MORE EXPAT TALES: Boat People 2 - The Story of Loc

In this, his second tale of boat people he met in Australia, my highschool friend Rolly Lampa quietly but powerfully strikes one against a Communist regime that made boat refugees of a generation of Vietnamese people. At the same time, he gently chides me for a (probably) tacit pitch for Communism when I fretted earlier over what I called a "clampdown" on one of our batchmates who died an NPA commander in the early years of martial rule in the Philippines. (To decode this cryptic intro, read post alluded to here.)

The other Vietnamese guy I met while in Customs was a bit different. He was tall and gangly and well educated, an IT guy no less. His name was Loc. He was with the unit that serviced our computers and coordinated mainframe requirements. He had newly transferred in from another government office and he was working on the disc drive of the guy next to me when he must have overheard a conversation I was having with another Pinoy officer.

When the other officer had gone, Loc caught my eye, smiled, and introduced himself. You’re from the Philippines, he asked, and his English was accentless, almost Pinoy-sounding. He said he had many Pilipino friends. Turned out he’d also come to Australia by way of the “camps” – in his case, camps in the Philippines (Palawan, I think). We chatted, and from then on, in the manner of officemates the world over, when we crossed each other’s paths, we would nod to each other and say Hi, Hello.

One late afternoon, it was my turn to call up the IT group for help – my computer kept freezing. Loc got the assignment and spent about an hour at my computer station, doing techno things. It was past five and the office was almost deserted when he finished but we continued chatting.

I remember the winter rain splattering on the windows when Loc told me his story. Once upon an afternoon only, and we never again got to rap with each other that long again.

Loc was 17 when he went on the boats. When he tells his story, he begins with about 20 odd men in the boat, no women. Like Ba, he never tells what happened to the women on the boat. They got to open sea and were heading north, towards Hongkong but they ran into trouble near some coral reefs that he later found out were called Freedomland on Philippine maps. There was a gunboat, he says, flying a strange flag. Many years later, he found out that was a People's Republic of China (PROC) flag but he couldn’t have known. The men on the boat saw the gunflashes even before they heard the chatter of the machine guns but they were taken completely by surprise. Some stood up to raise both hands in surrender but the firing went on.

Loc does not remember making a conscious decision on what to do. He simply dove head first into the water. Good for him, he was a strong swimmer; that had been his school sport. Loc remembers diving in the general direction of the nearest island and he remembers that he hadn’t taken more than four or five strokes in the water when he felt a glancing blow to the top of his skull. Loc showed me the scar where the bullet had furrowed a neat groove through his hairline. Might have been a ricochet from the hull of the boat because it was a spent bullet that lodged weakly near his temple. Through a red mist, Loc swam as he had never swam before, fighting not to pass out. He thinks he may have swam about 6 or 7 km before the breakers flung him on the beach. He kept drifting in and out of consciousness but remembers with clarity the moment when his eyes focused on a pair of combat boots. He looked up to the muzzle of a rifle and thought it was all over. It wasn’t. A Philippine marine had stumbled upon him on the beach.

Afterwards, Loc remembers only kindness. Maybe it just wasn’t his time yet, he says. Maybe some young Philippine Army doctor thought he was a challenge. Maybe karma. Maybe faith (he is Roman Catholic). Maybe plain compassion, he speculates, and that is why he likes Pinoys instinctively. I feel unbidden pride in my own people. Loc lived through the hospital and the refugee camp, and the processing. He reckons three or four men in his boat survived, none of them his relatives. He is the only one who chose to live in Melbourne. He finished college, got a job, got married and had just become a father to a baby girl when we talked idly, waiting for the winter rain to let up. I moved on to another government office a year later and haven’t had occasion to run into him ever since.

But I think of Loc every time I read stories of personal bravery and about refugees and the people smugglers who are much in the news. Lately, I’ve been reading my blogger friend’s struggle to accept the reluctance of her high school classmates to affirm one of their own as an “outstanding alumnus” for having co-founded the NPA. Where has all the romance gone for a generation who used to wear Che Guevara T-shirts ? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. Nowadays, I think of the NPA and their vision of an alternative society and my mind’s eye locks into a 17-year old orphan boy swimming to freedom through a hail of bullets. Not much romance there, I would think.

Sadly, reality beats romance every time. The reality is that the homes they left must have turned pretty awful for Ba and Loc and their people to flee in rickety boats and make their way through unspeakable horror to freedom and a better place to raise their own children. And I’m glad the NPA will never take over my old country. Or turn out a generation of Pinoy boat people.

By:

Rolando Agaton Lampa
Melbourne, Australia

Photo credits: stockxpert

MORE EXPAT TALES: The Boat People 1 - The Story of Ba

Here's another piece from my high school editor and friend, Rolando A. Lampa, a Pinoy expat in Australia. Here, he tells the story of two Vietnamese men he made friends with in Oz -- former "boat people" who "paid for their visas in blood and tears."

In Australia, most English-speaking migrants gravitate towards the public service. It’s a mini-United Nations. In my time as Customs Officer and later, Tax Officer, I worked with so many first and second generation migrants that we sometimes played a game of spot-the-native-born-Aussie in the Office. I made friends with Maltese, Anglo-Indians, Serbs, Cypriots, Mauritanians, Italians, South Africans and Sri-Lankans. Most came to Aussieland like me under the qualification points system with sponsorship from close kin.

But there were two guys in my first office who were different from the others. They were Vietnamese "reffos" (refugees), and they were young men with old eyes. The routes they took in coming to Australia were different from the rest of us.

I remember two in particular, Ba and Loc.

I first met Ba at the Customs Office when I was the Detained Goods Clerk at Melbourne docks. He was then the Uniforms Officer and we shared an office and storeroom. Ba was a shy, bespectacled, dapper little man with really polite manners and very gentle demeanor. I used to watch him service uniform requisitions, leading officers to the dressing rooms to try the uniforms on and patiently going back and forth to the storeroom to find just the right size for the finicky ones. He was unfailingly courteous, not complaining when officers would walk in even during lunch break or tea time asking to be served.

We used to talk in the afternoons, when work dragged. The accent took a little getting used to and Ba was not very fluent in English but I understood him well enough. He came, he said, from the “camps” – the Indonesian refugee camps. He was born to a well-to-do Saigon family; his mother, he said, owned three groceries and so they were able to afford the boatmen’s asking fees when time came to quit the place.

They were in the second wave, around 1980. They were heading for Malaysia or Singapore and through to the west coast of Australia but didn’t make it and wound up in Indonesia. Processing by the UN took more than five years but Ba and his father and two uncles finally made it.

Foolishly, I asked about his mother. Dead, he said in a flat voice -- and his aunts and an older sister, all dead. Suddenly, I recalled all I had read about the fishermen/pirates in the Gulf of Thailand and the orgy of plunder and rapine that the flotilla of boat refugees from Vietnam had sailed through in trying to get to Australia. I never asked again. Ba must have been a boy at the time. He was only in his mid-twenties when I got to know him.

Speaking to him in private, I understood Ba hated the communist regime in his old country with a passion. Their house and their stores had been expropriated. Communist policy, I commented but Ba shook his head. No, some ranking military officers got their hands on their properties is all, nothing to do with socialism. But Ba was upbeat about things, in that oddly polite way that he had.

There were a couple of younger sisters back in Saigon he was sponsoring, through the family reunion policy at the UN International Refugees Commission. At first, I felt a little envy; if only we Pinoys could work our way through an appropriate UN office as the Vietnamese could, maybe we could get over more of our family members. But thinking like that made me feel guilty; we Pinoys would never have knowingly endured the terrors that the Vietnamese boat people had. Ba and his family had paid for their visas in blood and tears.

A couple of months before he moved on to the Airport (ethnics were badly needed there), something happened that showed me another side of Ba. There was this burly Building Maintenance officer up on the second floor who occasionally came down to greet officers coming in for their uniforms. His name was Digby and he was your caricature redneck, a loudmouth with very vocal views about too many Asians swamping Australia and all that.

One time, I saw Digby at the end of the room, whispering to another officer and turning around to say something to Ba, guffawing and braying all the time. I couldn’t hear from that distance but Ba suddenly stooped down and in one fluid motion scooped up a massive telephone directory and flung it at Digby’s face. The next moment, Ba had jumped up on the table, hands in the standard karate stance and other officers in the room were rushing in to break it up. Break what up…. Digby was stumbling out the door, clutching a broken nose. He never came down to our office again. They hushed it all up and Ba got his requested transfer, anyway.

I haven’t seen Ba for several years now but I liked that little guy. I hope his sponsorship of his kid sisters was successful.

By:
Rolando Agaton Lampa
Melbourne, Australia

Watch out for the next expat tale: The Story of Loc

EXPAT TALES 1: THE LAMPAs OF MANILA

From time to time, ode2old will feature nostalgia stories of Pinoys and Pinoy families living abroad -- how they made it there, the struggles they went through to get settled, how they've kept their "pinoyness" while trying to assimilate a borrowed culture, what they miss most about the ole country, and generally their remembrances of home and their dreams of coming back.

Here's the first such story by my ole friend and high school classmate -- the former child prodigy I blogged about months ago -- ta-daah! -- Rolando Lampa.

My sisters left in ‘74: one in August heading for Australia, the other, barely two months later, bound for Canada. They would not see each other for almost 20 years; that was not the way they planned it, but that was how things panned out.

Sisters led the way

My soon-to-be Australian sister left with her husband, their 2-1/2 year old son and their baby daughter who was only four months old when they boarded the plane. They would have gone away, sooner or later, anyway. My sis and her hubby met at the U.S. Embassy on Roxas Blvd where they both worked and in 20 years or so (not sure now about American federal worker retirement policy; its probably changed now) they would have been given their green cards anyway. But they couldn’t wait; all around us in the early seventies, the baby boomers were departing in great numbers for anywhere that paid wages in dollar currency.

My sister’s husband was an electrical engineer and worked in maintenance at the U.S. Embassy. He got a tip that Australia had just formulated a very generous migrant-assisted program for “technos” and tradesmen. You applied, got interviewed, got approved – the Aussies would fly you and your family to a capital city of your choice, house you, feed you, put you in touch with local industry, and if you couldn’t land a suitable job within a year, or if you just felt it wasn’t the country for you, why, the Aussies would fly you back to Manila at their expense. Good deal, wasn’t it ?

So they applied with the Australian Embassy before Christmas ’73, were interviewed in the New Year, and were approved shortly after my sister gave birth to her baby girl in April. They were given six months to front up to Aussieland. Late August, they were living in government housing in Melbourne and by Christmas they both had jobs and had moved to their own flat.

Next sister was dalaga, no boy friend, and five years away from getting married and settling down. She was doing well working in admin in a garment firm in Pasig; but all her barkada, one after another, were drifting away to the West. Within a two-year period in ’73-’74, around six of them, singles and newly-weds, all migrated to the U.S./Canada. So my sis filled up applications with both embassies and swore privately to ruck up to whichever country responded first. Seems so unheard of nowadays, but in the late sixties and early seventies, you could really just front up to those embassies and fill up migrant visa applications. Quotas were not overflowing then; it was a more innocent time.

The Canadian approval came in early ’74; a year later, with my sister Baby well settled in her high rise apartment in Toronto, the Americans sent their own approval. My sister thought about it but her close friends were nearby and she had a good job, so she said – Not. Besides, she could freely move across the U.S. border and did so regularly to visit other friends from the old firm who had set up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, just four hours away from Toronto on the road to Niagara Falls. She stayed put.

Migrant waves in 'innocent' times

My sisters were lucky. They were in the first big wave of non-medical migrants. From the mid-60’s onwards, Pinoy doctors and nurses were already entering the States via the Exchange Visitor Program. In the early 70’s and especially after martial law, the migrant mix changed – in came the white-collar professionals, the engineers, accountants, teachers, marketing guys, etc. Much different then, when it was easier to apply for migrant visas. By ’79 when Marcos had lifted the travel ban and it was OK to go and visit the U.S./Canada on tourist visas, times had changed. There were long lines at the embassies. On Roxas Blvd., outside the embassy, you had to have an alalay to stand in line for you or hold your spot in the queue while you went off to buy a sandwich and a drink. There would be the odd cowboy who made it a business to stand in line and offer his place in the queue to latecomers – for a suitable fee, of course.

Those were the early days. There were no airport tubes yet – you went out on the tarmac and boarded the stairs, turned around at the top of the stairs to wave to family and friends, indistinguishable in the crowd at that distance, and then you were swallowed up by the plane and suddenly you were gone from their lives and you were stepping into another planet. That was at the old MIA on Airport Road in Paranaque.

Leavetaking at the airport, Pinoy Style

Departures were a new thing then. Whole families would rent jeeps and mini-buses from the province to give their son or daughter the proper send-off. They brought their own baon: pancit and adobo and rice in kalderos and Tupperware, and also plates and crockery, and they shared lunch in the car park outside MIA. Departure day was like All Saints Day at the cemetery. The children bawled and squabbled and played with the automatic doors and spilt coca cola on the marble floors inside the airport reception area. Outside there was an army of vendors and on-lookers and loiterers. Everywhere there was picture taking. Souvenir shots with Uncle This and Auntie That and cousins and barkada. Pinoy culture. You would think they had said their goodbyes at home before setting off for the airport but they could never have enough goodbyes. Last minute reminders to call up Tio This and Kumadre That when you get to San Francisco. Pinoy courtesies. Makulit – also Pinoy habit.

There was even a kind of dress code, back in the early seventies. Departing women wore pant suits and some even that most inconvenient of all attire for going to the toilet, the one-piece jumpsuit. The men wore coats or bush jackets. They would be stuck in cattle class for 15 to 18 hours, but what the heck, you had to look good for the photos. Nowadays, we all tend to get on the plane wearing the daggiest of T-shirts, loose track pants and a weather-beaten jacket with pockets for passport, eyeglasses and cell phone. That was a long way away then.

The migrant would check in, clinging to that ubiquitous documentation envelop with X-ray test result as tightly as if it were his beating heart. He would shake loose from family and barkada, retaining the vision of a teary-eyed nanay blowing a last air kiss, and go out the doors, onto the tarmac and the stairs that Ninoy Aquino would make famous much later.

There was one last crazy goodbye rite to be done. When the plane doors closed and the engines sprang to life, the crowd would move on up the stairs and on to the airport roof. Their eyes would follow the plane as it taxied up the runway. The crowd would move to one side of the roof and as the plane moved in the other direction, the crowd would follow on to the other side of the roof, all the while waving and trying to catch a glimpse of their son or daughter in the airplane windows. Unbelievable now but that’s how it was done. Then the plane would take off and the crowd would yell and maintain eye contact until the plane was a speck on the horizon, until it was gone from sight. Then they would disperse.

Today we chortle at the memory at the way we said goodbye to family members back then (still done today but there’s less drama) but there is a sweetness in the memory. Sometimes, we relate these things to our new non-Pinoy friends and they are amazed. Our way, we say, of bidding goodbye and wishing well. And that’s the way (aha, aha) I liked it.

So my sisters left for the great unknown and I said goodbye (as above) In good time, I also left for good. But that’s another story.

By:
Rolando Agaton Lampa
Melbourne, Australia
Guest Blogger

Note: Are you a Pinoy living abroad? How is it like? What are its upside and downside? Would you like to write about it? Send your pinoy diaspora pieces for posting on http://ode2old.blogspot.com by emailing annamanila at myrnaco.@gmail.com