Author’s Note

April 30, 2015, is the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. On that day in 1975, North Vietnamese troops captured the South Vietnamese capital and ended a twenty-year war between South Vietnam, supported by the U.S. and its allies, and North Vietnam, allied with Russia and China. The North Vietnamese renamed Saigon “Ho Chi Minh City,” and the country of Vietnam still celebrates April 30 as Reunification Day. For the thousands of South Vietnamese who fled, and for their descendants, it was the day they lost their country and will forever be mourned as “Black April.”

After the war, the new Vietnamese government enacted harsh policies, sending one to two million people to re-education camps, where over 165,000 died; 50,000 to 100,000 people were executed. Farmlands were seized and redistributed. Families were forced to leave the cities and farm in the “New Economic Zones,” and the ethnic Chinese (or “Hoa”) saw their businesses confiscated. Over two million South Vietnamese, who came to be known as the “boat people,” fled Vietnam in overcrowded boats, their destinations Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Hong Kong. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 200,000 to 400,000 died at sea.

It is estimated that of the 800,000 boat people who survived, more than half were resettled in the United States; the rest found refuge in France, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Many were tragically repatriated to Vietnam.