A long way from Vietnam
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2021
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Vietnamese migration to the UK is the second highest after Albania and each year the numbers are rising. Not even the tragedy of the Essex lorry disaster in 2019 has been enough to put people off. Then 39 Vietnamese migrants suffocated in a container lorry as they came over the English channel. BBC journalist Nga Pham talks to people in Vietnam about their desperation to leave their country. Coming from some of the most economically deprived provinces, families pay between $30-45,000 to people smugglers to send hundreds of their children out each year in the hope of a better future. She meets people who are now working in the shadow economy in the UK, in nail bars, cannabis farms and restaurants, hiding in plain sight. She also talks to those who were caught up in trafficking networks, discovered by the police and deported back to Vietnam with nothing to show for their years of slave labour.
Reporter: Nga Pham Producer: Anna Horsbrugh-Porter A Just Radio production for the BBC World Service
(Image: A group of women harvest rice, Vietnam. Credit: BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:03.2 | Let's sanitize our hands. |
| 0:11.2 | Everyone here is wearing a mask. It's a Sunday and I'm in London at the Vietnamese Catholic Church. |
| 0:18.0 | After months of lockdown, believers can gather again. |
| 0:22.0 | A christening has just taken place and I'm waiting for |
| 0:25.6 | maths to start. After the service I'm able to speak to Nguyen Huetong a small frail man sitting on the edge of a pewhewe pewe, |
| 0:42.0 | nervously clutching a plastic bag. |
| 0:45.0 | I like that we're not going to make a mink, |
| 0:48.0 | and I'm mink moon, that we don't want. |
| 0:51.0 | So, we can't make it. Since we lost our son, both of us nearly collapsed, the pain was too much, the loss was too big. Our son was so young, we both are traumatized and depressed. |
| 1:07.2 | So we come here to the church asking for help. Our son died. I didn't go to do it. |
| 1:14.0 | I'll go down and go to. |
| 1:16.0 | I'm with him. |
| 1:18.0 | Mr. Tung arrived in the UK from Vietnam |
| 1:22.0 | with his wife in 2019, borrowing a large amount of money |
| 1:26.7 | to make the 10,000 kilometer journey across China, Russia, Poland and France, which took them nearly a year. |
| 1:35.0 | A few months later, he sent for his 15-year-old son, Hong, to join them with tragic results. |
| 1:42.0 | I am Nafam, and in this week's assignment I am investigating |
| 1:46.8 | why so many people still want to leave Vietnam and risk their lives coming to |
| 1:52.1 | the UK. |
| 1:55.0 | On the 23rd of October 2019, I was at work at the BBC |
| 2:00.0 | when the first report started coming in of a lorry found in Essex with the bodies of 39 migrants. |
... |
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