Her Journey  

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This is a retelling of my mother’s story. It is about her migration from Vietnam to New Zealand by boat. My mother has both five sisters and five brothers who migrated from Vietnam with her. They all travelled to Hong Kong together where they stayed at a refugee camp.  

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In the past, they suffered poor living conditions and faced hardships while in Vietnam. It was due to this my mother's family decided to depart in search of a happy and peaceful life elsewhere. 

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The story begins from the left-hand side of the cotton cloth and goes right across. The colour choice of black is because of how the darkness speaks of a significant time in my parents’ lives before they settled in New Zealand.  

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Characters without faces are people from the village and unidentified people from the boat. The main characters, those are my parents, my mother and father’s parents and my mother’s siblings, appear in the story with their faces drawn. I have left the characters’ clothing the same including Rice Paddy hats which are known to be worn by people of Vietnamese descent. No one was able to afford good quality items, and all faced no choice but to wear the same clothes and walk barefoot. 

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Thousands of people flee their homelands and try to settle down in other countries to have a taste of freedom for various reasons. Some have encountered dangerous situations and are being treated unfairly by people in their country. Resettlement figures have been steadily declining in the past decade.  

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My mother and father met each other at Hong Kong Refugee Camp. My parents migrated to New Zealand in the year 1990. The last Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong closed on May 31, 2000. 

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Jenny Pham