The Vietnamese Boat People arrived here 25 years ago. Kathy Sheridan hears how they have overcome State indifference to build new lives
Self-pity is not an option and language remains a barrier even now, 25 years on. So only the most trusted around them can have an inkling of the nightmares that haunt those the world knew as the Boat People. The pretty woman sitting behind your local take-away counter might be the little girl who waited with her family in a Vietnamese dockland for the older sister
who never arrived and was never seen again. The courteous man may be the youth who saw his father brutally murdered in front of him.
Somewhere in the midlands, there is a woman burdened with the memory of setting out on the South China Sea with her husband and three children; of their boat being boarded by heavily armed pirates; of her husband’s desperate attempts to protect her from rape, culminating in his murder and his body being tossed overboard. After that we are told only that their boat entered the doldrums and after three weeks his body resurfaced alongside them and remained there for days.
The story appears in a forthcoming book on the Vietnamese-Irish by anthropologist Mark Maguire. Taken together with dimly recalled footage of overcrowded old rust-buckets with their pathetic banners – “Let us land Please” and “Have pity on us!” – it humanises a catastrophe that saw one and a quarter million people flee their homeland after Ho Chi Minh’s communist regime claimed Vietnam in April 1974. About a third of those men, women and children never found safe haven; wiped out by pirates, storms, starvation and un-seaworthy boats.
In 1979, Thai Van Nga was 27, one of many desperate refugees in a boat pushed back out to sea by the Malaysian navy. This was not uncommon. At the time, an Irish Times report described how the occupants of a boat twice turned away were robbed and raped by Malay soldiers and later attacked by pirates. When Thai's boat was finally allowed to land, they were transferred to a camp where they remained for eight months. "They treated us like animals", he says now, in an uncharacteristic display of bitterness,
adding that theUN"saved" them.
Back in Ireland, meanwhile, the State had its eyes shut tightly. As far back as 1968, questions had been asked in the Dáil about giving homes to Vietnamese children. In 1975, the then government was asked by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to resettle three Vietnamese
families. A year later, it was asked again. All were refused. But by late 1978, fierce pressure from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), combined with Ireland being thrust into the international limelight as holder of the 1979 EEC presidency, finally forced the government to act. The Irish
Episcopal Commission for Emigrants (IECE), in the person of Bishop Eamon Casey, demanded 1,000 resettlement places; the government offered 100. The public debate took off.
At one level, the argument, often ideologically driven, centred on the background of the refugees – “moneyed people of Chinese descent with something to hide” versus “Sino-Vietnamese scapegoats of the Hanoi government”. At another, the Letters pages of the newspapers rang with the kind of language that resonates to the present day. “What about our own Boat People [i.e. the travelling community and the poor]?”, asked one. “Did anyone ever stop to think who these people are, and how much money they spent to get on the boat?”. Another wondered: “Will they contribute anything to the Irish economy? . . . In essence, what have they to offer? . . . [Concern] should look closer to home and cease pontificating about the need, and indeed the nobility, of helping the Vietnamese.”
This being 1979, it's worth noting that Ireland was in a holy lather of excitement at the imminent visit of the Pope. Even so, the old Céad Míle Fáilte image was taking a battering. The historian David N. Doyle reminded us Irish people had acted like "evil green barbarians" when supporting
the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the US in the late 19th century.
The Irish Times writer, John Healy, asked why nobody had reminded the EEC Council of Ministers that "We, the Irish, were the first boat people" and proposed the performance of Donogh O'Malley (then a junior minister) at the first meeting of the World Bank as an inspiration to all aspirant statesmen. The story goes that when two African delegates in national dress pledged £3 million from their countries, "O'Malley jumped up and bellowed: '£5 million from Ireland'. When his officials objected, O'Malley apparently
replied: 'No f***ing black in a football jersey is going to put Ireland down'."
In the end, begrudgingly, Ireland more than doubled its original offer to 212
places. Meanwhile, in a surreal turn of events in South-East Asia, a substantial number of "our" refugees were refusing to budge, preferring Canada, the US or other countries in which relatives had settled – or, alternatively, baulking at what they understood to be a war going on in the North. By the time the first 58 people finally arrived here in August, at least the same number had gone on the run somewhere in Shamshuipo camp in Hong Kong.
And how did we appear to the new arrivals? Faced with the tiny edifice that
was our national airport, some thought – hoped – it was only a stopping-off point. The weather was another surprise. An elderly man stepped off the plane carrying a straw hat and a palm leaf fan, clearly in the belief that he would need them in scorching Ireland. Thai – with some advance knowledge imparted by an Irish nun, "the head nun in Malaysia" – was fated to arrive in November, disembarking to "a half metre of snow", huddled in Aer Lingus blankets.
Only a handful of them spoke any English. The majority were poor, unskilled
ethnic Chinese with little formal education and, in some cases, illiterate in their own language. Many had had to flee without spouses and children. For these invited guests of the State, the first decade of the process was "a dark
episode . . .", writes Mark Maguire, "a chronicle of heroic efforts by individual government representatives, NGO workers and Vietnamese leaders, all embedded in a wider context of official and public inattention".
The reception phase was handled by the Irish Red Cross. Funding for accommodation and furniture came through the IECE, funded by Dublin church collections. When families were dispersed, it was almost invariably to church- and convent- owned accommodation, aided by the extraordinary efforts of local people. In the midlands, the headstone of a local woman who died young records that she is fondly remembered by a Vietnamese-Irish family. As Maguire puts it, "communicating with each other through gestures, good will and a kind of Esperanto, she nursed their sick children. . . fought with bureaucrats for their fledgling take-away businesses . . . and every Friday night, they would leave so much take-away food at her door that she
had to get neighbours to help her eat it".
At government level, by contrast, departments were busily resisting any
calls on funds. An IECE secretary, Father J. Byrne, remarked that as far as he understood, the government felt NGOs had pressurised it into taking the refugees and it was now the responsibility of those organisations to look after them. Language tuition, mystifyingly, was provided by special education teachers, trained in the education of deaf people, without dictionaries, to the satisfaction of no one. Once the refugees left the reception centres, even that stopped. Thai recalls that in his first job as a "houseman" in Jury's hotel, he learned the words for items such as cups and bottles.
Probably the most devastating longterm effect of this strategy was on the school-age refugees of the time, for whom Vietnamese was the only language in the home. One girl in her 20s recalls that she hadn’t a word of English until she started school at the age of four. Yet an official report in 1980 pronounced: “It is not considered that schoolgoing [sic] children will need further special instruction in English.”
For Maguire, this amounted to the greatest and, ultimately, the most selfdefeating policy failure. “Children with barely a few words of English were being put in classrooms with no special provision and expected to pick up another language by osmosis”, he writes, “and along the way some were expected to pick up a few words of Gaeilge”.
There were reports of children arriving in class without a word of English
and sitting in silence. To compound the problem, such children were often
called upon to translate conversations between parents and teachers. Such was the level of misunderstanding that one young girl, manifesting bruises from racial bullying at school, was presumed to be suffering from physical abuse at home and was put into care until the confusion was cleared up.
Another man, now in his 30s, described how, as a result of the dispersal policy of the time (a policy now discredited internationally), he was the only Asian child in a country school. “I spoke no English and would sit in class with the teacher saying things I couldn’t understand. When I got homework, I had to take out the dictionary to understand the questions.” He recalled, with evident pain, how during “every break, when the kids went out to the playground they would all gather around me, hundreds, in a circle and eat their lunch watching me – I was an alien”.
The upshot of government “policy” was not merely a dislocation between children and parents, or an undermining of parental authority, or an inability to perform such natural tasks as helping a child with homework; as recently as the late 1990s, only half of Vietnamese-Irish judged themselves to have functional English language, according to a report. The same report also suggested, not surprisingly, that the majority of Vietnamese in employment were those with reasonable language skills. “In consequence”, says Mark Maguire, “for the sake of short-term inaction, long-term dependency on State benefit has been incurred.”
The loneliness and isolation of that time is still palpable in the voices of what
Maguire refers to as the "middle generation"; the "polite", "neat", "quiet and wellbehaved" children of the 1980s, about whom one teacher was helplessly pessimistic. The future for them, she said then, was "not good. The pressure of society is such that they keep to themselves . . . they are harassed outside the school because they are hard-working and are viewed as managing to make a go of their takeaway vans . . . there is jealousy in the community . . . which makes life very difficult for the families."
Trinh, a 21-year-old woman born here, recalls that there was racism – not at school, where Buddhists like herself were treated with sensitivity, she says, but around her home. "Oh yeah. They'd call you names, throw stuff at your house, climb up the back walls. Maybe it was just because they were kids but they used to give us loads of abuse. You still find a few like that. When my brother and I went to inquire about car insurance, I showed the
woman my passport but she still wanted to know had I a card . . . 'a card to show you're entitled to live here', she said."
For all their politeness and unwillingness to criticise their Irish hosts – to whom they are always careful to render gratitude – dark shadows lurk behind the undoubted success stories of many of the early arrivals. When the dispersed families vanished back to Dublin in a desperate search for work and kindred spirits in 1982, there was often chaos behind and ahead of them. One family left for England, threatening to bring a charge of maltreatment against Ireland at the UNHCR’s office in London.
Generally, their predicament was not helped by the fact that they ended up in vast estates where unemployment rates of up to 80 per cent were common.
Vietnamese families – such as Thai’s – went into the Chinese take-away business out of stark necessity and a profound yearning to give their children the education and opportunities for success that are the driving forces of their lives. For them, still, life begins and ends with the – usually vast –extended family.
With the banks unwilling to advance loans, they combined their funds, enabling one to buy a take-away van and get a revenue stream going, while putting money into the fund for the next person.
Thai – a trained panel-beater who undertook a daily six-hour commute from
Portlaoise on his motorbike for a year – admits that he had no liking for or expertise in the take-away business. "I learned to cook by watching friends and I worked for nothing to get the experience. It was just a job. I didn't want to be a cook and didn't want my children to be either."
Working in a mobile Chinese takeaway was a hazardous occupation. Casual abuse was the least of it. Local gangsters on poor Dublin housing estates were demanding £100 a night or burning the vans and beating up the occupants. The fledgling entrepreneurs also fell foul of the licensing laws, the health authorities and the neighbours. After gardaí and Dublin Corporation locked his caravan, Thai, with his wife, children and friends, blockaded a
busy road in protest. He was locked up before being rescued at 2 a.m. by a civil servant, the late Michael Stone.
"Yes, we won", Thai recalls now with a smile, but the continuing hassle eventually prompted him to buy a take-away shop on the North Strand,
which he still operates.
He lives in Malahide, but introduces us to his tenants in the former local authority house he bought outright, one of several shrewd decisions made before the boom. None of this would be possible without family. For the Vietnamese-Irish, family remains vital to the successful operation of their shops and restaurants. For younger generations, that can mean a life focused on little beyond work and study. “They tell you to study, but you’re supposed to be working as well,” one young girl told Mark Maguire. “I don’t mind helping out but it’s just that it’s, like, all the time . . . You go to work in the afternoon and you’re back in the middle of the night. And if you’re not working, you’re supposed to be studying.”
But for the older generation, it’s all about what Maguire calls “an ethos of achievement”, building, working, investing.
And thus, while the older pioneers dream of taking pictures of their graduate children and buying televisions receiving Vietnamese channels, the children of the Boat People are becoming adults, getting the education on which their elders pin so much sweat and hope and – as an ironic result – moving farther
from their roots. "I'm Irish. I was born in Vietnam, but I'm Irish. My friends are Irish . . . Except with my family, I'm kind of Vietnamese," one girl told Maguire. So you're Vietnamese at home, he asked? "Yes, yes", she said brightly. "Inside it is Vietnamese food and outside it's McDonald's."
In the small back garden of Thai’s older brother’s home, plants of bamboo, lychee and grape vines are a flourishing leafy reminder of Vietnam. In the livingroom, a massive television is switched to a Vietnamese satellite channel. To the left of the front door is an entire room that is a shrine to Buddha and the ancestors of the deeply religious owner.
Apart from Buddha, a vast collection of small and large icons populate the room, including a deity with a flame-red face who – Thai explained earlier – “fights for peace” and is known as “an honest man”. Also among them is a money deity, another for land and one for protection from the devil. Will Trinh have a room like this? “I’d have one Buddha in my house,” she says softly. “I don’t think I’ll have the ancestors.”
To Thai’s generation of exiles, to whom the country reopened in the early 1990s, frequent trips to Vietnam are visits “home”. Thai – who says proudly that he has three family graduations to attend this year – is currently working on a plan to fund and build a school near his birthplace in Ho Chi Minh city.
"It's my motherland," he says. "Of course I miss it. I feel I'm home when I'm there." However, to Trinh, Vietnam is "warm and lovely" but is just "a holiday". In between is a cohort that feels disenfranchised by both countries, people in their late 20s and 30s, who chafe at their limited involvement in Irish society but also at a sense of being "strangers" in Vietnam, which they perceive as being their own country, yet where they still feel "unsafe" and have a sense of being watched constantly. The older people maintain
a diplomatic silence on this. Some have a notion that when the children are grown, they might live there for part of the year.
Overall, the Vietnamese-Irish have turned themselves into a success story, says Mark Maguire. “Fundamentally, this is a group of people who arrived with nothing in 1979 and is doing well. You get a sense of people who see themselves as progressing.” Language, clearly, remains an issue and a barrier to integration in a significant number of cases. Some, their educational opportunities destroyed by short-sighted government policy, continue to work in the take-aways while remaining aloof from Irish society.
A substantial number remain in, but not of, this society. “But you’re never going to get the multicultural dream,” says Maguire. “This is a practical question, rather than an ideological one.”
What is most instructive, however, is to look at the cuttings files from six, seven, and more years ago – to see the political speeches and debates on immigration, and then to read the claims of present-day politicians that we could not expect to have been prepared for the vast increase in immigrants in recent years. “It’s ridiculous”, says Mark Maguire. “How long did we expect to live in splendid isolation?”