Street Roots • June 17-23, 2016
HUYEN, from page 4
looked after by an absent-minded
housekeeper, and the countryside, where
she would play with the pigs on her
grandfather’s farm.
“My grandfather used to tell me stories
about the communists,” she said. “He said
even to go out for a piece of bread, if you
are out at the wrong time or place, they can
shoot you through the head.”
Many Vietnamese fled the country when
North Vietnam’s communist regime proved
victorious, but in 1975, Huyen was just 1
year old, and her little brother, Vinh, was a
newborn; it would
have been too
difficult Her parents
decided to wait and,
as a result, lost most
their life’s savings and
treasures to
You can vote for Thuy Huyen between
communist raids.
now and August 31 at www.
Huyen remembers
MsAmericaPageant.com
the fear that gripped
her family after her
Eacli vote costs $1. with a minimum
grandmother’s home
purchase of five votes. The winner
Was
invaded. Soldiers
receives half the proceeds. Huyen is
threatened to kill
currently in fourth place.
everyone who was
there, and they took
everything that had
been collected over
the years.
Her father’s
To live stream the Ms. America
extended family was
pageant, visit AlertTheGlobe.com at
killed off entirely by
7:30 p.m. on Sept. 3,2016
communist soldiers.
Huyen doesn’t
remember ever
meeting any of them.
“I was against the communists,” Chanh
explained from his home in Aurora, Ill.
“They followed me, and they wanted to
imprison me. That was the reason why we
had to escape.”
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The escape
It took one full year of planning and
preparation before Huyen’s family could flee
Vietnam in 1979. If they were caught trying
to leave, they could have faced execution.
While the communist regime was trying
to keep the Vietnamese in, it was forcing
the Chinese out Like many other
Vietnamese escaping the country at thè
time, they decided their best bet was to
pretend to be Chinese.
False identification was purchased for
Huyen, her sister and brother, her parents,
and 12 aunts, uncles and cousins who would
accompany them. They all had to learn their
Chinese names and to speak some
Mandarin phrases.
Huyen was only 5, but her mother taught
her a few words, just in case she was asked
any questions. She cut both her daughters’
hair very short, like little Chinese girls.
They secured their place on a wooden
fishing boat with a payment in gold for each
passenger. Luckily her grandmother had
enough to pay their passage - and to buy
them life preservers.
Her father said the boat could hold about
80 people. Most everyone who boarded was
Vietnamese pretending to be Chinese, to
avoid detection.
Communist soldiers kept forcing more
and more people on board until there were
News
300 people stacked on top of each other,
said his wife, Lien. Most boats used for
these escapes were built for fishing along
the shoreline, and not built for the open
sea. Those who made this voyage came to
be known as the Vietnamese Boat People.
For four days and four nights, they
traveled across the sea toward Indonesia.
Huyen recalls that many passengers became
seasick and vomited on the boat. Her
younger brother suffered ongoing seizures,
and just a toddler, he kept soiling himself
with no change of clothes.
Chanh said the overloaded boat lost its
equilibrium when it hit a storm. In the
middle of the sea, it began to sink.
Huyen and her family were the only
refugees wearing life preservers.
At her mother’s insistence, everyone in
the family jumped overboard. A nearby boat
manned by Thais hoisted them up with a
large fishing net.
Hundreds of Vietnamese who refused to
jump drowned when the sinking boat
slipped beneath the waves.
It’s estimated that somewhere between
200,000 and a half-million refugees fleeing
by sea after the fall of Saigon died making
the trip.
Approximately 1 million Vietnamese Boat
People made it to refugee camps, where
disease and starvation took thousands more.
Tens of thousands of Chinese also died at
sea.
Huyen’s family thought they were safe
once onboard the Thai fishing boat. They
were fed a rice porridge called Congee.
Huyen remembers one fisherman cut up
apples for them to eat.
Throughout the 1980s, Thai fishermen-
turned-pirates robbed thousands and raped
and murdered hundreds of Vietnamese who
were fleeing the communist regime by sea.
In 1982, the New York Times reported
200 women and girls taken from Vietnamese
boats were recovered from Thai houses of
prostitution.
The Thai fishing boat carrying Huyen and
her family landed on a small, nondescript
island somewhere in Indonesia.
That’s where four of the fishermen pulled
out guns, holding the barrels to the heads of
her father, her uncles and her older male
cousin, she said.
“My parents were very smart,” Huyen
said. “They knew we were going on a boat,
so they hid a lot of jewelry in their bodies -
which is a very common thing when you
escape.”
The men looked to Huyen’s mother for
direction, and she told them they would
have to relinquish it all in exchange for their
lives.
The family was transferred to a third
boat, and after two more days and nights at
sea, they landed at Kuku, a refugee camp in
Indonesia where they would live for more
than a year. It was sparsely populated when
they arrived, but there were thousands by
the time they were transferred to Galang i
refugee camp in 1980.
“Life in Galang is just like life in Kuku,”
Huyen said.
There was no clean water. Huyen and her
older sister would fetch ocean water,
contaminated with human waste from
refugees who used the shoreline as their
toilet Their mother would boil it to kill the
bacteria.
They had only the clothes on their backs,
and there was very little food. Huyen and
Page 5
her sister befriended a set of twins who
taught them that with two bean sprouts,
they could grow more, and that’s how they
survived until near the end when
international aid organizations began to
distribute food such as crackers.
It was in Kuku that Huyen’s stomach had
ballooned, and she’d find out later it was
also filled with worms.
But Huyen maintained that she was a
fortunate child, because so many children
around her were dying from starvation and
malaria.
“We would always see parents crying all
the time, and they were carrying their kids
up to the hill to bury them,” Huyen said. “I
have those memories in my head, and even
to this day, when I look outside to the sea,
or at the coast, I have tears every time
because I think about my escape, and all the
people that died.”
Her little brother’s seizures continued,
and her sister’s asthma was a constant
concern to her parents, but miraculously,
they all survived to see the day their names
were called to board a plane to the U.S.
Huyen’s aunt had a father-in-law who had
moved to the U.S. in 1975, and he was
sponsoring the entire family.
Starting over
Huyen’s family started their new,
American life in Port Arthur, Texas.
Chanh worked three jobs and eventually
saved enough to move his family into a
$10,000 house.
They hadn’t been there long when a
burglar broke in and held a knife to Lien’s
neck. For the second time in as many years,
she brokered a deal for her safety - he could
have the family’s savings, hidden below the
television set in the living room. He made
off with about $400.
They soon moved to Chicago, where they
continued to live in poverty, moving from
place to place for the next few years, usually
following a bump in rent
And now there were more mouths to
feed. Her parents had taken in several
nieces and nephews and adopted a 9-year-
old girl whose mother was still in Vietnam,
and her mother had given birth to their
fourth child, another boy.
Adjusting to the U.S. was not easy for
Huyen. She was too nervous to speak
English, and she carried around notes her
father had written for her to communicate
with her teachers and classmates. There
weren’t any other Vietnamese children in
any of her classes.
Some of the kids mocked her, and told
her to learn English or go back to China.
“They hurt your feelings a lot,” she
remembered, “but back then I was like, Oh
whatever, I’ve been through so much, I can’t
even think about that.”
But other kids took pity on her.
Huyen remembers the day her classmates
presented her with a piggy bank they had
filled with money. They wanted her to use it
to buy a winter coat. Everything she wore
was second hand, and her only jacket was
too thin to keep out the penetrating chill of
Chicago’s unforgiving winters.
She got a lot of help from her teachers,
too, who would buy her lunch and pay her
way on field trips.
But her parents labored constantly to get
their family back on its feet
See HUYEN, page 7
"We would al
ways see par
ents crying
all the time,
and they
were carrying
their kids up
to the hill to
bury them.
I have those
memories in
my head, and
even to this
day, when I
look outside
to the sea, or
at the coast,
1 have tears
every time be
cause 1 think
about my
escape, and
all the people
that died^*
THUY HUYEN