Word: thuy
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With 67 other refugees, Nguyen Phuong Thuy, 15, slipped out of Viet Nam in a 33-ft. boat. The craft was well into the Gulf of Thailand and the presumed zone of safety when it was attacked, not by pursuing Vietnamese but by a vessel carrying eight Thai fishermen. The pirates kidnaped Thuy and another young girl, then sank the refugees' boat with the rest of the Vietnamese still clinging to it. "I can't forget the look on my little sister Tran's face when she slipped below the water," Thuy said later. "I still...
Cruel indeed. Thuy was seized last May. During the next 3½ months, she often was gang-raped 30 times a day. She was kept in a dark locker where the temperature hovered around 100° F and fed a subsistence diet of rice and water. When Thuy passed out, she would be roused by being drenched with a bucket of salt water and then raped again. Her kidnaped companion was treated the same way and then thrown overboard. Thuy was bartered, along with baskets of fish, to 14 other boats, where her ordeal continued. When the last pirates...
Nguyen Phuong Thuy is not alone. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), women on 81 % of the boats reaching Thailand in the first nine months of 1981 were raped, most of them many times over. A total of 552 were attacked in front of their relatives; another 200 were carried off to other fishing vessels. The attackers, many of them carriers of venereal diseases, often left the women infected as well as brutalized. Many victims became pregnant. A report to the relief agency CARE by a doctor who worked at the Songkhla camp...
Meanwhile, Nguyen Phuong Thuy is slowly recovering from her nightmare. Recently, she wrote to her family in Viet Nam: "My dear mother, don't think about coming by sea. Escape or not, you surely will be dead, but I think it's better to be dead in Viet Nam. For me, I will never forget my travail on the sea. Don't follow me, my dear mother...
...Trinhs are understandably fearful of crime. The first day they moved to Brooklyn they witnessed a mugging in the subway. Says Thuy, 22: "We've been warned not to leave home unless it's necessary, not to go out after dark, and to always travel in twos and threes." Adds Thuc Phan, 20: "How can we tell robbers we are too poor...