by Julia Legian
This kind of punishment was reserved for the naughtiest kids. I couldn’t believe Mr Dan could be this tough. Half an hour later, Mr Dan came back.
“Get up, you naughty girl,” he said. “Did that hurt?”
“Yes, sir! It hurt a lot,” I cried. “I have holes all over my knees!”
“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I didn’t want to do this to you but I had to punish you to set an example to the others.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I promise I won’t do that to you any more.”
“I know. Now be a good girl and go and do your work.”
I walked back into the classroom and the kids looked at me and giggled. I decided I shouldn’t fool with Mr Dan because, despite his soft looks, he was tough after all, and capable of handing out severe punishments. He was also a kind teacher, the nicest in the entire school, so I knew I should be nice to him. After that, every day before class Mr Dan asked me to check his drawer to make sure there were no creepy crawlies in it.
After a couple of months I noticed a shift in Ba Tu’s attitude towards Phuong and me. She became agitated and she served less food for us to eat. Eventually, she started to call us bad names and ordered us around. She poked us out of bed.
“Get up you brats. It is 4am - get up and go to work.”
She made us sort fish, the horrible work my Mum used to do. We had to start early, going to school only after we had finished. She stopped Hung and San from playing with us. One day Ba Tu didn’t give us lunch money. I asked her for some.
“Great Aunt, we need money to buy lunch for school,” I said.
“There’s no food for you two,” she replied. “And come straight home after school - there is plenty of work for you both to do.”
Before and after school, Phuong and I were forced to sort seafood for neighbours. The next chore was to remove the shells from the shrimps that had been left drying in the sun for some days. The stench was awful.
“Do we have to finish this ginormous pile of shrimps on our own? How are we supposed to do this, Phuong?” I complained.
“Here, take this canvas bag,” Phuong said.
I felt rebellious.
“What for? It’s almost as big as me!”
“Stop complaining, Loan. Just work. Here, hold it steady. I’ll put a few kilos of shrimp in there for you. What you have to do is to lift this bag over your head and hit it onto the ground as hard as you can. That’s how you get the shrimp shells off. It’s not that hard.”
“But Phuong, this is too heavy for me! I can’t lift it. Can I pour some out?”
“You’re just lazy. Why can’t you be quiet and do as you’re told? Do you want us to stay here forever?”
It took hours of back-breaking work to complete the task. During the dry season, Ba Tu made Phuong and me walk all the way to Ben Nha Tho to collect fresh water from the well.
Ba Tu had fifteen huge clay pots for water. Sometimes it took days to fill them. Phuong and I walked many kilometres in the blistering heat to collect the water.
I struggled to keep the two buckets, tied at each end of a long, thin bamboo stick, balanced on my shoulders, although Phuong had no trouble. I had no idea how she did it. She didn’t lose a single drop of water while I spilled it everywhere. Phuong was good at everything while I was the opposite.
“Phuong, please stop! I need a break. I’m tired and hungry and the water is spilling everywhere,” I complained.
“Stop whining, it’s not that hard. Keep walking and try to keep the buckets still. It looks like you’ve lost half the water already. There won’t be any left by the time you get home. You don’t want to get a sore bottom, do you?”
“I can’t stop it from spilling out. It’s this stupid road’s fault. It makes me spill the water every time I step in a hole. How do you keep it steady? Can you show me the trick?”
“There’s no trick, it’s just you. Stop complaining. I’m so tired of listening to you,” Phuong sighed.
The jobs of shelling shrimps and collecting fresh water turned out to be a walk in the park compared to the job of using our bare hands to clip thousands of razor - mouthed lizard fish (Bombay duck) heads’ together. These grotesque sea creatures had to be clipped together by their jaws to loop them over bamboo poles to hang them out to dry.
Bombay Duck / Lizard fish
“Ouch, ouch, ouch! Phuong, I can’t do this. I don’t want to do it any more,” I cried. “Look at my fingers - they’re bleeding. Look at this, please help me take these teeth out of my skin!”
“You can’t remove them. Let them stay under your skin and they will rot away some day. There’s nothing I can do. Just work through the pain. Anything is better than being beaten by Ba Tu.”
Three months turned into three years and there was still no sign of Mum or Grandma. Ba Tu was furious about having to look after us all this time. We lost weight. We outgrew our clothes and they hung off us like rags on dilapidated store dummies. The other kids made fun of our appearance.
I hated the New Year - particularly when we lived with Ba Tu. Our cousins got lots of delicate pork meat to eat, Li Xi (red money bags) and new clothes. Phuong and I got zilch, not even a friendly smile from Ba Tu.
“It’s New Year’s today, Sis. Do you think Ba Tu will give us some young coconuts to drink? She has hundreds and everyone gets to drink it except us.”
“I don’t think so,” Phuong replied.
One day I discovered that I could scrape the shells off the very young coconuts and eat them. They tasted like wood but were deliciously crunchy.
Every now and then we became debt collectors for Ba Tu. She was making a killing lending money and charging ludicrously high interest rates of 60-100% on the loans. If we failed to collect, she stopped feeding us until we came home with results. Phuong didn’t have the heart to give the poor people a hard time and she struggled for the first time in her life. I didn’t like doing it, either, but I harassed people when they left me with no choice. I didn’t want to go home empty handed and get beaten and sent to bed hungry.
I was also lucky I had Tam, my old friend, to help me out. It was a job that Tam was very good at. He was a fearsome kid with a loud mouth. When the people didn’t pay, he refused to leave, and he abused the heck out of them until he got something.
“Tam, why are you so mean to people?” I asked.
“I’m just acting,” he replied, laughing. “I’m going to become a great actor when I grow up.”
One day Ba Tu sent me across town to collect debts. I called by Tam’s house to ask him to come.
“Tam, I’m here.” I called Tam’s mother Aunty Hong. She was a first class, smashing lady for whom nothing was a problem. She came to the door.
“Hello, Loan dear. Tam’s not home yet. He’s gone to his uncle’s shop to pick up some fruit. But he’ll be home soon. Come on in.”
“Thank you, Aunty Hong.”
I entered the two storey brick home with its expensive marble floor. Aunty Hong gave me a delicious banana rice cake and a glass of water. We chatted while I waited. From where I sat I could see out the front door. I saw a beautiful, slender young woman approaching the house.
Her beauty diminished as she came closer and I noticed her face flushed with rage.
“You bitch!” she screamed at Aunty Hong. “I’m going to destroy you and your whole family!”
I cringed back in shock.
“Who is that crazy woman, Aunty Hong?”
Aunty Hong pushed me into a corner.
“I have no idea,” she replied grimly. “ Go over there and eat your cake my darling. I’ve never seen her before. She must have mistaken me for someone else. Let me talk to her and find out.”
I went to the corner and sat eating my food as I watched the crazy woman run at Aunty Hong. She carried a large metal container. The next seconds happened in slow motion. I watched in horror as the woman threw liquid in Aunty Hong’s face before she ran away.
Aunty Hong screamed in pain.
&n
bsp; “Argghhhh! Argghhhh! What is happening to me? Mummy, help me! Mummy! Mummy, where are you! No, God no!”
I almost collapsed with shock when I saw the skin on Aunty Hong’s face and neck dissolving in front of my eyes. I dropped the cake and sank to the ground, covering my eyes and crying in terror. Pandemonium broke out as Tam’s Grandma ran out from the kitchen to the front porch where neighbours were swarming as they heard Hong’s cries. Tam rushed into the house.
“Mummy, what happened?” he shouted.
Aunty Hong couldn’t answer or comfort him. Confused he turned to me.
“What happened to my Mum?” he asked, his face reflecting his shock at the sight of his mother’s raw, burned features.
I tried to control my tears. “This wo … oo … ooman walked straight up to your mum and threw a container of liquid all over her. Aunty didn’t have time to stop her and we didn’t realise it was acid until …”
I stopped before I blurted out that it had eaten the flesh from his mother’s face. Tam’s neighbours took charge, loading Aunty Hong onto a motorbike to take her to Soc Trang hospital.
Some time later, the spiteful woman was caught. She confessed she’d had an affair with Long, Tam’s father. Long had ended the relationship, prompting her to destroy Aunty Hong’s beauty to get even. Tam’s dad ended the marriage when Aunty Hong returned from hospital. Abandoned by her husband, she was forced to go back to live with her parents in Saigon, taking Tam with her.
I never saw Tam again, never got to say goodbye to him or to say I was sorry for Aunty Hong’s tragedy and that he had to go away. As for her attacker, the woman was sentenced to only five years’ gaol for destroying the life of my good friend and his wonderful mother.
Chapter 14
Life went on at Ba Tu’s house. She became more abusive than ever. My cousin Hung often shared his food with me. Phuong’s best friend, Dep, often broke her sweet potato in half and shared it with Phuong. In Vietnam, you eat sweet potato if you are poor. Dep was dirt poor but she had a heart of gold.
“Don’t worry, Loan, I have hidden some food for you. I’ll give it to you when Grandma takes a nap,” Hung said.
He was a kind and loving cousin and he loved me like a sister.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s nearly one o’clock,” he said.
“Is she in bed yet?”
“Yes, she has Phuong plucking her grey hairs. We’ll leave when she starts snoring,” Hung laughed.
Miss Perfect Phuong with her gentle hands sat on a high chair over Ba Tu’s head, unhappily plucking Ba Tu’s grey hairs, strand by strand. One time Great Aunt asked me to fill in for Phuong and I yanked a handful of her hair out on purpose. I copped a horrific verbal lashing from her but from that day on she never asked me to do it again.
Whenever I didn’t have to work, my cousins took me to play in the abandoned houses nearby. This was usually during the two hours after noon, when Ba Tu took her beauty nap. These houses, abandoned by people trying to flee Vietnam, were a hide-and-seek heaven. The three of us were inseparable.
One day San came alone.
“Hey, Loan, Hung has to do his homework so he won’t be coming with us,” San said.
We made our way to one of the houses to begin our game. However, once inside, San pushed me against the wall and started kissing me and trying to pull my clothes off. I felt something hard pushing at my lower body. Petrified, I pushed him away and sprinted home.
I did not dare to say a word about the incident to anyone, keeping the secret to myself. I knew if I told anyone, Ba Tu would throw me out of the house because she loved her grandsons and hated me. Why should she believe me?
I stopped playing with the boys. I hated Phuong. She became close to Di Hoang, Ba Tu’s youngest and favourite daughter. Phuong was treated well by the whole family. They even took her to Vietnamese opera shows with front row seats, while I had to risk my life dangling from the overcrowded trees with the rest of the poverty-stricken kids. Sometimes I would take my anger out on Phuong and beat the heck out of her. I blamed her for my misery.
It was a typical afternoon during Ba Tu’s daily nap when I spotted a skinny, sickly looking girl who lived opposite Ba Tu. I hadn’t noticed her before. I went over and introduced myself.
“Hi there, I’m Loan. What’s your name?”
“My mum calls me A Shen,” she said in broken Vietnamese.
“That’s not a Vietnamese name.”
“It’s Chinese, Teochew.”
I was pleased to talk with her. It turned out we were the same age.
“Have you been living here long? How come I’ve never seen you before?”
“I’ve been here a long time with my Mum and my older sister but I’ve been very ill so I haven’t really gotten out of the house much.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know. My gums bleed a lot during my sleep. Mum has to give me a fresh pillow every morning. I hate going out of the house because the kids tease me. They’re scared to come near me. They think they will catch my disease. Now that you know, I guess you don’t want to be my friend, either.”
A Shen looked at the ground and pulled a sad face.
“I don’t care; I’m not scared of death or diseases,” I said. “I’ll be your friend if you want.”
A Shen was the best friend I ever had. I visited her every single day during Ba Tu’s beauty sleep. I sat by her bed and we chatted away. We talked about everything and anything. She dreamed of becoming a school teacher when she grew up. We promised each other we’d be best friends forever. I loved every moment I had with her. We laughed a lot. She even got her mum to feed me decent food once in a while.
Being with A Shen made my life with Ba Tu more tolerable. She reminded me how to be loved and happy again.
A Shen became more pale and weak as the days went by.
“Loan, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’ve been feeling really weak and I can’t sit up in bed any more.”
“Don’t worry, A Shen. How about we lie next to each other? It’s much more fun to chit chat that way. Move over.”
I gently pushed her to one side and lay beside her until she got tired and fell asleep.
“Loan, don’t forget, no matter what happens to me I’ll always love you forever. I’ll go wherever you go.”
She squeezed my hand tight and closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
I went home later that day with a horrible feeling that something bad was about to happen to my best friend but I didn’t know what it was.
I went over the following day but A Shen was not in her bed. I couldn’t find her mum, either. I asked one of the other family members.
“A Dzung, where did A Shen and your Mum go?”
She told me they had gone to Saigon to visit some family members. I was surprised. I thought she was too weak to go anywhere and A Shen didn’t mention she was going away. Day after day I sat on her bed and waited for her to return. Two weeks went by. I was excited to see her mum walk through the door.
I jumped up to greet her. “Aunty, where’s A Shen?”
She didn’t say anything for a few moments but then she burst into tears. “I’m sorry Loan, A Shen died two weeks ago.”
I refused to believe her. “What do you mean, died?”
“I’m sorry, dear. She’s dead.”
“No, Aunty, that can’t be. She was fine when I last saw her. Your other daughter told me she was visiting relatives.”
“I’m sorry, dear, we didn’t want to tell you earlier. We were afraid you might be upset.”
“No, Aunty, no! This can’t be happening! She’s my best friend, the only friend I have left. She can’t leave me. Where is she? Can I see her?” I sobbed while grabbing onto her hand.
“No, dear, you can’t see her. I buried her in Saigon yesterday.”
“It’s not fair! I didn’t get to say goodbye,” I sobbed. “Why, Aunty, why did you do this to me?” I choked up and
could barely breathe. I felt hurt and angry. At that moment I felt like someone had ripped my heart out of my chest in slow motion. The pain was unbearable. I struggled to breathe.
I sat on A Shen’s bed and cried until the time came for me to get back to work, my heart shattered into a million pieces. I couldn’t stop the tears as I walked back to Ba Tu’s house.
It was one of the most devastating days of my life. I had never felt such loneliness. My misery escalated and I burned with anger and fury about life after A Shen’s death. I spent most of the time wondering what I had done to get such a rotten deal.
For a long time I had no one to share my pain with. I felt lost, deserted and empty with no one to talk to. I decided to take my chances and hang out with my cousins again. San wasted no time and took advantage of the situation. He tormented me for months and, although I tried not to be alone with him, he often managed to find a way to get me on my own.
I was furious that he could get away with harassing me. Hatred welled up in me for all those who might have been responsible for my pain. I resented my grandmother for abandoning me. My self-loathing also painfully ate away at my soul. Most of all I despised boys ... any boys. I attacked innocent boys who crossed my path or anyone who gave me a look of disapproval. I was like a wild animal out for blood.
I became feared in the village for my violent behaviour towards villagers - young or old. I didn’t care. The only one who was not afraid of me was my great Aunty Ba Tu. She responded to my bad attitude by trying to starve me to death. She often made me kneel outside the house until my knees were numb, hitting me with a long bamboo stick to punish me because in her opinion I was a menace.
When I thought all hope was gone; when I was just about to give up on God and everybody else, a couple of things happened that transformed my life. They didn’t happen at the same time, but at different times and stages in my despicable existence.
Chapter 15
My first experience with the power of faith came on the day I ran away from Ba Tu and San.
Ba Tu had made me kneel outside her house until sunrise, for refusing to work and for disappearing for a whole day.
