The hunted and haunted outcasts who changed their new country forever

Adrift in a round bamboo basket somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand, Tuong Quang Luu peered through the squall and spied whales breaching in the distance. In the breaks between the tropical rains of May, he noticed the seabirds were getting larger and flying higher; even to the untrained eye, this was a sign they were far from land. One way or another, there was no going back to Vietnam.

“We would perish or survive.”

Four Thai fishing trawlers passed the little boat that was never meant to stray far from shore and ignored their pleas for rescue. The fifth stopped to scoop them up.

“I was a diplomat, not a fisherman,” Luu says now from his home in Sydney. “So it was scary but, luckily, I survived the hazards of that trip.”

For Luu, those hazards involved a close encounter with a vessel manned by communist forces and being put to work with the crew in rough seas. For an estimated 2 million others who fled Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, and the end of a war that had killed millions and pitted empires and neighbours against each other, there were greater perils.

An estimated 500,000 refugees died in the years of exodus that followed; shot by coast guards or pirates, robbed, raped, thrown overboard after starving or dying of thirst, or lost at sea. More than 150,000 made their way to Australia, a wave of migration that has forever changed society.

Luu declined the offer of an easier escape. Having been an envoy in Canberra, where most of his family were safe, he was friendly with the Australian diplomats. There was a seat with his name on it on the Hercules that took the ambassador away when the Saigon embassy was abandoned on Anzac Day 1975.

Instead, Luu stayed. He was the last senior diplomat left standing in the southern government’s ministry of foreign affairs “because my bosses had already left the country”. The former president, Nguyen Van Thieu, decamped for Taipei with an exit visa that Luu stamped after being roused from his sleep.

On the morning of April 30, soldiers were ordered to stop fighting and the North Vietnamese Army swept in and declared the country liberated and reunited.

A tank rolls through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon on April 30, 1975.Credit: AP

Luu walked the Rue Catinat and took in the French colonial sights such as the Notre-Dame Cathedral before seeing the National Liberation Front’s advance party. He moved a few hundred metres west to watch as the North Vietnamese forces in Russian and Chinese tanks tore down the gate of the presidential Independence Palace and hoisted their flag.

He shed his jacket and tie and retraced his steps to the Caravelle Hotel, long a melting pot of diplomats and correspondents that had housed the Australian embassy on the seventh floor.

“The saddest thing for me to see was the elite of the South Vietnamese forces, the marines, walk up the street without weapons,” Luu, 84, recalls. “That was very disheartening, very sad.”

He and his father-in-law fled Saigon on a motorcycle. By that evening they had lied their way through a checkpoint and had started a week of hiding in the Mekong Delta disguised in “black pyjamas”, the peasant outfit adopted by the Viet Cong. As the enemy’s grip tightened, they decided the bamboo boat was worth the risk.

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They gather on Thursdays for a stretch of yoga, a cuppa and cake, and a good old-fashioned natter. The business of the day may be a talk about bowel screening, dance practice or planning an excursion to the zoo, but something deeper binds the Vietnamese Women’s Association.

On the outside there may be smiles, yoga instructor Jennifer McFarland explains when asked about the lasting effects of the war, but pain lingers inside.

The women speak of losing loved ones in war, of being separated from family members, of uprooting their lives and of terrifying journeys that seemed preferable to a brutal life under communist rule. Of husbands, fathers and brothers asked to report to authorities for 10 days only to disappear into prison for years and returned on the brink of death. Of possessions and money taken. Of knowing they might encounter rape or death at sea.

The refugees on Le Pham’s boat fought pirates to save themselves and get to safety.Credit: Kate Geraghty

The boat Le Pham was on with 157 others encountered pirates – three times. The first stole all their goods. The second tried to steal more. The third, frustrated, rammed their boat so they would sink and die.

Everyone on board had had enough. They fought back and overwhelmed their assailants, seizing the attacking vessel. They sailed into Darwin famous as the refugees who beat the pirates.

“We had to stand up and fight, or we would all die,” Pham says. “We threw them in the sea.”

Outside the Cabravale Senior Citizens Centre, corflutes for Dai Le and Tu Le compete for attention, and a stall selling bahn mi and Vietnamese coffee prepares for lunch. Only a block away is the hustle of Cabramatta market.

“Pho has become part of the national dish,” declares Diana Nguyen, a Melbourne-born actor, comedian and writer who explores her heritage and the influence of the Vietnamese on Australian society. “We’ve got too many doctors and pharmacists!”

Before the Fall of Saigon, fewer than 2000 people of Vietnamese descent lived in Australia. Today, the number exceeds 300,000 and Vietnamese is the fourth most commonly spoken language. A spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said “deep people-to-people links” supported relations between Australia and Vietnam; the Whitlam government formally established relations with the communist north in 1973 in parallel to the diplomatic mission in the south.

“The Australia-Vietnam relationship has never been stronger,” the spokesperson said. “Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies in the region and a major hub for manufacturing and investment. It is an active player in regional and global affairs, and a key partner for Australia.”

The Bishop of Parramatta, Vincent Long Van Nguyen, says Vietnam today is a long way from an inclusive and just society and this worries members of the diaspora. Haunted by memories of the Tet Offensive in 1968, he recalls his family bundling everything up and fleeing their home north of Saigon in 1975.

“We left our country of birth, but we still have a stake, an interest in the kind of society it is shaping up to be, and unfortunately, for me, Vietnam is still divided,” he said.

After his brief stint on the fishing vessel, Luu was detained at the home of the trawler captain near the Thai port of Samut Sakhon. Within a week, he had talked a policeman into taking him to Bangkok and finding the nearest telex machine. “I sent a cable … I said, ‘I survived, and I’m in Thailand.’”

Luu flew to Sydney and after reuniting with his family was invited to Parliament House for tea with Kim Beazley snr, then the education minister.

“The first words that he said to me will stay with me forever,” Luu says. “He shook my hand and said, ‘Quang, welcome home.’ It’s so moving. I was then a refugee, not a diplomat any more.”

The Fraser government reversed the Whitlam-era policy of not accepting Vietnamese refugees, and an era of multiculturalism began. A long-time advocate for refugee rights and for 16 years the head of SBS radio, Luu is proud that his adopted country has accepted him but credits the success of multiculturalism to those who worked hard to fit in.

“Had the Vietnamese settlement failed then I would not think that multiculturalism would have continued,” Luu says. “The fact that multiculturalism was strengthened was because of the successful settlement of Vietnamese in Australia.”

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Al Chi Hoang has not been back to Vietnam in the 42 years since he fled, but it has never left him. Family members born in the north were killed as they fled south in 1954 when the country was torn in two. Later he was drafted into the Army of the Republic of Vietnam for “the most controversial war in the last century”.

At 19, dreams of honing his English skills and becoming a teacher were on hold, and he was taught to be an officer. Australian troops were withdrawing in 1972, just as Hoang graduated as a second lieutenant and was choppered into a 66-day siege at An Loc.

One night he was shot in the leg. He later received a wound to the stomach.

“That’s the reason why I lived,” he figures, as he was given rare permission to be evacuated from the front. “If I stayed back I’m not sure I’d be able to talk to you now.”

By April 1975, he was leading a platoon about 50 kilometres outside Saigon and preparing for his next job at the military language school: “We did not think we were going to lose.”

Al Chi Hoang with a portrait of himself as a young man in the South Vietnamese army.Credit: Kate Geraghty

On April 30, he inspected the troops and went about the day as usual until he received a call shortly after noon from the bodyguard of his commanding general. The general was among several who killed themselves as the southern capital had been overrun.

Hoang and his men tried to fight on and, with their wives, took refuge in a Catholic Church overnight. As they prepared for battle the following day, a young priest intervened: “Listen, lieutenant, they’ve all surrendered.”

The platoon members discarded their uniforms and went their own ways. Hoang walked about 30 kilometres south to the home of his aunt, who had become rich supplying bars but whose fortunes changed dramatically under communist rule. “It was terrible, no life. They controlled everything.”

Unable to escape, Hoang spent the next seven years rotating through re-education camps including a total of two years in solitary confinement. “And I challenged them: ‘If you are doing good then you don’t have to educate me.’” He never stopped arguing, even as his weight plunged to about 40 kilograms and his two daily spoonfuls of rice included pebbles.

His ordeal came to a sudden end when the Reagan administration reached a deal to resettle up to 100,000 prisoners. He was released in August 1982, slipped supervision and made his way by boat to a camp in Malaysia. Seven months there gave him “a lot of time to think”.

He thought of the parents and siblings and nephews killed, not only in the war but at sea trying to escape; a sister had made it to Australia and a nephew was born in Singapore. He thought of how, in the chaos before the collapse, a girlfriend had taken him to a fortune-teller who said he would achieve his dream “in a very far, very distant place in your midlife”. He thought of how the US had abandoned South Vietnam and his fellow soldiers.

He admits he was bitter. “I didn’t hate them, I never hated them, but I thought the way they handled Vietnam was wrong, definitely wrong,” he says. “I thought they knew that too, but whether they learnt their lesson or not I’m not sure: under Trump I don’t know.”

He was determined to reach Australia. When he saw a US officer processing refugees, he made sure his papers were stamped “denied” so he could reach the country of his choice.

Salty winter air greeted him at the Endeavour hostel in South Coogee in July 1983. A single man with English skills, he picked up odd jobs.

One day, while absorbed in The Sydney Morning Herald, a colleague suggested he should return to study. He finished law school and became a solicitor as he neared 50; it coincided with the need for an operation. “Even my wife said, ‘You’re nearly finished.’”

Memorabilia in Al Chi Hoang’s home commemorates his service in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Now aged “towards 73” and surrounded by the evidence of the life he built – piles of work, books on the war, mementos of travel and the toys and debris that come with a grandchild – Hoang skips quickly from subject to subject as if lingering on one thought is too difficult. He does emphasise a desire for democracy in Vietnam, saying it is why he has never returned.

“We always choose freedom.”

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Diana Nguyen grew up as cultures clashed.

Born in Melbourne in 1985, she is the eldest daughter of refugees who met at the Enterprise hostel in Springvale. In primary school she witnessed the drug epidemic that gripped the Vietnamese Australian community. At nine, her parents split, and she was roped into helping raise her younger sisters. As a teenager, she was on the receiving end of disappointment and anger from her mother, Huong.

“How dare you not listen to me, I came here by boat,” was a common complaint by Huong, who was not alone in having difficulty adjusting to Australian life.

Bishop Vincent describes his 16 months in a Malaysian refugee camp as traumatic and says beginning a new life in a strange country was harrowing.

“You came totally unprepared and in a state of extreme vulnerability, if you like, with no family network, no preparation, training, economic means etc,” he said. “Plus Australia was not yet as ethnically diverse as it is today. I think we came in the shadow of the White Australia policy.”

It was in Vietnam on a family holiday, when Diana Nguyen was in her mid-twenties, that mother and daughter began to better understand each other. They were packing to leave My Tho, in the Mekong Delta, when Huong opened up about her decision to flee.

During the war, Huong was on the ground as a social worker with Unicef, an educated woman who understood freedom. She knew there was a better life to be had and took to the sea even knowing there was privation and the risk of death ahead.

Diana reflects: “I felt like, ‘Wow, mum, why didn’t you tell me this earlier, in my teenage years, so I wasn’t a shit teenager?’”

Comedian, actress and writer Diana Nguyen says the Vietnamese community has become integral to multicultural Australia.Credit: Wayne Taylor

She laughs that she continues to fall short of her mother’s expectation that “I should get a nine-to-five job so that I can have a child”, but she is much more forgiving after realising her mother’s sacrifices and struggles. “I can’t fault my mum for loving the way she did.”

She and her two sisters recorded their mother’s story properly, filming the kind of oral history the Vietnamese Museum of Australia will seek to preserve when it opens in Melbourne’s west. At the museum’s groundbreaking ceremony last month, she was struck by the diversity of faces in the crowd.

“We are Australian, we are Vietnamese Australian, we are no longer the outsider. Unfortunately, any cohort or group that comes to Australia is classified as the outsider until they’ve done the hard yards. I think we’ve done the hard yards and we are absolutely in the psyche now, we’re inside,” she says.

“I’m just very excited for the future and the next generation of Vietnamese Australians who are going to make their mark on this world.”

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