THE HUNGRY SEA
A Memoir of a Modern Odyssey (2002)

Paul Truong
With Leslie Alan Horvitz

After Saigon fell to the Communists in the spring of 1975, hundreds of thousands of conquered South Vietnamese, desperate to escape the country out of fear of political persecution, slipped out of ports in small, rickety wooden fishing boats, headed into the open sea in hope of finding refuge in a new land. The refugees became known as the “Boat People.”

The crews manning these craft were mostly fishermen, used to navigating rivers and coastal waters; who had never been to sea before in their lives. Buffeted by typhoons, torn asunder by high winds, boats went down by the scores, their passengers vanishing without a trace in a watery grave. Packed together in unsanitary conditions, refugees succumbed to disease and exposure and became easy prey for Thai pirates who robbed and brutalized them, raping and abducting the women. Many of the kidnapped victims were taken to Kra Island off the southern coast of Thailand, where they were hunted down like animals.

It’s estimated that over a quarter of a million of Boat People perished at sea. The true number will never be known.

In spite of these daunting odds, more than 1.6 million Vietnamese eventually found new homes — 250,000 of them in the West, mainly the US. Some, however, ended up settling in such improbable places as Iceland and Bermuda. Strangely enough, though, until now, the saga of the Boat People has largely gone untold. Many of the Vietnamese refugees don’t want to speak about their ordeal, whether because of guilt or simply because they find it too difficult to dredge up painful memories.

Some former Boat People, however, are determined to bear witness to what they saw and what they endured. In one sense, this story is a dramatic account of one survivor – Paul Truong, who was 13 at the time he set out with his father Tien on the harrowing journey to America. But while this book will be told from Paul’s perspective, as a first-person account, it also aims to present his personal narrative in the larger context of the saga of the Boat People — the largest mass exodus of asylum seekers by sea in modern history.

The older son of a top Vietnamese officer liaising with the US Embassy in Saigon, Paul was raised to be excel at everything he attempted – in the schoolroom, in soccer or in swim metes. But the one skill that Paul mastered above all others was chess, a game his father encouraged him to play even though he didn’t know the game himself. By the age of eight Paul was already a national chess champion, easily beating experienced players many years his senior. Chess taught him several things: self-confidence, the ability to focus and think several steps ahead of his opponent, skills that would later prove crucial to his survival at sea.

In April of 1975, as Communist forces lay siege to Saigon, Paul’s father tried to get his family to safety. A wiry nimble teenager, Paul slipped into the US Embassy compound as the last evacuees were being lifted off by helicopter from the embassy roof. But in the chaos Paul’s father, mother and baby brother were barred from entering the compound by MPs. Unwilling to desert his family, Paul turned around and left the embassy grounds to rejoin his family. Fearing arrest because of his connections to the Americans, Tien went into hiding. For the next four years he plotted to escape the country with Paul, relying on a clandestine network of dissidents and smugglers to obtain information and false papers.

Armed with false documents identifying them as Chinese refugees, Tien and Paul made their move the night of April 30th, 1979 – four years to the day that Saigon fell – knowing that security forces were likely to be distracted by celebrations in honor of the Communist takeover. Even apart from concerns about their safety, their departure was a wrenching one; with no chance of surviving an ordeal at sea, Paul’s mother and baby brother had to stay behind. Paul and his father had no way of knowing whether they would see them again.

It wasn’t until June that Tien and Paul finally put to sea. Their boat, which could safely accommodate 20 fishermen, was jammed with well over six hundred men, women and children. Provisions were meager – some water, dried fruit and bread and for most people a single change of clothes. The only sanitation was in the form of a bucket passed from hand to hand.

Two days out at sea, with only a single compass to navigate by, the boat was set upon by Thai pirates armed with knives and pistols. After robbing the terrified passengers, the pirates dragged several women back to their boat. They were never seen again. Only four hours later the refugees suffered a second attack. These pirates were even more ruthless. Paul, who knew next to nothing about sex, watched in horror as the pirates stripped 12-year old girls and elderly women alike and proceeded to rape them. He couldn’t understand why the men wouldn’t jump the assailants rather than stand helplessly by. No sooner had the second contingent of pirates gone then a third pirate launch bore down on them. By the time pirates came for a fifth time there was practically nothing left to take. In retaliation the pirates sank the boat.

With no land in sight, surrounded by sharks attracted to the body parts floating in the wreckage, Paul and his father managed to stay afloat. Even when all seemed lost Paul was determined to survive: he had a mission – he was going to reach America and find a way to get his mother and brother out of Vietnam. He wasn’t going to allow anything –sharks, Thai pirates, or even the South China Sea – to swerve him from his goal. Almost miraculously, the survivors – about 300 in total – were rescued by a passing US oil tanker.

The refugees’ ordeal was not over, however. The tanker deposited them on an island off the coast of Malaysia. They were then placed in a squalid refugee camp where disease was rampant and where guards distributed the most generous rations, not to the starving or infirm, but to the women who slept with them. The Malaysians, like many other Asian governments, looked on the boat people as a nuisance to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. After a few months, the authorities herded the refugees on another fishing boat that was in even worse shape than the one they’d begun their journey in, with barely enough water or fuel to last a single day. A naval patrol boat towed their vessel out to sea, alternately speeding up and slowing down, putting such strain on the lumbering craft that it would have broken in two – which was the navy’s intention – if it weren’t for an act of heroism by a teenage girl who saved the boat from sinking.

But saved for what? Reduced to a ration of one Coca Cola bottle cap of water three times a day, the refugees began to die off at an increasing rate. After drifting for days, they finally came within sight of a deserted island belonging to Indonesia. But as they approached the island, Indonesian patrol boats interceded, threatening to blow them out of the water if they came any closer. Paul’s father, because of his fluency in English, tried to negotiate – to no avail. Tien then came up with a desperate plan to deliberately sink their boat and dare the Indonesian navy to stand by while they all drowned…

The gamble paid off. The refugees were allowed to go ashore. The first group, nearly delirious from lack of food and drink, scrambled towards a nearby stream to slake their thirst. By the time Paul and Tien reached land in the last launch scores of people lay dead – the water turned out to be poisonous.

With world attention suddenly focused on the surviving remnants on the island, the Red Cross began delivering desperately needed provisions. Official delegations from several countries followed in their wake to interview the Boat People for the purpose of issuing visas. Over the next several months Tien organized the makeshift camp, making certain that everyone had what they needed to survive. Tien’s principal concern was to ensure that every refugee had a new home to go to. The US delegation was the last to arrive. Because of his past service to the US Government, Tien had no trouble securing a visa for himself and Paul. In addition, they had family members living in the States.

After an exhausting journey that took them nearly halfway around the world, from Indonesia to Singapore and then to LA they finally reached their final destination: Newark, NJ. They were still wearing the same T-shirts, shorts and sandals that they’d left Saigon with. This is how Paul describes his memory of his arrival: “When we got to Newark Airport at four in the morning it was snowing. This was the first time I’d ever seen snow. My uncle and aunt met us and drove us to their house. I remember sitting in his 1969 Plymouth Satellite and thinking what a huge car it was. It was December 1st 1979. We’d arrived right before Christmas. The streets were full of decorations and lights. And I thought, Wow, this is America.”

It would take several years struggling to scrape money together and dealing with red tape before Tien was finally in a position to bring his wife and his younger son to America. “No matter what happens to us I swear that we will never be divided again,” Tien declared during an interview with a local TV station after his family’s emotional reunion.

Over the next several years Boat People continued to flee Vietnam in h hope of reaching safe haven. For a while their plight drew the sympathy of the world and more nations including the US opened their doors to them. By the end of the 1980s, however, the Boat People, who were now seen as economic, and not political, refugees, began to wear out their welcome. Thousands of them were forcibly repatriated to Vietnam. By the early summer of 1997 all but a handful of the refugees were flown home by the United Nations, bringing to an end the saga that had began in secrecy with the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Susan Polgar April 12, 2007 Chess Improvement, General News 13 Comments
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