Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  My entire family kept staring at the beach, hoping against hope to see one more truck roll up at the last minute and let our mother out. But that truck did not come, and we kept glancing at our father and wondering if he would really leave without her. He had no choice; no one was allowed to remain behind except to die. We were really going without her, and we cried when we thought we might never see her again.

  Everyone else sat looking out to sea, waiting for something to happen. So did the guards—but apparently something went wrong. A connection wasn’t made, or a phone call was never received, or someone wrote the wrong date on a calendar. We were never told exactly what the foul-up was, but a couple of hours later we were ordered to get out of the boats and load onto the trucks again. The guards drove us back to the same spot we had left from that morning, and once again we flopped down on the sand while the guards roped us in for the night.

  Everyone was tired and disappointed, but the eight Chung children couldn’t have been more relieved.

  Twenty-One

  BETRAYED

  THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SUNRISE I HAVE EVER SEEN occurred on the morning of July 3, 1979. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky that morning, and when the first sliver of sun appeared over the South China Sea, the world burst into color. The black water took on its first hints of blue, the dull gray sand sparkled with light, and the horizon caught fire and burned upward into the sky. But it wasn’t the dramatic lighting that made that sunrise so memorable; it was the fact that when the first rays of sunlight fell across our beach, my brothers and sisters and I saw our mother walking toward us.

  It would be a gross understatement to say that we were happy to see her. We were thrilled, we were overjoyed, we were complete again—but the emotion we felt most was relief. Less than twenty-four hours earlier our family had been sitting on a fishing boat, expecting to put out to sea, and if we had been forced to leave without our mother, there would have been no way to know when we would be reunited again—if ever. The problem was more than logistical; if our mother had remained on the beaches without us, she would have been a young, unattached female refugee—and at that time there was no more vulnerable person on the planet.

  Compassion fatigue is understandable—when hearts grow tired and cold after repeated attempts to offer help. What I find impossible to understand is how fatigue can descend into assault, abduction, and brutal murder. That was the fate of many women who sailed into the South China Sea, and the violence didn’t end when their boats reached shore. Women were particular objects of violence during that period, just as they have been throughout history. Man’s inhumanity to man can be appalling, but it’s nothing compared to man’s inhumanity to woman.

  Within an hour of our mother’s arrival, the trucks returned and the guards ordered us to load up again. That was when our sense of relief turned to awe. If our mother had returned a single hour later, we would have missed her and possibly never seen her again. After nine days of separation she rejoined us within sixty minutes of our departure—and only because the previous day’s departure had been mysteriously cancelled. That kind of incredible coincidence is enough to make even a hardened cynic think about Providence.

  The trucks returned us to the same location as the day before, and once again the four derelict fishing boats were lined up waiting for us—only this time an enormous Malaysian navy patrol boat sat anchored just offshore. This time it was easy for everyone to decide seating arrangements because everyone had had a dry run just the day before—except for my mother. My father had made the decision yesterday that our family would accompany his family, but yesterday my mother had not been there to cast her vote. This time when my father got off the truck and started toward the Chung boat, my mother decided it was time to make her opinion known. Maybe she felt sorry for her own family when she saw them outnumbered by the Chung clan two-to-one, or maybe she considered the prospect of being wedged into a tiny boat alongside Grandmother Chung; whatever her reasons, she made it very clear to my father that our family was going with her family, not his.

  There is a very wise Chinese proverb that says, “Never strike a flea on a tiger’s head,” and I think my father sensed that this was not the time to challenge his wife’s wishes. We were going with her family—end of discussion. Besides, he thought, what did it really matter? My father knew it was only a journey of two or three hours, and when we reached the refugee camp, we would all be together again anyway. It seemed like a good idea to yield to his wife on such a minor point.

  But to my mother it wasn’t a minor point. When we were on the beach, the Chung family had not seen fit to associate with the Truong family, and for five straight days my mother had to watch her husband shuttling back and forth between families, trying to play the role of both faithful husband and loyal son. In my mother’s eyes it was time for her husband to choose. All her married life she had felt her husband’s divided loyalty. One of the reasons she wanted to leave Vietnam was to put an ocean between her husband and his mistress, and now she wanted to put some ocean between his family and ours. She knew that his choice would be mostly symbolic since we would all soon be reunited anyway, but to her it was an important choice because it meant that her husband was deciding where his heart really belonged.

  So instead of heading for the Chung boat, my parents chose to join the Truongs, and I’m sure the last-minute change of venue earned my father and mother a few smoldering glares from Grandmother Chung. But my mother ignored her, and my father complied, and before long everyone was once again loaded and waiting to depart.

  Sailors aboard the Malaysian patrol boat tied four large ropes to the stern and cast them to us, one for each fishing boat. We understood then that the patrol ship wasn’t there as an escort—it was there to tow us, which we were glad to see since the patrol ship’s engines were far more powerful and reliable than the ones on our rickety boats. The guards helped tie the ropes to the bow of each boat, and again we waited for something to happen.

  This time something did.

  It was about ten o’clock in the morning when we were finally cleared to leave, and we were all getting impatient because we were eager to reach the refugee camp and settle in. The Malaysians didn’t tell us which specific refugee camp they were taking us to, but we had heard there were several island refugee camps just off the Malaysian coast, and we were probably headed for one of those.

  The most famous of the island camps was Pulau Bidong, a rocky one-square-mile island about thirty miles from the coastal city of Merang. Just three years earlier Pulau Bidong had been a deserted tropical paradise, but when the Vietnamese exodus began, a refugee camp was established there, and it quickly became a tropical ghetto. The camp was called Bidong for short, but the camp’s unfortunate occupants called it Bi Dat—the Malay term for miserable.

  Pulau Bidong was expected to house only five thousand refugees, but just five weeks after it opened, it was home to twenty-five thousand refugees and eventually held more than forty thousand—all packed into one filthy, overcrowded shantytown along the coast. The camp was officially run by the UNHCR but in reality was left to fend for itself. Building materials were in short supply, so refugees were forced to live five or ten to a makeshift shack constructed entirely from discarded items—cardboard, plastic tarps, tree limbs, rice sacks—anything they could manage to find. The only sanitary facilities were Asian squat toilets in tin sheds, and the only showers were drums of water with ladles. The beach was littered with garbage that rotted in the tropical heat, which made the island an ideal habitat for rats—and they were everywhere. The refugees once caught eleven thousand of them in a desperate attempt to ward off an outbreak of plague.

  Pulau Bidong was a dangerously overcrowded slum, where refugees were forced to live with limited food, polluted water, overwhelming stench, and disease-carrying mosquitoes. They survived any way they could until they could find a sponsor and leave, and some never did. They thought their stay would be only temporary—that was the thought that kep
t them alive—but few of them knew how long their stay would last or how bad the conditions would be.

  My parents had heard about refugee camps like Pulau Bidong, but details about the deplorable conditions there did not become widely known until later. Maybe it was best they didn’t know because my family was forced to go wherever the Malaysians chose to take us anyway. To my parents, a refugee camp was just the next stop on the road to a new life, and regardless of the conditions they encountered there, they would just have to endure it as best they could.

  The big ship’s engines finally started to rumble, and the ship inched forward until it had taken the slack out of the ropes—then the engines roared and we took off. We moved slowly at first until the ship made certain that the ropes were holding and our fishing boats had cleared any sandbars near the beach. Everyone cheered when the ship finally accelerated and we were really under way, but our enthusiasm didn’t last.

  When the big ship gunned its engines, its stern sank low in the water and generated an enormous wake. Our little fishing boats were dwarfed by the patrol ship, and its wake was almost big enough to swamp us—Jenny remembers reaching over the side of our boat and being able to touch the upswell of the wake. Our boats rode four abreast and sometimes banged together as they cut back and forth across the wake, and we had to constantly bail to keep water from filling the boats. But the ship settled into a constant speed, and as our boats followed more or less in a straight line behind it, we managed to keep the flooding to a minimum. It was an exhausting and nerve-wracking trip, but we knew we could handle anything for two or three hours.

  But a few hours later the ship had not stopped, and there was no sign of an island anywhere. When we left the beach, the patrol ship had taken us straight out to sea and had not veered a single degree to port or starboard since. No one could be certain that we were even headed for Pulau Bidong, but if we were, we should have been there by now.

  We felt even more uneasy when we looked behind us and saw nothing but water. All we could do was grip the sides of the boat, hold on to each other, and wait to see what would happen next. Once again we were powerless, unable to control our direction or destiny. The Malaysians had the big ship, and we were consigned to the tiny boats; we danced behind them like wooden puppets on strings. They could take us anywhere they wanted, at any speed they wanted, for as long as they wanted, and we had no way to stop until they allowed us to.

  They towed us until it was completely dark, but even then they didn’t stop; the patrol ship still maintained its speed and course, taking us deeper and deeper into the South China Sea. Another hour passed, then two, then four—they towed us for twenty straight hours and didn’t stop until just before dawn. When they finally cut their engines, the big ship lurched to a stop while our momentum bumped our lighter boats up against its stern. When the wake washed past the ship and flattened out, the night fell eerily silent. We were too exhausted to say anything, and we were all numb from the deep-bass rumble of the twin diesel engines.

  My father still wasn’t sure what the Malaysians had in mind. Maybe there had been a last-minute change of plans; maybe we were never headed to Pulau Bidong at all; maybe they decided to take us to the big refugee camp in the Anambas Islands far to the south—that would have accounted for the extended voyage. The night was so black that the sky blended seamlessly into the sea, and my father stared into the darkness hoping to see some sign of land nearby.

  Then some Malaysian sailors lined up along the stern of their ship and looked down at us.

  “You’re on your own now,” one of them shouted down, and with that they cut the four ropes and dropped them into the water.

  We stared up at them in shock. Even then my father had a hard time comprehending what was happening to us; he wondered if the Malaysians might have made a navigational error.

  “This isn’t the place!” he shouted up to the sailors. “We’re not there yet!”

  There was no reply.

  Another man on our boat was beginning to catch on. “You’re leaving us here?”

  “You’re not our problem,” the sailors called down. “Go back where you came from.”

  Another man on our boat, an engineer by trade, stood up and shouted, “We need diesel fuel! Give us some fuel for our engines!”

  One of the sailors yelled back, “Here’s your fuel!” and cracked the man over the head with a long oar. The blow sent him tumbling over the side of the boat into the sea, and we had to drag him back in to keep him from drowning.

  “At least leave us water!” someone else pleaded, but he kept his head down to avoid a similar fate.

  This time the sailors responded by firing rifles into the air, and when they had our attention, one of them said through a megaphone, “Don’t ask for help. You have to take care of yourselves.”

  Take care of yourselves—the Malaysians picked a fine time to return control of our lives to us. It’s not easy to “take care of yourselves” in the middle of an ocean without food, fuel, or water. But that was not the Malaysians’ concern. A moment later their diesel engines roared again, and the ship veered hard to port and headed back in the direction we had come from.

  The most depressing sunrise I have ever seen occurred on the morning of July 4, 1979, because when the sun came up that morning and illuminated the sea, it revealed to us what a terrible predicament we were in. We had been abandoned in the middle of the South China Sea, and there was no sign of land in any direction. We all sat in stunned silence for a few minutes, unable to comprehend what had just happened. We knew the Malaysians didn’t like refugees, but we did not know they despised us so much that they would tow men, women, and even children out to sea and leave us all to die.

  There were lots of things we didn’t know at the time. We didn’t know there were ten thousand refugees just like us back on the beaches of Malaysia. We didn’t know that in the previous three years more than a hundred thousand Vietnamese boat people had landed in neighboring countries, such as Malaysia, and already more than sixty thousand refugees were waiting for sponsors in overcrowded refugee camps all over Southeast Asia. We didn’t know just how hostile the Malaysians had become or that it was now common practice to tow refugee boats at high speeds until the boats overturned and everyone drowned. On islands such as Pulau Bidong, the bodies of drowned refugees washed ashore almost daily, and the camp’s residents were left to bury their kin. We learned later that the refugees from Mỹ Tho, who had arrived on the beach before us, had received the same treatment we did—only when they were towed to sea, some of their boats capsized, and the passengers drowned.

  Malaysia’s deputy prime minister had even publicly announced that if any more refugees attempted to come to his country, “We will shoot them on sight!” But shooting was such an unsightly way to deal with the refugee problem; the Malaysian government apparently decided that drowning was much quieter, and the sea offered the added bonus of not only killing the refugees but burying them too.

  Because our fishing boats had been towed to sea, no one had thought to test the boats’ engines, and when some of the men did, they found them fouled with seawater—our engine even had a cracked block. A couple of the engines actually started up but quickly sputtered to a stop, and the hope of sailing under our own power was quickly abandoned. Someone suggested that our boats might be more stable if we used the ropes that were still attached to our bows to tie the four boats together into one giant raft. We tried that, but the sea that morning was rolling in big, undulating waves, and our boats kept slamming together until we finally had to cut them loose out of fear that the fragile old hulls might break apart. No engines, no sails—not even an oar. These were not boats; they were floating coffins.

  Because there were several children on our boat, we carried more passengers than any of the others—ninety-three in all, packed together in one mass of human flesh. There was nothing we could do all day long but sit in our little boat and watch each wave carry the other boats a little bit farther aw
ay from us until by nightfall we could no longer see them at all.

  Then we were really alone.

  Twenty-Two

  SEASWEEP SETS SAIL

  IN EARLY 1979, STAN MOONEYHAM WAS MAKING preparations for the Cal Loader to set sail again in search of refugees adrift in the South China Sea. He was committed to the work of Operation Seasweep, but he knew that to improve upon the previous year’s efforts there were two problems he would have to solve. The first was the ship itself: the Cal Loader was sufficiently large but too light to operate safely in anything but calm seas. The second problem was the bigger one: after witnessing two refugee boats sink without warning the year before, Stan knew it was no longer enough just to resupply them and send them on their way—for all he knew, the three boats that the Cal Loader had only resupplied last year could have sunk the very next day. The only way he could guarantee the safety of the boat people was to rescue them, and to do that Stan would have to find a way to get some country to agree to resettle any refugees he managed to pluck from the sea.

  That was not going to be easy. He had already experienced blunt and sometimes hostile rejection from half a dozen countries when he first presented his plan, including his own United States. But two things had happened since then that were about to change everything.

  First, World Vision’s efforts were becoming internationally known. Refugees who were fleeing Vietnam and safely arriving in other countries were beginning to report that they had heard about Operation Seasweep on radio broadcasts from the BBC, Radio Australia, and the Voice of America prior to leaving Vietnam and that World Vision’s compassionate efforts had given them courage and hope.

  The second thing that happened was more subtle but even more important. Operation Seasweep was helping draw international attention to the boat people crisis itself, and when the rest of the world saw that a small handful of dedicated people were willing to risk their own lives to rescue another country’s refugees, they were shamed into changing their policies and taking action themselves. In Washington, President Carter issued a presidential directive that any refugees picked up by a US-owned or US-registered vessel would be guaranteed resettlement in America if the refugees so desired.