The Vietnamese people have a tradition of sticking to the place where their ancestors are buried. The Vietnamese people, especially those living in the northern rural village some 70 years ago, are known for being conservative and have no tradition of leaving to seek economic opportunities elsewhere. Many people never left their village. However, after the signing of the Geneva Accords that split the country in two along the 17th parallel, migration to South Vietnam became a powerful political movement attracting millions of people in North Vietnam. Countless people in the countryside then decided to leave their ancestors’ graves, rice fields and houses to flock to Hai Phong, Hanoi in order to find the way to the South. Although the North Vietnamese Communists tried to stop them, people still found all kinds of ways to escape the danger of Communism. In Hung Yen and Bac Ninh, many people burned their own villages before leaving.
What was the reason people in the North of all walks of life and all ages decided to leave their birth places? Was it a manifestation of the will to escape shackles of an inhuman regime? So, the first collective migration of 1954 had a profound spiritual value: it was a stern accusation against the Communist regime even though the Communist Party always tried to embellish its own image with deceitful means.
History has shown that the North to South migrants made a wise decision. South of the 17th parallel, these migrants succeeded in rebuilding their lives in an atmosphere of democratic freedom. Contrastingly, on the other side of Ben Hai River, under the blood flag, the barbaric tragedies of the land reforms, of Nhan Van Giai Pham terrified the survivors and tamed the people, making the simple North Vietnamese docile servants to the Communist Party.
Twenty years later, tragedy struck again. In April 1975, the Vietnamese Communists violated the Paris Peace Accords and overran South Vietnam. The Vietnamese people left again, mostly in horrible conditions, especially in the late 1970s and the early 1980s when the Communists accelerated their oppression with re-education and reform programs, robbing the people of their properties by moving them to the New Economy region and by attacking private business and personal wealth.
The exodus continued, but grew greater, more constant, and especially more terrifying and tragic. The word “Freedom” had become much more expensive. Most of those navigations across the East Sea were made by ships as fragile as the lives of boat people. Despite of dangers lurking, the wave of people crossing the sea, or escaping through the jungle, was growing rapidly, shocking the whole world. The message about the value put on Freedom by Vietnamese people fleeing via land or boat is compelling because it was written with the lives of more than 500,000 victims buried in the sea and the deep jungle, with the humiliating horrors of tens of thousands women raped by Thai pirates and with the grief of countless separated families. The unlimited value of Freedom was also affirmed through the mighty burning fire and the hanging noose experienced by those who were repatriated by force. Freedom or Death! That was the indomitable will, held high by the ill-fated as they fell.
Since 1996, the boat people tragedy seems to have calmed down after the United Nations’ decision to resettle people in refugee camps. In fact, the emigration is still quietly going on to this day and is no less tragic: hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese girls are resigned to marrying old and handicapped husbands in foreign countries, countless young Vietnamese men accept to work as hired labor in harsh circumstances in Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan and the Middle East, in order to escape the Communist “paradise”.
Freedom, Freedom! I pay with tears.
Freedom, Freedom! You pay with blood and bones.
Freedom, Freedom! You pay with your life.
Because of the word Freedom! We live our lives in exile (Author: Nam Loc)
To the second and third generations of Vietnamese refugees: You are on the threshold of 2021. Having left Vietnam with empty hands and deeply wounded souls, but with a progressive and diligent spirit, Vietnamese refugees have made significant contributions to their countries of residence and many of their descendants have been having achievements that enhance the reputation of Vietnamese overseas.
The world has always had important and traumatic events for decades. However, the Vietnamese boat people event is still viewed as the greatest and most tragic exodus in modern history. This is a disgrace for the Vietnamese Communists as all of humanity has witnessed the Vietnamese people voting with their own lives.
That is why the Vietnamese communists have tried to hide their crimes with all kinds of ruse. They attempted to trivialize and smear the sacred meaning of this mass emigration. Also, the passage of time has helped them to rewrite history. Just by reading a few newspapers in Vietnam, we will quickly find that the regime’s writers call the refugees economic beggars. “It is possible to summarize the basic reasons for them to leave the country as follows: infection by the venom of psychological war on ‘paradise life abroad’, family conflicts, disappointments in love, difficulties in life, keeping up with friends … ” (An Ninh Gioi, Khong Minh Du).
By distorting information, the Vietnamese communists have deliberately tried to bury the heroic and tragic past of boat people although many of these people are still alive. More heartbreakingly, some overseas Vietnamese associations and some people who have followed their parents abroad but, for various reasons believed in the policy of deceitful reconciliation of the Communist Vietnam, have forgotten about the crimes of the communists and avoided the yellow flag of the Republic of Vietnam that once defended their families.
For local people, the Vietnamese community is an industrious and gentle immigrant population. Fewer and fewer people know us as freedom loving Vietnamese who are refugees from the communists. Our children and grandchildren know more or less about our asylum seeking past, but most of them do not have a clear understanding of the spiritual values of the free Vietnamese. In addition, many of them still wonder as to why in a multicultural city like Montréal, where each ethnic group has a specific landmark: Chinese have Chinatown, Italians have Petite Italie, Jews have a major hospital and other well-known activities, the Vietnamese, despite their sizeable number, do not really have a cultural fulcrum so that they can be proud of their ethnic heritage.
Our elder generation has made great efforts to protect our refugee identity as well as the legitimacy of the Republic of Vietnam. But most people of the first generation are now old and weak, and some have passed away. We belong to the next generation and will also follow them. Can the tragic deaths of more than 500,000 victims and the hopelessly horrifying lives of those kidnapped by pirates be forgotten in the indifferent passage of time? Can the history page of the boat people be turned so that the third generation will no longer know about the ancestral origins? Will the national yellow flag and the crimes of the Vietnamese communists be forgotten while the whole world is still reminded of the Holocaust of the Nazis as an unforgettable lesson? Whose responsibility is it when the word Vietnam will only be a distant memory of our children and grandchildren?
These are the questions that plague our conscience.
And the intention to follow in the footsteps of the pioneering cities and to build monuments of boat people began to sprout in our minds. By 2020, we have begun concrete efforts to advocate for the Boat People Monument project through soliciting signatures of the residents of the Town of Mount Royal (also called garden city), sending a petition to and meeting with the Town mayor and councilors.
We expect the Boat People Monument at the garden city to be:
- A symbol of commemoration and justice for those people who died in their quest for freedom. (It was through their tragic deaths that the world has opened its arms to us. One of the unlucky people, Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Dung at the Sungei Besi camp in Malaysia, wrote the following fateful lines before committing suicide on May 3, 1993 because of being forced to repatriate: “I died not out of despair, but because I wanted to give hope and life to many others.”)
- A symbol of the Vietnamese people’s hunger for Freedom and Democracy.
- A symbol of the courage and the sacrifice of our parents.
- A symbol for the integration and the success of the succeeding generations.
- A symbol for the maturity and the strength of the Vietnamese Refugee Community
- A symbol of the will to protect the truth of the history of the Vietnamese refugees, and especially the will to defend the Republic of Vietnam ideal and to honor its yellow flag.
The monument is also a testimony of our gratitude to the Canadian and the Quebec societies for having generously accepted us and given us a new homeland.
We believe that together with the statue of Soldier and the statue of the late President Ngo Dinh Diem at Le Repos St Francois d’Assise cemetery, the Monument of Boat People, through the image of a mother, dressed in ao dai, who sits with her teenage son to review history, will make an important contribution to preserving the history and culture of the Vietnamese refugees.
We are fortunate to have the approval of the Town of Mount Royal to build a monument in the city park, so the cost of the project is greatly reduced. This is a rare opportunity that we think we must seize. If this project cannot be implemented due to disagreements, apathy, lack of funding, etc., we fear that there would be no other opportunity. The noble ideals of Freedom of our father’s generation will disappear without leaving a trace…
May the spirit of our nation founding fathers bless us! The nationalist Vietnamese will overcome all the differences and work together to carry out the monument project in order to leave an imprint of our roots to future generations.
We sincerely thank the sponsors for their quick financial and other contributions at the very beginning when the organizers are still in the phase of preparing documents and data to present the project to all our fellow countrymen. Your interest and gesture have been a great encouragement to us.
Please visit Hưng Viet’s website for updated news about the Boat People and Gratitude to Canada Monument project. (hung-viet-vhr.org/duantuongdai)
We will succeed!
We hope to be in touch with you again soon and wish you all the best.
Montréal, December, 2020
Cấn Thị Bích Ngọc
Translated by Cấn Dũng Tiến
