Boat People: Becoming Refugees

Why does someone leave home to seek refuge elsewhere?

This question is at the heart of Ann Hui’s Boat People (1982), which depicts the plight of those who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. Made during Hong Kong’s New Wave of cinematic innovation and the second wave of Vietnamese boat refugees, Hui’s film provides a raw and moving response to that question by documenting life in postwar Vietnam—it shows how violence, unfreedom, and hopelessness forced people to risk everything by stepping into boats.

Boat People contains one of the earliest cinematic representations of Vietnamese refugees, and it is the culmination of Hui’s “Vietnam trilogy,” following The Boy from Vietnam (1978) and The Story of Woo Viet (1981). The trilogy’s final film distills the thematic concerns of its predecessors and focuses most explicitly on the driving forces of refugee migration. It was produced when the majority of those undergoing migration did not have access to the means of self-representation, when they were viewed primarily through news headlines and government policies. Although in the past few decades diasporic Vietnamese writers, visual artists, and filmmakers have begun telling their own stories, Boat People remains a rare and foundational text, one that portrays Vietnamese refugees as subjects worthy of narrative and ethical contemplation.

In the late seventies and early eighties, “boat people” fleeing Vietnam regularly washed ashore in neighboring countries. In the years preceding the release of Hui’s film, the number of refugees arriving in Hong Kong surged to reach its highest level. From 1978, when the second major wave of migration began, to 1981, the year before Boat People’s premiere, there were over ninety thousand arrivals. By the end of 1979, over fifty-five thousand refugees were housed in camps across the British territory. These numbers amounted to what is routinely called a “refugee crisis.”

Boat People’s opening sequence declares Hui’s commitment to the ordinary people who bear the brunt of war. The first image introduces Akutagawa (George Lam), the film’s protagonist, as he photographs the military procession marking the Communist liberation of Da Nang. As Akutagawa intently captures the soldiers and tanks parading triumphantly through the street, his photographic lens—and Hui’s cinematic camera—comes to rest on a boy with a maimed leg limping away from the crowd. Akutagawa follows him and takes a photo of his silhouette moving slowly down an empty alleyway. This powerful opening visualizes the gap between appearance and reality, setting the official story against the lived one.

Three years later, when Akutagawa returns to Vietnam to document the country’s reconstruction, the guides who oversee his official visit are acutely aware that the Japanese photographer’s images will become important mediations between Vietnam and the rest of the world. But after a visit to one of the regime’s New Economic Zones, where a group of schoolchildren perform happiness for his camera, Akutagawa meets a fourteen-year-old girl, Cam Nuong (Season Ma), on the streets of Da Nang. He eventually follows Cam Nuong to a bloody execution ground where people gather to strip the executed of their remaining valuables, and to a landfill to watch people forage for scrap metal, where they both witness her brother’s gruesome death from an unexploded ordnance. Akutagawa’s desire to see the reality of life in postwar Vietnam propels him. And to see how Vietnamese people live—or are unable to live—is to understand their motivation for seeking refuge elsewhere. For Akutagawa, this vision is terrifying in its brutal revelation, complicating his innocent desire to look and see.

But Hui’s film does not allow Akutagawa—and viewers—to turn away from the violence. After witnessing scenes of poverty and repression, Akutagawa comes to the realization that, for many people, postwar Vietnam is unlivable. Transforming from observer to participant, he resolves to find passage out of Vietnam on a boat for Cam Nuong and her little brother. To fund the escape, he sells his camera—his source of livelihood and agency, an instrument of his very vision. His earlier wish to see turns into a desire to assist, because vision demands action.

“It was a revelation to be given this cinematic portal into the past, one that turned history into film and now exists as a historical document of a formative moment for me and many Vietnamese refugees.”

And it is this vision that destroys Akutagawa. In the final moments of the film, while carrying a can of diesel fuel to Cam Nuong’s boat, he is shot by police patrols and bursts into flames. While it may be tempting to interpret Akutagawa as a self-sacrificing savior, his death at this crucial moment does not emphasize his heroism so much as the perils of life in, and escaping from, Vietnam. Akutagawa’s horrifying immolation as the boat speeds away into the dark of night casts these refugee journeys as a pressing matter of life and death.

Boat People was released in the year of my birth. The film depicts the world that I was born into, and it is a bittersweet experience to watch this world on-screen. I, too, would leave home and become a boat refugee, in the late eighties. I, too, would come to know the unbearable loss the film speaks of. It took me many years to find Hui’s film, and to see fragments of my own personal experience reflected in her narrative. It was a revelation to be given this cinematic portal into the past, one that turned history into film and now exists as a historical document of a formative moment for me and many Vietnamese refugees. The film explained to me the milieu of my own leaving—filling in the gaps of my memory. I have yet to find another one like it, a film that focuses on the perspectives of asylum seekers at a time when they were scattering across the world, looking for ways to survive.

Much has been said about the Vietnam War and its aftermath, so much so that the war is now considered overdocumented in American historiography. Hollywood, of course, has played a major part in dramatizing how the war injured and damaged the American soldiers who fought in it, and by extension the American nation. In this context of American tragedy, a film like Boat People could not have been, and indeed was not, made. At a time when Hollywood was building an industry on, and rewriting history through, filmic representations of “Vietnam,” Hui’s film shed light on those pushed to the margins of American cinema and history. Put next to classics such as The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), and Full Metal Jacket (1987), Hui’s film stands out as one that humanizes and makes grievable the collateral damage that litters the backdrop of American action, both military and filmic.

Centering Vietnamese people on-screen was an act of political solidarity on Hui’s part. The sensitivity with which she treated the subject matter—conducting hundreds of interviews with Vietnamese refugees and setting forth to document their stories with complexity—was a mark of her humane and socially conscious filmmaking. This was not sensational, sentimental, or opportunistic work, as some early reviewers claimed. Rather, it was a compassionate attempt to capture the terrifying truths of human displacement.

Boat People was an anomaly in its contemporary moment, and because of this it broke new ground and has stood the test of time. As the Vietnam War begins to recede in history, more wars continue to be fought and more refugees are made. Hui’s film holds a torch to the undeniable humanity of people fleeing political violence.

The final image of the film, a close-up freeze-frame of Cam Nuong and her brother in a boat moving across the expanse of a blue sea, relays the incompletion of the refugee’s narrative. If the country they left behind contains many dangers, the migration journey holds its own perils, and the place of arrival is never a guarantee for the boat people. The image is a plea in the form of an ethical question: How will the international community come to the aid of these people? The end of the film suggests that the continuation and resolution of the narrative must occur offscreen, in how governments and populations, like those of Hong Kong, respond to the immediate predicament of Vietnamese asylum seekers. As the credits roll over the still image, Boat People asks audiences to attend to the complex social world beyond cinema’s ultimately limited frame.

This piece has been adapted from the essay “Ann Hui’s Boat People: Documenting Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong,” originally published in Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

Boat People: Becoming Refugees

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