‘Boat People’ in Asia Get Show of Support at Park : Fund-raiser: Organizers say money raised will help Vietnamese get asylum.

About 1,000 people walked the perimeter of Mile Square Park to show their support and raise money for Vietnamese “boat people” seeking asylum while being held in refugee camps in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.

“I believe that on this issue public opinion works for change,” said Lan Nguyen, a Long Beach attorney who organized the walk. He is a member of a group that provides legal assistance to detained boat people. “The people outside (the detention camps) must bring this to the attention of the public.”

Organizers said the walk was one of the Vietnamese community’s largest demonstrations of support for the thousands of boat people in the camps. Demonstrators wore T-shirts with an image of a letter of rejection for asylum while walking the 4-mile course around the park.

Each participant paid a registration fee. The proceeds from the walk, estimated by organizers to be in the thousands of dollars, will go to the Legal Assistance for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers, which hopes to present legal cases to the United Nations in an effort to win asylum for those refugees.

The money will help finance four-person legal teams that will visit the camps to interview and document refugees being held there.

Many of the marchers had been boat people as children or their parents were boat people who fled after Saigon fell to the Communist regime in 1975. Forced repatriation of boat people is an important issue for them.

“We know what it is like back there (in Vietnam) and many of us were boat people at one time or another,” Nguyen said. He said that many families were divided or relatives died while leaving on the boats.

Nguyen said he came to this country in 1979 after drifting at sea for seven days in a boat that ultimately landed in Malaysia. He and some of his family spent almost a year at a camp there before coming to the United States.

The effort to help the refugees took on additional urgency last month when the Hong Kong government forced 59 Vietnamese from the camps onto a plane destined for Vietnam.

“That touched off this whole event,” Nguyen said. He said there is fear that if protests are not heard, the Hong Kong government will quietly repatriate those who remain, as will other countries holding refugees.

Nguyen said there are about 60,000 people being held in cramped quarters of the detention camps in Hong Kong alone. He estimated the total number of refugees in the Southeast Asian region is close to 200,000.

“Today we are working for them,” said Santa Ana resident Nam Phan, a student at Cal State Long Beach. “Before I was a boat person just like them. . . . They want to come here to have freedom.”

Phan said he left behind his mother, brother and sister when he fled Vietnam in 1975.