VIETNAMESE BOAT PEOPLE RETURN TO LAND THEY FLED.

Byline: Ian Stewart Associated Press 

She gambled everything to escape Vietnam nine years ago: home, family, dignity. In the end, she lost it all.

At Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport, Nguyen Thi Hien said goodbye to nine years behind barbed wire and climbed aboard Vietnam Airlines charter Flight 7911 to Vietnam.

She, her husband, Hoang Duc Hung, and their three children were among the last of the boat people whose saga gripped the world's attention in the 1970s and '80s.

Now, having finally surrendered to the reality that no other country wanted them, they were getting onto an airplane for the first time in their lives, and going home with less than they started with.

Convinced almost to the last that the family would get asylum, Hien had given most of their belongings to other families who chose to return months ago.

``We packed up everything we had in the camp, but there's not much. We don't have much left,'' said Hien as she grappled with the mysteries of the seat belt.

Hien is 34, a short woman with sad, down-turned eyes, whose odyssey began in February 1988 when her husband, a ship welder, was out of work and Vietnam's communist economy was sinking.

They sold their home for $450 worth of gold, enough to buy the family passage on a leaky fishing boat along with 60 other people.

Her in-laws vowed to disown them if they left, and they haven't been heard from since the family set off from a beach just north of their hometown of Haiphong.

``I don't know what they're going to do when we get back,'' Hien said. ``It's very sad. Everything is gone now. But we had to go back.''

After drifting through the South China Sea, the overburdened boat broke up just off a Chinese beach. For six months they lived on the beach, begging Chinese fishermen for money, food and passage to Hong Kong.

The next nine years were spent in the Whitehead Detention Center, one family among thousands waiting, filling out forms, answering questions, seesawing between hope and despair, finally opting for ``voluntary repatriation'' and a U.N. cash grant worth $400.

Cabin attendants, accustomed after 279 U.N. repatriation flights to dealing with first-time fliers, handed out extra air sickness bags as the Airbus and its 120 home-bound boat people taxied toward the runway.

At liftoff, Hien got her first and probably last glimpse of Hong Kong's glittering skyscrapers, a world apart from the squalor she was used to.

The Vietnamese had never been welcome in Hong Kong. As their number grew to 60,000, the clamor went up to get rid of them. They were viewed as a burden on the taxpayer, the fallout from a crisis not of Hong Kong's making.

Now only 6,000 are left, and Hong Kong aims to be rid of them before China takes over the British colony July 1.

Hien sank into her seat and closed her eyes. Tears rolled down the cheeks of her youngest son, Hoang Doanh, who was born in Whitehead. His father cradled the 2-year-old in his arms and fed him milk.

Watching her children grow up in the drab, spartan camp was tough on Hien. When Hoang Thi Thao, 13, and Hoang Thin, 11, were asked to write an essay on wildlife, they didn't know what a water buffalo was, or where birds fly to.

``They'd only seen the birds fly above the camp,'' Hien said. ``They didn't know they landed. They only knew they flew away.''

During the two-hour flight, she gave voice to her misgivings: Where would they live? Find work? How would their family receive them?

Vietnam guarantees that returning boat people will not be punished. But those who left to find better job prospects are often perceived at home as opportunists who deserted Vietnam in its darkest hour.

``We don't care when they left, or care why. If they don't act against the government, they are most welcome to return,'' Pham Khac Lam, vice chairman of the National Committee for Overseas Vietnamese, said in a recent interview.