Journalist Thuy Thanh Vu, 38, works tirelessly to help other Vietnamese refugees. Vu and her family escaped from Vietnam in 1979, beginning a harrowing journey by boat that landed them in the hands of pirates. That led to her work to bring the plight of the boat people to the attention of the world. Last year, she received the 21st Century Woman Award from National Organization for Women and the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp for her efforts. The mother of four daughters, Vu is a reporter for the San Diego Union. She and her husband, Duong Phuc, editor of a Vietnamese newspaper in San Diego, are working on a book and screen play about their family history. Vu talked about her escape and her adjustment to a new culture with freelance writer Norma Libman.
I was working as a war correspondent covering the war in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1970 and 1971, when I was only 20 years old. I met my husband at the front line. He was a war correspondent also, and I think he was the best of all the Vietnamese war correspondents. We met in 1972 and we were married in 1974.
My life changed quite a bit after I got married. Traditionally, if the man can support the wife, then the wife is not supposed to work. So I quit my job after I married. My husband is from a very traditional family. It didn`t bother me at first because I had been working a lot. I was the first woman in my own family who had had an outside job, and I`d had a lot of experiences in the four years before I got married. So I thought it would be a good time to relax and enjoy myself.
But after a while I really missed work. I missed the traveling. So I came back to work six months after the marriage. My husband and I didn`t work together at that point because he was drafted, as were most of the men during the war. He became a lieutenant in the army. He was the chief administrator of the Vietnamese army radio station.
I had a baby, and at that point my whole family began leaving Vietnam. Everybody left while I was in the hospital, which was really tough. My parents were the last to leave, and we decided to escape with them-by boat. This was one week after the Communists took over.
My husband and I and the baby and my parents got on a boat. We hoped that we would be picked up by the American 7th Fleet, which was expected to be along the coast of South Vietnam. We spent three days at sea and we didn`t run into any American ships.
My baby got really sick. My husband and I decided to go back because we were afraid that our baby would die if we continued much longer. So the three of us transferred to a fishing boat that we met on the way and we came back to Vietnam. My parents were picked up by an American ship just three hours after we left them.
A month and a half after we came back my husband, because he was an officer in the army, was put in a re-education camp. This is a nice name for a communist jail. I was still on maternity leave at that time so I escaped that. I was working on the Voice of Freedom, which was a radio station funded by the United States. I moved to my parents` old house, where nobody knew about my work.
My husband was in jail for two years. For the first year I didn`t know where he was. They kept transferring him from one place to the other, and he was not allowed to write home. So I was always chasing after his whereabouts. Finally, in 1977, we decided that he should escape because there had been no trial, no court, no sentence. We didn`t know how long he would be kept there. During the second year I was able to communicate with him because I kept following him, and I was able to contact him while he was on his way to the jungle to do hard labor.
I was disguised as a country farmer. The farmers had pity for the prisoners and would give them food and cigarettes as they passed by. So I put a message in a cigarette and gave it to him, and that`s how we communicated with each other, though he was not able to respond much.
The plot failed and I was arrested. Then my husband was able to escape on his own 10 days later. The guards told me that he escaped, but I didn`t believe them. I thought that they may have executed him. A lot of people were being executed. Two months later they released me, and only then did I believe that my husband had escaped. Because I knew they were going to use me to capture him.
After I was released, I contacted my best friend and I found out that my husband had contacted her also, and she had helped him go into hiding. She also helped me to hide. My husband and I weren`t really together, because it wasn`t safe for anybody to keep both of us, but we were able to be together at times. We lived like this for two years and during that time we had another baby. Also during that time we were always trying to leave Vietnam.
We had a group of friends who were former journalists, mostly women whose husbands were also in jails. They helped us with the escape plans; we made 20 attempts to escape, each time with different identities so they could never connect us with out past attempts. Each time, we failed. Once we were on a boat that drifted for 15 days and finally drifted back to Vietnam.
That was a very difficult time in my life-living without knowing what tomorrow would be like. I ask myself how I was able to deal with that, and I don`t know. You never know what you can do when you have no other choice. But every night I went to sleep not knowing if things would be the same tomorrow. Finally, at the end of 1979, we got on a boat and we were able to leave Vietnam. Our boat engine died after two days and we drifted for 10 days in the Gulf of Thailand and we were captured by pirates. They were actually Thai fishermen who had become professional robbers.
At that time Thailand did not want the Vietnamese refugees. And we didn`t want to go there either because we knew that the government didn`t want us and that there was piracy there. We wanted to go to Malaysia, but because the boat engine died we drifted to Thailand. The wind always blows you in the direction of the Gulf of Thailand.
These pirates robbed us and held us for 21 days on a deserted island in the gulf. There were 81 people on my boat, but during the 21 days we were on the island, four other boats were also towed there, so we were up to 157 people.
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They held us there just to rape the women and to have the time to rob us totally. Some people left Vietnam with all their possessions. They changed them to dollars and diamonds and they hid them, sometimes in their bodies or their shirt buttons, and all of that. So it takes a lot of time to find everything.
The pirates destroyed our boat and stole the engine. They came back every night to rape the women. I was able to hide on top of the mountain, clinging to the side of the cliffs. My husband helped me and two other women find a place that looked like it was too difficult for a woman to get to, and that`s what saved us. I was one of the very few women who was able to escape being raped.
There were 16 people killed. The pirates would come back only at night, because they were fishing during the day. On some stormy days when they couldn`t fish they would stay on the island all day. At one point my husband said he could count up to 50 boats, which would have 8 to 12 people on each one. So that was almost 600 people. It was a two-square mile island-600 people hunting 157 people on a tiny island, all at the same time.
My husband had to watch the children and bring us food whenever he could, when the pirates weren`t watching him. We had one bowl of rice per person. Just enough to keep us alive.
It was just like a nightmare. Sometimes I still wake up in the night and I think, did that really happen to me? In the 20th Century? It`s just impossible. But I was among the very lucky ones. So I made a vow to myself during those days of hiding that if I survived, the first thing I would do would be to tell all my foreign correspondent friends about what happened.
We were rescued when a Canadian oil company helicopter flew over the island and saw us and reported it to the United Nations. We were brought to a refugee camp in Thailand and we stayed there for a year. Usually it would take only three months to be emigrated to the United States, but because we accused the pirates and took them to court we had to stay to be witnesses. It was the first trial ever of the pirates in a Thai court.
After they were through with us as witnesses we were allowed to leave, although we didn`t know the outcome of the trial. Two years later we learned that the pirates had been given sentences of two years, but were let out right away. But because of the trial and an open letter my husband and I wrote to our foreign journalist friends, we started a whole new worldwide awareness about the piracy.
When we came to the United States we stayed first with my parents in Dallas, Tex. But we couldn`t find any jobs there with our backgrounds. After a few months we moved to San Diego, where we had a friend who had shared all our problems in Vietnam.
My first job was with a community college in San Diego as an instructional aid. And then my husband and I got jobs with the University of California at San Diego in a program for refugees and we worked there for two years. At the same time I worked as a mental health counselor for Vietnamese. We both worked two jobs at the time.
I joined the San Diego Union in 1985. I realized that I was so helpless in the counseling field. I couldn`t solve any of the problems. So I thought of going back to journalism. In journalism you just need to present the problem; you don`t have to solve it.
The Boat People SOS Committee was formed in 1980, and at first we just gave emotional support to the boat people. But then in 1985 we started getting financial support from the Vietnamese community all over the world, and we began to send rescue ships to the South China Sea to pick up the people.
My husband went on the first trip, in 1986, and last year I went. It felt like finishing something. I`d been on the South China Sea a lot, but only in very hard times, trying to escape and being ignored by all those international commercial ships. It`s a terrible feeling when you`re starving and you know you`re dying, and so many ships pass by and they just ignore you. There was even a point when we were about to burn our boat to force them to rescue us.
I always dreamed about going back there in a different position. Last year I got to do that with the crew from ABC`s ”20/20” program. I was flying in a helicopter just to look for boat people, and I had once been a person who was abandoned by others.
It really fulfilled a dream of my life. And it solved a lot of my emotional problems. Now I have some good memories about that place.
I think the hardest challenge I`ve ever faced, even in comparison with the ones I faced in Vietnam and at sea, is the one I face now in trying to balance my family life and my professional life.
Women have to look at the price of any achievement they get and weigh it to see if it`s worth it. Your husband is the first person who needs to give you support before you can do these things.
It is even more difficult for us as Vietnamese women because of having all the dreams and all the goals as well. We dream of going back to Vietnam some day when there are no communists there. That dream seems to be farther and farther away. Also, we have to adapt to the new life and try to be successful in our new life, at the same time trying to retain our old identity and our old culture and tradition, and apply that to the children.
It`s very hard. I feel so sorry seeing the chldren caught between the two cultures. That`s very difficult but then that`s the price of freedom. And it`s worth it. No price would be too high for freedom.
Because we`re in the same profession, my husband and I understand each other`s problems. And we`re really best friends. But the responsibilty of being each other`s spouse sometimes require us to stop one another from going beyond the limit. And it`s harder for him because it seems like I get more attention and that`s another dilemma. Especially coming from a country like ours. But I guess it`s the same here. He feels proud but at the same time uncomfortable.
I`m proud of my achievements and happy to have a forum to fulfill my goal of publicizing the plight of the boat people. I feel that since I could have died in Vietnam, my life should now be different and I should be committed to a good cause. That`s always haunting me.
But I also have to do what`s best for my family. Any success that a woman achieves outside the family always brings a problem and sometimes the price is too high.