The moment the beatings began, our entire group had begun to shout and wail, and the officer was getting annoyed. He ordered us to be silent and emphasized his point by firing his rifle once into the sand—but the muzzle was so close to my father’s ear when the shot was fired that for an instant he thought he was dead. The bullet missed him, but the blast was so loud my father temporarily lost hearing in one ear.
The officer eventually realized the beatings were accomplishing nothing other than allowing him to vent his frustration over the fact that yet another batch of annoying refugees had arrived on his beach and had become his responsibility. He needed time to consider what to do. The sun was setting by then, and he knew he had to contain our group before some of us tried to escape under cover of darkness. He ordered his soldiers to make a circle around us with a rope, and that enclosure became our world.
“No one crosses this rope,” he ordered. “Cross the rope, and we shoot you.”
Two hundred ninety-plus exhausted refugees spread out the handful of tarps retrieved from the boat, formed a crossword puzzle of bodies on the still-warm sand, and went to sleep.
Eighteen
BLOOD ON THE SAND
WE WOKE UP HUNGRY AND THIRSTY. SOME OF THE fathers in the group stood at the rope perimeter and pled with the Malaysian soldiers, who were not particularly sympathetic after having to stand guard over us all night long. “We have children,” the fathers said in broken English, and when they pointed back to our boat, the guards understood and began to escort them one at a time to retrieve any food or clothing the men could find. Unfortunately most of the food had been stored on the lower deck, which was now underwater, so they found very little that was still edible.
The skies were clear that first day on the beach, and the sunrise over the South China Sea had been breathtaking, but as the sun climbed higher in the sky, the sand underneath us began to grow uncomfortably hot. When my mother leaped from our boat, she had somehow managed to grab one small bag and take it with her. Along with a few other things, the bag contained a plastic tarp that she was now trying to rig into a makeshift tent to shelter us from the sun. No one knew how long we would be on that beach or what the next step of our journey would entail. The disgruntled villagers had returned to their kampong houses, the guards looked as bored as we were, and no one seemed to be in a hurry to do anything. Our exodus seemed to be turning into an extended camping trip.
My immediate family along with my mother’s family set up camp on one side of the rope enclosure while Grandmother Chung and my uncle and his family chose the opposite side. That left my father caught in the middle because he was a member of both families. He spent his entire day hurrying back and forth to see what he could do to help both families, and my mother and Grandmother Chung took turns accusing him of disloyalty whichever way he went.
Our one consoling thought was that there was no sign of the refugees who had arrived on the boat before us, which gave us hope that the Malaysian authorities didn’t plan to leave us here forever. With that thought to comfort us, we settled in and did our best with whatever we had to make our campsite more livable.
Then another boat arrived.
This boat was twice the size of ours and held five hundred refugees, which was enormous by our group’s standards but not particularly impressive to the Malaysians. Transporting refugees out of Vietnam had become a lucrative business for regional smuggling syndicates, and the Malaysians were used to seeing fifteen-hundred-ton-steel-hulled freighters that carried two thousand refugees at a time. Those refugees were sometimes left to rot on board the freighters because the syndicates lost interest in them the moment they left Vietnam. But poorer refugees were forced to flee any way they could, and unscrupulous smugglers saw an opportunity to make a profit from them; that combination created a thriving business in human trafficking.
By the time the last of the new arrivals had waded ashore, our private beach had become a public parking lot. Ironically, the intrusion of a second group of refugees stirred some resentment in our own. This was our beach, and we were here first. Peninsular Malaysia had a five-hundred-mile coastline—did these people really have to land here? Our two dozen guards took one look at the number of new arrivals and realized that it would be impossible for them to maintain order in a group so large, so an hour later one of the guards shouted, “Let’s go!” and began to coil up our rope enclosure.
We were leaving, and we had no idea where we were going.
Everyone carefully packed up the possessions they had managed to salvage from the boat and obediently followed the guards. They marched the entire group down the beach, then turned west into the palm trees and through some thick woods, then back onto the beach again. We marched for two or three hours under a midday tropical sun until some of the group were so exhausted they were ready to drop.
The worst part was the sand. In the process of abandoning our ship and struggling through the surf to the beach, almost everyone had lost shoes or sandals and was forced to walk barefoot, and by midday the sand was scorching hot. Yen had especially tender skin and had always been careful to wear shoes, even when she used to tramp through the mud on our farm. Without shoes her feet were blistering badly, and she could walk only a short distance before she had to stop. Whenever she did, my brother Bruce would take off his shirt and spread it out on the sand for her to stand on. To this day Yen tears up whenever she recalls her brother’s act of kindness. Jenny carried Anh; Bruce and Yen took turns carrying Hon; and with everyone else’s hands full, I had to walk on my own.
By nightfall we finally stopped. We were on the beach again, and the only difference we could see between our new location and the one we had left that morning was this one was occupied by five hundred fewer refugees. The guards herded our entire group down to the shore and into the saltwater, where we bathed without soap, but after the long day’s march the water was a welcome relief. Even the guards joined us. There was nothing to dry off with, but it didn’t matter because the evening was still hot; we all were dry in minutes. The guards used the rope to encircle us again, and we all spread out our tarps and readied our campsite for the evening.
We were too exhausted to sleep well, and the centipedes that crawled over us and tickled us with their hairlike legs didn’t help. Throughout the day our one consoling thought had been that the previous group of refugees might have successfully arrived at a refugee camp; now we began to wonder if they were just camped like we were farther down the beach.
The next day was a repeat of the day before. We woke to the guards firing their guns in the air and waving for us to follow them. When we packed our belongings this time, we left a few of them behind; you discover which possessions are really important when you have to carry them around on your back all day. Again we marched for hours down the beach, and again the skies were clear, but by this time no one was giving thanks for the beautiful weather. Clear skies meant no relief from the sun, and it beat down and leeched the water out of us until our tongues clung to the roofs of our mouths.
Every day it was the same, for five days in a row—pack up our things, march for miles down the beach, stop at another random location, wade into the ocean for a quick bath, then collapse in exhaustion inside our rope corral. Each day we left a few more things behind until we carried almost nothing—even my grandmother’s throne was eventually abandoned. Each day took a little more out of us, and the very young and very old suffered most. Somewhere along the way the old man who had struggled with dehydration on the boat died, and there was no choice but to leave his body behind.
What kept us alive during those five days of forced marching was a daily food delivery from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHCR was an organization created by the UN General Assembly after World War II to help displaced persons in Europe, and their current mandate had been extended to include refugees in Southeast Asia. Each morning a white truck would pull up to the beach and a woman from the UNHCR would deliver food—not
to us, but to the guards. A standard UNHCR ration pack was supposed to contain nine hundred grams of rice, condensed milk, meat, fish, vegetables, noodles, salt, sugar, and even two teabags, but by the time the rations reached us, the guards had removed most of it for themselves, and all we were left with was a little rice, saltine crackers, some dried food, and every child’s favorite: lima beans. Bruce can’t stand the smell of lima beans to this day.
Each ration was intended to last a refugee three days, but the stripped-down version we received was barely enough to get us through a day. The guards allowed us to gather driftwood from the beach to build small fires and cook the food that required it, and since most of us had left our pots and pans behind, we cooked in the tin cans the food came in.
By the fifth day all of us were exhausted, but my mother seemed especially tired and weak; she even began to weep as she trudged down the beach. My mother is an incredibly resilient woman who always seems to take life in stride, regardless of how difficult it is, and it was not like her to cry or even to complain. All of the children could tell that something was wrong with her, but we had no idea what it was.
Then we noticed she was bleeding.
Blood ran down her legs and left a trail behind her in the sand as she staggered down the beach. By nightfall she had lost so much blood that she was barely conscious, and when we finally camped, my father made her sit on a pillow to try to stop the bleeding. My mother had miscarried, and she didn’t even know she was pregnant—the stress and exhaustion of the past few weeks had kept her from even noticing. Sometime in the last five days, she had passed two lumps of blood and kept it from everyone but my father, who secretly buried what might very well have been my mother’s second set of twins.
And now she was hemorrhaging. Instead of being able to recuperate after her miscarriage, she had been force-marched for hours every day with barely enough food to sustain her and nowhere near enough water to replenish the blood she was losing. She lost so much blood that she finally passed out and lay unconscious on the sand while my father desperately tried everything he could think of to stop her from hemorrhaging—but nothing worked. There was nothing he could do but sit helplessly beside her and hope the bleeding somehow stopped on its own.
Then it started to rain.
And this was no summer shower—it was a torrential downpour from the southwest monsoons that inundated Malaysia from May to October every year. Lightning flashed all around us, and the wind blew so hard that the rain fell sideways and the drops stung our skin like needles. It rained all night long, and throughout that night Bruce and my father stood in that downpour and held a canvas tarp over my mother in a desperate attempt to keep her warm and dry while she slowly bled to death.
The monsoon stripped away just about everything that wasn’t tied down. We went to sleep on tarps and woke up on sand. Everything we had salvaged from the boat and hauled like pack mules for the last five days was gone. We had the clothes on our backs, and we had each other—but we were terrified that we might not have our mother for long.
I believe that night was the beginning of my father’s transformation. Less than five years before he had been a prince of Soc Trang, where he was rich, respected, and powerful. He owned rice mills, houses, cars, and even a luxury mistress; the world belonged to his family, and there was nothing he could not own or accomplish.
Then the wind began to blow.
The communists took the rice mills, houses, and cars; the mistress moved on; the Public Security Bureau took most of his money, and the government took the farm. Half of his luggage had been left floating in the Ganh Hao River, and half of our jewelry had been stolen by pirates. He had leapt from a sinking ship with just a few remaining possessions; most of them were scattered somewhere behind him on the beach, and now a monsoon had taken just about everything else.
Five years ago he was a prince, and now he owned a tarp.
The wind had stripped him of everything he owned, everything he had ever wanted—but as he looked down at his dying wife and his frightened children huddled around her, he began to realize that the only things he had left in the world were the only things that had ever mattered.
By morning my mother was conscious but so weak that she couldn’t sit up on her own. Her bleeding had slowed a little but only because she had not moved a muscle all night long. Now she would be forced to march for hours again, and my father knew she would never make it through the day.
He squatted down and pressed his back against her, then wrapped her arms around his neck like a sweater and stood up. He took one of her legs in each hand and carried her piggyback to the nearest guard, and we could see drops of our mother’s blood trailing in the sand behind her.
When my father came to the rope, he stepped over it.
The guard pointed his rifle and shouted at him.
“My wife is dying!” my father pleaded. “She needs a doctor!”
The guard took one look at my mother and knew he was not exaggerating. He pointed to a spot farther up the beach near the trees. “There’s a truck there. Tell them she needs to go to the hospital. H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L.”
My father nodded and hurried off.
The truck was a military cargo vehicle with an open back like a pickup. The truck bed had no cushion or pad; it was just bare corrugated metal, painted the same color as the truck. My father set my unconscious mother on the truck’s gate and gently laid her back, then climbed onto the truck bed, and dragged her in the rest of the way. She lay on her back in the center of the truck bed with her arms limp at her sides. There were no benches on the truck, so my father squatted down beside her, and when he knocked on the cabin window, the driver took off.
The roads were rough, and the soldier driving the truck drove fast; he was used to hauling cargo and apparently didn’t think that human cargo deserved any different treatment. My mother’s head banged against the corrugated truck bed every time the truck hit a bump. There was nothing my father could do but watch and wince every time it happened.
It was a long and jolting ride to the hospital. When they finally got there, my father helped transfer my unconscious mother to a stretcher, and when he lifted her head from the truck bed, the back of her hair was soaked with blood. He was allowed to help carry her into the hospital, but the moment he set her down, he was told he would have to leave. They were willing to accept my mother, but they made it clear that this was a hospital and not a refugee camp. My father had no choice but to climb back into the truck and drive off again, and by the time he made it back to the beach, it was already starting to get dark.
On the way to the hospital, he at least had my unconscious mother to keep him company; on the way back all he had was a puddle of her blood and all the terrible thoughts it brought to mind. Would the hospital really treat her, or was it just providing a comfortable place for her to die? Had he taken his wife to a hospital or a morgue? Would a worthless Vietnamese refugee receive the same quality of care that a Malaysian would? Would anyone even bother to look at her?
And the most terrible question of all: How will I raise eight children by myself?
For some reason our group was not forced to march that day. The guards allowed us to remain camped where we were to try to pick up the pieces after the previous night’s storm. My brothers and sisters and I had all watched that morning as our father lifted our mother onto his back and carried her up the beach to the truck, and even after they disappeared into the palm trees, we stared after them for a long time. We spent the entire day hoping they would both come back, but that evening when our father stepped out of those palm trees again, he was alone.
Nineteen
SHELTERING ANGELS
THE LAST THING MY MOTHER COULD REMEMBER WAS sitting on the beach and a vague sensation of being lifted—after that everything was a blank. Now she found herself lying on her back on a comfortable bed, staring up at a man who was speaking a language she could actually understand, and that had not happened since she left Vietnam.<
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Where could I possibly be? she wondered, but she was too weak to even open her mouth to ask.
“I need to do a procedure on you,” the man told her. “I’m going to give you something to make you sleep.” And with that, he slid a needle into her arm, and everything went black.
When she woke up again, she was finally clearheaded enough to understand she was in a hospital room, but she had no idea how she got there or how long she had been gone from her family. She had no sense of elapsed time at all; to her, it seemed as though she had closed her eyes one minute and awakened the next.
A man entered the room and walked up to her bed—the same man who had spoken to her before. Now she could see that he was a doctor and that the reason she had been able to understand him was because he was Chinese.
“You miscarried,” he said bluntly. “I performed a D & C, and you should be all right now. But you can’t have any more children—your blood is too thin.” And to make certain she followed his advice, he informed her that while she was unconscious, he had taken the liberty of implanting an IUD, free of charge.
To the doctor’s credit, he allowed my mother to remain in the hospital until she recuperated, and she had lost so much blood that recovery was a slow process. Nine days passed before she was strong enough to leave, and when she was finally released and went to get dressed, she discovered that the blood-soaked clothing she had worn to the hospital had turned putrid. The nurses had to scrounge up something for her to wear back to the beach, and the clothes they gave her would have fit loosely on a woman twice her size.
Where the Wind Leads Page 14
