After years of escape attempts, beatings, and imprisonments, family emigrates to United States

by Sara Peters

Huan Joe Nguyen '93 was imprisoned for three months, robbed, betrayed, and abandoned at sea. These experiences could fill the life of a professional spy. But Joe Nguyen experienced all this before his ninth birthday.

Lyn (Joe's sister), Malaysian police captain Zanell, and Joe on a beach on Pulau Tengah.

Princetonians are made--notborn. The journeys they travel before arriving on campus begin at points all over the globe. During their formative years, Mr. Nguyen and his sister, Lyn, were refugees from South Vietnam, fleeing the country during the years of Communist control. His mother fought to provide a better life for her children.

She'd never heard of Princeton University then. Yet, during the desperate, silent, moonlit boat rides across the border, she clutched her children--and her dreams of a life of freedom and joy--tightly.

Huan Nguyen was born in 1971 in Dalat, South Vietnam. At the time, South Vietnam was a democratic republic, and the Nguyen family enjoyed a fairly comfortable lifestyle.

Life changed for this little boy in 1973 when his father, a major in the Vietnamese Air Force, died of leukemia.

But life was altered beyond imagination in 1975, the year Saigon fell to the North Viet namese Communist forces. After the fall of Saigon, South Vietnamese fled the country, piling onto anything that would float, risking starvation, illness, and piracy. Those braving the perils of this exodus were dubbed "boat people."

"Many boat people fled for political reasons," Mr. Nguyen said. "But I think our family was driven more by hope of finding a brighter future."

The year of the invasion, Mr.Nguyen and his sister and mother fled Dalat. The children stayed with an aunt in Saigon, while their mother attempted escape. During one attempt, she was captured by Vietcong soldiers and imprisoned by the Communist regime for two years. During this time her family had no contact with her.

When Mr. Nguyen was a high school senior, he wrote an article for a local newspaper reflecting on this time he spent in Saigon.

"From morning to noon we went to normal classes," he wrote. "In the afternoon we went to brainwashing sessions. They encouraged us to inform on the activities of our neighbors and families."

In February 1978, Mr. Nguyen's mother planned another escape attempt. The children, their mother, and some extended family paid $1,000 in gold per person for passage on a ferryboat, whose captain promised to transport them, and the hundreds of other passengers, across the border.

The captain had no intention of fulfilling the promise. The crew beached the boat on the shores of My Tho, took the money, and left everyone stranded. The following morning, they were discovered by Vietcong soldiers, who imprisoned the lot of them.

"The Vietcong camp was a 'reeducation camp,' where they tried to indoctrinate the adults," Mr. Nguyen said. "It was more or less a prison with rats and roaches crawling everywhere."

After three months of sleeping on concrete floors, eating one meal a day of rice and dried fish, the children were released and sent to live with family in Saigon, until their relatives were let out of the camp.

In 1979, the Nguyen family prepared for yet another escape attempt. After four years of suffering and failed attempts, it is difficult to understand how anyone could muster the courage.

"At that time, my mother and many others believed that there was no future in Vietnam, especially for the children," Mr. Nguyen said. "Almost everything that my grandparents had built over the years had been taken away. Communism was not a political system that many South Vietnamese were willing to live under. The risk was high, but the potential for a brighter, better future was worth it."

Mr. Nguyen's family gambled for this future yet again, packing onto a large boat, called VT 268, filled with hundreds of others, all keeping the same big secret. They subsisted only on their dreams and a meager diet of rice soup.

On the fourth day at sea they spotted land. Yet it was guarded by Malaysian soldiers, who were notorious for denying refugees permission to land and sending them back to sea. The ill and desperate passengers finally decided to risk it, and the entire boatload were allowed to land on Malaysian soil, after paying the soldiers $3,000.

Though they'd finallysucceeded in crossing the border, achieving that symbolic victory, Malaysia was hardly the Promised Land. They were escorted to a camp at an abandoned school, which was guarded by armed men, where their activities were very limited, and their health still at risk due to meager rations.

When an official from the United Nations came to the camp, he was prohibited from coming anywhere near the refugees. Mr. Nguyen's mother saw this U.N. official as a source of hope, and tried to reach him.

She was halted by a soldier who put a gun to her head. She began calling out to the official, chanting "VT 268," and encouraging her former boatmates to do the same.

"She asked everyone to yell out our boat number, so that the U.N. official would know how to refer to us," Mr. Nguyen said.

She was whacked in the head with the butt of the soldier's gun, and fell to the ground, still calling to the official. This left an indelible mark on the United Nations, and would be integral in the fate of the refugees.

After several weeks at the abandoned school, the Malaysians announced that the entire camp would be relocat ed to a refugee island.

"Everyone received this news with a mixture of fear and happiness," Mr. Nguyen wrote in his article while a high school senior. "Happy that our escape might at last be over; fearful that the Malaysians were lying and were planning to force us back to sea."

They were right to be suspicious. After taking the refugees many miles away from land, they stripped the boats of the navigational instruments and left them stranded with only nominal food, water, and fuel.

Luckily they were saved by the kindness of some Thai fishermen who encountered the boat the following day. They provided them with as much food and fuel as they could spare, and directions for how to return to Malaysia.

Upon their return there, the U.N. stepped in and ensured that the boat people would be allowed to remain in the country as political refugees. They were taken to the refugee island of Pulau Tengah.

"There were about 12,000 people on the island," Mr. Nguyen said. "Mostly refugees along with guards and United Nations staff. Everyone had food and shelter. My mother worked with the U.N. to help process and place people, since she spoke English and French."

His mother was hard at work, but thetime was still a plateau in the drama of their lives, compared to the rockiness of the previous years. Mr. Nguyen, at the time, still only eight years old, took it easy.

"For me it was really idle time on a tropical island with nice beaches," he said. "Imagine being eight years old, with lots of free time and only an hour of basic English class a day. I played with other kids, and made friends with one of the Malaysian guards. I probably had the best tan I will ever have in my life."

Mr. Nguyen may have been enjoying his permanent summer on Pulau Tengah, but in 1980 his mother would finally accomplish the goal she had set years ago as a young widow in a broken land.

She completed arrangements for herself and her children to emigrate to the United States, and they arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1980.

Their new homeland would provide challenges of its own, but surely there must have been a tremendous relief at the end of the long, frightening journey that began the night Saigon fell to the communists.

The family soon moved to the greater Baltimore area, where Mr. Nguyen would receive the education that prepared him for Princeton.

As a high school senior, he had his choices narrowed down to Cornell, MIT, and Princeton: A dream almost too perfect for most parents to hope for.

"I liked the liberal arts focus of Princeton over MIT and Cornell," he said. "I was overjoyed at being accepted. It was really a dream come true."

Though Mr. Nguyen's long road to campus was fraught with challenges and perils that many of his classmates could hardly imagine, he maintains that his undergraduate years expanded upon his worldly visions of life.

"I think the Princeton experience really opened up the world for me as a young adult," he said. "Growing up before university, most of us tend to think of our careers in terms of 'doctor,' 'lawyer,' 'engineer,' 'architect;' the normal staple of careers. We're not really exposed to what is out there. The diversity of academic courses at Princeton, the people you meet, and the way the whole experience is structured really made me thirst for more experience and more knowledge about the world around me."

While a senior, Mr. Nguyen spotted an ad in The Daily Princetonian for the Princeton-in-Asia Program.

"I found one of the new positions in Singapore allowed me to teach engineering for one year. That meant that I would still remain within the engineering discipline, while at the same time be returning to Southeast Asia to explore my heritage," he said.

"I left the region when I was eight years old, so I did not have many structured memories of Vietnam or Malaysia, so coming back was like seeing it for the first time."

In 1993 he visited the island of Pulau Tengah, where he had lived as a child political refugee. Cleared of all huts and deserted of people, it is now a marine nature preserve, where leatherback turtles go to breed.

Today Mr. Nguyen works for an Internet consulting firm and is enjoying life in Singapore with his wife and children.

"People like me, who have the benefit of U.S. experience and a top-notch education will help spread ideas, concepts, and practices," he said. "This will, in turn, promote better understanding and relations between everyone in the world. As many Southeast Asian countries move toward the goal of becoming 'first world' nations, they will need more and more talent, and, fortunately, I think there is more talent coming this way.

"On the other hand, there is also much that Asia has to offer to the U.S.--not just a new market of goods and cheaper labor, but culture, work ethic, and some very creative solutions. In my opinion, Singapore is one of the best cities in which to live and work.

"One day I hope to be able to cross-pollinate and bring my experiences back to the U.S. Maybe that will be when my kids enroll at Princeton."

This article is dedicated to Mr. Nguyen's undergraduate adviser, Professor Emeritus Enoch Durbin, who passed away in May.

Photos provided by Van Thompson.