Compassion Fatigue: Hong Kong and the Boat People
Kirp, David L.
David L. Kirp COMPASSION FATIGUE: HONG KONG AND THE BOAT PEOPLE The world is turning a blind eye to Vietnamese refugees now being held as criminals. June 15, 1988, is circled in red, as a day of...
...Life in one such camp, Chi Ma Wan, in the weeks before the fateful date is described in the first part of this article...
...the South China Sea were like, how he passes his days and where he hopes to settle, intrusive interviewer's questions, he answers dutifully but listlessly, the tone of his voice never rising or falling...
...The cubicles are stacked like boxes, three high, thirty or forty to a row, two or three rows in a building...
...I don't believe you," he shouted, and ran away...
...Early in the morning, long lines of inmates wait patiently to gain access to them...
...The refugees sarcastically refer to it as "Chi Ma Wan Beach Hotel...
...It is as if these refugees, locked away for months and years in Chi Ma Wan, were being punished again for the crime of being inconvenient...
...June 15, 1988, is circled in red, as a day of outrage on the calendars of more than 26,000 Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong...
...In my interviews and in the diaries, a single theme is tirelessly reiterated: unequivocal hatred of the Communist regime in Vietnam...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 19...
...But Hong Kong could never be as unpleasant as Vietnam, the refugees say, for "Vietnam is just one big prison...
...A poll showed 65 percent of Hong Kong's residents favored the drastic expedient of pushing the refugees' boats out to sea...
...The building smelled of human waste because the few working toilets regularly overflowed...
...New arrivals sit quietly at the reception center, the quonset hut closest to the camp's guarded front gate...
...Residents were confined to the building day and night...
...Until that date, anyone who braved the typhoons of the South China Sea had at least a chance at a new life—a chance at what the Vietnamese prayerfully imagine as freedom—in the West...
...The toilets, foul-smelling portables, stand outside...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 17 help their cause...
...It also specified the medical consequences of the treatment the refugees were suffering: disease at epidemic proportions among the young, many of whom were malnourished, lethargic, and showing signs of degenerative illness...
...JUNE 1988: "CHI MA WAN BEACH HOTEL" It is an hour-and-a-half ride on a wheezing Hong Kong Corrections Department ferry from Queens Terminal to Chi Ma Wan Detention Center, one of the segregated camps where more than 16,000 Vietnamese refugees are warehoused...
...I hailed him, a pitiful Vietnamese boy, and all at once I awoke...
...Although she has six family members living in the United States, her application was turned down last fall...
...Approximately 100 Vietnamese will shortly be returning to Vietnam, the first volunteers to be repatriated...
...This pattern, an influx of refugees and measures taken to curb that influx, was familiar enough...
...The refugees sometimes bring the interviewers pieces of bone or dog tags they say come from MIAs, in the misplaced hope that these offerings will They would be imprisoned, cut off from international organizations, and denied any possibility of resettlement in the West, held until Vietnam could be persuaded to take them back...
...His latest book, Learning By Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America's Communities, will be published next month by Rutgers University Press...
...D ham Xuoi—Inmate Number One 1 of Hong Kong's Chi Ma Wan Detention Center as he is listed in the records, the first of the boat people to be confined here, in July of 1982—sits motionless during our half-hour talk...
...The nearly 2,500 refugees at this camp fled from Vietnam, some of them very recently, others as long ago as 1982...
...Festering rubbish and pools of fetid standing water were cleaned up only when Princess Anne, patron of the Save the Children Fund, appeared in September to express her interest in what the youngsters were acquiring by way of an education...
...Those who had come earlier and been held at places like Chi Ma Wan still held onto the tiniest sliver of hope...
...The week before my visit, a man stabbed his wife when he learned she was having an affair...
...The bung in the bottle": that is how Nigel French, a career civil servant in Hong Kong and the refugee coordinator in the Security Branch, described his adopted home when I met with him last June...
...There are 228 newcomers here on the day I arrive, ranging in age from two months to seventy-five years...
...It feels like prison...
...I am a refugee and I lost everything from my childhood, my country, my relatives, and even my freedom...
...In the era of perestroika—doi moi, as the Vietnamese say—such blunt anti-Communism sounds as dated as the reveries of Rip Van Winkle to the sensitive ears of the diplomats...
...To the refugees, those officials must seem as awesome, as mysterious and perverse, as the gods...
...At Chi Ma Wan, they are packed in quonset huts that 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 lack heat and ventilation...
...Between the beach and the dense complex of tin buildings and concrete pavement stand two metal fences, each twelve feet high...
...Instead, they are marooned in Hong Kong for the indefinite future...
...Hong Kong's government, acting on orders from Britain, declared that Vietnamese landing after June 15 would be routinely treated not as "genuine refugees" but as illegal immigrants who merely sought food and not freedom...
...While the British recently agreed to take 500 more refugees—a pittance—the United States recently reduced the number it is willing to accept...
...More than 10,000 Vietnamese have been trapped in Hong Kong by the new policy of not automatically granting asylum to the boat people...
...But fewer than 300 of the newcomers are willing to go back...
...As I approach thegate, accompanied by a photographer and a press officer, children squeeze their faces against the metal barrier...
...Now the West exists for them only in their blurriest dreams...
...Single men regularly seek out women, because they are lonely or because they have learned that bachelors are least likely to be selected for resettlement...
...The more ambitious refugees attend English classes...
...These new distinctions among kinds of refugees made sense only to the politicians...
...A 1988 Hong Kong Correctional Services department report estimates that 850 of the refugees are "vulnerable to psychological problems as a result of being rejected'?—turned away by the very Western countries that, at a 1979 Geneva conference sponsored by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), promised to provide housing for those fleeing Vietnam "as long as the problem lasts...
...Too many people like me have come and gone over the years, and too little has come of their visits, for that...
...And the desire for a better life isn't the only thing motivating these refugees...
...Families are formed and grow here...
...During the day, some camp residents will be in Salvation Army-run workshops, learning to make plastic flowers or toothpicks—and being exposed, willy nilly, to the Gospel...
...They resent even more the refugees themselves, who have been allowed to stay in Hong Kong when their own relatives who slip across the border are promptly arrested and sent back to China...
...Yet when a government treats its people as cruelly as Vietnam has in matters of religion and politics and privacy, even as it exposes them to the real possibility of mass famine—and when it regards flight as a traitorous act that demands, at the least, extensive "re-education"—it is impossible to construct a bright line that can separate an economic migrant from a political refugee...
...Sometimes the pirates who ply these waters stole their belongingsand forced their boats fatally farther from the shore...
...Anyplace but Vietnam . . . just let me go," he says...
...ties—and the cross-cutting preferred categories—Catholics, ex-military personnel...
...These trips are special treats, for they are the only time refugee children see grass or encounter a cat...
...I feel like an imposter at those moments, an abuser of dreams...
...He takes typing, pounding away at a battered manual, and he fitfully studies electricity, in hopes that those skills will boost his slim chances of getting out...
...Humane deterrence, the principle behind the 1982 closing of the camps,failed to keep the Vietnamese from coming to Hong Kong...
...Hong Kong used to pride itself on its treatment of the Vietnamese refugees—used to say how much more humane it was than Thailand, where boatloads of refugees were pushed back to the sea—but what the Crown Colony does is almost entirely determined elsewhere, in London and Geneva, in Washington and Peking and Hanoi...
...These boat people had risked their lives on what they thought was the first leg of a longer voyage to Australia or Britain, Canada or the United States, the dreamtime countries of the West...
...These refugees will learn to cultivate that passivity as a psychological stratagem, a stay against madness during the indefinite term they will spend behind the fences of Hong Kong's closed camps...
...In June, Hong Kong officials predicted that 10 percent of the new arrivals would turn out to be refugees fleeing persecution, not illegal economic migrants...
...The newcomers are lined up in neat rows waiting to be interviewed, their heads wrapped in white towels to delouse them...
...On the way to Hong Kong our boat faced typhoons, rough waves and a lack of food and water...
...It is a complex set of rules, Wing acknowledges, and there are inconsistencies in their application...
...Hong Kong to the Communist government of China in 1997—there is no hope at all...
...Summer temperatures, which regularly top 100 degrees, force them to sleep outside at night, and the winter cold makes nighttime sleep impossible...
...The new policy is avowedly tougher and less humane, but not clearly an effective deterrent...
...But nearly one-third of the residents, the so-called long-stayers, have been here for more than five years, and most of them no longer see much reason for activity...
...It took them weeks to navigate the South China Sea and an undetermined number of those who set out died at sea...
...Our only choice was freedom or death...
...Take the case of 39-year-old Ho Kinh, a corporal in the South Vietnamese Army whose face has been disfigured by shrapnel that also scrambled his brain...
...Sometimes their crafts were wrecked by typhoons...
...muscular wasting...
...The lights, bare bulbs, are too dim for sewing or reading...
...There, they talk or sit silently or sleep away the day...
...The June 15 policy change was meant to stop other Vietnamese from leaving their homeland...
...The case of a woman named Lei is relayed to me by one of the camp officials...
...In theory, they are all being interviewed to determine who among them count as genuine refugees...
...Where does Pham hope to go...
...Like children who remain in orphanages as teenagers, they sense that they have lost whatever appeal they might once have possessed...
...Between January 1 and June 15, 1988, 7,700 boat people reached Hong Kong—twelve times as many as had arrived during the same period the year before...
...Though the, refugees generally do not articulate these feelings, they slip out in the diaries that Ann Cusack, an Australian who teaches English at the camp, encourages her students to keep...
...On board are a dozen Vietnamese, the latest arrivals...
...Tivo mornings a week, twenty or thirty refugees will sit down with the Dutch ladies, as they are called, and busy themselves with arts and crafts...
...They can spend their money on cigarettes or Cokes—but not on liquor, which is forbidden, for the authorities fear what drunkenness might provoke...
...D espite a desperate labor shortage, many Hong Kong residents attacked this plan...
...T n practice, "humane deterrence" 1 isolates the refugees in an environment of privation...
...Abruptly, though, even this tiny exit into the wider world was sealed shut for new arrivals...
...In January 1988, after interviewing 1,500 boat people in Thailand, most of them from the North, the UNHCR concluded that three-quarters had been disenfranchised for political or ethnic reasons, and that their children's futures were similarly threatened...
...During the monsoon season, mud cakes the floors and seeps into the bedding...
...These long-stayers were typically fishermen or housewives or farmers in their homeland...
...respiratory problems...
...forces during the Vietnam war, two were political refugees and two were economic migrants...
...There is no rule requiring this, though the refugees do have to line up for muster every morning at seven o'clock...
...The Vietnamese government, badly strapped for funds, has softened its tone in recent days, promising the UNHCR that it would punish only those who traffic in refugees, not countrymen returning voluntarily...
...Several days a month in this room and identical offices down the hall, junior-level diplomats from Canada, Australia, Britain, and the United States—the only nations still admitting any Vietnamese refugees—assess the suitability of the would-be immigrants...
...officials determined that, of four Vietnamese brothers whose father had worked with the U.S...
...In 1986 and again in 1987, the number of arrivals rose by more than 50 percent, even as the rate of resettlement was falling by 44 percent...
...It is rare to hear even the mildest criticism of the authorities...
...Seen from .the water, Chi Ma Wan—literally, sesame bay—might be a resort, with its sliver of beach and its long, picturesque pier...
...They remain on twenty-four hours a day as a security precaution...
...They have no special skills and speak only Vietnamese...
...There has never been a riot here, not even a protest...
...slow healing of cuts due to lack of fresh air...
...I find that I am still sitting near the high wire fence and it's raining, some drops of water have fallen on my face, cold through my heart...
...No one at Chi Ma Wan, certainly not its very first inmate, really expects miracles...
...When I walk into a classroom, the students stand to greet me as if I were Mr...
...Occasionally there is an outing for the children of the camp, to an Oriental garden or the space museum...
...Wing carefully enumerates the priorities laid out in the 1980 Refugee Act—political dissidents, people with close U.S...
...Gradually these Vietnamese boat people, confined in what the Hong Kong government called closed camps—less politely, prisons—saw their dreams disfigured...
...Whole families are confined to cubicles not much larger than a baby's crib...
...in fact, however, that game seems to be largely rigged...
...But after three or four conversations with Ho, Wing is beginning to believe his account...
...The hope had been that the June 15 edict would stop the boat people, but over the next three months, 10,500 more had arrived, acid they filled Chi Ma Wan and another of the camps...
...Chips...
...For the newcomers—an embarrassment to a Western world that no longer pays much attention to people who flee Communism, a particular embarrassment to the British who will hand over David L. Kirp is a professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy of the University of California, Berkeley, and a syndicated columnist...
...That influx triggered anger in Hong Kong and concern in London...
...lack of adequate sleep due to the constantly burning bright lights and incessant noise both inside and outside the building...
...To spend time in these camps is to encounter the sadness of accumulated thwarted hopes, the numbed despair of voiceless human beings whose fate depends absolutely on the judgment of faraway officials...
...These migrants, it is said, are unlikely to have what the Refugee Act calls a "well-founded fear of persecution...
...Le Tuan Hung, the young engineer, writes: Under the Vietnamese Communist regime, which is wicked, oppressive and dictatorial, people have no right to say what they think, their property can be seized at any time, and many people have been revenged by killing or confinement...
...But last year the United States admitted just 333...
...Theoretically, they were eligible for resettlement, but they were entirely cut off from the outside...
...You might think that American diplomats would appreciate why someone would flee Vietnam—after all, the war we fought against that government was defended as a Wilsonian-style crusade for freedom—but the diplomats see things differently...
...The decision to confine boat people who arrived after that date in closed camps like Chi Ma Wan was meant as a "humane deterrent" to migration...
...In one instance, U.S...
...Refugees can make up to $20 a week sweeping the trash (there are signs throughout the camp scolding litterers), or doing piecework, or helping to prepare the meals...
...A small minority of these thousands of refugees will actually be resettled...
...When I ask him through an interpreter why he fled Vietnam and what the weeks on...
...As recently as 1981, over 12,000 Vietnamese left Hong Kong for the U.S...
...At any time except during meals—standard prisoner's fare—many of the refugees will be in their numbered cubicles...
...I want some seats for Tuesday night...
...They resent the financial burden the refugees pose: more than $100 million during the past decade, much of it for guards and fences...
...rickets attributable to a lack of vitamin D from sunlight...
...One man, a 26-year-old former engineer named Le limn Hung, writes of sitting at the camp's wire fence imagining that he is talking to himself as a 12-year-old boy growing up in Vietnam...
...For such work, they are paid the same rates as Hong Kong's prisoners...
...and as Peter Gill reports in a recent London Spectator article, visitors to the detention camps receive petitions written in blood from Vietnamese who say they will never return...
...For months, these refugees—as Like children who remain in orphanages as teenagers, they sense that they have lost whatever appeal they might once have possessed...
...When I inquire about Ho, Wing says that "there were too many holes in his story the first time around...
...I meet one of them, Teo Phan Van, who learned English during his six years here and is now teaching in the adult school...
...His brother recently arrived at Chi Ma Wan and the two of them spend all their time together...
...Meanwhile the old occupants of Chi Ma Wan, Inmate Number One and all the others whose stories I had listened to, were resettled in a hastily completed center, San Yick, an 11-story factory building in an industrial section of Hong Kong...
...Every seat is reserved...
...At the gate, guards carefully check our credentials, for only those with proper authorization can enter...
...It is hard, the refugees say, to make new friends—hard to know who can be trusted—andthere are mixed feelings when friends leave for new lives in the West...
...They would be imprisoned, cut off from international organizations, and denied any possibility of resettlement in the West, held until Vietnam could be persuaded to take them back the first handful were slated for "voluntary" repatriation in March...
...Are there any left...
...In fact, the odds against resettlement have grown worse during the 19806 as the war in Vietnam came to seem more remote to the resettlement countries...
...and sure enough, just fifty-four of the first 529 have been recognized as refugees...
...Old hostilities between North and South Vietnamese, and between Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese, have been replayed here with fists and knives...
...What are you doing now...
...But some camp residents will make it to the West...
...Contagion is a real concern in such close quarters: already this year there has been an outbreak of measles, and a hepatitis epidemic is always feared...
...He has tentatively been accepted by Canada, and his exuberance during our discussion is worlds removed from the prevailing passivity...
...I could not live under this regime, so I with my family risked our lives to leave Vietnam for our freedom...
...the class choruses, then answers in unison: "No, there are no seats left...
...There would be no fence surrounding this camp, no guards to keep the Vietnamese in...
...Once these words would have rung sweet, but fashions in ideology change...
...Britain, which greased the wheels of the agreement with about £70,000 in cash (an amount matched by the government of Hong Kong), supposedly to defray the refugees' resettlement costs, plainlyhopes that if this first lot is well treated, more will choose the same path...
...Others have been similarly stranded in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia...
...As I slip into an advanced class, a dozen students ranging in age from twelve to thirty are parroting sentences that, inside the high metal fences of Chi Ma Wan Detention Center, sound like lines from a scene written by an absurdist playwright...
...One councillor had an equally draconian alternative: "Charter a liner and sail them all to San Francisco where they will be duly unloaded into the ocean, and watch the rescue operation of the American government...
...But even in the mornings the temperature inside these barracks reaches the high eighties and a fan overhead barely stirs the fetid air...
...For several days, their personal histories will be reviewed and they will be screened for diseases...
...On the ferry back from Chi Ma Wan I spot a police cruiser racing across the harbor, carrying its familiar human cargo to Green Island reception center, the Ellis Island of Hong Kong...
...And then he asks, as if in afterthought: "Can you do anything to help...
...What is next...
...People stare, hands reach out to touch me, and the braver ones who know some Englishpause to say something...
...The weather this month is pleasant by Hong Kong standards...
...They are merely economic migrants—nothing more than Vietnamese wetbacks...
...No country is still acting on the principle of the 1979 Geneva accords, that all the boat people would be relocated to the West: numbers, and compassion fatigue, have outstripped commitment...
...The adult refugees would be free to work in the local area during the day, just like those who had arrived before 1982 and already lived in open camps, while the children would be educated at two UNHCR-run schools outside the camps...
...Smarting from the international criticism leveled at conditions in San Yick, the Hong Kong government an-nounced plans to build a new open center for all the refugees who came before June 15, to be opened in the spring of 1989...
...Before July 2, 1982—the other red-circled day of outrage in the calendar of the Vietnamese here—refugees coming to Hong Kong could live in the camps and go outside for work...
...They have no relatives in the resettlement countries, which long ago picked through their files and turned them down...
...the boy inquired...
...adults fearful of venturing from their bunks...
...But we never thought of returning to Vietnam...
...They separated families: in several instances, veterans of the South Vietnamese Army found themselves in San Yick while their families, who had arrived a few days later, were inaccessible in the detention camps...
...The small office we occupy, furnished with a gray metal desk and gray straight-backed metal chairs, is stripped of character but not of significance...
...Overhead, a banner proclaims "Jesus Was Born For You...
...There wasn't enough water in San Yick for drinking and washing—plumbing hadn't been completed before the Vietnamese moved in—and fights over water developed among the occupants...
...They prompted outbreaks of violence—even that rarity, a protest demonstration—and accusations of brutality toward the Vietnamese by their keepers were confirmed in an official inquiry, The haste with which new San Yick facilities had to be provided meant unimaginable new privations...
...The only natural light they received came from the steel-barred windows, and refugees would line up for a glimpse of the sun...
...FEBRUARY 1989: "THE BUNG IN THE BOTTLE" In the months after June 15, 1988, Chi Ma Wan came to seem like a little piece of heaven to the refugees who had been living there...
...The birthrate in the refugee camps is three times higher than among the residents of Hong Kong...
...One reason advanced for this sharp decline is that in the past most of the refugees came from South Vietnam, but three-quarters of the new arrivals come from the North...
...To the refugees, there is always the remote possibility that I am that Very Important Person who can personally rescue another Teo, which is why otherwise silent Vietnamese men and women greet me enthusiastically...
...A sheet or faded fabric remnant, sometimes just a strip of plastic webbing to prevent the children from falling out, is all that separates one family from another...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 many as 5,000 of them—lived in squalor, three and four to a bed...
...It is here that, more than once, Pham Xuoi has been interviewed and rejected: he owes those interviews in no small measure to his being Inmate Number One...
...What distinguishes the Vietnamese boat person from the Soviet Jew seeking to start over in America...
...This place is boring," says Pham Xuoi...
...A UNHCR report on conditions at San Yick minced no words in describing these horrors...
...If they've got good documentation—benefits papers, IDs, proof of family ties—approval is short and sweet," says Bob Wing, the American consulates earnest young refugee officer, who is at Chi Ma Wan interviewing what he calls the problem cases...
...This distinction, however, regularly collapses under its own weight...
...The local council in the neighborhood where the new open camp is to be situated threatened hunger strikes...
...Occasionally there are flare-ups...
...Make life hard, it was felt, and fewer Vietnamese would flee their homeland...
...I was happy at first when he came, yet he had no hope in the future...
...when Princess Anne appeared, councillors tried to present her with a petition with 10,000 signatures demanding that the camps stay closed...
...These fences used to be topped with barbed wire—you can still see the fittings into which the wire was stretched—but a few years back, in what was described as a humane gesture, officials removed the jagged steel...
...But this was only a prelude to the events of 1988, when more and more Vietnamese left their homeland, driven by fear of starvation and by rumors that the sanctuary of refuge would soon be denied them...
...Last fall, a Canadian official interviewed him but he has heard nothing since...
...Will Vietnam and Britain meet at Geneva this year (as seems likely) to initial a new agreement forcing the boat people, who risked their lives once in escaping from Vietnam, to make another dangerous journey—this one back home...
...But violence is infrequent—during my stay, the prison cells that house rule-breakers were empty—and invariably violence is turned inwards, refugee against refugee...
...They sit passively with their heads buried in their knees...
...The camp was vacated to house those new arrivals who, unless found to be "genuine" refugees, would eventually be returned to Vietnam...
...Whole families packed into decrepit rowboats, whole villages crowded into rickety junks...
...In Pakistan, the Afghan refugees talk of revolution and in the camps of Gaza the Palestinians practice it, but Chi Ma Wan Detention Center is so quiet that I wonder whether its occupants are in a trance...
...He fled, Ho says, because the Communists treated him badly, and he has been at Chi Ma Wan for six years...
...Other camp residents will be hanging out with their friends...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
