We Are Here

by Cat Thao Nguyen

  After ten days or so in Neak Luong, they made contact with the new smugglers, who took them by bicycle to Phnom Penh, approximately sixty kilometres away. Once they arrived in the capital, the hungry, tired fugitives and their weak baby hid in the roof space of a small house. In the early hours of the next morning, they set off for the provincial town of Battambang, the second most populous city in Cambodia after Phnom Penh, three hundred kilometres away. They followed the national highway by foot and at night slept hidden in the shadows by the roadside. Along the way, my father saw many European cars—Peugeots, Renaults and Mercedes—abandoned by the side of the road. Chaos had descended upon Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime. Anyone caught in possession of a luxury vehicle—a sure sign of a capitalist—was likely to be butchered by the Khmer Rouge.

  One night, as they were preparing to sleep on the roadside, my father walked away from the group in order to go to the toilet. To his surprise, he came across a manufacturing facility which was heavily guarded by Vietnamese forces and allied Cambodian soldiers. It looked as though this was some sort of checkpoint. The factory appeared to be newly built and bore the logo of Blackstone. My father knew of the company because his sister had had a Blackstone diesel engine in her rice-husking mill. The sight of the familiar logo brought his family sharply to mind and all at once he missed them so much his body ached. He knew that his departure would mean trouble for them with the authorities.

  Days turned into nights, comprising a series of anxious hours until they finally arrived at Battambang. From there they travelled along the railway towards the town of Sisophon. Like Vietnam, Cambodia too had been colonised by the French, and between 1930 and 1940 the French had built a railway from Phnom Penh to Poipet on the Thai border. From Battambang, there was a single-track line. People travelled along the railway on a single flat panel made of bamboo and attached to wheels; it was moved along manually with a type of pump. If there was an oncoming traveller, everyone would gather their belongings and lift the wheeled panel off the rails. This method was used to transport animals, people and produce. As the smugglers got the contraption ready, my family sat in a nearby field among some cattle, eating a small ration of food.

  Finally they arrived at the town of Sisophon, roughly fifty kilometres from the Thai border. There they hid in a tailor’s house until the smuggler could arrange for another four people and bicycles to take them further. The gentle old Cambodian tailor gave my mother a mandarin. It was almost completely dried but had enough juice left to give to my brother Văn. A little juice and vitamin C was a luxury that he sucked on ferociously. The old man’s kind presence radiated humanity. ‘Go to Thailand?’ the tailor asked in Cambodian. My father understood the word Siam and indicated that they were. The old man looked at the baby boy gnawing the fruit and smiled. This simple generous gesture from a gracious stranger would forever embed itself in my father’s memory. He would later reflect that it could have been this little drop of juice that separated Văn from life and death.

  This moment of humanity soon dissipated when the smuggler demanded money from my parents, declaring that Mr T had not paid him. Drenched in desperation, my parents explained that the only possessions of value were their wedding rings and my mother’s diamond earrings, an heirloom wedding gift from my maternal grandmother. The smuggler searched my parents and discovered that they had spoken the truth; they had nothing left to give. The smuggler stripped them of the wedding jewellery. These were precious items that were symbols of a prompt union, bringing my mother back to a day where she wore a borrowed dress and ate duck. A day so different to the unspeakable fear that now rested permanently on her face. She missed her sisters, her mother. Their constant fussing. The infinite sense of comfort that occurs when generations of women gather. She could see them at home looking out at the river and wondering about her, heavy with worry.

  When the items were handed over to the smuggler, they were then taken to hide in a farmhouse set amid a field of palm trees. The journey was taking its toll. Hng Khanh had been bitten by various poisonous insects and had open sores on his legs. He was in agony, to the point where he could not walk properly. There was limited clean water. My mother gave Văn water from a pond. Already weak, he had now contracted severe dysentery.

  Sisophon was the last checkpoint manned by Vietnamese forces. Soldiers regularly inspected each house in the area. That evening, my father was overcome with trepidation, dreading capture at any moment. As they listened to the soldiers making their inspections of various houses, fear exhaled from everyone’s mouth and rumbled in silence through the house. Somehow, miraculously, they were not exposed.

  The next morning, four men on bicycles took the group through the jungle. My father went first, then Hng Khanh, then my mother with Văn, and finally Hi. A couple of the smugglers who spoke some Vietnamese explained that the wife and child of the man who was carrying my mother and Văn had been murdered by the Khmer Rouge. He spoke some French and was an educated man. They set off, the parties separated by a few kilometres to avoid suspicion. The men posed as merchants and my mother posed as the wife of the man whose bicycle she was sharing. None of the parties knew the fate of the others.

  Before they reached their destination, the riders taking my father, Hi and Hng Khanh demanded more money. When they found there was indeed none to be had, the smugglers abandoned each of the three men alone in the middle of the jungle near the border town of Poipet. In the fight between the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian government, about six million landmines had been densely laid in and around the jungles of Poipet. My father and his nephew and brother-in-law were stranded in one of the world’s largest minefields.

  My father spotted a heavily trodden path made by merchants trading along the Cambodian–Thai border. But the jungle was dry and most of the large trees had been cut down. There weren’t even vines from which he could rehydrate himself. The jungle was also sparse, which made it immensely difficult to hide. He saw scatterings of dead bodies and severed limbs. One decapitated head had been mounted on a wooden stake on which Vietnamese words had been written in blood: Vietnamese are not welcome. It was not clear to whom the words were directed. Perhaps it was a message from the Khmer Rouge to the Vietnamese forces who were trying to oust them. Whatever the case, it was a chilling and atrocious reminder of the danger that surrounded him. But there was only one way to go: forward.

  My father decided to continue on the path, but not long after he was met by armed soldiers who did not wear any recognisable uniform. They wore khaki fatigues and had cartridge belts draped across them. They captured my father and took him to an enclosure surrounded by barbed wire. Here he met a Vietnamese helicopter pilot, also a refugee, as well as some Cambodians of Vietnamese descent. That night he was haunted by dreadful thoughts. There was no way any of the others could have made it, he reasoned. If they didn’t die at the hand of soldiers, they would never survive the landmines or the lack of water. Occasionally, gunshots could be heard from the direction of the jungle. My father lay awake in terror.

  The next morning, he discovered that the guerrillas who had captured him had contacted the Red Cross, who were operating near the border. For each refugee they safely delivered, the guerrillas were given a quantity of rice. In the morning, personnel from the Red Cross were brought to the enclosure and he was released to the Red Cross. They offered my father an aerogram with which to send a message to his family back home, but he refused it. The horrific journey he had endured and the thought of his missing son and wife had left him devoid of hope and the will to live. The devastation he felt was so pervasive, he could not face the empty and brutal reality that was before him. He had accumulated a heavy heart traumatised by re-education, landmines, guerrillas, severed limbs and gunshots. The trauma crept underneath his fingernails and into his eyes, his hair, his nostrils. My father promised himself that if he did not see my mother within a few days, he would take his own life.

  Left alone in the jungle, Hng Khanh had all but giv
en up; his open sores had grown so infected he was rendered virtually immobile. Hi, who had been several kilometres behind when the smuggler had abandoned him, had decided to keep going in the hope of somehow catching up with Hng Khanh. Hi had just caught sight of him—tall and fair, Hng Khanh was easily recognisable especially in these surrounds as he was too fair to look Cambodian but could be mistaken for a Vietnamese soldier—when suddenly a patrol of Khmer Rouge soldiers emerged from the jungle. Shrinking into the shadows, Hi watched in horror as a blindfold was put around Hng Khanh’s head, signalling an execution was imminent. Then a large piece of wood was swung at Hng Khanh’s head. Instantly, his legs collapsed beneath him.

  Awash with terror, Hi ran away as fast as he could. Then, in the distance, he saw my mother up ahead. The man who was transporting her had not abandoned her. Hi began to wave, calling out in Vietnamese to my mother. ‘Aunty, stop! Stop!’

  The man pedalled faster to get away from Hi. ‘He’s drawing too much attention,’ he said to my mother. ‘He’s yelling in Vietnamese. If we stop we will all die!’ My mother, unaware of what had happened to her youngest brother, understood what the man was saying and held on in frozen silence as they rode. The image of a screaming fifteen-year-old boy alone in a jungle, becoming smaller and smaller as they rode away, would haunt her forever.

  The man gave my mother his sarong to wrap Văn in. It was a thin frayed cloth in stripes of black, green and brown with streaks of white. My brother Văn was fading. The man searched for the makeshift camp near the border where the Red Cross had established a small clinic in a tent. Instead of trading my mother for rice like the guerrillas did with my father, the man did not leave until he found a doctor. Somehow he contacted his uncle, who lived in the area. The uncle was fluent in French and there were French Red Cross personnel working in and around the area. With the uncle’s help they found the clinic and the medical staff treated my brother. The uncle then asked a Red Cross officer whether my father was in the camp. My mother followed the two Cambodians and the Red Cross officer through the camp until they saw my father. Without a word, the man and his uncle left, leaving my mother reunited with my father, clasping the sarong tightly, speechless, hardly daring to believe she and her son were still alive; that amid the savagery of the jungles, soldiers and the smugglers, a lonely French-speaking Cambodian man had saved her.

  To her relief, they were soon also reunited with Hi, but her pleasure in the reunion turned to mind-numbing grief as Hi described what had happened to Hng Khanh.

  When my mother received the news, her senses evaporated and formed a tomb above her. She suffered an aching, wrenching numbness as she imagined her stoic teenage brother blindfolded and surrounded by strange armed men in his last moments. I should not have taken him, she agonised. It’s my fault. I killed him. It is my fault he suffered such a brutal death. At other times she persuaded herself that maybe Hi had been mistaken; that it wasn’t her brother he had seen. Maybe he didn’t get struck. Or maybe, though captured, instead of being killed he had been forced to become a child soldier. He was tall. Maybe he lived. The swirl of thoughts twisted around her and remained for a long time. Every so often throughout her life, these thoughts would revisit her and force her to once again taste the anguish, to smell the shame, to feel the sorrow, to hear guilt, to see the loss of her brother. She was the older sister; she had been responsible for him. Her own mother had pleaded with her to not take him but Hng Khanh adored my mother and insisted on going where she went. My mother often said it was fate that it was Hi and not she who had witnessed what happened. Instead of fleeing as Hi did, she would have run to her brother and most likely been killed herself, along with Văn. She would have turned back.

  As there were no official refugee camps in the area, the Red Cross moved my family to a Thai military camp. Here all the men, including my father, were ordered to dig trenches for the Thai soldiers engaged in border skirmishes with Cambodia. They were then moved to a prison that held Thai soldiers who had committed serious breaches of military codes. The prison was located on the Thai side of the Thai–Cambodia border in a district called Aranyaprathet. There were a few more Vietnamese people there but not many. At that camp, my father and Hi were made to clear the surrounding trees. The Thai prisoners were chained by their feet and they wore a metal ring around their necks. In the dark of the night, as the prisoners crawled and moved, the sounds of their rattling chains filled the air. The Thai guards who managed the prison regularly beat the Vietnamese as well as the prisoners, just for pleasure. Everyone was afraid the women would be raped, and the fear kept them all awake. My mother heard the grotesque, wild and violent sounds of random beatings and she tried hard to not be sick each time she heard human flesh being pounded. Some French-speaking Vietnamese wrote on a small piece of paper about the fear of rape and beatings. Finally, when the Red Cross officers came to see them, these small notes were slipped into their hands.

  Not long after, they were moved to an official refugee camp called Khao I Dang, twenty kilometres from Aranyaprathet. At the end of 1979, the United Nations had cleared the forest to make a camp for the Cambodians who were escaping the Khmer Rouge. It was administered by the Thai government and the United Nations. Ten out of the twelve sections of the camp were occupied by Cambodians; the remaining two housed Vietnamese.

  The Cambodians in Khao I Dang were either hoping for resettlement to a third country or waiting for the situation to become safe for them to return home. There were rations of water, rice and canned fish. Though quantities were extremely limited, the rations were precious. So too was the relative peace; they could no longer hear the gunfire of the jungles or the screams of people being beaten. But although they had found refuge, the Vietnamese in the camp faced an uncertain future. At the time, no government had recognised as official refugees the Vietnamese who had left their country by foot; those in the camp were in limbo, with nowhere to go. My mother watched as people smashed their own heads against stone walls in desperation. It was the not knowing that became their new enemy. Some people’s families offshore sent them money. Others were completely alone with no links to anyone. They could only hope that the faceless, nameless Powerful would soon decide that they were genuinely running from persecution. That they were running towards freedom.

  The days ran into weeks as they waited for the world to recognise them as legitimate refugees. At the camp, there were interpreters who had worked for the Americans. They loved listening to the BBC and Voice of America on the radio. One day, there was an announcement by US president Jimmy Carter. As the English-speakers hovered around the radio, the other refugees were going about their routine activities, cooking, sleeping, praying. My mother remembers the sudden thunderous outbreak of joyful cries. The men ran around the camp shrieking the news. President Carter had officially recognised those Vietnamese who had travelled by foot to be refugees. The camp erupted in elation. The ecstatic roars of the crowd were deafening. People shook their heads in disbelief. Tears streamed and knees trembled with joy. People slumped to the ground with hands cupped in prayer.

  Slowly, diplomats from all over the western world came to interview the refugees, including my family. Gough Whitlam, former prime minister of Australia, declared that he did not want anti-Communist Vietnamese refugees coming to Australia. Many would never forget his famous statement: ‘I’m not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us!’ Fortunately, he was no longer prime minister at the time, and he no longer determined Australia’s immigration policy.

  My family was moved to Sikhiu refugee camp, situated in a mountainous region of Thailand. It was a former women’s prison, converted into a camp to house the thousands of Vietnamese refugees flooding into the country, including numerous unaccompanied minors. All had travelled by foot through the sinister and dangerous jungles of Cambodia. The camp gathered people from all classes and ranks, with diverse stories and hopes. From criminals to CIA-tr
ained intelligence officers, clergymen and scholars, one single fact bound them in solidarity: that no matter how, no matter why, they had survived. Within the four walls of this former prison, people ate, slept, studied, wrote, found love, gave birth and died. The cycle of life went on here just as it did in any other community in the world.

  Though we were away from the mayhem of Cambodia and the oppression of Vietnam, Sikhiu refugee camp was not a complete haven. Every morning, all the refugees had to line up and salute the Thai flag while the Thai anthem played over the loudspeaker. Those who were too weak and hungry to attend were beaten. Sikhiu was notorious for the mistreatment of refugees. At night, the camp’s Thai guards along with other local men broke into the camps and raped several women. The refugees were always on the alert.

  In the camp everyone lived in makeshift shelters within a large compound. Each family sectioned off a little space with some wood and fabric. It was intensely crowded and at night there was literally no room to turn. Every day people would line up to get rations of water, rice, meat and oil so they could cook their own food among themselves. There was never enough food and water to go around.

  Hi’s mother had sewn pieces of gold into the hemline of his shirt and he was under strict instructions not to reveal the gold under any circumstances. Even when the smugglers abandoned him in the jungle, he held onto his gold. At the camp, it was Hi’s gold that gave my parents enough capital to start a small enterprise. My mother cooked a variety of noodles and rice dishes and my father ground soya beans into soya milk. My mother, a natural entrepreneur with a warm smile, drew customers from all over the camp. They came with their money and with their stories. Women who were raped by guerrilla soldiers in the jungles of Cambodia spoke to her of their sense of shame. Young single men asked her to write faux love letters to potential suitors in America hoping to get money sent to them. Married men with families back in Vietnam came to her for advice because they had fallen in love with women at the camp. There were tabs with customers all over the camp who promised to pay. Some did, some didn’t. With her exceptionally fair skin, European features and compassionate disposition, my mother was a source of support to many.