My journey from Vietnam to Australia

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 30^th 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 11^th 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.