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Newsletter No.7, May 2023

Updated: May 26

Title: The People- Smuggling Ship

 

It was 44 years ago we were last together. On 26th May 1979 the people-smuggling ship, the Sen On, ran aground in Hong Kong and was in danger of capsizing. Caroline (left), then a nine-year-old Vietnamese refugee, in fear of her life, jumped over the side and into the sea. She couldn’t swim. There were 1,433 refugees from South Vietnam crammed into the hold of the rotting freighter. Cang Dang (on the right of this photo) was one of them.

He was a former soldier in the ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army, and had been in hiding since the fall of Saigon four years before. He and his wife, Yen, were escaping from indefinite detention and forced ideological training. On that day in Hong Kong, in 1979, I and my colleagues of the Royal Hong Kong Marine Police managed to get all 1,433 refugees safely off the ship. Caroline, too, was rescued from the sea. Yesterday in Los Angeles the four of us met up once more for the first time in 44 years.





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