Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  Now everyone began to pray.

  Buddhists appealed to the Absolute Refuge, Taoists invoked the immortals, and ancestor worshipers sought the intervention of loved ones long since dead. Some tried to cover all the bases—my grandmother admitted later, “We prayed to Buddha; we prayed to our ancestors; we prayed to Jesus. We prayed to anyone who would listen.”

  Apparently Someone did.

  Our fifth day at sea ended with a ray of hope—not because we now believed we would be rescued but because we had begun to hope that maybe, just maybe, there was Someone out there who actually cared whether we lived or died.

  But a single rainstorm cannot replace the lost 15 percent of a body’s water. We were refreshed but not replenished; we were hopeful but far from healed. The next day would bring the sun again, and with it the heat and humidity. Tomorrow would be our sixth day at sea, and it was likely to be our last.

  Twenty-Five

  RESCUE

  BY OUR SIXTH DAY AT SEA, MOST OF US HAD LOST hope and with it the will to live. There is an ancient proverb that says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Prov. 13:12 ESV), and our hopes of rescue and deliverance had been dashed so many times that the only prayers we still offered were requests for an end to our suffering. A twelve-year-old girl aboard our boat would later recall, “I knew I was going to die. I prayed only that my death would be quick and merciful.”

  My father was confused to the point of despair. His family had endured so much suffering, so much loss, yet at the same time he had seen hints of divine protection all along the way. The communists had taken everything we owned, yet we had been allowed to live and even leave the country. We had been attacked by Thai pirates, but we had been spared the horrific rape and mutilation that had befallen so many other refugees. Again we were attacked by pirates, this time attempting to overturn our boat for the sheer pleasure of doing it, but their rope had broken at the last possible moment.

  What did it all mean? Why had there only been hints of divine protection—why not outright deliverance? Were we really being protected, or was it all just a stay of execution? If there really was a Creator God, was He for us or against us?

  My mother was thinking the same thoughts. She had miscarried and probably lost two precious children whom she would never see, but her own life had been spared. She had been returned to the wrong refugee camp late at night, a helpless sheep among ravenous wolves; but a compassionate Christian family had surrounded her and shielded her from harm. She had been separated from her beloved family for nine straight days, but she had been returned to them within minutes of their departure. If there really was a compassionate God who cared for her family and protected them, where was He now? For every terrible danger her family had faced, there seemed to have been a remarkable deliverance, but what was the point if it all ended this way? Moreover, my mother was still haunted by the dream she had experienced just before leaving Vietnam—the dream about the man in the marketplace who had pointed to her family and brought them all back to life. What did the dream mean if her family was to die like this?

  Yesterday’s rain had brought a brief respite from heat and thirst, but it was almost worse than nothing at all. It seemed like a cosmic tease—not enough to save us, just enough to prolong our agony another day. My father had prayed for rain, and his prayer had been miraculously answered—but the storm that immediately followed almost sank our boat. Even our blessings turned out to be curses; even the answers to our prayers were denials. Nothing made sense. We felt hopeless, helpless, abandoned by God and man—and my father was certain that this was the day we would all die.

  When Seasweep entered refugee alley, the watch was doubled with crew members spaced along the railings so that no sector of the horizon would be overlooked. Stan took the noon to four o’clock watch, scanning the sea with powerful binoculars but so far finding nothing. At about three thirty, he heard someone calling to him; he looked up at the bridge and saw project director Burt Singleton waving for him to come up. The bridge was the highest point on the ship, aside from the forward mast and rear stack, and the extra elevation made it possible to see a mile or two farther out to sea. Burt pointed to a dark spot on the port side horizon, and when Stan trained his binoculars on that spot, he could see that it was definitely a boat.

  On the journey up the Malaysian coast, there had been several sightings of possible refugee boats, but on closer inspection they had turned out to be nothing but small pleasure craft. Stan wanted to spare the crew any further disappointment, so he decided to just observe the boat for a while before deciding whether to take a closer look.

  The boat didn’t seem to be moving, which would not have been unusual for a recreational boat within sight of the shore, but Stan checked the ship’s charts and estimated that Seasweep was 120 miles off the southern tip of Vietnam. A boat that far from land had to be going somewhere, especially during typhoon season on the South China Sea, but this one wasn’t moving. As small as the boat was, it was difficult to estimate its actual size at a distance, but Stan thought it looked no more than thirty feet long. In the rough swells the boat rocked like a seesaw from bow to stern, with the two ends of the boat taking turns peeking up above the waves. Then Stan noticed something else: as he squinted through his binoculars, he could make out shapes above the boat. He had seen those shapes before—they were shirts or plastic sheets rigged as makeshift sails.

  That was the giveaway—it was definitely a refugee boat.

  Stan immediately gave the order for Seasweep to come about, and he alerted the crew to get ready.

  By late afternoon the temperature had peaked around its usual ninety degrees. No one on the boat could sleep anymore, nor was anyone fully awake; we just existed in a constant state of heat-induced torpor, mentally drifting with the rolling swells.

  Then someone called out, “Ship,” but with far less energy and enthusiasm than at the previous sighting two days ago. Still, we all sat up and looked, and this time things looked different. This time it was a single ship, and it was clearly not a fishing trawler. It was a real cargo ship, a big one, and most encouraging of all was the fact that it was painted white. The color of the ship meant nothing, really, but the pirate ships that had attacked us were dark and dreary, and we interpreted the cheerful appearance of this one as a positive sign. The ship was definitely heading toward us, approaching on our port side.

  “Everyone lie down!” someone shouted. “Act like you’re sick and dying!” That was strange advice, considering most of us were sick and dying, but the logic was easy to understand: “Try to look as desperate as possible to merit all the compassion we can.” I can remember lying back in the boat, doing my level best to look dead but still squinting up at the ship to see what would happen next.

  When Seasweep was less than a mile away, Stan could finally see the boat clearly, and what he saw astonished him. The boat wasn’t much larger than it had appeared at a distance, and it was packed with more bodies than he could count. He had never seen such an overloaded refugee boat, and when he saw how low it sat in the water and noticed that the stern was broken open, he wondered what was keeping the thing afloat. Because the boat was just over a hundred miles from Vietnam, Stan figured it had probably only been at sea for a single day. Thank God, he thought. There’s no way that death trap would have stayed afloat a second day.

  The crew hurried around the deck, making preparations. White plastic five-gallon containers of water spiked with glucose were readied and boxes of saltine crackers were opened to give the refugees something light to eat; as far as the crew knew, it could have been hours since their last meal.

  Stan looked down at the rickety boat and realized there was another problem: Seasweep had to approach very carefully because in rough seas the ship’s steel hull could crush the fragile wooden boat like an eggshell. Stan gave the order for Seasweep to slowly circle while he figured out the safest approach.

  Our eyes all widened as the ship approached. It was the size of
a building—at least it looked that way to us. It was five times longer than our little boat and ten times taller. As the ship drew nearer, we could see figures lined up along the ship’s railing, just as we had seen on both pirate ships—only this time we were relieved to see no one holding a knife and no sarong wrapped around a big potbelly.

  An Asian man in a maroon Windbreaker and a floppy white boat hat was holding a bullhorn, and when we saw him, we were even more relieved to see an Asian face that wasn’t Thai. The man smiled and called down to us in Vietnamese, “Friends! We’ve come to help you!” But the word he used for friends was a word that is often translated comrades, and that made everyone fear that this was a Russian ship that would only tow us back to Vietnam. But at that point no one cared; even returning to Vietnam would have been preferable to a slow death at sea, and my brothers and sisters tried to encourage one another by saying how nice it would be to return to Bac Lieu and eat ice cream and sugarcane again.

  But when the man in the floppy boat hat saw our dejected faces, he immediately turned around and showed us the back of his Windbreaker, which bore a bright yellow rectangle with three red horizontal stripes—the flag of South Vietnam. At the same moment a man on our boat spotted the name Seasweep on the bow of the ship and shouted, “Our savior!” The man said he had read about this mercy ship in an American magazine prior to leaving Vietnam and told us we were in safe hands—and that was when everyone began to applaud and grin and wave to the people lined up along the ship’s railing.

  The crew of Seasweep threw ropes over to the boat and gently drew it up alongside, and once the boat was safely secured to the ship’s port side, the five-gallon containers of water were lowered to the boat by rope. Some of Seasweep’s crew had assisted with World Vision’s land-based relief efforts, and what they saw here took them by surprise. In Africa, when an airdrop of food was made, the people waiting below would scatter everywhere, and whenever a bundle broke apart, there was complete chaos. But these refugees did nothing; they just watched as the containers were lowered down, without moving a muscle, almost as if they didn’t believe it was real. They were so dehydrated and so close to death that the sight of water floating down to them from the sky must have seemed like a hallucination.

  The refugees gradually realized their deliverance was real, and the crew smiled and watched with satisfaction as they began to gulp down water from plastic cups and empty tin cans. The crackers were sent down next, and the children eagerly devoured them.

  The next order of business was to send down Seasweep’s chief engineer, Mr. Choi from Hong Kong, who was assigned the task of examining the boat’s engine and determining whether the boat was seaworthy. Stan’s hope was that Singapore would be willing to accept these refugees simply based on President Carter’s promise that America would resettle them, but he knew it was a good idea to have a backup plan. If the refugee boat was not considered seaworthy, Stan could tell the Singaporean authorities that according to international maritime law he had been required to take them aboard in order to save their lives.

  After Mr. Choi climbed down the rope ladder to the boat, one of the refugees climbed up—a young man who spoke English fluently—and recounted the story of the boat’s journey. Stan was astonished to learn the boat had not come directly from Vietnam as he had thought—it had been towed from Malaysia six days prior. Stan looked over the railing at the boat again. Six days in that thing? And Malaysia was 230 miles away! The story defied imagination—it was a miracle the boat was still intact and no one aboard had perished.

  The young man also told Stan that this boat was not the only one that had been towed to sea from Malaysia. He told them there had been four boats in their original party of 290 refugees, but the other three boats had drifted apart after their first day at sea and had not been seen since. Stan immediately sent word to the bridge to search the horizon for the others, but none was found. The other three boats must have been more than ten miles away, and each one could have drifted in a different direction. If they looked anything like this one, Stan wondered if they were still afloat.

  Mr. Choi soon returned with his engineering report: The engine’s cylinder head was cracked, he announced, and it was impossible to repair it at sea. He added that the crack appeared to be old, which meant that the engine probably had not been working for a very long time, and he also noted that the boat was leaking badly. In Mr. Choi’s professional opinion the boat was definitely unseaworthy; so with international maritime law on its side, the crew of Seasweep began to bring the refugees on board.

  A basket stretcher was lowered first, to assist four refugees who were either too sick or too weak to move; they were taken immediately to the ship’s medical clinic, where Dr. Chandler and the two nurses could tend to them. The babies came next; they were placed in white pillowcases and pulled up by rope, like sacks of groceries. The younger children were lifted, using a rope sling, and the older children rode on their parents’ backs as they climbed the rope ladder to the ship’s deck. Stan took a head count as the refugees were brought aboard: he counted an unbelievable ninety-three refugees, including fifty-six adults, seven elderly, twenty-seven children, and three pregnant women. He could not believe the age range—from a six-month-old baby to a feeble old man. Stan felt humbled by their courage and the risks they were willing to take to gain freedom—men, women, and children alike.

  Anh and Hon screamed at the top of their lungs when they were dropped into pillowcases to be hoisted up to the ship. The first time the method was tried, the pillowcase tipped backward and almost dumped a baby into the sea. But the people on the ship figured out the problem before anyone was lost, and we all applauded as each one made it safely aboard. I rode up on someone’s back, hanging around his neck like a human cape, and so did Bruce, Yen, Nikki, and Thai.

  The family who had hoarded a container of water and kept it from the rest of us now realized their leftover water was unnecessary, and before they left the boat, they dumped the remainder into the sea.

  My father was the last to go aboard, and Jenny waited beside him until everyone else had taken his or her turn. As always, Jenny played the role of second mother and made sure the rest of us were safely aboard before she followed. She was the last child to leave the boat, and she climbed the rope ladder all by herself.

  While Jenny was waiting, a large, black butterfly suddenly appeared out of nowhere and settled on my father’s shoulder. Jenny smiled; she couldn’t imagine what a fragile creature like that could be doing in the middle of an ocean. What did it eat? How did it live? Where did it come from, and where was it going? She searched the evening sky to see if there were any more of them, and she wondered if she was the only one who knew they were there.

  Stan watched each refugee as each one reached the top of the rope ladder and was helped aboard by one of Seasweep’s crew. Some of the refugees were so weak and exhausted after six days at sea that climbing the ladder took every bit of energy they had left; and when they reached the deck, they just slumped down and sat there in a stupor. The children had the opposite response; they were thrilled by this new adventure and could not wait to explore their new environment. After six days of inactivity they had legs to stretch and energy to burn.

  The last refugees to come aboard were a young girl and her father, and by the time the boarding process was completed, it was dark, and the decks had to be illuminated by spotlights. The refugees were escorted below deck to the number-two cargo hold, where they would be served dinner. Stan knew that the ship’s cook would take good care of them because the cook was a refugee himself, with a wife and two sons who were still in a refugee camp somewhere in Malaysia.

  Stan gave the order for the empty boat to be tied behind Seasweep so it could be towed back to Singapore. He thought it might be wise to bring “Exhibit A” along with them and let the authorities back in Singapore take a look for themselves. Mr. Choi was a professional ship’s engineer, and in his professional opinion the boat was unseaworthy, but M
r. Choi was also a member of Seasweep’s crew, and the authorities in Singapore might have considered his opinion less than objective.

  Stan wanted to stay and search for the other three boats, but he knew it would have been impossible to find them at night. To even begin a search, Seasweep would have had to wait until morning, and then the search could have taken days. He was now responsible for the safety of not only his crew but ninety-three others, and the weather clock was ticking on the South China Sea. He knew his first responsibility was to return the refugees safely to port, so he reluctantly gave the order for the ship to start its engines and head south by southwest. He comforted himself with the thought that Seasweep might still have a chance of spotting one of the other three boats on the way back to Singapore.

  The stairway down to the ship’s cargo hold passed under a metal beam so low that even ten-year-old Bruce had to duck his head to get under it. The cargo hold was nothing but a cavernous storeroom with a floor made of rough wooden planks where blankets had been spread out for us to sleep on. The room looked as big as a soccer field to us, and part of it was occupied with stacks of supplies and food. There was a large opening in the deck over our heads where pallets of cargo could be lowered down to the hold; the opening allowed lots of fresh air into the room and kept us from feeling claustrophobic.

  At the far end of the hold was a long table lined with serving kettles, and that was where all the children headed. Sleep could wait—it was dinnertime. My brothers and sisters can’t recall many details about the cargo hold and its appearance, but they all clearly remember the menu that night: steamed rice with pork and eggs. Each dish was prepared to perfection since the Asian cook knew the way we would like it. Ever since we left Vietnam we had been eating dried, tasteless, preserved food that sustained our bodies but never satisfied us, and in the six days since we left Malaysia, we had eaten nothing at all. It was the best meal any of us had ever eaten, and no future meal would ever be able to compare with it because that meal went past our stomachs and directly into our souls.