Asio Liu’s documentary Strangers and Their Babies (陌生人與他們的小孩) uncovers the forgotten history of unlisted Vietnamese “boat people” refugee camps in the Penghu Islands following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. The film examines how over 2,000 refugees fell through official UN relief records.
The Penghu Camps and the Missing UN Record
- Between 1977 and 1988, Taiwan’s Penghu Islands sheltered more than 2,000 Vietnamese refugees across two camps, with 106 babies born during this period.
- Taiwan’s Public Television Service noted that the camps became a blank in UN relief records because the Republic of China no longer held a UN seat.
- The documentary recently made its North American premiere at the Viet Film Fest in Santa Ana, California, the largest Vietnamese diaspora film festival in the United States. It is the first Taiwanese movie the festival has selected.
Châu Kiết Nhi Remembers the Unrecorded Deaths on Boat 21
Châu Kiết Nhi remembers eight or nine people dying on the boat that carried her out of Vietnam in 1979. The government that took her in recorded no deaths at all. In Asio Liu’s documentary, she is credited the way the camp once registered her: by name and number, “Boat 21 Refugee (1979), Penghu Camp.” That small typographic choice holds the key to the film, as Liu keeps the record himself for people who fell between world records.
The festival’s artistic director, Eric Nong, calls the film’s subjects “the lucky ones.” Between 1977 and 1988, camps on Taiwan’s Penghu Islands—first at Hsiyu, then at Chiangmei village in Paisha—took in more than 2,000 Vietnamese boat people who arrived on 51 vessels. One hundred and six babies were born there, many of them without documentation.
Nguyễn Quốc Việt and the Search for Camp Leadership
The film follows four of those babies, now adults living in the United States and Taiwan, as they break their parents’ silence to investigate their families’ past. Nguyễn Quốc Việt, born in the camp in 1982 and now living in Seattle, reunites with Huỳnh Cẩn Du, the camp’s former deputy director. Liu also tracks down Huang Chin-Chih, one of the Hsiao-liu-chiu fishermen who rescued Việt’s family at sea.
Nguyễn Tân Vinh Anthony, born there in 1984, returns with his wife. Yen-Yen Ni grew up in Penghu, where her mother, Châu Kiết Nhi, married a local man and stayed while the rest of her family resettled in the United States. Liu has pursued this history since filming the empty camp on 16mm shortly before its demolition in 2003, working like an archivist.
| Camp Detail | Historical Record |
|---|---|
| Active Years | 1977 – 1988 |
| Locations | Hsiyu and Chiangmei village (Paisha), Penghu Islands |
| Estimated Refugees | Over 2,000 across 51 vessels |
| Recorded Births | 106 babies |
Nguyễn Thị Hà Seeks Her Camp Number
The fourth subject exposes another gap in that history. Nguyễn Thị Hà comes from a North Vietnamese family. As Brian Hioe has noted, countries such as the United States treated northerners as “economic refugees rather than political ones.” Her family had trouble obtaining asylum and stayed in Taiwan, prompting Hà to go looking for the record that counted her in.
The film shows how selective the official record could be. The deaths on Boat 21 went unrecorded. Châu Kiết Nhi also recalls a boat captain sentenced to three years in jail for helping refugees rather than leaving them adrift. Her own camp wedding, by contrast, made state media, as an ethnic Chinese refugee marrying a Penghu man suited the government’s preferred story of overseas Chinese fleeing communism for the motherland.
The ROC Army Penghu Defense Command Mural and Propaganda
The deaths the state did publicize were those aboard the Thanh Phong, only 34 of whose 146 passengers survived. A series in a military newspaper, “Blood and Tears of the South China Sea,” featured the disaster, which was also adapted into a film. Visitors to the camp, many of them soldiers and students, were led past a mural depicting its starving passengers under the same title.
Only at the end does Liu turn to this use of suffering as propaganda. Over an image of the mural, credited on screen to the ROC Army’s Penghu Defense Command, he calls its message clear: fight communism or become a refugee. That is the propaganda’s own summary, the one a separate, largely fabricated text, “Blood Letter from the South China Sea,” carried into school textbooks.
By then, the film has shown what the slogan leaves out: the uncounted dead of Boat 21 and a captain sent to jail. The record still matters. On September 1, Taiwan launched its annual campaign for inclusion in the UN system, and on October 10 President Lai Ching-te said Taiwan “must become a ‘city upon a hill.’” It still has no refugee law.
