Boat people

Within five minutes’ walk of my London home there are a dozen Vietnamese restaurants.  They cluster together at the southern end of Kingsland Road, all offering broadly the same cuisine, but each with subtle variations to the menu, the décor, and the price.  In the evenings, they are often full, with groups of prospective customers spilling out onto the pavements, forming approximations of queues, waiting for tables to become available.  I sometimes head to one of them for lunch, when they are comparatively quiet, to enjoy catfish in a caramelised sauce, or a chicken curry with coconut milk, and maybe a bottle of Hanoi beer.  The easy availability of good quality Vietnamese food, has always been part of my experience of London life. 

The presence of significant numbers of Vietnamese restaurants in the London Borough of Hackney is partly due to the work of Thanh Vu, who died two years ago.  During the border war between Vietnam and China in 1979, he fled by boat with one of his daughters.  They were picked up by a British ship after two weeks at sea, and taken to Singapore.  From there, Thanh and his daughter made their way to London, two of the 30,000 Vietnamese refugees (known as the “boat people”) who were accepted by the British government of the day.  Initially they were widely dispersed around the country, a policy designed by the British to avoid the over-concentration of refugees in one area.  Many Vietnamese people, preferred to live closer together, to re-establish family and friendship networks, and to support each other as they adapted to life in a new country. 

In those days, Hackney had a reputation as a place of poverty, crime, failing schools, and ineffective local government.  Property was cheap and there were many empty council flats.  Some of the recent arrivals headed to Hackney and squatted in empty properties, although the local council soon gave them tenancies.  In the early 1980s, it was estimated that around 5,000 Vietnamese people were living in the Borough.  Thanh Vu established An Viet, an advice and support centre, based in Englefield Road, where he organised English language courses, and helped to find school places for children and work for adults.  He also opened a Vietnamese restaurant in the building, and later was elected as a Labour Councillor for the Borough.  Many Vietnamese people worked in the textile trade – clothes manufacturing was a significant employer in east London and in the mid-1980s there were around fifty small factories in Hackney that employed primarily Vietnamese workers – while others set up nail-bars and grocery stores.  At the time I moved to Hackney, in 1991, the boat people were already well-established residents.   

My knowledge of Vietnam and its history is limited.  In 1975, I remember seeing television pictures of the evacuation by helicopter of US Embassy staff from Saigon, and have a clear memory that this event was presented by the British news reports as being a tragedy for Vietnam.  A few years later, American movies told a rather different story, that the war in Vietnam had been a tragedy for many of the US soldiers who had fought there: The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were perhaps the best examples, but I also enjoyed Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), not least because many of the scenes of burned-out warehouses and abandoned buildings, supposedly in Vietnam, were filmed in London’s Docklands, not far from where I then lived.  In my teens and twenties, I listened to the anti-war music of American singers – not only Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, but also Jimmy Cliff and Marvyn Gaye – which described the personal costs of war, but also drew attention to the corruption of politics and public life that had been precipitated by US involvement in the war. 

It was not until the mid-1990s – twenty years after the Vietnam war ended – that I discovered something of the history of French colonialism in Vietnam, the dismal final years captured brilliantly in the film version of Marguerette Dumas’s novel, The Lover (1992), and by listening to the music of Paris based jazz guitarist Nguyên Lê.  Then, I read Boa Ninh’s wonderful novel The Sorrows of War (1994), which delivered a decidedly non-triumphalist account of the war from the perspective of the “winning” side.  It was only at that point I came to realise that many of the “boat people” who had come to Britain were not South Vietnamese trying to escape from the communism of Ho Chi Minh’s followers, but North Vietnamese – such as Thanh Vu – who fled their country because they were ethnically Chinese, and were viewed as potential traitors by Vietnam’s nationalistic government. 

While I had never believed the simple story of brave US soldiers fighting for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, both of whom were betrayed by the incompetence of their own governments, it took a long time for the full complexity of Vietnam’s post-imperial history to start to become clear to me.  In Hackney meanwhile, by the mid-1990s most of the textile factories had closed down, as manufacturing was relocated to lower cost locations in Eastern Europe and South-East Asia.  As a result more restaurants opened up, as Vietnamese residents looked for alternative employment options.  Green Papaya on Mare Street became a particular favourite of mine.

The presence of “boat people” in my part of London has been on my mind this past week, as I read an engaging and well-crafted début novel by Cecile Pin, called Wandering Souls. The story starts in Vietnam in the late 1970s, when Anh – the main character of the story, at this point in her mid-teens – and two of her younger brothers, pack a bag of clothes and head to a nearby port, where they will join a small boat of other refugees heading to Hong Kong.  There they plan to wait for a couple of weeks until their parents and younger siblings join them, after which they will all travel to Connecticut, where a family member has already settled.  This plan does not work out.  Anh and her brothers eventually end up in a council flat in South London, where they make new lives for themselves.  Although their experience as first generation immigrants turns out to be difficult, leading them to abandon many of their early dreams, in due course their children, the second generation, are better able to make successful and happy lives in their parents’ adopted country. 

Anh is my contemporary.  While I was at school studying for A-levels before heading off to university, she was crossing a dangerous ocean in a small boat with two younger brothers, navigating life in refugee camps, learning a new language, heading out to work to pay the bills, cooking and caring for her siblings, trying her best to create a good life for what remained of her family, to achieve something that made sense of the choice that her parents had taken for their children.   One aspect of the book that I enjoyed were the short reflections on aspects of the war in Vietnam, written – as becomes clear – by the narrator of the story, but in a different voice.  These provide some factual content to supplement the fictional narrative, a sharp reminder that the context in which each of us lives out our lives is itself framed by choices made by others, who can determine whether or not things go well for us.  Yes, Anh is my contemporary: but the choices open to her were very different from the options I enjoyed, and the burden of responsibility she was forced to accept as a teenager was far heavier than anything I had to manage at a comparable age. 

The story of the novel was well told and felt truthful to me.  The obstacles faced by immigrants, not just having to master a new language and learning to cope with a different climate and unfamiliar food, but the social and economic barriers to progress at school, at work, and in private life, absorb considerable time and energy: they wear people down.  Many years ago, a colleague of mine in Melbourne (like London, a city of many immigrants), observed that first generation immigrants often focus on putting down roots rather than taking risks.  For them, migration was the big risk.  They gravitate to employment that relies on numeracy rather than literacy skills, because they lack confidence in their new language, and they often set up their own businesses, or work in professions as sole practitioners, to maintain some control over their working lives.  Hence, the large number of immigrants running family shops and cafes, but also working as pharmacists, accountants, and in IT.  Their children, the second generation, often feel more at home with the language and society into which they were born, and their dual cultural heritage gives then the confidence to pursue careers in teaching, law, the creative arts and the media.  Cecile Pin captures this inter-generational dynamic very effectively in her novel.

The lingering consequences of the war in Vietnam are no longer in the news.  Other wars in different places have taken centre stage in the media spotlight.  During my lifetime, however, this faraway country, fought over first by the French and then by the Americans, became a major source of global migration.  Some of those who survived the twin threat of storms and pirates, ended up in Hackney, where they have helped to make London a more interesting, and a better-dressed and better-fed city.  Twenty years from now, perhaps my local streets will host plenty of Syrian and Burmese restaurants, or nail-bars and grocery shops run by the Sudanese or the Afghans.  And then, a few years later, British universities and professions will welcome a growing number of recruits from their children: London-born, ambitious, and confident in their right to succeed here.  I hope so.