Clinging to an Island of Hope in Philippines

Hanh Luong and her two young sons spend their days and nights huddled next to a packed suitcase with their cellphone nearby.

For more than two months they have lived in a small dank room that a refugee organization has leased in one of the poorest sections of the Philippine capital, awaiting a call they know will soon come.

Luong, who is Vietnamese, says she doesn’t mind the long hours of boredom sitting on the hard floor her family shares with seven others, who also use the same hot plate and toilet. For at the end of that coveted phone call, she says, lies fulfillment of a powerful dream: Escape, after 16 years in the Philippines, to a new life in the United States.

“I’m just happy that my family has a future,” says Luong, 48, who will join a sister in El Monte. “Whatever job is offered me, I will take it, even if it’s washing dishes or cleaning the bathroom.”

Luong and hundreds of her compatriots in the Philippines constitute the world’s last group of unsettled Vietnamese refugees. Thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, the majority of the refugees are at last proceeding to hopeful futures in the United States. The less fortunate talk of suicide and weep over being left behind. Goodbyes are bittersweet.

“I feel lonely when I send some of my friends to the airport,” Luong says, “because I don’t know when I will see them again.”

Resettlement in the U.S. became possible only after American and Philippine officials hammered out an agreement last year. Until 1989, anyone escaping Vietnam was classified a political refugee. Since, however, the international community has screened refugees to determine whether they left for economic reasons, a finding that often bars them from legal immigration.

Having left their country about the time the policy changed, the Vietnamese still in the Philippines, many of them the last of those who escaped their homeland by sea, have been living a stateless existence. Unwanted by other countries and unable to own businesses, buy homes or hold most jobs here, the majority have eked out sparse livings as illegal street vendors.

Most initially lived in a refugee camp on Palawan, a remote island about 360 miles southwest of Manila. In 1996, the camp was closed and the Philippine government, under United Nations supervision, began sending them back to Vietnam.

Some refugees responded by attempting suicide, community workers say, and others rioted at the airport. Finally, after the intervention of human rights groups and the Philippine Catholic Church, the repatriation was halted.

Under the revised resettlement program, the first of the displaced refugees, 229 of them, left for the U.S. in September. By March, an estimated 1,600 are expected to have made the trip.

Nearly 500 refugees have been barred from immigrating because they married Filipinos who cannot legally accompany them as part of this program, or because they allegedly misrepresented their cases.

Among them is Hue Thi Le, 45, who, with her husband and six children, lives in a small two-bedroom apartment a few blocks from Luong’s tiny room. Fourteen years ago, she says, the family, desperate to leave Vietnam after the last of her Catholic-missionary husband’s stints in a Communist prison, told a lie.

For years her family had cared for the child of an American soldier and a Vietnamese woman, she says. Such children are afforded special immigration status by the United States government. In their haste to escape, she says, the family falsely claimed the child as a relative. The child has since emigrated to the America, but U.S. immigration officials denied the family’s request to follow, she says, sobbing.

“I see nothing but pitch darkness,” Le says. “I’d commit suicide if it weren’t for my children and religion.”

Philippine government representatives did not respond to requests for comment on the refugee situation.

Similar stories of anticipation and dejection are heard on Palawan. After the closing of the camp in 1996, at least 400 refugees were moved 10 miles away to a site called Vietville that the Catholic Church built. Today about 40 remain, living in two-room huts made of concrete and bamboo.

Tam Do Tran, 42, who is married and has two Philippine-born children, says her family is very happy about their imminent departure.

“We’re too excited to eat,” she says. “For 16 years, every night I’ve gone to bed dreaming of going to the USA. We want a country where we can find freedom and have a better life.”

A few doors away, Van Teo Nguyen, 31, is in complete despair. He is married to a Filipina, which precludes resettlement for his family. Praying that the U.S. will reconsider, he struggles to support his wife and three children on the $71 a month he earns cleaning the village grounds.

“It’s not enough to feed the children,” he says. “They are hungry all the time. I’m just like the other refugees, but now they can go, and I must say goodbye.”

Nguyen’s case is far from the most hopeless. That distinction may belong to Phong Huynh, 48, who has spent 20 years, the last eight at Vietville, sitting naked in a locked room with dirty walls and no furniture. Huynh escaped from Vietnam in 1983, but the boat was lost at sea for several weeks. To survive, neighbors say, the refugees resorted to cannibalism, killing and eating Huynh’s brother.

“That’s why he became crazy,” says Minh Dung Tran, 35, a refugee assigned by one of Vietville’s nuns to feed and clean up after Huynh.

Huynh spends his days carrying on conversations with his dead brother and babbling to passersby through an open window about finding a good woman and going to America. “As long as I stay here I will take good care of him,” promises Tran, who has been denied emigration because he’s married to a Filipina.

Ten miles down a thinly paved road, the abandoned refugee camp is a ghost town marked by the cracked concrete foundations that once bore barracks and a leaning wooden tower at the spot where a church used to stand.

“We had to catch rainwater in buckets,” recalls Niem Thoa Quy Le, 19, who spent his childhood here with his mother.

Later, the pair moved into a tiny room nearby. Like hundreds of others, they have been denied permission to move on.

Amid the dust of the camp, one corner remains alive. It is a small white coral grotto made by refugees in the trunk of a tree. There’s a cross in the cave, and a statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by engraved ceramic tiles, fresh flowers and half a dozen lighted candles.

For the Vietnamese refugees, many of whom are Catholic, the place is a shrine.

“Every week they make offerings,” Le says. “Those who have been approved offer flowers as thanks. Those who’ve been denied come to pray that they’ll be accepted.”