(Yen Siow, a former refugee from Vietnam, with an old photograph of her family taken near the Hawkins Road camp in Sembawang in 1980. Photo: Yahoo Singapore)

Yen Siow remembers being three years old and sitting on her mother’s shoulders in a boat that was full of water and floating on a stormy sea.

Adrift for five days and four nights in the South China Sea, she also recalls being hoisted onto her uncle’s back as he climbed a ladder to board a large ship, whose crew rescued the 82 Vietnamese refugees and transported them to Singapore.

Siow is a Vietnamese-Australian and a former refugee – one of the thousands of boat people who fled their home country amid the Vietnam War.



A significant chapter of Siow’s life began in October 1980, when she and her family were temporarily housed at 25 Hawkins Road, a refugee camp in Sembawang. She spent four months there with her parents, two siblings and some extended family members before they were sponsored to move to Australia in March 1981. Her parents and siblings still reside in Australia.

Now 39, Siow lives in Singapore and is searching for individuals and organisations that contributed to both her family’s welfare as well as that of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who passed through Singapore at one point or another.

Born Nguyen Thuy Hoang Yen, she tells Yahoo Singapore that her boat was rescued by a Norwegian oil tanker on 20 October 1980.

“I’m not here by accident. I wasn’t saved from this ship for no reason. I felt a compelling desire to go and find the rescuers and be thankful to them for steering the ship around and saving our lives,” she says.

Siow put out an appeal on a Facebook group for expatriate wives in Singapore seeking information on the ship.

With the help of some Norwegian expatriates in Singapore, she was able to locate the company that owned the ship which rescued her family, as well as the names of seven crew members who were on the ship – all within three days.

“This is really quite unique. There were hundreds of ships and this was 36 years ago. It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” she says.

She has been corresponding with two crew members from the ship, and hopes to meet them in Norway at the end of the year.

“Now that I’m back, I’m so grateful I have the chance to honour this country because Singapore took us in for four to five months as refugees… I was told that many ships passed us by.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she talked about the rescue.

“How did this one ship and the captain on the ship make such a big decision to turn around and reach out to us and say, ‘ You guys matter. You might be Vietnamese boat people but you matter to us and we’re going to rescue you.’”

She added that the ship’s crew also gave each of the 82 refugees on the boat a small $3 allowance per day while they lived at the refugee centre in Singapore.

“I don’t know how I could live if I could not pay respects to such people who saved my family like that,” she says.

“I want to tell the story that we are not here by accident. Our lives have purpose to it… I would love to share that story with other people – that I’m a product of someone’s kindness and generosity.”

Her own parents never talked about fleeing Vietnam, or their time at the Sembawang refugee camp.

“My parents have been silent about the boat experience and the war because it was too traumatic, so they never talked about it,” she explains.

Siow discovered pieces of her past only after she met her Singaporean husband, who often asked her father about how he escaped the war.

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(A photo belonging to Yen Siow showing the Norwegian oil tanker that rescued her family)



Life at Hawkins Road

The Hawkins Road refugee camp was a former British military barracks that was left unused until it was repurposed in 1978 to host the incoming boat people.

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