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Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Volume 16, Issue 17, Week of May 1, 2017
Fleeing Vietnam Tran family goes to prison
Cam Hutchinson Saskatoon Express This is the third in a series. he room was no bigger than 400 square feet. There were rock walls, barbed wire on the ceiling and a small rectangular window, up high. The open-air window was fortified with steel bars and wire. For beds, there were concrete slabs three feet off the ground and five feet across ringing the room. There were no blankets. A single bulb provided what little light there was. This is where 100 women and children would spend the next month of their lives. Men were crammed into another area of the prison and would be for four months. North Vietnam had won the Vietnam War in 1975 and now hundreds of thousands people from the south were fleeing their homeland. They became known around the world as Boat People. The Tran family was well on their way to freedom in a tugboat when the Communist navy caught up to them on July 28, 1978. The family and others on board were taken to a prison on Con Dao Island. Although she was only 10 at the time, Kim Tran remembers it well. She remembers each person being lined up outside a big door, waiting to be checked into the prison. Being so young, she entered the building with her mother, Them Thi Tran. When Kim’s turn came, a female guard told her to take off her top. Then, her pants. They were checking each new inmate for precious items like wedding rings, necklaces and gold. Some of these body searches were degrading. Kim had a cousin’s wedding ring and necklace attached with a safety pin to the inside of her pants. She told the guard she didn’t want to take her pants off and asked the woman how she would feel if someone
T
Tam Tran, with her granddaughters, Chloe and Tegan (inset). Tam’s husband died of natural causes on Con Dao Island. (Photo by Sandy Hutchinson)
told her to do it. The guard slapped her – hard. “I didn’t cry, but I saw stars,” she said. “My mom said you shouldn’t talk to them like that.” Them Thi Tran feared for her daughter’s safety. Luckily, the guard moved on without checking Kim. “I saved somebody some goodies,” Kim said with a smile 40 years later in her Saskatoon home. French colonists built the prison in 1861 to house both political prisoners and criminals. Not a lot of renovating had been done in the interim. In 1954, the prison was turned over to the United States and a year later to the South Vietnamese government. Horrible atrocities were committed at the prison, no matter which country was in charge. “In the back of this square room there was
a washroom, which had the squatting stones with the holes and no plumbing lines whatsoever,” Kim Tran said. “Underneath the holes were ceramic buckets where you do your waste in there. It was very horrible; there was no running water in there.” She said she threw up when her mother gave her a bowl from which to drink. She said everything tasted like raw fish. “At suppertime, they would open the door and all of us would come out. It was nice to see the sun.” She said three buckets were brought out for supper. One was a bucket of rice carried by two people. “They carried them and flopped them down; it’s like feeding cows on the farm. They brought another bucket that looked like muddy water with swimming maggots in it, and another bucket of steamed yam leaves
— that was our supper. “The bucket that looked like mud was fermented fish. It was disgusting. You’d just eat the rice and the ducks would come and eat the rest. “We had two meals a day and it was always rice with something — rice with fish if we were lucky or rice with salt. They let us out in the morning for about an hour to get some sun and then they locked us up.” (Continued on page 16)