Special to WorldTribune, April 30, 2025

By Robert Morton, New York Tribune, June 14, 1978

TOKYO — On May 18, the Japanese tanker was sailing through calm seas about 100 miles off the coast of northern Malaysia, when an officer on the bridge sighted a tiny boat in the distance — a fishing boat, he thought.

Checking through his binoculars, he saw a most unusual fishing boat. It appeared to be jam-packed with people, some of whom were standing on the roof and waving frantically.

There were 48 people, to be exact, and they had escaped from Vietnam only eight days before. But now, as they watched this large ship disappear into the horizon, like more than 40 others before it, some said they had lost hope in humanity.

Suddenly, to them miraculously, the huge tanker began to turn around. As it steamed toward them, two of the men dived overboard to meet it. Both had graduated from South Vietnam universities, and one had earned a Ph.D. degree in Europe.

A third man, 33-year-old Vuong Van Huu, climbed on board before the others and pleaded with the captain for his people’s safety. He had worked as an interpreter and photographer for a major American newspaper bureau in Saigon before it had been closed by authorities on April 29, 1975 — the day before the formal, unconditional surrender of the South Vietnam government.

On a ferry boat headed for shore through Tokyo Bay, Vuong and his friends talked about what had happened inside Vietnam during the first three years of the new communist government.

Their perspectives were distinctive in that almost all the adults in this group had college degrees, and some of the young people had been university students. Among the men were three journalists, one lawyer, one pharmacist and professor. But because they had been officers in the South Vietnamese army, they had not been allowed to work, and all had spent time in prison since the communist takeover.

Vuong said they had started planning their escape one year before.

“Because we were educated under the old regime, we knew we had no future,” he said.

Tired of Fear 

“Many of my friends had already been arrested,” he added, “and I was tired of living in fear.”

Almost all “boat people” and other Vietnam refugees who crossed the border into Thailand, agree that life in their homeland got worse rather than better after the end of the war. While there were no large massacres of the kind reported in Cambodia, severe controls were imposed.

Communist authorities halted all newspaper publication, transformed hotels into harsh prisons called “reeducation camps,” registered all private homes and initiated food-rationing programs. The Buddhist temples were closed, and only brief services with no teaching of the Christian doctrine were permitted in Catholic churches.

All these drastic measures were initiated during the new government’s first month — May 1975. Additionally, the communists promptly created large quantities of money and set out to buy everything of value. Prices soared 10-fold, and salaries were slashed.

High-ranking communist officials, including Soviet advisors, have Mercedes Benzes and Peugeots and live in large houses — all paid for by the people, Vuong reported.

Refugees at camps near Tokyo described a time of realization, disillusionment and fear for Vietnamese in both the South and the North. Some recalled that they had welcomed the end of the war, expecting kindness from their conquerors. Such hopes were quickly dashed.

Freedom Was Lost

“Everyone knows now that President Thieu’s government was much more free.” Vuong said. As examples he pointed out that people must fill out hard-to-get licenses to travel from one province to another.

The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, had always been told of the extreme poverty in the South. But as they occupied the defeated but more prosperous nation, they were confronted with the immensity of those lies. “Almost everyone now in Vietnam is anti-communist,” Vuong said flatly.

As for the border war with Cambodia, many Vietnamese expect to be defeated, especially with the increasingly angry Chinese presence on the northern border. The more friendly Soviet Union seems very far away.

China’s denunciations of the Vietnam communists have grown increasingly frequent and venomous during May with the reports that as many as 70,000 Chinese residents of Vietnam had returned to their homeland. Such reports did not mention that Chinese residents have comprised a large percentage of the hundreds of thousands of “boat people” and other refugees from Vietnam searching for new homes in free nations.

Chinese Exodus

Nearly half of one group of “boat people that landed in Japan during the first week of June, for example, were of Chinese origin. The reason for the most recent flood of Chinese refugees from Vietnam, according to refugee reports, is the crackdown by communist authorities on the remnants of capitalism in the heavily Chinese Cholon business district in Saigon.

Ironically, many of these same people had come to Vietnam as refugees fleeing the massacres committed during the early days of the communist Chinese government under Mao Tse-Tung [Zedong].

For most refugees, however, communism is concretely represented only by the fear of the secret police in Vietnam, who, as one man said, “might be your neighbor or your own son.”

One leader of a group of “boat people” who are temporarily living in Japan, said that the people he hadn’t trusted in planning his escape had been those who were succeeding under the new government.

The motto adopted by Vuong’s friends also represents the attitude, he said, of an increasing number of Vietnamese: “We would rather die at sea than live under the communist yoke.”

  ‘Tired of living in fear’: Three years after Saigon fell, well-educated ‘boat people’ told their story, WorldTribune.com