Refugees Vietnam

On a ragged dock in the Mississippi Delta, 50-year-old Rick Cao darns the nets of the Miss My Phuong, using both hands and a big toe to sort through a bird's nest of nylon. Soon, he'll shove off again to mine the Gulf of Mexico for shrimp, and he might go weeks without hearing a word of English on his marine radio. The Vietnamese, he explains, "are taking over the gulf." At an office park outside San Jose, 42-year-old Thinh Nguyen folds himself into his Acura after another 15-hour day.

They escaped Vietnam as boys after Saigon fell to the advancing North Vietnamese army in 1975. Separately, the three refugees came to North America, where they would flourish and graduate from elite universities. Today, this trio of activist attorneys donate their spare time as advisors, educators and mediators, moving and shaking Orange County's Vietnamese immigrant community into mainstream America.

Ninety-three Vietnamese boat people arrived in Hanoi on the last United Nations chartered repatriation flight there from Hong Kong. They were part of the last major voluntary repatriation organized by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. An additional 152 people were flown to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. The refugees' saga began during the 1970s in the aftermath of the Vietnam War as thousands sought to flee the country following the Communists' victory over U.S.

The Communists here once viewed them as the enemy--a disgruntled, dispossessed throng of countrymen who had sought refuge in 70 countries, dreaming of the day the Hanoi government would fall and the Vietnam of their memories would be reborn. They had left--more often than not, fled--by boat, by plane and on foot during three of Vietnam's epochal moments: when the French were defeated in 1954, when the Americans were chased out in 1975, when ethnic Chinese here were purged in 1978.

\o7 The saga of the Vietnamese boat people, one of the most tragic examples of human suffering in the region's recent history, has finally come to an end.\f7 --U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Hanoi, August 1997 * "It's over?" Nguyen Van Y asked, incredulous. "Then what am I doing still here? When the French ship picked us up, we thought three, maybe six months in the Philippines, then the United States. That was nine years ago." The noodle shop on Rizal Avenue was crowded, and "Mr.

Huong Nguyen's family had to leave its world, postwar Vietnam, to forge a new life in the United States. Now the UCLA senior has had to stand between two other spheres, torn between her identity as a bisexual and her commitment to the military. On Feb. 1, Nguyen was dropped from the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps, nine months after she wrote to her commander, saying she is gay. (Although she used the term "gay" in her letter, she identifies herself as bisexual.

Several hundred riot troops armed with tear gas, shields and batons poured into a detention center for Vietnamese refugees to end a nightlong hostage drama and round up inmates for forced repatriation. The officers seized the High Island camp after inmates armed with improvised spears, daggers and knives held a guard hostage for 12 hours in a desperate bid to avoid being sent home, officials said. The incident coincided with an announcement by a U.N.

A Malaysian navy ship deporting 317 Vietnamese refugees arrived at Vietnam's southern port of Vung Tau, a local immigration official said. The refugees were the first to be forcibly repatriated from a place other than Hong Kong, which is home to more than half the roughly 35,000 Vietnamese people still living in camps across Asia. The refugees fled their Communist country after the Vietnam War.

For the 36,000 Vietnamese migrants languishing in detention camps around Southeast Asia, a new U.S. plan to resettle qualifying refugees could be their last chance for life in America--or, by some accounts, a trap. On Monday, the U.S. government announced a program aimed at helping to end the long, often bitter odyssey of the thousands of economic and political migrants who fled Indochina and washed up in countries around the region in the years after the Vietnam War.

Authorities transferred 549 Vietnamese refugees to a Hong Kong prison Wednesday pending deportation, denying allegations that the jail would be dangerously overcrowded. "The management of Victoria Prison can actually comfortably accommodate that," Dickie Chan, chief superintendent for prisons, told government radio. "For example, if a cell usually has one fiberglass bed, in order to accommodate them, we will put a double-tier bunk there."