Stories of real life incidents

Nguyen Phan Thuy booked a passage out of Vietnam with her mother, aunt and younger sister. After ten days at sea the boat was stranded and without food or water. They were attacked by pirates, who shot her aunt. An old man's gold teeth were ripped out of his mouth with pliers and a woman's baby was thrown into the sea. The survivors were made to strip and then landed on the beach and their boat was sunk. The women were lined up and Phan and a girl called Lien were selected and taken on board a fishing boat. Over the next three weeks both girls were repeatedly raped. Lien could not stand it and in the end the pirates could not stand her. She was thrown overboard. Phan was sold to a village brothel - "The Paradise Massage Parlour". She became pregnant but the baby was aborted with a bamboo stick. Eventually she escaped and was handed over to the UN.

Source: http://www.vietka.com/Vietnamese_Boat_People/vietnamesesuffering.htm

Impact of the migration

The migration of a large number of individuals from Southeast Asia in the 1980s affected American-Vietnamese relations and offered ascend to new groups of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong Americans in the United States. Known as vessel individuals for getting away Southeast Asia via ocean, the mass migration of a huge number of Southeast Asians  produced a political and philanthropic conflict for the global group, the United States, and Vietnam.

They faced a lot of problems in living in refugee camps and may people got injured and drowned a lost the lives. After reaching the refugee camps people died in stamped and claustrophobia as well, the faced linguistic problems in foreign lands and got discriminated and were not welcomed properly. Other than that it took them time to settle in and deal with the refugee camps and find their way out of their to take a completely fresh start in new countries.

Cause of the migration

In late 1978, Indo-China degraded into war between Vietnam and Kampuchea and China in December 1978, Vietnam attacked Kampuchea while in February 1979, Vietnam attacked Chinese forces in the north. These two conflicts produced a lot of refugees.

How they migrated

Those Vietnamese who took to the ocean in tiny overcrowded ships were dubbed the “boat people.” The survivors sometimes languished for years in refugee camps. Countries like Canada took in the luckier ones. The journey was very dangerous

About the " Vietnamese Boat People"

Vietnamese boat people were mainly the citizens of Vietnam along with some citizens of Laos and Cambodia who were migrating from their homelands to different Asian countries due the Vietnamese war. The war took place in 1955 and went on till 1975 that is almost for 20 years but people kept migrating after that too. The term Vietnamese boat people is only referred to the people who fled to the communist government from the former south, although at the same the citizens from north fled to Hong Kong just are cautious from the government of Hanoi. 

Vietnamese war was the only and the most important cause of the migration. The Vietnam War was a long, costly-armed conflict that caused the communist rule of North Vietnam and its southern partners, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.