The wooden fishing boat that took Vu Chi Co to China is now part of a maritime graveyard in this dilapidated settlement of ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam.
This is an especially depressing little place, where both people and boats have been dumped by Chinese authorities after fleeing an expected massacre-a bloodbath in Vietnam created by rumors but which never occurred.
Vu and 13,000 other refugees live in a cluster of huts in Qiao Gang, which they call their ”overseas village” on the Gulf of Tonkin. They are among a reported 500,000 ethnic Chinese who fled Vietnam, their homeland for generations, in 1979 just before Chinese troops attacked in retaliation for Hanoi`s invasion of Cambodia.
Vietnam and China restored full diplomatic relations in November, and both Beijing and Hanoi publicly support voluntary repatriation. But neither is eager to burden its economy with poor refugees and thus hasn`t moved to facilitate it.
”If Vietnam welcomes its ethnic Chinese, most of us would go back,”
said Vu, 34. ”There is no room for us here, we`re not even allowed to fish. Nobody wants us. We`re simply tolerated as overseas Chinese, the kind with no money.”
Not all refugees agree.
”I went back to Vietnam for a few days and found it poorer than China. For the time being I`m staying here,” said Fu Wang Giang, 46. He now heads a work brigade at a farm outside the provincial capital of Nanning.
The farm, part of a zone known as the Overseas Chinese Investment Area, grows tea, citrus fruit and sugar cane with refugee labor. Project chief Chan Chang Yi also has ambitious plans for a resort and to employ the refugees to serve their well-heeled compatriots from overseas.
Chan says 15 percent of the 12,000 workers on his farm have applied to be transferred to other areas in China. ”None of the applications have been approved yet,” Chan said.
There are no transfer applications available in Qiao Gang, where damaged trawlers rot in the shallow harbor and men have the dull-eyed look of the permanently unemployed.
The refugees live mostly on United Nations charity. To earn a few feng
(cents) a day, the men spread shrimp brought in by other fishermen across a nearby road and separate out the sea worms. The women try to sell fruit and vegetables at a local market.
A few miles up the barren coast, in Beihai, the Pearl Co. produces a ton of cultured pearls a year and exports 20 percent of them as powdered pearl medicine, a Chinese remedy for intestinal ailments, eye diseases, mouth ulcers and internal infections.
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Qiao Gang has little hope for such prosperity.
After 13 years in China, Vu and her family of eight, including a 77-year- old grandfather, still live in one room. In Beihai, modern China has built four-star hotels.
”We often ask ourselves today, `Why did we run away?` ” Vu said. ”The Vietnamese were not persecuting us. But all the other Chinese kept talking about arrests, rape, torture and death. We infected each other with fear.”
Added Fu Wang: ”Someone started the rumor that the Vietnamese were going to kill us all. It spread like wildfire, and in the end we all just panicked and ran.”