“Do you know this place used to be a camp?” I found myself asking this question to my friends and families in Hong Kong when we were out and about in the city. My urge to make these remarks were prompted when we are at universities, museums, music venues, and housing estates where no traces of the lives of Vietnamese asylum seekers in Hong Kong – some lived in the camps for more than a decade – could be found. The fact that these camps were created, closed, and erased in the recent past, between the late 1970s and late 1990s, also renders this question more pressing.
More than 230,000 asylum seekers arrived in Hong Kong in the two decades in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The overcrowded camps, the strict control, and the prolonged detention period compounded into one of the most severe humanitarian crises in Hong Kong’s history. There are numerous books and research papers, from different disciplines, on the poor treatment of the Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong. There are also substantial archives of photographs, videos, newsreels, and government documents. Accounts of the refugees in the forms of diaries, oral history, and artworks can also be found relatively easily, including some being displayed in major museums in Hong Kong. In these extensive records, one can readily see how the Vietnamese refugees and camps were part and parcel of Hong Kong’s urbanscape. One can find photos of the barbed wire separating the camp and the walk-up buildings in Shum Shui Po, one of the densest residential areas in the world. Or we can read news reporting on the notorious San Yick Factory Building in Tuen Mun that was converted into a camp. At stake is that despite the ample information about the Vietnamese refugee camps, these camps have rarely been situated in the urban environment of Hong Kong. The fact that the camps’ construction and demolition coincided with the time Hong Kong was undergoing rapid transformation, is also rarely examined.
These are the reasons why Daniel Cooper and I decided to construct a comprehensive list of Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, and importantly, to document the usage of the sites before and afterwards. We found more than 40 places that were used to receive, sort, and detain the Vietnamese refugees. Some are purposed-built structures, but many more were converted from British colonial military sites, factory buildings, and dockyards. Our research is on the one hand straightforward since there are extensive government archival documents about the camps, as well as their planning and management. The history of the sites can also be traced relatively easily through historic maps and newspapers. On the other hand, the challenge of this work lays in conceptualising and explaining the camps as parts of the city. To highlight the porosity between the camps and the city also seem to suggest there was some sort of interchangeability between the citizens and the refugees; That is, to study the Vietnamese refugees as a part of Hong Kong’s population. The research, through a retrieval of the camps, argues that only by seeing “them” as “us,” can one patch together the urban histories of Hong Kong in the later part of the 20th century.
In Hong Kong, the fluidity between citizens and refugees is not an extraneous concept. We can build on the fact that most of the city’s population came from mainland China after the Second World War. We can home in the details about the “touch-base” policy, in the 1970s and early 1980s, that accepted unauthorised migration from China when they reached the urban areas of Hong Kong. We can also highlight the early period of the refugee crisis when the Vietnamese were allowed to leave the camps to seek employment or education in the city. In short, it is difficult to grasp the contingencies in Hong Kong’s urbanisation without the Vietnamese in the picture. For example, some Vietnamese refugee camps were deliberately placed in under-developed new towns, including Tuen Mun in northwest New Territories, to provide the much-needed workforce for the factories. When the camps were relocated, district officers protested about the potential economic impact on the area. Some camps were constructed on new reclamation sites – land that was made by ‘filling in’ the sea – before the government could sell the sites to build permanent structures. There were also countless debates between the Correctional Services Department and the Housing Authority, fighting over the allocation of Temporary Housing Areas, usually constructed to accommodate people from slum clearance. In other words, the camps are made and unmade as part of the industrial, population and physical planning in Hong Kong.
Almost half of the former camp sites also shared a similar story: they were former British military camps that were about to be turned into civilian uses as the threat of the Cold War, and the British imperial presence in the Asia Pacific region waned. As a result, these sites also enable us to parse out more complex population histories of Hong Kong, including the presence of Commonwealth soldiers and families working for the British military in Hong Kong. Many of the camp sites have been turned into major institutional buildings in Hong Kong: the Xiqu (Chinese opera) Centre used to be the Canton Road Reception Centre where almost all asylum seekers were first held, both Lingnan University and the University of Science & Technology of Hong Kong were built on former campsites, and the Museum of History stood on the site of the former Chatham Road Camps. At stake is that these institutions mention neither the history of the refugee camps, or the colonial and industrial pasts that shaped Hong Kong. Following the trajectories of the Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, we found more about the places we called home.
But how do we tell this history, for Hong Kong, where the issue of cultural and place identities has been highly contentious? How do we remember the sites when they are going to, almost inevitably, be redeveloped and converted again because of the demands of capital? Can we call these camps “heritage,” whatever that word means? If so, who’s “heritage” are they? Recalling the histories of spaces and places that no longer exist is often hard, but the trauma of detention makes this task even more difficult. For example, we will not recreate the camps using Virtual Reality or other 3D reconstructions – a common method in heritage studies – to not make human misery into exhibits. We can campaign for adding plaques, but can the commemoration also explain the ebbs and flows of urban changes? We know of excellent works from Taiwanese filmmakers who documented the Vietnamese refugees’ stories in Penghu as part of the island’s history, but that requires resources and talent that are not commonly available. We may put the drawings, maps, archival documents and photographic materials in an exhibition that showcase the histories we have briefly summarised here.
However, the impact of pointing at a well-known building, highlighting it was something extra-ordinary, may be blocked by the gallery walls. We found great responses from the residents when the recent past of their areas is being told, but the dispersed and remote nature of the camps means these interactions are often isolated incidents. In a way, these are common problems in architectural studies, so much so that we use Jorge Luis Borges’ short tale on creating a real-size map of an empire as a shorthand for this struggle. At the time of writing, we still do not have a solution. But maybe what we can do, is to return to the urbanity that drove this study in the first place. That is, instead of abstracting and reproducing the camps, perhaps we should simply see the city as the exhibit. In this effort, we can start by marking the city elements: we can identify the electric poles and streetlights that were once standing inside the camps, we can draw the land reclamation line where the refugee boats docked, and the trees that have seen it all. To think about these non-human characters is not to distracted from the suffering and experience of the Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, but to highlight the environments we shared. We may explore the potential of alternative ways of mapping, walking, moving, that enable us to experience these sites differently. Working in the field of architectural and urban history, in addition to writing about buildings and designs from the past, may also be about using spaces and places to situate different histories.
This research is a collaboration between Juliana Kei and Daniel M. Cooper, supported by the Lord Wilson Heritage Trust. More information, including the research report, can be found on the website HKCamps, as well as an article in the Change over Time journal on the Legacies of Detention, Isolation and Quarantine.