Like Kieu’s family, John Vien The Nguyen, a reverend, and his family also left Vietnam, during the "original exodus" in 1975, when the war in Vietnam was still raging. As they were leaving the country, Nguyen, then 11 years old, remembered that the propeller of the boat they were on, got snagged in steel cable, and took "hours" to untangle. "Meanwhile the shelling was all around us, and there were a lot of people killed. I remember the waves were pretty bad, and I went to the front of the ship just to feel the waves, although I didn’t know how to swim," he said. After three days in the rough seas, a barge, already carrying "thousands" of people, rescued them. That barge was then towed to a US ship, where they joined thousands of other rescued refugees.
"When we arrived, the first thing I recalled was eating one fourth of an apple, and taking a shower from a faucet," said Nguyen, whose family were sheltered at the US naval base in Subic in northern Philippines, before they were transferred to Guam and finally resettled in the US mainland. Later, as a student for Catholic priesthood in the US, Nguyen would return to the Philippines to volunteer at a Vietnamese refugee camp in island of Palawan between 1983 and 1984. And for the last three years, he has been back in the same island, serving as a priest to do a "partial repayment of the kindness" the Philippines showed to the Vietnamese refugees. Nguyen said that he was "extremely happy" to learn that the Philippine government said it would not turn away Rohingya refugees, if they made it to the Philippine shores.
PALAWANESE
It was also at the Palawan refugee camp, where Kieu Phung's family disembarked, as they awaited for their asylum papers to Canada. By then, it was only the Philippines that allowed entry of Vietnamese refugees. Kieu said that despite the number of refugees, the camp in Palawan was well maintained. While there, she studied English and learned how to use a typewriter and to sew clothes. She also volunteered at the local office of the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). "We had no problem with the local people. We can go to the local market, and there’s even a little Vietnamese bakery. I think that was something that the Vietnamese refugees who stayed here were very grateful," she said, adding that Vietnamese refugees who went through Palawan would affectionately refer to themselves as "Palawanese".
But not all who tried to escape Vietnam made it out alive. Two of Kieu’s friends, for instance, vanished without a trace. One boat turned over as it was approaching the shores of Palawan, drowning four or five members of one family, said Christensen. And there was the story of Group 52 Bolinao, Vietnamese refugees who survived at sea for weeks, but had turned into cannibalism.
ACT OF KINDNESS
In all, about half a million Vietnamese made it to the Philippine refugee camp in Palawan from 1979 to 1993, according to a website chronicling the camp’s history. After staying for a year in Palawan, Kieu and her family made it to Canada in 1989. Like her father, she pursued medicine, graduating at McGill Medical School in Montreal in 1997. In the same year she married Christensen, who would become a diplomat after working for UNHCR. Now they are back in the Philippines.
"My husband waited for me during all these years," said Kieu, who is now doing research on dementia at Manila's University of Santo Tomas, while her husband is serving as Denmark's top diplomat here. For Philippine-based human rights lawyers Anna Nguyen, VyHanh Nguyen and Hoi Trinh, whose parents were all Vietnamese refugees, the ordeal of the Rohingyas also "seems too familiar".
Anna Nguyen, an Australian lawyer of Vietnamese roots, said that countries often view refugees like the Rohingyas as a burden.
"Just because my parents were refugees it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to be a burden. I’m an example of that."
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