Just before our departure two local men managed to slip by the PSB agent and sneak aboard our boat. Anyone could have called out and turned the men in, but no one did. We were all refugees, and many of the families on board had paid their very last dong for the chance to escape. Everyone knew these were poor men who had no way to pay the government’s exorbitant fees, and we knew they were risking years of imprisonment by attempting to escape. Everyone understood their desperation and pitied their plight, so we allowed them to stay despite the fact that we didn’t have an inch of extra space.
It was late at night when our boat finally cast off ropes and slowly pulled away from the dock. The boat’s engine made a tinny, rattling sound, not the deep, throaty rumble everyone expected to hear. But at least the boat was finally under way, and that meant air was moving, which was a great relief to everyone below deck. The night was sultry and still, and the only sounds besides the rattling strain of the engine were the rolling chorus of insects from the mangroves and the dull flutter of fruit bats as they dipped low to snatch invisible mosquitoes from the air.
After months of careful planning and fearful secrecy, our final departure should have been a time of loud celebration, but no one spoke a word. Maybe it was the ominous effect of the shadowy mangroves that reached toward us over the black water, or maybe it was just the sobering realization that we were really leaving Vietnam—leaving home, leaving families, leaving ancestors in graves we would never visit again.
It would take all night for our boat to crawl slowly down the narrow Ganh Hao River from Ca Mau to the South China Sea, but by morning the river would widen and the mangroves would grow smaller. Black water would empty into blue, darkness would give way to light, and we would leave everything familiar behind us as we sailed off the map into the unknown.
Part Two
Do not believe that you will reach your destination without leaving the shore.
—CHINESE PROVERB
Fourteen
FIRST DAYS AT SEA
OUR FIRST DAY AT SEA WAS RELATIVELY SMOOTH, which was a very good thing, considering that few of us had ever been on a boat before, and almost no one had experienced the sea. The black waters of the Ganh Hao River had been as smooth as glass the night before, and some were expecting the sea to be the same.
They were disappointed.
A Vietnamese navy patrol boat had followed us until dawn, when our boat cleared the sandbars at the mouth of the Ganh Hao and entered the South China Sea. No one was sure why the patrol boat was bothering to escort us. Our fear was that they planned to stop us and demand one last bribe, illegally collecting money from people who illegally possessed it, and if they had decided to do so, we would have had no choice but to pay whatever they asked. But one of the sailors just shouted up to us, “You’re on your own now,” and everyone heaved a sigh of relief when the patrol boat veered off and sped back toward shore.
The weather was good that first day, but the gentle rolling of the sea was enough to give our boat a slight rock; that motion was enough to make even some of us on the top deck queasy, but it was far worse for those down below, who had no horizon line to focus on to steady their lurching stomachs. Those who became violently seasick had no chance of making it to the top deck to lean over a railing, so they just vomited into cups and plastic bags and passed them up to the top deck to be dumped over the side of the boat in a disgusting bucket brigade. Some in our party had been told that eating raw sweet potatoes would prevent seasickness, and they had been faithfully consuming them ever since our voyage began. As it turned out, sweet potatoes had no effect on seasickness, but they did add a lovely orange hue to all those cups and plastic bags. A nauseating odor began to creep over the ship, which caused seasickness to spread like a virus and filled the lower deck with moaning and grumbling.
The moment our boat entered the South China Sea, we turned south, which was about as far as our travel plans went. We had no definite destination in mind because we knew that virtually every country in Southeast Asia had already been overrun with refugees and the welcome mats had been taken in a long time ago. To the north lay China, our ancestral home, but the journey up the coast to mainland China would have been more than a thousand miles, and China was not accepting refugees anyway. We could have headed east toward the Philippines, but that would have meant a voyage of more than nine hundred miles across open sea with no comforting coastline in sight. We had only enough food and diesel fuel for a few days’ journey, and every day we spent at sea increased our chances of running into bad weather. That was a risk no one wanted to take—especially those below deck.
It was decided that our best bet was to head south toward Malaysia, fewer than three hundred miles away. We knew Malaysia was not accepting refugees either, but it was a chance we had to take. “Any port in a storm,” as the saying goes, and we needed to find a port—any port—before we ran out of fuel and found ourselves at the mercy of a summer typhoon. The one direction we did not consider was west toward Thailand, and it wasn’t because of Thailand’s official policy toward refugees.
It was the pirates.
The southern half of Thailand is shaped like the letter C, curling around from Cambodia in the north to Malaysia in the south and surrounding the Gulf of Thailand. That long, curling shape gives southern Thailand more than two thousand miles of coastland and has made fishing the dominant industry there for thousands of years. Commercial fishing in the Gulf of Thailand has always been a dangerous and labor-intensive trade, and only large exporters grow rich while the average Thai fisherman barely scrapes by.
There have been pirates in the Gulf of Thailand for centuries. Most of them have just been common fishermen trying to make ends meet, and most piracy has been little more than one fisherman stealing another’s catch because stealing fish is easier than fishing. But piracy started to change when the first Vietnamese refugees began to cross the Gulf of Thailand in search of a new home.
At first Thai fishermen were kind to refugees and often stopped to lend free assistance to stranded boats, but when the fishermen realized the refugees could afford to pay for their assistance, they began to charge, then overcharge, then steal. That was when Thai fishermen turned into Thai pirates, and that was when the real horrors began.
Refugees were fleeing with gold and jewelry, not their former country’s worthless currency, and that made refugees a perfect target for pirates. Large amounts of foreign currency would have been difficult for fishermen to exchange and hard to explain to Thai authorities, but gold didn’t have those problems. Vietnam allowed its refugees to leave the country with two taels of gold per person, which made some boats floating bank vaults. Our boat was probably carrying more than half a million dollars in today’s money, and that wasn’t counting the gold and jewels that had been smuggled aboard.
Refugees were usually civilians, not soldiers, so they were unarmed and unprotected. There was no country to protect them either; a nation’s territorial waters extended only twelve miles from its shores, which meant that in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of unpatrolled and unprotected waters. There was no law at sea, a brutal fact refugees soon discovered for themselves.
Two kinds of pirates prowled the waters of the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea: amateurs and professionals. The amateurs were just ordinary Thai fishermen who heard about the floating gold mines and occasionally decided to get in on the action. They could be violent and cruel at times, but they were nothing like the professionals. Professional pirates used large ships powered by three hundred–horsepower engines that no refugee boat could outrun. They were equipped with radar and modern Soviet and American weaponry: fifty-caliber machine guns, M79 grenade launchers, and even antitank weapons. They hunted in wolf packs like German submarines did during World War II: seven or eight boats would form a ring five to ten miles in diameter and wait for a refugee boat to enter; then one of the boats would circle in for the kill. Sometime
s the pirate ship would rake the refugee boat with machine-gun fire as the pirates approached, to let everyone know the seriousness of their intentions. At other times they would ram the refugee boat until the hull cracked and the boat began to take on water because there was nothing like a sinking ship to make people cooperative. The usual approach was for the pirate ship to cast its anchors onto the refugee boat and then reel it in until it was close enough to board.
What happened next would be anyone’s guess. The pirates’ supposed intention was theft, but with no law to restrain them and no concerns about trivial issues like human life and dignity, the atrocities became worse and worse.
Eight months before my family sailed into the South China Sea, a thirty-foot refugee boat called the KG 0729 left Vietnam with thirty passengers aboard. When their engine died, a Thai pirate ship pulled up alongside and forced all the refugees to board the Thai ship, where the men were searched and robbed and a few were thrown into the sea to drown. The rest were taken below and locked in a refrigerated hold. When one man was unable to remove his wedding ring fast enough, his ring finger was chopped off, and he was beaten to death and thrown into the sea while his horrified wife looked on. The younger women were repeatedly raped over a period of three hours, and when the half-frozen men were brought up from the hold, some were thrown overboard with their hands still tied behind their backs. The survivors were returned to their boat and released—but not before the pirate ship rammed the boat twice in an attempt to sink it.
There were often brave and capable men aboard refugee boats, and many of them had the strength and courage to fight the pirates—but they were often accompanied by wives and children, and they feared what might happen to them if they resisted the pirates and failed. When one refugee boat was attacked by eight Thai pirates, the refugees fought back and prevented them from boarding. In response the pirates called in a second boat that rammed the refugee boat so hard that it split in half and threw everyone into the water. The pirates then began to fish the refugees out of the water one by one, decapitate them, and throw their bodies back into the sea. Out of seventy-six refugees, only sixteen managed to survive.
Such violent and extreme cases sound as though they must have been exceptions, but the truth is they were common events. There was no way to stop the Thai pirates. Though the Royal Thai Navy ordered all of its ships to prevent piracy at sea, almost nothing was done. There was too much water and not enough ships, and the crews on ships the navy did possess weren’t particularly motivated to risk their lives in defense of a few worthless refugees.
Piracy was clearly illegal in Thailand, and Thai authorities made the penalties severe, but those penalties only served to make things worse for the refugees because they forced the pirates to make sure there would be no survivors who could testify against them. When one pirate ring was finally arrested, the ringleader turned out to be a respected local merchant who owned a grocery store and sold supplies to local fishermen. He was well-known and easily recognized, which made it especially important for him to leave no survivors behind. The pirates became a floating mafia; they were so efficient at eliminating witnesses that to this day no one knows how many refugees actually perished at sea, but according to some estimates only one out of two boat people survived. So many refugees were dying at the hands of pirates that legitimate Thai fishermen were forced to abandon entire fishing areas because their nets were dredging up too many human bodies. As one fisherman put it, “The jungle has its tigers and the sea has its pirates. It’s something we live with.”
The earliest refugees were just robbed and set free, but the pirates’ desire for greater profit led them to greater atrocities. Refugees were held for ransom; women were kidnapped and made the objects of repeated assault; young girls were abducted and sold into the sex trade. Piracy was so common that it became expected. A survey was done of a hundred refugee boats that had arrived safely in Indonesia over a four-month period: ninety-six of the boats had been attacked by pirates, an average of four times each. One boat had actually been attacked twenty-three times and somehow managed to survive. Accounts of the atrocities committed against boat people became so regular that relief workers conducting survivor interviews in refugee camps grew tired of repeatedly writing out the words rape, murder, and pillage and replaced them with a three-letter acronym: RMP.
My parents had heard all these stories and more, and still they risked everything by sailing an unarmed ship carrying half a million dollars in gold into a sea that pirates virtually owned. My parents knew they were risking their lives—and ours, too, because children were not exempt from pirate brutality—but still they thought it better to risk drowning at the hands of pirates than to face slow suffocation under communist rule.
On the second day of our voyage, the weather was fair again. Jenny was old enough to be allowed to wander the boat, and she loved to hang over the bow to feel the salt spray on her face and watch the silver flashes of fish leaping alongside the boat. Below deck there were still a few problems; there was supposed to be enough food for everyone, but the unsweetened rice cakes and dehydrated food made everyone thirsty and didn’t fill anyone’s stomach. The boat had only one cookstove, located near the stern, and it was intended to serve the entire boat, but some hungry passengers grew impatient waiting for their daily allowance of rice porridge and set up their own small stove below deck—which promptly tipped over and caused everyone to panic and scramble.
We were tired and cramped and hungry, but we had a lot to be thankful for. We had safely escaped from Vietnam, our family was all together, and Grandmother Chung was seated on her rightful throne, glaring like a lighthouse to guide our way to our new home. Blue skies, calm seas, leaping fish—it was a beautiful day at sea.
Until noon—that was when my mother looked at the horizon and spotted the ominous silhouette of a ship growing larger by the minute and heading in our direction.
For the first time in her life, my mother wished she wasn’t the second-most beautiful woman in Bac Lieu.
Fifteen
PIRATES
SOME OF THE MEN ON OUR BOAT ACTUALLY TRIED TO wave the ship down because at that distance there was no way to tell what kind of ship it was. Pirates were not the only ones operating in the South China Sea; the ship might have been a commercial vessel that could replenish our dwindling water supply or point us in the direction of a refugee camp.
But as the ship came closer, the men stopped waving. It was a fishing trawler, easily twice the size of our boat, with a wooden hull that was black from years spent at sea. The ship had a forward deckhouse and an aft working deck, where twin wooden outriggers projected from the mast like a pair of antennae. A knotted gray trawl net draped from each of them, and cables crisscrossed everywhere like the strands of a spider’s web.
The ship approached from the east at high speed, apparently hoping to overtake us before we could speed away, but if they had known how old and feeble our engine was, they could have taken their time. My father stood and watched as the ship drew closer, and he caught a glimpse of a name on the ship’s bow. He couldn’t read the name, but his familiarity with Asian languages told him it was written in Thai.
Everyone on our boat held their breath as the ship approached; there was no way to be sure of the ship’s intentions. The fact that it was a Thai fishing boat meant nothing. There were honest Thai fishermen, too, and everyone prayed this would turn out to be a crew of good Samaritans stopping to offer a helping hand.
But their intentions became clear when the trawler did not slow down.
It rammed us amidships with a tremendous thump and rocked our boat hard to starboard. The loudest screams came from below deck because the coach-class passengers didn’t see the ship approaching and had no way to anticipate the impact. They were completely blindsided, and their screams grew even louder when a spray of water began to shoot through a crack in the hull.
As the stern swung around and the ship came alongside ours, we saw men lined up along
the gunnels, clinging to the steel rigging with one hand and holding knives in the other. Some were dressed like ordinary fishermen, in fish-stained shorts and tattered T-shirts, while others were shirtless, their dark-skinned shoulders and chests emblazoned with tattoos that looked like scrolling veins. Some of them wore bandanas pulled back tight, and many had painted their faces with bright zigzags and symbols to make them look as frightening as possible. They waved their knives in the air and shouted, and when their ship drew close enough, they began to pour onto our boat like rats.
Fifteen pirates boarded our boat, and when they did, everyone began to scream and cry. Some of the women were wearing gold necklaces, and they quickly slipped them off and tucked them under their legs to hide them while others removed their own earrings and held them out in cupped hands to keep the pirates from ripping them off their ears and taking flesh with them.
My mother was worried about more important things than gold.
Jenny was twelve, and Yen was only nine, but pirates had been known to assault girls even younger, and my mother knew both of them were in danger. The women on our boat had all heard about the tricks that other refugee women had tried to avoid being singled out and raped. Some had tried smearing their faces with diesel oil, to make themselves look dirty and unappealing, while others tried basting themselves with a repugnant fish sauce, called nuoc mam. But pirates knew those tricks, too, and all they did was demand that the woman bathe first.
My mother pulled Yen in close and shoved her down to make her look smaller, and she covered Jenny’s head with a towel to try to disguise her as an old woman in a shawl. Some of the single women grabbed for other women’s children and held them in their laps, hoping that a mother might be shown more compassion—but pirates were not known for compassion. Other women pretended to be seasick or ill or anything else they could think of that might make a pirate pass them by. Women who had spent their entire lives making themselves as attractive as possible were now frantically trying everything they could think of to make themselves unappealing.
Where the Wind Leads Page 11
