My days as a happy refugee have long ended. I feel overwhelmed by the vision that one day, this class of emigrant communist officials who were brought up with communist ideals will become powerful economic giants, influential intellectuals, elite public servants and overtake this country where I’m taking refuge and turn it into a communist one.
My days as a happy refugee have ended. These days I live with the descendants of the communist officials of my other country – Vietnam.
I met him in a walking group. An Australian lady in the group told me that he’d boasted about his family holding power in Vietnam. He came here on a University scholarship and now works for a federal government department. A Vietnamese education body administers the award of the Australian scholarships to Vietnamese students. For Vietnamese, it is widely understood that in corruption-rife Vietnam, many communist officials use their influence to gain scholarships for their children to study and settle in Australia. In my online reading, I discover growing international discussion of the corruption that is rife in Vietnamese education systems.
One day, while leaving my friends’ house, I saw an expensive car stopped at the house next door. My friends told me that their neighbours were an aged couple who came to Australia under the sponsorship of their son who had first come here as an overseas student and later became Australian resident. Their house was bought in a fierce-bidding auction. The couple clearly came from North Vietnam based on their appeasing, monotone accent only possessed by those living under communism after North and South Vietnam was divided by the 1954 Geneva Accords. My friends later heard from the grapevines that the couple were high-ranking communist officials back in Vietnam.
My days as a happy refugee have ended. These day I sometimes have no option but to shop at businesses established by the emigrant communist officials of my birth country.
The grocery store that I used to shop had new owner. The owner was a Vietnamese Communist Party member who had emigrated to Australia under the business migration category after returning their party membership card.
Another communist official I knew back in Vietnam went to Australia on a house-hunting trip. He had already bought another house in Canada but the one in Australia that he had planned to buy was for his daughter to stay in while he sent her to study on his expense.He also talked about bringing millions of dollars to Australia whenever he wanted to under business migration category and putting up fake business for the first few years after arrival as he didn’t need to work to live.
Did those wealthy emigrant Communists build their fortunes on the money and jewellery they robbed from the captured defectors or on the assets they confiscated from the bourgeoisie in 1978? Or from the fee of 25 taels of gold for each ethnic Chinese passenger who then were allowed to depart Vietnam legally en masse in thousands in one of those “iron-build” ships back in 1978 and 1979? Was their money accumulated from the acts of corruption they made while they were still in power in Vietnam? While living a comfortable life in Australia, are they stretching their octopus arms and maintaining political power and connection to Vietnam?
My days as a happy refugee have long ended. I feel overwhelmed by the vision that one day, this class of emigrant communist officials who were brought up with communist ideals will become powerful economic giants, influential intellectuals, elite public servants and overtake this country where I’m taking refuge and turn it into a communist one.
In country of freedom, they meet,
The villains whose lives are discreet,
With victims who escaped alive,
They are the enemies in life.
Their fortunes they build when they rob,
Corruption has long made them nobs,
The filthy rich devils are rife,
They are our enemies in life.
Connection, power they maintain,
In Vietnam, victims are in pain,
How can both sides not live in strife?
They are the enemies in life.
(Kyrielle-style poem)
Image credit
by tommy japan.
My days as a happy refugee have long ended. I feel overwhelmed by the vision that one day, this class of emigrant communist officials who were brought up with communist ideals will become powerful economic giants, influential intellectuals, elite public servants and overtake this country where I’m taking refuge and turn it into a communist one.
A refugee's journey - Vietnam to Australia 
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Inequality in a communist Vietnam and the existence of capitalism after it was driven out in 1975, yet never before in Vietnam, the gap between the rich and the poor is much widen now. News on the web site of the Vietnamese government.
http://www.nationaltimes.vn/economic-news/vietnam-super-rich-has-increased-fourfold-in-ten-years-125326.html
“The ‘super-rich’ are individuals defined as having assets of US $30 million, approximately 630 billion dong, according to World Bank report released Tuesday .
The report revealed that Vietnam was estimated to have 110 super-rich in 2013. It means that one out of 1 million Vietnamese is super-rich. And the ‘super-rich’ are individuals defined as having assets of US $30 million, approximately 630 billion dong”
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The link below talks about scholarship and education corruption from an American with years of dealing with international study for students in Vietnam.
http://markashwill.com/about/
http://markashwill.com/tag/corruption/page/2/
“So how do institutions determine financial need in a country like Vietnam? It’s not easy. Unlike the US, which has many official paper trails that give schools a pretty accurate indication of a family’s ability to pay, “paper” and actual income and wealth in a country at Vietnam’s stage of development are usually two very different things. Like other countries, everyone wants a scholarship, including the sons and daughters of the nation’s über rich. (To put this in context, when I say “über rich,” I’m referring, for example, to people who own cars that are worth as much as or more than your home.) Scholarships are prestigious, confer bragging rights and, of course, save money along the way. What’s not to like?”
“Here’s an example that proves my point that schools need help distinguishing between actual and faux need. A young Vietnamese woman received a very generous (merit- and need-based) scholarship from a well-known and highly selective East Coast liberals arts college. Once she arrived on campus, other Vietnamese students knew immediately that the school had been had. She was in fact the daughter of a man who worked in ministry X, whose paper salary was quite low (in the hundreds per month), but whose family was, in reality, very wealthy. If the college in question had worked with a reliable and trustworthy partner on the ground, it could have determined in short order that the family had no need for a scholarship of that magnitude.”
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You can get download from this site
https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=0zDOU6aHJZH-8QX03oCIDw&url=http://www.hks.harvard.edu/innovations/asia/Documents/HigherEducationOverview112008.pdf&cd=22&ved=0CBwQFjABOBQ&usg=AFQjCNH7GLJbth6nhR80dAemo6bSpy_E4g
Page4/11 talks about buying titles and degrees!
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Interesting links regarding Vietnam with increasingly high number of students studying overseas yet GDP per capita is only around $1,700 USD.
http://wenr.wes.org/2014/06/trends-in-vietnamese-academic-mobility-opportunities-for-u-s-institutions/
“Vietnam’s higher education sector faces significant challenges. These are related to quality standards, a low post-graduation employment rate, and widespread corruption.”
“Last month’s WENR feature article, Higher Education in Vietnam, described how the low quality of Vietnamese higher education combined with increasing disposable income has led to an increasing number of Vietnamese seeking educational opportunities abroad. However, the challenges for Vietnamese are formidable, as per capita GDP was only US$1,755 in 2012, less than one-third that of China. Despite this, the number of Vietnamese students studying abroad at the tertiary level has increased significantly to 53,802 in 2012*, up from 23,334 in 2006 according to UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics.”
http://wenr.wes.org/2014/05/higher-education-in-vietnam/
“Vietnam has risen to become a significant source of international students for a number of countries around the world, most notably Australia and the United States which, combined, enrolled 36 percent of the approximately 106,000 overseas Vietnamese students in 2012.”
“In the United States, according to the most recent data from the Institute for International Education, there were 16,098 Vietnamese students on U.S. study visas in academic year 2012/13, making it the eighth largest sender of tertiary students to the United States.”
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Thanks for that information. It certainly is eye opening.
Australian history is also tainted with Communism, even to the point of compromising the Australian Defence Forces during the Great Wars, and one of our Prime Ministers, tried to Ban Communism, but, it was Unconstitutional.
For some reason, the idea of communism is promoted as the saviour of the “working class” as an antidote to Capitalism, which has it’s own issues, but, if you explore both these trends closely, you start asking yourself, what is the real difference, when they are both focused on great wealth enjoyed by the privileged few, and both impose much Government tape over people’s ordinary lives.
And there are many facts, through out modern history, where Democratic countries have aided Communist Regimes…and Rogue Nation States; for profit.
I have come to believe, that no government at all serves its people or the country, anymore, anywhere. in the world. It is all about mediocrity.
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This is so well written. And frightening. One must ask, is there really such a thing as “Freedom” ? I like your use of ‘octopus arms’. It is a picture that tells it like it is. That is the problem with a free country, it lets anyone in…even oppressors of the human spirit, for money. I too fear for what will become of this great country, if we allow our freedoms to be compromised. I really feel for your situation. It must be next to impossible to subjugated by the very thing that you escaped from.
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There are lots of communist officials in Vietnam who have bought multiple houses overseas, sent their children to study overseas and can easily emigrate to Australia or Canada any time they want to with the business immigration category. In the following writing, the communist party member, living in Hanoi, bought houses in the US, Australia and Singapore and said that she could emigrate to Canada whenever she liked to as Canada only needs people to have 1/2 million to apply for business migration. Sorry, the below link is in Vietnamese.
https://saohomsaomai.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/chuyen-that-o-thu-do-ha-noi/
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I was pompously informed by two women that their fathers are military Generals of communist countries. One woman came from China who had been an overseas student at the time of the Tiananmen square massacre and was then allowed to stay in Australia permanently as a result. Another is the daughter of a Russian military General who came here first as an overseas student and has since became a permanent resident. They both work in the government at management-level.
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There are other few privileged Chinese who came here to study at first then became permanent residents. They proudly told people that they regulary attended functions at the Chinese embassy during Chinese New Year and other special events. At the 2008 Olympic held in China, they proudly informed people that they were to take leave and work as volunteers to help out with the Olympic activities in their homeland. People were kept up to date with their “work of duty” by emails and pictures. If those people were so passionate and patriotic with their country and their communist regime, why did they move to live in Australia? Shouldn’t they bring the knowledge that they had priviledgely obtained in Australia back to China and serve their country and their people?
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