A Fair Wind
Sterling silver, 18ct gold and driftwood
H165mm x L 750mm x W 280mm
2015

My piece titled ‘A Fair Wind’ has been inspired by my family’s story of great courage and conviction to be free that caused them to flee Vietnam in 1984. They were certainly risking their lives as the penalty for people fleeing the communist regime was death but the desire to be free and more fundamentally to be able to worship freely enabled my family and many others to overcome these fears and make the decision to leave everything that they knew and loved behind with the hope of finding a “better land” and a new life.

My father had made a plan to flee with his family and relatives under the cover of night using my grandfather’s fishing boat which at most could hold between 40 – 50 people. However when it came time to go somehow their plans had leaked out and in total 92 men, women and children piled onto the boat that night to make their escape from Vietnam. My father managed to steer the boat as far as possible from Vietnamese shores across the South China sea. It was two o’clock in the morning on Good Friday, 20th April 1984.

Just the sheer numbers of the people on the boat dramatically increased the risks of failure and death. The first obstacle had been overcome in that they had made their escape without being caught by the authorities. The next obstacle in some ways was more terrifying. My family had heard of many stories of people fleeing Vietnam only to be captured by Thai pirates who killed the men and raped the women before throwing them overboard in shark infested waters.

It was in the early afternoon of Easter Sunday having been sailing in treacherous waters for 3 days that they spotted a large oil tanker in the distance. My father with other people on the boat tried to signal to the tanker to get their attention and hope that they would rescue them. Thankfully the oil tanker noticed my family’s boat and came to their rescue.

We later found out that before Captain Antony Goldsmith of the ‘Turquoise’ Oil Tanker had his afternoon snooze that day, he went on the bridge to check the noon position, and to see if all was clear before he went below and leave his second in command in charge. While looking across the horizon, he noticed a black dot about 12 miles away 40 degrees on the port bow. When he used his binoculars he could see a man standing on top of the boat waving his arms up and down. He mentioned it to the second officer and believe it or not, he and the other personnel that were on the bridge at the time could not see the boat. They all thought that the captain was seeing things and simply had a little too much to drink (The captain and crew had a party the night before, as they were due in Taiwan in three days time to scrap the ship). Thankfully, the captain ordered the quartermaster to alter course and steer towards the object, which after a few miles, all personnel on the bridge could see it was a boat and that it was a man waving a white flag on the top of the deck.

Three hours after my family and all the Vietnamese boat people had been rescued, the weather had blown up to a near typhoon force, even the enormous oil tanker was swaying side to side in the rough sea. My family would have surely perished if they had still been on that little fishing boat.

Providentially there was more than enough food supplies on the tanker to help all who had been rescued. When the captain of the Cornish oil tanker stopped to fuel the ship off the coast of Gibraltar, for some reason the ship chandler made a mistake with the captain’s stores order and put on board 15 large sacks of noodles, which as you can imagine came in very handy when feeding an extra 92 people.

The oil tanker that had become the rescue ship for all 92 refugees had been on its way from the UK to Taiwan to be scrapped but now it had to find a country that would be willing to take in all the refugees. This would not prove to be an easy task. The captain radioed Singapore, who replied they could do nothing for him. He then went towards Hong Kong and was told that if he came anywhere near the port he would be turned back by force. The captain then decided to steer the ship towards Taiwan and radioed them his intentions. They replied that if he approached their waters they would fire at him, and so he should take the Vietnamese boat people back where he picked them all up and throw them into the sea. Just as he was at a wits end, he received a radio message from the United Nations that he could land the Vietnamese boat people in the Philippines at the port of Manila, where the captain arrived with only enough fuel for a few more hours!

My family found refuge for the next seven months in a refugee camp in Palawan, the Philippines before they received news of residency status in Great Britain.

I will always be grateful to the British Government and its people as my family were allowed to come to Wales to settle in the coastal town of Barmouth. I was born in July 1985 and spent the first year of my life in Barmouth before my family moved to Birmingham.

It has surely been “A Fair Wind” that had brought my family safely from Vietnam and allowed me to have the opportunities that I have been given to develop my creative gifts and talents.

So my piece is firstly a way of not only honouring the courage and convictions of my family to find a place where they could practice their Christian faith freely but also to express my gratitude to the generosity of Great Britain and its people who allowed my family to settle in a safe country and also enabled us to flourish and contribute many good things to this nation.

Finally my piece is also a prayer for the masses of people who today are also on their own journey to find a “better land”. My prayer is that they will also be taken up by “A Fair Wind” and find places where they are welcome, where they are safe and where they can flourish and contribute good things to their new land.