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I'm Vietnamese. The Vietnamese people you mentioned who escaped to the US decades ago were refugees. They were escaping a country where bombs were being droppe
by thanhhaimai 3y ago
I'm Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese people you mentioned who escaped to the US decades ago were refugees. They were escaping a country where bombs were being dropped daily, famines were normal, and literally millions had died due to lack of food.
The literacy rate was 3%. In other words, the majority of those poor folks are not even fluent in writing their main language. Many of them, including my relatives, expressed the wish to learn English, but as you can imagine, it's pretty challenging. Some picked up enough to communicate, some gave up and depended on their children/grandchildren for translation. They had seen war and hell; being alive is a blessing.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoThis comment is interesting. What little I read about the "boat people" escaping Vietnam in the late 1970s was about comparatively privileged South Vietnamese fleeing the new regime that was out for revenge. So, I would have assumed high literacy from those demographics.
- thanhhaimai 3y agoThe privileged people in Saigon fleeing the new regime escaped mostly via connection. For example, I know people here who fled on US airplanes/ships. They were educated, and most likely knew some French/English before coming here. The "boat people" were more likely from the coastal town (like Vung Tau), who dropped everything and got on tiny boats, packed like sardines, hoped to get rescued from other fishing boats when getting out far enough to the ocean. They are often poor folks with nothing to lose, and willing to accept a coin flip chance between death and escaping to the US. For this part, I don't have the concrete statistics. But from the stories I have heard, the survival rate of those boat escapes is worse than 50%.