Hiding from bombs, pirate encounters: Fall of Saigon 50 years ago triggered terrifying journeys to Manitoba
CBC
Chau Pham can never forget drinking her own urine and watching people lose all hope.
Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe's ears filled with bombs as her family huddled in a mud dugout below their home.
Both women, now prominent Winnipeggers, were born into war. And both experienced terrifying journeys triggered by the end of the Vietnam War 50 years ago, as U.S.-backed governments fell to communist forces.
"The things that I saw, I would never want my own children to go through, ever — any children to go through," said Pham.
On April 30, 1975, South Vietnam's capital, Saigon, fell to North Vietnamese forces, ending the 19-year Vietnam War.
Waves of people fled over the next several years, a migration that became a humanitarian crisis by the late 1970s and early 1980s as close to one million people left not just Vietnam but also neighbouring Cambodia and Laos, where civil wars had ended with communist forces ousting U.S.-backed governments.
They faced perilous routes to reach refugee camps in Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines or Thailand. Boatloads of refugees fell prey to storms and pirates, while people were beset by starvation, dehydration and illness.
Sardined on an overcrowded fishing boat in the South China Sea, Pham was among those who became known as the boat people.
It was 1983. She was five years old and on her own.
Her parents remained in Long Xuyên village, as Pham's newborn brother was too young to make the journey.
WATCH | Two women tell the stories of their terrifying journeys to freedom in Winnipeg:
Pham was awoken by her parents and jewelry sewn into her sweater's lining. After a tearful goodbye from her mom, Pham was set on her dad's motorcycle and, under the cloak of night, taken to a nearby town and the waiting boat.
"He said to me that one day, we will be reunited, but this is the only way for me to have a better future," said Pham, now an emergency physician at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre.
She didn't understand what was happening, "but I knew that I was losing my family."
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