Viet Refugees: People World Forgot : UCI Students Making Efforts to Help Them

Six months after he visited several Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, UC Irvine student Duc Au is still haunted by an unforgettable image.

“These people were so idle--they didn’t have any hope left,” Au said. “I can still remember a young girl who was only 8 years old. She had spent most of her life there wasting her life while waiting for a country to accept her and her family.”

Since Project Ngoc (Pearl Project) was launched 2 1/2 years ago at UCI, its members--who, like Au, are predominantly Vietnamese--have raised enough money to send eight students to Hong Kong to visit Vietnamese refugee camps. Four students traveled to Hong Kong last December for a three-week stay, and a second group left two weeks ago for a three-month visit.

Now, Project Ngoc members have published a 35-page report that takes a critical view of U.S. immigration policy and the U.S. role in Southeast Asia.

Entitled “The Forgotten People: Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong,” the report has stirred the interest of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S. Committee on Refugees, both based in Washington.

“We are anxious to read a copy,” said Patricia Fagen, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. She called the Southeast Asian refugee dilemma an “appalling situation,” adding: “There is absolutely no place for the refugees to go at the present time. We would like to see a solution.”

The report says too many Vietnamese refugees are being rejected for resettlement in the United States because they cannot prove a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their homeland. That is the test for determining whether someone qualifies as a political refugee under U.S. immigration law.

If a person does not qualify as a refugee, he may be barred from entering the United States by quotas on immigrants coming to this country for economic reasons. The Project Ngoc report argues that the test for refugee status is too restrictive.

The report cites the case of a fisherman whose license to fish was seized because his daughter fled to the United States.

When another daughter of the same fisherman was asked by immigration officials why she left Vietnam, she said, “Because there is no freedom.”

When interviewed by the students with Project Ngoc, she explained that there is no freedom to travel or work for someone in her situation--essentially blacklisted because her sister fled. She added that the government also seized half of her father’s catch at one point, leaving the family impoverished.

“Her claims of political persecution by the Vietnamese government were ignored,” the Project Ngoc report said.

The purpose of the report, students involved in the project say, is to create awareness of a problem facing thousands of Vietnamese boat people in a land 7,200 miles away from Southern California.

“We’re trying to convince the world communities that these people are not migrants but political refugees,” said Au, who recently was selected Project Ngoc’s new chairman. “Conditions are already bad, and they are getting worse.”

Camps are overcrowded; refugees suffer from poor sanitary conditions, and not enough is being done to help, he said. Entire families, Au said, are living in quarters “no larger than a room with one bed.”

The report also is critical of educational opportunities in the Hong Kong camps.

“Refugees were not given proper general education or vocational training to prepare themselves for a successful resettlement,” the report said, and they consequently are facing a “bleak economic and social future.”

A Hong Kong refugee official agreed in a phone interview that the report’s depiction of conditions in the refugee camps is “factually correct.” Part of the problem, she said, is that the detention of refugees in closed camps was never intended to be a long-term approach.

“We never meant to detain these people for more than a year when we originally introduced the policy,” said Carrie Yau, principal assistant secretary for security in the Hong Kong camps. The closed camps, she said, were intended to deter further migration by the boat people--but they just keep coming.

“Hong Kong is such a tiny and overcrowded place--we are faced with the large numbers of refugees that we have here,” Yau said. “I must admit there are bound to be overcrowded conditions.”

Since January, Thailand has had a policy of refusing entry to boat people from Vietnam. More than 2,000 Vietnamese still are fleeing each month from their native land, but Indonesia and Malaysia are considering closing overcrowded camps built to accommodate them.

And in June, Hong Kong began classifying all newly arrived boat people as illegal aliens rather than refugees, said Court Robinson, an analyst for the U.S. Committee on Refugees, a private, nonprofit organization in Washington.

Yau said that policy, under which refugees from Vietnam are detained and screened before being taken to the camps, may alleviate overcrowding in the camps because Vietnamese boat people no longer will be granted refugee status automatically.

“You see, the message is not getting across to Vietnam,” she said. “Much as we’d like to open these camps, we can’t. And there is also a practical problem: If we were to open them, we’d like to open them up away from an urban center. But if you know Hong Kong, it is totally urban.”

The problem for her government, Yau said, is trying to reach thousands of Vietnamese before they leave Vietnam.

“We have the BBC (British Broadcasting Co.) and several other avenues of media here, but the problem is Vietnam,” she said. “And how do you reach illiterate farmers and fishermen who sell their land to come to Hong Kong?”

Since South Vietnam fell to the Communists in April, 1975, more than 800,000 Vietnamese have fled by sea to neighboring jurisdictions. More than 115,000, it is estimated, have reached Hong Kong.

Today, the process of resettling refugees from the Hong Kong camps to homes in the West has slowed considerably, according to U.S. refugee officials. There now are more than 21,000 Vietnamese refugees in the Hong Kong camps--more than twice as many as last year and more than there were in 1980, when the exodus from Vietnam was at its peak, Yau said.

“One of our fears,” said Van Tran, a former Project Ngoc chairman who helped coordinate the overseas trips but did not go overseas, “is the threat of Hong Kong repatriating all the refugees in the camps. Vietnam has already said it is a crime to flee the country.”

What is the driving force behind Project Ngoc?

“It’s simple,” Tran said. “We care.

“They are our brothers and sisters, and we who have successfully gotten out of Vietnam, I think, have an obligation to help those less fortunate than us.”

Tran said the idea started as an invitation, “or rather a challenge,” from a Catholic nun, Sister Christine Truong My Hanh, who works for Caritas, a Catholic organization helping refugees in Hong Kong.

“In essence, we gained more by giving and learned the true meaning of humility in the face of pain and suffering,” Tran said.

During the three-week tour in December, the students visited five camps, including Kai Tak, the Argyle Transit Center and Tuen Mun, all in Hong Kong. They also were allowed into two closed camps, Lei Lin Chau and Chi Ma Wan, to interview refugees.

Since Au returned from Hong Kong, he has decided that more must be done to increase the public’s awareness of the refugees’ plight. Consequently, he has made a number of speaking appearances in Orange County’s Southeast Asian community, “to let them know what we saw.”

Students raised their own funds to pay for the tours and negotiated with the British government for permission to enter the closed refugee camps, Tran said.

To raise the $8,000 needed so far to cover travel costs and other expenses, the students sought donations and sold Vietnamese-style barbecued chicken at noon during the spring quarter at UC Irvine.

In fact, Au was the organization’s cook.

Each Wednesday night, Au’s ritual, as it became widely known among the Project Ngoc members at the university, would include cleaning, cutting, baking and then barbecuing 200 pounds of chicken.

“I would cook the chicken,” Au said, “and on Thursdays our group would sell it on campus at noon to other students. That and seeking donations from Vietnamese businessmen along Bolsa (Avenue in Westminster, an area known as Little Saigon) is how we are able to finance our projects.”

Au explained proudly how four more students have gone to Hong Kong to spend the summer. They will teach English in the camps and return to UC Irvine for the fall quarter.

The four are My Nga Le, 22, a senior political science student; Thuy Nguyen, 21, a senior mechanical engineering student; Thanh Nguyen, 28, a junior in information and computer science, and Lam Vu, 21, a senior in engineering and English.

Those interested in contributing money or English reading materials and dictionaries may contact Project Ngoc by writing to the project at the Student Activities Center, UC Irvine, Irvine, Calif. 92717.