Hiding from bombs, pirate encounters: Fall of Saigon 50 years ago triggered terrifying journeys to Manitoba
'The things that I saw, I would never want my own children to go through, ever'
Chau Pham can never forget drinking her own urine and watching people lose all hope.
Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe's ears filled with bombs as her family huddled in a mud dugout below their home.
Both women, now prominent Winnipeggers, were born into war. And both experienced terrifying journeys triggered by the end of the Vietnam War 50 years ago, as U.S.-backed governments fell to communist forces.
"The things that I saw, I would never want my own children to go through, ever — any children to go through," said Pham.
On April 30, 1975, South Vietnam's capital, Saigon, fell to North Vietnamese forces, ending the 19-year Vietnam War.
Waves of people fled over the next several years, a migration that became a humanitarian crisis by the late 1970s and early 1980s as close to one million people left not just Vietnam but also neighbouring Cambodia and Laos, where civil wars had ended with communist forces ousting U.S.-backed governments.
They faced perilous routes to reach refugee camps in Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines or Thailand. Boatloads of refugees fell prey to storms and pirates, while people were beset by starvation, dehydration and illness.
Sardined on an overcrowded fishing boat in the South China Sea, Pham was among those who became known as the boat people.
It was 1983. She was five years old and on her own.
Her parents remained in Long Xuyên village, as Pham's newborn brother was too young to make the journey.
WATCH | Two women tell the stories of their terrifying journeys to freedom in Winnipeg:
Pham was awoken by her parents and jewelry sewn into her sweater's lining. After a tearful goodbye from her mom, Pham was set on her dad's motorcycle and, under the cloak of night, taken to a nearby town and the waiting boat.
"He said to me that one day, we will be reunited, but this is the only way for me to have a better future," said Pham, now an emergency physician at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre.
She didn't understand what was happening, "but I knew that I was losing my family."
A cousin of Pham's mom was on the boat and agreed to care for her.
"I remember very clearly when the pirates stopped our boat for their very first time — all the women on our boat were harmed," Pham said.
Some children not much older than herself were also abused.
"And I remember one husband who tried to hold back his wife. They [pirates] pushed him over the boat and the propeller had cut off his arm."
He survived after being pulled back aboard by the people on Pham's boat.
During nine full days on the sea, Pham's boat was stopped multiple times by pirates.
"We were stripped of everything," she said. Some swallowed jewelry to protect it.
Surrounded by salt water that left you thirstier if you drank it, Pham and others resorted to swallowing their own urine.
"I remember looking around at people covered in vomit and lice," she said.
The boat reached the relative safety of the Songkhla Camp in Thailand on the 10th day.
The United Nations estimates up to 250,000 boat people died at sea during that first wave, and the exodus continued into the 1990s.
In total, it's estimated a half-million boat people lost their lives and that Canada accepted nearly 200,000.
Stobbe was four in 1977, when her family abandoned their lives in Laos, fearful of being sent to a re-education camp by that country's new communist regime.
They hung laundry outside to make it appear they were home, then slipped away in a canoe — Stobbe, her two sisters (ages six and one), dad and six-months-pregnant mom. Everything they could take was wedged into a single suitcase.
They paddled the Mekong River to Stobbe's grandparents' house.
"There were soldiers on both sides of the river — the Lao soldiers who were told to shoot anyone trying to escape the country, and the Thai soldiers who were told to shoot anyone trying to enter Thailand," she said.
After a weekend, when it seemed safe, the family set out to cross the 1.5-kilometre-wide Mekong to Thailand.
They dodged large rocks stippling the surface before the canoe was caught in a whirlpool and spun several times.
"We were all very scared, and none of the children could swim," Stobbe said.
As water poured in, she and her older sister scooped it out while their parents kept the boat upright and steered it out of the vortex.
They made it across and were given shelter for the night by a Thai couple who saw them land. The next day, Stobbe's family walked 12 hours to a U.S.-run military camp for displaced persons.
Stobbe's family lived in the military camp until Laos threatened the Thai government with war if they continued to harbour Laotian citizens.
Her family fled to a refugee camp in northern Thailand, chopped bamboo trees to build a thatched hut and lived there for six months before being sponsored to Canada in December 1979.
They first landed in Montreal wearing shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops. After being given winter clothing, they boarded a flight for Manitoba.
No one spoke their language, so gestures were the only way to communicate. Stobbe's mom took English classes in Steinbach before the family later resettled in Winnipeg.
Stobbe is now a professor in conflict resolution studies at Winnipeg's Canadian Mennonite University, following a career path carved out by her experiences.
"I've always been interested in looking at ways to resolve conflicts without the use of violence," she said.
'They were so desperate'
Pham spent more than two years in the Songkhla Camp in Thailand, being treated for tuberculosis and witnessing more tragedy.
"It was a very hard time in refugee camp, because people … weren't sick just physically. They were sick emotionally, they were sick mentally," she said.
"They were so desperate, they were forced to take their own life because they didn't see hope."
To be accepted into new countries — Canada, the U.S., Australia and France — refugees needed a clean bill of health.
Pham was abandoned by her mom's cousin because of her illness.
"The family didn't want me to live in the same hut as them," said Pham, who was soon taken in by her 18-year-old aunt, her mom's youngest sister.
Every morning, Pham would get up when the roosters crowed and rush to a Red Cross station for a regimen of antibiotics.
Her aunt refused flights to new countries until Pham was accepted, too, in 1986.
Sponsored by a church congregation, they headed for Manitoba.
"My aunt was ecstatic. She busily got started on knitting all of these cardigans, thinking that it was going to be warm enough and that was going to be our jacket," Pham said.
They landed in a blizzard.
As other refugees met their sponsors and departed, Pham and her now-pregnant aunt stood alone. Closed roads prevented their sponsors from getting there.
A Vietnamese translator at the airport got in touch with the sponsors and set up Pham and her aunt in a hotel.
That's when Pham met the woman who would become her Canadian mom.
Darlene Lindsay lived in Winnipeg and was asked to check on Pham and her aunt. Lindsay instantly connected with them and arranged — with financial support from the church — to keep them in the city and look after them.
Initially, Pham and her aunt lived in an apartment, with Lindsay visiting daily to teach them basic English and help them adapt.
Pham eventually moved in with Lindsay. Seven years later, she sponsored Pham's entire family — parents, younger brother and a baby brother born since she left.
"I recognize now, as an adult and with a lot of heart-to-heart talk with my parents once we reunited, why they made that painful decision to let me go," Pham said.
Despite the early hardships, Pham, who is co-medical director of the HSC emergency department, would go through it all again.
"It shaped who I am. It's given me perseverance, it's given me humility, and it's given me compassion to be able to serve other people who are from a similar walk of life."
Her future path became clear during those days in the refugee camp, when her medication was timed to the rooster's call.
"I knew if I made it out of the refugee camp, I wanted to be that same physician who treated me every morning and who gave me the ticket to a new life when I was cured."
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