I was born in a middle class family. I have two
older brothers (Kong and Sing) whom lived in HongKong since they were 18 years old and three older sisters (Nhung, Fong and Hing). I
was pretty happy living in a family like this. I always had what I wanted. When
I was about ten years old, I had set my goal to finish high school and was
happy if my parents arranged a marriage for me after that. I thought I would
never need to work in my life other than help my father in his business. I
thought my life was as simple as that.
There was a traumatic change in my life after the
30th of April 1975. I was about twelve years old at the time. As I
remember, that year was the year South Vietnam became liberated. The communist
army was everywhere. I followed the South Vietnamese
to welcome the communist. Things started to happen about two weeks later. They
froze all the cities. Nobody could get out of their houses. They wanted to
change the currency. They declared that the existing currency was no use. Those
who did not obey were killed. The money in the bank would belong to the bank yet
it had no value. My father always invested his money in the bank and all his
machinery. He also liked to keep cash as well. That night, I saw my father and
my sister Fong counting all the money we had in the house. That was the order
from the communists. It was a 15 kg-rice bag full of money. I did not know the
amount, but I my father did not sleep that night. Everybody was silent. I knew
something was serious. Next day, Fong and my father took that bag of money to
the bank. In return, we had two hundred dollars. I could see people burning
money on the street. I could hear people committing suicide by jumping off
their balcony. What could we do with these two hundred dollars my mother asked?
My mother said, “Yenha you cannot have your luxury breakfast any more. We cannot
afford to employ workers in your father’s shop.” This currency change had
happened twice within three years since 1975. My father had nearly went insane
during the second currency change.
Everything changed upon the arrival of the
communists. My school was not allowed to teach Chinese. I had to learn
Vietnamese instead. Going to school was not important to children any more. All
students had to do labour work and had political lessons. I was the most
uncooperative one within my class. Every time they said, “Your parents are not
your parents. Uncle Ho Chi Minh and the communists are your parents.”
Then I would shout out “RUBBISH!” I got thrown out of my classroom very often.
I could never recite the five rules from Uncle Ho Chi Minh. I never
joined them to go to pick up the rubbish in the field. My parents always made
up excuses for me not to go. There were some children whose hands and legs were
blown off or they were blown up just for picking up rubbish because the
American Army had set up a quite number of land mines in the field. Who knew
where they would put them. So I was always made to stand in front of the class
and have a board hang down from my neck saying, “I am not a good child of Uncle
Ho Chi Minh.” When I finished sixth grade in 1977, I had forgotten to enrol for
seventh grade. So when my sister and I turned up to school in the new term,
they said we could not go to school because we didn’t enrol. My father said
to his daughters, “You don’t need to go to school anymore. They teach nothing but
rubbish.” We were ecstatic. So my two sisters, Fong and Hing, went to the
sewing school to learn sewing. I went to a private art class to learn drawing.
When we had nothing to do, we helped our father in his shop. He was still doing
his business secretly so we could be fed. Why was it a secret? The communist
forbid anyone to have their own business.
Every month, my father needed to attend a local
meeting with the communists. During the meeting, he was required to reflect on
himself to look for his own faults. My sister Fong needed to attend a local
fortnightly meeting about how to become a watchdog for the neighbourhood and
how to make other people’s life more miserable. Hing and I had to do the same
thing. I also needed to attend a local fortnightly meeting. I always chose the
last row and fell asleep in the meeting. Sometimes I would let my imagination run
wild during these kind of meetings. Every morning around 5 am, somebody from
the neighbourhood knocked at our door and asked us to wake up and join in the
exercise team. We had to go otherwise during the meeting, we had to say how bad
we were and we should be punished. That means we needed to do some labour work
in the fields. We had to buy rotten food from the communists with most of the
time spent queuing. There was once when we bought some fishes from them, my
neighbour cooked them and fed the cat. Can you guess what happened after? The
cat died after the feast. We hardly ate any food from the communists. We were fortunate
enough to buy our food from the black market. The communists would name a
person ‘capitalist’, if he/she did not do what they asked. Once a person became
‘capitalist’, then that person would end up in strife. This meant hard labour
work or they have to go to the ‘New Educational Camp’. The ‘New Educational
Camp’ was an open ground that had no houses, no markets, no hospital, no
facilities for daily living, no toilets. It was a horrific place not suitable
to be lived by any human being.
My father and one of his friends had a joined a
steel mill. His friend left Vietnam just before the communists came. So they
were not aware my father was a partner. The communists took over that mill.
Luckily it was gone. My father also had a shop, a joint business with my uncle,
selling irrigation parts and machinery in Saigon now Ho Chi Minh City. That
shop was under my uncle’s name. He only maintained his own irrigation parts and
machinery services shop at Cho Lon. Luckily my father business was only a
service shop otherwise our family would have needed to go to the “New
Educational Camp”. It was dependent on what kind of business people did at the time.
Some people were sent to the worst camp and others to a so-called better camp
where they did not suffer as much. My uncle’s whole family had been sent to the
“New Educational Camp”. The communists came to their house at about 10 pm and
packed them all up at the back of an army truck. They hid in the jungle and
escaped from Vietnam to become boat people. My aunty died during the escape.
Most business people were sent to the camp. The communists also did not send a
member of the party to live with us. They had assigned one communist to stay in
my neighbour’s house. Whenever people left or entered the house, they checked
their shopping bags and searched their body for gold and other valuables. My
mother was so scared. We were all very nervous and sensitive about the things
that happened around us. The communists had come to our house to search
through several times. First time they came, my father hid a box of
gold inside a machine. They did a report on what we have inside my father’s workshop. They
told my father all his machinery and things in this workshop now belonged to
the communist party. They marked and labelled whatever they want to take. Once
they left my parents breathed out a sigh of relief. If they took all the
machines away at that instance then our box of gold would have been gone forever.
That night, my father took out that box of gold and hid it inside one of our
pillars. He did a very good job to hide that box of gold. This box of gold was
my mother’s saving. My mother often said it was like collecting dews on a
lotus leave. It took her many, many years to collect the box of gold.
Things had changed again in June 1978. My sister
Fong received a notice to go the countryside to do tunnel digging for three
months. My mother tried to buy someone to replace her, but failed. My other
sister Hing also received a notice to go for army training at the end of 1978.
There was not any indication for how long she was required to go for. We had
heard lots bad news about tunnel digging and army training. There were lots of
people who went and never returned.
My mother said to my father, “That’s it! I’ve had
enough. We need to get out from here.” At that time, one of my father’s friends
had a fishing boat. They had planned to get out. My father was willing to be
the mechanic on the boat and supply all the necessary machineries and parts
that they needed to make the boat run efficiently and safely. We were required
to pay the communists 3290.625 grams of gold. There were nine people in my
family. Each person needed to pay 13 pieces of gold. Each is equivalent to
28.125 grams. My family included my parents, three sisters, elder brother in
law, nephew, niece and myself. My mother’s gold saved us all. But we were still
253.125 grams of gold short. Luckily two of our cousins were willing to lend us
these 253.125 grams of gold. Our cousin Tan told my parents that they didn’t
need to pay back his seven pieces of gold after we arrived in Australia. Fong
paid the 2 pieces gold back to our other cousin FengYu.
My father chose the open escape. This meant we paid
the communists so we could get out of the country instead of sneaking out.
After several months of planning and preparation, at last we could get on the
boat and say farewell to Vietnam. My father chose an iron fishing boat due to
its safety and strong structure. However, when the boat owner registered the
boat for an open escape, the communist party wanted to possess it. At the end
they replaced the iron boat with a wooden fishing boat.
In August of 1977, we had been told it was time to
leave. We were so happy and confused because we did not know where we were
going at that time. We knew that we were risking our lives for freedom.
On the day before our escape, I attended a local meeting
about being a watchdog. My best childhood friend Han Xiang had been assigned to
watch our house. On the day of our escape I wanted to tell Han Xiang I would
never ever see him again for the rest of our life. I swallowed back all the
words I wanted to tell him. I did not even say goodbye to him. We sneaked out
from our house one by one quietly to my cousin’s house. We were not allowed to
let anybody know that we were escaping. We were only allowed to bring two pairs
of clothes. There was nothing more than that. My cousin drove us to Bien Hoa.
It is a country town in South Vietnam. There was a bus waiting for us. We drove
along an unsealed road to get to a small fishing boat waiting for us. The
communists called out our names and matched our photos. We got onto the boat. I
was very surprised to see how tiny the boat was. This fishing boat was 24
metres long and 4.2 metres wide. The boat number plate was VT333. Originally we
had over 400 people on this boat. We could not
even move or stretch our legs. The cabin was stuffy. I had trouble breathing.
The boat went smoothly for about 3 hours. When it came to the International
Water, the sea was so rough. We could hear our boat begin to wreck. We could
hear the cracking sounds. People started to throw up. I could hear a group of
people pray to Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. My mother was praying hard. It was
dark, smelly and scary. Somebody even pissed on the person who sat next to me.
She yelled out loud. I thought we were going to die. The boat was like a mixer
machine, it mixed all the people and goods together. But luckily the Captain
decided to return back to Vietnam. We went back to Bien Hoa in the middle of
that night. We stayed in a vacant farmhouse for more than a month just waiting
for our boat to be fixed. It split in several places. A few boys on top of the
cabin saw a white lady leading our boat towards the shore. Bodhisattva
Avalokitesvara must have answered our prayer. We had no money to spend in the
farmhouse. My father gave all his cash to the communists before we departed
because they asked all people on board for Vietnamese currency. They said we
would not need our Vietnamese currency overseas. One of my father’s friends
actually supplied us money at that time. In the farmhouse, there was no bed, no
toilet, no bathroom and no kitchen. But we survived. There was an open toilet
in the middle of a fish pond. It was fascinating watching the fishes jumping up
to catch the fresh poo. This took me a while to get used to it. Furthermore we
bathed in the same pond as the fish. It was definitely unhygienic!
In October 1978, we started our trip again. This
time the communist used the role call system and only 328 people were able to
board. We made it to one of the islands in Malaysia – Besa Island. This trip
took us three days and three nights on the sea. On the second day my mother
asked me to look for our father because we hadn’t seen him for more than a day.
So I went to the machinery room and found my father lying there. I asked him
whether he was still ok. He couldn’t answer me but the person next to him said
he wouldn’t die that easily. On the second night, we saw a boat and our captain
quickly turned off all the lights because he suspected it was a pirate boat.
All of us sat in a small fishing boat without food
and water for three days and three nights. Once we saw some land, we were so
happy but did not know where we were. One of the guys on our boat seemed very
experienced. He used an axe to break the boat to make it sink. We couldn’t
understand why he did that at that time. We all needed to jump off the boat and
swim to the shore. I was looking for my father at that time. He was lying down
half dead in the machinery room. I told him that we arrived in an unknown
island and we needed to swim to the shore. Can you guess what happened? All the
girls in my family did not know how to swim at the time. But somehow all of us
made it to the shore. The waves actually pushed us to the shore. There were two
Malaysian Police Officers were talking to our interpreter. They slapped him on
his face. They told us to get back onto our boat and leave the island
immediately. Now I understand why the wise man had made our boat sunk. I think
at that time our interpreter explained to them that we could not get back onto
our boat because it was sinking. The two officers could not do anything except
let us stay. But another boat came in about a second after us and was towed
away by the Malaysian water police. The next day we saw their boat wrecked on
the shore. We knew that they could not make it. We all cried. We were allowed
to stay in a big empty house up in the mountains for about couple of days. Then
they transferred us to an island called ‘Pulau Bidong’. The sound ‘Bi Dong’ in
Chinese means suffering.
Bidong Island was a huge undeveloped island. It
took three hours by boat to get there. The sea was very rough. My parents were
ill and seasick. Again we needed to swim to shore and once more we swallowed
many litres of salt water.
When we arrived at Bidong Island, it was almost
evening. We met one of our neighbours there. He gave us a bowl of cooked rice.
Nobody could imagine the beautiful fragrance and taste of rice. All of us had a
spoonful of it. My brother-in-law met a friend there as well. He actually built
huts to sell to the new arrivals. He said we did not need to pay to stay in his
hut for couple of days. But when we were in his hut, he said to my parents that
we needed to pay him 84.375 grams of gold. My mother had to sell her wedding
ring, my ear-rings, our beautiful Seiko watches and my grandmother’s earrings.
We had gathered all our gold jewellery to get these 84.375 grams of gold to pay
him. Otherwise we had nowhere to stay and besides, my parents were very ill at
that time. There were 16 people lived in a 3m x 4m hut. My family consist of
nine people. My father’s friend’s three children (Minh, Bien and Fan) and one
family of four, whom I never met in my life claimed to be our relative in order
to stay with us. There was no bed or anything in the hut. It was so crowded. We
could not even lie down side by side. I felt like a sardine in a can. Our
neighbour saw our situation and allowed my father to stay in his hut while he
was on the island. On the next day of our arrival, Fong, Hing, Minh, Bien and I
borrowed a saw and an axe. Five of us went up to the mountain to chop down some
trees to make a bunk bed for my mother and my eldest sister’s family. We went
to the shipwreck to get some nails and some other useful things. There were
plenty of shipwrecks lying close to the shore. We decided to build another hut
next to the one we had. We had no footwear, nor any proper tools to chop the trees.
We only had a blunt axe and a saw, which we borrowed from someone. We needed to
climb high up in the mountain to get some straight trees because people who
came before us had got all the good timber close to the foot of the mountains.
The way up was very slippery and sloppy. We fell and rolled down many times
while we carried heavy timber. We were very lucky that we did not injure
anybody or ourselves. We built a hut’s frame using all the timber from the
mountains. Hing went up to the mountain and found some plants that had very
long and wide leaves. So she weaved them to make walls for the hut. Everything
was done by hand with no access to any technology. I was amazed that we were
surviving. We had to get firewood from the mountain. We had to fetch drinking
water down from the jetty that was more than a 30 minute walk from our huts. We
could not use the water from the island because it caused diseases. We always
had to beg for water to wash our clothes because we did not have our own well.
I remembered we had a coca cola can of water to wash our body. I was not sure
which part of my body that I should give a wash. We did not have enough people
to dig our own well. We had been given heaps of green beans for food from the
Malaysia government. I think the Americans and other countries funded it. So we
grew them into bean sprouts. We were given heaps of dried salt fishes that had
worms. We ate them and they were so delicious. Do you believe it? There was not
enough food for everybody. We were given chicken and beef three or four times
within the five months we stayed. I remember there was once my sister Fong went
for a walk with her friend on the shore. Her friend kicked something and found
it was an uncooked chicken leg. He was so delighted and happy as if had found
gold. He waved his chicken leg and jumped up and down. We always laughed at him
about this. He was so proud that he had found a chicken leg on the shore.
We met one of our cousins on the island. I had more
than twenty cousins. She told us about her trip. She had been robbed and
stripped three times by the Thai pirates. One of the women on the boat got her
finger chopped off by a pirate because she could not get her ring off from her
finger. There was a baby who died of thirst during the escape. They even
considered cooking up that baby to eat its flesh because they were on the boat
for five days without food and water. But the baby’s mother refused. They
needed to drink their own urine. They arrived on an unknown island and stayed
there for a week. There was no fresh water or food other than coconuts. They
ate coconuts every day and got heavy diarrhoea. After a week on that island,
they had been discovered by the Malaysian Police and put them on the ‘Bidong’
island. This was a very sad story.
My mother had bad gastro for a while on the island.
She could not get used to the water there. Once we thought we were going to
lose her but Buddha did not let that happen. I thank Buddha many, many times
for that. My father was very sick but he recovered much quicker than my mother.
Once he recovered from sickness, he started to build up his business on the
island. One afternoon he walked along the shore with me. He saw there were lots
soft drink cans lying on the shore. He asked me to pick them up for him. The
more I got the better things he could do with them. He opened up all the empty
cans and joined them together into a big pieces of can metal. He used them to
make trays, water barrows, suitcases and all sorts of kitchenware. The water
barrows that he made wouldn’t leak. He did not have a welding machine at that
time. He used the big fuel tank’s lid to make woks. He used “Coco Cola” glass
bottles to make lamps. It was amazing what my father could do with his own hands.
I had learnt how to join small pieces of metal into a big piece of metal, but I
could not join them together as well as my father could. My water barrow
leaked. He asked me to sell all his products and gave me some commission. So I
did. His business grew rapidly. We received heaps of orders from people. We
started to have money to buy better food. We even had enough to buy junk food.
Before that, I could only look at people eating and trying to swallow my hunger
quietly. I was in the stage of puberty at that time. My stomach was hungry all
the time. There were a lot of people who came to say hello to my father wanting
to have a free cigarette from him. Our lives were getting better and better. My
mother eventually recovered from her sickness. We were all one big happy family
again.
I learnt how to swim during the time we stayed on
the island. So if I needed to jump down from a boat, I did not need to drink
salt water anymore. I also learnt to see people in different ways. Like how I
see my father now, he is truly a hero to me. He supports his family
unconditionally and the way he deals with people. He has a strong determined
mind and is never afraid of taking risks.
I often climbed up a small hill, sat there alone
for hours and thought about my unknown future, about my life, about my parents,
about many, many people who gave up their lives in this escape, about life and
death. I couldn’t hold back my tears for the people who had lost their lives. I
gazed at the sea-horizon and was lost in thoughts.
Five months later, our names were called from the
Australian Embassy. We were so happy that Australia was going to interview us.
On that day we went to the interview, Fong and my mother borrowed their
friend’s thongs. Hing always had her own because she could never walk barefoot.
My father wore his handmade wooden thong. I went bare feet. We got accepted
straightway during the interview. The Australian Embassy said that Australia
needed lots of young girls and they laughed. They asked my father what were our
preferences. My father had put down our three preferences as Australia only. My
eldest sister did not get called because she was in a separate family. She was
very upset about that. Fong came back from the interview and asked her friend
why his things were so heavy. The next day we saw a hole underneath his thongs.
We all laughed and thought he must of hidden his gold in that pair of thongs.
Two weeks after the interview, they called our
names again to go to Australia. We were really delighted but did not know what
Australia was like. We also knew that my eldest sister’s family would join us
in Australia because her family also got accepted from the Australian Embassy. We
all thanked Buddha for that! So we packed our rag clothes and got onto the boat
happily on the set day. Strangely on that day our backyard Cambodian neighbour
who we had no contact with, went to the jetty and bid us farewell. The handsome
Cambodian guy came to shake our hands and say goodbye. We were stunned and
amazed. We thought maybe he had been our secret admirer. This time we did not
need to swim to the boat. We actually had a jetty to walk to the boat. I was
thankful of people who had built that jetty. We took three hours from the
island to the mainland and sat on the bus for the whole night before we arrived
at Kuala Lumpur. We stayed in a refugee camp for about three weeks. We were not
allowed to get out of the camp, but my sister Fong and my father managed to
follow people to sneak out to get us some decent clothes.
We arrived at Sydney on the 11th of May
1979. I was fifteen years old. That day was so cold. I think it was less than
fifteen degrees. We had our summer clothes on. Everything was so strange to me.
All the trees were look so strange. They were short, dried and bendy-looking
trees. Their leaves were not green as I got used to see the trees back home.
People looked strange and the building looked strange. The houses were so far
apart and there were not many people on the streets. Everywhere seemed so dry
that I could not find many rivers or creeks around. We stayed in a hostel for
about two weeks. I cannot remember what it was called. My father’s friend from
Adelaide came to fetch us. He and his wife drove us to Adelaide. Fong was so
disappointed about my father’s decision.
Straight away, Hing and I were placed in a special
English School for about five months. We had been placed in a school called
Thorndon High School after the special schooling. I was too old to get into
year eight class. In Australia, it is according to the student’s age to be put
into a particular class. Again, I had found this strange. So I was enrolled
into a year ten class at Thorndon High. Hing was in a year eleven class. I
actually jumped three years of schooling. I started school at eight years old
doing year one. I stopped school when I completed year six. We really struggled
at school. I had problems with catching up as I had missed three years of
schoolwork along with problems with English. My study habit consisted of
getting home from school and starting my homework by looking up the dictionary
to translate all the vocabularies to Chinese. I would get to bed at 9pm or 9:30pm
and wake up at about 3:30am and continue to do my homework. Hing’ study habit
was totally different from mine. After school, she went to bed straightaway.
She woke up for dinner. After dinner she worked through to about 3:30 am in the
morning and went to bed after that. We all made it through to university but
she quitted after matriculation even though she could get to university. I made
it through, and got myself an ordinary degree and an honours degree in the
Mathematical Science Faculty in 1987 and a master degree in multimedia in 2002.
It was hard but I made it.
My parents went to a special English school for
about two years. They could get themselves around the community without any
problems. Fong went to a special English school for about five months and got a
job after that. She was a quick learner. She used to own a restaurant and a
takeaway but now she prefers to work for others.
We never regret coming to Australia. My father is
the only exception as he always says he could still be in business if he was in
Vietnam. My mother says, “The most important thing is we all together and
happy.” My two brothers are also here in Adelaide with us.
