Britain's embrace of Vietnam's 'boat people' is a lesson in how we welcome refugees, 50 years on

The war in Vietnam ended 50 years ago, and in its aftermath two million people fled the country – many by dangerous passage across the sea. Then, as now, ‘boat people’ were a political issue – an urgent humanitarian crisis that spread across the globe and polarised opinion. Hundreds of thousands were eventually settled overseas. For Refugee Week, filmmaker and author Chi Thai, who was four when her family took to the sea in a leaky boat, recalls the journey that brought her to the UK.

There is a moment in my children’s book The Endless Sea – like all classic disaster stories where life  hangs in the balance – that comes down to one simple question: Will we live or will we die? 

Because when the ship (SS Sibonga) finally reached us, I thought we were saved – it was enormous. But still the water rose. What were they waiting for? Our boat began to sink faster… 

There are parts of my family’s story about our refugee journey in 1979 from Vietnam that I knew I needed to share. These were not glossy details of heroism of the British merchant vessel, coming to the rescue of desperate boat refugees trapped on a sinking boat in the middle of the South China Sea, but something darker and more complicated. 

When my family first boarded that crowded, rickety boat in South Vietnam, we were one of three vessels that set out in search of safety. These boats were made poorly and quickly; once out at sea, one of the three boats sank entirely – every passenger lost. Our boat was not far from that same fate when we saw salvation emerge in the distance. But every heart broke on our boat, as hours clocked up and we collectively realised that maybe it was not here to rescue us, and the vessel that we’d boarded in search of our freedom might become our tomb.  

When I think about this, I recall a mother on our boat cradling her dead baby. She and her grief would become the subject of my film, Lullaby. After making Lullaby, I would learn that five babies died aboard our boat. 

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I would be in my 30s when I would finally understand what caused the delay of our rescue. Up until then, I and so many Vietnamese refugees had credited Margaret Thatcher as our saviour. In 2009, the National Archives released papers that showed that she did as much as she could in her power to avoid taking in and being responsible for Vietnamese boat refugees picked up by British vessels.

She went as far as suggesting the removal of Britain from the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and revoking long-standing international maritime agreements requiring the rescue of those in distress at sea. She apparently believed that there would be riots in the streets if the UK took in Vietnamese boat refugees.  

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Eventually, Thatcher acquiesced under huge pressure. Given how much of Vietnamese history had been written by the hand of colonisation and revolution, to be then trapped on a sinking boat caught between the crossfire of, yet again, huge political forces out of our control, was in so many ways absurdly fitting – the painful irony of our horrendous predicament at that time is not wasted on me.  

We were lucky – we were finally rescued. The merchant vessel took us to Hong Kong, then still under British mandate. But even there, Thatcher attempted to avoid responsibility. We were not allowed to set foot on British soil and were forced to remain on the ship for days, which was never designed to hold 1,200 refugees. 

Eventually, we were processed and placed in a Hong Kong refugee camp – which is another story in itself. And when we were later transported to the UK, what happened next was nothing short of a fairy tale. 

At the airport, a host of volunteers greeted us with kindness, offering teddy bears to the children. We boarded a coach to a residential campus where refugees were to be prepared for civilian life in the UK. On the way, we stopped at a service station, and volunteers handed out ice creams to everyone. Some of these volunteers became lifelong friends to my family, people to whom we will always be indebted. 

Far from rioting in the street, our neighbours helped us in more ways than I can count. I vividly remember my mother kept a garden where she grew fruit and vegetables. Then in the autumn, when our garden was ripe, the whole street came together on a warm Sunday afternoon to pull potatoes, pluck beans and pick strawberries.  

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War I reflect on the boat refugees of then and now. It is hard not to. In the first half of 2024, more Vietnamese attempted small boat crossings across the Channel than any other nationality. 

The growth of anti-immigration sentiment in the world at large, and the wider international adoption of ‘pushback tactics’ for refugees on boat crossings, often brings me back to that moment of my family’s refugee story. 

In today’s world, it is impossible to imagine the extent of the refugee resettlement programme authorised by Thatcher’s government ever happening again. Instead, many asylum seekers and refugees today experience a hostile environment, left in the margins of UK society for years on end. 

When I sat down to write The Endless Sea, it opened a space for me to think about the choices made by those in power – the decisions that forced us to flee and, later, the ones that determined whether we were worthy of rescue.  

When we made our journey, there were six million refugees around the world. Today. There are more than 110 million forcibly displaced, a number that includes more than 36 million refugees. But the question remains the same: who is deemed worthy of saving?

Refugee Week runs 16-22 June 2025.

The Endless Sea by Chi Thai is out now (Walker Studio, £12.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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