We Are Here

by Cat Thao Nguyen

  On one occasion, she lit the lamp as usual. The river was still and she waited for the black patch to take shape before her. The nearby bridge was quiet as curfew was still in place. But suddenly, from the shadows, she heard: ‘I’ve got you!’ She withdrew quickly into the unlit house, frozen with terror, unable to breathe. She listened in the placid darkness to the conversation between the rice farmer and his captor. The captor was just a civilian, but someone who had aligned himself with the new regime. The police were called and the farmer was imprisoned. Knowing the police would interrogate the farmer, demanding to know the name of his accomplice, my mother left immediately for Bien Hoa province to visit one of her brothers who had been moved to another re-education camp. Her father was working several kilometres away in the family’s rice fields, which had been taken over by the state. He travelled out from the fields to join her in Bien Hoa, but they decided not to stay overnight as they usually did on their visits for fear that the farmer would betray my mother to the authorities, who would then come for her sisters back home. My mother eventually discovered that the farmer was held for a long time. He was brutally bashed but he never disclosed her identity. The integrity and courage of this ordinary man would stay with her, to surface in unexpected moments when she was an older woman, standing in an unassuming kitchen in Sydney or while she waited to pick up her small children from school—it would call to her like valiant drumbeats from a distant past.

  Despite the incident, my mother continued her black market trade. While her older brothers were detained indefinitely in re-education camps, as the eldest in the family she was responsible for her three younger siblings. She existed like a wounded animal, near death, moving on instinct and desperation. At night, she boarded small trucks to take the bags of rice from Gò Du to central Tây Ninh, passing various checkpoints. Again in a dance with danger. The script was set. The characters knew their roles and their lines. Finally, the enterprise fell into a routine rhythm. The nimble impulses of survival again found a way. For some time she succeeded, passing through various checkpoints unhindered, but inevitably there came a day when she was stopped by an inspector.

  She approached the checkpoint. My mother tried to look nonchalantly sombre—a look that many of the other tired travellers wore. But the man stopped her and she was inspected. The other passengers watched in silence as she dropped to the ground and cowered on all fours, begging them like a slave child for lenience. Forgive me for being poor, kind sirs. The salty warm tears of shame and anger rolled down her cheeks. She stared at the boots in front of her, refusing to meet the eyes of her new masters. Finally, she was permitted to leave but her precious contraband was taken. It was yet another wrenching setback.

  My mother moved on to another initiative. Taking the family’s entire savings, she decided to go to Saigon to buy contraband coffee and other items to bring back and sell in Tây Ninh. But as she was walking through the city to meet the trader, she was pushed to the ground and robbed. All the family’s cash was gone in one decisive stroke. My mother could not fathom facing her family. There was nothing left. She stood there, her patched pants mocking her. The usual chaos swirled around her as she contemplated the classroom she used to sit in not long ago. The slow despair crept inside her bones. She was twenty-two years old. A hummingbird inside an engulfing storm cloud that devoured her. She wanted to stop flapping. She wanted to stop fighting. No more white noise. No more guessing. No more frightening episodes of army boots approaching, crawling for safety at night and scrambling for shreds of life in the day. For a long time, overwhelmed by defeat, she thought about the nectar of death. How peaceful it would be. Its seduction lingered on and my mother struggled to resist. But the faint lining of consciousness came back. A forced rational reality interrupted her thoughts, demanding her to come back to her family. She eventually awoke to the stark knowledge that her family needed her. She made her way back home.

  Not long after, my mother’s tenacious will to live returned. She decided to trade trash. Bottles, duck feathers, tin cans, pieces of board, steel—for anything reusable, there was a buyer. But capital was required. My mother took the clock from the wall, the radio, the rice cooker, tables, chairs and lights, and sold them. She pawned my grandfather’s ring numerous times. Like many Vietnamese women, my grandmother had a solid jade bangle. Jade is precious, and once you put a jade bangle on your wrist you are never meant to remove it because it has protective powers. As it is meant to sit snugly around a woman’s wrist, it is shatteringly painful to put on but even more excruciating to take off. My grandmother’s jade bangle was the last reminder of better times. As my mother soaped her mother’s hand, she pulled violently at the bangle until bruises swelled and hand bones neared breaking point. They sat on the floor of the wooden house, now empty of belongings and quickly filling with storylines of vast sadness. The river looked on in curious quiet. As they held the soaped jade, both women wept through throbbing pain and splintering heartache.

  With the money she had amassed, my mother gathered together a group of family, friends and villagers and gave each a little bit of money to source goods. They would reassemble with a collection of trash, which she would on-sell to a distributor. But some of the desperate women took the money and never came back. When my mother went to collect it, she found them starving. She not only forgave the debt but bought them rice. It was another failed venture that stabbed brutally at her. In an emerging empire of ruthless savagery, her kindness was her downfall. Her sweet student disposition could not compete against the torrential hustle of this new reality.

  With what little money she had left, she set up a small packaging operation. Under the new Communist regime, all books and documents related to the old South Vietnamese government had to be destroyed. History was to be rewritten. Street names were to be changed. My mother went to schools and purchased their history books, geography books and any other books that contained unpermitted knowledge. She then set up a production line of neighbourhood kids who cut and glued the paper into foldable bags of various sizes and sold them to market vendors who had not yet been stopped by the authorities for trading outside the system. The vendor would fill the 100-gram, 200-gram and 500-gram bags with sugar, rice and other products. At the same time, she regularly went to Black Lady Mountain, thirty kilometres away, to buy custard apples to distribute to children to sell on buses and at bus stations. The kids would each carry a tub of heavy custard apples, weaving in and out of the buses like swift hungry mosquitoes. Each child bulging with wit, tragedy and grime.

  When my father was released from the re-education camp in 1977, he returned to the small village just outside Gò Du where he had spent his childhood. He soon realised that my mother was one of the few educated women left of marriageable age and a similar class, and he decided he would marry her. It was not an extensive courtship and there wasn’t anything romantic about it. A week after they met, my mother accepted my father’s proposal because he fulfilled her two conditions—he was educated and he was not disabled from the war.

  They were married on 16 November 1977, two and a half years after the war ended. My father and my mother each had toiled through their own traumatic episodes. Each soundlessly suffering, forcefully containing it within.

  My mother borrowed a wedding dress from one of her sisters-in-law. My father slit the throats of his family ducks, de-feathered them and helped to cook his own wedding feast. My mother’s father borrowed money from relatives in order to host the celebration. At the wedding, they were given just enough money by the guests to pay back the loans. There wasn’t even enough left over to make a pair of pants. Looking at my parents’ black and white wedding photos, I’m struck by the lingering sadness they exude. My mother is smiling in only one of the pictures; at the prompting of the photographer, she is feeding my father cake. She wore the only pair of shoes she had—tired old black sandals. A portrait shot of her illuminates her beautiful features, reminiscent of a French–Vietnamese blend. But enduring melanch
oly seems permanently trapped in her eyes. She was a young girl becoming a woman in postwar Vietnam, too often tarnished and defeated with no one to hold her. She stares at the camera—demure, on the brink of a future so terrifyingly uncertain.

  Not long after the wedding, the river began to swell like the belly of a malnourished child. It was a cruel bash at open wounds of a village trying to simply stay alive. The flood engulfed the market a hundred and fifty metres from the riverbank. My mother’s belly was swollen too; she was about to give birth to her first child. She slept on two beds stacked one on top of the other, elevated above the water’s flow, gritting her teeth in silent, excruciating pain. A son was born and she clutched him in her arms as the bitter, pernicious flood forged on.

  After the birth, my mother stayed with her parents so they could help look after her and the baby. They could not afford for everyone to eat rice so while my nursing mother ate rice, everyone else lived on cassava roots. My father went to work on my late grandfather’s pepper plantation, trying to remain inconspicuous. He rarely went to the central part of the village for fear of identification and further persecution by the authorities. My father never spoke of his time in the re-education camp to anyone, not even my mother, choosing instead to submerge the memories in drink, often in the company of peers whose life had taken a similar turn. Discarded men who were draped with the same cloak of disillusionment. Once the proud son of a well-to-do businessman, dressed in crisply ironed shirts, he now found himself with a small baby, living off the proceeds of his labour on the pepper plantation. The rice wine soothed his nightmares and eased his fears.

  Not long after, rumours circulated around the village that the authorities were searching for my father. The authorities had determined that, without any training or equipment, he was going to be assigned to de-mine fields ridden with landmines. The news shook him deeply. Tremors of dread burrowed their way into his marrow and began to consume him. For many years, despite a changed reality, the dread would stay with him. He knew that death was upon them. When my father told my mother, she looked at him. He was not just her husband, the result of a hasty marriage: he was now also the father of her son. She made a choice. All around her, men of the former southern regime continued to be persecuted and they each began a slow death as indignity decayed them. She could see no future for their family here. In 1979, my parents decided to leave Vietnam.

  Living as they did in a landlocked province, they had no access to a boat. For them, the quickest way to get out of Vietnam was through Cambodia. My mother’s family had a friend who agreed to smuggle them across the border. Mr T was my grandfather’s god-brother and a trusted family friend; he was like an uncle to my mother. He was the only reason they decided to leave via that route and at that time. They paid him ten taels of gold upfront, which was an incredible amount at that time; today it would be close to A$17,000. Many families could never imagine obtaining such an amount of money in their lifetimes.

  Mr T hired various smugglers to take my family through Cambodia all the way to Thailand. In the group to leave was my mother, father, twelve-month-old brother, fifteen-year-old cousin and fifteen-year-old uncle. Each smuggler would take them to a certain rendezvous point and there hand them over to the next person. By then, the Khmer Rouge, under the dictator Pol Pot, had been ravaging Cambodia for four years from 1975, ultimately committing genocide. More than two million Cambodians perished in the name of his futile attempt at social re-engineering towards an agrarian-based Communist society. All those suspected of being educated were slaughtered. These included people who wore glasses, indicating they were able to read. Mass graves with severed heads and limbs were later found, as were the graves of babies who had been smashed against trees in order to save bullets. The site of these graves would later become known as the Killing Fields. The mania of Pol Pot was stopped only when the newly unified Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 to oust the Khmer Rouge. Within Cambodia, Vietnamese refugees were fleeing the new Vietnamese government, Khmer Rouge soldiers were fleeing the Vietnamese forces and there were random paramilitary Thai soldiers lining that country’s border with Cambodia. Refugees were also being kidnapped and traded to international humanitarian organisations in return for bags of rice.

  In this time and place of utter madness and amid this terror, my parents embarked on their exodus through Cambodia. Later, reports would state that as many as half of all those who left Vietnam by boat died. But out of every four people who tried to flee Vietnam over the Mc Bài border into Cambodia, three were shot. Later still, some researchers estimated that only ten per cent of those who undertook this journey by foot survived.

  CHAPTER 2

  A simple sarong

  In the middle of the night in late 1979, my mother sat silently, steeped in sorrow, in the house where she had given birth to her son and before the ancestral altar where she had been married. The flood waters had long receded and the river was calm. Her mother, father, sisters and youngest brother wept in silence for fear the neighbours would guess my parents’ intentions and inform the authorities. No one could be trusted and everyone wanted to appear to be supporters of the new Communist officials so betrayal by neighbours was not uncommon. Her two sisters held her tightly, sobbing violently into their hands cupped against their mouths in the pitch-dark. There was no way of knowing whether the group would survive the journey ahead of them. My mother’s lips trembled.

  The next day, they left the only world they had ever known, uncertain of when and if they would ever return. The carnage, trauma and pain of the journey would be inconceivable.

  It was late in the afternoon during the wet season. The rice crop was almost ready to be harvested. It was unsafe to travel all together, especially with a woman and baby. At the time, most of the refugees, particularly those who travelled by foot, were men who left alone. My father took his nephew, Hi, and my mother’s brother, Hng Khanh – both fifteen – to the Mc Bài border crossing. Posing as merchants, they arranged for bicycle taxis to take them to the Cambodia border town of Bavet. Traders frequently crossed the border, and they were not questioned. They stayed overnight in Bavet with a smuggler, waiting for my mother.

  Late that night, my mother, holding her baby, moved through the rice fields which lined the road to and beyond the border. She was accompanied by one of the men Mr T had contracted. It was rough terrain, often with no clear path. The border was heavily guarded with armed guerrillas on both sides. Close to the border, my mother tripped and fell into a small ditch. Immediately she clamped her hand across my brother Văn’s face as he struggled to cry out.

  Someone yelled into the darkness. ‘Who’s that?! Who’s there?!’ Bang, bang, bang. The frighteningly rapid thunder of gunshots punctured the air. Paralysed with fear, they huddled in silence, my mother trying to soothe her baby. Strangely and fortunately, as if aware of the danger they were in, Văn was quickly compliant and placid, like an old man with deep knowing trapped inside a baby’s body. They stayed crouched in the vast and empty rice fields for a long time until the night was silent once more. Eventually they continued walking, arriving scared but safe in Bavet, at a small hiding spot where they met up with my father. The next day, my mother’s father crossed the border on a motorbike and met them to say goodbye to his first daughter and youngest son one last time. My grandfather looked long and hard at his son. He observed with pride that Hng Khanh was tall, highly intelligent and mature for his age. He was sure to survive the journey, he thought. He did not know that this was to be the last time they would ever see each other.

  Led by the smuggler, the small group made their way to a large provincial town where they took a ferry across the Mekong River to the busy city of Neak Luong on the other side. They boarded the ferry together with motorbikes, trucks, bicycles, beggars and animals. Once on the other side, they went into hiding, waiting for the smugglers who would take them on the next stage of the journey to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. In the late afternoons, my father w
ould walk by the river, watching as people washed and small children played in naked innocence, oblivious to the monstrous atrocities plaguing their country. One afternoon my father found a French dictionary, titled Larousse, discarded on the side of the road. He found it so strange that it lay there so passively, so unwontedly. Something that he would have nurtured like a sacred relic. He quickly picked it up and took it back to their hiding spot. Inside the book was a map of Cambodia. As he studied it, he realised how far away from the Thai border they were. The realisation devastated him. But, he reminded himself, when they’d made the decision to leave Cambodia, they had knowingly chosen to risk death rather than face what life held for them in Vietnam. Despite the dangers, they would have to keep going, wherever fate would lead them. There was no turning back.