Long Nguyen Vu Dedicates Life to Helping Fellow ‘Boat People’ : Beaten but Unbowed, Refugee Fought Back and Won

It was just after Long Nguyen Vu’s third beating at the hands of his Hong Kong guards, on the day he turned 18, that the young Vietnamese refugee contemplated suicide.

“I was crying so hard, I couldn’t stop,” Vu recalled in perfect English during a recent interview with The Times. “It was not the pain. It was the shame.

“I had never been beaten in Vietnam, even under this terrible government. Here, in one of these Western countries full of liberty and freedom of expression, this happens.

“If these countries are all like this, I thought, well, there was no point in my daring escape from my homeland in which I was willing to lay down my life.”

But Vu, now 22, did not slash his wrists on that lonely day in a Hong Kong prison cell in 1985. He decided to fight the system. And now, after a four-year refugee nightmare--an ordeal of beatings, false charges, despair and confinement in prisons and caged camps that refugee officials privately say is an all-too-common reality of a refugee’s life in many areas of Southeast Asia--Vu has dedicated his life to helping the tens of thousands of Vietnamese still languishing in Hong Kong’s camps.

Vu is one of the lucky ones. Through sheer will, cunning and inner strength, he survived his miasmic four years and charted a course through the labyrinth of resettlement bureaucracy to finally become a French citizen last year.

But he did not remain in France long. After converting to Christianity from his native Buddhism, he returned to Hong Kong on Christmas Eve, 1987, to help the less fortunate ones--the Vietnamese refugees who have come out in the recent wave of “boat people” and who are now stuck in the same limbo and confinement that marked his life.

Inspiration to Others

Vu’s own story serves as inspiration to the hundreds of refugees he has visited in the closed camps of Hong Kong. By rights, he never should have been eligible for resettlement in the West.

Like most of the refugees who have bobbed into Hong Kong’s harbor in their ramshackle boats this year, Vu is from northern Vietnam. The governments of the United States, Canada and Australia--the principal Vietnamese resettlement destinations--do not, as a rule, accept refugees from the north, preferring those who sided with the U.S.-backed government in South Vietnam before Saigon fell in 1975.

But unlike most of his fellow northerners, Vu was not merely an economic migrant fleeing Vietnam’s now-devastated economy. His family had collaborated with the French colonial government before 1954, when the Communists gained control of North Vietnam. And Vu’s family paid dearly for it for decades.

“When I turned 16, I was refused admission into the university,” Vu said. “The police board in my district said, ‘No way.’ They said, ‘Your parents are parasites of the system who suck the people’s blood. If we train you and re-educate you, you too will become a reactionary.’

“I thought, if I stay here one more year, they will force me to enlist in the army, and for sure they will send me to the Cambodian border.

“I had my dreams. I just wanted to act on them.”

Fled in 1983

It was those dreams that pushed Vu into a rickety 6-by-20-foot boat with 21 other refugees on Aug. 23, 1983. And it was those same dreams that kept him alive through the next four years of hell.

After being robbed by Chinese pirates of everything that his parents had given him for the journey, Vu landed in Hong Kong 40 days later. Within months, he received his first severe beating. He said he had been placed in a quarantine cell at Hong Kong’s Hei Ling Chau closed camp, and a guard falsely accused him of smoking in the toilet.

“I said, ‘No, I haven’t had a cigarette in many days,’ ” Vu recalled. “Then they told me to get down on my knees. Again, I said, ‘No, I did nothing wrong. It’s preposterous. It’s demeaning.’ Then, one guard slapped me. Another punched me in the stomach. When I fell, they kept punching me and kicking me.”

Several months later, after assimilating into the camp, Vu tried to intervene on behalf of another refugee who was being reprimanded by a camp guard. Vu spoke no Chinese, and the guard misunderstood. A tussle ensued and Vu was falsely charged with hitting the guard. He was jailed for more than five months, during which, he said, he was again severely beaten. He had two court hearings, which he did not understand, and was finally released back to the refugee camp with a 14-day jail sentence on his record.

Just days after his initial arrest, Vu was to have had his final interview with U.S. immigration authorities, who were prepared to accept him under a program that permits resettlement of unaccompanied minors. By the time he was released, Vu had turned 18 and was no longer eligible.

The Canadian government interviewed him, but it rejected him on the basis of his jail sentence.

2 Years of Study

Determined to escape legally, Vu dedicated the next two years to studying. He learned fluent English and French, and, through a sheer fluke, was accepted in August, 1987, by the French government when several refugees who had been rescued by a French mercy ship decided to seek American asylum instead. Vu, by then a French-speaker who was highly recommended by international refugee workers who confirmed his story, helped fill the open quota.

Recalling his years of beatings and dehumanization, Vu said: “The horrible thing is, I am sure that there are people here now who are suffering more terribly than I did.

“But I no longer want to take revenge against the people who are doing this to my people. I just want to lead a life trying to help all these refugees here.

“What the world does not understand is these people are victims. I am still Vietnamese. But I have some power now. I have to take responsibility for the people of my country. Because now, it is obvious no one else is going to do it.”

More important, Vu added, his life bears a message for the Western nations as well, the resettlement countries that traditionally reject refugees like him.

“My message is to the nations and the people who call us economic refugees, to the people who say all of these refugees are parasites and maggots,” he said. “These are people who forgot how much blood and tears have been laid down by refugees like ourselves to build a country like America up to what it is today. They need to remember this sacrifice that their forefathers made and see that we are no different than them.”