The Unwanted

by Kien Nguyen

  He grabbed my shoulder and dragged me down the street. Through a purple horizon, the sun, enormous and glorious, erased the last shadow of night. The sleepy town beyond the lines of coconut trees roused lazily. I could hear the clanging sounds of utensils against clay bowls, and a cock crowed expansively. Up the hill, we headed toward a parked jeep. The policeman cuffed my hands behind my back, shoved me in the backseat, and drove off, honking the horn to signal his partners. On the hard pavement, two naked people jogged slowly with their hands behind their necks. Strutting a few feet behind, the policemen stabbed the tips of their guns into one bush after the next as their search for the runaways continued.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The jeep drove through busy streets and stopped at a police station. Its front room was an ornate salon with a fake leather sofa, framed Chinese calligraphy on the walls, and a low chandelier. Rare orchids in terra-cotta vases sat on the windowsills.

  From behind the bar, which was opposite the entrance, a clerk took my snapshot and fingerprints, as well as a short report of my background. When she released my hands, my fingers added more smudges to the glass of the bar top. Soon, a couple of policemen escorted me down a long hallway and shoved me into a small cell. They slammed the metal door shut. I heard a click as they inserted the key to lock it, then their footsteps as they walked away.

  The cell reeked with a mixture of rotten meat, urine, and cigarette fumes. Its stucco walls were streaked with what appeared to be blood and feces. It was cold. From the center of the ceiling hung a corroded hook with its sharp edge pointing upward. Underneath sat a crooked, wooden table with an enormous steel mallet and a few rusty bent nails on it. At the far end of the room, against a wall, I saw a large iron tank the size of a library desk filled with dirty water, its surface vibrating with chunks of feces. Desperate to hide, I squeezed into the only secluded spot in the room, a corner next to the tank. I drew my knees up against my chin and made myself as small as possible.

  I heard footsteps approach and once again, the clicking sound of the key. I withdrew further into the corner and tried not to breathe. I didn't want my captors to see that I was crying, for fear that they would interpret tears as a sign of admitted guilt. Two policemen entered the room. The iron door squealed on the hinges and clanged shut.

  One of them walked in, unhooking his belt. He laid the items attached to it, including a gun in a leather case and an array of bronze bullets, on the table. He looked like an ordinary middle-aged man, with coarse black hair and a flat nose. The younger policeman leaned against the wall and watched his partner in silence. In his hand, he held a cache of roasted pumpkin seeds, which he popped into his mouth one by one as he tapped his grubby shoe on the floor. The noises he made stirred my anxiety until it built inside me like a volcano, ready to erupt.

  He spat a husk in his partner's direction. “Did you sleep well last night?”

  The other man took the gun out of the casing and unloaded its contents on the table. “No, I spent the night in bed with this juicy girl downtown. Who needs sleep?”

  “Good for you,” the young man agreed. “I didn't have much sleep either, for a different reason. I was on watch.”

  “I heard you guys caught a couple of hookers down in Cam Ranh Bay and paraded them along the beach. Must have been quite a sight to watch.”

  “Yes, it was fun —” He stopped, looking around the room. “Hey, where in hell is that kid?”

  I shrank deeper into the dark corner.

  The older man replied, “He's behind the tank. Hey, you, get out of there.” He banged the tank with his gun, and I sprang from my refuge.

  The younger policeman threw away the rest of his snack and approached me. His hands seemed enormous, and his forefingers and thumbs shared the same brown, nicotine stain as his teeth. He seized my neck and pushed me against the tank, pinning my throat and cutting my air supply. I struggled to breathe. Like an angry water buffalo, he flared his nostrils and hissed in my face, “Tell me, you little rat, who is in charge of your boat?”

  My voice came out as a whisper, “I don't know what you mean, sir. I ran away from home.”

  “That is a good answer, but how long can you hold up that lie?”

  “Mr. Comrade, I am not lying.”

  He enunciated, “Understand this: I am not your comrade.” A look of hatred contorted his face.

  Suddenly, from behind the young policeman, the older man struck a sharp blow across my face. A thousand stars exploded in front of me. The two men lifted me up and threw me into the iron pool, splashing water onto the cement floor. I hoisted myself up to the surface, but a strong hand pushed me back into the filthy water. Trapped inside the tank, I felt my lungs burning. One of the policemen banged on the outer shell of the tank with the mallet. The shrill noise vibrated into my ears with a thousand excruciating pins. I lost control of my bodily functions, but still my captors would not let me surface. At last, they pulled me out of the water like a dirty dishrag.

  The older policeman shook me and laughed, “Are you ready to talk now?”

  Their voices faded as the ringing in my ears grew louder. I vomited, coughing helplessly in an attempt to expel the liquid from my lungs. They pushed me under the water again. The world faded to black as the tank swallowed me up, and I felt myself go limp in their hands.

  I WOKE UP in a dark space, with my wrists tied together in front of my chest. My left cheek was pressed against a cold, moldy tarpaulin-covered floor. I seemed to be in a cell that swayed in a tedious, rocking motion. Then, the sound of an engine and the smell of a dusty road entered my awareness. I was inside a large vehicle. Each time a wheel crashed against a rock, my gut wrenched painfully; however, I had vomited all that was in me. The aftertaste was bitter and dry on my throat and tongue. Curiosity overtook me, and I propped myself up to peek through a tiny hole on the sheetmetal wall.

  It was daytime. The truck was climbing a barren and desolate mountain. Jungles of dead trees clinging to hard, clay soil disappeared into the horizon. At the end of a long and tortuous road, I spotted a rusty gate, standing next to a series of gas tanks. Above it was a sign scribbled in black paint: REEDUCATION CAMP No. PK 34. And underneath in lowercase were these words: “Reserved solely for boat criminals.”

  The prison was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and, I later learned, land mines. From either side of the gate, narrow trenches encircled the compound like the outline of a maze. Inside a small, corrugated-tin watchtower, three guards in green security-police uniforms stood at attention with rifles on their shoulders. When the truck came to a stop, one of them stepped down to open the gate. Suddenly, the vehicle's covering tent was ripped open. Bright light poured in, bringing with it the blazing temperature from outside.

  More guards appeared. Two of them pulled at the rope around my wrists to get me off the truck. The courtyard was littered with flotsam of heavy weapons and deteriorated U.S. bombs and shell casings, plus the skeleton of a large howitzer. The prison quarters were composed of clusters of long, single-story barracks, joined together as if they were holding hands. The prisoners were segregated according to their age and sex and separated from one another by high fences, and in some places, minefields.

  The guards left me alone under the hot sun. Here and there, I saw groups of prisoners marching in single file between the barracks. All were women and children. Their naked scalps baked under the scorching sun, and their shoulders sagged, while their vacant eyes stared dumbly at the ground. Their zombielike lethargy made me turn away with fright.

  From inside one of the barracks, a prison officer strode over toward me. He was over forty, short and skinny. His eyes, hidden behind oversized sunglasses, showed no emotion as he grabbed the rope and led me across the square.

  We came to a small opening in the ground. A hundred feet ahead was the barbed wire fence separating this prison from the men's penitentiary. Some of the male prisoners stole a curious look at the two of us from afar as they, too, shuffled along in lin
es.

  The warden unhooked a trap door to reveal a large dungeon below. “Get down,” he said.

  I looked into a dark chamber, about eight-by-nine feet and thirty feet deep. The glossy floor reflected the light and reeked of sewage. Somebody let out a hollow whimper, which traveled upward as if from the bowels of Hell. Horrified, I took several steps backward.

  “Use the ladder, half-breed. Or would you like me to kick you down?” the warden asked as he unroped my hands.

  I made my way slowly down a wooden ladder, which ended about five feet from the ground. The oubliette was built of red brick, offering no ventilation except for the trap door. As the cold air gripped my skin like dead claws, I realized that my head was completely bald, just like the rest of the prisoners in camp PK 34. During the period that I had passed out, the policemen at Cam Ranh Bay must have shaved my head.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Inside the moldy cell, two feet of stagnant water seeped out of the ground to form a shallow well. The earth was incredibly cold, despite the hot temperature outside. The dark outlines of prisoners, covered in mud, sloshed around in slow motion to make room for me. Once I was inside, the warden withdrew the ladder and closed the trap door. Somewhere in the dark, a child's voice cried out. A woman begged in sorrow. Her voice echoed against the brick walls and died away. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I made out the shapes of over two dozen inmates huddled in each other's arms. Never had I beheld such despair.

  Suddenly, the panel on the ceiling opened again, and I heard the rumbling of motors. People got to their feet and moaned with fear. Although I didn't know what the noise meant, I, too, began to panic. Two thick hoses appeared through the door and aimed down at us. Before I could prepare myself, jets of bitterly cold water blasted everyone inside. Children cried, clutching at their mothers for protection. The adults leaned against the walls, bracing themselves against the onslaught. Despite the shock, I found the water revitalizing, since it wiped away the bitter dryness in my mouth and replenished my dried-up body.

  The hoses continued to spray water for the next few hours. Inside the oubliette, the water level rose to my waist. We sank into the soft, slippery ground. Finally, the motors were shut down, and the hoses withdrawn. Darkness once again filled the doomed space.

  I lost all sense of time. Where darkness ruled, day and night were obsolete. I pressed my face against the wall, preferring to inhale its dampness instead of the odor of thirty desperate people. Insects crawled all over me. Some stood at the entrance of my nostril, but I made no effort to push them away. Strangely, my awareness of their presence seemed to keep me from losing my mind.

  A few steps in front of me, a woman stood with her shirt open. She clutched a child of about six or seven years old against her naked chest. The child's head rested against her bony shoulder. Her lips, trembling from the cold, formed an inaudible whisper.

  I moved closer to her. “I am sorry, lady. What did you say?”

  The woman wiped a strand of wet hair away from her face. Then, with the same hand, she caught the child's head. She blinked several times. The words that escaped from her mouth were incoherent to my ears.

  I shook my head. “I don't understand what you are saying to me.”

  She shoved her child in front of me. In the dark, I could feel its still body wrapped in a wool blanket. “Hold her, please,” the mother said, clearer this time.

  I accepted the heavy child from her mother. In my arms, her head fell backward like that of a broken toy. The wet blanket dropped from her face and my fingers came into contact with her clammy skin, as wrinkled and rough as a piece of leather. I could feel her lips, which were swollen to the size of two filled leeches on her small, lifeless face.

  I threw the corpse back into the mother's arms and screamed, feeling my sanity slip away. The woman received her child back against her naked breasts. Her face remained neutral; I pushed away from them and continued screaming until I lost balance and fell back into the dirty cesspool.

  AFTER THE MOANING and crying had subsided, the endless desperation, the gnawing hunger, and the ceaseless chill ushered in the next phase of torture. I stopped thinking; instead, I withdrew into myself and allowed my mind to harden like a piece of rock. In that hazy state I lay until the trap door opened. How long had I been buried in that underground cell? I couldn't tell.

  Light poured in, blinding us. The warden's voice roared from above, announcing the ending of the hard punishment. The same ladder was suspended from the ceiling.

  We crept up like refugees from the grave. My numb feet, black and blue and festering with open sores, could barely follow the commands of my brain. We fell into a line under the sun, gripping each other's arms for support. The generator bellowed, and the guards again turned the familiar hoses on us, washing the filth from our bodies. After the shower, we received our new prison uniforms—a pair of faded black, secondhand, “one-size-fits-all” khaki pants and a black T-shirt.

  In front of us, the warden addressed us. His mat of coarse hair, almost blue under the hot sun, seemed enormous over his undersized head. He tried to read through his dark sunglasses from a crumbled piece of paper. After a few unsuccessful attempts, he tossed it aside.

  “You just came out of the Lady Death's cavern,” he said. “Some of you might be sick, and some of you might even be dead. But I am sure that none of you are deaf, so listen carefully. This is camp PK thirty-four, the home of boat criminals from the three provinces Nhatrang, Cam Ranh, and Tuy Hoa. Once you are here, you must follow certain rules. This specific camp is for women and children. You and the rest of your team will live, sleep, and function as a single unit. You will be fed three times a day, and you must not take the ration back to the shelter with you. No one is allowed free run of the camp, which means you will be traveling in single file, except for the children and the sick, since they will be working on base. The women will work from six-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon in the sweet-potato fields at the other side of the mountain. You are allowed to write one letter a month to your family. I don't guarantee that it will get delivered, but feel free to write if you like. At this moment, your families should already have been informed of your whereabouts, so you may expect to have visitors sometime next month. Any attempt to break the rules or to escape will send you back to the death cave. Any questions?”

  No one spoke. The warden shrugged. “Fine, follow the guards to your cell.”

  We marched together past the courtyard, heading toward the barracks. I was the last one in line. The lady with her dead child moved a few paces ahead of me. She whispered a lullaby and rocked the corpse in her arms.

  Suddenly, from behind me, separated by two layers of barbedwire fences, a familiar yet haunting voice uttered my name. It was as if an electric current had jolted through my spine. I turned around. A man leaned on the fence from the other side of the prison. His hands clutched the barbed wire like claws. I didn't recognize his face, but the voice was the same.

  “Hey, Kien. Is that you?” He grinned, waving at me. “This is Uncle Lam. Remember me?” A guard seized his arm, pulling him away from the fences. The cunning smile, however, remained on his face.

  I wanted to run, but my knees wobbled. I wanted to speak, but the words were trapped in my throat. Everything threatened to turn black around me. As I struggled for consciousness, I wondered how Lam had recognized me after six long years.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Iwoke up sometime that evening inside a new prison cell, shaking like the severed tail of a lizard. The tatami mat underneath me was soaked with my perspiration, yet I could not stop trembling from a chill that came from somewhere deep inside my bones. Pain shot up and down my spine, radiating through me to the joints of my hands and feet.

  There was no electricity inside the camp, and the barracks had no window for ventilation. As a result, the inner space of these prisons was always submerged in an eerie, bluish darkness—a perfect environment for starving rats. They
emerged at night from the gutter in the back, reeking of feces. Their eyes were tiny red dots, burning like fire as they chased each other and jumped on the inmates to look for food. A pair of them attacked my feet, making a tic-tic sound with their teeth. I was too weak to shoo them away. All I could do was to wiggle my toes in misery and hope they would get tired of the game soon. But I had no such luck.

  The night was silent. The other children who shared my cell slept on, making little noises as the rats pricked their hair and scratched their skin. Huddled in a fetal position, I struggled against the urge to throw up the ration of cassava roots I had received earlier at the mess hall. As the fever heightened, the churning in my stomach became more violent, and I disgorged the contents on the floor. The puddle of vomit was instantly covered with rats. I dragged myself away, and the chills finally stopped.

  Morning's arrival was greeted around five o'clock with the national anthem from a transistor radio. The music screeched through the loudspeakers, followed by the ringing of a bell, long and insistent, pulling people from their mats. Outside, the sun still hid behind the mountains. The compound was encased in a dull, sallow fog so thick it gave the illusion that we were all swimming among clouds. In the courtyard, shivering against the mountain's chilly dawn, we exercised to the radio music. Breakfast came next—a small portion of a thin rice paste mixed with a few strands of spinach. Dead roaches floated in my bowl, and the dirt at the root of the unwashed greens tasted as bitter as my own bile.

  Soon, the adults lined up outside their barracks. The other children and I were locked inside the mess hall until eight o'clock in the morning. We watched the grown-ups' activities outside through small windows covered with iron bars and wire mesh. Each woman inmate was assigned a double-wheeled cart heaped with freshly cut potato vines wrapped in bundles and ready to plant. The women pushed their barrows down the path past the junkyard of weapons, through the prison's entrance, and toward the other side of the mountain. The guards trailed behind the prisoners in horse-drawn carriages, their machine guns held ready in their arms.