Word: hong
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this hot, blue Sunday morning, on this pontoon in Hong Kong harbor, on a crate marked PRECISION EXPLOSIONS, LTD., the priest sits safely. He has just arrived from Haiphong with 28 others, who five weeks ago slipped aboard too small a junk and trusted themselves to the South China Sea. Behind him the junk bobs crazily in the harbor, giving an idea of how it must have rolled in open swells. His fellow refugees huddle together on the pontoon, staring straight ahead, as if posing for a formal family photograph, and sipping water from an orange plastic bucket passed from...
Around the pontoon, boats chug and cruise?police boats, water taxis, sampans piloted by women in straw hats, ferries, tugs, dredges, schooners. Freighters with exotic names lie at anchor. In the background, the office buildings of Hong Kong Island stand pressed against Victoria Peak. Trinh Thi Nuong, 8, gazes at the city in open wonder. She is told that she looks lovely...
Tomorrow their junk will be towed to Gin Drinker's Bay, the place designated by the Hong Kong authorities as an elephants' graveyard for the vessels of the boat people. There it will either be burned straight away or await burning with other wrecks on a jetty directly across the water from a hill of gray gravestones and a blue columbarium. The engines, which do not burn, lie heaped like brown skulls beside the remains of tillers that were made with welded pipes. Only a few boats rest in Gin Drinker's Bay now, smoldering near the scavenging dogs. There...
From this point on, the refugees will follow a set procedure, one established by those who came to Hong Kong before them. Unlike the Thais, the Hong Kong authorities do not consider these refugees illegal entrants, and in effect have given them a status close to citizenship. For six days they will undergo health examinations. Then they will be placed in the Jubilee Reception Center, where all refugees must be processed before going off to any of four camps: Argyle 3 and 4, or Kai Tak East and North. Like the Jubilee center, all are located on Kowloon Peninsula...
...their hopes of resettlement are justifiably higher. But in temperament the Vietnamese children seem quite different from the Khmer. Generally they are wilder and more independent, either because of their greater freedom in the camps or because of something characteristic. Argyle 4 used to be a storage depot for Hong Kong's armed forces. Now it looks like a teen-age canteen, the kids loitering under the fluorescent lights like teen-agers in any poor city neighborhood, their self-possession equally dopey and sinister...