A trip down memory lane for refugee
Dai Le joined thousands of other Vietnamese in the city's camps 34 years ago, when she was 10, before her family began a new life in Australia
For Dai Le, the most unforgettable memory of living in Hong Kong was scrubbing out wooden toilets in a refugee camp.
The Vietnamese-born Australian, who is now a member of Fairfield City Council in Sydney, returned on Tuesday last week, exactly 34 years after she left the city to resettle Down Under.
Le was invited by Christian Action, which was helping Vietnamese boatpeople at that time, to speak at a fundraising dinner last Wednesday.
Le told the South China Morning Post that she would "never forget" the days she took turns with other children to clean the wooden toilets that the former colonial government brought to the refugee camps.
"If you asked me, as an adult, to go in and clean the toilet, I would not go there. I would not touch it," Le, who is a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist, said.
She could just remember a dockyard at Canton Road and the camp in Sham Shui Po from which Australia accepted her as a refugee on December 3, 1979.
In 1978, when she was 10 years old, Le, together with her mother and two younger sisters, boarded a small boat with 35 other Vietnamese refugees and left the Philippines. The family had fled there when Saigon fell in April 1975, and this was their second treacherous journey in search of a safe haven. After 10 days, her boat was picked up by a Hong Kong patrol vessel and the family was taken to a refugee camp.