The Skyluck Journals

I was only four years old when my family fled Saigon in 1979. I only have a few fragments of memories from our escape. But when I was in high school in the late 1990s, my mom, Tina Nguyen, told me she had kept extensive journals of the journey.

My parents, younger sister, an uncle and I escaped on the Skyluck. It was a rusty 3,500-tonne freighter with four cavernous lower decks and a top deck that looked like a cobweb of cranes and cables.

That ship carried the five of us, along with approximately 2,700 desperate Vietnamese refugees, to Hong Kong. We would eventually settle in Canada in July 1980, but the journey took 18 difficult months.

Memories can be tricky — I was on the Skyluck but don’t remember much because I was so young, and mom is aging. I’m afraid of losing this chapter of our history.

I asked my mom if she still had those journals. She said she would look for them, but I could sense hesitation in her voice. Maybe they were still too difficult to share.

A few years later, when I was in my 20s, she brought out a shoe box from her closet and said, “Here it is.”

Inside the box was an assortment of notebooks and paper. One of them caught my attention. It appeared hand-crafted, made from rough, yellow paper stock, and bound together with thick thread.

My dad made this from materials he found aboard the Skyluck. The slips of paper were actually labels peeled carefully from cans of yellow beans — a food staple during the five months we lived on the boat.

There were two other notebooks in the shoe box. I started calling them the Skyluck Journals.

The journals contained all the hallmarks of a sweeping epic: a daring midnight escape, mutiny on the high seas, danger and thrilling action, the discovery of a new land.

I was floored and excited beyond belief when I first saw them. It had been nearly 20 years since she had written them.

Unlike oral stories, these weren’t distorted through time and retelling. They were tangible proof of our history on ink and paper — stories written mere hours after they happened.

Over several weeks, my mom and I sat down together and translated about 15 of the journal entries. As a four-year-old, I don’t remember much of the journey — just little snippets like I was eating an orange when my mom told me we were going on a short trip. I hoped these would help fill in the gaps of my own memory of my family’s story.

In the late ‘60s, my mom had just started law school in Saigon, and spent her afternoons with friends at cafés and picnics at the park. The Vietnam War felt very far away. But in 1974, the mood started to change.

People from the central regions of Vietnam were fleeing the fighting, many of them to Saigon. On April 30,1975, my mom stood on the balcony of our home in the city centre and witnessed what once seemed impossible: communist tanks rolling towards the Presidential Palace. Saigon — and by extension, the rest of Vietnam — had fallen.

By the late ‘70s, people were fleeing the country altogether because of lack of food and jobs. My parents were labelled co-conspirators of the previous government. But even talking about escaping could mean imprisonment.

Quietly, my parents started discussing how they would leave. My mom was worried we would die at sea. My dad looked at her, and replied with a firm sincerity, “We will go together. If we die, we die together.”

Listen to the radio documentary The Skyluck Journals.

After 17 days, the Skyluck finally sailed into Hong Kong waters. But it was forced to anchor off of Lamma Island, under guard, a few kilometres southwest of the main island.

Authorities disabled the ship’s engines and reassured the people that they would land soon. But days became weeks, and weeks became months. Almost five months later, the refugees were becoming desperate.

While living conditions remained difficult, there was one thing that brought moments of levity and laughter: the flea market.

WATCH: Tina Nguyen reads an entry from her journal about the flea market.

With the Skyluck anchored off Lamma Island, the refugees were desperately trying to get the world to take notice of their plight. They wrote messages on the side of the ship: “Have pity on us. Let us land.” They wrote letters to the UN high commissioner.

When those efforts landed on deaf ears, several young men tried to swim to Lamma Island in an attempt to deliver messages to the media. Most of them were rounded up and sent back to the ship. One man drowned. Then they staged hunger strikes. But despite all of it, nothing.

Finally, they gathered one night to make an ultimate decision: cut the Skyluck’s anchor chain. With a storm on the horizon, the ship might be pushed towards shore, or back out to sea.

WATCH: Tina Nguyen reads an entry from her journal about the sinking of the Skyluck.

After the Skyluck sank, we and the other rescued escapees were moved into a refugee camp in Hong Kong.

After nearly 13 gruelling months, we finally left in the summer of 1980 for Montreal. Canadian immigration authorities then took us to a military base by bus.

On the way to Montreal, my mom recalled seeing bright yellow flowers covering endless green fields. She’d never seen such a beautiful sight. She would later learn those flowers were dandelions.

But it didn’t matter that the flowers were weeds, nor did it matter that new challenges would come. Because in that moment, she saw a country where we could thrive, and a chance to dream again.

After we arrived in Canada, my mom put her diaries in a closet, hoping to never relive these painful memories.

But as we’ve worked on this project together, she told me she realized that she always had the strength to do it — and that my sister and I deserved to know the full story.

So far, we’ve only made it through half of her diaries, but I am determined to complete the translations while my mom still has her strength and clarity.

The toughest moment was hearing my mom share her memories of the day the Skyluck sank. Her voice swelled with emotion as she recalled that day. It broke my heart to hear my mom cry, but I’m so grateful to her — for doing it, for surviving, for loving us, and for reliving it so that I could learn our shared story.