Please RSVP by emailing: chk.library@utoronto.ca.
About the Talk
On May 4, 1975, just four days after the Fall of Saigon, a Danish vessel carrying about 3,600 South Vietnamese docked at the Kwai Chung Container Port in Hong Kong. Initially, the incident was treated as a one-off event, overshadowed by Queen Elizabeth II’s visit at the same time. What began as a single incident evolved Hong Kong into a long-term humanitarian frontier that intersected with the lives of over 200,000 refugees who fled home for political, religious, ethnic, and other reasons. The saga would outlast four governors and continue even beyond the 1997 transfer of sovereignty.
The Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library is pleased to have Jeffrey Ngo to give a presentation on Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong. This talk draws on work in progress toward his dissertation project, a new international history of the boat people entitled “Thuyền Nhân: Vietnamese Refugees, the Human-Rights Regime, and Global Governance in Hong Kong.”
This talk will be divided into three parts:
Part one of the talk traces early departures from a unified Vietnam experimenting with communist rule and surveys key turning points in colonial policymaking.
Part two situates the crisis within a broader international landscape, highlighting how decisions made in Geneva, Washington, Ottawa, London, Paris, Canberra, and elsewhere profoundly dictated realities on the ground.
Part three explores new directions for research, including how the boat people both loomed large over and were shaped by the Sino-British negotiations, the handover countdown, and the rise of local electoral politics.
About Jeffrey Ngo
Jeffrey Ngo is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor in history at Georgetown University who specializes in the Pacific World. He holds a B.A. (2016) and an M.A. (2017) from New York University. Dividing time between London and Washington, he returns to Toronto as a former visiting scholar (2017-18) at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library.
Moderator: Holly Du
Holly Du is a Vietnamese Chinese who left Vietnam in 1978. She was later placed in Kai Tak refugee camp and came to Canada in 1980. Holly holds a Master Degree of Theological Study. Her first English work, By the Riverside of Kampuchea, follows the story of a Chinese Cambodian woman who endured the trauma of war, and found peace in Canada.