The Kylu, nee Skyluck

[Randy W]

from the SCMP, about Chinese-Vietnamese boatpeople after the fall of Saigon

 

An interesting but lengthy story for anyone who cares to read it. You'll need to scroll past a graphic which illustrates its journey from Jan. 24 to Feb. 7, 1979.

Skyluck, the ship that smuggled 2,600 boatpeople to Hong Kong – and freedom

 

With the Skyluck’s engines immobilised (Hong Kong Marine Police having removed the ship’s fuel pumps), the 105-metre vessel and its increasingly frustrated passengers had been anchored in the West Lamma Channel, between the islands of Lamma and Cheung Chau, for months. Finally, believing they had been abandoned by Hong Kong and the international community, and in a do-or-die move arising from utter despair, the refugees had severed the Skyluck’s two anchor chains – as a storm approached – and now, under a bruised sky, buffeted by strong winds, and pushed and pulled by fierce currents, the colossal ship was loose and out of control.

Police launches and salvage tugs were rushed to the scene, scrambling to get lines to the stricken vessel, but their crews were pelted from the Skyluck with bottles, cans and flaming Molotov cocktails. At the top of the ship’s gangplank, one refugee waved an axe to keep the police at bay.

Less than two hours later, the Skyluck’s portside flank smashed into rocks at the north-western tip of Lamma, where, at the mercy of heavy swells and grinding on bare granite, it began taking in water. While the younger and fitter refugees shimmied down rope ladders and cargo nets to run for the hills, many of the elderly and very young waited on board, or huddled by the water’s edge, tired, forlorn and wretched in the rain.

The Skyluck’s journey had come to an end. Those of its passengers had just begun.

 

. . .

 

On April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon, the capital city of South Vietnam, to the communist North, the long Vietnam war came to an end. The following year, Saigon would be renamed Ho Chi Minh City, in honour of the North’s late revolutionary leader.

With the country soon to be officially unified under the Communist Party of Vietnam, the bloody revenge against the people of the South (that many had anticipated) did not materialise. Once the dust of conflict had settled, however, as many as 300,000 people, especially those associated with the southern government and military, were sent to re-education camps to be “reformed” through hard labour and political indoctrination.

A further million, mostly city dwellers, were dispatched to “new economic zones”, essentially primitive agricultural communes where, if they were to survive, they would have to clear malaria-infested jungle and try to grow crops. In 1976, French journalist Jean Lacouture described one zone he visited as “a place one comes to only if the alternative to it would be death”.

. . .

By 1978, however, the trickle had become a flood (at its height, in 1979, more than the total number of refugees that arrived in Hong Kong in 1975 landed in the city in a single day). This was largely due to the forced socialist remoulding of industry and harassment of Vietnam’s ethnically Chinese population, who had historically dominated commerce, especially in the South. In March 1978, “all trade and business operations of bourgeois trades­men” were abolished in Vietnam, and tens of thousands of private enterprises were shut down.

Completing the perfect storm, tensions were rising on the Vietnam-China border throughout 1978 (resulting in China’s invasion the following year), the Vietnamese government increasingly viewing the country’s ethnic Chinese as potential fifth columnists and a threat to national security.

 

 

 

1979 photo of the Skyluck sinking months after the refugees cut the anchor chain and crashing onto Lamma Island.