And they didn’t. Malaysia flatly refused to allow the refugees to come ashore, and it took two weeks of negotiations before Thailand finally agreed to take them—and only after the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees promised to arrange resettlement. The refugees had nowhere to go during that time and were forced to remain aboard the Cal Loader, which put the ship out of commission fourteen days while the negotiations ground along. That was unacceptable to Stan. The twenty-one lives he had saved were priceless and worth every bit of his time and effort, but who could say how many other refugees might have perished while the system crawled along at a snail’s pace?
He decided to try a different plan. John Calder was sent to buy a fishing boat in the Malaysian coastal town of Kuantan. He managed to find one for three thousand dollars that was capable of holding a hundred refugees, though he never let on to the sellers what the boat was intended to do. Fortunately fishing was one of the chief industries in Kuantan, and the boat could be left docked among hundreds of similar boats without raising any suspicions.
It wasn’t long before the Cal Loader encountered another refugee boat, and that boat was in even worse condition than the first one and quickly sank. This time seventy-three refugees were taken aboard, and that was when the new plan went into action. The ship sent a coded message to Calder, instructing him to bring the fishing boat to a rendezvous point just outside Malaysia’s twelve-mile limit in international waters. That was an important precaution because if anything went wrong, Stan didn’t want to find himself and his crew at the mercy of an angry Malaysian court.
When the two vessels rendezvoused, the seventy-three refugees were transferred to the fishing boat. The boat had been outfitted with a compass, navigational charts, and enough food and water to take them just about anywhere they wanted, though it was learned later that the refugees decided to take their chances in Malaysia and managed to reach a refugee camp there.
It was not a bad plan, Stan thought. At least it seemed to be an improvement over the old plan because it had taken only two days for the Cal Loader to rescue the seventy-three refugees and let them find their own home, instead of two weeks to find a home for them. But it was an expensive plan—Malaysian authorities had confiscated the fishing boat, and three thousand dollars was a lot to pay for each new batch of refugees.
Stan and his crew continued to sail the South China Sea in search of refugee boats, but soon they encountered another problem. The Cal Loader, a World War II–era landing ship, was designed to sit shallow in the water so it could run itself aground and allow the tanks it carried to roll out onto dry land. When the Cal Loader was unloaded, its bow sat less than four feet underwater; the ship practically sat on top of the water, and that was a problem. The ship was just too small; a vessel that operates on the high seas needs a greater mass and a deeper draft to give it stability against the wind and waves. June to December was typhoon season in the South China Sea, when the winds could blow with hurricane force and the waves could be as tall as buildings. In seas like that the Cal Loader would roll over like an empty milk carton, which meant the ship would have to be out of commission for half the year.
By late 1978, Operation Seasweep had to be suspended for the remainder of the year. They had already been pushing their luck by continuing operations through the temperamental summer months; by fall, a typhoon could strike the area almost without warning, and it made no sense to take refugees aboard a ship that was in danger of sinking too.
At year’s end Stan looked back on what Operation Seasweep had accomplished: 94 refugees in two different boats had been rescued from certain death and delivered to refugee camps; another 134 refugees in three other boats had been resupplied and probably saved from a slow death at sea. Those results were encouraging, but Stan knew they could do much better, and they would have to if they wanted to make even a small dent in the overall problem. More than two hundred lives spared in just a few months of operation—but how many more could be rescued if Operation Seasweep could continue throughout an entire year?
What Stan needed was a bigger ship.
Seventeen
LAND AT LAST
LAND!” SOMEONE SHOUTED, AND EVERYONE ON THE TOP deck scrambled to their feet and pushed toward the bow to stare in the direction he was pointing. It was just a dark line across the distant horizon, and one of the men said it was probably just a line of clouds and sat down again—but when details began to be visible, we knew we had found land.
It was around noon on the third day of our journey, and for the third day in a row, the skies were sunny and clear. But the beautiful weather had done nothing to lift the spirits of the passengers on our boat; the general mood remained somber and fearful after the pirate attack the previous day. An elderly man below deck had begun to suffer from severe dehydration from the combined effect of 145 bodies packed tightly around him and the hot, stagnant air that the twin vents were supposed to relieve but didn’t. We were tired, we were hungry, and we were terrified into numbness by the thought that the next pirates we encountered might have a lot more experience.
But the moment land was sighted, everyone’s mood changed. We were not going to die at sea after all; we were going to make it. Our boat was intact, our food and water had held out, and we had managed to avoid the first typhoon of the season. Our endless journey suddenly became endurable, and everyone began to talk excitedly.
We had found land, but we had no idea what land we had found. It was definitely not an island because it spanned the entire horizon from east to west. It must have been some country’s mainland, and since we had maintained a strict heading of south by southwest, it could only have been the Malay Peninsula—either the southern tip of Thailand or Malaysia itself. As we soon learned, we had found our way to the state of Terengganu on the east coast of Malaysia.
There were no houses or buildings anywhere in sight—just a wide strip of tawny sand bordered by a dense line of palm trees. The area looked desolate, and we couldn’t help wondering how far from civilization we were landing. Someone suggested that we sail up and down the coast until we found a more promising site to land, but then we saw something that told us we had come to the right place: there was another refugee boat already there. It was beached bow-first on the sand and rested askew like a sunken shipwreck. The name on the stern told us that the boat had come from the city of Mỹ Tho in the Mekong Delta not far from our home in Soc Trang. They were fellow refugees from Vietnam, and the similar timing of their departure meant they were probably Chinese just like us. Suddenly our desolate landing site was beginning to seem like a family reunion.
We saw no sign of the other refugees as our boat approached the beach. We took that as an encouraging sign because it meant they had probably moved inland and possibly even found a refugee camp that would accept them. If we could land nearby, we might be able to pick up their trail and follow them. Picking a specific landing spot wasn’t difficult because there were no docks or piers anywhere in sight. We had an entire beach to choose from, and all we needed to do was throttle up our little engine and run our boat up on the sand just as the other refugees had done. Speed was crucial because the deeper we managed to beach our boat, the shallower the water would be that we would have to wade through to get ashore; and for people who couldn’t swim, that was an important consideration.
Everyone sat down and grabbed hold of what they could while the captain coaxed the engine to maximum rpm, but as our boat approached the shoreline, local villagers began to pour out of the woods and rush toward our landing site. They shouted to us, but no one could hear them over the roar of the surf and the whine of our engine. When they waved to us, we all waved back, but the looks on their faces told us that this was not a welcoming committee.
The Malaysians were telling us to turn around and go back, but it was too late for that. Even if our feeble engine had possessed enough power to stop the boat’s forward momentum and bring the boat around, where were we supposed to go? Back to Vietnam wi
th no place to live? Back across the South China Sea without enough food or water to survive the voyage? Back into pirate-infested waters or into a summer typhoon that could swallow our boat, with a single wave? We had given up everything to get this far, and we had nothing to return to. Turning back meant death, so our only alternative was to run the boat aground and deal with the Malaysians later.
But we realized that even if we beached our boat, the Malaysians could still force us to turn back. We were arriving at midday when the tide was low; all they would have to do was wait until nightfall when the tide came in again and lifted our boat off the sand—then they could push us out to sea again. The only way to prevent that from happening was not only to beach our boat but scuttle it.
Some of the men rushed below deck and used any piece of metal they could find to hack away at the thick planks of the hull until cracks appeared and water began to trickle in. The men had to time the sabotage just right; if they scuttled the boat too soon, we would find ourselves in deep water, and if they waited too long, the Malaysians might see what we were doing—and they looked angry enough already.
When water began to gush into the boat, the lower-deck passengers grabbed their possessions and scrambled up the ladder to higher ground. While everyone was climbing up, my uncle was climbing down because he had hidden gold and jewels in a secret compartment below deck, and he wasn’t about to let them go down with the ship. My mother and father never saw that hidden money and had no idea how much was there. As always, my uncle and grandmother controlled the family finances, and in their view the arrangement hadn’t changed just because we had left Vietnam. My own family left the boat with only the money and jewelry that my mother had managed to hide on each of us, and it wasn’t much.
Those who could swim preferred to take their chances in roiling surf, instead of a sinking ship, and they jumped into the water before we even reached the beach. The rest of us braced ourselves for impact, and we were all thrown forward when the boat hit the sand and ground to a halt. Then everyone began to pour over the sides of the boat; able adults went first, plunging into tepid, chest-deep water and struggling through the surf until they collapsed on the sand. Jenny, Bruce, and Yen jumped on their own, which was a dangerous thing to do, considering that Yen was only nine at the time and water that is chest-deep for an adult is deep enough for a nine-year-old to drown in. When their feet hit bottom, the water was well over their heads, and they came up spluttering and coughing. Some of the men remained in the water to assist anyone having difficulty by hooking their arms around them and hauling them to the beach.
For the older passengers the jump was too much, and they had to be lowered over the side of the ship into the water. That included Grandmother Chung, which was a lot like lowering a cat into a bathtub. Her throne went with her, of course, but at least she wasn’t seated in it at the time. My mother’s father was seventy-eight and one of the oldest people on board; he had to be lowered carefully because he walked with a cane and his bones were brittle enough to break.
When my father jumped into the water, he turned, held up his arms, and waited for my mother to drop the younger children down to him. She started with the oldest and worked her way down: first Nikki, then Thai, then me, and finally the twins. Deciding the right moment to let go of us was not easy for my mother because only the bow of our boat was resting on the sand; the rest of the hull was still floating, and the powerful surf rocked the boat back and forth like the pendulum of a clock. Our boat was designed to sit high in the water, and with the weight of more than 290 people removed, it sat even higher. It was a long way for a young child to fall, even into water. My mother had to hold us one at a time at the port side railing and wait for the boat to rock forward until the railing was closest to the water—then she had to let go.
Imagine dropping your children from the side of a rocking ship into pounding surf and hoping they come up again. I cannot imagine what was going through my mother’s mind when she released each of us into midair and watched us drop like plummeting rocks into our father’s waiting arms. But my father could not risk trying to catch us before we hit the water; we were going too fast for that. He had to wait and let us hit the water first, then scoop us up when we bobbed back to the surface like corks.
I have no memory of Bac Lieu or Soc Trang or our little farm with its ducks and geese and pigs. My very first memory in life is the moment I was dropped into that warm ocean water on the beach in Malaysia. One moment my mother was holding me under both arms; then suddenly I was weightless, drifting like a leaf through the noise and chaos all around me—then I plunged into a silent, blue haze of half-bodies wading through clouds of sand. I never shut my eyes. I just stared wide-eyed at this strange new world as my body slowly started to rise. A moment later I felt a pair of strong hands grab me by the arms and pull me from the water, and I found myself staring into my father’s face. I thought I had forgotten the entire experience until twenty years later, when I stood on a beach for the second time in my life; as soon as I smelled saltwater, the memory came rushing back to me.
The twins were the last to go, and then my mother jumped after them. Within minutes my entire family was lying on the hot sand, shaken and panting but safely ashore.
The Malaysian villagers were like a gaggle of cackling geese gathered around us, shouting angrily as they pointed to the sea. We couldn’t understand a word they were saying, which wasn’t surprising, considering Peninsular Malaysians speak more than forty languages. But we knew what they were trying to say, and to be honest we really didn’t care. We were too tired and too relieved to be standing on solid ground again.
The cold reception was more than a lack of Malaysian hospitality. In the four years since the fall of South Vietnam, more than 300,000 refugees had fled Vietnam and run their boats aground in “nations of first asylum” like Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Malaysia alone took in 124,000 of them, and at first they were received with compassion and kindness—but their sheer numbers began to overwhelm the job market and social services of the country. Ordinary Malaysians like these villagers had borne the brunt of it because they were the ones competing for those jobs and social services. By the time our family arrived in Malaysia, the nation was suffering from what some have called “compassion fatigue,” and our beach reception committee wanted to make it very clear that our kind were no longer welcome there.
My father considered telling them we were Chinese, hoping to play the ethnic exemption card that had worked so well for us in Vietnam, but when he learned the Malaysians hate the Chinese, he decided to keep it to himself. There had been a long and bitter conflict in Malaysia between capitalism and communism, and most of the communist insurgents had been Chinese. In their eyes we were not only social parasites but possible communist agents, and that made us the worst of all possible refugees.
When the boat had begun to founder, everyone had abandoned ship so quickly that they left many of their possessions behind—which were now underwater. Under the disapproving glare of the Malaysian villagers, some of the men began to return to the boat to salvage anything that might be useful on the beach. One man retrieved a combination ax-hammer, but it was no ordinary hand tool because the handle was hollow and filled with gems. Others retrieved cook pots, tarps, and any food or water they could find.
An hour later a military truck pulled up on the beach, and two dozen soldiers dressed in khaki shorts and green caps and armed with bolt-action rifles began to off-load and surround us. Apparently someone had tipped them off that another boatload of pesky refugees had arrived and sent for the soldiers to keep the villagers’ displeasure from getting out of hand. The soldiers added to the confusion by trying to shout their orders above the din, and when they did we were surprised to find that they were speaking English. Malaysian was the official language of the country, but because of Malaysia’s history as a British crown colony, English was a common language too. My father knew only bits of English, but my
mother’s younger brother, Uncle Lam, was fluent, and he became our official translator.
Uncle Lam told the officer in charge that our boat had been irreparably damaged and we had been lucky to make it to the beach before it foundered. The look on the officer’s face made it clear what he was thinking: Malaysia must be the luckiest country in the world.
The officer waved off Uncle Lam’s bald-faced lie and demanded, “Who’s in charge here?”
Uncle Lam hesitated. The captain had guided our boat across the sea, but now that we had landed he was no longer in command. Our family was the majority shareholder in the boat, but that didn’t mean we were in charge. Technically, no one was in charge—but that answer didn’t satisfy the officer.
He divided our group into men and women and made us line up separately on the beach, then marched down the lines, demanding, “Who’s in charge?”
He eyed my father and his older brother suspiciously because they were a head taller than anyone else, and in his mind height implied authority. When a few of the men began to nod sheepishly and point to the both of them, the officer’s suspicions were confirmed, and he dragged my father and uncle out of line and forced them to kneel.
“Who else? Who else is in charge here?”
By the time the officer was finished, he had randomly selected five or six “leaders” from our group who knelt before him in the sand.
“You can’t stay here!” the officer kept shouting, and the louder he shouted, the angrier he became until he lifted his rifle and brought the butt down hard on my father’s shoulder. My father cried out and raised his arms to try to shield his head, but that only made things worse. The officer turned to my uncle and delivered the same blow, then started bringing the butt of his rifle down like a jackhammer until both men were barely conscious.
Then something happened that no one in my family had ever seen before. Grandmother Chung stepped out of the line of women, dropped to her knees in front of the officer, and begged him to have mercy on her sons. My grandmother was a fiercely proud woman, and that was probably the first and only time in her life that she had ever begged for anything. But as thick-skinned as she was, her sons were her whole life, and she knew that at the officer’s whim both of them could die.
Where the Wind Leads Page 13
