Springfield resident Thu Pham recalls fate of her own countrymen, in thinking about missing plane.
The fate of the Malaysian Airlines jet with its 239 passengers, missing since it departed Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, and speculated to be anywhere in a two million square mile area, that includes the South China Sea, has brought back memories of Vietnamese fleeing on that sea for at least one Springfield resident.
"I hope for the best for them and for them to be safe. It is a very scary situation. Maybe there will be a miracle to save them all," said Thu Pham, who escaped her war-torn country by boat, in 1987, and spent two years in a Thai refugee camp, before coming to the United States.
Pham, former coordinator of the Vietnamese Health Project based at Mercy Medical Center, escaped from Saigon, traveling south west along the coastline to Cambodia, where she and eight other refugees spent two weeks, and then boarded another small boat to cross the Gulf of Thailand.
Previously, she had tried to escape Saigon, now Ho Chi MInh City, by boats headed from the Communist country into the waters of the South China Sea.
"I tried seven times, but was cheated. They would take the money from you, but you would go nowhere. They would say there was no boat, because the police came," Pham said.
Pham recalled families with members who did escape "for freedom" on that sea.
"The boats were very old, and many did not make it through. People face pirates, and did not know where they were going. Some were lucky, and got saved by boats. You could end up anywhere, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines. One of my friends, who came after me, landed in Malaysia, married and was sent back to Vietnam, after seven years. His wife came to the United States after 11 years, and three years ago they were reunited. " Pham said.
The tens of thousands of Vietnamese who began to flee their worn-torn country in the 1970s, and were sometimes rescued by merchant ships who followed a tradition of leaving them at the next port-of-call, prompted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to try to get coastal countries to give the refugees temporary residence, if other countries would agree to resettle them.
In the case of Flight 370, some 25 nations are now involve in the effort to locate the plane that is said to have lost contact with ground control 40-minutes into its night flight, as the Boeing jet was headed over Gulf of Thailand, between northern Malaysia and southern Vietnam. It then reportedly then changed direction, its signaling disabled, in what is now being theorized as an act of sabotage.