'I like the fishing because you are free to work'
HELLO STEVESTON,
GOODBYE VIETNAM
Ten years after they fled revolution and war for a new life in Canada, Vietnamese fishermen find their integration into the fishing industry hampered by hostility and discrimination
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|HE    first time I Pham Thom and I Van Moc Le spent lany time at sea, I they were fleeing I communism in Vietnam, hoping to find a new life in some other land. The second time, they were skippers of their own salmon gillnetters on the Fraser River.
To Thom and Le, the journey from re-education centres and prison camps in p«6t-war Vietnam to the floats and net racks of Steveston's Paramount Pond is an almost incomprehensible miracle they are at a loss to explain.
But to some Canadian fishermen, the sudden arrival of Vietnamese fishermen, first in ones and twos, then by the score, seems sinister and disruptive. Since 1986, sporadic conflict between Vietnamese fishermen and those of .other races has hit every area of the coast and almost every fishery in which Vietnamese are present.
For the Vietnamese, the joy of finding some measure of economic security and personal freedom in the fishing industry has been tempered by incidents of hostility and discrimination from Canadian fishermen.
On the other hand, non-Vietnamese fishers have been shocked by the aggressive, no-holds-barred style of some Vietnamese and angered by incidents both on the Skeena and the Fraser which escalated from arguments over fishing spots into fistfights and gunplay.
Matters came to a head at Steveston's Paramount Pond during last summer's sockeye fishery when hundreds of fishermen from along the coast descended on the river looking for moorage and net rack space only to find the area occupied by Vietnamese fishermen. In one melee, one fisherman's arm was pierced by a gaff hook.
"I don't say all Vietnamese are good," says Pham Thom. "A few are no good. The same goes for white men." What's needed, he believes, is communication and understanding. "There are two sides to these issues."
"Some white people consider us as second grade citizens," adds Van Le, who has experienced harassment first hand. At a recent Nitinat fishery, other fishermen repeatedly corked him, setting their nets so close that his own gear was useless. "But struggle over this is not
THE FISHERMAN / NOVEMBER 17,1989
necessary, it's no use," he adds. "We also hope white men realize it's difficult for us. We should help each other and then these bad things won't happen any more."
Neither Thom nor Van Le are strangers to difficulty. Their own stories are typical of the tragedy and hardship that tens of thousands >of Indochinese refugees endured during their journey to Canada. They are in Canada and the fishing industry to stay, and they are appealing to fellow fishermen to work with them to make the transition easier.
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Pham Thom, now 62, owned a small business selling and repairing motorcycles in the ancient Vietnamese capital of Bien Hoa, not far from Saigon, when communist tanks and troops overran South Vietnam in 1975. With his nine family members, Thom was sent to the "new economic zones," undeveloped jungle regions where hundreds of thou-
• Pham Thom (left) and Van Moc Le were the original Vietnamese fishermen in B.C. and founders of the Vietnamese Fishermen's Association. They were among tens of thousands of boat people granted refugee status. A few hundred now seek to integrate into the gillnet fleet (below), a community far removed from what they knew in Vietnam, which already includes fishers of many races. They hope dialogue and co-operation will smooth the problems of integration.
By GEOFF MEGGS
sands were put to work clearing the land and establishing farms.
"We had to cut trees and build for them, not for us," Thom recalls. In 1978, he was offered a ticket out of the country.
Already beleaguered by natural disasters, their own misguided economic policies and the refusal of the United States to pay a penny of its promised $7 billion in reconstruction aid, Vietnam became embroiled in war in Kampuchea and was in turn invaded by China.
In a security move with haunting overtones of the expulsion of Japanese Canadians , from this coast in 1941, the Vietnamese government took stringent measures against its ethnic Chinese citizens. They were harassed and even lost their ration cards. Many were urged to leave.
Tens of thousands effectively were expelled. Although not of Chinese background, Thom was among them. In 1978, after paying the authorities a hefty sum of gold for his exit visa and
fare, Thom boarded a freighter for the seven-day trip to Hong Kong, where he spent six months in a refugee camp.
"When the Canadian official came, I applied to move to Canada and I arrived in September, 1979," he recalls. 'A church family helped me find a job on a farm in Alberta and after one year I moved to Edmonton."
Thom paid his own fare to Canada and slowly built up the resources to move his entire fam-