Anh Nguyen Austen

You know, there were these different configurations and they obviously failed.

And so they came to the decision that because it was hard to get passage for a family with children that they just had to buy and build their own boat to escape.

Yes, so he got a group of family members and friends together, and we had to pay the living of a fisher family that were living near the coast, and they would kind of house the building of the boat.

And then we put together, you know, the mechanic and the navigator, an ex-Navy person, and everything in a year's time was—

was planned to build this boat that would be the fishing boat, kind of just presumably going out for the morning fish.

Well, it was.

In fact, you know, my mother would go into the city and her family had had kind of a petrol company.

So she actually brought different engine parts home.

And they would have done all this and we wouldn't have known anything about it.

We were just, you know, sitting by the well and looking at the goldfish.

Well, it's only family and family friends and cousins because it was all kept in secret.

And again, you know, the key is never to talk about any of the plans because the fear that you would be interrogated later.

So even when I later meet my cousin, my favorite cousin that I grew up with, he was shocked to see me because he wasn't ever told what happened to me or where we went.

Well, I presume that I got to take my doll.

And I remember distinctly, my father had a motorbike and there's a sidecar.

And so I got to drive and sit in the sidecar.

And we would have been told that we were visiting an auntie on the coast.

And we went out that night.

I don't think I would have known anything was amiss, except that when we probably got to the house and it's time to kind of walk through the marsh to get to the boat.

So at that point, I even remember that my sister was talking about, you know, the Viet Cong and being scared.