We’re Watching the Death of Hope : Refugees: The Vietnamese shipped back to Hanoi by Hong Kong only wanted the freedom they could see daily outside their barbed wire.

Each broken-hearted Vietnamese refugee being rushed Tuesday onto a plane heading from Hong Kong to Hanoi was given $30--a consolation prize, compliments of the authorities in the British colony.

But the refugees, who went unwillingly back to Vietnam, had already tasted freedom. They saw it through the barbed-wire fences as Chinese children laughed on their way to school. They watched it gleam on the tall, glassy skyscrapers that towered over their own tin-roofed huts. They heard it spoken on their radios; freedom danced on the Chinese-language television screen. Freedom taunted them, but proved forever elusive.

Pinned on my wall are photos of refugee children staring out from behind the bars of their camps with wide, hungry eyes. They remind me of myself, 15 years ago a Vietnamese refugee in the Philippines and later in Guam. I remember days spent staring out through those fences toward real homes in the distance, wishing that my family and I could be there instead of inside muggy army tents. The children in the pictures are waiting for the same things that I did. They want to live where I do now.

If the British resume forced repatriation early next year, as planned, they can expect riots, fire, bloodshed, suicides in the camps. For when the grand prize of freedom is taken away, no consolation prize can compensate. The crowded bunk beds, the piled-up feces, the stench and murderous heat, the cholera outbreaks, the years of waiting, all these horrid conditions and indignities, once endurable, suddenly become maddening. Endurance may be a characteristically Vietnamese trait, but my countrymen endure only when hopes and dreams are nurtured in their hearts. Take away those dreams and chances are they will commit desperate, violent acts.

Displayed in the refugee camps are signs that read: “We would rather die than go back,” and “Better dead than Red.” They are written with blood.

Waiting has become fruitless. Hope for freedom is but a one-way ticket “home”--home to face the assured cruelty and revenge from Vietnamese authorities.

Condemned is he who is branded an “economic refugee,” for he has no chance of resettlement in a third country. Only “political refugees” are considered legitimate refugees, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has declared in faraway London. Only a minuscule number of the boat people have successfully defined themselves for Hong Kong authorities as political refugees. The rest are to be sent home. But were you to look at those who stare out from the fences with an unbanishable hunger for freedom, you could never know the difference between a Vietnamese political refugee and an economic one. And how could anyone make such a distinction among thousands of children living in those camps?

The labels don’t fit. The differences are apparent only to those who make up rules and regulations that brush the majority off as “illegal immigrants.” But all of the refugees fleeing communist Vietnam will be punished when they return, no matter if they are from the north or the south, ethnic Chinese or not, political or economic refugees.

Some of the refugees would argue that the fact that they took flight itself is the most political act imaginable. By leaving, they defied an oppressive communist system known for its human rights violations. The refugees would tell you that they did not escape for better bread or rice. They had heard that tens of thousands of Vietnamese perished on the South China Sea; they understood the odds. They wanted more than bread; they wanted a life without persecution, a life where no authority has the power to move them and their families about.

“We want freedom,” writes a young Vietnamese man asking for help. “They jailed my father and forced my siblings and me to work in the isolated mountainous areas.” He is the son of a sergeant who once served as a medic in the South Vietnamese army in Danang. “If you could save me,” he writes, “I will devote my entire life to the cause of freedom.”

But like the 46,000 people due to be sent back to Hanoi next year, this young man will likely spend his future in those mountainous areas from which he so desperately tried to escape. He will spend his life longing for freedom, not serving it.

I remember my bus ride to the Guam airport en route to the United States years ago. I was elated; I couldn’t sit still. The cool, sweet wind rushed through the windows and I thought I felt freedom whispering on my skin then. I wish I could share that experience with this young man and those like him. Instead I mourn for my countrymen’s fate. I can’t begin to imagine the bitterness they feel as they take their dark journey toward an ominous Vietnam.