Inspired Magazine

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
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