID interviewers was that they maintained a systemic hostility and bias towards the asylumseekers, reflective of the largely negative attitude towards the Vietnamese asylum-seekers held by the Hong Kong public as a whole by the early 1990s, induced by ‘compassion fatigue’ as the drain on Hong Kong’s resources accelerated with successive waves of boat departures. In many cases, assertions made by asylum seekers—particularly of conduct on behalf of officials of the Vietnamese state that would amount to persecution under the terms of the 1951 convention— could not be independently verified or corroborated. In these circumstances, the HKID officer could form an assessment of the credibility and truthfulness of a given asylum-seeker and their assertions, by reference to such factors as their demeanour, their mode of response to questions, any inconsistencies in their accounts, however minor (not hard to find when interviews often consisted of several hundred questions over several days), and contradictions between assertions made by the asylum-seekers. HKID officers also depended on an array of pre-existing ‘facts,’ such as information from UHNCR or foreign governments, about the benign and improving human rights situation in Vietnam. For example, it was a common assertion that ordinary lay Catholics in Vietnam in the early 1990s were not being persecuted by the state because of their faith. While this may have been generally true, there were certainly exceptions. Yet assertions by asylum-seekers in localized, unfavourable situations in Vietnam where their Catholic faith left them vulnerable to capricious or hostile cán bộ (cadres) were regularly rejected on the basis that they did not tally with the generally accepted assertion that such persecution had ceased by that time. Asylum-seekers also regularly asserted that the demeanour adopted by the interviewing officer (not, of course, subject to scrutiny and assessment as was their own demeanour), was often both hostile and intimidatory. They would regularly be accused of concoction, fabrication, and of being ‘coached’ by other asylum-seekers within the camp. There was, in fact, some legitimacy to this last point; in pre-screening interviews, we too often heard exact repetitions of the same story, although occurring in different times and places, so as to lead us to conclude that when a fact-set resulted in a successful application for refugee status, then it would be re-used by subsequent applicants to whom it did not in truth apply. However, this practice was not widespread, and was usually appropriated in such a clumsy and blatant manner as to be quickly apparent. Many asylum seekers reported that the tenor of the interview was that from the standpoint of the Immigration officer, all Vietnamese were essentially liars, that nothing they said could be accepted in the absence of corroboration, and that evidence of this negative conclusion as to their credibility could be induced via an intimidatory and drawn out procedure that would leave the interviewee fearful, confused, fatigued, and disoriented. Many asylum-seekers believed that this not merely a matter of personal animosity on the part of the interviewers, but rather a deliberate policy aimed at producing the lowest possible ‘screen-in’ rate for refugees status, thereby providing a disincentive to others to leave Vietnam in the hope of resettlement.15

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For the individual asylum-seeker, the seemingly unjust, biased, and arbitrary basis of the thanh lọc process accentuated the disappointment, frustration and anger experienced by the rejection of their claim for refugee status. To have their hopes for a new life which the granting of refugee status would accord was the most fundamental source of their disappointment. But this was significantly compounded by the fact that many believed they were not accorded procedural fairness, and worse still, that their personal integrity was impugned by allegations of dishonesty and duplicity. It was thus towards HKID and its officials that most of the asylum-seekers felt the most deep-seated animosity. Perhaps surprisingly, few harboured such similar negativity to the agencies managing the camps, who were seen as largely doing a difficult job for which they were not themselves responsible.16 HKID were seen as the ‘common enemy’ not only by most of the asylum seekers, but by many of the NGOs and their employees, and even by some individuals within the management of the camps, who saw the antagonism caused by the interviewing process, and the undue delays, as a threat to the often fragile atmosphere of peace and stability within the camps. The other significant focus of asylum-seeker animosity is perhaps a little more surprising; the negative attitudes held towards the UNHCR, and in particular those of its officials charged with administering the programme of voluntary repatriation back to Vietnam.

Hồi hương (repatriation) and resistance to it For most of my time working in the Detention Centres of Hong Kong, the majority asylum seekers—even those who had been definitively screened out—were strongly resistant to the idea of voluntary return to Vietnam (Europa: 1427).17 Those who were mandated with the task of persuading people—particularly some unfortunate and largely blameless staff of the UNHC—were vilified and shunned by many within the detention centre communities for their advocacy of return. Why were the attitudes to voluntary repatriation so negative? After all, for those who had received—in the slang of the camps—hai cánh gà (two chicken wings; i.e. been twice rejected), there was little objective incentive to remain in the deplorable living conditions of the camps, without realistic hope of achieving their dream of resettlement. So why did people resist? First, some asylum-seekers held a well-founded fear of what life would be like on return to Vietnam, either as a consequence of persecution, or more likely, of material poverty and lack of opportunity. There were few ‘pull factors’ leading them to consider return. Until early 1992, asylum seekers who returned voluntarily to Vietnam were offered a subsidy of US$360. But in a desire to accelerate the repatriation process, people were warned that the subsidy would soon be withdrawn, and that they should therefore grasp the opportunity to take a sum which could potentially set them up in some small enterprise in Vietnam.18

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Second, the camps were hotbeds of rumour. False information could travel like a pandemic, and bruit be accepted as objective fact. This would often lead to unrealistic hope being attached to distorted interpretations of half-heard statements. For example, in early 1992, a US congressman—perhaps with a constituency—suggested that perhaps the US government should consider taking the remaining screened out refugees for resettlement. This was soon as an indication that the US government was definitely about to take all those screened out, and that therefore if they waited a little while longer, they would all attain their wish of resettlement in America. It was perhaps a sign of that trait in human nature that causes us to cling to our hopes, however irrational and contrary to known facts. Third, there were groups within the camps who had a vested interest in maintaining the camps existence with a stable population, which the repatriation programme, if successful, would have undermined. The first were the organized criminal gangs who, through extortion and intimidation, often exerted a considerable and malign influence over the lives of the camps’ inhabitants. For these gangs, the camp populations were a source of both revenue (many camp residents were sent money, particularly by Việt Kiều relatives), and recruits, particularly from the unsupervised, disillusioned and under-stimulated population of young males who made up a disproportionate part of the camps’ population. Second, the political cohorts within the camps, who were deeply opposed to the communist regime in Vietnam, wanted the camp populations to remain, as a sign of both resistance to what they saw as political tyranny in their homeland, and as a source of shame to their political adversaries. Those who threatened to compromise this by returning to Vietnam—or even worse, by attempting to persuade others to return—could be portrayed as collaborators or quislings of the Vietnamese regime. Again, given the atmosphere in the camps, this was a potent allegation. It was sometimes made against the ALR. We had to be scrupulous in ensuring that we were not seen as being part of the UNHCR and Hong Kong government’s effort to advance the voluntary repatriation programme. The fact that we were in the camps because of the mandate of the Hong Kong Security Bureau was bad enough; if we had been seen as linked to the UNHCR’s volrepat programme, we would have been effectively boycotted by the bulk of the camp population, and our pre-screening counselling programme ruined. Sometimes, this reaction verged on paranoia. At High Island, we were told that many people refused to come to see us because we were meeting people in a shipping container that on other occasions was used by UNHCR for voluntary repatriation information meetings. On a later occasion, ALR produced a video to show to asylum seekers in order to explain the thanh lọc system. At one point, where there was no spoken narrative on the video, we included a song in a popular Vietnamese genre, namely a somewhat melancholic and nostalgic yearning for home. We were immediately told by certain camp representatives that this was clearly an attempt on our part to induce people to return to Vietnam, and hence was a subliminal instrument of the voluntary repatriation programme.19 The fourth reason as to why the voluntary repatriation programme met such resistance arose from the physical conditions within the camps, and the lives

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people were forced to lead there. The Hong Kong government openly admitted that it ensured the living conditions in the camps were barely tolerable, in the hope of providing people with a disincentive to remain. This was a counterproductive strategy. It simply deadened people’s spirits, left them desensitized to their plight, and rendered them less capable of taking the sort of pro-active decision that would enable them to return. There were many people who, through the enforced inaction of life within the camps, had lapsed into a form of inertia and fatalism that left them prey to those who had cause for them to remain. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, many people remained because of their very real fear of confronting the reality of failure, and the shame that attached to it in the eyes of their families and home communities. Each person who left had a dream; of resettlement in a new land, with a new life, where prosperity, freedom, happiness, and success could all be grasped. Their families, and frequently their home communities, had invested a good deal of hope, and sometimes significant amounts of money, in ensuring that this dream would become a reality. For the returnees, such hopes were to be forever unfulfilled. Many were filled with dread at the thought of the shame that would be attached to having, as they saw it, let down and dishonoured those who had helped them and or believed in them. Ironically, this fear was most potent in the group that actually had the most to gain by repatriation; namely, the unaccompanied minors, in whom the Confucian mentality of fulfilling the duties of mutual obligations were so strong, thus preventing them from resurrecting the potential for a successful life in their homeland. They were taught not only to defer to elders, but to entrust to those elders the making of important decisions. Now, in the absence of such familial elders within their lives, the unaccompanied minors found the making of such an important decision to return to Vietnam to be beyond their scope of reference. Many NGO workers urged these unaccompanied minors (after they had their two chicken wings) to voluntarily return to Vietnam.20 We would put before them the reality of their situation, and the positive possibilities of what life could be like for them on their return. Most could see that at an objective level, this was essentially correct. But only a few could overcome the inherent fear of dealing with the reactions of those at home, and take on the largely unaccustomed role of decision-maker.21 In essence, the authorities—both the UNHCR and the Hong Kong government—never came to terms with this. There were some small programmes which had some efficacy, such as getting parents in Vietnam to write to their children in Hong Kong (particularly to unaccompanied minors), telling them it was all right for them to return, and that they would not be blamed for failing to reach their land of promise. But in the main, the authorities continued to invest a blind hope in ‘upping the ante’; exerting negative pressure via deteriorating living conditions in the camps, the withdrawal of support programmes, and the threat of forced repatriation, while at the same time increasing the flow of positive information about the improvement in economic opportunities, and life in Vietnam generally, for those who would return.

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Conclusion The flow of asylum-seekers leaving Vietnam for Hong Kong had essentially ceased by 1993. It had by then become clear that Hong Kong had ceased to be a viable route to resettlement. Moreover, improvements both in the economic conditions, and levels of interference in the lives of its citizens by the Vietnamese state, have lessened the imperatives for departure. Yet for many, the urge to leave Vietnam remains as strong as ever. But now, different routes to the same goal (marriage, student visas, overseas labour placements and the like) have replaced the leaking fishing boats. Thus the likelihood of the events of the 20 years subsequent to 1975 being repeated in the near to medium future seems remote. But there are lessons to be learnt from the experience of the Vietnamese asylum-seekers in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia. First, there needs to be greater clarity as to the role of the UNHCR in dealing with those who have sought asylum in abroad, but who are determined to have not fulfilled the Geneva Convention requirements. In the CPA period, the UNHCR were put in a most unenviable position in having to protect the interests of people who fell outside of their immediate mandate. They did so while under political and financial pressure from both resettlement nations and from the Hong Kong government to act in a manner which left them open to the charge that they were not protecting the interests of those they were commissioned to serve. They had no direct role to play in the screening process (other than with unaccompanied minors), and were doubtlessly aware of the deeply flawed nature of the procedures adopted by domestic jurisdictions, both in Hong Kong and elsewhere, yet were powerless to intervene. Sadly, the solution to this problem in future situations; to give the UNHCR the legal, political, financial and personnel resources to implement screening themselves is unlikely to be ever adopted. The other valuable lesson to be learnt is that expecting asylum-seekers to exist in a degrading and captive environment does not act as an effective deterrent to their departure (if the ‘push factors’ are strong enough), and does not enhance the likelihood of their submission to voluntary repatriation. Nor do excessive delays in determining their cases. Of course, the Hong Kong government had every right to argue that the numbers arriving were so overwhelming as to make the implementation of a more ideal system of detention and screening all but impossible. However, a more effective regime would provide for reasonable living conditions, the non-detention of children (especially unaccompanied minors), proper legal representation for asylum-seekers during the screening process, rapid determination of cases, and a reasoned, attractive, and culturally congruent programme to encourage voluntary repatriation.

Notes 1

The author worked as a volunteer lawyer in the Asylum-seeker camps of Hong Kong from 1990 until 1993, for Australian Lawyers for Refugees (ALR), an organization under the auspices of Jesuit Social Services Australia (JRS). This paper is based on

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3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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hundreds of interviews, both formal and informal, with Vietnamese asylum seekers, both during and after their time in the Detention Centres of Hong Kong. Article 1 of the Convention, as amended by the 1967 Protocol, defines a refugee as: ‘A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country …’. A 2000 UNHCR paper claimed that 796,310 Vietnamese had left Vietnam by boat to seek asylum between 1975 and 1995, whilst another 42,918 left over land. In the case of Hong Kong, the rescinding of the automatic presumption of refugee status was backdated to August 1988, to take account of the large influx of asylumseekers in the year prior to the signing of the CPA. Marjoleine Zieck (1994: 464) cites June 1988 as Hong Kong’s cut-off date, but my clear recollection is the end of August. CPA, Article 6. A separate procedure, under the direct Administration of an arm of the UNHCR, considered the cases of unaccompanied minors aged sixteen and over, although their appeals were dealt with under the same procedures as adult asylum-seekers. At various times, I worked at (in order) High Island, Tai A Chau, Whitehead, and Hei Ling Chau. I visited Argyle on a number of occasions, but never made it into either Sek Kong or Chi Ma Wan, although I could look down on the latter from the heights of Hei Ling Chau. There was another similar facility at nearby Tseun Wan. It was officially closed on 1 June 2000, making it the last remaining facility for Vietnamese asylum-seekers in Hong Kong This list is far from complete. Many other agencies provided services to the camps, but on a sessional basis. All of the agencies mentioned had a permanent presence in the camps which they served. Another 114 were injured. Our group were always fearful that people were being asked for money in order to attend appointments with ALR lawyers (which were, of course, entirely free of charge). I had it offered to me, and occasionally had people turn up to counselling interviews intoxicated. Although we were also permitted to circulate within the closed camps a booklet in Vietnamese which described (but without criticism) the screening process; ibid. Once again, having never been privy to such an interview, it is impossible to come to any independent judgement of whether these allegations against the HKID and its officers were justified. But I did on many occasions read statements of determination from these officers relating to particular asylum-seekers who I myself had interviewed at length in the pre-screening counselling process. Adverse determinations by HKID officers as to the credibility of these applicants were often entirely at odds with my own assessment, which found them to be people grappling with a difficult legal process in an alien cultural and linguistic environment, and doing their best to tell their life story in the most honest and accurate manner that they could. This was particularly so in relation to HKHR in their administration of the Tai A Chau Detention Centre. Attitudes were perhaps a little less benign in relation to the Hong Kong Corrections Service at Whitehead and Hei Ling Chau. For example, in 1992, some 12,000 asylum-seekers were voluntarily repatriated; less than 20 per cent of the screened-out total still in the camps. Some 300 ‘double-backers’ were identified as having been repatriated back to Vietnam to claim the subsidy, then immediately returned to Hong Kong; ibid., 1427.

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19 The video had to be withdrawn and re-produced without the offending song. 20 Though ALR lawyers had to do so on an informal and confidential basis, partly because it was outside our mandate, partly because we were fearful of repercussions if word got back to the camp elders and politicians. 21 My largely subjective and anecdotally based views as to the attitudes of unaccompanied minors in the camps are largely corroborated by the far more empirical study of James Freeman. Most notably, see his work with Nguyễn Đình Hữu (2003: 107–37).

Bibliography ALR (1993) ‘Notes for Vietnamese asylum seekers awaiting refugee status determination’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 5(4): 630 – 46. Davis, Sarah E. (2008) ‘“Realistic yet humanitarian”: the comprehensive plan of action and refugee policy in South-East Asia’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 8(2): 191–217. Europa (2003) The Far East and Australasia, 2003, 35th edition, London: Routledge, p. 1427. Fontaine, Pierre-Michel (1995) ‘The comprehensive plan of action (CPA) on IndoChinese refugees: prospects for the post-CPA and implications for a regional approach to refugee problems’, Global Change, Peace & Security, 7(2): 39 – 60. Free Vietnam Alliance (n.d.) ‘Stop sending victims of persecution back to Communist Vietnam’, http://www.fva.org/0495/appeal.html (accessed 3 September, 2009). Freeman, James and Nguyễn Đình Hữu (2003) Voices from the Camps; Vietnamese Children Seeking Asylum, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hathaway, James C. (1993) ‘Labelling the “boat people”: the failure of the human rights mandate of the comprehensive plan of action for Indochinese Refugees’. Human Rights Quarterly: 686 –702. Hong Kong Government (2000) ‘Pillar Point Vietnamese Refugees Centre formally closed’ http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200006/01/0601005.htm (accessed 7 September 2009). New York Times (1992) ‘18 Vietnamese die in violence at refugee camp’, 4 February. —— (1993) ‘Hong Kong journal: barbed wire, watchtowers and the ruined years’, 13 October. UNHCR (2000) Insight into the Return of the Boat People, Ha Noi. Zieck, Marjoleine (1994) UNHCR and Voluntary Repatriation of Refugees: A Legal Analysis, The Hague: Martinus Nihoff.

8

Visions of resistance and survival from Hong Kong detention camps Daniel C. Tsang

Decades after a cataclysmic event, human memory often recedes, replaced by more current concerns, while likely to be still lurking in the deepest recesses of the mind. The documentary evidence, however, if preserved, not only manages to maintain an important record, however disputable, of some of what happened, but offers new generations a change to re-interpret the past in the context of the present. This chapter teases out some of the voices preserved in artwork, political periodicals, and poetry from Vietnamese refugee detention camps in Hong Kong, especially the Whitehead Detention Center in Shatin. This is the literature of the transplanted and politically dispossessed, expressing political hatred for a victorious regime, as well as nostalgia for a lost homeland and vanquished regime, during an uncertain period in the midst of a tumultuous exodus of Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese “boat people” and others who arrived in Hong Kong by land in the two decades after 1975. The article draws on materials preserved in the Southeast Asian Archive at the University of California, Irvine’s Department of Special Collections and Archives.

Southeast Asian Archive at the University of California, Irvine Several hundred thousand people—Vietnamese and Chinese Vietnamese—who left Vietnam in two decades or so after 1975 were incarcerated in refugee detention camps in the region—as well as in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Government has prided itself on its “humanitarian” act in taking in the “boat people” from Vietnam but what is the view of those left for years in the camps awaiting resettlement or—ultimately for some—repatriation to Vietnam? Luckily one of the more accessible collections of materials from those detained in the Hong Kong Detention Centers is available for public use in California. The University of California, Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive has managed to preserve for posterity much of the artwork, political publications and writings by the refugees in Hong Kong. (See “Research Note” at the end of this chapter.) How this collection came about is as follows: Coincidentally with the founding of the Southeast Asian Archive in 1987, a group of UC Irvine students, concerned about the plight of Vietnamese refugees, formed a humanitarian group on campus, called Project Ngoc (Pearl). As part of Project Ngoc, UC Irvine students over the

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years converged on Hong Kong and volunteered their services in the Hong Kong detention camps. According to the Guide to the Project Ngoc records (2003), the project comprises eight standard archival boxes plus nine oversized folders, which “contains materials relating to the activities of Project Ngoc (1987–97), a nonprofit humanitarian group consisting mainly of college students. Materials from Project Ngoc include correspondence, records of meetings and activities, and photographs and slides documenting travel to refugee camps and statewide activities. Materials from various organizations involved with refugee issues include correspondence, bills, and other printed ephemera. The collection also contains artwork done by refugee artists in the Hong Kong camps.” As the Guide notes, “Originally initiated as a class at UCI by graduate student Tom Wilson, PN (Project Ngoc) was an attempt to increase the awareness of the students concerning the Vietnamese refugee crisis. Students in the class then decided to help alleviate the tragedies of the refugees by taking the Project beyond the limitations of the classroom and forming an organization in the hopes of realizing more concrete projects to assist the refugees.” More substantive materials on Hong Kong detention camps actually are contained in another Southeast Asian Archive collection, “Paul Tran Files on Southeast Asian Refugees.” Paul Tran Loc Hoang, a UC Irvine student who would became a community activist, made eleven trips to Hong Kong, especially to Whitehead Detention Center, collecting an incredible source of materials from his compatriots in the camps, including artwork, camp publications, and refugee correspondence, audio and video recordings, legal appeals, NGO reports, news clippings, as well as artifacts including even a gas mask and an (unarmed) tear gas canister. His collection contains some of the richest materials that remain to be explored on such topics as North/South Vietnam tensions in the camp, anti-communist organizing, resistance to repatriation, riots, police crackdowns, small press publication and literary output, and more generally, camp conditions, especially in the “closed” camps. The entire collection (not just those devoted to Hong Kong) spans 29 boxes and 17 oversize folders, with Hong Kong materials interspersed (Guide to the Paul Tran files on Southeast Asian refugees, 2003).

Confinement: constant theme What stands out among the literary output and artwork is the constant theme of confinement, as depicted, symbolically and literally, by barbed wire. The imagery invoked is that of the prison. In fact one writer, the anthropologist John Kundsen (2005), explicitly calls the Hong Kong camps as prisons in a “concrete hell” (p. 35, 40–43) and describes in stark tones life of incarceration behind barbed wire: They live crammed together behind chain-link fences several meters high. The fences, topped with barbed wire are strictly patrolled by the prison authorities or the police. The lights are never switched off. This particular world has no grass, no flowers, no animals, no toys. The prisoners are not allowed to prepare their own food, which is scooped from large plastic barrels on a communal basis … [p. 40].

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A visually stunning collection of artwork illustrates an anthology of Vietnameselanguage poetry, “Hoa Trong von Kem” (Flowers Behind Barbed Wire) that is archived in the Paul Tran Collection. In its introduction, the compilation’s editors, who formed in 15 April 1990 a Vietnamese Refugee Writers group from those incarcerated in Section 8 at Whitehead Detention Centre, described themselves in Vietnamese language1 as “lovers of literature and the arts who are anti-communist”. They also state in the introduction: We hope that this collection, which has conjured up images of our dear homeland full of sorrow, will move our countrymen abroad to love their homeland [even] more. We also hope that through this collection, the Vietnamese abroad can see more clearly their flesh and blood countrymen who are [now] suffering and worrying, but are still aspiring. The collection comprises 182 poems by 13 writers, only four of whom have been granted their freedom at the time of its publication (1 July 1991), with some contributing to a California-based journal, Viet Nam Hai Nguoi. The editors concede: ‘All things begin with adversity,’ and as such, the content and the form of the poems here are sure to have their own shortcomings. Nonetheless, we consider this the first fruit of the season, that we would like to present to our countrymen in units 7 and 8, to those at Whitehead, and to all refugees in Southeast Asia. They assert that: “An independent, free, democratic, and prosperous Viet Nam is what we strive for.” Le Huynh’s poem in the anthology is where the prison analogy is starkly made. He writes in Nha Tu (The Prison)2 My poems are kilos of explosives Flaring from the prison’s abyss The prison stretches for five hundred miles It starts from Viet Nam, ends in Hong Kong In another poem, “Hoang Hon Trai Cam” (Sunset from the Forbidden Camp), by Le Hong Son, on pages 13–14 of the anthology, the reality of confinement is mitigated by rays of sunshine through the “steel nets” surrounding Whitehead Detention Center in Shatin: Creeping pass the eyes of fences, the wind shoulders longings-anxious longings. Shatin, encircled by steel nets, hopes and dreams soar with wings slanted hills-retreating shades-on a search with aching sorrow where to—oh wind—where to …?

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Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement ferry with you a drop of my sorrow Forty, yes, is not quite old but my baggage already tugs with despair With whom do I share the injustice, the rancor? Sunlight casts its short rays, its long rays its inner rays browning, its outer rays glimmering soft wind raises each distant wave like sobs echoing from homeland. April, 1991. Section 3, Whitehead.

The cover of this collection of poems clearly depicts incarceration: The illustrated cover, in watercolor, depicts rolls of barbed wire along one edge, while rays of sunshine dominate the colorful painting, as a father, mother and son on a boat reach out towards the rays. The sea threatens menacingly in the foreground, with octopus tentacles flailing above the water. But the inside back cover of this anthology, also in watercolor, perhaps is more optimistic. Coils of barbed wire and a fence appear, but in the distant background. In the foreground, a shirtless boy gazes past the fence into blue sky and green grass beyond the fence, while a toy truck, with US written on its hood, and a detention camp cup—appear beside him on the floor of his bunk bed. Somehow, youth and toy truck brings forth a more hopeful imagery. On page 137, below a poem, an illustrator has drawn barbed wire atop Whitehead detention camp fencing, while a refugee squats under the watchful gaze of a detention camp guard with a rifle. Thus, one cannot escape the feeling of being incarcerated. Zinoman (2001, p. 36) in his analysis of Vietnamese revolutionary prison memoirs noted the absence of “vivid depictions of the texture of colonial prison life or evidence of the development of distinct subcultural formations behind bars” given their focus on relating revolutionary struggle. The poetry (and artwork) depicted in Hong Kong’s detention centers do not reflect revolutionary struggle but another sort of creativity that speaks across political boundaries. Poetry that speaks to or artwork that depicts the human condition will find receptive readers throughout the political spectrum. Here’s a poem that manages to speak to love despite the barriers. In Tinh Yeu Qua Luoi Thep (Love That Crossed Barbed Wire), another poet, Cao Manh Kim, exclaims (p. 132): I’m in Section 3 you, Section 7 our rendezvous by the fences by the fences, we talked [about] life and love incessantly, night after night [our] budding love

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remained severed by the fences [our] love deepened faithfully [our] love, truthful cannot have freedom The sky resounded with torrents [our] story remained incomplete the obstacles, the impediments metal sheets tightly sealed the fences I spoke in shouts to reach your ears From here on, we leave the days behind wires No longer must we shout You and I reunited!

Periodical collection Other publications archived at UC Irvine Libraries’ Southeast Asian Archive include a good collection of periodicals from refugees in several Hong Kong Vietnamese refugee detention camps from the 1990s. Whitehead: Tap Chi Tu Do (1990–93), Tap Chi Dan Quyen (1991–93), Nhan Quyen (1992–93), Tap Chi Dien Dan Dan Chu (1993–94), Tap The Khat Vong (1995), Thong Tin Nhan Ban (1994–95). High Island: Tieng Gol (1990), Tap Tho Niem Tin (1990). Nei Kwu Chau: Nguyet San Hy Vong (1992). Monthly issues of these publications often reprinted articles from mainstream media (such as the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post), which the editors translated into Vietnamese, but also included creative work (poetry and artwork). Significantly some issues archived appear to be original page proofs, with color graphics and original type-written script, suggesting a closer collaboration than otherwise expected between outside community activists and those in the camps. Indeed, several issues of Tu Do (Freedom), Whitehead Detention Centre’s monthly, were subsidized by a major Hong Kong corporation, the Swire Group. While all the serials expressed anti-communist viewpoints in their articles or graphics, some seemed to be expressly set up as political magazines, in direct opposition to the governing regime back in Vietnam, under the theme of human rights. Surprisingly, the Hong Kong government tolerated these journals, approving their publication, with their editors even expressing their appreciation to the local authorities for “censoring” them. For example, in the same edition of Tu Do that thanks the Swire Group, the editors go on to state that “we are indebted to all who have made financial donations and [to] many magazines and newspapers.”

104 Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement Among those listed are Time, The Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review and Asian Wall Street Journal, but also Vietnamese-language publications from the Vietnamese diaspora, including Viet Nam Hai Ngoai. The Tu Do editors express “a positive duty to thank” UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and ISS (International Social Services) “for their help and particularly Ms. Penares for her valuable suggestions and positive decisions in favor of our magazine.” They also thank the Vietnamese leadership of Sections 1 and 2 of Whitehead, “without whose contribution and co-operation this issue [would] never have been finished.” Most ironically, the editors “sincerely thank Mr. Du—CSD chief officer for his censorship and approval of the draft.” CSD stands for the Hong Kong Government’s Correctional Services Department, which operated the detention camps. Graphic design from the covers of Tu Do also depicts imprisonment, coupled with the hope for freedom. One cover depicts a youngster behind bars while next to the youngster is an image of the Statue of Liberty. Along both sides of these images are the identical pleas, in English, “Do Not Abandon Me, Liberty!” Its commemorative issue after one year depicts barbed wire in the foreground with the silhouettes of a man and a woman with arms raised supporting the publication. By its 27th issue, the cover depicts a raised fist, with chains broken, below two peace doves against the background of a boat bathed in rays of the sun (Figure 8.1), perhaps an overly optimistic depiction, given the reality facing most of the asylum-seekers.

Artwork from detention camps In addition to artwork from the Project Ngoc Records, actual artwork preserved in the Paul Tran collection include over 200 separate items, drawn by artists, young and old. They range from anti-communist art (Ho Chi Minh is a favorite target) to idyllic depictions of rural life back in the homeland. Given their tumultuous and often circuitous journey from Vietnam to Hong Kong, it is not surprising that the visual depictions often depict an essentialized memory of a lost homeland. The imagery also is alive with perhaps ironic symbols of hope. The Statue of Liberty, the Stars and Stripes as well as a dove (representing peace) are prevalent in many paintings, despite what many refugees would see as US abandonment of the fight back in their homeland, and despite their small chance, as the 1990s rolled on, of being able to find resettlement in the West. Many of the paintings depict life within the camps, encircled by tall fences and barbed wire. Many are oversize, almost all carefully annotated with the detention camp name and section plus the artist’s detainee number. These images share a stark similarity to the “Visions from Prison” (1990) art produced by inmates in the California State Prison System’s Arts in Corrections program, which is intended, ironically, “as a vehicle for more effective rehabilitation.” Some of the Hong Kong detention camp artwork also share a similarity with a collection of Vietnamese artists’ depiction of incarceration in Vietnam (Tran 1990).

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Figure 8.1 “Tap Chi Tu Do”/Freedom Magazine (cover). Issue no. 27. 1992. Whitehead Detention Centre, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Paul Tran Files (MS-SEA002).

The most striking item is likely the artwork painted on a piece of cloth, which, when unfolded, turns into a colorful panorama of Whitehead Detention Center (Figure 8.2). While the prison setting remains, and scenes depicted include a hunger strike and police striking the refugees, the overall portrayal of life in the camps is optimistic and reveals hope. Hopeful scenes depicted include the refugees playing soccer and volleyball, albeit behind fences topped with barbed wire, while other refugees watch a stage performance. In another section, younger detainees attend school. Other paintings, of course, deal harshly with the stark realities of detention and of dashed hopes and forced repatriation to their homeland. From the Project Ngoc Records, Trinh Quoc Lap’s “Hope of Freedom” panting depicts optimism, with a male figure staring into a flying dove, albeit surrounded by barbed wire while he is chained (Figure 8.3). Another painting, from the Paul Tran Files, by Pham Tien Dung, shows resistance and solidarity as refugees join arms in a protest in front of guards (Figure 8.4). From the Project Ngoc Records, a starker image (by Do Trinh) shows red drops of tears streaming down a face, a dove shown above the head but with a letter of rejection of refugee status behind the blood-like tears (Figure 8.5). In contrast, another painting, from the Paul Tran Files, by Tran

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Figure 8.2 Comprehensive action plan, Boat People Detention Center in Hong Kong. Original in color, undated, by Thac Vien, artist, storycloth. Source: Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Paul Tran Files (MS-SEA002).

Figure 8.3 Hope of freedom. Original in color, undated, by Trinh Quoc Lap, artist, painting. Source: Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Project Ngoc Records on Southeast Asian Refugees (MS-SEA016).

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Figure 8.4 Camp protesters. Original in color, undated, by Pham Tien Dung, artist, painting. Source: Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Paul Tran Files (MS-SEA002).

Ngoc Dong, depicts a cheerful boy as if celebrating repatriation to Vietnam by holding up a paper crane, against a backdrop of barbed wire (Figure 8.6). In his analysis of the art of diasporic Vietnamese artist Danh Vo, art critic Luigi Fassi (2010, p. 157) notes that in Danh Vo’s work, “the strange vitality that ‘papers’ acquire in the lives of refugees—their power to dictate whether an individual will be included among those with the ‘right to have rights’ or excluded and relegated to the status of bare life—is often examined via a kind of bureaucratic absurdism.” Thus when life is a series of setbacks art will soon capture the process.

Chicken wing as metaphor The Hong Kong detainees had an ironic metaphor for the seemingly inevitable series of official rejections of refugee status faced by many, as John Knudsen (2005, pp. 41–42) so succinctly observed: The chickenwing [sic] (cánh gà) is an essential metaphor here, used by camp prisoners, refugee workers, and the UNHCR. A negative result following an applicant’s first interview with an Immigration Officer earns the applicant his or her first chickenwing. This is the first screening. If, upon appeal, the Refugee Status Review Board comes to another negative decision, the

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Figure 8.5. Rejection letter. Original in color, 1989, by Do Trinh, artist, painting. Source: Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Project Ngoc Records on Southeast Asian Refugees (MS-SEA016).

applicant receives a second chickenwing. This is the second screening. Having been rejected twice … the applicant is now ready for voluntary repatriation. The UNHCR may still come to the rescue, however, if a person who has been refused is finally “mandated in” by the Review Board. If not, the person receives a third chickenwing, meaning forced repatriation. (Original footnote reference removed.) Knudsen (2005, p.42) also notes that the detainees have more informal, if illustrative, descriptions: First chicken wing: “fly back to Vietnam—a chicken cannot fly with one wing.” Second chicken wing: “fly back to Vietnam—a chicken can fly with two wings.” Third chicken wing: “forced repatriation with UNHCR, the final arbiter of “flight,” positioned as the enemy.” Knudsen (1992) named an earlier work of his Chicken wings: Refugee stories from a concrete hell. Other observers have also used the term in the titles of their work, including Peter Hunt (1996) in his master’s thesis on crime among Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong. Writer Andrew Lam (2005, pp.77–78), offers

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Figure 8.6 Forced repatriation. Original in color, undated, by Tran Ngoc Dong, artist, painting. Source: Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Paul Tran Files (MS-SEA002).

another take on the chicken wing metaphor, when he writes about Hong Kong camp detainee Lieu Tran and two partake of chicken wings, a camp staple: “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 a 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 the 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.” For those unwilling to be repatriated to Vietnam, this legalistic process has essentially rendered such detainees stateless. This chicken wing metaphor is graphically illustrated in a painting [by Doan Huu Duc] of a naked child sitting among barbed wire, with chicken wing written in Vietnamese. The painting depicts not only a child in detention, but alludes to the dire conditions facing children

110 Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement in detention. The plight of children in detention, especially that of unaccompanied children, is excruciatingly explored in Refugee Concern Hong Kong’s 1991 damning report, Defenseless in Detention.

Library proposal One of the early Project Ngoc projects, whose documentation is found in Paul Tran’s collection, caught my librarian’s eye. It captures well Project Ngoc’s advocacy mission, and its practical side, as it faced the challenge of trying to alleviate Hong Kong detention camp conditions. The document is a two-page, undated, “Proposal for Libraries in Refugee Camps,”3 submitted by the Council for Refugee Rights and Project Ngoc. It sought sponsors to support the effort to set up a maximum of 10 libraries in the Hong Kong camps “to provide up-to-date information and entertainment to asylum seekers.” As background, it provided this justification: “Vietnamese asylum seekers arriving at refugee camps often end up spending an average 2–4 years in those camps. Due to the long stay, many young children and adolescents do not receive adequate [in]formation and often are illeterate [sic]. Language and cultural orientation teachers in these camps are often overworked and underpaid. Their greatest complaint, however, lies with the lack of resources to aid their teaching. Through volunteer experience and observations in the field, we recommend that a number of libraries be established to fulfill these grave needs. Aside from camp social workers, the very limited libraries that currently exist in the camp often are the only sources of information to which the asylum seekers have access. Information presented in these libraries are often outdated, incomplete, scarce and inappropriate. It added: For those asylum seekers fortunate enough to arrive before the cut-off dates, the libraries could provide information that will be useful to eventual resettlement in a western society. For those who have to face repatriation, information in the libraries serve as their only point of contact with western societies. In either case, a good library would be vastly useful. Coupled with cultural orientation and language classes, good libraries will aid asylum seekers to improve their understanding of the West. This is especially useful for young children and adolescents to spend their languished years in the camps. The proposal went on to suggest that its “main focus would be to improve resources at existing libraries” in the camps, rather than create new libraries, and that not all detention centers would be “receptive” to a library. It suggested stocking the collections with “[b]ooks and magazines that introduce the Western cultures in both Vietnamese and English” with mailing costs, if any, covered by the sponsors; Vietnamese newspapers, magazines, and books “that provide updated information,” language books “that teach English, French and Vietnamese,” and “[v]ideotapes for cultural orientation purposes” as well as “[e]ntertainment videotapes such as concert, music tapes, translated Chinese movies tapes.” The proposal estimated it would cost US$500 to operate each library, including $350 for subscriptions and cost of books.

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Unfortunately, no trace remains in the files as to the disposition of this proposal. However Project Ngoc (1988, p. 17) paints a dark picture of library facilities in one closed detention camp, Tuen Mun: “The Tuen Mun library is best described as pathetic. The two-bookcase library is as sparsely stocked as Hei Lin[g] Chau. It is doubtful the English books could be read by refugees. Obviously this library also needs a large number of English grammar texts, Vietnamese newspapers, magazines, and tapes.”

Ethnic Chinese among detainees Within the detention facilities in Hong Kong, in 1982, tension between North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese migrants erupted into violence, sparked by “arguments over ideology.” As a result, Hong Kong authorities attempted to relocate certain migrants, reserving Hei Ling Chau detention camp for largely North Vietnamese. Of 2,831 refugees there, 98 per cent are North Vietnamese, with only two per cent (48 refugees) ethnic Chinese. The population makeup resulted from a “conscious effort” by the government to separate Vietnamese from the North and South into different camps. However, within Tuen Mun, another closed camp, “both groups exist peacefully today” (Project Ngoc 1988, p. 13). In contrast, Chau Nguyen (2000, p. 105), a South Vietnamese refugee in his pre-teens, recalls being in Tuen Mun in 1988 and being beaten up by northerners there, until the southerners tried, unsuccessfully, to strike by climbing over a fence. Ramses Amer (1991, p. 106) estimates that of the boat people leaving Vietnam, an estimated 60–70 per cent were ethnic Chinese, “equivalent to between 202,521 and 236,275 persons.” An additional 230,000 ethnic Chinese are believed to have left Vietnam via overland routes to China. Thus Amer estimates that some 432,521 to 466,275 ethnic Chinese left Vietnam up to the end of September 1979. What happened to them? How many came to Hong Kong and elsewhere, such as to the United States? The collections archived at UC Irvine offers some clues. As for ethnic Chinese arriving in Hong Kong from Vietnam, official statistics compiled by the Hong Kong colonial government, as archived in the Project Ngoc collection of the Southeast Asian Archive (“Ethnic origins of arrivals” 1991), show that the majority of the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam arrived in Hong Kong in 1979, with 17,972 Chinese Vietnamese arriving that year from South Vietnam, and 37,536 from North Vietnam. The only other years of significant arrival of Chinese Vietnamese were 1989 and 1990. In 1989, 1717 Chinese Vietnamese from South Vietnam and 486 Chinese Vietnamese from North Vietnam arrived in Hong Kong. (A larger number of Vietnamese arrived that year from North Vietnam (28,878) compared with 3,033 from South Vietnam.) In 1990, 4,260 Chinese Vietnamese arrived from South Vietnam compared with just 296 from North Vietnam. Overall, from 1979–91, 24,581 Chinese from South Vietnam arrived in Hong Kong, and 38,836 arrived from North Vietnam. 43,755 Vietnamese from South Vietnam arrived in Hong Kong and 56,646 arrived in Hong Kong from North Vietnam.

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Citing a later Monthly Statistical Report (June 1993), Ronald Skeldon (1994) gives slightly different figures, noting that in 1991, 2319 ethnic Chinese from South Vietnam arrived in Hong Kong, compared with 222 from North Vietnam. However, 1992–93 ethnic Chinese migration to Hong Kong from Vietnam are miniscule and do not appreciably change the totals. Skeldon notes, significantly, that the Hong Kong colonial government statistics do not include “ex-China Vietnamese illegal immigrants.” In 1987, for example, some 7406 of these ex-China Vietnamese illegal immigrants (or ECVIIs in local jargon), arrived in Hong Kong. Since they did not reach Hong Kong as a place of first asylum the colonial government did not consider them to be eligible for resettlement, and after China agreed, they were repatriated to China. The fact that the numbers of ethnic Chinese ending up in Hong Kong are undercounted because of this official distinction between those arriving from Vietnam and those arriving via mainland China is a consequence of politics and policy. As Chris Bale (1990, p. 171), Oxfam Hong Kong’s director has noted, “. . . boat people must also be seen in the context of illegal immigration from China, and there is a fundamental double standard here. Gurkhas and guard dogs patrol the Chinese border, and the illegal immigrants they catch are routinely sent back across the border. Twenty thousand are sent back every year. 320,740 have been sent back since 1979. There is not a whisper of protest from the international community about this repatriation.” In addition, Hong Kong’s colonial government during this period of Vietnamese refugee influx stopped its “touch base” policy of accepting migrants from China who managed to reach urban areas in Hong Kong, and began treating all such migrants as illegal immigrants. At the same time, Hong Kong residents’ attitude toward the Vietnamese, initially one of “humanitarian sympathy” changed to “strong ambivalence” before turning to “outright hostility,” according to Lawrence Lam (1994, 147). The policy of arbitrary detention was challenged by civil rights attorney Pam Baker (Robertson 2002) of the Hong Kong-based Project Concern, whose victory at the Privy Council in London in 1996, meant the colonial government had to release “some 275 people with Taiwanese documents who had been registered in Vietnam as aliens. They had each been detained in Hong Kong, without trial, for periods of between five and eight years,” according to Rob Brook (1996). However, this legal victory turned out to be a hollow one, largely ignored by the colonial government which sought to free its hands of any such problems in the run-up to China’s taking back Hong Kong the following year. The Hong Kong authorities insisted that arbitrary detention was both lawful and appropriate. The US General Accounting Office (1996) also would find the overall Hong Kong refugee screening process appropriate. The artwork and literature preserved at UC Irvine’s detention camp materials is skimpy on the ethnic subgroup breakdown of the detainees. However, one poem manages to refer to ethnicity. In the collection of poems cited earlier, there is poem (pages 208–9), Nguyen Van Thuyet’s “Co gai Nguoi Viet goc Hoa”

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[Chinese Vietnamese girl], is also illustrated with barbed wire behind the title words while a girl sits by her bed. The words Viet and Hoa are highlighted in watercolor. Where many of the Chinese Vietnamese who fled Vietnam ended up has recently gotten more scholarly attention. Sociologist Ruben Rumbaut (2007, especially pp. 656–57) has cleverly teased out ethnic affiliation by analyzing place of birth and language spoken at home in the US 2000 Census and Public Use-Micro Sample (PUMS) five per cent sample data to estimate the actual numbers of Chinese Vietnamese who arrived in the United States from the 1970s through 2000, with Monica Trieu (2008, p. 20; 2009, p. 21), providing additional data. Among those born in Vietnam who arrived in the US, only 6,760 Chinese Vietnamese are estimated to have arrived there in 1975 (compared with 87,869 Vietnamese), but in 1979, the number of Chinese Vietnamese rose to 27,736 (compared with 30,562 Vietnamese) and in 1980, the number was 26,046 (compared with 48,291 Vietnamese). In summation, many issues remain to be explored, and the archival materials at UC Irvine Libraries are rich sources for teasing out information about resistance and survival in the Hong Kong Vietnamese detention camps.

Research Note The bulk of the resources covered in this paper are from the Southeast Asian Archive at the University of California, Irvine. Now part of UC Irvine’s Department of Special Collections and Archives, the Southeast Asian Archive was formed by librarian Anne Frank in 1987 to collect and preserve materials relating to the refugee and immigration experiences of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and the Hmong from 1975 and beyond (Fujita-Rony and Frank, 2003). Since the archive was formed 12 years after the Fall of Saigon (or the Liberation of Vietnam), its Hong Kong detention camp-related materials mainly focus on the period since 1987, and more specifically on asylum seekers seeking resettlement but with many, in the end, facing repatriation to Vietnam before Hong Kong reverted back to China in 1997. Nonetheless, the Southeast Asian Archive has maintained arguably the most publicly accessible collection of materials relating to the Hong Kong detention camp experiences of the post-1975 refugees from Vietnam.4 Indeed, some materials have been placed online via the SEAAdoc gateway: “Documenting the Southeast Asian Experience” (http://www.lib.uci.edu/seaadoc/ ), supported by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, finding aids from the various archival collections are accessible online via the Online Archive of California (http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ ) where one can browse the collections or the institutions (including the Southeast Asian Archive) participating in the online archive. A small annual grant, the Anne Frank Visiting Researcher Award, named after the archive’s founding librarian, is available by competitive application for researchers visiting the archive from outside Orange

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County, California. For more information, see: http://www.lib.uci.edu/libraries/ collections/special/coll/seaa/award-call.html. The artwork reproduced in this chapter are courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Four items are from the Paul Trân Files on Southeast Asian Refugees, 1975–2001. MS-SEA002. Two are from the Project Ngoc Records on Southeast Asian Refugees. MS-SEA016.

Notes 1 My appreciation to Trinh Luu for assistance with translations of this and other text, including poems, from this anthology. 2 “Nha Tu” is included on page 49 of the anthology. 3 Located in the Paul Tran Files on Southeast Asian Refugees collection, MS-SEA002, Box 15, Folder 7, ‘Project Ngoc, Meeting Materials, 1989–90.’ 4 While UCI Libraries have acquired and archived over 200 pieces of artwork, that number is dwarfed by the 800 items of artwork collected by the Vietnamese Art in the Camp project, of the Garden Streams Hong Kong Fellowship of Christian Artists. The project, which ran from 1989–91, and was organized by artist Evelyna Liang Yeewoo, brought into the camps Hong Kong artists and art educators to conduct workshops on painting, embroidery, music, drama, dance, and writing. Some 200 items of artwork, photographs and textual documents were presented in an exhibit, C.A.R.E. Local Vietnamese Community Art Re-encountered, organized by visual studies scholar Sophia Law Suk-mun in April 2008 at Lingnan University (Law, 2008). A selection of 40 items were exhibited in January 2009 at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. (Information from Samson Wong, who has been cataloging the artwork, for much of this information in an e-mail dated 2 April 2010, and from Sophia Law and Evelyna Liang.) The artwork has been shipped from Hong Kong to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where it will be processed for archival preservation, and temporarily housed there.

Bibliography Amer, R. (1991) The Ethnic Vietnamese in Vietnam and Sino-Vietnamese relations, Selangor: Forum. Bale, C. (1990) ‘Vietnamese boat People’, in R.Y.C. Wong and J.Y.S. Cheng (eds), The Other Hong Kong Report 1990, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. p. 171. Brook, R. (1996) ‘Arbitrary detention of Vietnamese asylum seekers’, Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor Newsletter, June, www.hkhrm.org.hk/english/reports/enw/enw0696b. htm (accessed 7 September 2009). Fassi, L. (2010) ‘Terra incognita: Luigi Fassi on the art of Danh Vo’, Artforum, 48(6): 152–59. Fujita-Rony, D. and Frank, A. (2003) ‘Archiving histories: The Southeast Asian Archive at University of California, Irvine’, Amerasia Journal, 29(3): 155. Guide to the Paul Tran files on Southeast Asian refugees (2003) MS-SEA02, Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine, Libraries, www.oac.cdlib. org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf8f59p1tg/ (accessed 6 September 2009). Guide to the Project Ngoc Records (2003) MS-SEA016, Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine, Libraries, www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ kt8z09p8pd?query=Project%20Ngoc (accessed 30 August 2009).

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Hong Kong Government (1991) ‘Ethnic origins of arrivals’ 1991, in Monthly statistical report (arrivals and departures) (March), SRD 704/1/1, located in Project Ngoc collection, MS-SEA016, Box 1, Folder 42, Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine, Libraries. Hunt, P.G. (1996) ‘Dragons and chicken wings: the anomalies of the involvement of Vietnamese refugees in crime in Hong Kong, 1989–95’, Master thesis, University of Hong Kong, http://hub.hku.hk/handle/123456789/25752 (accessed 8 May 2010). Knudsen, J.C. (1992) Chicken Wings: Refugee Stories from a Concrete Hell, Bergen: Magnat Forlag. —— (2005) Capricious Worlds: Vietnamese Life Journeys, Lit Verlag, Muenster. Lam, A. (2005), Perfume Dreams, Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Lam, L. (1994) ‘Hong Kong Chinese: facing the political changes in 1997’, in H. Adelman (ed.), Legitimate and illegitimate Discrimination: New Issues in Migration, Toronto: York Lanes Press, pp. 135–52. Law, S.S. (2008) ‘Art in adversity—C.A.R.E. at Lingan University,’ in Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook, Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, pp. 143–63. Nguyen, C. (2000) ‘Hainan, Hong Kong, and Tuen Mun camp’, in M.T. Cargill and J.Q. Huynh (eds), Voices of Vietnamese Boat People: Nineteen Narratives of Escape and Survival, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 99–106. Project Ngoc (1988) The Forgotten People: Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong: A Critical Report, Irvine, CA: The Project. Robertson, G. (2002), ‘Pam Baker: Hong Kong lawyer who fought for rights of Vietnamese refugees’, The Guardian, 27 April, www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/ apr/27/guardianobituaries (accessed 7 September 2009). Rumbaut, R.G. (2007) ‘Vietnam’ in M.C. Waters and R. Ueda (eds.) The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 652–73. Skeldon, R. (1994) ‘Hong Kong’s response to the Indochinese influx, 1975–93’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 534. Tran, D.T. (1990) Writers and Artists in Vietnamese Gulags, with Choe’s Cartoons from Vietnam, Idaho: Century Publishing House. Trieu, M.M. (2008) ‘Ethnic chameleons and the contexts of identity: A comparative look at the dynamics of intra-national ethnic identity construction for 1.5 and second generation Chinese-Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans,’ PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine. —— (2009) Identity Formation among Chinese-Vietnamese Americans: Being, Becoming, and Belonging, El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing. U.S. General Accounting Office (1996) Vietnamese Asylum Seekers: Refugee Screening Procedures under the Comprehensive Plan of Action, Washington, DC: The General Accounting Office. ‘Visions from Prison’ (1995) in N. Morris and DJ Rothman (eds.), The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 8 pages of unnumbered plates between pages 274 and 275. Zinoman, P. (2001) ‘Reading revolutionary prison memoirs’, in H.T.H Tai (ed.), The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 21–45.

9

Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong Visual images and stories Sophia Suk-mun Law

History is often recorded and read in texts. However, images are more powerful than words when it comes to revealing tragic episodes in history. One recent example are the thousands of images of 11 September 2001 collected by the United States Library of Congress (Adams 2002). These images vividly reflect the immediate emotions and their aftermath of a traumatic event. In April 1975, the fall of Saigon marked the beginning of one of the largest forced human migrations in modern history. To escape from the iron-fisted rule of the communist government, millions of Vietnamese risked their lives in a bid for freedom by fleeing the country in boats. According to a report issued by the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR) in 2000, one third of Vietnam’s boat people, or around 250,000 men, women and children, died at sea as a result of storms, illness, starvation or at the hands of their fellow passengers. For the survivors, their tragedy did not end once they reached land. Because of its geographic location and unique political situation, Hong Kong played a significant role in this drama. Between 1975 and 1995, Hong Kong took in 223,302 Vietnamese boat people and around 40 refugee camps at different periods were set up by the government to deal with the crisis (findings from my current project which involved many sources). This chapter features photographs taken during that period in an attempt to paint a vivid picture of the Vietnamese boat people’s plight in Hong Kong through the eyes of the media.

The first wave of Vietnamese boat people Hong Kong received its first wave of Vietnamese boat people on 4 May 1975 when a Danish freighter, the Clara Maersk, entered the territory with a group of 3743 refugees on board. A few days later, on the seventh and the tenth of May, another two cohorts of 70 and 27 boat people were found and rescued near Hong Kong waters. Both the Immigration Department and the Social Welfare Department began going through the necessary procedures to process and settle these people. They were hosted in temporary refugee camps, including government barracks at Chatham Road, Dowell’s Ridge in Fanling, Sek Kong, and Sai Kung. The Harcourt Road Fire Station, Tai Lam Prison, and Victoria Prison were also used for short periods for transit purposes. As for the wounded and the sick, they were

Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong 117 first treated and processed through the Princess Margaret Hospital. In a process funded by the UNHCR and aided by the Hong Kong British Government, most of these refugees were resettled in a third country, including the United States, France, Germany, and Australia. During their stay in Hong Kong, boat people were free to leave the refugee camps. News, editorials and criticism related to the first wave of influx of Vietnamese boat people published in local newspapers reflect the sympathetic views of local citizens for these people. Photographs in the Mingpao (10 May 1975, p. 5), as shown in Figure 9.1, show groups of boat people in Hong Kong, including a refugee family of seven, five sisters, and a nineteen-year-old ex-law student. One of the photographs captures a scene where refugee children receive candy, food and clothes from local people in front of the camp gate. According to some reports, donations were made to the refugees (Mingpao, 8 May 1975, p. 1), and a mobile telegram station was specially set up by Cable & Wireless Company to allow refugees to send telegrams to their relatives in Vietnam (Mingpao, 9 May 1975, p. 1), and the government was urged to help the refugees make contact with relatives in Hong Kong (Mingpao, 10 May 1975, p. 1). A report that appeared in the Mingpao in August 1976 indicates the sympathy commonly felt by local citizens for the refugees generally lasted throughout the following year. It tells of the

Figure 9.1 The first wave of Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong. Source: Mingpao 1975-5-10).

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arrival at a local dock of a tiny fishing boat with its exhausted passengers, who were warmly welcomed with bread and fruit by local fishermen (Mingpao, 8 July 1976, p. 4). On the other hand, local observers had already voiced their concerns about potential problems arising out of the large number of Vietnamese refugees even from the very beginning. One of the earliest indications of such concern came from an article published in the Mingpao on 30 May 1975. It points out that without a proper resettlement scheme for the refugees, they would become a big problem for Hong Kong.

Local reaction to refugee policies The sympathetic attitude of Hong Kong people towards Vietnamese boat people began to waver as numbers escalated dramatically by the end of the 1970s. In 1978, the number of new arrivals was five times as high as in the previous year. In 1979, the number climbed further to 68,748. The number of Vietnamese refugees traveling by sea doubled from 1500 a month in late 1977 to a new record of 3000 a month in March 1978, spiking further to 4920 and in April and to 5840 in May (Hughes 1985: 59). According to a record made by the Hong Kong Government Secretariat (1987), the number of arrivals grew from 1001 in 1977 to 6609 in 1978. While many refugees still fled in small fishing boats, thousands traveled in freighters that, although spacious, were decrepit. There is evidence that syndicates in southern Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, and Taiwan used abandoned freighters to transport Vietnamese who could pay to escape from their country (ibid: 60–61). Would-be refugees were told that to secure passage on one of these freighters, they would have to pay 10 taels of gold for each adult and five taels of gold for each child aged between five and sixteen (ibid). Thousands of Vietnamese refugees who could afford to do so were taken by these freighters to the South China Sea, from where permission to land in a country was sought. Due to skepticism over the “refugee trade”, many Southeast Asian countries including Thailand and Malaysia stopped receiving boat people. On 15 January 1979, Malaysian Prime Minister Hussein Onn announced that Vietnamese refugees would no longer be granted permission to land in Malaysia. Food and water supplies might be given but a number of countries in the region prohibited vessels carrying Vietnamese boat people from approaching their coastal waters. Hong Kong declared itself a first port of refuge in January 1979. The liberal policy inevitably encouraged Vietnamese boat people to change their destination from other Southeast Asian countries to Hong Kong. It was taken as “purely sentimentality which fed the cynicism of Hanoi”, by critics such as Das (1979) in June 1979. One week before the policy was introduced on 23 December 1978, the Huey Fong, a 1600-ton tramp streamer carrying 3320 boat people, entered the harbor without permission. Upon its arrival, Hong Kong police discovered gold worth almost US$800,000 in the engine room. Evidence showed that the Vietnamese government was involved in this kind of “refugee trade”. The captain and his crew, together with a businessman, were convicted and sentenced to between 15 months and seven years in prison. A few weeks after the arrival of the

Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong 119 Huey Fong, another freighter in poor condition, the Skyluck, entered Hong Kong waters carrying 2660 refugees. Substantial coverage and pictures of the investigation relating to both the Huey Fong and the Skyluck can be found in Sing Tao Jih Pao (August 8 1979, p. 1). Given local dislike for the refugee trade, the Hong Kong Government prohibited the refugees from landing. Food and medical care were given and the ship drifted along the nearby coast for five months. During this period, a mass protest swim, and a hunger strike were held and placards begging for help were constantly displayed, but all these efforts failed to persuade the Hong Kong Government to grant permission to land. On 29 June, the ship’s anchor was deliberately cut loose and the ship drifted to Lamma Island, thus bringing an end to the drama (Figure 9.2). Another even more dramatic incident occurred earlier on 26 May 1979. A smaller freighter, the Sen On, deliberately ran aground on Lantau Island carrying refugees, several hundreds of whom ran ashore. Before the freighter reached Hong Kong, the captain and eleven crew members had already disappeared. Although the ship had room for only 600 to 700 passengers, it was carrying 1430 refugees, who the Hong Kong government was obliged to receive and process (Hughes 1985: 190). In addition to the large number of refugees who came by freighter, small boats carrying hundreds of refugees kept arriving in Hong Kong. When a 35 meter vessel named the Ha Long entered Hong Kong waters on 15 April 1979,

Figure 9.2 Skyluck drifted ashore on Lamma Island in 1979, and more than 3000 Vietnamese refugees on board were received by the Hong Kong Government. Source: Hong Kong Government Information Service (1980) Hong Kong 1980: A Review of 1979.

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Figure 9.3 Five hundred and seventy-three refugees were found inside the lower deck of a 35 meter long vessel, Ha Long when it arrived in Hong Kong on April 15, 1979. Source: Hong Kong Government Information Service (1980) Hong Kong 1980: A Review of 1979.

it was shocking for all to see how 537 refugees, of whom 230 were children, were packed below deck (Figure 9.3). According to a government report, around 19,000 and 20,000 boat people arrived in Hong Kong in May and June 1979 respectively. A record 4516 boat people arrived in fishing boats in one single day on 10 June 1979. These small boats were towed to the government dockyard in Canton Road for processing and health checks. The dockyard was used as a kind of closed centre that refugees were not allowed to leave until they had a medical examination, been inoculated, and gone through initial processing by immigration staff. Local officials were totally unprepared for the number of boats rushing into Hong Kong. On 22 June 1979, the dockyard held about 10,000 refugees of all ages (Figure 9.4). The physical environment, both for the Vietnamese living there and staff, was distressing as one can imagine. Daily supplies would have been stretched and the heavy workloads demanded at that time in the dockyard must have been barely manageable. The escalating outflow of Vietnamese boat people in 1979 was described in a testimony given by Richard Clark, United States coordinator for refugee affairs, to the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the United States Congress House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, as an “absolute explosion” (1979: 2). It is estimated that the number of boat people leaving Vietnam’s shores every month increased dramatically from 22,000 in March to 32,000 in April and grew further to 65,000

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Figure 9.4: The government dockyard at Canton Road served as a closed centre for processing all newly-arrived Vietnamese boat people and around 10,000 boat people were waiting for health checks and the initial registration by immigration staff. Source: Hong Kong Government Information Service (1980) Hong Kong 1980: A Review of 1979).

in May. By the end of 1979, there were 50,609 boat people in Hong Kong awaiting resettlement. As many Western countries began to slow down the Vietnamese refugee resettlement process and United Nations funding was cut, Vietnamese boat people became a pressing issue for Hong Kong. Local communities started to question the policy of accepting these people. Tasker’s (1976: 30–31) earlier view that “Refugees from the mainland also need the same benevolent and sympathetic treatment and should be allowed to stay here permanently” was reiterated. In explaining the changing attitude of Hong Kong people to receiving the Vietnamese, the then governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, spoke at the United Nations conference held in Geneva in July 1979: I can claim with pride that we have carried out our obligations to the full. Hong Kong’s record as a place of first asylum is unique. But on past experience you cannot blame people in Hong Kong for drawing the conclusion that help would be greater if policies were harsher. Nor can you blame those who apply harsher policies for concluding that they paid off (Hong Kong Government Information Service 1980: 8–9). He continued to explain local people’s hostility towards the refugees and said: By hard work, social adaptability and realism based on the acceptance of the fact that resources are limited, the people have made for themselves a

122 Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement structure of life enormously better than 10 years ago. It is the benefits of this structure that they fear may be eroded by this influx of boat refugees over which they have no control (ibid). The social tension and financial burden induced by the arrival of the Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong can be seen in the number and locations of newly converted refugee centers. Before 1979, there was only one dockyard reception centre (Chatham Road) and a few refugee camps as stated earlier in this chapter. To cope with the large numbers, sites such as military camps and factory were temporarily transformed into refugee centers in 1979. By the middle of the year, there were 15 refugee camps including Sham Shui Po (3000 refugees), the Jubilee detention camps, the Argyle St Army Camp 4 (20,000 refugees), the Kai Tak East and North Camps (10,000 refugees), the Tuen Mun 23-storey factory I and II camps (16,000 refugees), and the Shek Wu Hui Camp. These were open camps located close to the heart of local communities. Refugees were free to go in and out of the centers and were allowed to find jobs to support themselves. News reports appeared about conflicts between Vietnamese refugees and local citizens (Sing Tao, 8 February 1979, p. 2).

A new policy on the Vietnamese—the closed camp To deter more boat people arriving, the Hong Kong Government adopted a closed-camp policy on 2 July 1982. Refugees who arrived and those born after that date were segregated from the local community. The closed camps at Chi Ma Wan, Cape Collison, and Hei Ling Chau, were run by the Correctional Service Department and the Pillar Point Refugee Centre was run by Caritas under the UNHCR. Boat people housed in these camps, both young and old, were confined in a closed space that was barred and wired like a prison (Figure 9.5). It is easy to imagine the fragile psychological state of these people under such conditions immediately following their horrific ordeal at sea. Agitation, anxiety, and frustration were easily ignited in these camps, often turning into violence, riots and crime started increasing in 1982. A number of fights broke out in Kai Tak North in early May of that year (Mingpao, 4 May 1982, p. 1). Of the 7000 refugees housed in this camp, 6000 were from southern Vietnam and the rest were from the north. The first riot involved 300 refugees, four of whom were injured, and was followed by another riot on the next night. Six refugees were ultimately arrested and 15 were injured including a Chinese reporter and a European policeman. During the riots, almost 1000 refugees fled their camps for safety and were later transferred to the Jubilee Camp. Another riot occurred on 9 May 1982 at the Argyle Street Camp in which 23 refugees were arrested and charged (Mingpao, 9 May 1982, p. 7). Henry Loke, the Manager of the Kai Tak North camp reflected the prevalence of fighting inside the camp in saying: “This is very common occurrence among Viet refugees. After a few beers they get drunk.” (Humphrey 1982: 11). In reporting the riots, most Chinese newspapers focused on the violence and conflict among the Vietnamese.

Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong 123

Figure 9.5 Life behind the wire. Source: AIC, Garden Streams.

It might be too easy for the Chinese media to blame Vietnamese refugees for the riots owing to their own regional and cultural conflicts. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, the Western news media featured articles reviewing the underlying causes of the violence inside the camps. Physical conditions in the refugee camps and frustration arising from long periods in this environment were certainly a catalyst for the violence. Many of the camps were actually military sites in which the buildings were made of zinc and metal and had originally been erected for temporary purposes. A report in the South China Morning Post on June 23, 1988 (p. 1) indicates that for the Vietnamese refugees, “temporary” could really mean indefinite. It reported that one of the earliest refugees, Pham Van Xuel and his brother Manh stayed at the Chi Ma Wan closed camp for six years waiting for resettlement. The physical conditions of the camps were later succinctly recalled by an ex-refugee and described in an article published on The Correspondent (Sept/Oct 2005, p. 22) has written the following: “Behind the wire, inside a cage, within a hut, stuffed in a box”. The camps were composed of “huts” made out of metal containers. Each hut contained approximately 20 three-level bunk beds which were constructed using metal frames and thin plywood boards. Each level counted as a unit which was partitioned from its neighboring unit by a wooden board and drapes. The bottom levels were usually allocated to families, meaning that a family of three, four, or even five had to live in an 8′ × 6′ × 3′ cubicle

124 Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement (Figure 9.6). The middle cubicles were usually allocated to couples, and the highest cubicles to single men or women. All daily activities such as dining and bathing were conducted in public. Under such conditions, which gave people little space and even less privacy, anxiety, frustration, and anger begat violence, and women and children were common victims of abuse. Hong Kong’s closed-camp policy, which was adopted in 1982, reduced the inflow of Vietnamese boat people into Hong Kong only for a while, and the situation worsened again when the political and economic situation in Vietnam deteriorated further in 1984. The number of annual Vietnamese boat people arrivals spiked dramatically from 3395 in 1987 to 18,323 in 1988. Arrivals peaked in 1989, when there were 34,112 new refugees, and remained high in 1991 at 20,206 (Hong Kong Government 1993). In April 1988, a survey was conducted to investigate local people’s attitude to the refugee policy. In the survey, 65 per cent of the interviewees supported refusing entry to Vietnamese boat people (South China Morning Post, 18 April 1988, p. 1). The Hong Kong Government began to discuss the possibility of “voluntary repatriation” with the Vietnam Government. On June 16, the government started a screening policy for all asylum seekers to differentiate legitimate refugees from economic migrants. All boat people arriving in Hong Kong on or after that day were immediately transferred to detention camps to await screening. This policy seems to have gained the support of local citizens. Three months after the first survey, another survey indicated that nearly 75 per cent of Hong Kong people held the view that boat people should not be permitted to land in the territory (South China Morning Post, 25 July 1988, pp. 1 and 3). Two other surveys were conducted in the following year, providing evidence of the persistence of a similar attitude among local people as reflected by their support for the revocation of the first port of refugee policy. The first

Figure 9.6 The image shows the interior of a detention camp where teens were crowded together in between rows of bunk beds. Source: AIC, Garden Streams.

Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong 125 survey, which was carried by the Central and Western District Council, showed that 89.3 per cent of the community supported scrapping the policy. Likewise, the survey conducted by the Sai Kung District Council showed that 75.6 per cent of the district’s populace believed that the Hong Kong Government should abolish the policy. In subsequent years, various local communities protested against the government’s old refugee policy. For example, a Tuen Mun Distinct Council member, under the support of the local community, conducted a hunger strike for thirty hours in order to draw the public’s attention to the refugee crisis (Mingpao, 8 October 1988, p. 2). Later, the North New Territories District Council also protested against government’s decision to change the military camps in the district to refugee camps (Mingpao, 29 April 1989, p. 6).

Solving the Vietnamese problem—the screening policy Although most local people rejected the presence of the Vietnamese boat people and generally supported the screening policy, the policy itself was not without controversy and local media were aware of the irony. Two cartoons published in local newspapers at the time reflect how the screening process was held up to ridicule. The first one depicts the desperation of boat people who arrived after the cut-off date (Sing Tao Daily, 16 June 1988, p. 26); whereas the second one highlights the controversial nature of the policy in a humorous way (Mingpao, 16 June 1988, p. 4). It shows a female officer holding a refugee baby and asks: “His father is a political refugee but his mother is an economic migrant. What should I do about his status?” Under the new screening policy, those whose refugee status was confirmed were transferred to open camps to await processing for resettlement to a third country. Those who were considered “economic migrants” were detained in detention camps for possible repatriation. Detention camps including those at Chi Ma Wan, Stone Cutter, Cape Collison, Erskine, and Hei Ling Chau were set up in that year, followed by the Whitehead, High Island, Tai A Chau, Shek Kong, Shek Kwu Chau, and the Nei Kwu Chau detention camps in 1989 to cater for the high number of arrivals discussed earlier. For the Vietnamese refugees, waiting was the only theme of camp life. Inside the camps, adults had no jobs, children had no formal school. Weekdays and Sunday worked the same for these people whose daily routines were repetitions of waiting for meals, baths, bedtime, and indefinite years of the screening process. If waiting in an open or closed camp was frustrating for boat people given the unknown duration of their stay, those forced to wait in detention camps experienced a feeling of utter hopelessness given their fear of repatriation. Protests and riots were predictable as these were the only means for refugees to give vent to their anger and distress. Three hundred women began a hunger strike at Hei Ling Chau on 9 July 1988, which was soon followed by another hunger strike on a larger scale involving 2720 boat people. Weapons searches were carried out in the refugee camps a few days later. The unrest led to direct confrontations between the refugees and the staff of the Correctional Service Department and the Civil Service Department (Mingpao, 23 August 1988, p. 23).

126 Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement The first group of 75 boat people to leave Hong Kong under the voluntary repatriation scheme returned to Hanoi on 2 March 1989. This number was insignificant in comparison to the 55,728 Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong at the end of that year. Owing to the large influx of boat people between 1988 and 1989, the Civil Service Department acknowledged that the detention camps were seriously understaffed (Mingpao, 8 August 1988, p. 13). Given the increasing number of inmates and the lack of management staff in the detention camps, protests easily snowballed into chaos. A hunger strike involving 2000 inmates at the Whitehead detention camp began on 1 June 1989. This group was joined by another 3000 boat people inside the camp the next day (Wen Wei Po 3 June.1989, p. 12). Although the incident did not result in serious injuries, the edgy, volatile atmosphere inside the detention camps was unmistakable. The reaction against the screening policy was further aggravated by another policy, the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) for Indochinese Refugees, which was formulated at the international conference held in Geneva in June 1989. The CPA acknowledged the legitimacy of the controversial screening process in separating economic refugees from those with a legitimate claim to refugee status. Only the latter were accepted as asylum seekers eligible for resettlement in a third country. Individuals whose refugee status was denied were repatriated, either through clandestine departures or as part of regular departure programmers. The message the CPA gave to the Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong, whose frustration at years of waiting in the detention camps was compounded by the fear of repatriation, was that most of them had a bleak future. Before the end of the year, over 10 riots broke out in various detention camps, resulting in serious injuries and deaths. For example, two riots broke out in Shek Kong in July and September, and two boat people were killed. And in the riot at Sham Shui Po on 31 July 1989, 300 policemen and firemen were needed to control the situation. These riots were widely covered by the local news media at the time. Headlines of this news often emphasized the ruthlessness of the violence inside the camps. The one on Sing Tao Wan Po (17 August 1989, p. 2) used very strong wordings such as “brutal nature” and “ruthless killing” in its heading. This would easily induce to the reader that the refugees were the trouble makers who should take the whole responsibility of what happened. Hong Kong implemented a Forced Repatriation Scheme in December 1989. This did not run smoothly as it provoked protests in the camps and drew public attention. The government’s action induced global outrage, but gained local support. Different emphases in reporting the scheme are noted in the local Chinese and English media. While English newspapers like the South China Morning Post focused on the rights of the refugees and the injustice of the policy (12 December 1989, pp. 1 and 2; 13 December 1989, p. 5; 14 December 1989, pp. 1 and 5), Chinese newspapers like the Sing Tao Daily (17 August 1989, p. 3) and Ta Kung Pao (18 Septmber1989, p. 8) focused more on the strong resistance of the refugees. As increasing numbers of boat people had their refugee status denied and were subjected to mandatory repatriation, the sense of distress and hopelessness they shared went to an extreme that decisions on individual cases

Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong 127 became a matter of life and death. As early as 14 January 1987, Pastor Tri Cao, a former refugee who settled in the USA in 1977, warned that any attempt to repatriate refugees would cause a wave of suicides (Davis 1991: 71). In February 1990, a man attempted suicide but was rescued and hospitalized. A report stated that earlier in the week in which the man attempted suicide, boat people drew lots in a suicide plot to gain support against forced repatriation (South China Morning Post, 21 February, 1990, pp. 1 and 2). Violence and riots in the detention camps continued in the 1990s on a larger and more serious scale. In a riot that took place at Whitehead on the 3 and 4 of May 1991, 1200 policemen and Civil Service Department staff were called in and tear gas was used. Boat people of all ages, including women and children were affected. On 3 February 1992, another serious riot at Shek Kong that was ignited by a conflict between two gangs of boat people from southern and northern Vietnam resulted in 24 deaths and 114 injuries (Figure 9.7). In the course of this incident, huts were set on fire and many boat people were burned or died while attempting to escape. In a riot at Whitehead on 10 May 1996, boat people set the administrative building and huts on fire. Forty-seven policemen and staff members of the Correctional Service Department, and seven boat people were injured while 119 fled from the camp, though most of them were caught within a few days. The riot became front page headline the next day. The one in Oriental Daily (11 May 1996, p. 1) employed an image with a series of huts on fire, vividly illustrated the barbaric and relentless nature of the event. The caption under the photograph described the refugees as being beast-like creatures who started the fire. As Hong Kong would soon be returned to China, the British Government was obliged to resolve the Vietnamese boat people crisis as far as possible before the

Figure 9.7 The riot at Shek Kong detention camp on February 3, 1992 led to 24 deaths and 114 injuries. Source: Next Magazine 1992-2-14.

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Hong Kong Vietnamese boat people and their settlement

July 1997 handover. UNHCR promised to help speed up the resettlement process, while repatriation, both forced and voluntary, was systematically pursued. By the end of 1996, the number of boat people in Hong Kong waiting resettlement had fallen to 6872. The number was further reduced to 1200 by the end of 1997. Detention camps were subsequently closed as the number of refugees decreased. The new Special Administrative Regional Government of Hong Kong (HKSAR) announced the abrogation of the first port of refuge policy in 1998. On 22 February 2000, the HKSAR Government widened a local resettlement scheme for Vietnamese refugees, receiving 1400 applications. On 1 June 2000, Pillar Point, the last detention camp for Vietnamese refugees was closed, thus bringing an end to the official segregation of the Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong.

Conclusion The materials used for this chapter are mainly sourced from the Hong Kong media. The perspective adopted by most local Chinese newspapers and other sources about the boat people and violence within the camps is inclined to reflect the emotions of the local Chinese community, while the perspective used by the English media is more neutral and diverse. Although these reports might be subject to local bias, the factual information relating to the number of refugees, camps, policies, dates and the nature of the riots are nonetheless useful: it tells history as seen from outside of the camps looking in. However, this represents only half of the story, the other half has to be told by Hong Kong’s Vietnamese refugees themselves. Without their input, the historical record is incomplete.

Bibliography Adamson, Jeremy (2002) The Image as Witness, The Library of Congress, (Accessed 10 July 2009). Chang, Pao-min (1982) Beijing, Hanoi and the Overseas Chinese, Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies. Clark, Richard (1979) “Briefing on the growing refugee problem: implications for international organizations”, Testimony given to the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the U.S. Congress House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, 96th Cong., 1st session, 5 June. Das, K. (1979) “Malaysia shocks the world into action”, Far Eastern Economic Review 114(26): 10. Davis, Leonard (1991) Hong Kong and the asylum-seekers from Vietnam, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hong Kong Government Information Service (1980) Hong Kong 1980: A Review of 1979, pp. 8 –9. Hong Kong Government (1988) Fact Sheet: Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong, May 1988, Hong Kong Government Printer. Hong Kong Government (1993) Monthly Statistical Report (Arrivals and Departures), Hong Kong Government Printer.

Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong 129 Hong Kong Government Secretariat (1987) Regions fro which Vietnam Refugees Departed from Hong Kong (Ref: SRD 703/3/R, February 1987), Hong Kong Government Printer. Humphrey, Peter (1982) “Weed out refugee hoodlums: official”, South China Morning Post (4 May). Hughes, Kristen Grim (1985) Closed Camps: Vietnamese Refugee Policy in Hong Kong, Ph.D., Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley. ReliefWeb (n.d.) Articles related to the natural disasters and crop failures affecting Vietnam in 1977 and 1978, http://ocha-gwapps1.unog.ch/rw/rwb.nsf/doc106?OpenFo rm&view=rwlusppublished&po=0&rc=3&cc=vnm&offset=1500&hits=100&sortby= rwpubdate&sortdirection=descending (accessed 3 October 2009). Tasker, Rodney (1976) “Refugee: lucky for some”, Far Eastern Economic Review, 93(27): 30 –31.

Part III

Hong Kong and beyond

10 Sojourn in Hong Kong, settlement in America Experiences of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees Jonathan H. X. Lee

What does it mean to be Chinese? Vietnamese? Or perhaps Chinese-Vietnamese? What does it mean to be Chinese-Vietnamese American? What does it mean to be Asian American? Contextualized in the transformed Asian American landscape resulting from the manner in which Vietnamese refugees were introduced into America, this chapter explores the politics of identity formation in post 1965 and post 1975 transformation in Asian America. It examines issues of bicultural and bilingual mixed-race Chinese-Vietnamese refugee Americans. The term Chinese-Vietnamese American reflects what many consider to be America’s strength: Diversity. This signifier reflects three complementary yet competing national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious social groups and identities. Moreover, it reveals the inherent diversity associated within Chinese or Vietnamese or American, and bespeaks of the heterogeneous nature of Chinese America and Vietnamese America. Understanding and accepting their inherent diversities will inevitably impact political representation and enfranchisement, and possibly address the social, educational, economic, and health issues directly impacting several Southeast Asian refugee communities in America, in particular, Chinese-Vietnamese Americans. The “model minority” stereotype that suggests that Asian Americans (as a homogenous category) are somehow exemplary “Americans” when compared to other ethnic groups (like Blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos) ignores the real needs and concerns of refugee Southeast Asian Americans (like Vietnamese, Hmong, Lao, and Cambodian Americans). Asian American scholars, activists, and community workers are aware of the negative consequences of lumping refugee Southeast Asian Americans into the “model minority,” but the US Census and major funding institutions (e.g. Ford Foundation) have yet to accept these communities as distinct entities with specific needs, which results in racializing them as “Asian” and perpetuating disparities in access to educational, social, and political resources. In their having to claim one or the other ethnicity and ancestry, there has been a dearth of studies addressing their actual needs and concerns—which has created a long-standing problem for the Chinese-Vietnamese American communities in America. A considerable number of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees arrived in America via Hong Kong. The duration of their stay in Hong Kong varied, but their displacement from Vietnam connects them all. Changing immigration patterns has

134 Hong Kong and beyond drastically transformed what it means to be Asian in America. This chapter provides an experiential account of first-generation refugee resettlement and the formation of identities for Chinese-Vietnamese refugees who arrived to America via Hong Kong. An examination of generational conflicts and historical awareness among the first generation and their American-born children will illuminate the complex process of identity formation and community identification. Although the dislocation and displacement was a tremendous reference point for refugees, the powerful forces of American cultural values and ideals have caused intergenerational fractures. The process of settlement and integration into American society has thus been uneven, slippery, and difficult.

Historical backdrop The liberalization of immigration policy after 1965 paralleled the changing mainstream attitudes, perceptions, and conceptions of American culture.1 The initial American perception of Chinese immigrants during the early nineteenth century was ambiguously affirmative: they were seen as industrious and hygienic, and most likely capable of becoming good citizens. But once economic competition in agriculture and gold mining increased, the attitude quickly shifted to one of discrimination, followed by total exclusion that was informed by fervent xenophobia. The first decade of the twentieth century ushered in the great image of the “melting pot,” a process of assimilation by which diverse peoples from around the world assembled on American soil and, over a period of time, acculturated themselves into mainstream American life (Lee 2006). Chinese immigrants, however, did not straightforwardly melt into American mainstream society. The end of the Second World War ushered in the counter-cultural movements that began to question the normative perception and conception of American social life and brought with it a re-evaluation of the expectation that immigrants would assimilate into mainstream society (Lee 2006: 238). The civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s did not merely express dissatisfaction with racial and prejudicial beliefs and public policies, but also revealed a deep-seated quandary with the principle of assimilation. To the extent that the American way of life was normatively white, Protestant, heterosexual, and middle-class, it was unfeasible for various segments of the population to ever become completely “American.” The imagined consensus promoted by those who favored assimilation could only be sustained by excluding people with dark skin, non-European ancestries, and limited incomes—in particular Asian immigrants. The civil rights movement not only insisted on sensible changes in public policies, it also demanded a transformation and reconstitution of American national self-identity; it insisted that America recognize and reconstitute itself to be a pluralistic society, and that there were manifold and legitimate alternative ways of being American. This produced the pluralistic perception of American life, envisioning it as a “salad bar”—multifarious: culturally, religiously, linguistically, ethnically, politically, sexually, socially, economically, and nationally.

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Between 1882 and 1965 exclusionist ideologies gave way to the melting pot attitude, which, beginning in the 1980s, then gave way to the ideology of cultural pluralism, which continues to dominate public discourse. Since 1965 there has been a rejuvenation of Chinatown communities across the United States, especially in large metropolitan areas such San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Chicago, and Houston. At the same time, these regions have experienced the formation of “new” Chinatowns in rural areas (Kwong 1979, 1996). In all these areas, the development of new Chinatowns has taken place and continues to occur because of a continual flow of Chinese immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and various Indo-Chinese subpopulations from Southeast Asia (e.g. Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Malaysians, Sino-Khmers, and Sino-Thais).

New strangers on the shores: Vietnamese refugees Post-1975, immigration reveals the dynamic changes in the Asian American landscape in general, and the Chinese American landscape in particular, which was significantly reconfigured by Indo-Chinese immigrants who arrived in the United States following the Fall of Saigon. As the United States pulled out of the disastrous Vietnam War in April 1975, about 130,000 Vietnamese, who were generally highly-skilled and well-educated and who feared retaliation for their close associations with Americans, were airlifted by the US government to bases in the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island in the Northern Pacific Ocean (Chan 2006: 63). Although the task of resettling the initial wave of refugees from Vietnam (130,000 Vietnamese and 5,000 Cambodians) was complete by the end of 1975, many refuge-seekers continued to leave Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam after the American evacuation and resettlement efforts ended (Chan 2006: 65).2 By late 1977, as the number of boat refuge-seekers increased—reaching an average of 1500 refuge-seekers a month—Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, unable to accommodate them, began to push the boats back to sea. Pressured by the international community for its moral and social responsibility, the United States began to respond through legislation.3 To counter the humanitarian crisis, President Jimmy Carter ordered the Seventh Fleet to seek vessels in distress in the South China Sea. A sizeable percentage of refugees coming from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were of ethnic-Chinese backgrounds, speaking either Cantonese or the Chaozhou dialects. From 1978 to 1989 ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese were persecuted amid international power struggles: there was increasing ethnic tension between Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese. Fear of being pushed into the jungles resulted in 160,000 ethnic Chinese from all over Vietnam migrating to China’s southern provinces (Whitmore 1996: 88–89; Chan 2006: 73–74). By the end of this exodus, nearly a quarter million Chinese-Vietnamese had returned to China (Chan 2006: 74).4

The Hong Kong transient detention centers Hong Kong was one of the Asian places receiving the refugees. In May 1975, it encountered its first batch of roughly 4000 boat people, who were picked up by a

136 Hong Kong and beyond Danish ship in the South China Sea. In 1978, nearly 9000 arrived by small boats. Some were ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese merchants who were able to utilize their contacts in Hong Kong to arrange for their passage. By spring 1979 Hong Kong housed 17,000 boat people. Sucheng Chan (2006: 77) notes, The local people resented them tremendously because the Hong Kong government was very tough in the way it handled would-be refuge-seekers from the People’s Republic of China: Hong Kong’s border guards caught and deported them to the Chinese mainland without mercy. By allowing the Vietnamese boat people to stay, its critics said, the Hong Kong government was following a double standard, showing far greater leniency to the refuge-seekers from Vietnam than those from China. Members of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council were also angry: They felt that Great Britain was doing nothing to relieve Hong Kong, its crown colony, of its burden, yet gave the colony no authority to deal with the situation on its own. Despite these complaints, no one foresaw that the worst was yet to come. Vi, a first-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American recalls being unable to land in Hong Kong.5 She says, “I was 13 years old when I escaped Vietnam. The 10 day journey to Hong Kong was rough because the boat was constantly attacked by waves. I arrived in Hong Kong in 1982.” By the time Vi’s ship arrived in Hong Kong, the refugees camps were full. She says, “Our boat was blocked off and the officials sent us to a different camp, which is how I arrived in the Philippines. I lived in the refugee camp for six months. Finally, I was sponsored by a Catholic Church, and arrived in the United States in 1984.”6 The trafficking of refugees became a lucrative business in Vietnam and resulted in an international refugee crisis. The massive influx of new refugeseekers placed greater and greater pressure on the limited resources in Hong Kong, which resulted in changing policies. A conference convened by United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim in Geneva on July 17–19, 1979; along with the participation of the United States, Great Britain representing Hong Kong, and ASEAN countries all agreed that something had to be done to assist the country of first asylum (Hong Kong). The Geneva Conference resulted in immediate change, although the Hong Kong government became increasingly bitter because it was shouldering 35 per cent of the boat people, but was allocated only 13 per cent of the resettlement to countries of second asylum slots, which limits the number of refugees that could leave Hong Kong (Chan 2006: 81–82). The United States responded to the international refugee crisis by increasing its intake of refugees to 168,000 per year. Soon afterwards, Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980 as a way to facilitate the resettlement of refugees. The Act established the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services to administer the domestic resettlement program, by which refugees could receive cash assistance, medical assistance, and supportive services to ease their initial adjustment to the United States, and ultimately facilitate their economic self-sufficiency. Henceforth, a sizeable portion of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees arrived in the United States after spending time in Hong Kong.

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The passage from Vietnam to Hong Kong was not easy, as first-generation Chinese-Vietnamese refugees recall. Mrs. Lê recalls, The boat ride was horrible. It was a small boat with too many people. Everyone was throwing up and could not sleep. I barely saw the daylight. I lost count of how long it took us to get to Hong Kong. All I remember was the long days and endless nights. Many waited for varied time intervals before being informed that they would be able to immigrate to America. Mrs. Ngô says, I would do a lot of cleaning, cooking and sleeping to pass the time. I spent so much time there I understood and spoke Cantonese. I did not like the people there. They were so mean and they thought they could take advantage of me because I was a foreigner. Mr. Cao confided, The reason why I had access to Hong Kong is because I knew how to fix boats, which made me the go-to person to fix the very boats the refugees use to flee. The Chinese-Vietnamese refugees’ memories of Hong Kong are ambivalent. Hung, who arrived to Hong Kong at age sixteen recalls the American Red Cross delivering food twice a week. He remembers his mother feeling lonely and scared, so while in the refugee camp, she prayed to the Buddha, hoping to get sponsored to the United States. The primary recollection of their experience in the refugee camps in Hong Kong was marked by waiting. Another informant Mrs. Lee told me that time seemed to move slowly because she was waiting for the paperwork to move to America. She has nothing good or bad to say about her time in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. Memory of these Chinese-Vietnamese and Vietnamese who had passed through Hong Kong briefly seems to focus on their American experience, as Hong Kong is merely a transitory centre, and experiences there are forgettable, whereas experiences in America are viewed and understood as more permanent. The average length of stay for the majority of subjects interviewed was six months to two years. However, all of them stated that they were lucky and fortunate because their stay in Hong Kong was short, compared to other people they know who stayed for five years or more. Several mentioned knowing someone that stayed in the refugee camps in Hong Kong for nine to ten years.

Getting settled in America Scholarship on Southeast Asian refugees lump Chinese-Vietnamese refugees with Vietnamese refugees, very little is known about the 25 per cent of this refugee population (Rumbaut 1996: 322). The majority of the Chinese-Vietnamese refugees living in the United States today entered during the second wave period between 1978 and 1982 (Trieu 2009: 21, 24).7 Like many refugees before them,

138 Hong Kong and beyond the new arrivals had to be processed and resettled in America.5 Upon arriving in the United States, refugees were first sent to four government reception centers located at Camp Pendleton, California; Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania; Fort Chaffee, Arkansas; and Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. There, they were interviewed by voluntary agencies and matched with country-wide sponsors. They were initially distributed across all 50 states to minimize the negative impact of a refugee population. Despite the government’s attempt to disperse the refugee population, as a result of tertiary migration from other states, California emerged as a concentrated centre. In southern California, a sizeable population of Vietnamese refugees reside in Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. In northern California, they are located in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose. The immigration of the Vietnamese refugees to America is generally divided into two periods (Do 1999: 26). The first period is divided into three waves. The first Vietnamese came just before the Fall of Saigon, bringing between 10,000 and 15,000 refugees to America (Do 1999: 26). The second wave brought some 80,000 refugees during the Fall of Saigon, most of whom were airlifted by helicopter. These refugees worked with the Americans and many had marketable skills and spoke at least functional English (Do 1999: 26). This wave benefited from the large-scale guilt that Americans struggled with because of the war, which was translated into providing social services and ample government resources to assist in their resettlement. The third wave witnessed 40,000 to 60,000 refugees who fled Vietnam, but by this time American guilt was wearing thin (Do 1999: 27). The refugees who began to flee Vietnam after 1978 are what Hien Duc Do (1999) calls the second period refugees. These refugees were considerably worse off than those who had escaped during the first period. After 1978 most of the refugees attempted escape in small boats that were not seaworthy (Do 1999: 28). Mr. and Mrs. Lý remember: We paid three pieces of gold for passage out of Vietnam. We were crammed into a small boat with seventy-five other people. For twenty days, we were out at sea with no food or fresh water. There were no bathrooms, so people had to excrete waste off the side of the boat. People vomiting and getting seasickness was common. We arrived at Hong Kong and they government quickly placed us in a refugee camp. We stayed there for two years. We learned a little English and waited for our time to leave. Many of these ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese boat people risked their lives to escape Vietnam. Some successfully made it to America, but many more were sent to detention facilities where they either stayed temporarily until they were shipped back to Vietnam or remained permanently. Many ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese who had long ago made Vietnam their home also left during the second period, specifically between 1978 and 1980 (Do 1999: 27). Unlike the refugees who fled during the first period, they did not benefit from America’s guilty conscience; rather, they entered during a period of economic recession caused by a decline in the real estate market and high unemployment, which translated into “compassion

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fatigue.” Anti-refugee Americans invoked the popular question of the day: “Why are we taking care of the refugees from Indochina, and not our own people?” (See Taggart Siegel’s 1987 film, Blue Collar and Buddha).

First impressions Upon arriving to America, many refugees felt ambivalent about their situation. They were also ambivalent about their experiences in Hong Kong. Overwhelmed by the new environment, they felt like fish-out-of-water, and they struggled with survivor’s guilt. Even so, for Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, their dual ethnicity and ability to speak both Chinese and Vietnamese proved to be useful. Mrs. Lâm says, The main problem coming to America was the language barrier because neither me nor my husband spoke English, which limited our job opportunities to working for our own kind who spoke either Vietnamese or Chinese. Mrs. Kim recalls, When I first came to the United States, I lived with my sisters in the Tenderloin [an urban district of San Francisco]. I was afraid to do anything because I did not know how to speak English well and I did not know the area. However, when I found that there were other Vietnamese in the community as well, I felt much better because whenever I was lost, I was able to ask for directions and most importantly, I was not an outcast of the community. After securing lodging in the new environment, one of the first priorities, was to find work. Many moved to neighborhoods known to have Vietnamese or Chinese immigrants. For instance, Mrs. La says, “The Tenderloin was the Vietnamese version of Chinatown. It was the centre for all the Vietnamese refugees, mostly because of the cheap rent for the apartment, so we moved there.”8 In seeking employment, Chinese-Vietnamese quickly realized their inability to speak English kept them from high-paying jobs, but they felt fortunate that they could work as service workers in Chinese restaurants or sweatshops. Kevin, a secondgeneration Chinese-Vietnamese American recalls his grandmother saying, “I was lucky to have work. I was an old woman, but I could still sew.” A survey conducted by Caplan, Whitmore, and Bui (1985) in the early 1980s shows that among the Southeast Asian refugees in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, and Orange County, Chinese-Vietnamese refugee population tended to be older than the Lao and the Vietnamese, with an average age of 33 years. They were also not as proficient in English compared to other Indochinese refugees. Economically, compared to the ethnic Vietnamese, the Chinese-Vietnamese refugees were less likely to be in the labor force, had a lower median monthly income, and without employment and health and retirement benefits, were more likely to be dependent on government welfare programs. Overall, the ChineseVietnamese were invariably at a disadvantage in terms of economic integration (US Department of Health and Human Services 1982).

140 Hong Kong and beyond On the other hand, Chinese-Vietnamese were able to develop good relationships with other Chinese businesspeople in the United States because of common languages. Over the years, such ethnic economy has grown in size. ChineseVietnamese now have a monopoly in the Asian grocery business, primarily because established corporations are unprepared to serve Asian customers, especially the increasing relatively affluent Asian population with a demand for Asian goods. But they are at the same time facing competition from other Asian immigrants from Thailand, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (see Gold 1994).

From refugee to American born There are four distinct stages in the development of Vietnamese and ChineseVietnamese communities in America. The first stage was the wave of exiles that fled Vietnam immediately after the fall of Saigon in 1975. These exiles were primarily from middle-class backgrounds, were Catholic converts, had English proficiency, and worked with the US government before the Fall. The communities they built tended to revolve around manufacturing in California, and fishing in the Gulf Coast (e.g. Texas, and Louisiana). The second stage included refugees who arrived between 1979 and 1982. The majority of these refugees were Chinese-Vietnamese, popularly called “boat people,” arriving in large numbers. They were members of the petit bourgeoisie, were rural poor of a lower socioeconomic status, and had scant or no English skills. They were scattered by resettlement, but secondary migration led them to California and Texas, to already established Vietnamese refugee communities. The third stage occurred after the 1980s. This stage was community-oriented, based on the flourishing of ethnic businesses, civic organizations, and other community social structures that were established to serve the immigrant refugee population. The fourth stage reflects the development since the 1990s, when 1.5- and second-generation ChineseVietnamese Americans mature and become politically active. Their parents— refugees who fled Vietnam after 1975—began to become naturalized citizens and politically active themselves, once they acknowledged that their dream of returning to Vietnam was no longer realizable. Similar to many immigrants before them, the first- and second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese Americans struggle to balance themselves between the forces of traditions and the new American ways, between being Chinese, Vietnamese, and American. Their parents feel this anxiety, as Mrs. Pham laments, declaring, My first impression of America is that it is too free. Kids are raised with no traditions and moral values … Young women are running away and getting pregnant. Boys are joining gangs and dropping out of school. America has little discipline. Both parents and children point to language barriers as the source of their intergenerational conflict and misunderstanding. Susie, a 1.5-generation ChineseVietnamese American who arrived when she was five years old states,

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Linguistic obstacles are by far the root of all problems in my family because it contributes to the domino effect of more problems such as changing roles within our family, stress, and anxiety about us being too American. Another compelling example of the rift created by the language barrier between the 1.5- and second-generation and their parents is evident in Nancy’s statement, The generation gap between my mother and me are obvious. I mostly speak English. I do not know how to cook a full Vietnamese meal. I speak my mind whenever I feel like it. I do not know much about my Vietnamese and Chinese traditions. My mother on the other hand can whip up a meal in thirty minutes. She also holds her emotions in, instead of talking about it. It is frustrating because she expects me to know, but I can’t read her mind. For the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese Americans, their development was further challenged through their encounters with racism. Hoang, a 1.5-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American says, I went to kindergarten like everyone else. However, the first school I went to was full of Chinese immigrants, so it felt normal, like being at home. Later, after we moved, it was different and I started hearing chants like “Ching chong Chinaman sitting on a bench …”9 Interestingly, both parents and their children are aware of the cause and source of their intergenerational conflicts. Michael, a second generation ChineseVietnamese American says, My mother thinks differently than I do because we grew up in two different environments. I would not say that I identify with my mother’s experiences, but rather understand her struggles. I have never gone through what she went through, but I can understand her struggle and for that I appreciate her sacrifice. Similarly, Barbara notes, My mom loves her children like a lioness protecting her cubs. Although she understands that children in America have no respect for elders like the children in Vietnam. The main factors that contribute to the clash between children and parents are, first and foremost, linguistic reasons and then cultural reasons. When Barbara and her mother get into arguments, she admits, laughingly, to saying, “This isn’t Vietnam, Mom; get used to the American culture. … so just chill out.”

Maintaining culture, maintaining self Children who grew up in households with first-generation refugee parents expressed their childhood experiences positively, indicating that their parents

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have been successful in transmitting traditional values, morals, and customs to them, even though they may rebel against them.”10 Victoria, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American says, Practicing filial piety is learning to respect and care for those around you, especially your elders. My parents taught me to respect and care for those around me, especially my elders. My parents taught me to respect and obey the older generation and to care for the parent as they get older. Conversely, Minh, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American says he learned how to be an American by watching several popular American TV shows. He says, I didn’t have my parents or anyone as a set role model but instead I had the actors and characters on TV to learn from. Everything I learnt about how to act or how to think came from TV shows and most of the time it was a white character or it was the “American way.” The way I dressed came from the commercials; the way I talked came from Saved by the Bell; the way I treated others from Barney; my sense of right and wrong came from Power Rangers; and what I know about sex, came from the media. Many of the 1.5- and second-generation said that their parents did not talk to them about important topics like sex and birth control, and that they had to rely on their schools and friends to learn about it. They also said that much of what they learned about social values and norms, was indirectly through the hierarchical nature of their family structure, which emphasized respect for the elders that included their parents and their older siblings.

1.5- and second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American identities Among the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese Americans, the process of identity formation is complex and complicated, revealing that for them, identity is fluid, flexible, and ever changing. Justin, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American expressed a very assured identity as American, saying, “There is no question about it: I am a genuine American citizen, California-grown, and no one can touch that.” While Sherwood indicates a more nuanced and sophisticated explanation of his multiple identities, saying: I have my own challenges growing up as a 1.5-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American. I speak Cantonese, English and understand Vietnamese. I celebrate Chinese New Year and American New Year. I listen to Asian music and American music. My identity is very fragile and conditional in terms of my experiences. I was born Chinese-Vietnamese in Saigon. I consider myself absolutely Americanized but as I grow up, clashes between the American culture and Chinese-Vietnamese culture makes me question my identity time and time again.

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Along a similar vein, expressing the difficulties of “fitting-in” and “making friends,” Robert, a 1.5-generationer says, “Being a 1.5-generation ChineseVietnamese American, I strive to be accepted in my community as Chinese, Vietnamese, and American.” One prevailing theme that most experienced and articulated is the struggle to form and understand their identity. This is brilliantly expressed by Bao, a second-generationer who says, My whole life has been a constant juggle of three identities and it doesn’t help that it changes so drastically according to each situation such as going to Chinatown, Little Saigon, or connecting with my relatives back in Vietnam, or attending a football game. One can say having a triple identity doesn’t amount to a hindrance but instead acts as a benefactor because it opens you up to more opportunities. As stated above, identity formation is a process—fluid, flexible, and changing— well illustrated in Tiffany’s comment: Like most Vietnamese American teens it is difficult to meet the expectations of parents while attempting to assimilate into the American culture. When I started elementary school, my parents enrolled me in Chinese school at the same time. At this time, I thought my identity was Chinese American. Later, I realized that I was not only following Chinese traditions, but also Vietnamese culture and traditions. I not only had to assimilate to the Chinese and American cultures, but also the Vietnamese culture.

Living among multiple worlds: the politics of identity and Asian American pan-ethnic identity The post World War II era ushered in the counter-cultural and civil rights movements that began to question the normative vision of American social life. The American way of life was not limited to Protestants, whites, males, heterosexuals, and middle-class households. Assimilation favored socially constructed notions of “white” identity, by excluding people with dark skin, non-European ancestries, and limited incomes—in particular Asian immigrants. The civil rights movement demanded practical changes in public policy, and a transformation of American national self-identity, insisting there were manifold and legitimate alternate ways of being American. One result of this vibrant period was the creation of the homogenous taxon “Asian American”—coined by historian and activist Yuji Ichioka—which was initially used to describe the politically charged group identity in the ethnic consciousness movements of the 1960s through 1970s. There are discontinuities, tensions, and disadvantages between the ethnic-specific Asian identity (e.g. Chinese-Vietnamese American) and pan-ethnic Asian American identity. The goal and mission of the ethnic consciousness movement of the civil rights era emphasized the individual community’s rights and abilities of

144 Hong Kong and beyond self-determination. The pan-ethnic Asian American identity, while strong in numbers and, hence, politically significant, depress the interest of individual groups, and consequently, downplays an individual community’s self-determination at the expense of the larger pan-ethnic Asian American community. Ironically, this in itself is a hegemonic process of homogenization that the Asian American civil rights activists protested and fought against because it denied individuals and their respective communities a means of self-determination.

Conclusion Chinese-Vietnamese refugees and their American-born children are understudied and under-represented. They are, unfortunately, an invisible demographic group in America’s political and academic landscape, although physically they are very visible in Chinatowns and Little Saigons in most of the urban centers. The Asian American movement must shift its focus from pan-Asian American solidarity, to ethnic specific social justice to correct the historical imbalance of the last three and a half decades. Southeast Asian refugees and their American children are at a disadvantage—educationally, economically, and politically. To continue to ignore their actual needs, even if unwillingly, in favor of a pan-Asian American identity, benefits the first wave of Asian American immigrants and their descendents, at the expanse of Southeast Asian American refugees and the generation that is growing up in America. Not fully Chinese, Vietnamese, or American, Chinese-Vietnamese refugees and their children are placed outside these communities, yet they straddle them all simultaneously. For this very reason, future research on Chinese-Vietnamese refugees and their children may reveal aspects of community, ethnic, identity, and cultural formations in Asian America that has not been documented and, further, confirm that identity (e.g. Vietnamese, Chinese, and American) is already shifting and always situational.

Notes 1 Ethnic Chinese immigration to the US may be distinguished in three stages: (1) 1840 to 1965; (2) post-1965; and (3) post-1975. 2 In the two years after the communist victory, relatively few people escaped Vietnam, because the new authorities announced that certain groups of people (e.g. elected officials, employees of various counterinsurgency, religious leaders, intellectuals, military officers, the middle class, and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese) would be taken to ‘re-education camps’ located at ‘New Economic Zones’. There they were forced to till uncultivated land and admit to crimes against the new communist state. In light of these punitive measures, middle-class people and merchants, both ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese, began to escape by sea. At first, the American public did not hear much news about them because their numbers were small. The country of first asylum also wanted to keep the arrival of these ‘boat people’ as quiet as possible because they feared a larger exodus and influx if people in Vietnam learned that their compatriots managed to successfully seek refuge (Chan 2006: 65). 3 The Public Law 95–145 allowed refugees to change their status from ‘parolee’ to ‘permanent resident’ because it was apparent that they would not be able to return to their home countries.

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4 According to Sucheng Chan (2006) the vast majority of boat people from southern Vietnam landed in Malaysia, while many who escaped from the north found a shorter route to Hong Kong, which eventually came to house the second-largest number of boat people. 5 Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of the subjects interviewed upon their request. All interviews were conducted in person, over the phone, and with follow-up emails. 6 Vi’s account may differ from “official” or “scholarly” accounts, but they reflect what she remembers and is able to recall in light of the life changing events that she experienced. War, trauma, migration and displacement causes a fundamental fragmentation of sense of self, ethics, morality, and identity. Details may be vague, and individual stories and memories might invoke more questions by others. 7 According to the 2000 US Census, close to a million Vietnamese and Chinese Vietnamese refugees resettled in the United States between 1975 and 2000 (Trieu 2009: 12). 8 Little Saigons, like historic and contemporary Chinatowns, are ethnic enclaves that thrive from selling and marketing Vietnamese or Chinese services and goods. The establishment of Little Saigons fulfils an important cultural need for immigrant Vietnamese Americans. In Little Saigons, new Vietnamese Americans can speak Vietnamese, maintain their folkloric customs, and interact with people with whom they share common values. The elderly and recently arrived Vietnamese Americans tend to spend most of their time in Little Saigons. Before the establishment of Little Saigons, Chinese-Vietnamese refugees depended on Chinatowns. Their ability to speak Chinese (e.g. Mandarin, Chaozhou, and Cantonese) assisted them in opening up shops and establishing themselves as a new component of the Chinatown communities. 9 ‘Ching chong’ is a derogatory term used by Americans in the US for Asians. For more on racial encounters see Do (1999: 49–60); and Rutledge (1992: 106–12). 10 The study conducted by Caplan, Whitmore, and Bui in 1982 show that among Southeast-Asian refugees ethnicity was a less important factor in successful societal integration than several others, such as length of time in the United States, education and pervious occupation in Southeast Asia, arrival with English proficiency, location of resettlement (Houston and Boston had better economies), and household composition (number of employable adults).

Bibliography Aguilar-San Juan, K. (2009) Little Saigon: Staying Vietnamese in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benoit, C. (1981) “Vietnam’s boat people,” in David Elliott (ed.) The Third Indochina Conflict, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 139 – 62. Caplan, N., Whitmore, J.K. and Quang L. Bui (1985) Southeast Asian Refugee SelfSufficiency Study: Final Report, prepared for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Chan, K.B. (1990) “Getting through suffering: Indochinese refugees in limbo 15 years later, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 18(1): 94 –110. Chan, S. (2006) The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight, and New Beginnings, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Do, H.D. (1999) The New Americans: The Vietnamese Americans, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Espiritu, Y.L.(1996) Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws and Love, Lanham: AltaMira Press.

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Freeman, J.M. (1995) Changing Identities: Vietnamese Americans 1975–1995, Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Gold, S. (1994) “Chinese-Vietnamese entrepreneurs in California,” in Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng (eds) The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 196–228. —— (1992) Refugee Communities: A Comparative Field Study. Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Hitchcox, L. (1990) Vietnamese Refugees in Southeast Asian Camps, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jang, L. and Winn, R.C. (2003) Saigon, USA, DVD. Kwong, P. (1979) Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. —— (1996) The New Chinatown, New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Lee, J.H.X. (2006) “Contemporary Chinese-American religious life, in James Miller (ed.) Chinese Religions in Contemporary Societies, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, pp. 237–40. —— (2003) “Ancestral veneration in Vietnamese spiritualities,” The Review of Vietnamese Studies, Online Journal, 3(1). Lee, J.H.X. (2010) Cambodian American Experiences: Histories, Communities, Cultures, and Identities. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company. Light, I. and Bonacich, E. (1988) Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles 1965–1982, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ong, P., Bonacich, E. and Cheng, L. (1994) The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Rumbaut, R. (1995) “Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian Americans,” in Pyong Gap Min (ed.) Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 232–70. —— (1996) Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in Contemporary America, edited by S. Pedraza and R.G. Rumbaut, Belmont, VA: Wadsworth Publishing Co. Rutledge, Paul James (1992) The Vietnamese Experience in America, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Siegel, T. (1998) Blue Collar and Buddha DVD. Skinner, G.W. (1951) Report on the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Ithaca: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program Data paper. Takaki, R. (1998) A History of Asian Americans: Strangers from a Different Shore, Updated and Revised, Boston, MA: Back Bay Books. Trieu, M. M. (2009) Identity Construction Among Chinese-Vietnamese Americans: Being, Becoming, and Belonging, El Paso: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1982) Refuge Resettlement Program; Report to Congress, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. —— (1983) Survey of the Social, Psychological, and Economic Adaptation of Vietnamese Refugees in the U.S. 1975–1979, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. —— (1985) Southeast Asian Refugee Self-Sufficiency Study, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Whitmore, J.K. (1985) “Chinese from Southeast Asia,” in David W. Haines (ed.) Refugees in the United States: A Reference Handbook, Westport: Greenwood Press, pp. 59–76. Zhou, M. and Bankston III, C.L. (1998) Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States, New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

11 Dark tourism, diasporic memory and disappeared history The contested meanings of the former Indochinese refugee camp at Pulau Galang Ashley Carruthers and Boitran Huynh-Beattie Pulau Galang is a 16 km2 island in Indonesia’s Riau archipelago, lying just south of Batam. From 1975 to 1996, Galang was a refugee camp administered by the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR) and the Indonesian military that housed Indochinese boat people who had landed in Indonesia. Some 145,000 refugees passed through Galang on their way to resettlement in third countries and, for a few thousand, repatriation to Vietnam.1 While the jungle has reclaimed parts of the former camp, large sections of it, including the places of worship, cemetery and administration buildings, have been maintained or restored. With the addition of a small amount of curating by its Indonesian caretakers, Pulau Galang has effectively become a museum of the Indochinese boat people crisis. The camp has now become something of a pilgrimage site for former internees and their children, and also attracts tourists, especially from Singapore. Every weekend some 100 to 200 people sign the guestbook, and caretakers report a monthly average of some 1200 visitors (Fadli 2009a). In March 2005, 150 Vietnamese refugees from Australia, the United States and elsewhere returned to Pulau Galang and Pulau Bidong (in Malaysia) to erect memorials to those who died in the exodus from Vietnam after 1975. After complaints from the Vietnamese government, Jakarta agreed to destroy the monument on Pulau Galang, to the consternation of the Vietnamese refugee community worldwide. More recently, Hanoi has put further pressure on Jakarta to close the camp to visitors entirely, presumably because it supports a version of the history of the Vietnam conflict and its aftermath that the government finds objectionable. Overseas Vietnamese organisations accuse Hanoi of attempting to ‘erase history’, while the Batam Industrial Development Authority (BIDA), which manages the site, is unhappy at the potential loss of an important tourist site on the economically troubled islands. This humble island now finds itself at the center of a conflict over the interpretation of an important slice of twentieth century history. The three main interested parties in the argument, we will argue below, project fundamentally different meanings onto the site of the former refugee camp. For Vietnamese refugee visitors, the island is a shrine containing personal and familial significance, most especially those who left family members and loved ones in the disturbingly large cemetery there. For overseas Vietnamese refugee organizations,

148 Hong Kong and beyond it is an important as a stake in the ongoing (symbolic) anti-communist struggle against Hanoi, giving support as it does to the diasporic version of contemporary Vietnamese history, and substance to the collective memory of persecution, trauma and loss upon which diasporic identity is built. Hanoi’s somewhat startling desire to ‘disappear’ this history—at a time when it is also seeking to woo the diaspora in the West to participate in a project of transnational nation-building (Carruthers 2007)—speaks of an equally singleminded perspective. It appears that the Vietnamese government fears diasporic anti-communists will exploit the site and distort or exaggerate its meaning in the service of a radical homeland politics; and that non-Vietnamese tourists will imbibe the diasporic version of history simply by visiting this museum of suffering—one apparently supported by a fraternal Southeast-Asian government. It is perhaps predictable that Hanoi should take this view, and yet its response seems disproportionate. The dismantling of this accidental museum would in itself be a gross act of symbolic violence, distorting history in its own Big Brother-like way. To add further complexity to this picture, the site’s local management projects yet another interpretation on the former camp. BIDA’s desire is to preserve and develop the former camp as a tourist site, one which from our perspective falls within the genre of what has recently been dubbed ‘dark tourism’, i.e. tourism to historical locations associated with ‘death, suffering, violence or disaster’ such as Auschwitz or Cambodia’s Killing Fields (Stone and Sharpley 2008: 574). The transformation of such sites into dark tourist locations inevitably involves processes such as commodification, sensationalisation and the ‘scripting’ of the tourist experience. While for Vietnamese refugee tourists the site will no doubt retain a very specific meaning, accidental or ‘non-purposeful’ dark tourists may well take away a dehistoricised or hollowed out experience of the site based around a universalised definition of ‘human suffering’. We will argue below that the curating of the site which has occurred so far encourages such generic interpretations. This chapter will not seek to recuperate the ‘authentic’ meaning of Pulau Galang. Rather, it will take the first steps towards a critical analysis of the meaning of the site for the various parties involved.

Refugee experiences of return The first visitors to the site of the former camp at Pulau Galang in any numbers were Vietnamese refugees. When Carruthers visited the island in 2002, this phenomenon had already been noticed by the Indonesian press: a framed newspaper article (entitled ‘Dimanaka Kalian, Teman?’) was on the wall of the small museum that had been created in the old administrative centre. Seen through the prism of the dark-tourism paradigm, these refugee returnees are ‘purposeful’ dark tourists. They have a very definite interest in the site from a personal, familial and, for many, communal point of view, to the extent that they may identify with a Vietnamese community that draws an important part of its public identity from a shared diasporic narrative of flight and suffering. The refugee returnees should be distinguished from the ‘non-purposeful’, non-refugee tourists who

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might discover the site by serendipity or as part of a larger, non-dark-focused, tourist experience (Stone 2006). As mentioned above, a party of 150 refugees visited Pulau Galang in 2005. This trip, and the building of the memorials at Galang and Bidong, was organised in part by Luu Dan, editor of Sydney Vietnamese newspaper Dan Viet. Luu Dan spent eight months in Pulau Galang in 1983, and his return with the 2005 group was his second trip back to the island. Partly as a result of Luu Dan’s efforts, this trip received a good deal of media attention, including stories in the Jakarta Post and AgenceFrance Press. A journalist from Melbourne’s Age newspaper even accompanied the group all the way, and reported quite eloquently on what transpired there. Naturally, the experience of return was an emotional and uncanny one for the former refugees. Both participants and observers reported that the trip was a catalyst for the telling of refugee stories, with people being invited to come to the microphone in the tour bus to tell their tales. Peter Wilmoth from The Age recorded this harrowing narrative: As the motor boat to Bidong Island lurches around in the swell, Than Nguyen sits wearing her life-jacket, staring ahead, silent, a look of utter desolation on her face. Twenty-one years ago, Than spent three days in an open boat with her husband and four children, aged four, seven, 10 and 12. During the voyage, her four-year-old son became ill with a high temperature. ‘When the boat sailed past Thailand he became sick, vomiting’, she tells me in a quiet voice. ‘After two days he died.’ She knew there was no way to save him, but at least he could receive a proper burial. She asked the boat’s owner to go to land so she could bury him but the engine wouldn’t start. As the stricken vessel floated, some men on board found a piece of tin and fashioned a barrel. They put the boy’s body in and pushed it out to sea. She is going back to honour him. (Wilmoth 2005b) The facilitation of such stories is important since, as other researchers have shown and as we have experienced ourselves when interviewing Vietnamese refugees, it is not uncommon for people to remain silent about such tales for decades (Nguyen 2005). The narration of personal and familial history helps to resolve trauma and at the same time transmits memories of life-changing events across generations in the diaspora. The cemetery at Pulau Galang is a major motivation for return trips. It reportedly contains over 500 graves, many for juveniles. Visiting and tending to the graves of family members, as well as the performance of rituals for these spirits, is a key part of the return experience. Returnees clear plant growth away from the graves, place flowers on the them and burn incense and ‘hell bank notes’ for departed relatives. One family from Sydney who had gone on the 2005 trip committed themselves to rebuilding the cemetery. As Luu Dan told us The mother in this family has been having nightmares and flashbacks about her time in the camp and at sea. She was praying and according to her story her prayer had been answered and she had make that commitment (Interview with Luu Dan, Sydney, 20 September, 2005).

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‘Nguyen’, a Catholic, returned to Pulau Galang in 2009 after 27 years in Australia for the purpose of retrieving the remains of his wife for reburial in Vietnam. He and his then newlywed wife had escaped Vietnam by boat in 1982, and were originally held on Kuku, their point of landfall. Nguyen’s wife died there the day before they were to be transferred to Galang. (Interview with ‘Nguyen’, Sydney, 2010). Experiences of the camp at Pulau Galang vary widely. Some reminisce about a relatively pleasant time spent on the island, while for others the camp itself was a site of extreme trauma (Bociurkiw 1993). A participant in the 2005 trip to the camp told Huynh-Beattie frankly about the abuse she and others suffered at the hands of the Indonesian soldiers in charge of security at Pulau Galang. After witnessing robbery, rape and death on the boat journey, ‘Hien’ was confronted on arrival with horrors of the camp’s own making. Reflecting on this experience in a spirit of Buddhist compassion, she said: I want to thank them, those who tortured me before, those did harm to me or wanted to. I’m talking about the Indonesian soldiers in the camp. I’m talking about the humiliation that I suffered, as well as that other refugees had to endure, from the soldiers, from the local people. I had mixed feelings; I wanted to curse them, I wanted to take revenge, but then I forgave. (Interview with ‘Hien’, Sydney, 17 August 2010) It appears that conditions varied in the camp at different periods, and that men and women had markedly different experiences of it. Nguyen, by contrast with Hien, has fond memories of the time he spent at Pulau Galang. He reports having had little or no contact with local people or authorities in the camp, and was there at a time when international delegations visited frequently. At that time (1982), a volunteer Camp Executive Committee made up of the refugees themselves handled most day to day matters, and local authorities merely patrolled at night. For Nguyen and his acquaintances on the island, it was a ‘protected alcove’ where one found ‘the most positive and warmest sentiments among people’. By contrast, he found the human sentiment [tình người] in his eventual land of settlement to be far less warm than that which prevailed in the camp. Kuku and Galang by contrast were places where people shared their food and clothes, their happinesses as well as their sorrows (Interview with ‘Nguyen’, Sydney, 2010). Nguyen Tuan Hung, who was resettled in Sweden in 1987, spent three years on Pulau Galang, and has returned there four times. He was only 11 years old when he landed there, and says that if Vietnam is his ‘Fatherland’, Pulau Galang is the ‘Motherland’ where he spent his youth. He dreamed of it every night for the first three years he lived in Sweden, and remembers such things as going into the jungle with his friends to catch fish, or to collect wood for the construction of a temple (Interview with Nguyen Tuan Hung, 2010). Returning to Galang is an opportunity to reflect on one’s migration journey, one’s identity, and the meaning of home. Reminiscences such as these bring out the contradictions in the migration experience, and most particularly the unsettling of ‘home’ as a stable category. Interestingly, the stories of all of our interviewees contest the official diasporic narrative whereby Vietnam is constructed

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as a ‘communist hell’, the refugee camps as a purgatory, and Australia (or other host nations) as the promised land. For Hien, it appears that the camp was more hellish than anything experienced in Vietnam, or even the boat journey itself. For Nguyen and Tuan Hung, by contrast, the (remembered) camp is more ‘homely’ than either of their lands of eventual settlement turned out to be. Such fragmented personal narratives cannot easily be recouped into the collective history that diasporic elites seek to tell about refugee communities abroad in acts such as the establishment of the memorials on Galang and Bidong.

Diasporic memory It appears that the spontaneous return visits of Vietnamese refugees to Pulau Galang spurred the Indonesian administrators of the site, some of whom had worked in the refugee camp, to put some effort into reinventing it as a museum and tourist destination. Having participated initially in the museumisation of the island in this somewhat accidental manner, overseas Vietnamese involvement became more organised with the 2005 trip, on which the memorial was erected. We can read this memorial project as an attempt by former refugees to claim the site in some sense, or at least to seek to more actively participate in the construction of the meaning of the partly restored, partly decaying camp. The inscription on the memorial read in Vietnamese: Tưởng nhớ hàng trăm ngàn người Việt Nam đã thiệt mạng trên đường tìm tự do (1975–96). Dù họ đã chết vì đói, khát, bị hãm hiếp, bị kiệt sức hoặc vì một nguyên nhân nào khác, chúng ta cầu xin rằng họ bây giờ được hưởng yên bình vĩnh cửu. Sự hy sinh của họ không bao giờ bị quên lãng. Các cộng đồng người Việt hải ngoại, 2005. And in English: In commemoration of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people who perished on the way to freedom (1975–96). Though they died of hunger or thirst, of being raped, of exhaustion or of any other cause, we pray that they may now enjoy lasting peace. Their sacrifices will not be forgotten. (Wilmoth 2005a) The inscriptions were quickly knocked out of the stone at the request of the Vietnamese government, leaving a striking image of a centre-less monument. The Jakarta Post reported that ‘The Vietnamese Government took the view that the wording on the plaque denigrated the dignity of Vietnam’ (Wilmoth 2005a). Naturally, this act was greeted with the utmost outrage by overseas Vietnamese organisations. Quynh Dao, of the Australia-Vietnam Human Rights Committee, wrote an impassioned letter to the Jakarta Post in which he pleaded: Please do not give in to the Vietnamese communists. They deny the living even the right to commemorate deceased relatives, friends and compatriots. They deny the dead the right to be remembered. They deny the Indonesian people the right to commemorate a great deed of humanity. (Dao 2005)

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Trần Trung Đạo, a Vietnamese American, wrote in a Vietnamese language blog that when he saw the image of the destroyed memorial, he had the same outraged feelings as when he first saw images of Ground Zero (Đạo 2005). He went on: In that monument … there are the traces of foetuses that suffocated while still in their mothers’ stomachs, the crying of hungry and thirsty children, the blood of Vietnamese women in pain at the hands of pirates, the despairing cries of parents in the midst of storms on the open seas. (Đạo 2005)2 For Đạo and other commentators, diasporic memory and history itself is threatened by a 1984-like ‘erasure of the past’ (xóa bỏ quá khứ). The monument in Galang is not only in memory of our countrymen who were sacrificed on the path to freedom, but more importantly, its part of the history of Vietnam. A hundred years hence, two hundred years hence, the younger Vietnamese generations will look for Bidong, Galang, Palawan, Sungei Besi, White Head, Panat Nikhom and so on … to retrace the steps of those who went before and to overhear the ocean whisper about a woeful and majestic path that has been trodden. Destroying that monument is a crime against history. (Đạo 2005)3 It will be noted that Đạo imagines a 200-year continuity of diasporic Vietnamese history and identity, which may be somewhat ambitious! Alternatively, his words can be interpreted to mean that 200 years hence the diaspora’s descendants will have been rightfully reinstalled in a post-communist Vietnam, and their version of the nation’s history will have been established as the uncontested one. In my interview with him, Luu Dan noted more prosaically on the island of Galang: It’s in a very tiny one of among 7000 islands in Indonesia. Nobody would have known of its existence. And because of that the Vietnamese community overseas says when one memorial has been demolished, 1000 will spring up around the world in major cities [laugh] … Ironically it coincided with the time Pham Van Khai was in the United States telling the overseas Vietnamese people ‘OK let’s forgive and forget, let’s shake hands’. And that’s why it upsets a lot of people. They say how can we reconcile when you say one thing and you do another … The latest chapter in this saga is that Vietnam has in 2009 exerted renewed pressure on Jakarta to close the Pulau Galang site entirely, and to redevelop it, perhaps as a tourist resort (!). A coalition of overseas Vietnamese organisations has published a joint declaration against this closure which stresses the importance of Galang as a global heritage site, and, most interestingly, emphasises the interests of local Batam citizens and businesspeople in the old camp.4 This unexpected solidarity will be discussed at greater length below.

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A dark tourist site Batam, like neighbouring Bintam, is a short ferry ride from Singapore. While Bintam has had some success in reinventing itself as a cheap resort tourism destination for Singaporeans, Batam and its neighbouring islands have failed to develop as successfully. In the 1990s, enthused by the possibilities of the newly minted Sijori growth triangle (Singapore, Johor, Indonesia), the Habibie government built six state-of-the-art bridges connecting Batam to neighbouring islands, including Galang, in order to attract investment and encourage development. Galang was slated to become a ‘biomedical engineering hub’. When Carruthers visited the islands in 2002, this vision had failed to emerge. The beautiful highway was all but empty of traffic, and the bridges served mainly as a vantage point for lovers seated on the backs of their stationary mopeds. Unable to compete with neighbouring Bintam, Batam bears a sleazy reputation as a sex tourism destination. Suffering the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in Indonesia, Batam is known as a place where Singaporean men go to gamble and where they keep their Indonesian second wives. It is also a location for the dumping of Singaporean waste. Batam attracts migrants from all over Indonesia, but suffers acute unemployment (Post 2001). In this environment, a ready-made cultural tourism location attracting 1200 visitors a month is clearly an important asset, and local authorities and tourist operators are reluctant to give it up. The 80-hectare refugee camp complex has been managed by the Batam Industrial Development Authority (BIDA), now called the Management Board of Batam Free Trade Zone, since 1997. As mentioned above, BIDA has overseen the restoration of the old administrative building, as well as cooperating with the various faiths in the restoration of some of the places of worship, including the Kwan Yin (Quan Am) temple and Catholic church. Buddhists from Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia visit the island’s Mahayana temple, which has gained something of a reputation for potency in answering prayers. The church also receives some visitors (Fadli 2009a). The island has several asphalt roads to facilitate the visits of these and other tourists, although the managers would like to build more roads to expand the access of tourists to the island. BIDA has reacted strongly to the apparent acquiescence of Jakarta to Hanoi’s request to close the site. As reported in the Jakarta Post: BIDA does not want the former refugee camp to be closed because tour operators, local residents, visitors and a number of local communities feel like they already own the place … Recently, tour operators in Batam expressed their opposition to the government’s planned closure of the camp, on the grounds that it would remove one of Batam’s tourist attractions which is famous among both domestic and foreign visitors. (Fadli 2009b) Having initially welcomed the refugee returnees with open arms and (perhaps naively) supported the building of the monument, BIDA now seeks to distance

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itself from any political use of the former camp. The board’s spokesperson told the Jakarta Times: Tourists operators have no intentions of exploiting the gloomy past of the Vietnamese government … We are not interfering with the country’s political issues. For us the site is quite beneficial as an unusual tourist attraction. I believe the site has quite a high historical and humanitarian value. (Fadli 2009b) While the overseas Vietnamese organizations seek to establish solidarity with the camp’s managers in their Joint Declaration, it seems that there is a fundamental difference in the two groups’ interpretations of the meaning of the site. The BIDA spokesperson’s comments strongly suggest that they are seeking to depoliticise the island and to market it to a primarily casual or non-purposeful dark tourist clientele. This reinterpretation is based on a strategy of chronologically distancing (Stone 2006: 149) the camp from the fraught politics of the Indochinese boat people crisis, and emphasizing the historical (read apolitical) and humanitarian value of the site, as well as its novelty and sensational aspects. This logic is very much evident in the way in which the camp has been curated by its current administrators.

Curating the camp In addition to the preservation and restoration of some of the religious buildings, the camp has been altered by the site managers. Key here seems to have been Mursidi, now 60, a man who worked in the refugee camp and is still employed by the Management Board of the Batam Free Trade Zone to take care of the site (Fadli 2009a). Some distance from the old main administrative building, a number of fishing boats used by the refugees, some rotted through and some restored and in good condition, have been pulled into loose formation and set upright on concrete supports. The boat is a ubiquitous image in Vietnamese refugee culture, and the camp ‘curators’ have obviously picked up on its connotations of freedom and existential journeying. The experience of viewing these boats is an emotive one indeed for the visitor. At the time that Carruthers visited, there were no plaques or overt scripts provided to properly historically situate the exhibit. Subsequently, a billboard reading ‘Galang: Memory of a Past Tragedy’ and featuring period photographs of refugees on wooden fishing boats, was erected. The old administrative building is the most obviously curated site. It has been turned into a somewhat weird and wonderful museum of the bureaucratic side of camp life. The first thing the visitor notices is a large wall display of identity photographs. Carruthers was immediately reminded of the wall display at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, and had to quickly remind himself that those in the photographs were not dead, but rather (presumably) people who had been happily resettled in the West. Another display has been made of the identity cards and tags of former inmates, while a crude wooden chart and flow diagram represent the ‘Global

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Data of Galang Refugee Camp’ and the complicated steps in refugee processing. These exhibits are actually a little disturbing to the extent that they represent a Kafkaesque bureaucratic imagination run wild, and the visitor can’t help but feel for the internees who were once subject to this institutional mind. A ‘wheel of fortune’ type game adorns another wall, and one assumes this was painted by the refugees themselves, since it is all in Vietnamese. Entitled ‘Electronic Airplane Game’, it invites players to spin the wheel to find out if they are going to be resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia and so on. A list of rules is painted next to the map suggests the game was run as a kind of lottery. Most probably this game dates back to the ‘happy’ period before the implementation of the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA), when all arrivals in fact were being resettled.5 Other rooms display refugee arts, including a large phoenix and religious statues and plaques. These activities speak of the vibrant civil society that flourished in many Indochinese refugee camps despite the often desperate conditions (Hansen 2009). The curatorial imagination behind these strangely juxtaposed exhibits has bizarre and even phantasmagorical overtones. This is certainly not a slick commodification of death and suffering for tourist consumption, and yet its appeal to the viewer’s fascination with the misery of others is perhaps even more disturbing for its handmade quality. Again, one is reminded of the clumsy transformation of Tuol Sleng by the Vietnamese curators who arrived soon after the invading forces.6 In this context, one should also mention the effect of the dilapidated, unrestored buildings that the visitor constantly stumbles upon. Is it possible that the managers of Pulau Galang have artfully left them in decay in order to make the dark tourist’s experience that much more vivid and authentic? Like much of the curating of the site, the tour guides’ scripting of visits to the former camp plays up the logic of the exotic, strange and sensational: Tour guide Mohammad Yono said hundreds of refugees committed suicide by hanging themselves or throwing themselves into ravines after they were denied refugee status and faced forced repatriation. ‘This place is haunted. Many ethnic Chinese have come here to get inspiration on lottery numbers’ from the spirits, he said, pointing to a ravine where refugees were said to have killed themselves. (Agence France Presse 2005) One is tempted to say that the attribution of spiritual potency to this site because of its history as a locus of death and suffering fits into the paradigm of the ‘Dark Fun Factory’ (Stone 2006: 152–53). Yet we must also bear in mind that, in the context of the Nanyang Chinese religious world, other explanations might be more suitable. As Luu Dan explains, the Quan Am temple on Pulau Galang has also been recruited into something of a fertility cult: A Taiwanese group is sponsoring the Buddhist temple. Believe it or not they believe that temple is a very sacred site. When they pray there for son they have a son! As a way of paying back for their prayers being answered they donate and they pay to keep up that temple. Every year that delegation visits that

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Refugee interpretations The responses of the former refugees we interviewed to the curated aspects of the camp don’t point to a sense of open anger at the site’s having been commodified, sensationalised or genericised to meet the desires of non-purposeful tourists. However, coming back into contact with the administrative side of camp life led some of our interviewees to reflect very critically on the attitude of camp officials and locals at the time of their internment. A participant in the 2005 trip organised by Luu Dan reported feeling not a little disgusted at the hypocrisy he saw in the banquet organised by BIDA to welcome the returnees, and sat with difficulty through the longwinded speeches by local officials. ‘It’s like, you didn’t want us at the time, why behave like this now?’ he said (Interview with Kim Huynh, Canberra, 2010). Hien remarked that she was ‘very moved’ when she visited the museum. At the time of her visit she was not clear whether it had been initiated and curated by the local authorities or by the Vietnamese Australian Boat People Archive, who hosted the trip. Nevertheless, she remarked: ‘The museum’s display should be exposed to international view, not just for Vietnamese refugees to see. After all, Vietnamese refugees and ChineseVietnamese boat people are a global phenomenon. We are lucky, but what about the many who did not survive? Ignorance is brutal.’ Her reaction to the display triggered further memories of her time in the camp, and led her to reflect on the extremes of good and bad she experienced there: HUYNH-BEATTIE:

You are happy with the representation at the museum? Yes. It’s a very truthful representation. There are good people and bad people. An old soldier tried to protect me. I was young, only 18 then. Some young Indonesian soldiers tried to drag me away to rape me. Now I can only remember the old man who protected me, and I forgot the faces of those who wanted to harm me. [Laughs] The images in the museum reminded me of the good much more than the bad. The photographs reminded me of the protection, compassion and generosity I received. In that kind of situation, bad things were the norm … That good thing helped me to feel happy and to move on. Even if I wanted to hate them, I just can’t. How can I remember everything? When I returned to Galang, I met Tony and Anthony, two brothers, they used to be two arrogant, dominant and horrible bothers who tortured and bullied our refugee people. These two guys used to have Vietnamese women with them, and these women were really ‘on the nose’, disgusting. Before I went on that trip, I imagined my anger and possibly taking some revenge on those people, like throwing some money onto their faces. But when I got there, they apologised.

HIEN:

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HUYNH-BEATTIE:

They apologised? Yes. They did, they stood on the bus and apologised to us about what they did in the past. Thirty years later, I don’t know if they remember us. After all, so many years have passed. I realised that they were haunted by this burden. Their faces looked embarrassed and guilty (Interview with ‘Hien’, Sydney, 2010).

HIEN:

‘Nguyen’ was more ambivalent about the importance and potential of the museum: The museum actually has just a few items: a couple of rotten boats and a few photographs … Galang is the largest refugee camp for Vietnamese boat people, but it is actually meaningful only for Vietnamese. The number of Vietnamese who returned to visit Galang is very small, so sustaining the museum is not such a priority. Most Vietnamese refugees, when they make this pilgrimage, want to see what they had experienced before. This experience is valid to Vietnamese refugees only. I noticed on my trip that most of the tourists [who visit Pulau Galang] are from Indonesia or Singapore on holiday. The camp is now turned into kind of ‘resort’. In my opinion, the images of the camp before would not be appreciated by these tourists, as they are by Vietnamese (Interview with ‘Nguyen’, Sydney, 2010). We interpret Nguyen’s observation that the island is now a kind of ‘resort’ for visitors from Indonesia and Singapore as an indirect critique of the idea of nonpurposeful dark tourism to the island, since no tourist infrastructure exists there apart from the camp itself. There is a hint in his diplomatic speech that the transformation of the island into a dark tourist site involves an undesirable degree of commodification and sensationalisation of the suffering that occurred there. Finally, we learned from Tuan Hung, who was told by an Indonesian friend, that tourists from Vietnam had visited the island. The somewhat mind-bending idea of non-purposeful dark tourists from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam visiting Pulau Galang adds yet another layer of complexity to this already highly ambiguous site.

Conclusion We hope to have shown by this discussion that the former refugee camp on Pulau Galang is subject to a multiplicity of interpretations. For refugee visitors, it is a site of personal history, transition, and tragedy. These memories do not always confirm the larger narrative that anti-communist elites in the diaspora seek to construct around the island—something that suggests a source of critique of this narrative may lie within diasporic Indochinese communities themselves. For diasporic anticommunists, the museumised camp has become a stake in the symbolic struggle with Hanoi, and has been appropriated as a means of legitimating and purveying a highly ideologically informed version of Vietnam’s history. The solidarity that seems to have sprung up between overseas Vietnamese community associations and the Indonesian managers of the camp, united in

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their desire to see it preserved, does not preclude the fact that they have divergent interpretations of the site’s meaning. For the latter, the island is ideally open to a plurality of uses and interpretations. In addition to its functioning as a shrine, political symbol and site of personal remembrance for refugees, they wish the island to be open to other uses, including religious, touristic and even ludic (or playful) ones. They have sought to distance themselves from the still recent and potent political history of the camp, and to emphasize its heritage value, as well as its value in evoking a (hollowed out) historical experience of human suffering, trauma and death. The way in which the camp has been curated, we believe, succeeds in doing this by evoking an affective response to the exhibited signs of suffering and bureaucratic intimidation without attempting to inform the visitor of the historical circumstances which produced them. For instance, the billboard encouraging visitors to experience Galang as a ‘memory of a past tragedy’ makes no reference to the Vietnam war, and BIDA has responded to Vietnamese government concerns by proposing to change the way the site is signposted from ‘Vietnamese Refugee Camp’ to ‘Refugee Camp’ (Fadli 2009b). The reinvention of a former refugee camp as a dark tourism site is an interesting development, and Pulau Galang might even be the first instance of this. Refugee camps are not mentioned at all in Stone’s comprehensive survey article on dark tourism (Stone 2006), and it is not at all clear how easily they might fit into the dark tourism paradigm. While, like other dark tourist sites, the camp itself was in fact a site of death and suffering, it is problematic for the Indonesian hosts, Vietnamese refugee organisations, and even individual visitors, to acknowledge this. Rather, the site is meant to connote the death and suffering that took place on the open seas between Galang and Vietnam. As we have seen, however, memories of the misery manufactured in the camp itself return to haunt the island. This contradiction not least helps to make Pulau Galang ‘a highly emotional and politically charged heritage product—easy to market yet tricky to interpret’ (Stone 2006: 150).

Notes 1 Estimates of the numbers of refugees who passed through Pulau Galang vary between 145,000 and 250,000. Around 132,000 are estimated to have been resettled from Galang in third countries. 6000–8000 long-term residents remained in the camp in 1996, the majority of whom were repatriated. A very small number of former refugees remain on Batam, McBeth (1994), ‘Long goodbye: Vietnamese asylum-seekers revolt on island camp, Far Eastern Economic Review; Fadli (2009a) ‘Revisiting the refugees on Galang Island’, 4 August. 2 ‘Trong tấm bia đá đơn sơ kia có dấu vết của những bào thai bị chết ngộp khi còn trong bụng mẹ, có tiếng khóc của những trẻ thơ đang đói khát, có giọt máu của người phụ nữ Việt Nam đau đớn trong bàn tay hải tặc, có tiếng gào tuyệt vọng của bà mẹ giữa cơn bão lớn ngoài khơi’ Đạo, T.T. (2005) ‘Nhìn tấm bia tưởng niệm ở Galang suy nghĩ về hòa giải’, DVCOnline, (accessed 7 July). 3 ‘Trong ý nghĩa đó, tấm bia tưởng niệm ở đảo Galang không chỉ để tưởng nhớ đồng bào đã hy sinh trên đường tìm tự do, mà quan trọng hơn, đó là một phần của lịch sử Việt Nam. Một trăm năm sau, hai trăm năm sau, các thế hệ Việt Nam sẽ tìm đến Bidong,

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Galang, Palawan, Sungei Besi, White Head, Panat Nikhom v.v … để dò lại dấu chân của những người đi trước và lắng nghe tiếng biển thì thầm về một chặng đường bi tráng đã qua. Đập đổ tấm bia là một trọng tội với lịch sử, và giống như số phận của tập đoàn Taliban khi bắn sụp các tượng Phật ngàn năm ở Afghanistan, không có đất sống cho những kẻ từ chối, khinh bỉ và hủy diệt các giá trị văn hóa thiêng liêng của dân tộc mình’, Ibid. 4 ‘WHEREAS the destruction of the Galang Refugee Camp will lead to the loss of employment and income of the local tourist industry which is in its early development stage; WHEREAS the destruction of the Galang Refugee Camp will deprive the local population of an important recreation facility which provides them with a precious environment for weekend relaxation; WHEREAS the Galang Refugee Camp has now become a heritage of Batam, one of the major local tourist attractions which is non-political in nature and which is not meant to have any detrimental impact on any individual, organization or country in the world’. Joint Declaration of the Overseas Vietnamese Communities Regarding Communist Vietnam’s Pressure on the Government of Indonesia to demolish the former Refugee Camp in Pulau Galang, Batam (Riau, Indonesia), 2009, http://cuunuoc.org. 5 Many thanks to Ramses Amer for making this sharp observation. We had initially supposed this game to be an example of camp gallows humour. However, we should bear in mind that, unlike the Hong Kong camps, the overwhelming majority of internees at Pulau Galang were in fact accepted for resettlement. Reportedly only some 6000 out of over 145,000 were repatriated to Vietnam. 6 As Ramses Amer also points out, the fact that Tuol Sleng was a camp for the extermination of Khmer Rouge cadres and their families has been largely obscured in the transformation of the site into a dark tourist attraction. For the casual visitor, the message taken away from the former camp is simply one about the brutality and inhumanity of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Bibliography Bociurkiw, Michael (1993) ‘Terrorised in the Camp of Shame’, South China Morning Post, June 6. http://www.library.ohiou.edu/indopubs/1993/11/05/0005.html Carruthers, A. (2007) ‘Vietnamese language and media policy in the service of deterritorialised nation-building’, in L.H. Guan and L. Suyardinata, Language, Nation and Development in Southeast Asia, Singapore, ISEAS, pp. 195–216. Dao, Q. (2005) ‘Galang Refugee Memorial’, Jakarta Post, 29 June. Đạo, T.T. (2005) Nhìn tấm bia tưởng niệm ở Galang suy nghĩ về hòa giải. DVCOnline, 7 July. Fadli (2009a) ‘Revisiting the refugees on Galang Island’, Jakarta Post, 4 August. —— (2009b) ‘Closure of former refugee camp stirs protest’, Jakarta Post, 30 July. —— (2009c) ‘Vietnamese refugee camp still open’, Jakarta Post, 1 August. France-Presse, Agence (2005) ‘Tears and joy as ex-Vietnamese boat people revisit camp’, 3 April. Hansen, Peter (2009) Thanh Loc: inside the Hong Kong Immigration Department’s refugee screening system from a refugee perspective’, paper presented at the Refugee Politics and the Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora—30 Years after the ‘Vietnamese Boatpeople’ in Hong Kong, SEARC, City University of Hong Kong, 17–18 October. McBeth, J. (1994) ‘Long goodbye: Vietnamese asylum-seekers revolt on island camp, Far Eastern Economic Review. Nguyen, N.H.C. (2005) Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives, Altona, Vic.: Common Ground.

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Post, T.J. (2001) ‘Batam bridges lay dormant’, Jakarta Post, 24 December. Stone, P. (2006) ‘A Dark tourist spectrum: towards a typology of death and macabre related tourist sites, Attractions and Exhibitions’, Tourism, 54(2): 145 – 60. Stone, P. and Sharpley, R. (2008) ‘Consuming dark tourism: a thanatological perspective’, Annals of Tourism Research, 35(2): 574 –95. Wilmoth, P. (2005a) ‘Boat people condemn loss of monument to their lives’, The Age, 26 June. —— (2005b) ‘Come hell or high water’, The Age, 17 April.

12 The repatriated From refugee migration to marriage migration Yuk Wah Chan

Peter1 met Mary through the introduction of a friend when Mary was a tourist in Hong Kong in 2002. When they went for marriage registration in 2003, Peter was amazed to learn from the registration officer that Mary had a record at Immigration. It was only about this time that Peter learned that his wife was one of the former boat people who had been kept in Hong Kong refugee camps for eight years. This chapter examines the stories of some repatriated boat people who returned to Hong Kong through marriage migration. They continued the sojourn story by building a close network with previous Hong Kong boat people who have settled in Hong Kong. The outbound marriage market in Vietnam has been expanding since the mid 1990s. After three decades of refugee migration, Vietnam is witnessing a different wave of out-migration—marriage migration— which engages mostly Vietnamese women from both urban and rural areas, and is closely related to the ‘refugee diaspora’ formed few decades ago. The cases in this chapter illustrate how repatriated boat people had found it hard to adapt to life in Vietnam after repatriation and always yearned for a chance of re-migration. Returning to Hong Kong through introduction marriage has been a common practice among these former boat people.

Cases of re-migration Most of the refugee ‘returnees’ were the boat people children who had spent their childhood in the refugee camps. According to Davis (1991), about 35 per cent of the 45,000 boat people in Hong Kong in 1990 were children. They grew up in the Hong Kong refugee camps, learned Cantonese through interactions with camp officers and social workers, and developed some sense of attachment to Hong Kong. They were adolescents when they were repatriated. Back in Vietnam, some enrolled in Vietnamese schools while others worked in factories or stayed home. Many found it hard to adapt to life in Vietnam and had few friends. Some families also felt discriminated against because of their previous ‘fleeing’ attempt, and had to struggle to get normal household registration and other stuffs. These ex-refugees yearned and planned for new chances of moving out again. When the adolescents turned adult, they found their way back to Hong Kong through marrying.

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Kannie Kannie was twelve and her little sister was ten when they were sent off by their parents as unaccompanied children to try their luck. There were over fifty people on board the boat used for their escape. Every family had to pay the group leader a few taels of gold. It took more than a month to reach Hong Kong. Kannie still remembered when she saw the shore of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong police announced through a loudspeaker: ‘This is Hong Kong, do you want to stay in Hong Kong or move on. You will be provided with food and water.’ Kannie said the group’s destination was actually South Korea, not Hong Kong. But seeing that many of the women were vomiting and fainting, the males voted to stay. The people on the boat were then led onto the Hong Kong shore, and were immediately handed food and water, and a Vietnamese translator announced aloud the policy of Hong Kong: ‘Bat tau tu nay, mot chinh sach …’. Kannie said: I did not eat, but listened to the announcement carefully. Since I was the elder sister, I felt I had the responsibility to take care of my sister. Kannie explained that her parents sent her and her sister to the boat because they wanted them to have a better future. In fact, she did not know where she was going to. The parents told them they would go on a travel trip with some uncles … When UNHCR sent investigators to their hometown to check their identity, the grandmother was horrified to see Kannie’s and her sister’s picture, and immediately admitted that they were her granddaughters. Kannie and her sister were then repatriated in 1993. In Vietnam, Kannie went back to school to finish her secondary school education. However, she did not feel like belonging there anymore. In 1999, when she turned twenty-two, she was introduced to a Hong Kong man when she travelled as a tourist to Hong Kong. They arranged a fake marriage at the beginning so she could stay in Hong Kong. But according to Kannie, the marriage turned from fake to real. ‘This is fate. I found him a nice man, and began to like him, we became real couple.’ Kannie and her husband now have a daughter aged seven. In retrospect, Kannie thought that perhaps she could have a very different life in Vietnam—having normal education and life like many others—if her parents did not make the decision for her and her sister and put them on board a boat. Once, her mother asked her if she would blame her for making such a decision. Kannie said it was hard to guess what would have happened otherwise if things had been different. She did not feel too much regret for her life. She now had a stable family, a husband and a daughter. She had also arranged for a marriage for her cousin to come to Hong Kong few years ago.

Joanne Joanne was born in Haiphong in 1983. Her family had a few senior members who belonged to the communist party, and was not poor. Her father worked in a shoe

The repatriated 163 factory and her mother was a dress-maker. However, her father often yearned to go abroad. In 1989, he heard that some friends were planning to go to Hong Kong, and had arranged a boat. He decided to go alone and came back to take the family after he settled. Joanne’s mother insisted that the family should leave together. Then one day, the family of five moved secretly onto a small boat which was congested with a few tens of others. Joanne recounted: Our boat was very small, every person was tightly seated next to another person. It took a whole month to reach Hong Kong. Our boat was actually hit by a typhoon one time, we had to get on shore at Hainan in China. We climbed over a mountain to ask for food from some families there. The Hainan people gave us food and took us to a big hole, where twenty something people were buried. They were Vietnamese who had died at sea and their corpses floated onto the shore. We stayed in Hainan for a week and then sailed on again. From the age of five to thirteen, Joanne was locked up in Whitehead camp. In 1997, her family was repatriated. Once, getting off the airplane, the family was taken to investigation by Vietnamese police officers. ‘They treated us badly,’ Joanne said, ‘like animals.’ Joanne and her parents did not feel good back in Vietnam. Their house was already sold by their grandmother and they had to stay at an uncle’s place. ‘Our neighbour treated us like we had betrayed the country. We were also discriminated against by the government. It was very hard for my family to apply or register for anything. In the first few years, only my father had an identity registration.’ Joanne found it difficult to adapt to life in Vietnam. After studying two to three years in the secondary school, she quit and began to work in her mother’s tailor shop. Since she spent most of her childhood in the refugee camp, she remembered more things about Hong Kong than Vietnam. The first few years when she was back in Vietnam, she felt like a stranger and could not trust the people around. ‘I don’t like Vietnamese men. They often exaggerate things. I do not like them.’ At the age of 19, she came to Hong Kong on a tourist visa to meet different men introduced by a matchmaking company. She identified one whom she liked most and continued the communication over phone calls. A year later she travelled to Hong Kong again to get married to this man and was now a Hong Kong citizen of permanent residence.

May May first came to Hong Kong in May 1989 at the age of twenty. She came with friends, and without any family members. I started to escape when I was sixteen. I always dreamed of beautiful places abroad that I saw on television. I decided to leave Vietnam and stole my mother’s gold to pay the boat leaders. I had tried seven times before I finally

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Hong Kong and beyond succeeded to get on a boat and sailed out. We reached China after two days, and at a shore in Quang Tay, we changed to another boat. It took a month to reach Hong Kong.

When May was taken onshore, the thing she remembered vividly was the smell of the bleach sprayed on the boat people’s body. ‘It is a terrible smell.’ May was first locked up at the camp in Tai Po with around three thousand boat people. After eight months she was transferred to a larger camp of seven thousand people, the Man Yee Camp in Shatin, and had stayed there for five years. In Man Yee, she married to a Vietnamese man and gave birth to two children. May joined the voluntary repatriation scheme and returned to Vietnam in 1994 because she thought that there would be no future for the family to stay on. However, once back in Vietnam, she broke up with her husband who ran off with another woman. May had to raise her kids on her own since her mother still loathed her for running off to Hong Kong. She moved to another place and according to her, struggled very hard to bring up her kids and send them to the university. In 2003, May travelled to Hong Kong. She met a man through some friend’s introduction, and got married. After a year, they divorced, and May met another Hong Kong man and married again in 2007. She now has a three year old girl with her new husband. She worked in a hair salon. Summing up her migration experiences, May believed that the main reason for her to move again was that she did not like to live in a place where she could not really feel free to say things and do what she wanted to do.

Cathy Cathy came to Hong Kong with her cousin as boat people when she was ten. The cousin stayed in the boat people camp until 1996 and then married a Hong Kong man when she was eighteen. Cathy went on a different path. In 1993, she joined the voluntary repatriation scheme when she was fourteen. She started working in a factory a year after she was back in Vietnam. Feeling discriminated against, and seeing no good future in Vietnam, Cathy decided to migrate again. In 2000, Cathy was twenty one, and got married to a Hong Kong man by introduction. However, this relationship did not work out. After a few years, she divorced her first husband and married another Hong Kong man who was about her own age and they now have a four year old daughter. Like others who had spent their childhood in Hong Kong, Cathy spoke fluent Cantonese. She worked as a salesperson, and her husband was a computer technician. She described her family as a happy one and she lived like any other Hong Kong person. For her, having a job and making money in Hong Kong was better value for money than in Vietnam. ‘It is much better to earn money in Hong Kong, and send money back to Vietnam.’ She sent money back to her parents in Haiphong to build a house and invest in business. Now, she did not need to worry about the financial situation of her parents anymore.

The repatriated 165 Most of Cathy’s sisters and brothers were living abroad in different countries. Like her, all of them have moved out within the last few years, through their connections to overseas relatives, and marriage migration. She liked to return to Vietnam to visit her parents, and most of the time, she went back with her daughter and sometimes with her husband. Cathy’s grandfather was a Catholic and her siblings and her were baptized when they were kids. As a Catholic, she found life in Hong Kong freer and people went to church without any fear of repression.

From refugee migration to marriage migration The above cases of remigration have illustrated how ‘refugee migrants’, after failing their refugee trajectory, had turned to become marriage migrants. These former boat people had stayed in the refugee camps in Hong Kong for a few years and were repatriated to Vietnam because they were unable to obtain ‘refugee status’. They were either arbitrarily sent back to Vietnam or returned to Vietnam on a voluntary basis. The above cases involve both families and individuals who could not fulfil their dreams of migration at the first attempt. However, their desire for migration did not recede. The desire for moving abroad again was especially high when they found life back in Vietnam hard to adapt to. Compared to men, women often have a higher chance to migrate as marriage migrants. As asserted by Constable (2005: 4) and others (see Willis and Yeoh 2000), international marriage migrants are mostly women who move from poorer to richer places. Among the repatriated refugees, the same pattern follows: female exrefugees get a higher chance to migrate again. Having said this, it is not impossible for repatriated Vietnamese men to return to Hong Kong through marriage. Among the informants, there is one couple where the woman is a Chinese Vietnamese and has settled in Hong Kong with her family after being released from the refugee camp in 1996. The man was not eligible to stay in Hong Kong and was repatriated. He returned to Hong Kong in 2008 to marry his girlfriend.

Resource centres of marriage migration The global Vietnamese diaspora has produced active agents in churning up new rounds of migration (see Thai 2008). All the above remigration cases were made successful by using acquaintance networks in the Vietnamese community in Hong Kong. Since the re-migrants were refugees before, they had relatives, acquaintances and friends who had become Hong Kong citizens. The new bordercrossing brides would then become the new network locus for her family members and acquaintances to migrate. A year before Joanne was married in Hong Kong, her elder sister had already come to Hong Kong through an introduction marriage, which was arranged by her mother through her acquaintance network in Hong Kong. Her sister then helped Joanne to find a husband through a matchmaking company. Joanne’s marriage had already lasted for nine years while her sister divorced her husband a few years ago and has returned to Vietnam.

166 Hong Kong and beyond As stressed, the boat people settlers have become marriage middle-persons. They are able to get to know single Hong Kong men through their work place, friend circles, and their husband’s connections. It is not uncommon to find families of the informants’ husbands having taken more than one Vietnamese wife. Some of these voluntary Vietnamese middle persons may take ‘introduction’ fees from both the bride’s and the groom’s families. Besides voluntary marriage middle-persons, there are a few ‘professional’ matchmakers in the Vietnamese community. These matchmakers work to match both real and fake marriages. The standard price for successful marriage (meaning successful registration for marriage) was HK$40,000–50,000 in 2009. The Vietnamese women are sometimes the financial support sponsoring their female relatives, including sisters, nieces, and aunts to marry abroad. Cathy had recently helped her aunt successfully settled in a marriage in Hong Kong, and had borrowed money from the bank to finance other outbound marriages to Australia in her family. All the women who she financed were repatriated boat people. Another Vietnamese informant in Hong Kong also paid for the introduction fee for her niece, not an ex-refugee, to marry to Hong Kong. The usual age difference between the Vietnamese wife and overseas husband is ten to twenty years. I asked my informants why they would be willing to let their Vietnamese relatives marry Hong Kong men of a much older age. A 50-year-old informant said, ‘They are marrying older man here. But so what? Marrying a Vietnamese man does not mean they will have a good future. Many men take drugs and gamble. When we find a husband for them, we check the family background and job of the man. We make sure they have good jobs and are reliable.’ In the following sections, I will explore the concept of ‘migration habitus’. Gendered marriage migration has made international marriages mostly composed of migrant wives and local husbands. Such a phenomenon has been paralleled by a list of stereotypes against the migrant wives. These stereotypes have a lot to do with popular conceptions about the intentions of marriage migrants; especially typical is the assumption that these female marriage migrants, from less developed places, are marrying for money. Rather than accepting such perception uncritically, I employ the concept of ‘migration habitus’ to delve into the complexity of the structural and dispositional factors that lead to a migration decision.

Migration habitus The cases illustrated in this chapter are of a number of border-crossing brides who have a ‘refugee’ background. Failing to accomplish their ends in the previous ‘migration trajectory’, the women made another attempt to migrate through marrying, to fulfil their individual or their family’s wish of migration. Not all of them have exactly the same reasons and the support of their families for migrating. The most commonly assumed reason—economic aspiration—is only part

The repatriated 167 of the complex whole that constructs the ‘migration habitus’ that surrounds and individual and pervades a family and a community. The ‘migration habitus’ I conceptualize here has been motivated by the interviews conducted with the emigrant brides who have engaged in activities like traveling to the migration destination to meet with potential grooms, preparing necessary budget for such meeting, and identifying husbands in the global marriage market. The preparation for international marriage migration does not happen in a second. Potential migrant women and their families have to work out their migration plan and prepare some money for connection networks and overseas travel. Some were said to have spent a few tens of thousands before a possible ‘husband’ was identified. The concept of ‘migration habitus’ is an attempt to theorize the structural, familial and individual levels of factors, and the interactive process between structural factors and personal migration motives. Bourdieu’s (1977) ‘habitu’ is a complex concept, which highlights the structure of people’s mind and explain how their behaviour is being characterized by a set of learned and acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste, which in turn help reproduce social conditions and perceived realities. The habitu is in fact the structured disposition of individuals and groups, closely shaped by societal milieu and dialectically linked to the individual’s or group’s past experiences. As Bourdieu explains: The habitus, the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus (Bourdieu 1977: 78). Classical migration studies tend to use the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ model to identify reasons for migration. Sending and receiving countries are often taken as entities with oppositional socio-economic and political conditions that push or draw people to emigrate or immigrate. Such model tends to dichotomize the two sets of opposite qualities of the sending state and the destination. The ‘push and pull’ model also standardizes reasons for outmigration and homogenizes migrants’ experiences, and disregards the formation of the motivational process that acts on individuals and families. To replace this static and oppositional model, the concept of ‘migration habitus’ highlights the embeddedness of migrants’ migration motives, projections of life chances, expectations of future encounters, connections to migration circles, migration preferences, and imaginative life-worlds. More often than not, migration decision is not induced by one single reason, but by a myriad of possible choices at certain moments of a person’s life time. It is also often related to family history and community culture; migration is thus an outcome of a historicized habitual milieu formed at communal, familial and individual levels.

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In less developed places, the social production and reproduction of prospective migrants is often related to a milieu of transnational migration network, personal and familial connections, nourished migration ideals, sufficient detachment from the local community, and perhaps insufficient information of the actual living of the migrants in migration destinations. Many of the repatriated families and the children have felt detached from the Vietnamese societies after repatriation. For the repatriated children, lacking proper education in the Vietnamese society and having hybrid childhood in both Vietnam and Hong Kong have made it harder for them re-integrate. As claimed by Joanne: ‘I lived most of my life as a child in Hong Kong. When I returned to Vietnam, I hardly remembered anything about Vietnam, and felt strange to live among the Vietnamese.’ They are particularly prone to the temptation of a second-time out-migration. Their remigration had coincided with the social milieu of marriage migration which has become very popular among Vietnamese women since the late 1990s. The concept of ‘migration habitus’ has incorporated ideas from the concept of ‘culture of migration’, which creates positive perceptions and supportive morals for migration (Massey et al. 1993). Pieke and his colleagues (Benton and Pieke 1998; Pieke et al. 2004) have written ethnographically rich reports on Chinese migrant communities and migrants’ migration strategies. Examining the culture of migration of the Chinese, Pieke has pointed out that chain migration among Chinese migrant communities is often linked to the ideal of independent entrepreneurship. Besides providing sponsorship for the migration of friends and relatives, overseas migrant communities also play a big role in shaping the life strategies and migration pattern of future migrants. Thus, chain migration entails the following cultural logic (1998: 10): [I]t reproduces and is reproduced by discursive practices located partly in the home community and partly in the community of fellow villages in Europe. Chain migration is tied to a representation of reality, including of chain migration itself, that focuses prospective migrants in the home community exclusively on an overseas career. In other words, within a culture of migration, potential migrants would develop sufficient detachment from the local community and enough aspirations for life elsewhere. Aiming at substantiating the arguments of ‘migration culture’, Kalir uses the concept of ‘migratory disposition’ to illustrate individual susceptibility to migration options, bodily feelings and personal desires (Kalir 2005: 188). However, by placing the stress back to individual decision-making process, culture (structure) and agents are then again separated. Neither focusing merely on the structural environment, nor on individual dispositions, the concept of ‘migration habitus’ emphasizes the dynamic process of interaction between structure (both economic and cultural) and agents, and individual/familial interpretations of such structural environment. While there is certainly a structural/cultural milieu that shapes the life outlook of prospective migrants, individuals and families would undergo their own motivation-formation processes to act on a migration trajectory.

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Following the waves (theo phong chao) and migratory culture The Vietnamese term ‘phong chao’ may be translated into waves or campaign. Among the settled Vietnamese in Hong Kong, a number of them have stressed to me that theo phong chao had been the reason for them to flee during the late 1980s. One informant said: In those years, many people talked about going away to Hong Kong and elsewhere. It is hard to say why exactly we wanted to go. I was teaching at a school in a small town near to Haiphong. Most people could be sent back to the city after five to six years of work in rural places. But I waited and waited, they did not let me back. I was very angry. Then some friends came and said to me that they were planning to run to Hong Kong. I said to them, go, let’s go. Following the movement, theo phong chao, has formed a particular migratory culture in the late 1980s. For those who followed the movement or fashion, all might have some sort of micro stories/individual grievances to tell which triggered the decision to leave. Some of these micro stories might sound trivial and immature. One of the informants said that in 1988, she finished her secondary education and would like to study in the university. However, she failed her university entry examination. Without much other aspiration, she went on the path of migration. Another female informant said, ‘Some friends asked me if I want to go, so I joined them and went with them (co ban du di).’ The informants explained that during those years in Vietnam, it was very common for people to follow others and join the ‘escape’ waves. In other words, phong chao had been the structural-cultural generative schema strongly shaping people’s ‘migration habitus’. While a phong chao of fleeing (a tendency or fashion of refugee migration) has already existed in the society, very small incidents would have triggered people’s desire to leave. In the 2000s, the phong chao of ‘escaping’ by boats did not exist anymore. Nevertheless, there was a new ‘phong chao’ of marrying out. For the repatriated female boat people, outbound marriage is an easy way out to accomplish their unfulfilled migration dream. Having exposed to the existing culture of outbound marriage, the potential migrants’ alienated life experiences in Vietnam have aggravated their distance from local marriages. Moreover, their close networks to overseas Vietnamese communities guarantee resources and information for introduction marriage, which in turn help consolidate their ‘migration habitus’. Pieke (1998) has depicted the communal emigration psyche among the Chinese migrant communities: Economically, socially and psychologically, these communities are completely integrated with their counterpart communities abroad and largely isolated from the society and economy around them. This fact also explains why emigration has continued from home communities in Hong Kong … and … Wenzhou … even in periods of rapid economic growth in nearby

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Hong Kong and beyond urban areas. There communities look to a society on the other side of the globe; the opportunities offered by and economic miracle taking place next door are of no special significance to them. (1998: 10–11)

As stressed, economic motive is only part of the migration habitus leading to migration. Many popular understanding and discourses of the motives of female marriage migrants from developing countries to developed places have been overshadowed by an assumption of economic incentives. The women migrants are often seen as money oriented and married for social mobility. As suggested by Nakamatsu (2005: 169–70), people tend to assume that the international marriage by introduction and arranged marriage through middle-persons are victims of poverty at their home town in less developed places, and are uncivilized and money-motivated. Reflecting on their migration experiences, many informants emphasized that whether in the late 1980s or in more recent time, economic motives were not the main reasons for leaving Vietnam. If they were really poor, they would not have enough money (gold) to pay the boat leaders. Indeed, compared to those who had not fled or left, the informants and their families were not particularly worse off. It was more of the totality of their ‘migration habitus’ which were formed by an existing migration fashion, aspirations of future life elsewhere and dissatisfaction of present life at home that had driven them to go away.

Migration habitus and modernity discourse Many Vietnamese brides have regarded Hong Kong as a more modern city with better life chances. Wrapping the ‘migration habitus’ of these ‘returning’ (returning to the first asylum centre) repatriated boat people is a strong modernity discourse about the living environment and social system of Hong Kong. Among these ‘ex-refugees’, there is no lack of fond memories of Hong Kong. Though having been locked up in the refugee camps, many still remember Hong Kong as a place of familiarity and see Hong Kong citizenship as a way enhancing life chances for themselves and future kids. Hong Kong also represents a fairer and more reasonable social system than Vietnam. Critics tend to assume women from less developed places traveling to developed places for marriages as victims of social, familial and global patriarchal systems, and are sacrificing their own happiness for the up-gradation of material life of their families. Constable (1997, 2003) has provided thick discussions of this issue in her studies of Asian brides or mail-order brides. Considering choices between marriage at home and abroad, Vietnamese women, however, might not consider the former situation as a guarantee for happiness. To some of them, marriage is like gambling, neither one way or the other would guarantee a final happy outcome. There were also cases (such as the case of May) in which women having failed in their marriages in Vietnam determined to migrate to Hong Kong to obtain a new chance for a marriage. A number of migrant wives also tend to see Hong Kong men as more responsible husbands and fathers. Thus,

The repatriated 171 for the migrant women, the modernity imagination and discourse often exceed the limits of a better-paid job or money matters, and include a more desirable social environment, differently cultured males, different ways of handling family problems etc. The life world of most of the Vietnamese in Hong Kong is still largely entangled in transnational communications and emotional activities that happen in between persons within the Hong Kong Vietnamese community and across Hong KongVietnam borders. Much of their planning of life strategies still heavily engages problems and family issues back in Vietnam. The ‘migration habitus’ of the Vietnamese are not merely generative dispositions hanging on individuals before their migration; once formed, they are continuously shaped by new encounters in their migrant life, everyday happenings in both settlement and home societies, and also by the migrants’ persistently changing imagination of modernity.

Note 1 All names in this chapter are pseudonyms.

Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a theory of practice, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Constable, Nicole (1997) Maid to order in Hong Kong: stories of Filipina workers, Ithaca, New York, NY: Cornell University Press. Constable, Nicole (2003) Romance on a global stage: pen pals, virtual ethnography, and “mail-order” marriages, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Constable, Nicole (ed.) (2005) Cross-border marriages: gender and mobility in transnational Asia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Benton, Gregor and Frank N. Pieke (eds) (1998) The Chinese in Europe, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Davis, Leonard (1991) Hong Kong and the Asylum-seekers from Vietnam, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Kalir, Barak (2005) ‘The development of a migratory disposition: explaining a “new emigration”’, International Migration, 43(4): 167–94. Massey, Doreen, et al. (1993) ‘Theories of international migration: a review and appraisal’, Population and Development Review, 19: 431– 66. Nakamatsu, Tomoko (2005) ‘Complex power and diverse responses: transnational marriage migration and women’s agency’, in Lyn Parker (ed.) The agency of women in Asia, Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, pp. 158–81. Pieke, Frank N. (1998) ‘Introduction’, in Gregor Benton and Frank N. Pieke (eds) The Chinese in Europe, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 1–17. Pieke, Frank N. et al. (2004) Transnational Chinese: Fujianese migrants in Europe, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Thai, Hung Cam (2008) For better or for worse: Vietnamese international marriages in the new global economy, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Willis, Katie and Brenda Yeoh (eds) Gender and Migration, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Conclusion Yuk Wah Chan Vietnamese diaspora—an Asian settlement This book is a result of converging interests in re-examining the Vietnamese refugee story that had aroused persistent international attention in the last three decades of the twentieth century. It is an attempt to amend the previous incomplete study of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora. The Vietnamese refugee story has been largely represented by the abundant accounts of refugees having settled in the West. We have not found any comprehensive study of the settlement of the Vietnamese refugees in Asia, a geographic space that had played an extremely crucial role in the process of the exoduses of the boat people. The different chapters we put together here have reconsidered a number of important questions about the development of the different Vietnamese refugee waves (Chapter 1 and 2) and the ethnic factor contributing to the divisions among the refugees (Chapter 3 and 4). It has also rebuilt different phases of the refugee camp period, depicting the hopes and fear of the incarcerated boat people and their experiences from perspectives different from a number of the previous boat people literature (Chapter 6, 7). From the newsletters and magazine articles, poems and art work of the boat people, we examine the humble desire for freedom and independence of many of the refugees when the chance to be resettled grew dim (Chapter 8). We also reflect on the interaction between the Vietnamese boat people and Hong Kong society at large through a display of visual images (Chapter 9). More importantly, we acknowledge a Vietnamese settlement in Hong Kong, which has been invisible. We have surveyed the Vietnamese boat people migrants and studied how they have settled in Hong Kong and whether they have integrated well into the society (Chapter 5). This book takes an initiative to address the fact that a part of the refugee migrants did not settle in the West, nor were they repatriated. Rather, they have been ‘stuck’ in the ‘asylum centre’. In the case of Hong Kong, over fifteen thousand had settled in Hong Kong before 1988, many of these were Chinese Vietnamese and would no longer claim the ethnic label of Vietnamese. Those who arrived in the third wave—1988–91, were mainly ethnic Vietnamese from the north. After the screening policy was implemented, the repatriation scheme began to send people back to Vietnam. Within the following years when more and more camps were being closed, those who were screened out, particularly the Vietnamese women, seeing no hope of resettlement in the West, resorted to local marriages to obtain a chance to stay. We estimate there were over one thousand such cases. In the year of 2000 when the last camp was shut, there were over two thousand deadlock cases, the government decided to allow these families and individuals to acquire the local citizenship.

Conclusion

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The Vietnamese community, with similar ‘refugee’ background and shared ‘camp life’ experiences, has been able to provide support to each other. For the women who shared the same fate of marrying local men, they are particularly closely knitted together. In the last part of this volume, we go beyond the geographical context of Hong Kong and include two chapters that deal with the situations of settled Chinese Vietnamese refugees in the US (Chapter 10) and Vietnamese from Australia visiting former refugee camp sites in Indonesia as a form of dark tourism (Chapter 11). The last chapter (Chapter 12) relates the stories of some repatriated boat people to ‘returning migration’ to Hong Kong through marriages. This second-time migration of the former boat people intriguingly links the refugee diaspora with the new migration pattern of the Vietnamese— marriage migration that has emerged since the mid 1990s.

From a refugee model to a marriage model Many of those who failed to obtain a refugee status for resettlement had made use of ‘marriage’ to obtain a citizenship in Hong Kong, and most of these were female detainees. As one informant described, ‘In the years running up to 1997, every Sunday we dressed up in our best outfit, put on make-up to meet our future husbands.’ Most of the husbands are men from the working class and of age much older than the women. A large settlement of Vietnamese women into Hong Kong families has brought about some interesting outcomes: (1) It has effected the feminization of the Vietnamese diaspora in Hong Kong. This ‘Vietnamese diaspora’ is basically separated from the Chinese Vietnamese who have better integrated into the Hong Kong Chinese society. (2) It has led to a new generation of local born Vietnamese-Hongkongese children. The hybrid upbringing of these children and their identity should be an area of interest for those interested in intercultural families and the acculturation of the second generation of migrants. (3) The Vietnamese wives have virtually become a locus for initiating new rounds of migration—marriage migration by introducing single men for women in Vietnam. Some of the cross-border brides are themselves former boat people who once lived in the Hong Kong refugee camps. As the governmental census has shown, 75 per cent of the Vietnamese population in Hong Kong are females. It should be noted that the refugee paradigm for the Vietnamese diaspora that dominates both popular and academic understanding of the overseas Vietnamese communities has been gradually shifted. Since the late 1990s, marriage migration has become prominent among Vietnamese women in Vietnam. Overseas Vietnamese refugee men from the West have been returning to Vietnam in search of wives. Many Vietnamese women have also targeted these overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) to seek an emigration possibility, constituting what Hung Thai1 calls a trans-Pacific global marriage market.

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Hong Kong and beyond

Growing rapidly at the same time is a regional marriage market with Vietnamese women marrying Koreans and Taiwanese. Unlike a century ago when international migration were often conducted by men, women today are particularly active in initiating migration. Feminization of migration in the developing world has drawn substantial scholarly attention. But not yet is this phenomenon in Vietnam being studied in relation to the former refugees. In our investigation of the plights of the repatriated boat people, we have found evidence that many of those who failed in their previous ‘refugee’ migration attempts have continued their migration trajectory through marriage. Some re-migrated to Hong Kong while others to Korea and Japan, and they continue to chain up others, mostly women, to migrate. Thus, from a refugee model, the Vietnamese diaspora has gradually turned to a marriage model, carrying on the migration dreams of many Vietnamese nationals. The two models, though separated, and appeared in very different forms in different historical contexts, are indeed intrinsically inter-related. The Vietnamese dream and trajectory of migration, rather than being a matter of individual life strategy, is often family based and oriented. The Vietnamese refugee dream of ‘seeking a better life’ has been carried through and continued by a large number of female nationals.

Asian Vietnamese diaspora—unfinished migration trajectory—Hong Kong and beyond Global politics in the late last century had produced a disturbed period in Vietnam. The Vietnamese refugee saga had aroused worldwide concern over three decades in the last century and had produced over a million refugee migrants. An uncertain number perished during their escape. Most of the survivors have settled in the West, but a number of them have actually settled in Asia, the transitory asylum places. Vietnam is now one of the most stable and peaceful countries in Asia, and the economy is growing fast. Nevertheless, many Vietnamese are still on the move. The refugee diaspora spreading across the globe has continued to sponsor such moves economically and inspire such move ideationally. Without incorporating any stigmatizing connotation of the term ‘refugee’, the concept of ‘refugeeing’ is used in relation to the unsettled sense of the Asian diaspora settlement, and the continuing movement of a large number of Vietnamese intrinsically linked to the refugee diaspora. This book is an attempt to arrest attention to the existence of a Vietnamese refugee settlement in Asia. It recovers a missing part of the Vietnamese diaspora with Vietnamese stories from Hong Kong. We hope that it will draw more research interests on the Vietnamese and other Indochinese diaspora in other parts of the Asian asylum territories, such as Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, Japan and Macau. In the last decade, some of these places have become centers for new rounds of Vietnamese migration. Whether there are significant numbers of Vietnamese refugees settled in these territories, how these settlers have been leading their life, and whether and in what ways new rounds of Vietnamese

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migrants are related to the previous Vietnamese refugee migrants should be of scholarly interest. We hope to see new research effort in examining these questions, which will surely enrich our understanding of the rapidly growing migrant populations in Asia and beyond. A respected monk in the Hong Kong Vietnamese community once explained to some Vietnamese devotees the concept of refuge-taking during a Buddhist refuge-taking ritual: You are now taking refuge in Buddhist training. Do you understand what is ‘taking refuge’? It’s like being a refugee, you were refugees before, you take refuge in something … All human beings are refugees, we are all refugees We take refuge in the best; Buddha is the highest refuge … The unfinished ‘refuge-taking’ trajectory of the Vietnamese has a lot to do with the belief of an unfinished/incomplete modern life at home and the imagination of a better modernity elsewhere, including the West as well as many of the more developed places in Asia.

Note 1 See Hung Cam Thai (2008) For better or for worse: Vietnamese international marriages in the new global economy, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations, page numbers in italic refer to tables Africa 11 Age, The 149 Agence-France Press 149 ALR (Australian Lawyers for Refugees) 90–1, 94, 97n12, 98n19 Amer, Ramses 15, 36–47, 111, 159n5, 159n6 American Red Cross 137 Amsterdam, International Institute of Social History 114n4 artwork, refugee 16, 99–114; anticommunist 104; chickenwing metaphor 107–10; and confinement 100–3; creativity 102; ethnic Chinese 111–3; and ethnicity 113; imagery 104–7, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113; optimism 102, 105; poetry 101–3, 113; Project Ngoc (Pearl) 99–100, 110–1, 111; Southeast Asian Archive, University of California 99, 99–100, 103, 111, 113–4; symbols of hope 104; Vietnamese Art in the Camp project 114n4 Asian Americans 133, 143–4 assimilation 7, 143 asylum centres 4 asylum seekers 11, see also refugees; accommodation 87; criminal networks 90; decline in numbers 96; dreams 95; and ethnicity 4–5; legal representation 90, 96, 97n12; motivation 85; NGO services 88–9; numbers 23, 97n3; push factors 96; repatriations 93–5, 98n17; screening interviews 90–3, 97n15; social networks 89–90 asylum territories 174 Australia 16, 150–1 Australia-Vietnam Human Rights Committee 151

Baker, Pam 112 Ban Me Thuot 21 Batam 153 Batam Industrial Development Authority (BIDA) 147, 148, 153–4, 156, 158 belonging 14 Bhabha, Homi 84 Blackwell, Francis 86 boat people 36–47, 135; arrivals in Hong Kong 6, 6, 8–9, 46, 47n2, 116–8, 117, 118–21, 119, 120, 121, 124, 135–6; casualties 116; children 76; crisis of 1978–79 36–9; ethnic Chinese 36, 36–7, 38, 39–40, 46–7; factors behind exodus 40–5; first wave of 116–8; Forced Repatriation Scheme 126–7; local hostility towards 121–2; marriage 15–6, 69; numbers 111–2, 116, 118, 120–1, 124, 136; origins 9, 38; passage 118, 137; public images of 9, 16, 116–28, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 127; refugee numbers 36–9, 37, 38; repatriations 5–6, 8–9, 11; resentment of 136; screening policy 8, 10, 16, 85–96, 124, 125–8, 172; semi-legal departure system 44–5; sympathy for 118; trade begins 22 boat people period 4 boat people settlement, in Hong Kong 65–74; difficulties faced 68; discrimination 71–3; education 67, 67, 69–71; family life 67–8; identity 68–9; income 67; inter-cultural marriage 69–71; marriage 69; self dependence 70–1; social support 68; transnational connections 69; Vietnamese community 65–6, 66–9, 66

178

Index

Bourdieu, P. 167 Bousquet, Gisele 30 British Red Cross 88 Brook, Rob 112 Bui, Quang L. 139, 144n10 Burma 5 California 138 California, University of 16; periodical collection 103; Southeast Asian Archive 99, 99–100, 103, 111, 113–4 California State Prison System’s Arts in Corrections program 104 Cambodia 5, 20, 20–1, 22, 29, 32n2, 44, 135 Canton Road dockyard, Hong Kong 120, 121, 122 Cao Manh Kim 102–3 Caplan, N. 139, 144n10 C.A.R.E. Local Vietnamese Community Art Re-encountered (exhibition) 114n4 Caritas Hong Kong 88 Carruthers, Ashley 16, 147–58 Carter, Jimmy 135 Chan, Ocean W. K. 16, 76–84 Chan, Sucheng 136, 144n4 Chan, Yuk Wah 3–16, 15–6, 16, 31, 52, 65–74, 161–71, 172–5 Chi Ma Wan refugee camp 8, 123 Chicken wings: Refugee stories from a concrete hell (Knudsen) 108 chickenwing metaphor 107–10 childcare 71 children, see refugee youth China 5; border closure 39; border patrols 112; citizenship 42–3; exodus to 45–6, 48n12; handover of Hong Kong to 9, 127–8; refugee entries into 39, 135; relations with Cambodia 44; relations with Vietnam 44 China–Vietnam border war 7, 22, 40 Chinese Vietnamese refugees 3, 7, 15, 36–47, see also ethnic Chinese; acceptance as 31; expulsion from Vietnam 40; group dynamics 4; hidden 29; identity 6; importance 36; integration 5, 15; population numbers 36; relations with Vietnamese 77–8, 80–1 Chinese-Vietnamese Americans 133–44; 1.5- and second-generation 140–1, 142–3; arrival in America 138; assimilation 143; community development 140–1; cultural identity 141–2; demographics 139;

first impressions 139–40; identity 141–4; identity formation 142–3; immigration waves 138, 140, 143n1; intergenerational conflicts 140–1; invisibility 143; language skills 139, 140, 140–1; passage through Hong Kong 135–7; racism and 141, 144n9; settlement in America 137–9; and tradition 140; and the Vietnamese exodus 135 Cho Lon 52–3 citizenship 14 Clark, Richard 120 closed-camp policy, Hong Kong 7, 10, 23, 86, 122–5, 123 Community and Family Services International (CFSI) 88, 89 compassion fatigue 92, 138–9 Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) 23, 32n2, 85–6, 126, 155 Constable, Nicole 165, 170 Correctional Services Department (CSD) 77 Correspondent, The 123 Council for Refugee Rights 110 Cuba 11, 27, 30 Dan, Luu 149, 152, 155–6, 156 Dan Viet 149 Dang Phong 58 Dao, Quynh 151 dark tourism 16, 147–58; curating 154–6; definition 148; experience 156; local management 148; motivation 147–8; multiplicity of interpretations 157–8; non-purposeful 148–9; Pulau Galang refugee camp site 153–4; purposeful 148; refugee interpretations 156–7; and refugee return experience 148–51 Das, K. 118 Davis, Leonard 76 Defenseless in Detention (Refugee Concern Hong Kong) 110 detention, arbitrary, challenge to 112 detention centres, see refugee camps diasporic identity 14 diasporic memory 151–2 discrimination: Hong Kong 71–3, 81–3; refugee youth and 81–3, 84 Do, Hien Duc 138 Ðạo, Trấn Trung 152 Do Trinh 105, 108 Doan Huu Duc 109–10 Donnelly, Nancy 30

Index 179 drug abuse 80–1 drug-trafficking 82–3 East Asian cosmopolitanism 32 Eastern Europe 11 ethnic Chinese, see Chinese Vietnamese refugees; Chinese-Vietnamese Americans: boat people 36, 36–7, 38, 39–40, 46–7; business networks 42; closed camp experience 77–8; discrimination 81–3; economic position in South Vietnam 53–6; education 48n15; ethnic groups 47n3; integration in South Vietnam 58; investment in South Vietnam 56–9; landownership 56; migration 39–40, 44; migration to China 45–6, 135; numbers 111–2; persecution of 135; refugee artwork 111–3; rejection of Vietnamese citizenship 42–4; scholarship on 52; semi-legal departure system 44–5; settlement 172; settlement in America 137–9; in South Vietnam 52–9; and South Vietnamese industry 58; South Vietnamese rice trade and 53–6, 54, 55; stereotypes 52–3; and the Vietnamese exodus 39–40, 44, 135 ethnicity, and asylum-seeking 4–5 EXCVII 6, 7 family connections 11–2; emotional attachments 13 Fassi, Luigi 107 Forced Repatriation Scheme 126–7 France 20 French Indochina 20 Garden Streams Hong Kong Fellowship of Christian Artists 114n4 Geneva: conference, 1978 37; conference, 1979 23, 39, 121–2, 136; conference, 1989 126 Geneva Convention, 1951 85 Gia Ðinh Phất Tú (Buddhist Family) 89 globalization 13, 74 González, Elián 28 Goscha, Christopher 59n1 Great Britain 9, 127–8, 136 Guide to the Paul Tran files on Southeast Asian refugees 100 Guide to the Project Ngoc records 100 Ha Long, the 119–20, 120 Haines, David 15, 20–32

Haiphong 9 Haiti 11, 27 Haitians 30 Hansen, Peter 16, 85–96 Hei Ling Chau detention camp 8, 111–3 history, erasing 147, 148, 152 Hitchcox, Linda 30 Hmong community 32n2 Ho Chi Minh City 41, 42, 43, 47n6 “Hoa Trong von Kem” (Flowers Behind Barbed Wire) 101–3 homeland culture, exposure to 13 home-settlement connections 4 Hong Kong 20; boat people arrivals in 6, 6, 8–9, 37, 38, 38, 39, 46, 47n2, 116–8, 118–21, 119, 120, 121, 124, 135–6; boat people education 67, 67; boat people family life 67–8; boat people numbers 116; boat people settlement 65–74; Canton Road dockyard 120, 121, 122; centrality of 32; Chinese communities 5; Chinese status in 31; closed-camp policy 7, 10, 23, 86, 122–5, 123; discrimination 71–3, 81–3; emigration 9; employment 69–71; ethnic Chinese numbers in 111–2; and ethnicity 4–5; female Vietnamese population 173; first refugee arrivals 7, 21, 116–8; Forced Repatriation Scheme 126–7; handover to China 9, 127–8; identity 10; Immigration Ordinance 86; immigration policy 72, 172; and marriage migration 162–5; memories of 170; passports 71–2; and the politics of migration 32; population background 9–10; population numbers 10; Princess Margaret Hospital 117; refugee impact 10; refugee integration 5; refugee numbers 5, 10; refugee policies 118–22; refugee saga 9–10; refugee status in 30; Refugee Status Review Board 86; refugee survival tactics 11–3; refugee-turned-marriage migrants 69–71; screening policy 8, 10, 16, 85–96, 124, 125–8, 172; settlement model 15; settlement stories 4; social support 68; Vietnamese arrivals in 6–9, 6; Vietnamese community 65–6, 66–9, 66, 171, 172–3; and Vietnamese exodus 28–32; Vietnamese fate in 31; Vietnamese population 65 Hong Kong Housing Services for Refugees (HKHSR) 87

180

Index

Hong Kong Immigration Department 86; interviews 90–3, 97n15 Hong Kong Security Bureau 90–1 Huey Fong, the 118–9 Hunt, Paul 108 Huynh-Beattie, Boitran 147–58

Lee, Jonathan H. X. 16, 133–44 Lieu Tran 109 literature 3–4, 5–6 Loke, Henry 122 loyalties, flexible 14 Ly Long Than 58

Ichioka, Yuji 143 identity: Asian American 143–4; changes 4; Chinese Vietnamese refugees 6; Chinese-Vietnamese Americans 141–4; diasporic 14; formation 142–3; Hong Kong 10; multiple 143–4; politics of 143–4; refugee youth 83–4; sense of 69, 70, 73; unbounded 14; Vietnamese 47, 65, 68–9 immigrants, illegal 9 Immigration Department, Hong Kong 72 in-betweenness 14–5, 84 Indochina War 53 Indochinese Refugee Assistance Program 24 Indonesia 5 integration 15 International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam 114n4 International Journal of Refugee Law 90–1 international marriage, see marriage migration International Social Service Hong Kong (ISSHK) 78, 82 International Social Services (ISS) 88

Macau 5, 174 MacLehose, Sir Murray 121–2 Malaysia 5, 118, 135, 144n4, 174 marriage, see refugee-turned-marriage migrants: age difference 166; boat people 15–6, 69; fake 70–1, 74n2, 166; gamble 170; husband–wife relationship 68; inter-cultural 66, 69–71; migration 73–4; refugees and 9, 11, 13 marriage migration 161–71, 173, 173–4; experiences 162–5; financing 166; matchmakers 165–6; and migration culture 168, 169–70; migration habitus 166–8, 169–71; motivation 166–7, 169–70; planning 167; refugee returnees 161–5; resource centres 165–6 Massey, Doreen 74 Mekong Delta 56 memorials 147, 151–2 memory, diasporic 151–2 migrant transnationalism 13–4 migration 4; to China 45–6; culture of 168; East-Asian experience 15; ethnic Chinese 39–40; feminization of 174; marriage 73–4, 161–71; motivation 167, 169–70; network 168; politics of 27–8, 32; refugee 10–2; strategies 168; trajectories 4 migration culture 168, 169–70 migration habitus 166, 166–8, 169–71 migratory disposition 168 Mingpao 117–8, 117 modernity 170–1 Monthly Statistical Report 112

Jakarta Post 149, 151, 153–4 Japan 5, 174 Kai Tak North refugee camp 122 Kalir, Barak 168 Kelley, Gail 31 Kennedy, Edward 24 Kennedy, John F. 24 Khmer Rouge 22 Knudsen, John 30, 107–8 Korea 5, 174 Kundsen, John 100 Lam, Andrew 108–9 Lam, Lawrence 112 language skills 26, 139, 140, 140–1 Laos 5, 20, 21, 22, 135 Law, Sophia Suk-mun 16, 116–28 Le Hong Son 101–2 Le Huynh 101

Nakamatsu, Tomoko 170 nationality 14 Nguyen, Than 149 Nguyen Ngoc Chuong 57 Nguyen Tuan Hung 150 Nguyen Van Thuyet 112 Onn, Hussein 118 Operation Eagle Pull 21 Orderly Departure Program (ODP) 7, 23, 33n5

Index 181 Oriental Daily 127 overseas Chinese, see ethnic Chinese overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) 3–4, 47, 48n17 Oxfam Hong Kong 112 passports 71–2 Pham Tien Dung 105, 107 Pham Van Xuel 123 Philippines, the 5 Phnom Penh, fall of 21 Pieke, Frank N. 168, 169–70 Pik Uk prison 82–3 Pillar Point Refugee Centre 80, 87, 122, 128 power geometry 74 Princess Margaret Hospital, Hong Kong 117 Project Concern 112 Project Ngoc (Pearl) 99–100, 110–1, 111 Pulau Galang refugee camp 16, 147–58; abuse 150; boats 154; Camp Executive Committee 150; cemetery 149–50; conditions 150; curating 154–6, 158; dark tourism experience 156–7; as dark tourism site 153–4, 157; exhibits 154–5; local management 148; memorials 147, 151–2; motivation for visiting 147–8; multiplicity of interpretations 157–8; museum 148, 156–7; museumisation 151–2; Quan Am temple 155–6; refugee interpretations 156–7; refugee numbers 158n1; refugee return experience 148–51; repatriations 159n5; tour guides 155; visitor numbers 147 pull factors 93 push factors 40–5, 96 Quang Ninh 9 receiving countries 5, 11 Refugee Act, 1980 (US) 27, 136 refugee camps 5, 8, 74n1, 122, 135–7; abuse 150; accommodation 79, 87, 123–4, 124; Catholic community 89; childhood in 16; Chinese Vietnamese/ Vietnamese relations 77–8, 80–1; closed 7, 10, 77–9, 86, 87–8, 90, 122–5, 123; closure 65, 128; conditions 4, 79, 86–90, 94–5, 100, 122, 123–4, 150–1; confinement and artworks 100–3; criminal networks 90, 94; dark tourism 147–58; drug abuse 80–1, 87, 90; education 78, 88; experience of

25–6; food 88, 137; gangs 81; library proposal 110; medical services 88–9; NGO services 88; open 79–80, 86, 87; periodicals 103–4; population numbers 21, 22; protests 125, 126; religious practices 89; riots 77–8, 89–90, 122–3, 126, 127, 127; rumours 94; sanitation 88; segregation policy 77; social networks 89–90; survival tactics 12–3; temporary 116–7; total institutions 83–4; vested interests 94; violence 9; waiting 125; welfare 78; youth experiences 76–7, 77–81, 83–4 Refugee Concern Hong Kong 110 refugee fatigue 79 refugee politics 4 Refugee Status Review Board 86, 91, 107–8 refugee trade 118, 136 refugee youth: adaptation 83; Chinese Vietnamese/Vietnamese relations 80–1; closed camp experience 77–9; discrimination 81–3, 84; and drug abuse 80–1; drug-trafficking 82–3; education 78, 82, 110; employment 82; games 78–9; gangs 81; identity 83–4; integration 81–2; life in refugee camps 16; memories 83; NGO services 89; nostalgia 77, 84; numbers 76, 80; open camp experience 79–80; plight of 109–10; refugee camp experience 76–7, 77–81, 83–4; refugee experience 76–84; repatriations 95; screening policy 97n6 refugee–immigrant conundrum 30–1 refugeeing 14, 16, 174 refugees 11, 25, see also asylum seekers; accounts of 3; adaptation 3; anger 156; assimilation 7; chickenwing metaphor 107–10; dangers faced 25; definition 11, 97n2; diversity 28–9; ethnicity 3, 4–5, 29; final trajectory 30–1; first arrivals in Hong Kong 7, 21; group dynamics 4; hidden diversity 28–9; Hong Kong saga 9; impact on Hong Kong 10; marriage and 9, 11, 13; numbers 5, 10, 85; repatriations 5–6; skills 26; status 3, 30, 33n5, 85–6, 125, 144n3; story 4; suicides 127; survival tactics 11–3; transnationalism 13–5 refugee-turned-marriage migrants 9, 15–6, 65–6, 67, 73–4, 161–71, 173, 173–4; experiences 162–5; fake marriages 70–1, 74n2, 166; fees 70; financing 166; matchmakers 165–6;

182

Index

refugee-turned-marriage migrants (Cont.) and migration culture 169, 169–70; migration habitus 166–8, 169–71; motivation 70; resource centres 165–6; returnees 161; sexual promiscuity 70; stereotypes 166; women as 69–71 refuge-taking 175 religious practices 26 remigration 161–5, 168, 174 repatriations 5–6, 11, 16, 172; boat people 5–6, 8–9, 11; and failure 95; Forced Repatriation Scheme 126–7; and marriage migration 161, 162–5; Pulau Galang refugee camp 159n5; pull factors 93; refugee youth 95; re-integration 168; resistance to 93–5; subsidies 93; voluntarily 93–5, 98n17, 126 resettlement 4, 7, 20, 22–3, 30, 85; in America 16, 133–44; experience of 25–6; final trajectory 30–1; first wave 117; migration politics 27–8; numbers 23; programs 24–5; receiving countries 11 returnees 161–5 rice trade, South Vietnam 53–6, 54, 55 Rumbaut, Ruben 113 Saigon, fall of 3, 21, 135, 138 Save the Children Fund 88 Scott, James 12–3 screening policy, Hong Kong 8, 10, 16, 85–96, 124, 125–8, 172; closed-camp policy 86; detention centres 86–90; Immigration Ordinance 86; interviews 90–3, 97n15; language and translation services 91; legal representation 90, 96, 97n12; lessons 96; pre-screening interviews 92; processing time 91; Refugee Status Review Board 86; refugee youth 97n6; repatriations 93–5 Second World War 20, 134 semi-legal departure system 44–5 Sen On, the 119 settlement: Hong Kong model 15; models 4 Shek Kong detention camp 127, 127 Shum, Terence C.T. 15–6, 65–74 Sing Tao Wan Po 126 Singapore 5, 135 Skeldon, Ronald 112 Skyluck, the 119, 119 South China Morning Post 123, 124, 126

South Vietnam: American support for 56; banking sector 57; Chinese economy 53–6; Cho Lon 52–3; credit market 54; ethnic Chinese in 52–9; ethnic Chinese industry 58; ethnic Chinese integration 58; ethnic Chinese investment 56–9; exports 56–7; foreign trade 56–7; imports 57, 58; junk shipping 54; Ky Thuong Ngan Hang bank 59n4; landownership 56; Mekong Delta 54; rice exports 53, 54–5, 55; rice imports 55–6; rice mills 54, 57, 57; rice shops 54, 55; rice trade 53–6, 54, 55 Soviet Union 11, 44; collapse of 27 stateless persons 71–2, 80 Stone, P. 158 Suehiro, Akira 57 survival tactics 11–3 Tai Ah Chau Detention Centre 77, 77–8, 86, 87, 88, 97n16 Tan Nam Hai 57 Tana, Li 15, 52–9 Tasker, Rodney 121 Thailand 5, 21, 59n3, 135, 174 Thatcher, Margaret 9 theo phong chao 169–70 tourism, dark, see dark tourism Tran Loc Hoang, Paul 100, 110 Tran Ngoc Dong 107, 109 transnationalism 13–5 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation 44 Tri Cao, Pastor 127 Trinh Quoc Lap 105, 106 Tsang, Daniel C. 16, 99–114 Tu Do (Freedom) 103–4, 105 Tuen Mun detention camp 111 UNHCR 5–6, 10, 23, 32n2, 78, 85–6, 88, 93, 95, 96, 116, 128, 147 United Nations Convention and Protocol on the Status of Refugees 23 United Nations (UN) 121, 136; Geneva conference, 1979 23, 39, 121–2, 136; and the Southeast Asian refugee issue 9 United States of America 92; acceptance of refugees 31; Asian Americans 133, 143–4; assimilation 143; Chinatown communities 135; Chinese-Vietnamese American community development 140–1; Chinese-Vietnamese American identity 141–4; Chinese-Vietnamese population 16, 133–44; civil rights

Index 183 movement 134, 143; compassion fatigue 138–9; cultural pluralism 135; diversity 133; Eisenhower Administration 24; ethnic Chinese in 113; evacuation operations 21; first impressions of 139–40; immigration 31; immigration policy 134–5; immigration waves 138, 140, 143n1; Indochinese Refugee Assistance Program 24; Little Saigons 144n8; melting pot 134–5; migration politics 27–8; national 143; Office of Refugee Resettlement 136; racism 141, 144n9; Reagan Administration 24; reception centers 138; reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Vietnam 28; Refugee Act, 1980 27, 136; refugee intake 136; and refugee status 30; resettlement experience 26; resettlement in 16, 30, 94, 133–44; resettlement programs 24–5; rice exports 55–6; San Francisco 139; settlement in 137–9; support for South Vietnam 56; Vietnam War 20–1, 27, 135; and the Vietnamese exodus 135; Vietnamese fate in 31 values, traditional 68–9, 69 Vertovec, Stevan 13–4 Viet Nam Hai Nguoi 101 Vietnam 74, 174; American reestablishment of diplomatic relations with 28; Chinese residents 42–3; citizenship 42–4, 46; currency reform 41; economic conditions 96; economic policies 40–2, 45–6; ethnic Chinese migration from 39–40; evacuation of 21; expulsion of ethnic Chinese 40; fall of 143n2; foreign nationals 43; human rights situation 92; invasion of Cambodia 22; migration to China 45–6; New Economic Zones (NEZ), 40, 41, 42; political dimensions 42–4; Public Security Bureau 40, 44–5; Quang Ninh province 45–6; registration campaign 39–40; relations with China 44; socialist transformation 40–2; taxation 41; X1 campaign 41; X2 campaign 41

Vietnam War 7, 27, 52, 56, 135; aftermath 20–3 Vietnamese Art in the Camp project 114n4 Vietnamese Australian Boat People Archive 156 Vietnamese exodus 20–32, 52, 135; aftermath of war 20–3; Asian settlement 172–3; ethnic Chinese 39–40, 44; factors behind 40–5; final trajectory 30–1; first refugee crisis 21; Hong Kong and 28–32; migration politics 27–8; migration to China 45–6, 48n12; Operation Eagle Pull 21; resettlement 22–3, 24–6, 30; resettlement experience 25–6; second refugee crisis 21–2; semi-legal departure system 44–5 Vietnamese identity 47, 65, 68–9 Vietnamese refugee era 3–16; Asian context 5–9; Hong Kong saga 9–10 Vietnamese Refugee Writers 101 Vietnamese refugees 3, 29; acceptance as 31; criminal records 80–1; group dynamics 4; integration 5; relations with Chinese Vietnamese 77–8, 80–1 Waldheim, Kurt 136 Wee, V. 52 welfare dependence 27 Whitehead Detention Center 99, 100, 101–3, 103–4, 105, 106, 126 Whitmore, J.K. 139, 144n10 Wilmoth, Peter 149 Wilson, Tom 100 women, see also marriage migration: education 69–71; employment 70–1; Hong Kong Vietnamese population 173; intercultural marriage 65–6, 69–71; self dependence 70–1; sexual promiscuity 70; silent settlement 66; stereotypes 70 Woodside, A. 58 Yuht Naahm Jai 81–3, 84 Zinoman, P. 102