Learning to live in the 'land of long white feet’

Press, 3 February 1979, Page 1

Learning to live in the 'land of long white feet’

“He says, ‘News Zealand boys have very long feet; I just have short feet’,” said Thai Muoi, translating for her younger brother, Thai Tien, aged 13, a Vietnamese refugee who has been in New Zealand about three weeks.

Thai Tien, with his three sisters, aged 12, 14, and 16, began school in Christchurch this week, just two weeks after they arrived with their parents on a flight from Hong Kong. Before that they were picked up at sea by the freighter Tung An after leaving Vietnam in a fishing boat late last year. When they arrived in Christchurch, the family was re-united with an elder sister, Muoi, and her husband, Huynh Van, who had left Vietnam as refugees in 1977, coming to live in Christchurch in November that year.

Shirley Boys’ High School, where Tien started this week in the third form, seems a long way from Saigon (where the Thai family came from) or Hong Kong, but Muoi said that Tien w'as quite happy at the school.

“He said his teacher is kind to him. His classmates are kind to him and show him every time when he cannot understand,” Muoi said. The first day he took the wrong bus home and ended in Cashmere. but with the help of the bus driver he managed

to get back to Cathedral Square and then find his

By

GENEVIEVE FORDE

way to his sister’s Kilmore Street house. He came last in a running race at school, hence the remark about the long feet New Zealand boys have. They did have races in Vietnam, Muoi said. It was just that the boys here were much bigger, she said. Two of his sisters attend Avonside Girls’ High School and the third is at Shirley Intermediate School. The children were entered at the schools by their sponsor, the Rev. J. E. Pollard, of the Kaiapoi Baptist Church.

The Health Department had provided the family with a table, six chairs, and some single beds.

Muoi said. But because there were so many of them (11 persons in the one house, including Yen), with only three bedrooms, there was not enough room to put up all the beds, and some of the family were sleeping on the floor.

However, this is expected to change soon. Muoi

and her husband. Van, and little Yen, with Van’s two sisters — one who is working as a waitress in Wellington and who plans to study commerce at Canterbury University, and another, aged 16, who arrived in New Zealand yesterday as a refugee from Hong Kong — will move to a house in Riccarton, as soon as they can find one.

“We have a big family,” said Muoi. Muoi said that one of the first things her parents noticed when they arrived in Christchurch was how few people there were in New Zealand. “On the way back from the airport they were asking where the

people were,” she said. “My father felt very busy in Vietnam. A small country with not many people. Here he can’t find a job the same.”

Her mother was a little homesick at first, Muoi said, and still worried about her eldest son, who was married with a small child, in Saigon. “Now she feels hapnv

-eels very happy to come to New Zealand because there are kind people in New Zealand,” Muoi said. But were not the Vietnamese people kind, too? she was asked.

“She says that every country has got kind people and bad people, but the New Zealand people are more kind than bad,” said Muoi.

Apart from the Health Department and Mr Pollard, the Thai family are particularly grateful to “a very nice lady called Nina,” who works in a department store, whom they met quite by chance while they were in town shopping one Friday night. “We became friends. She was very understanding about refugees,” Muoi said.