When Hope Prevails : Vietnamese Refugee and Her Son Savor Freedom After Years Behind Barbed Wire

After three weeks in the United States, secure in a relative’s comfortable home, To Cam Thi Tran still is jolted awake each night by memories of the past seven years, spent behind barbed wire in Malaysia.

There, in detention camps with other Vietnamese refugees, Tran lived in overcrowded huts under constant surveillance by armed guards, learned to salvage extra food from trash cans, suffered burns from extinguishing fires before they were detected by guards, and continually feared being beaten or, worse, being returned to Vietnam.

She also bore a son while incarcerated, watched her husband die and learned to endure without giving up hope.

Tran, 23, and her 5-year-old son, Bidong (named after the detention camp, Pulau Bidong, where he was born) were among the last Vietnamese refugees to leave Malaysia for freedom and to escape forced repatriation to Vietnam. On June 25, mother and son were on an airplane headed for the United States while the last of 4,000 other refugees were being sent from Malaysia back to Vietnam.

Through her sister-in-law’s persistence and the efforts of Legal Assistance for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers (LAVAS), Tran is now living with her husband’s sister, Chau Pham. She spends her days filling out endless papers, visiting doctors’ offices and learning English.

“I want to be a beautician like I was in Vietnam,” she said. “I want to provide for Bidong. I want him to be a lawyer so that he can stand up for the underprivileged because we suffered once. There’s never been a day that I get a full night’s sleep. I can’t believe that I’m here. I still think I’m in the camp. I still see the barbed wires.”

With help of Pham and LAVAS, Tran and her son were granted humanitarian parole to leave Malaysia. Return to Vietnam would have meant even worse treatment than in detention camps, she said.

Her father had had ties to the former South Vietnamese regime, and her family, under constant surveillance by the Communists, had moved to Cambodia.

Tran’s husband had been under surveillance in Vietnam and had his household registration papers--necessary to obtain housing, clothing and food rations--revoked. Her husband’s family had moved to the U.S.

*

Repatriation would have left Tran and Bidong especially vulnerable, alone and with no one to return to in Communist Vietnam.

“No one ever thought when we escaped Vietnam that we would have to endure so many years in the camps,” she said. “They say we’re economic migrants, but it cost a lot to get out and people traded everything they owned to get out.”

Tran and her husband left Vietnam for Malaysia in April 1989, paying $3,000 each for passage on a rickety boat that was attacked by Thai pirates during the voyage.

They lived in Pulau Bidong camp, a narrow barren stretch of land, for several years. Their son was born in the camp. They were then transferred to Sungei Besi, another camp.

Sungei Besi was surrounded by barbed wire. No one was permitted to leave and guards monitored all activities. The children received no schooling. Up to 14 people were crowded into a hut 10 feet long by 8 feet wide. Daily food rations were two fist-sized balls of rice with a bit of chicken, about the size of a thumb.

She said she had to fight other refugees for scraps from the trash cans, salvaging what she could from rotten vegetables. At first she was too embarrassed to pick up trash but learned to join in as food became increasingly scarce. The meals were not much better, she said. Sometimes the soup would have bugs in it. She would close her eyes, swallow and hope for freedom.

Her husband died last October of lung cancer. He had surgery for the disease while in the camp, but received inadequate treatment afterward, she said.

She recalled that one week after her husband died, their son became very ill, shaking with fever. Tran took Bidong to the camp’s medical clinic and stood outside in the rain all day, waiting for medicine.

The Tran family was helped by her husband’s sister, who sent about $500 every couple of months through a nun who volunteered in the camp and smuggled the cash in her underwear. The money helped to buy a bit more food on the black market at extremely inflated prices, Tran said.

That stopped abruptly on Jan. 18, a date firmly engraved in Tran’s memory. Malaysia began a serious crackdown to encourage the refugees to return to Vietnam. Tran recalled that tear gas was released throughout the camp to force the refugees out of their huts. Living conditions declined even further and food rations were cut back to encourage voluntary repatriation. The guards wouldn’t permit anything to be sold inside the camps. Anyone caught with smuggled food was sent to the “monkey house,” where more than half a dozen people were cramped in a room 5 feet by 5 feet. If anyone poked a head out, he or she was soundly beaten by the guards, Tran said.

She and her son managed to avoid the “monkey house,” but only because they were not caught when rules were bent. She said some food was smuggled into the camp by friendly officers, but when the shift changed, the new guard often would take it away. A burn scars her thumb from an attempt at cooking ramen noodles. She had used an empty can, burning the wrapper for fuel because it wouldn’t smoke. She has smaller burns dotting her arms from attempts to quickly douse fires when guards approached.

Tran knows she was fortunate. In addition to the refugees sent from Malaysia back to Vietnam, there are 30,000 other Vietnamese elsewhere throughout Southeast Asia facing impending repatriation. Hong Kong’s camps have until next June because they house so many refugees--18,000. Indonesia has extended its deadline until December, and the Philippines has turned over maintenance of its centers to the Catholic Church.

*

Tran put up with the camps because returning to Vietnam was an even worse fate, she said. If she and Bidong had returned, the Communists might not have done anything immediately, but somewhere down the line, she believes, she and her son would have been put in re-education camps where they would have been subjected to forced labor with minimal food. Or even torture and extermination, she said.

“Sometimes in the camps I would be startled out of my sleep and think how could this be my life because I had lost so much,” Tran said. “When I left the camp, I looked back at the three gates [enclosing the camp]. I thought of the Vietnamese people. I ache for them, some of the kids are only a few years old. All they know is life behind the fences and they had to go back to Vietnam. At least in prison you know how long your sentence is. This prison has no sentence.”

Tran didn’t allow herself to believe that she would be able to get out of the refugee camp until the fourth and final level of the screening procedure. When she found out she made it, tears swelled up and overflowed.

“I felt so ecstatic because I saw a future for my son,” she said. “The last seven years were a huge price to pay but at least now my son has a future.”