UPROOT FOR A BETTER LIFE OR STILL A PAINFUL…

The sea appeared to be their last resort. Around a million and a half people climbed aboard boats, many of them little more than wrecks, and set off from their homeland of Vietnam without knowing exactly where they would end up. Driven away by war and persecution, they came to be known as “boat people”. Nobody knows just how many of them did not survive the journey. Beginning in 1978, this exodus was the second wave, hundreds of thousands having already fled the country– either by land or together with the departing US troops – after South Vietnam surrendered in 1975. So now they were coming by water, all hoping for a future in a far-away land. The conditions on board were often appalling. Images of emaciated survivors and overcrowded reception camps were seen around the world.

Vietnamese boat people (Vietnamese: Thuyền nhân Việt Nam), also known simply as boat people, refers to the refugees who fled Vietnam by boat and ship following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. This migration and humanitarian crisis was at its highest in 1978 and 1979, but continued into the early 1990s. The term is also often used generically to refer to the Vietnamese people who left their country in a mass exodus between 1975 and 1995 (see Indochina refugee crisis). This article uses the term "boat people" to apply only to those who fled Vietnam by sea.

Scanned from Viet museum

As these larger ships met resistance to landing their human cargo, many thousands of Vietnamese began to depart Vietnam in small boats, attempting to land surreptitiously on the shores of neighbouring countries. The people in these small boats faced enormous dangers at sea and many thousands of them did not survive the voyage. The countries of the region often "pushed back" the boats when they arrived near their coastline and boat people cast about at sea for weeks or months looking for a place where they could land. Despite the dangers and the resistance of the receiving countries, the number of boat people continued to grow, reaching a high of 54,000 arrivals in the month of June 1979, with a total of 350,000 in refugee camps in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At this point, the countries of Southeast Asia united in declaring that they had "reached the limit of their endurance and decided that they would not accept any new arrivals"

1975 was a watershed year for Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War finally came to an end, the United States withdrew from Southeast Asia, and communist governments were established in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Over the next 25 years (with a peak exodus from Vietnam in 1978 and '79), over three million desperate refugees fled these countries, many of them in overcrowded, small, dangerous boats. Thousands died at sea. The survivors were housed in camps in neighboring countries. This caused an international humanitarian crisis. Which countries would give these refugees permanent homes?

We belonged to the side that lost the war and my family was persecuted. My parents were put in jail for different reasons: my father for being part of the South Vietnam government and my mother for having too much money. In the last days of the war, my parents had decided to split the six children up in different trips so that some of us might survive.

In 1979 alone, 68,748 Vietnamese people arrived in Hong Kong. At first, things went relatively smoothly. As researcher Priscilla Koh notes in an article for Refuge, an academic journal on refugees, boat people were escorted by the Royal Hong Kong Marine Police to a dock where they were quarantined for a week. That was followed by another week in prison while their paperwork was being processed. Finally, they were released to one of several makeshift camps. 

As a part of Operation Passage to Freedom the aircraft carrier HMS WARRIOR was among those sent to evacuate non-Communist refugees from Haiphong, North Vietnam to Vung Tau, South Vietnam, transporting more than 3,221 people in two voyages, and being awarded a South Vietnamese Presidential Citation.