Making Friends Easy for Westerners in Vietnam Park Where All Have Stories to Tell

A walk around the shady park in front of the former South Vietnamese presidential palace in Ho Chi Minh City provides a dozen new friends in as many minutes.

“Hello, my name is Thanh, where are you from? Do you speak English? Can I talk to you?” says a 40-year-old man in slacks, sandals, a sports shirt and a faded baseball cap that says “L.A. Dodgers.”

Thanh and dozens like him gather every morning in the park alongside Han Thuyen Street to pick up scraps of information about the chances of emigrating to the United States and the progress of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ Orderly Departure Program.

Any Western visitor, be it an aid worker, journalist or U.S. Vietnam veteran, is immediately surrounded by a group, all with stories to tell.

Thanh’s story, told with a rehearsed precision, has a depressingly familiar ring to it for anyone who has spent time in Vietnam.

Fluent in English, he talks with a shy charm, eager to be understood without being pushy.

“I was a captain in the South Vietnamese Army. I worked a lot with the U.S. Marines in Da Nang. I have applied to go to the United States under the Orderly Departure Program because there is nothing for me here, no work.

“I spent five years in a re-education camp. Now I come here every morning, like many other of my former colleagues, to see what we can find out.”

Approximately 200,000 people left Vietnam under the Orderly Departure Program from its inception in 1979 through 1988.

According to a senior Vietnamese immigration official, about 44,000 people are expected to leave under the program this year, double the 1988 number.

But a backlog remains of 70,000 people who have been given clearance to emigrate to all countries, but who are waiting for flights.

The Vietnamese official said he estimates that there were 50,000 to 60,000 former army officers and officials of the former South Vietnamese regime who were eligible to go to the United States under a special section of the ODP.

“So far the departure rate for that program is running at about 8,500 a year, but we would like 40,000 to go. We have suggested that the United States send ships to accommodate them, but they have rejected the idea,” the official said.

So for Thanh and his colleagues, the wait goes on, with little information trickling through other than brief letters of acknowledgement from U.S. officials in Thailand or requests for further papers and information.

These letters, many of them several years old, are treasured and tendered to the visitor as if they were a magic pass to another world.

Anh, a wizened little man in his 60s who said he had been an interpreter for the U.S. Navy in the Mekong Delta, proudly displayed a letter dated April last year that showed his application had been acknowledged by the Orderly Departure Program section of the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.

“It is such a long time, and it goes so slowly,” he said.

The presence of these men in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon until North Vietnamese troops defeated the South Vietnamese regime in 1975, seems like an anachronism.

Most of the estimated 6 million people in the sprawling, lively city seemed determined to look to the future, encouraged by the Vietnamese government’s new open-door policy toward non-socialist countries, particularly Western aid donor nations.

Thi Binh, a 35-year-old schoolteacher who admitted that in the past she had considered emigration, said she is staying.

“You always have to fight, to struggle hard and keep ahead,” she said.