'The Exodus from Vietnam' embroidery

This embroidery, ‘The Exodus from Vietnam’, was created by an unknown Vietnamese ‘boat person’ in a Hong Kong detention camp in the early 1990s. While the identity of the maker has been lost, their journey from Vietnam to Hong Kong has been preserved through their art.

The story told through this cloth suggests that its maker was one of the thousands who crossed perilous waters by boat in the decades after the Fall of Saigon in 1975 to reach the shores of lands such as Hong Kong (other destinations included, for instance, Malaysia or Indonesia).  These individuals and families have collectively become known as ‘boat people’. Once they reached their destination, survivors were led by local authorities to closed camps or detention centres where they often remained for years before their status was settled. If granted refugee status, they would become eligible for resettlement in a third country. Whether the maker of this cloth was ultimately granted refugee status and resettled, or repatriated, remains unknown.

In this embroidery, the maker uses vertical tiers to visually represent the key chronological periods of their journey. This style of embroidery is commonly seen in story cloths created by the Hmong, an ethnic minority community in Indo-China, and this may suggest that the maker was from or influenced by this community. Placed in literal parallel to each other, the maker’s rendering of their time in prison camps in Vietnam looks strikingly similar to that of their subsequent limbo in the Hong Kong detention camp – is this a coincidence or intentional artistic choice by the artist?

The act of making this embroidery is but one of many ways its maker would have told their story over the years – to the authorities who greeted them in Hong Kong, to the assessors of their refugee applications, and perhaps to trusted individuals within the camps or even the media. Language barriers often complicated these acts of story-telling, sometimes with longer-term consequences for their future settlement. Those who produced crafts or art were not only able to communicate their experiences visually, they could make money to purchase items beyond basic necessities in the camps such as cigarettes. For some, embroidery may also have been a means of processing the traumas of war.

New Zealand was one of many countries which accepted those successfully awarded refugee status by the UNHCR. The greatest intake of Vietnamese refugees occurred between 1979 and 1980 when approximately 1,500 arrived. While some of those accepted by New Zealand did come via Hong Kong, few Vietnamese were entering New Zealand as refugees in the 1990s.

The cloth was purchased by New Zealander Dinah Towle from a shop run by the Hong Kong Red Cross. In the early 1990s, Dinah was living in Hong Kong with Richard Towle, her husband at the time, who was working for the UNHCR in various capacities with individuals and families escaping Indo-China after the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in 1975.