Carina Hoang Carina Hoang fled South Vietnam in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, endured a traumatic escape from which she barely survived, and now returns to the Indonesian isles to which she once escaped on an annual pilgrimage to uncover the lost graves of other Vietnamese refugees. Guided by faith, spiritual belief and the knowledge it was so nearly her laying in an abandoned grave, her efforts are bringing desperately awaited relief to families yearning to give a proper burial to long-dead loved ones.
It’s 1998 and Carina Hoang has returned to the place of her nightmares. She thrashes through the jungle, the guide hacking through the fortress of trees with a machete to reveal long-forgotten graves. These overgrown tombs mark the bodies of Vietnamese refugees who fled in their hundreds of thousands after the Vietnam War. Eventually she finds it – the grave of her cousin who died here nearly 20 years before. News of the find spreads. Pleas from other Vietnamese families trickle in. Can Carina help find the graves of their loved ones? Now, each year, Carina returns to tiny, remote and little-known Indonesian isles to search for more graves. She’s made seven trips, discovered more than 100 graves and taken 20 families to the final resting place of their loved ones. She does it out of her own pocket, in her own time. Why does she return to this place of the dead? Because she was very nearly one of them. FEAR Rewind to 1975 and 12-year-old Carina’s life had turned upside down. Her dad, a former police chief in South Vietnam, had disappeared. Some people whispered that he’d killed himself. Others said the communists had captured or killed him. Still others said he’d escaped. His military involvement during the war meant he was a wanted man by the communist government. Panicked, Carina’s mum destroyed all evidence of their former lives. She amassed everything – marriage and birth certificates, photos, papers and burned them. She gathered all her treasures, all the gold this once-comfortable family had accumulated, and hid it in jars and toys. They lived in fear that each knock on the door was a communist coming to take them to a South Vietnamese ‘re-education camp’ for political prisoners. They knew there’d be no trial, no sentence. They were forbidden from working or passing their school tests, yet selling on the black market was illegal. They knew hundreds of thousands of city people were being rounded up by the truckload and dumped in ‘new economic zones’ – uncultivated fields with no shelter, no food – and told to forge a life for themselves. Then, in 1978, the war with Cambodia broke out. Carina’s mum knew her children would be drafted as soon as they reached 16 years. Carina’s mum first organised for Carina’s older sister and younger brother to escape – they fled for safety in Malaysia aboard a small fishing boat where they hid in a hull packed with ice. Several months later it was Carina’s turn. She was 15 years old and would have to take her 11-year-old brother and 10-year-old sister with her. Carina’s mum would remain behind with her two youngest children. ESCAPE ATTEMPTS First, Carina attempted to flee on the same boat on which her siblings had escaped earlier, but someone tipped off the police and the boat left without Carina. Next Carina and her younger siblings joined a group of escapees who fled via train, on foot and in a truck, dodging military checkpoints, to a secret beach where they waited for small taxi boats to ferry them to a bigger vessel. But when the taxi boat did not return after a second group had been transported they knew something had gone wrong. They fled into the forest but police caught most of them. Carina and her siblings were among the few who escaped. By January 1979, they were ready to try again. But they’d been lied to – after handing over her mother’s gold to the people smugglers, Carina discovered the boat was being rebuilt and not ready for the journey. Carina was stuck hiding in the country, hundreds of kilometres away from her family. “I could not contact my mum, I could not go home, could not leave the house, and my mum did not know where to find me,” she says. “Almost daily, I saw lines of escapees who were led by policemen, walked by the house with their hands tied behind their back. I remembered thinking it would only be a matter of time [before I was] one of them.” A month later, Carina was returned to her mother, the gold replaced with nothing but a set of earrings. ESCAPE Ever resourceful, Carina’s increasingly desperate mother wrangled another escape opportunity. Carina and her siblings would pose as Chinese Vietnamese who were being exiled from the country. In May 1979, a by then 16-year-old Carina and her younger brother and sister boarded a 25-by-five-metre wooden boat, along with 373 others, including 75 children. The boat operators forced the refugees into the bowels of the boat where they’d remain for seven days. The first night a storm struck and the terrified passengers became violently ill. With no room to lie down, it wasn’t long before they were covered in vomit, urine and faeces. After recovering from the storm they were attacked by Thai pirates. They’d heard stories of such attacks – babies thrown overboard, men murdered, women raped – so the women and children rushed to cover themselves with excrement in a bid to deter would-be attackers from approaching them. By the third day the boat approached Malaysia and spirits soared – it seemed freedom was in sight. But Malaysia had just introduced a ‘push back policy’ towards boat people. They’d been instructed to shoot to kill to deter the refugee Opposite page, top Carina at a grave of a Vietnamese refugee on Kuku Island, Indonesia in 2010. Opposite page, bottom Carina’s refugee ID photo on Kuku Island in 1979. CARINA HOANG 53
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