The Journey of Vaan Nguyen

Vietnamese 'boat person' Kien Wong now lives in Haifa and owns Yan Yan, a popular Chinese restaurant. You can read more about the boat people rescued by Israel in 1977 @ the film "The Journey of Vaan Nguyen".

Boat people is a term that usually refers to illegal immigrants or asylum seekers who emigrate in numbers in boats that are sometimes old and crudely made, rendering them unseaworthy and unsafe. The term came into common use during the late 1970s with the mass departure of Vietnamese refugees from Communist-controlled Vietnam, following the Vietnam War.

In April 1975, North Vietnamese totalitarian communists defeated the South Vietnam regime and the United States army. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese secretly fled South Vietnam to escape communist persecution and torture. Many escaped in small, unreliable boats and faced harsh weather and threats from pirates as they were turned away by neighboring local authorities. More and more Vietnamese began escaping. One June 10, 1977, an Israeli cargo ship en route to Japan crossed paths with a boat full of 66 Vietnamese. They were out of food and water, were extremely lost and scared, and their boat was leaking. Their SOS signals had gone ignored by passing East German, Norwegian, Japanese, and Panamanian boats. The Israeli captain and crew immediately offered food and water and decided to bring the passengers on board and transported them to Israel. There, Prime Minister Menachem Begin authorized their Israeli citizenship, comparing their situation to the plight of Jewish refugees seeking a haven during the Holocaust. Following this rescue, between 1977 and 1979, Israel welcomed over three hundred Vietnamese refugees.(source: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

In Israel, the Vietnamese immigrations represent a change in transformation in the Israeli conception, one that saw the Jewish state as the state of the Jews with a Jewish majority. Even though the absorption of hundreds of Vietnamese did not change the political map in Israel, the absorption of the Vietnamese still constituted a change of civil identity in the state of Israel who take in non-Jewish refugees.

The number of Vietnamese people in Israel is estimated as 200. Most of them came to Israel in between 1976-1979, after prime minister Menachem Begin authorized their admission to Israel and granted them political asylum. The Vietnamese people living in Israel are Israeli citizens who also serve in the Israel Defence Forces. Today, the majority of the community lives in the Gush Dan area in the center of Israel(source: wikipedia)



September 21, 2006
Vietnamese Israeli family takes a long trip ‘home’

By Tom Tugend,

In 1977, an Israeli cargo ship nearing Japan spotted a leaking boat crammed with 66 Vietnamese men, women and children out of food and water.

They were among the hundreds of thousands of "boat people," fleeing their war-ravaged country following the end of the Vietnam War. Despite desperate SOS signals, the refugees' distress had been ignored by passing ships from East Germany, Norway, Japan and Panama.

The Israeli ship picked up the weakened passengers and took them back to Israel. There, Prime Minister Menachem Begin authorized their permanent admission to Israel, comparing their plight to that of Europe's Jewish refugees seeking a haven in the 1930s.

What happened to the Vietnamese refugees, and the hundreds that followed them, in "the land of the Jews"?



In one of the opening scenes of the Israeli documentary film "The Journey of Vaan Nguyen" , Hanmoi Nguyen, one of the original refugees, has been in Israel for 25 years. He works hard in a Tel Aviv restaurant, lives modestly, and with his wife is raising five Israel-born, Hebrew-speaking daughters.

The oldest girl, Vaan, is a writer, has served in the army and feels Israeli -- except for her looks. In their classic up-front style, her fellow sabras keep asking her whether her eyes are slanted because she eats so much rice and if she is related to this or that Chinese martial arts star.

In the evenings, the father writes Vietnamese poetry and joins his friends in nostalgic songs about the beautiful land they left behind.

In Vietnam, Hanmoi Nguyen was the son of a wealthy landowner, and he dreams of returning to his village to reclaim the property and settle scores with the communist functionary who kicked him out at gunpoint.

He scrapes together enough money for the trip and returns to a land and a people he hardly recognizes. In a curious parallel to the Holocaust survivors who returned to their homelands to reclaim their old homes, he is met with suspicion and hostility by the new inhabitants and red tape by officials.

Even the hated communist functionary, like the Nazi bully in Germany, is now a nice old man who urges that bygones be bygones.

After a few months, daughter Vaan joins her father to dig for her own roots. She is happy that people on the street look like her, but has trouble negotiating the language and has no patience with the elaborate circumlocutions of social intercourse.

To the natives, Vaan herself has become a foreigner, and she laments, "I am a tourist, I am an Israeli."

The agony of being suspended between two civilizations, without being fully at home in either one, is sensitively, at times heartbreakingly, portrayed, but the film by Israel's Duki Dror (a UCLA alumnus) is not without humor.

One hilarious scene shows the newly arrived boat people being welcomed by an effusive Jewish Agency representative in Hebrew, of which the polite audience doesn't understand a word.

Shortly afterward, an equally enthusiastic integration official tries to teach the refugees a lively Chanukah song.

On the reverse side, the returned father tries to explain Israel to puzzled Vietnamese
(source: http://www.jewishjournal.com/arts/article/vietnamese_israeli_family_takes_a_long_trip_home_20060922/)