Malaysia

For a generation of boat people, Malaysia was not a destination but a threshold: Pulau Bidong held a quarter of a million refugees between 1978 and 1991, and a large share of the communities in America, Australia and Europe passed through that one island. The camp closed, the island emptied, and the Vietnamese population in Malaysia today is a different and much more recent thing — factory workers, cooks and students who arrived in the last two decades.

The migrations that built it

1. 01 1978–1991: Pulau Bidong, a transit camp for a quarter of a million people
2. 02 2000s onward: labor migration
3. 03 2010s onward: students and restaurant workers