Notebook 3
I changed my object to the movement of refugees after the Vietnam War. I changed my object to this because of how I wanted the Zine to look like. Most of the national contexts are the same for this object. The intersections of this object could be the class of the people who moved to different countries, how these Vietnamese refugees interact with or how they live in that country, and the societal rules that they have to learn in the new country.
Many refugees like my mother in the 1970s to 1980s left Vietnam by boat to go to refugee camps in hopes of leaving the country. Since the 1960’s there were southern Vietnamese communists that were assassinating the political officials of the south Vietnamese government. With all these attacks, it was said that they were merciless meaning civilians were also killed. This made the people in the south who did not side with the government or the North’s ideology of communism want to leave the country to a better place. One of these people happened to be my mother who was in Vietnam during the aftermath of those times. Since the fall of Saigon, the south Vietnamese people were anxious whether their family would be hit next. The people who lived close by the shores knew when there were boats at bay with a covering on the side it meant that those people were leaving the country. At that time my mother was living with her aunt and they were trying to find ways to get on the boat. Most of her aunt’s daughters and sons had already left on that boat. For an amount of gold her aunt had asked a neighbor that she knew to get her on the boat. When they got on the boat there were more people then they could carry on the boat. The boat stayed at bay for 30 days without moving because if they moved with that many people then the communists would find out. Within those thirty days, there were a few pots of porridge. Each family got about two bowls of porridge. Once the porridge started to get scarce only the rich that bribed with their gold got the porridge. When the porridge was gone, slowly people started dying of hunger and what they did was whenever a person died they would hit a gong to signal someone was dead. After the gong, they threw that person into the sea. After a while, there were too many deaths that they just threw them into the sea without the gong.
I wanted to relate this to what happened to this present day where there are people in Libya who are crossing the Mediterranean Sea to get to Europe for a better life. It is said that the numbers rose over the year of 2016. A fact from one of the articles below states that the deaths in the Mediterranean pushed the global death numbers by about 7,000. These people came from Syria, Tunisia, Libya and the Palestinian Territories. This is the result of the Middle East crisis which could be tailed back to the 9/11 Terrorist attack. With the U.S. and other nations in the Middle East people are dying and I mean civilians who just happened to live in their own home. The refugees who left Libya to go to Europe were people just like the south Vietnamese people who were trying to find a better life, a safe place, and a guarantee that they won’t end up a civilian that died because of a war that does not deal with them. These refugees looking for a better life were sent in boats that break down or sink before any rescue boats can go save them. Of course, not all of these people were leaving their origin because of war; however, they are still people who think they deserve a better life giving them the initiative to leave what they had before. Smuggling people into a country which makes those people criminals were just sending the people on boats that they knew were going to capsize. The people that decided to go, the refugees, never lost hope that maybe they would be lucky to be able to make it even though they probably knew the boat wouldn’t make it to Europe. These people knew that they wouldn’t come back to their country so they took a risk.
The Vietnamese people who left the country during the aftermath of the fall of Saigon did the same thing. They left knowing that they might die out there in the ocean and their family would not know of that. My mother left her country knowing that maybe one day she wouldn’t make it, but still, she tried for her future. My mother was one of the lucky refugees that got to her destination at the Bidong Island where the refugee camp was and she was also lucky that she was able to get to Canada.
Sources:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/02/libya-halts-hundreds-europe-bound-refugees-170204180351634.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/number-refugees-reaching-europe-plunged-2016-170106132732972.html
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/least-700-people-drowned-mediterranean-8076451
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/23/record-migrant-death-toll-two-boats-capsize-italy-un-refugee
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/the-vietnam-war-as-seen-by-the-north-vietnamese/390627/
http://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/viet-cong/