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	Intelligence The story behind today's news from the editors of Asiaweek From Our Correspondent Personal perspectives on news around the region

One morning this week I found myself waiting at the airport with a friend for a woman he knew from childhood in his old village to arrive from America. When the flight was delayed, we moved on to the coffee shop with the brother and sister-in-law of the woman we were expecting. Everyone was excited, and soon the story of this couple spilled out.

They were both also living in America, and had arrived the week before on holiday. The woman, Phu, had boarded a boat on the coast south of Saigon in early 1981 and had made it through the gauntlet of Thai pirates to Thailand. She was just 19. The would-be refugees ran out of food, and the boat was so rickety that Phu thought it was going to sink, but fortunately it didn't hit any bad weather, and everyone survived.

Refugee workers have estimated that anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 Vietnamese boat people have died on the high seas trying to escape. Many young women were kidnapped and raped by the Thai pirates who operated in relative impunity in the Gulf of Thailand, despite protests to the Thai government by NGO's and foreign governments.

Phu spent a year in Thailand and then was sent to the U.S. -- she ended up in Minneapolis in Minnesota, and had to do some serious acclimatizing when the first winter hit. Twenty degrees centigrade is cold in southern Vietnam, but in Minneapolis it was minus 30. Then there was the wind chill.

It was in Minnesota that Phu met Khieu. He is a few years older than her, and his route to the U.S. was even more arduous. In 1979, soon after the Vietnamese army had invaded Cambodia, he and a cousin got on their bicycles in southwestern Vietnam and cycled across the border. They had no idea how far they would get, but after a couple of weeks they made it to the town of Siem Reap, the site of the famous Angkor temples. Fighting was still going on in the countryside, particularly in the west, but they just kept pedaling.

Since their village was close to the Cambodian border in Vietnam, they spoke both languages -- when they met Vietnamese troops they spoke to them in Vietnamese, and when they were in Cambodian villages they pretended to be Cambodians from the other side of the country, who had come to find a way to do trade across the
Thai border. The pair finally managed to find a way across that border with the help of some smugglers, but then turned themselves in to the Thai authorities, asking to be sent to the U.S. They were put in Phanat Nihkhom processing camp, and seven months later they were on their way to Minnesota, too.

Khieu and Phu got married, and have one child. They have well-paying jobs, and they have sponsored a number of their relatives in Vietnam to come join them -- including Khieu's sister, whom we were waiting for at the airport.

When her plane finally arrived, the level of excitement of the waiting family members -- both U.S. and Vietnamese sides -- was stretched to breaking point. She finally emerged, pushed her baggage cart through the crowd waiting around the exit gate, when everyone surged forward. Her cases fell off the cart, tears were hidden as people hustled after the stray luggage, greetings were blurted out, and another Saigon airport drama was in the can.

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