Manh vividly remembers the boat journey out of Vietnam. He was just 11 years old when he and his sister, under the protection of aunts and uncles, set out from a port near Saigon. Source: Melbourne Catholic.
“It was rough, very scary, about five or six days and nights at sea,” Manh recalls.
“Our engine was broken and the water was coming into our boat. We were sinking. So we were pretty much waiting to die, you know?”
Then came what Manh describes as a miracle: an oil tanker appeared and rescued the 130 or so people on board the boat.
“That day was the 15th of August [1980]. It’s Mary’s Assumption to heaven. We were all praying to her, all the Catholics. We prayed and then, yeah, she kind of answered.”
Manh was speaking after a commemorative Mass at St Ignatius’ Church in Richmond, Melbourne, to mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
April 30 is known as Reunification Day in Vietnam, the day in 1975 when North Vietnamese and communist Viet Cong forces captured Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, ending the Vietnam War and the 21-year north-south divide.
But it also started a mass refugee movement of people from the south, including political dissidents and Christians, of whom Catholics were the biggest group.
For the Vietnamese diaspora, April 30 is a remembrance day, and St Ignatius’ is one of the churches that holds a special Mass each year for hundreds of community members who come from all over Melbourne for the occasion.
“This Mass serves as a time of prayer and reflection for the Vietnamese people, particularly those who experienced the hardships and displacement,” Chau Xuan Húng, master of ceremonies at the Mass, said.
The service was offered in Vietnamese and started with a procession to the front of the church, where parishioners paid their respects to all who had lost their lives in the Vietnam War and its aftermath.
The liturgy was sung by St Ignatius parish priest Fr Trung Hoang Nguyen, and the homily given by Fr Peter Hoang Kim Huy, the Provincial of the Salesian Asia-Pacific province.
FULL STORY
Journey to hope: 50 years on, Melbourne’s Vietnamese Catholics remember (Melbourne Catholic)
