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Listen   Huy Pham talks about his homeland Saigon

Homeland
- Huy Pham -

» Left Saigon, Vietnam 1988, age 9 years old
as refugee

» 1988-1990 in Thai
refugee camp

» Arrived Sydney,
Australia 1990

» Visited Vietnam in 2002

"Land is very rare in Saigon... I think in Saigon, it's such a small city, maybe just the size of Bankstown, and you can fit millions of people in there. If you can go on a motorbike, it probably just takes you thirty minutes to an hour to do the whole tour of the city. It's extremely dense, and a lot of the houses they're really small buildings."

"When you come here to Australia, you just find it very surprising, the spaciousness of the land here. I see so many parks here, in Sydney. In Vietnam, in Saigon I only know of one park…actually that park is in a zoo, and I've only been to the zoo once in my life. I do remember that the park's had green grass and plants, and flowers."

"With the parks in Vietnam, people actually don't use it to relax, to take a walk; they use it to play games and sports. Like soccer, it's very popular, so people like to do that in parks. Or in the morning, what my mother used to do was she would ride her bike to the park and then do Tai Chi with a group of people, say like around six or five o'clock in the morning they would have already started and by the time she finished another group came to the park and took over. So it's, you know, it's competitive over there to go to the park!"

"Before 1975, my Dad was in the Southern Vietnamese navy. He was a person with very high rank, you know, he used to command a big ship. So then after 1975, the Southern Vietnamese, they lost, so Northern Vietnamese came in, so that's when people went through many changes there and basically people who were high rank, people who had wealth and power, they lost all of it, they lost. Many men that served in the armed forces, they got sent to re-education camps and in these re-education camps, they got tortured and so on. They say re-education but I say it was really, an act of vengeance."

"I've been to a couple of my mum's friends places where they actually live on top of the river. The river over there actually is not that pretty at all, it's pretty dirty and smelly too (laughs) it's not like the Georges River here in Bankstown. You really can't fish over there, like you wouldn't want to eat anything that you fish out of the river, because people do all sorts of things in the river, like they bath in the river, they wash their clothes in the river, and occasionally they go to the toilet in the river as well."

» Huy Pham's journey