In 2016, the show team Who are you ? offered to be the subject of an episode. First, I declined because, unlike other guests with whom she had been able to go back five or seven generations, I knew in advance that the team would find nothing about my ancestors. Very few archives have survived wars, colonization, changes in political regimes, poverty … Following several telephone conversations, the laziness of sitting on a plane for 24 hours twice in a week gave in to the insistence of Manuelle Légaré, the chief brain researcher. I knew we would inevitably go back to a few places in Vietnam and Malaysia, but I didn’t believe the team was going to do the impossible.
The tourist
We were 218 boat people who had been able to dock in Malaysia after four days at sea. The local police had been keeping us in a large hut for several days when a white man walked towards us, braving guns pointed at him. My father seized the opportunity and also dared to walk towards this man whom he believed to be a tourist. According to my father, there was a five-second exchange in English, enough time to say: “Help us, notify the High Commissioner for Refugees of our presence, please.” We will never know if we were transported to a refugee camp thanks to this tourist’s call or not. But my father chose to give it all the credit.
For 38 years, he has told so many times these miraculous five seconds and his gratitude to this tourist that it has become legendary.
My father told this story to Manuelle as if it were a fantastic tale. Never ever would we have imagined entering a restaurant in Paris one day to find this tourist, who was working at the time as an engineer for a Club Med. He was a tall, aging man and, above all, weakened by a serious accident which had cut open his skull and stole an important part of his memory. Yet he remembered us, or more precisely the refugees from the sea. He refused my father’s thanks because he did not consider his gesture heroic or deserving. “It was a human gesture,” he told us in his trembling voice.
He passed away a few months after our reunion. His name was Jean-Pierre.
The Guardian
Our refugee camp was on the edge of a forest and surrounded by barbed wire on only three sides. It was therefore possible to venture a few steps beyond the limit to collect branches and twigs used to fuel fires for the kitchen. The guards sometimes managed to catch some of these brave ones. They punished them by making them do push-ups in the middle of the camp. Since we ate and drank very little, people would lose consciousness very quickly at 40 ° C during this very ordinary physical exertion. 10-year-old Kim thought the guards were unfair, even cruel people. When the team told me that I was going to meet a Malaysian who had worked in the camps at the Red Crescent headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, my heart twisted.
I was afraid that this guardian would see the back of my mind, which is still showing shamelessly on my face.
It took only a minute for the first tear to fall down my cheek. The former warden began by telling me that during all this time he had followed the motto of the Red Crescent to the letter: Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. (Live with them. Learn from them. Love them.) He worked periodically for a whole month at a time in a camp located on a desert island which received at the height of the crisis 60,000 Vietnamese. At the end of each month, he put on a show with Malaysian and Vietnamese participants, guards and refugees. This is how he learned Vietnamese songs, including one he sang in front of me and the cameras with impeccable pronunciation. He went on to say that the hardest part had been not being able to offer more than an egg or a liter of water a day, and that his helplessness in the face of such human misery often prevented him from sleeping.
This meeting capsized me. I was sorry that I had not thought about the task a country would have to feed and shelter 252,000 refugees. I was disappointed not to have thought of the difficulties of those who had to pick up the lifeless bodies and wrecks of wrecked boats from the beach, not to have tried to look at the situation from the point of view of the guards, not to have knew that despite the suffocating heat, despite the cultural differences, despite the roles, despite the circumstances, there had been love.
He passed away last year. He was called Human.