Vietnam Boat People

Many Vietnamese fled their country after the Vietnam War when Saigon fell and the Communist Party took over. Many of them began to leave their homes in 1975 and continued to escape in the late 1970s and the 1980s. They left their home, their country, because of the violence in Vietnam and their fear of the Communist Party. During the war, there were a lot of bombs and gunfire, causing many deaths. Then when the communist troops came down to the south, “they shelled the city, causing fires in certain neighborhoods, destroying houses and creating a deep uproar among the already scared Saigonese” (Vo 65). People felt trapped under the new regime. In the book, Voices of Vietnamese Boat People, many immigrants share their family’s stories. Ai-Van Do writes about how his father was sent to a camp in the mountains to be reeducated and had to do hard labor. His

family had to continue to work hard, especially because they had to prove to everyone around them and the Communist authorities that they had “awakened” and changed their mindset. Do wrote that his “parents wanted to leave this prison of a country as soon as possible” (Do 14). [maybe give another example]
And so, because of the conditions under the communist regime, many Vietnamese became refugees when they left their country.

Leaving the country itself was difficult. Do’s family planned the escape for months. Many people were caught by the police when they tried to escape. While some people escaped through by foot and planes, the majority of the refugees escaped on a boat, and that is why they are named the “Vietnamese Boat People.” Because escaping was difficult and sometimes random, many families were separated. In the autobiography documentary Oh, Saigon Doan Hoang looks back at her family’s escape. Her secret half-sister, Van Tran, was left behind because of a split second decision on her parent’s part. Journalist Thuy Vu talks about how her family had to split up if they wanted to leave. Her mother and brother went on the airplane, and Vu, with her other siblings, went on the cargo ship. Both Hoang and Vu had their families reunited, but that was not the case for others. Because the trip was challenging and very secretive, many families had to leave behind their other family members, and they never

reunited.
The journey after they escaped was not easy either. The refugees faced many hardships on the boats in the ocean. The boats were often overcrowded and rickety, and they faced many storms. The refugees’ “clothes were tattered and wet, their mouths burning of thirst, their lips cracking under the sun, and their stomachs crying for food” (Vo 115). [expand on this more]. The boat people struggled on their journey were not only because of natural reasons like the ocean storms, but also because of external factors like pirates taking advantage of them. There were many pirates at the time attacking the refugees’ boats. Fishermen and pirates have been prevalent in that area for hundreds of years. In the beginning, a few of the fishermen did help the boat people and led them to safety. But then these few found it more convenient and easy to make money from these refugees. And so they

[expand a lot on this]. Reportedly, up to 50 percent of the people who traveled via boat perished in the journey (Gold 59).
When the Vietnamese who survived the long voyage in the boat and reached land, they went to refugee camps. Many of them “spent several months in the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, or Hong Kong” (Gold 59).