Leaving home was easy for Dinh Thi Thu back in 1988, when the only job she could find was as a housemaid and her unemployed husband took out his frustrations by beating her.
Fishing boats were pushing off weekly for Hong Kong from secluded spots up and down the coast around Haiphong. Everyone knew someone who was going to the booming capitalist haven 560 miles away on the southern shore of China.But coming home has been hard.
Thu staged a six-day hunger strike but that did not stop Hong Kong officials from carrying her onto a plane on April 7, 1993, and sending her back. She is one of nearly 1,000 Vietnamese forcibly repatriated by the British colony over the past four years.
"I am a very unhappy woman," said Thu, 32, tears streaming from reddened eyes while she talked about her hostile family and problems finding work and a place to live.
Thu is among the unlucky remnants of an exodus that began in 1975, when waves of refugees fled after communist North Vietnam toppled the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam. Departures crested again later in the 1970s, when Vietnam expelled most ethnic Chinese, and in the late 1980s, when unemployment drove thousands to seek better lives.
Altogether, more than 1.6 million people left. The West, sympathetic after the decades of war in Vietnam, took most of the Vietnamese refugees in. But good will is running out and world attention has shifted to new refugee crises in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
Governments in the region and the West plan to hold a conference soon to decide what to do with the more than 42,000 Vietnamese who, like Thu, fled Vietnam for personal and economic reasons, do not qualify as political refugees and refuse to go home voluntarily.
Hong Kong and the Southeast Asian nations that once served as way stations to the West want to close their holding camps and put an end to one of the world's longest-running and most expensive refugee resettlement efforts.
"I don't think the international community can sit and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for years to run a program like this. I think the people in the camps are holding us hostage now," said Jorgen Gammelgaard, director of the European Union's program for helping Vietnamese who come home.
Since 1989, officials of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have tried to identify genuine political refugees and get them asylum. At the same time, they have tried to entice the rest back to Vietnam with economic incentives.
UNHCR says that most of the 65,000 people who agreed to return are doing at least as well as when they left Vietnam and that there have been no reprisals by Vietnamese authorities. Some have used grants and loans to start businesses and now rank among their communities' most prosperous members.
Most who came back willingly had not sold their houses or knew they could move in with relatives. Many were fishermen who easily went back to their old lives.
But many of the holdouts sold homes, divorced spouses or otherwise burned their bridges before fleeing Vietnam.
Forced repatriation seems increasingly the only solution for them, but it is one that governments and UNHCR shrink from. So far, only Hong Kong has tried it and just on a small scale, intended mainly to encourage other boat people to accept their fate and return voluntarily.
Vietnam, which is making market-oriented economic reforms and working to improve ties with the West, does not want large numbers coming back by force, either.
"If we say we agree to receive forced returnees, the United States will say Vietnam does not respect human rights," said Hoang Van Dinh of the Haiphong city government.
One-third of the voluntary returnees and more than one-fifth of the holdouts come from his city, a sleepy port on the Tonkin Gulf 60 miles east of Hanoi.
Dinh said Vietnam will accept repatriation only if it is done in an orderly way, with dignity and "the support of international groups."
The European Union's program for luring Vietnamese home spent nearly $50 million on small business loans, job training and infrastructure development for returned boat people and their communities over the past four years.
The program shut down Nov. 30, the first concrete signal that international help for Vietnamese boat people is winding down.
Most important, UNHCR's program for helping boat people who return is scheduled to end in December 1995 after spending more than $600 million.
Dinh said Haiphong will maintain most of the job training centers the European Union built or equipped. Jobs, education and land remain scarce, but the 7,300 Haiphong residents still in camps overseas will have the same chance as people who never left, he said.
Thu's case shows how limited the prospects can be.
A farm woman with only seven years of schooling, she had no political conflict with Communist Party authorities. Going to Hong Kong was simply the only way she saw to leave her abusive husband and find a job.
Now that she is back, her problems are back, too. With help from the European program, she was trained and hired by the Haiphong Woolen Factory to work at a knitting machine. But her piecework wages are equivalent to only about $6 to $18 a month, barely enough for food.
Her parents reject her as disloyal to the family. A succession of friends have put her up, but the family she is with now says she must leave when the eldest son comes home from the army.
"We (returnees) have no problems with the local authorities here. My main concern is how to survive," Thu said.