hong kong's refugee dilemma
Out of Haiphong they were 182 of them crowded into a shameful boat that had run under sail before the southwest monsoon. For five weeks they had been at sea, and when the voyage came to an end, in the saffron glaze of a summer noonday in Hong Kong, no cheers were raised. None of that - not with the tight grip of sickness and fear on the bodies and souls of these people. It was in the eyes that the fear showed most, eyes that followed the approach of a marine police launch like radar locked in on a target. The warning given by an officer on the launch was but a formality. They were there illegally, he was obliged to say, and must depart Hong Kong waters. That done, he began the process whereby the British crown colony would become the first port of refuge for yet another group of "boat people" from Vietnam. All but one of the 182 were ethnic Chinese. They ranged in age from 70 years to the 3-month-old girl who lay in fitful sleep while her mother whipped the sultry air around the infant's head with a fan. The boat was no more than 60 feet long and 15 feet wide. To raise an arm was to commit an act of rudeness; such was the allocation of space on the boat. For more than a year a massive movement of people had been taking place in Southeast Asia. It included the flight of tens of thousands of people into Thailand from Kampucha (formerly Cambodia) and Laos; countless other thousands continually filter across the frontier from China into Hong Kong. It was in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin; however, that the movement took on high drama, for there it was scored with a terrible mortality. The refugees departing Vietnam put out in decrepit junks and fishing boats with motors that sputtered and spewed oil in fits of outrageous engineering. It is possible that as many as half of them perished at sea. It was a major tragedy, and, more the shame, a tragedy given to the market place. The Chinese fleeing Vietnam had to pay a fee for their chance to joust with death.