I traveled to rural Vietnam to try to understand why the Vietnamese would be willing to be transported in container trucks to Britain. I found poverty and desperation on a level I haven't seen in a while. My story: nyti.ms/2Puop24
I heard the Vietnamese community is divided about the news that the 39 victims in the container truck found in England could be Vietnamese. Some are sympathetic but others say they deserve it because they chose to be smuggled out.
A Vietnamese person wrote on Facebook that the brother of Pham Thi Tra My made up the story of her final heartbreaking texts to her mother in order to get money. This made me furious.
I looked at those texts and the previous ones that she had sent to her mother. In one message, she asked her mother whether her father had bought flowers for her mom because it was Women's Day. And then, that final message: "I'm dying, I cannot breathe."
I heard the cries of her mother, the wails that would sound out from Tra My's room, where she lies weeping. I saw the hollowed-out, red-rimmed eyes of her father, who cried and clutched his chest while talking to me. I was there, and these aren't the faces of people lying.
I was assigned to this story because it was first thought that the 39 victims were Chinese. But many smuggling experts felt it was highly unlikely that Chinese people would choose to be smuggled out in trucks in 2019, given the economic boom.
I started thinking about the migration of the Fujianese, where my paternal grandfather is from. There was no family mythology about how he came. China was poor, and if there was an opportunity to leave, you did, was the reason that was given.
By dint of my birth, I grew up in Singapore, got a decent education and can travel to more than 100 countries, visa-free. Can farmers from Nghe An and Ha Tinh, where many of the 39 victims are believed to be from, realistically get a visa to the UK?
And so if you get your nails done in Britain by a Vietnamese migrant, ask him or her about the "line" -- how did they get to Britain and why?
