The same military transport that had brought her to the hospital returned to take her back again, and as she climbed into the back, she realized she had no idea where the hospital was located or how far it was from the beach. Since the driver didn’t bother to ask her for directions back to her family, she assumed he knew where to take her, and if he didn’t know, there was nothing she could do to help.
The trip back took far longer than she expected, and the longer they drove, the more worried she became. The driver didn’t seem to know where he was going. From time to time he pulled over and stared at the trees for a moment, then drove off again. To make matters worse, it was already evening and getting dark fast. If the driver couldn’t find her family in the daylight, he wasn’t going to do any better in the dark.
My mother began to see patches of sky through the palm trees, which told her they must be nearing the beach. A few minutes later the driver abruptly pulled over, tapped his horn, and pointed to a small break in the trees. Thirty seconds later he roared off again, leaving my mother on the side of the road. She almost ran to the beach, eager to see the looks on all of our faces when we first spotted her walking toward us.
But when she stepped out of the palm trees, she saw nothing but sand and sea. She looked up and down the beach, and as far as the eye could see, there were no groups of refugees anywhere in sight.
It was the wrong beach.
Her stomach began to twist into a knot. She had no idea where she was or where her family was. Each day our family had been forced to march farther down the beach, but it had always been a random distance, and each place we stopped looked exactly like the one before. There were no distinguishing landmarks anywhere—just water on our left, palm trees on our right, and sand in the middle. And our group could have been moved several times in the last nine days—we could have been anywhere by now.
Then another thought occurred to her: A boat of refugees had arrived before we did, and a second boat arrived the day after. That meant we were not the only refugees wandering up and down the beach—there were hundreds, maybe even thousands, and locating one family among them could be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. And even if she did know where we were, how was she supposed to get to us? This wasn’t Soc Trang, where she could just wave down a pedicab and tell the driver, “Take me to my family.” The truck was gone, and she was stranded.
Nine days ago she was part of a refugee family. She knew all the dangers her family might encounter when they left Vietnam, but she always thought they would face them together. This was a situation she had never even considered. She was alone, and the thought terrified her.
The sun disappeared below the trees behind her, and the tall palms covered her in deep shadow. In a few more minutes she would be alone in the dark.
Then she heard sounds from somewhere behind the palm trees, and in the deepening darkness she could make out lights. She followed the lights through the trees and discovered a large warehouse-type building in a gravel-covered clearing. The light she had seen was coming from the building’s windows, and when she stretched up on her tiptoes and peeked in, she saw row after row of wide bunk beds lined up from one end of the building to the other. It was a military barrack, and it was temporarily housing a large group of refugees.
She felt a surge of hope as she opened the door and stepped in—but when she scanned the faces of the refugees, she didn’t see a single face she recognized. She began to wander around the room, asking if anyone had seen or heard about her family, and before long she ran across two sisters in their early twenties who were from her hometown of Bac Lieu.
“Where are you going?” my mother asked them.
“To France,” one of them said. “We have sponsors there.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tonight, at ten o’clock. You can come with us.”
“I can’t,” my mother said. “I have to find my family.”
“Well, you can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re alone. Sometimes the soldiers come and take women at night. There won’t be anyone here to protect you, and if you’re alone you’re going to get raped.”
My mother stared in disbelief. In just a few hours this entire group was going to leave for France, and she would be left at the mercy of the Malaysian soldiers. There was no law to protect her—the soldiers were the law. As a refugee her life was worth nothing, and the soldiers could do anything they wanted. They could even kill her when they were done with her, and one refugee among thousands would never be missed. She was thirty-seven, attractive, and barely healed from a hemorrhage that had almost killed her. She couldn’t just abandon her family and board a plane for France, but she couldn’t find her family either; she couldn’t bear to go, but it wasn’t safe to stay. What was she supposed to do?
Then the second sister said, “Only Jesus can protect you now.”
My mother looked at her. She had heard of Jesus before but only as one enlightened being among many. Household shrines in Vietnam commonly included an image of Jesus along with the Buddha and honored family ancestors. But this young woman spoke of Jesus as if He were God himself, a powerful and loving being who strengthens the weak and protects the defenseless—and considering my mother’s situation, it was no surprise that she found herself eager to listen. The young woman’s words touched something deep inside her, and before long my mother was on her knees, praying for protection and deliverance.
At ten o’clock the soldiers came—but only to notify the group that plans had changed and they would not be leaving for France that night after all. My mother was greatly relieved and wondered if the last-minute change of plans was her first answered prayer.
An hour later one of the soldiers announced, “Lights out!” and promptly switched off the lights, throwing the entire barrack into darkness. Everyone immediately found their way to their beds, and my mother was left standing alone in the middle of the barrack.
“Come with us,” she heard a voice say. A man and woman who looked to be in their midfifties, motioned for her to follow them and led her to a lower bunk, where two other figures were already reclining. They were the two young sisters from Bac Lieu, and the man and woman were their parents.
“Take the middle,” the man told her. “You’ll be safe there.”
My mother lay down in the center of the bunk while the two sisters reclined on either side of her. The woman lay down beside one of her daughters, and her husband took the opposite side—five adults in one narrow bed. My mother spent the entire night with a compassionate Christian family surrounding her like human parentheses—the mother and father protecting their daughters and the daughters protecting her.
My mother didn’t sleep much that night. From time to time the door would squeak open, and a few minutes later some young woman would be heard whimpering, “No, no,” followed by silence when the soldier dragged her off or just climbed on top of her in her bunk. No one dared to intervene, and the next morning everyone wondered who last night’s victims had been—but the poor souls refused to identify themselves out of shame. I’m sure that event haunted each of them for years to come—not only the brutality of the rape itself but the sense of utter powerlessness that a refugee feels when she learns that sometimes even her body is no longer her own.
To my mother’s great surprise, early the next morning the driver who had mistakenly dropped her at the wrong beach returned for her. He told her through a translator that he had only left her there because he had been ordered not to return with her and had to leave her somewhere—but he had been searching ever since and had managed to find our family and returned to take her to them.
Before she left, my mother thanked the family of sheltering angels who had slept surrounding her the previous night. She never saw that compassionate family again; she never would have met them at all if not for a driver’s poor sense of direction. It was a mistake, an error, an accidental encounter. She was there
for only a single night, but that night was a turning point in my mother’s life, just as my father’s loss of wealth and power was a turning point in his. The simple prayer she prayed the night before was more than a desperate cry for help—it was a response to something beyond her, the beginning of something that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
My grateful mother was told she would soon be reunited with her family, but the driver failed to mention that one day earlier her family had been loaded onto fishing boats to be towed to an island refugee camp—without her.
Twenty
THE BEACH
WHEN MY FATHER RETURNED FROM THE HOSPITAL, he told us our mother would have to remain there until she was well. He did not know how long that would be, but he was sure she would be fine and would come back to us soon. That was what he told us, but I wonder if he was really thinking something more like, Your mother bled the entire way to the hospital, and she was unconscious when I left her. I didn’t know a woman that size had that much blood in her. She could be dead by now, and I would have no way to know. If she does die, I’m not sure if anyone will even bother to tell us.
But that would not have been a very good way to comfort eight frightened children, so he just reassured us that everything was going to be okay.
For nine straight days my brothers and sisters and I stood at the edge of the rope and watched anxiously for our mother to return. We were worried about her, but we had other concerns that helped distract us—like staying alive. Our family had marched so far down the beach that the UNHCR no longer made regular food deliveries and we had to scavenge whatever we could to eat. My aunt walked up to the rope one day and beckoned for one of the guards to come closer, then pulled off one of her gold rings and handed it to him while she gestured to her mouth. The guard weighed the ring in his hand and held it up to examine it, then nodded his head and walked away—and a few minutes later he returned with a loaf of bread and a few bananas. It was extortion, but when you’re starving, a loaf of bread is worth its weight in gold.
Someone donated three big sacks of rice, but the rice had been stored so long it had turned hard and yellow with age. We ate it anyway. We ate anything given to us and stretched it as far as possible; whatever it was and no matter how small the portion, it had to feed eight children and an adult. Whenever we complained to the guards that we didn’t have enough food, they just pointed to the children and said, “Eat them.”
Water was a bigger problem. It continued to reach ninety degrees every day, and we desperately needed water to replace what we were losing to sweat. The soldiers began to escort us to a small well where we could draw water, which was little more than a hole in the sand near the palm trees where we could lower a can attached to a long rope and dredge up whatever water we could find. The water was always dirty and hot, and with 290 people drawing from the well, it sometimes went dry. The guards quickly tired of escorting individual refugees back and forth from the well, and instead set a specific time period each day when everyone was allowed to draw water. People waited in long lines, hoping to get their chance before time ran out. Jenny and Bruce had the job of fetching water for our family, and they waited in line each day with Jenny holding one of the twins on her hip while Bruce stood behind her in his red-checkered shorts. When the allotted time ran out, the guards just shouted, “Go!” They fired their guns into the air, and everyone scattered, whether they were still thirsty or not. Go was the first English word Bruce and Jenny ever learned. Apparently it meant, “Run, or I’ll shoot you.”
On the morning of the ninth day, the guards fired their rifles to get our attention and announced we were leaving. That concerned my father because we had not been forced to march since he took our mother to the hospital, and he had been hoping we would be allowed to remain where we were until she returned. If we moved, how would she find us? The thought of our mother dying had terrified him, but the thought of her living and never finding us again didn’t seem much better.
But when a line of trucks pulled up to the beach, my father realized we were not going to march—we were being taken somewhere by truck, and that meant it would probably be more than just a few miles down the beach.
“Everybody on the trucks!” the guards shouted.
But the sudden change of routine was so unexpected that no one moved.
“Where are we going?” my father asked.
The guards were not interested in discussion. “On the trucks!” they shouted again, and when they started to aim their rifles at us, everyone jumped to their feet and began to gather anything they had managed to collect since the storm.
“Leave everything,” they ordered. “You won’t need it. We’re taking you to a refugee camp a few hours away, and you’ll have everything you need there.”
At that news everyone began to talk excitedly. We weren’t just moving down the beach; we were leaving. After fifteen days of useless waiting, we were finally being taken to a refugee camp where our lives could start again. Everyone was thrilled—except for my family.
“My wife is still in the hospital,” my father pleaded with one of the guards. “She hasn’t come back yet.”
“Nobody stays,” the guard said with a shrug, and then he raised his voice so everyone could hear: “Leave everything—there won’t be room for it. We’ll take an inventory of everything you have and give you a receipt. You’ll get it all back later. But you have to report everything—money, jewelry, personal possessions—everything. If you fail to report one single item and we find out about it, you won’t go—we’ll leave you here to die.”
The threat of being left behind to die was an effective incentive, and everyone began to reach into secret pockets for lumps of gold and jewelry they still concealed. To look at our haggard and sunken-faced group, you wouldn’t imagine there was a dollar between us, but it was astonishing how much money was produced once life itself was on the line.
The guards went from person to person and catalogued every item they received. Each family was given a written itemization and was instructed that without their receipt they would be unable to claim their possessions later on. At that point, a single piece of paper became the most valuable item that any of us owned.
My family took one last look at the palm trees in hopes that our mother would show up at the last moment, but she didn’t. We had no choice but to join the others on the trucks and pray that she would catch up with us later.
The trucks drove for a long time before stopping again, and when they did we realized we were still at the beach and there was no refugee camp anywhere in sight.
The guards banged on the sides of the trucks and ordered everyone out.
“Where’s the camp?” someone asked.
“We’re taking you to the camp,” one of the guards replied.
“In those?”
Lined up side by side in the water were four derelict fishing boats that looked battered and worn and probably hadn’t been used in years—and for good reason. Paint flaked off everywhere, revealing patches of weathered gray wood. One of them had a crack in its stern so large, we could see through it into the boat.
“What happened to our boat?” someone called out.
“We heard it sank,” a guard called back. “You should be more careful next time.”
There was nothing we could say. We had scuttled the boat ourselves to avoid being pushed back to sea, and consequently it was unavailable—but even if our boat had been in perfect condition, it was doubtful the Malaysians would have returned it to us. Our boat was worth money, and these fishing boats clearly were not.
“The refugee camp is on an island,” one of the guards explained. “It isn’t far—only two or three hours. But there won’t be much room, so again—leave everything behind.”
Our group of 290 divided by four—each of the fishing boats had to carry more than seventy people, and none of the boats was more than thirty-five feet long. A fishing boat that size was probably designed to carry a crew of half a doz
en men. How would seventy people ever fit? And how many people could it hold before it sank like a rock?
“Load up!” the guards shouted, but instead of heading for the boats, everyone began to scurry around like ants, waving and shouting to each other. This was not a group of strangers; it was a group of families and in-laws and distant cousins, and everyone wanted to make sure that all of their personal connections boarded the same boat. The guards couldn’t have cared less about our family connections—all they wanted was to make sure the boats were weighted evenly. We were just heights and weights to them.
As everyone divided into families and scrambled aboard the boats, my father had to make a decision. He was a member of two families, one by birth and the other by marriage. On my mother’s side were her mother and father, her younger brother, his wife and their two children, and one of her younger sisters who was still single. That made just seven on the Truong side of the family.
On my father’s side of the family was Grandmother Chung, my uncle, his wife and children, and my three aunts, along with their husbands and children. The Chung family was more than twice the size of the Truongs, and numerically it only made sense for our family of nine to balance out the numbers by boarding with my mother’s family. But loyal son that he was, my father chose to stay with Grandmother Chung, and the nine of us squeezed into a boat along with my father’s family and took up almost half the available space.
It took quite a while for everyone to decide on a boat and board. Some had connections to several families and could not decide between them; they kept jumping back and forth between boats until the guards finally ordered them to stay where they were, and even then one or two of them made last-minute changes.
When the boats were fully loaded, there was barely room for anyone to breathe. Everyone sat cross-legged, wedged in like matchsticks in a box; no one had room to lie down or stretch out, regardless of size or age. Older children sat beside their parents while toddlers sat on their parents’ laps. We were all hot and miserable, but at least we could be comforted by the thought that the trip would only last a couple of hours.
Where the Wind Leads Page 15
