Dang Thi Hai spent five months in prison under the Vietnamese - and eight years seeking permission to leave her country. But her most difficult months came after she arrived in Britain, her country of asylum. 'You struggle to get out of what seems to be a difficult situation. You want freedom. Then you get it - and you have to find something new to live for. When I first came here I found it difficult to talk without tears.'
Dang Thi Hai's job is to support Vietnamese refugees in London, where over half of the 20,000 in Britain are now concentrated. She is finding that the shock has only now begun to catch up with people, after some eight years in the country. 'At the moment there are many in our community suffering from depression and mental problems,' she says.
Things are particularly hard for the old - like Dang Thi Hai's mother, the daughter of landowners. 'She finds the language and the climate difficult. And when you are old, you tend to look back to the past - and hers was glorious.'
Some 16,000 of these refugees are ethnic Chinese from North Vietnam. The rest, like Dang Thi Hai, are Vietnamese from the South. The two communities, she says, are deeply divided. 'When we first arrived the Chinese, who were often uneducated, needed the Vietnamese as translators, to deal with the British. Now the Chinese have learnt English and they want to take over the jobs we used to do. There is a lot of hard feeling.
'Although we too have suffered under the Vietnamese Communists, the Chinese identify us with them and with the discrimination they experienced. I try to listen to those who feel this way and to apologize for what my people have done. And I try to talk to the Vietnamese too. We need to learn to serve the Chinese, rather than feel superior and look down on them.
'Britain is trying to build a united multicultural society,' she says. 'If our small community is divided into factions which hate each other, this will not help. At the moment we seem to be a problem for you. But if in our two communities we can learn forgiveness, that is something we can contribute to the country as a whole.'
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